Insurgents Wanted

Jesse Walker | September 26, 2008

James Pethokoukis makes a prediction about the next election:

The Republican presidential nominee in the summer of 2012 will have come out against the Paulson-Bernanke bailout plan in the fall of 2008. Conservative rage against the $700 billion "rescue" attempt, as President Bush terms it, has been stoked white hot by Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, and the powerful pundits of the right-wing blogosphere such as Michelle Malkin and Jonah Goldberg....

Now 2012 may seem awfully far away right now. But is there any doubt that Hillary Clinton would be the Democratic nominee today if she had voted against the Iraq War back in 2002? She was for it, Obama was against it, and Obama is the nominee. And don't be surprised if there are insurgent Republicans in 2010 who run against incumbent GOPer who voted for the bailout in a replay of the 2006 Lieberman-Lamont Democratic primary battle.

At this point the dominant D.C. Democrats seem less interested in blocking the bailout than in attaching various add-ons to it. (Kinda like an "emergency" war appropriations bill.) But if grassroots Dems still perceive the results as a handout to bankers and Wall Street gamblers, we could see a similar dynamic in the Blue party in 2010 and 2012.