I do not think you are following the post anymore, but I apologize for jumping down your throat.

My guess would be that Beck will back a Ron Paul-type candidate.I do not think Paul will run again, but there will very likely be at least one person trying to fill the Bircher gap in the race.

All of this makes us look like idiots. If you can’t see how awful Beck makes us look to the rest of the world and how ashamed we should be of him, you will see it when all your “liberal” media enemies get ahold of us and twist everything we believe into pure nonsense. He’s making it so easy for Romney enemies and as we can see from the “Taint” article, it’s already started. They are taking things like the White Horse Prophecy that is not a tenant of our religion, not scripture, we are not even sure if it happened, and using it to suit their purpose, which is to say we are all paranoid lunatics.

This is just the start. You Ryans of the world did it to yourselves by encouraging this kind of fact-unbased, “Howard Stern is a reliable source if it suits my purposes,” aka “Well, Glenn Beck said it so it must be true,” CRAP.

I just think it is naive to believe that a huge percentage of his votes didn’t come from people who knew little more about him than his skin color and his party affiliation.

This is true of most candidates in previous elections as well, and so, unremarkable. Large numbers vote in every election without very much information. And that’s just for those who actually vote – imagine the ignorance among that slightly smaller group who can’t even be bothered.

…a case can be made that Beck is to Mormonism what Father Charles Coughlin was to Catholicism in the 1930s, when the “radio priest” peddled nasty, faith-based opposition to another ambitious Democratic president.

I’ve been re-reading Sinclair Lewis’s novel It Can’t Happen Here (for work) and was struck by the similarities between Beck and the fictional representation of Coughlin. Beck’s Mormonism is less important as an ideological influence and more important as a way of establishing his family-values ethos. It will be interesting to see if Romney can cash in on the general ethos without having to field the weirdness factor this time around. The perception that he was an opportunist didn’t help him do that, really.

The other problem is that Romney is unlikely to appeal to any populist sentiment very well, being an elitist (i.e. he’s well connected, educated and articulate). It seems to me that Beck discourages that kind of politician, and Huckabee is a better fit for Beck’s demographics.

And it definitely helped in to run against McCain, who looked old and sloppy when it came to ideas. Tragic for McCain to have said the economy was sound, two days before the crash came. This was especially true after McCain had been previously quoted as not being strong on economics.

For Pres Obama, “it’s the economy, stupid” would have been a perfect slogan to use against the Republicans.

My theory is that the people who say a lot of people voted for Obama because of his race make that accusation because of Obama’s race.

That was my bad, I didn’t mean to indicate that everybody who voted for Obama did so because of his race. But I do believe it was the majority of his voters. One of many demonstrations of this was a Howard Stern bit where they interviewed people on the streets of New York to ask what they thought of Obama’s selection of Sarah Palin for VP. The response was overwhelmingly supportive of Palin.

The economy will be a disaster for several more years to come, easily through the next campaign period. Economists are finally admitting that they are stumped as to why unemployment rates continue to climb despite the “stabilization of the financial sector” that Washington and the IMF, G8, etc.. have been trumpeting as a major success (when it’s really just the banks slowly strangling the golden goose with fees). There are literally millions of shadow foreclosures that will not hit the market for at least another year or two because the banks can’t manage them. The dollar is imploding and new construction is down 70% (which has a funding, procurement, permitting and building cycle of 5-7 years, meaning we are at least 5 years away from seeing any sort of turnaround in both the residential and commercial construction industry).

Romney has already established himself in public opinion as someone who knows how approach financial crises. It’s going to be the central factor in the next election cycle. I guarantee it.