This President should be beatable. But the real Republican contender won’t get in the ring for another five years
Florida
By rights, Barack Obama should be on the ropes. After what he himself described as a ‘shellacking’ in the midterm elections, he was given a mandatory count and still managed to stay on his feet. That ‘hopey-changey thing’ hasn’t worked out as advertised. America’s debt mountain is of Himalayan proportions. Last weekend, Washington was on the brink of a government shutdown as Obama’s government and Congress traded punches over budget cuts. Half the country hates Obama’s nationalised healthcare plan with a medieval vengeance.
It gets worse. His promise to shut Club Gitmo has been shelved indefinitely.
His plans to try 9/11 mastermind Sheikh Khaled Mohammed as a common criminal in New York had to be abandoned. His mission to reach out to the Islamic world has belly-flopped. The Middle East is in turmoil, the Muslim Brotherhood on the march in Egypt, Iran is still on course to go nuclear and the President was seen to dither hopelessly over Libya. At times the coolest man on the planet has looked laid back to the point of comatose. His own cheerleaders are disappointed and muted.
So you might expect the Republicans to be itching to field a candidate against him for next year’s presidential election. Instead, Obama has just announced his candidacy for 2012 and is in the process of raising an astonishing $1 billion for his re-election campaign. In a country where money doesn’t so much talk as shout at the top of its voice, he looks almost certain to beat any Republican who dares to get in the ring with him. And there is a distinct, near-farcical lack of any credible contender willing to have a go.
Sarah Palin probably won’t run, but she remains a role model for women called Peggy Sue who waddle round Wal-Mart in their curlers. Her main function in life is as a political pin-up for men of a certain age. I read the other day that there are now clubs where you can buy a lap dance from a Sarah Palin lookalike — which I suppose is some kind of compliment. Last time I looked, Spearmint Rhino wasn’t employing any Theresa May clones to pull in the punters. Palin revels in her celebrity, has become a permanent fixture on Fox News and recently starred in her own reality TV show. But there’s no political Midas touch.
Her support for her assorted ‘Mama Grizzlies’ in the Congressional elections last November produced decidedly mixed results. Some of the crazier broads, like the one who said she had ‘dabbled into witchcraft’ and campaigned against masturbation, have disappeared already. The more sensible candidates would have won anyway, without Palin’s backing. Which brings us to Michelle Bachmann, the Minnesota congresswoman with her eyes on the White House. When she turns on her overdrive, Bachmann is perhaps the only woman in American politics who can make Palin sound like Indira Gandhi. There are tapes of her bloopers doing the rounds on the internet, including the bizarre claim that Jimmy Carter was responsible for swine flu. She can be safely ruled out.
Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor and Baptist preacher, is another Fox News favourite. He has a Saturday-night talk show, a weird hybrid of politics and country music, which ends with him up on stage playing guitar with his guests. He has a folksy bedside manner, is popular with the Republican base and fared well in the early primaries last time — but he hasn’t committed himself and has recently moved to Florida where he is building a retirement home. Travis Tritt probably stands more chance of beating Obama.
Mitt Romney is another candidate who has been round the block — and fallen short. That hasn’t stopped him establishing an ‘exploratory’ committee for 2012. Romney is a serious contender, the bookmakers’ favourite. But his candidacy would be fatally flawed, and not because of his Mormon faith. It’s exactly five years ago this week since, as governor of Massachussetts, he signed into law a state healthcare plan not dissimilar to Obamacare. Hardline conservatives will never forgive him. In any event, in the 2008 primary race he couldn’t even win his home state of Michigan. The likelihood of him having the juice to overhaul Obama is slim.
Then we have Tim Pawlenty, a former Minnesota governor who just hired a seasoned campaign strategist. He’s popular with evangelical Christians, a crucial constituency on the right, and can boast a decent record. There’s a school of thought, to which I don’t subscribe, which holds that if John McCain had chosen Pawlenty over Palin as his running mate he would have beaten Obama. But Pawlenty’s not insubstantial problem is that he has the charisma of Iain Duncan Smith. Hilariously, he’s even taken to calling himself T-Paw, like a renegade South Central Los Angeles rap star, in an attempt to establish some street smarts.
But nothing speaks more eloquently about the talent drought in the Republican party than the emergence of Donald Trump as a serious challenger. The property tycoon-turned-TV personality has declared that he will ‘probably’ run as an independent if he doesn’t win the Republican nomination. Soberingly, he was recently placed joint first place — with Huckabee — in a CNN poll of Republicans asked to name their dream candidate. This suggests a kind of mass death-wish among the right. America may have been ready for a black president, but would it ever vote for someone who parts his hair under his ear? You should never trust a man who pretends he isn’t bald.
The most compelling candidate is Chris Christie, the Irish-Sicilian governor of the great state of New Jersey. He’s built like a dump truck, looks and sounds like Tony Soprano’s brother-in-law Bobby, and boasts that he has single-handedly kept Dunkin’ Donuts going through the recession. Were he to make it to the White House, he would have the distinction of being the fattest president since William H. Taft (1909–1913), who tipped the scales at 25 stone. It was once said that when Taft went swimming they had to close the Atlantic.
But Christie is a formidable politician, as you’d expect from someone who has thrived in the snake pit which is the Garden State. He has the common touch. In some ways he’s a cross between Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill on Krispy Kremes. If Christie stands this time, the money follows him.
Another heavyweight, in every sense, is Haley Barbour, from Mississippi, praised for his handling of the Katrina aftermath. Barbour is big in the South and told reporters last year that if they saw him lose 40 pounds he was either running for president or had cancer. Barbour has subsequently been on a diet. Since we don’t have access to his confidential medical records, I think we can take his weight loss as a ‘maybe’.
These are the runners and riders. Even so, all the indications are that if the economy picks up and with a sympathetic mainstream media on his side, Obama wins again. Curiously, the President’s ratings actually went up after last week’s budget stand-off. Most Americans expect their politicians to work together once they get to Washington, not bring the government to a standstill. And on the right, the House Republicans took a kicking from the Tea Party’s chief barker, the radio host Rush Limbaugh, for agreeing to just $38 billion in cuts, not the promised $100 billion. One step up and two steps back.
So where does the GOP go next? A few weeks ago, I found the answer. It was at a Tea Party rally at a county fairground in Florida. The star turn was Marco Rubio, the state’s newly elected Republican senator. Rubio took on the establishment and won, winning more than half the vote in a three-horse race an d demolishing former governor Charlie Crist (once touted himself as a potential presidential candidate). That steamy Friday evening, more than 5,000 people had come along to hear him speak.
It is hard to imagine a crowd that size turning out to hear any politician in Britain between elections. Or even during elections. Nothing in British politics could raise a crowd like this — I discount stage-managed, bussed-in, union-funded anti-cuts rallies. Call Me Dave would probably have a problem filling a church hall in Witney.
Rubio embodies the American dream as much as Obama. He is the 39-year-old son of Cuban immigrants who escaped Castro’s tyranny. That night in Indian River County he received a hero’s ovation from an ecstatic crowd. Contrary to the usual lazy liberal smears, the people who came to see him were not ‘Bible and guns’ extremists but decent, ordinary citizens, small businessmen and ex-servicemen. As a veteran of political conferences and politicians’ speeches, I have rarely come away so energised as I was by Rubio, who spoke eloquently and passionately about the imperative for low taxes, small government and balanced budgets. Here’s a man, I thought, who actually means it.
Already, Rubio has a devoted fan club who’d love to see him take on Obama and run either for president or vice-president in 2012. He’s ruled both options out, unsurprisingly for someone elected last November. But here, without doubt, is a man heading for high office in the not-too-distant. Rubio would swing the socially conservative Hispanic vote, which will soon make up a fifth of the population, and which has traditionally gone heavily to the Democrats. That would not just deliver Florida into the GOP column, but the key electoral college state of California.
It’s dangerous to make predictions about American politics, but I offer one now: that Rubio will be America’s first Hispanic president by 2020 at the latest. To paraphrase the rock critic Jon Landau when he first saw Bruce Springsteen: ‘I have seen the future of American politics and its name is Marco Rubio.’ But luckily for Obama, this future does not look likely to arrive just yet.
Among the challengers