Saturday night six Republican hopefuls met in Des Moines for their latest debate. You can read the full transcript here. There will likely be only one more such encounter before the Iowa caucuses, the first official test of strength in the nomination process, are held on January 3, 2012.
Newt Gingrich, as the new front runner in the polls, came under attack from his fellow competitors, as did Mitt Romney. See polling data here. Though he lied several times to obfuscate his former record of support for such measures as climate cap and trade and an individual mandate to buy health care, and drew belly laughs trying to explain his eight-figure K Street lobbying haul as simple "private sector free enterprise," most observers felt Gingrich held his own well enough to retain his late momentum toward victory in Iowa. See the Fact Check report on instances of untruthfulness in the debate here. Suffice it to say this field did not win any awards for accuracy last night.
What stands out more than anything at this time are the glaring deficiencies of all the remaining Republican candidates. One-time front runners Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry, along with Rick Santorum, have sought to appeal to the conservative Evangelical Christian vote. Yet Bachmann's and Perry's stumbles have evaporated their following, while Santorum has yet to be able to generate any. None of these three gives evidence of being ready to assume the office they seek.
Jon Huntsman, a fellow who tries to talk sense, suffers the handicap in the Republican electorate of being a former appointee of the Obama Administration as Ambassador to China. Though he is actually quite conservative, the former Utah governor also suffers from sounding far too reasonable when GOP primary voters are howling for red meat rhetoric. Huntsman also gets stuck with being identified as the second-fiddle "other Mormon" in the field behind Mitt Romney.
That leaves the two current leaders, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich. Romney's Achilles' heel is certainly his reputation as a serial flip-flopper. Gingrich and the others have zeroed in on this, and were he to win the nomination you can rest assured the Obama campaign would have a field day on this score. He is competent to be president, but comes across as rather a patrician wimp, strangely reminiscent of the forty-first president, George H. W. Bush. He might be the most electable general election candidate in the GOP primary field, but he is viewed as too moderate by the typical Republican primary voter.
Newt Gingrich assuredly knows enough to be president, and now has a sizable lead among likely GOP voters in all the national polls. Yet he too has major weaknesses. He has reversed course on the issues perhaps even more than Romney, if that is possible. He is mean and shoots from the hip like a talk radio pundit, making outrageous statements often at odds with reality. His ethics lapses are the stuff of legend. And Gingrich has made over $100 million as a K Street Washington lobbyist for firms the Tea Party excoriates for "crony capitalism." This has all come after he was drummed out of the House Speakership and fined $300,000 by an ethics committee run by his own party in 1998. As Joan Walsh of Salon writes of Newt, "even his baggage has baggage."
Though President Obama should be regarded as vulnerable given the slow recovery of the economy, this field of GOP challengers will be challenged indeed to beat him come next November. And their biggest obstacles might well be themselves.
3 comments:
Not only is Gingrich carrying a lot of baggage around, but he's damn scary. He says he'd ignore Supreme Court decisions if he didn't think they were right or interfered with him as commander-in-chief.
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-gingrich-judges-20111217,0,1295899.story
I know I've probably stated this before, but the partisan bickering and polarization of the way the President is picked is, in my opinion, a direct result of the primary system.
In primaries, you get the hard left and hard right of the two major parties come out and vote and thus a candidate has to appeal to the base of the party to win the primary, thus giving us hard left or hard right candidates during the election. The candidate that can then deftly steer their way the best to the moderate core, which probably makes up over 60% of the electorate, will have the best chance of winning.
Unfortunately, under this scenario, you only have to attract enough to get your majority of 51%, or in some cases not even that in the case of George Bush, since he only had to attract enough in Florida to make his case for President. That leaves the rest of the populace out in the cold and unpleased with the President.
There's something to be said for those smoke filled rooms of old where the good ol' boys of the party picked the guy who would be the standard bearer of the party to run for President. They were smart enough to know that you have to appeal to the moderate middle in the general election in order to win and have comfortable support from your constituents.
And another reason they'll have a tough time winning is they are forgetting their Reagan history.
"When the chips are down and the decisions are made as to who the candidates will be, then the 11th commandment prevails and everybody goes to work, and that is: Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican."
Great comments, Webfoot.
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