Esteemed Democratic presidential contender Mike Gravel is talking out of his ass again:
Go here to see the YouTube video!
If we can train our straight soldiers to be homosexual, then can’t we train homosexuals to be heterosexual?
My take on the Iowa Aimes straw poll, in no particular order….
Turnout stank, but it was what would have been a moderately cool day on Venus, and Rudy and Fred weren’t there to vote for, and McCain wasn’t there to vote against, so that probably accounts for it.
Romney captured about 31% of the votes cast, winning an easy and large plurality. The context for that number is that in pre-straw poll, uh, polling, Romney was running at about 30% with the mayor and FDT included. Given that the second tier is garnering Hasselhoff numbers, one would have thought that the ex-Massachusetts governor would have scooped up at least a lot of otherwise-Fredheads at the very least. Instead almost every “anybody but Mitt” vote bled off to Mike Huckabee and Sam “Gary Bauer” Brownback. Given the resources Romney expended, and the resources Huckabee and Bauerback, er, BROWNback didn’t, Mitt can’t be thinking he got his money’s worth.
The view is what you would have expected over at Romney Central - essentially, “Hey, he won, didn’t he?” - which is true, as far as it goes. It’s interesting to note that Double-H spins Huckabee’s and Brownback’s strong place and show respectively as a bad sign for Thompson, on the grounds that a groundswell for TV’s Arthur Branch should have produced more than 231 lonely Fredheads to wilt in the sweltering August sun.
But there’s nothing new about the view that Fred’s dithering has cooled off the late spring-early summer momentum of his “front-porch campaign”. Bottom line is, he didn’t contest Aimes, and got the result one would have accordingly expected. Rudy, who is in the race, has been campaigning for months, and is one of the front-runners, didn’t contest Aimes either, and he got forty-eight fewer straw votes than FDT - who is pulling twice the national numbers that Romney is without even “officially” trying.
Ergo, either the Iowa straw votes that would have gone to Rudy and Fred were deliberately re-directed to Huckabee and Brownback in order to deny Romney the magnitude of victory he had reason to expect with no serious competition, or the lower participation was due to Giuliani and Thompson participants simply sitting out, which would make Romney’s 31% look even more underwhelming.
Hugh says it’s “all part of the plan.” And Romney did win by double-digits. But it’s kind of like the early college football season when a Nebraska or a Florida plays Drillbit Tech and “only” wins 35-7 when they should have reached anybody-playing-Charlie-Brown’s-AllStars blowout level. Yeah, they’re highly ranked, and yeah, they’ll probably be really good this season, but you can’t really point to this game as persuasive proof.
