{"id":5099,"date":"2009-07-16T08:03:15","date_gmt":"2009-07-16T13:03:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=5099"},"modified":"2009-07-16T08:03:15","modified_gmt":"2009-07-16T13:03:15","slug":"the-myth-of-the-good-republican","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=5099","title":{"rendered":"The Myth Of The “Good Republican”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jim Ramstad is officially out of a gubernatorial race<\/a> that he never actually announced he was in.<\/p>\n

Ramstad’s a good guy.\u00a0 He’s a fellow Jamestown, ND native, so he has a huge head start.\u00a0 And his nine terms in the House made him one of Minnesota’s most experienced politicians.<\/p>\n

And I’d never have voted for him.<\/p>\n

Oh, that’s not true.\u00a0 If the DFL had nominated a typical “East Is Red” crypto-Maoist and the Ventura<\/strike> “Indy” party had nominated pretty much anyone in their party, I’d have held my nose and voted for the Rammer, after having joined with whatever pressure group was out to drive him to the right a la <\/em>Brian Sullivan vs. Tim Pawlenty in 2002.\u00a0 At least with an “R” in front of the name, there’s a fighting chance there’s a working brain trapped in there somewhere.\u00a0 It doesn’t always work (ipse <\/em>the Congressional GOP caucuses since 2000), but I am pragmatic enough to know a Jim Ramstad, “moderate” as he is (his ACU rating is a point or two to the left of John McCain) will make a better governor than a Susan Gaertner or a John Marty or whatever other indistinguishably-“progressive” hamster the DFL throws up.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But in the weeks before Ramstad bowed out, you started to hear the most dreaded sentence anywhere in politics; DFLers saying “I’d <\/em>vote for Ramstad!”\u00a0 With some,\u00a0 you knew they meant it, more or less.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But I remember when McCain was every Democrat’s favorite Republican, putatively a “maverick” who’d as soon take on the conservative establishment as vote with it.\u00a0 He was “the Good Republican”…<\/p>\n

…until he got through Super Tuesday.\u00a0 And then, out came the knives.\u00a0 Overnight, he became Karl Rove’s spawn.\u00a0 He “ran to the right” and “embraced the theocrats”, supposedly – I keep asking, but nobody can exactly tell me how<\/em> he did any of this.\u00a0 But no matter.<\/p>\n

Just remember – whenever the left sets up a “good Republican”, it’s for the sole purposes of tearing them down when and if they become a threat.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Had Ramstad won the nomination, he’d have been labelled as “Pawlenty Lite” overnight (ironic, since Pawlenty is hardly a rock-ribbed movement conservative – although he’s delivered in the clutch on taxes and spending, and gotten the labels from the local left and media to prove it.\u00a0 Pardon the redundancy).\u00a0<\/p>\n

Republicans can not win<\/em> if we don’t present an alternative <\/em>to the Democrats – in Minnesota or nationwide.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jim Ramstad is officially out of a gubernatorial race that he never actually announced he was in. Ramstad’s a good guy.\u00a0 He’s a fellow Jamestown, ND native, so he has a huge head start.\u00a0 And his nine terms in the House made him one of Minnesota’s most experienced politicians. And I’d never have voted for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60,56,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5099","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-campaign-10","category-campaign-12","category-minnesota-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5099","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5099"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5099\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5099"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5099"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5099"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}