Quick Thought on Super Tuesday Results – Republicans.

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For eight years the base has been either ignoring or actively pushing aside the moderates in the party. Tonight, the moderates pushed back!

PS. I don’t like the political maneuvering that occurred, but I will bet that RusHannity will blame Romney’s poor showing EXCLUSIVELY on the political machinations that went on in West Virginia.

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Derek Walker. Politics, of coarse!

Is Talk Radio Becoming The New "Daily Kos"?

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“He seems more opposed to pork barrel and deficit spending than doctrinaire conservatives”. Victor Davis Hanson On McCain.

By doctrinaire conservatives he means the group who call themselves “Reagan Conservatives”. Barely a month after Hanson wrote this piece, McCain, after being proclaimed dead in the water a few months ago, somehow pulled a Phoenix and has surprisingly emerged as the presidential front-runner for the Republican party. Now that it’s down to McCain or Romney, and the GOP finds itself fractured and bogged down by infighting, much like the Democrats were a few years ago, with print conservatives siding with McCain and most of talk radio pleading with the audience to vote for Romney.

The base of the GOP has not been enamored with any of the candidate they had to chose from, because none of the leading candidates had the creds to be a “Reagan Republican”. Guliani wasn’t Christian enough. Romney and Huck were both moderate to liberal governors. Romney is Mormon, which the evangelical crowd considers a cult, and is one reason why he couldn’t carry South Carolina. The talk radio set has become vehemently opposed to the notion of a McCain presidency. Rush and Hannity and most of the other conservative broadcasters are collectively trying to torpedo the “Straight Talk Express” with almost Jihadic fervor, and are actively endorsing Romey. The animus toward McCain is so strong, the talk radio set is DEMANDING a Romney nomination, and  not becuase Romney is the  desired “true” conservative; they would have endorsed him long before this if he were. It’s strictly because Romney is not McCain.

Because of my new teaching job, I don’t listen to talk radio as much as I used to. But for most of last year, conservative hosts, with the exception of Heugh Hewitt, were leery of Romney because of his record of raising tax… er, I mean fees, and his Hillaryish health care reform. And many of the callers didn’t like Romney because he is a Mormon. As Hanson and noted, McCain does have his faults, Gang of Four, McCain – Feingold, the illegal “Amnesty” bill, etc., but if you are going to use Reagan as your ruberic, McCain is as close to Reagan on reducing government spending as your going to get. He has the votes to prove it. Romney doesn’t. And McCain was for the Iraq surge long before the electoral defeat of the congressional Republicans forced the Bush administration to adopt it as well. Factcheck.Org rates McCain better than Romney. And Club For Growth has this to say about McCain:

Despite his poor record on tax cuts, Senator McCain’s zealous effort against wasteful spending deserves praise. Over his twenty years in the Senate, he has been at the forefront of the battle to eliminate wasteful projects and inject greater discipline and transparency into the appropriations process, often by introducing a slew of cost-cutting amendments. While many of these measures did not pass, they served an important role in shining a glaring light on congressional profligacy.

Someone once say – it’s not a taxing problem, it’s a spending problem. If you didn’t spend so much, then you wouldn’t need to tax as much. Problem solved. Most Republicans have forgotten this. McCain hasn’t.  If that’s not conservative, I don’t know what is.

As of Monday, Super Tuesday eve, despite the talk radio animus,  McCain’s poll numbers continue to surge. All the hand-wringing and arm-waving by the Rush’s and Hannity’s of the talk radio set has not seemed to diminish McCains progress. Since the anti-McCain tirades started, McCain may have had the largest growth in poll numbers of all the candidates in the race.

So here is my question.

Has the political influence of talk radio faded with the general public? Do they no longer have the power to influence the populace to vote for a candidate? Is Mitt Romney the next Ned Lemont? Are they becoming the conservative equivalent of the Daily Kos?

I guess we’ll know tomorrow.