The Newshogger's whiskey caucus started in the collective experience that Shamanic, Cernig and myself had when we were blogging together at the Unpaid Pundits. One of our conservative Republican co-bloggers in the spirng and summer of 2005 was convinced that Condoleeza Rice was the perfect and winning 2008 GOP nominee. We saw a massive opportunity to get some good booze out of this situation and bet heavily against it. However due to counter-party risk, we have had to write down our bets to zero as we know we won't get paid.
Back then I could not understand the excitement on some parts of the right that Condoleeza Rice generated. Right now I can understand the institutional and structural supports behind the remaining Republican nominees; Romney matches up with the money, Huckabee with the evanglicals, McCain and Guiliani with the Hawks; Rice would have been set up as George H.W. Bush following Junior. She is and has been a non-entity who has not been able to credibly establish herself as a major bureaucratic power with any independence beyond that of being a Bush family lackey. She has no sigificant political or policy accomplishments that appeal to the Republican primary electorate, and if we think debate on the Wilder effect is significant with Obama, it would be drowned out by polling 'discrepencies' generated by a black woman running in a Republican primary. In 2005 Dick Morris floated a purely anti-Clinton identity politics rationale for nominating Rice, but even then his calculations seemed weak.
And yet this talk will still not die down. Via Miami Progressive, Robert Novak is passing along rumors about Rice as VP for McCain.
Who does she deliver? What charge does she advance or refute? What states come over to the GOP column because of her? I don't get this Rice boomlet as there is no substance to back it up.
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