The line that ensures Mitch Daniels will never be President:

[Eid Ma Clack Shaw]

"The war in Iraq will cost $50-60 billion"

Then we have the rest of the Bush economic policy he crafted. Doesn't look too good for him, does it?

Put it this way, I'm unsure as to why so many 'establishment' Republicans are hoping that this man will make a late entry into the race, and even more flabbergasted that some on this very forum worry that he'd be an opponent of almost uncanny strength. First of all, he'd go down like a wet fart, splitting the 'moderate' Romney vote and handing Gingrich the nomination on a silver platter.

Next, let's say he was somehow engineered into the nomination. Consider that he sounds "sane" by GOOP standards not because he has great ideas, but because he is really fucking boring. I'm sorry, but that's just a fact.

So we've got:

Bushaggage, including a frankly scandalous estimate of the financial impact of Iraq.

He is REALLY boring. I mean, you could roll the most charismatically challenged aspects of Al Gore 2000 Edition, John Kerry, Bob Dole and Michael Dukakis into a big doughy ball and you have a candidate with three times the magnetism of Daniels.

He is REALLY short. Not just short, but really, really weedy, with his hair transplant and shrunken head only compounding his lame appearance. He would probably look Presidential if you gave him seven inches, a more convincing hair job and inflated his head a bit.

He would be a remarkably inept candidate; at least in failed Democratic candidates they usually got half of it right, but Daniels is that rare major league politician who manages to lack charisma AND look like a complete wuss. He just comes across as this kind of risible man, and that in conjunction with his Bushaggage would send him careening to a Mondalian defeat.

Even Gingrich would do better right now, given his ability to get the rabids foaming at the mouth. Daniels couldn't, and Obama would be a dreadful head-to-head match up him, the absolute worst.

[bigtree]

1. he's the fricking poster boy for boring

. . . right on about splitting the Romney vote. Every angle the ABR crowd can think of looks useless. It's their message, not the appeal. They just don't get it. The entire 'I hate Obama' thing got old last winter. They've got nothing else at all to substitute for it, though. They'll push one of these clowns forward, eventually, and we'll see just how many folks will vote for their tired, tedious, spiteful circus Daniels was struggling to barker last night.

[Eid Ma Clack Shaw]

4. Well..

Maybe it's kind of apt that a man who missed his true calling as a funeral director should represent the moribund GOP.

[Stinky The Clown]

2. His rep is not enhanced by his wife's antics

A philandering husband looks bad, but in a way, to more than a few, seems "heroic". "Getting a little strange on the side." "How does he get all those women?"

The flip side is a guy whose wife leaves him for another man. Suddenly, while he's sympathetic, he also gets seen as somehow less than a man.

I am not defending any of these views, but I do think they're real and I do think they'll affect Daniels if he runs.

[2pooped2pop]

6. that plus

his grandfather is Syrian and that means he's Kenyan and will need a super dooper, long form birth certificate.

And
He sold Hwy 6 in Indiana to Foreign Investors. What other parts of AMerica will he sell to non-Americans? The Lincoln Memorial?

lol, I need similes.

[CTyankee]

3. Against Obama's obvious "star power" Daniels looks like a little sh*t...

These repubs have quite a line-up: snarling Newt, Mitt outatouch, the santorum, Free Bananas Paul. And the second string: Daniels, bully boy Christie (also snarling)....who else is on the dance card?

If I were a republican, I'd be pretty worried right about now...

[n2doc]

5. If voters had memories Newt would be gone

Voters don't seem to care about what people have done in the past. Now Daniels may be torpedo'ed by his family issues, but it won't be because of Iraq.