So, Tom Pauken, former head of the Texas Republican Party, is not impressed with the Democratic candidates for President. Stop the presses. Mr Pauken thinks John Edwards is insincere and Barack Obama is inexperienced and Hillary Clinton is unelectable. Not much originality in thinking there. Mr Pauken is such a knee-jerk conservative that he may be unable to provide any objective analysis of the Democratic race.
Mr Pauken is more interesting when he's analyzing the Republicans. He drips venom when he talks about how the conservatives screwed up American foreign policy... excuse me, how the neo-conservatives did. Mr Pauken can't stand even sharing the label conservative with some of these guys. He can't stand conservatives' fiscal policy, even though George W Bush followed in Ronald Reagan's footsteps of cutting taxes and ballooning deficits. Mr Pauken is not too happy that conservatives haven't banned abortions, that they haven't gotten courts to approve of teachers leading prayers in public schools again, that they haven't launched a new crusade against the invading Muslim hordes in Europe (on this last one, maybe he should just give the neo-conservatives a little more time).
As you can probably guess, there aren't too many Republican candidates for President who meet Tom Pauken's minimum requirements for acceptability. Mr Pauken wants to exclude from the conservative label any conservative who has crossed him in the last two decades. That's a lot. He's still smarting from Karl Rove getting the best of him in the early 1990s in Austin. By my last count, the only conservatives left in his big tent are himself, Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, and two of those are dead. Three, if you count being dead politically. So, Mr Pauken's analysis of the Republicans boils down to watching who escapes his criticism. Former Governor Mike Huckabee might be Mr Pauken's favorite, or least flawed anyway. Here's what he had to say about Gov. Huckabee earlier this week: "Huckabee increasingly is tapping into the populist, middle class base of the Republican party which fueled Barry Goldwater’s and Ronald Reagan’s campaigns for President." Does it sound like Mr Pauken is making a little room inside his tiny tent?
Stay tuned.
P.S. But you'll have to stay tuned here. Tom Pauken continues to block me from posting comments on Dallas Blog itself.
No comments:
Post a Comment