Midterm elections are over and President Obama is approaching the halfway mark of his first term. You know what that means.
It’s already time to start speculating about the presidential election of 2012.
It is almost a foregone conclusion that Obama will be the Democrat nominee. Perhaps the one person who could pose a challenge to Obama is Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, though she has denied rumors that she is going to run in 2012.
“I am very happy doing what I’m doing,” Clinton said on Fox News on Sunday. “And I am not in any way interested in or pursuing anything in elective office.”
While I am not wholly convinced that Mrs. Clinton is done with elective office (see 2016), I am confident she won’t oppose Obama in 2012. Very rarely do politicians run against the incumbent president of their own party.
However, just because the Democrats are relatively boring does not mean the Republicans are following suit. Desperate to regain control of the White House, Republican presidential hopefuls are popping up quicker than Tea Party activists at a Sarah Palin book signing.
So who are some of the GOP hopefuls so far? The names are familiar: Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee and the aforementioned Palin. That line-up of GOP candidates is precisely why Obama stands a good chance of re-election in 2012.
Palin was Sen. McCain’s vice presidential nominee in the 2008 election. Romney and Huckabee were both presidential candidates who lost their primaries. Since 2008, Palin has taken the invisible reins of the Tea Party and sputtered around on television. Huckabee is a talk show host on Fox News, and Romney has been in hiding, silently building a campaign. The interesting bit about the Republican Party is that, unlike the Democrats who have a clear front-runner, the Republicans lack a leader of their party.
What’s developing is analogous to a game of political chicken between Romney, Huckabee and Palin. The media strategy is straightforward: be the last to reveal your candidacy and earn the most nationwide attention. It requires a delicate balance by the politician to use the media correctly. The issue for the Republican Party as a whole is this lack of any strong perceived challenger. While the nation has heard of and remembers Huckabee, Romney and of course Palin, the longer they hold out from declaring their candidacy, the longer the Republican Party remains leaderless.
Without a strong direction, the party can only become more divided, and the more divided the party is, the more difficult and fierce the primary battle will be. The more difficult the primary battle, the more likely they will lose the presidential election. When primary battles develop within parties, it saps the candidates’ strength and focus, while the other party delivers a clear, concise message. It’s interesting to note: The Republicans in 2008 selected McCain fairly easily compared to the bitter struggle between Obama and Clinton. Among a long list of things that caused McCain to lose that election was the selection of Sarah Palin as his VP.
What’s the Democrats’ view on Republican opposition? Vice President Joe Biden recently stated that he thought Sarah Palin was likely to get the nomination.
“Were I a Republican senator or a Republican political leader, I would look and say, ‘Wait, she’s got a good chance of getting the nomination,’” Biden said. “But I think, in that race, it would be a clear, clear choice for the country to make, and I believe President Obama would be in very good shape.”
Which begs the question: Can any Republican mount a serious challenge to Obama? Because I agree with Vice President Biden. I think Sarah Palin does have a good chance at the nomination. Frankly, better than good. She clearly receives the most media attention of any of the other candidates, and she has a form of grassroots mobilization through the Tea Party.
But Palin will never win a presidential election. She is way too much of a polarizing force for Independents. I just don’t believe it could ever happen. So what about Romney and Huckabee? Certainly they would have a better chance at upsetting the incumbent President than Palin does. It might even happen. The issue with Romney and Huckabee is going to be obtaining the Republican Nomination. Right now Palin is the Republican Party, no matter how much pain this causes the Republican Party leaders. Realistically it’s their own fault to begin with. They created her when they flew her in from Alaska. And now it’s Palin’s face you constantly see on television, in the bookstores and on the Internet.
It’s going to be very difficult for even Romney and Huckabee, two well-known Republicans, to garner enough support to battle Palin in a Republican primary. It’s going to be bitter; it’s going to be brutal. That’s why it seems almost a sure thing that Obama will remain in the White House through 2016.
[email protected]
Tellam: With no strong GOP candidate, Obama re-election seems likely
Daily Emerald
November 22, 2010
0
More to Discover