I was already thinking along the lines of the title when I got word via “The Hill” that one of Tim Pawlenty’s hometown Minnesota newspapers put the news of Pawlenty entering the Presidential race on its obituaries page. To me, that is the quintessential metaphor for the actions and chances of the Republicans vying to unseat President Obama.
Most of what would have been serious contenders for the Republican nomination have declined to run. On that list is Mike Huckabee, Chris Christie and Mitch Daniels, among others. They seem to understand that beating Obama will be difficult if not impossible, and that the chances would be much better to run in 2016 against a non-incumbent. Every single person currently running for the Republican nomination is unelectable. They are so far from what it would take to be electable that one wonders why they are even bothering or why anyone would donate money to their cause. Let’s run down the list:
http://www.democratsforprogress.com/...
I was already thinking along the lines of the title when I got word via “The Hill” that one of Tim Pawlenty’s hometown Minnesota newspapers put the news of Pawlenty entering the Presidential race on its obituaries page. To me, that is the quintessential metaphor for the actions and chances of the Republicans vying to unseat President Obama.
Most of what would have been serious contenders for the Republican nomination have declined to run. On that list is Mike Huckabee, Chris Christie and Mitch Daniels, among others. They seem to understand that beating Obama will be difficult if not impossible, and that the chances would be much better to run in 2016 against a non-incumbent. Every single person currently running for the Republican nomination is unelectable. They are so far from what it would take to be electable that one wonders why they are even bothering or why anyone would donate money to their cause. Let’s run down the list:
Newt Gingrich
You could write a book on all the mistakes Newt Gingrich has made and problems he has had since declaring his candidacy. I’ll concentrate on some of the worst ones.
Recently it came out that Gingrich at one time owed half a million dollars to Tiffany’s for jewelry purchases. The issues that raises are pretty obvious. How does someone like that relate to everyday Americans? Isn’t someone who would spend that amount on jewelry superficial? Et cetera. The impact of all of that could have been blunted by a good explanation or dealt with by a good apology, but instead Gingrich gave a non-explanation, calling it a “regular revolving account” when asked about it, and giving no other details. If he cannot deal with an issue like that in a straightforward way, how is he going to deal with difficult decisions he makes as President?
Last week, Gingrich criticized the Ryan plan, the budget plan the entire Republican Party has gotten behind to oppose President Obama’s budget. The Wall Street Journal followed with an article accusing Gingrich of throwing fellow Republicans “off a Grand Canyon rim” and then there was video of Newt being chewed out by an Iowa Republican voter for attacking Ryan’s plan.
Gingrich’s flip-flopping on intervention in Libya is mind-numbing. This video by TPMTV http://www.youtube.com/... shows about twelve separate changes of direction by Newt in a four-week period on what he believes regarding how we should handle Libya. With this kind of a track record, can anyone imagine Gingrich acting decisively as commander-in-chief?
All of the above regarding Gingrich is bad, but it is worse considering where he starts the nomination process, and that is with the reputation of excoriating Bill Clinton for having an affair while simultaneously carrying on an affair of his own and having two marriages end because Newt started affairs with other women. That kind of hypocrisy is serious and would be an obstacle all by itself to getting a party’s nomination, let alone winning a general election. Combine that with the rest of his issues and Gingrich is going nowhere.
Michele Bachmann
Michele Bachmann’s chances for the nomination and general election can be summed up in two words: “Tea Party”. She has aligned herself very tightly with the Tea Party. She proclaimed herself chairperson of the House Tea Party Caucus and delivered the “Tea Party Response” to the President’s State of the Union address. While that could be seen to be a positive thing 18 months ago, the Tea Party is now very unpopular in the country and seen by the Republican establishment as an annoyance at best and the reason they didn’t win back the Senate in 2010 at worst. The bad news for Bachmann is that the Republican establishment has a stranglehold on the GOP Presidential nomination process. Nationwide, opinion polls regarding the Tea Party show that the Tea Party is viewed negatively by anywhere from 15-50% more people than view it positively. Anyone tied to the Tea Party is unelectable.
All of that is incidental to the fact that Bachmann’s views are so far to the right (the words “lunatic fringe” come to mind) that even without the Tea Party, it’s hard to imagine Bachmann competing in any swing state.
Tim Pawlenty
Having his announcement put on the obits page of a hometown newspaper isn’t just a good metaphor for the chances of the Republican party in 2012, its a good metaphor for the effect of one of Pawlenty’s speeches. The Pawlenty camp likes to say that people want a good President, not an exciting speechmaker, and if you are in a position where you are trying to support Pawlenty, I guess that is what you would have to say. The reality is that people do look to their President for inspiration, and when halfway through one of your speeches people start to think of suicide as a good alternative to having to sit through the last half, you are decidedly lacking in the inspiration department.
Now that sounds a little harsh, but when you look up “Tim Pawlenty speeches” on Youtube and spend some time watching and listening to the reaction, the tepid applause and the yawns even from people who agree with everything he is saying, you realize that this guy has no chance to become President.
As if that wasn’t a big enough hurdle to climb, Pawlenty has what is being described as his own “Willie Horton”, Horton of course being the criminal who sank Michael Dukakis’ Presidential candidacy after it was found that on a Massachusetts furlough (Dukakis was Governor of Massachusetts at the time), Horton raped a woman in front of her husband.
Pawlenty issued a pardon to child molester Jeremy Giefer so that he could marry the 14-year-old girl he was molesting and raise the daughter that Giefer had fathered with her. When that child turned nine, Giefer started molesting her as well and molested her nearly 250 times in a nine-year span before he was caught.
It’s pretty obvious that the other contenders for the GOP nomination are going to use this incident against Pawlenty, and without having the oratorical skills to defend himself, it is going to be more than enough to prevent him from winning the nomination.
What will be interesting to me is how Fox News handles the Jeremy Giefer issue. The two architects behind George H. W. Bush’s Willie Horton attack on Michael Dukakis were Lee Atwater (who has since passed, but not before recanting his use of the Horton tactic) and Roger Ailes, who is now the president of Fox News and chairman of the Fox Television Stations Group. A famous quote of Ailes’ at the time was: “The only question is whether we depict Willie Horton with a knife in his hand or without it.” Is Ailes going to direct the folks at Fox News to cover the Jeremy Giefer issue with the zeal that he and Atwater sought to have Horton covered? Now THAT would be some “Fair and Balanced” coverage. I’ve bought extra popcorn with which to watch what happens with Pawlenty and Giefer on Fox.
Herman Cain
The first question I asked myself about Herman Cain is: Why does someone who ran a large pizza chain think that the skill-set for that job translates right into the Presidency? I am still waiting on an answer to that question, beyond the cute platitudes Republicans usually use to respond to it. The answer became more clear when Cain appeared on Fox News Sunday earlier this week and was asked several questions about the Israel-Palestinian issue… it doesn’t.
Cain doesn’t know the most basic issues surrounding the dispute between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Having declared his bid for the Presidency before bothering to educate himself about those issues shows a bewildering lack of judgment. It also is a slap in the face to both the Israelis and the Palestinians.
At this time, let me introduce what I humbly refer to as the ‘Leser rule”: “Thou shalt not declare your candidacy for the Presidency of the United States before thoroughly understanding the top three foreign policy issues facing the country, the ways Democrats and Republicans typically deal with those issues, and thou shalt be able to articulate your own intended policies with regard to those issues.”
Now of course, with help from the conservative media outlets, Cain is trying to explain away his lack of knowledge on the subject. My friend Neil Cavuto at Fox News had a guest on that said that what the American people are really concerned about is “issues, not gaffes.” I agree, but lets really understand what a gaffe is. A gaffe is a misspeak, an accident. You mean to say “Toronto” and you say “tomato”. You mean to say “50 states and six territories” but you say “56 states”. You know what the answer is, but you say something else.
Cain did not commit a gaffe, any more than Sarah Palin did when she was asked what she thought about the Bush doctrine and she replied: “In what respect, Charlie?” When you completely do not know the answer, when you don’t even know anything about what is being asked, such that you cannot even craft a good BS story, it is not a gaffe. You are ignorant concerning that issue.
Later, Cain undermined even what Cavuto’s guest had tried to do for him by going on Hannity and admitting that he did not know what concepts like the “Right of Return” for Palestinians was, and he was “caught off guard” and the question “came out of left field… I now know what that is.” Cain then made a further fool of himself by saying: “The thing you are going to learn about Herman Cain if he doesn’t know something, he is not going to try and fake it or give an answer that he doesn’t know what he is talking about”
Except that is exactly what Cain did. When asked about the right of return, Cain tried to assert that the Israelis wouldn’t mind having the Palestinian refugees come back, something that anyone with even the slightest grain of knowledge about the Israeli-Palestinian issues would know is not true. So even in his attempt to explain away what happened, with 24 hours to think of a good excuse, Cain said something that is easily demonstrated to be untrue.
This raises other questions about Cain’s candidacy. What other things does Cain not know and why did he declare his candidacy without understanding the job? How can you understand the job without understanding some of the top challenges facing someone who would take the job?
I am going to bet that after George W. Bush and Sarah Palin, the American people are sick of having unqualified people pursue the top two jobs in the country.
Ron Paul
Ron Paul does not believe in the Republican platform on social issues and is against the Bush doctrine that is now held as central to Republican beliefs on foreign policy. He has zero chance of winning the GOP nomination. He might be a threat to my friend Wayne Allen Root if he ran for the Libertarian nomination, but he is not a real Republican and Republican primary voters get that.
Jon Huntsman
Huntsman is pro-civil unions for gays. In the GOP that is an unforgivable sin. To make matters worse, it is not enough to gain the support of those who are pro-LGBT rights, because those folks, like me, demand full marriage equality for the LGBT community. He has lost a constituency here without gaining one. Being pro-civil unions only increases his problems with the all-important (for a Republican) Christian Right when one considers that, like Romney, he is a Mormon.
I agree that such things shouldn’t matter in modern politics. Those who are members of the Christian Right have their own ideas about what should matter.
Mitt Romney
Like Gingrich, Romney’s issues of unelectability could be the subject of a book the size of War and Peace.
The issues of flip-flopping have been covered by me and countless others in prior articles. Romney has been pro-gay rights and then anti-gay rights and back and forth a few times on that and abortion and gun rights. How he really feels about those issues is anyone’s guess, but what is not a guess is how that will hurt him in the GOP nomination process. Some of the ugliest moments for any of the candidates in the 2008 election were those when John McCain, Mike Huckabee and various other Republican hopefuls confronted Romney on his flip-flopping during debates. Expect more of this in 2012, with an added twist.
The twist is Romney’s signature issue as Governor of Massachusetts, healthcare reform. By now everyone knows that the healthcare reform he enacted in Massachusetts is extremely similar to that enacted by Barack Obama for the country. That is something that his GOP rivals will bring up again and again during the primaries.
What is also going to hurt Romney is the pathetic speeches he has given on two occasions where he had an opportunity to make a stand. The first speech I am talking about is the one in 2008 when he talked about religion in the political process. He had an opportunity to be a leader and make a broad speech that put to rest whether any religion should matter in the Presidential selection process. Instead, Romney’s speech was narrow and concentrated on the idea that he personally should not be discounted because of his religion.
A similar failure was evident in his speech attempting to explain away Romneycare. Instead of coming out strongly one way or the other, either saying that it was right and Obama’s healthcare reform efforts were right, or that he recants his program and both were wrong, Romney tried for some kind of nuanced middle that made no sense whatsoever.
What will kill his Presidential ambitions is that he seems afraid in any circumstance to make a stand on anything. Can you imagine a President Romney being decisive on any foreign or domestic issue? Can you imagine Romney taking the risk and giving the order that President Obama just did to get bin Laden? That seems completely out of his character. Look for a lot to be made of that very thing during the race.
With the motley crew of characters I have described above, I pronounce the efforts to elect a Republican President in 2012 Dead on Arrival.
The only two questions left are which of the unelectables will actually win the nomination, and how badly will they be beaten by President Obama. I’m guessing the Las Vegas over/under for President Obama will start at about 350 electoral votes.