PJ: I actually wonder when the cycle ended. Even before Obama took his oath of office, media pundits began predicting who the next republican candidate would be for 2012.
The Economist
Lexington
It's that time, already
A gaggle of would-be presidents start the hard slog of chipping away at the Granite State
THEY call him a pizza mogul so here he is, the day before the big debate, working the room in Sal’s Pizza in Manchester, New Hampshire. Herman Cain is plain “black”—he does not like to be called an African-American like Barack Obama, but like the president he has an only-in-America life story. The poor black boy born in Memphis 65 years ago made good and built what his campaign calls a “multidimensional” life that has included being, literally, a rocket scientist for the navy, turning around the Godfather pizza chain, hosting his own radio talk show and running the National Restaurant Association. One fan in Sal’s calls him “part Ronald Reagan, part Lewis Graham, part Martin Luther King and 100% rock star”. Now Mr Cain wants to be president.
Why? Blame God, in part. Mr Cain, signing a customer’s pizza box, adds a reference to Matthew 25:24, the parable of the talents. After recovering from cancer, he explains, he is putting his own talents at the nation’s disposal. How does he know that God helped save him? Hell, why else was the doctor to whom he turned named Lord and the nurse who greeted him named Grace? To cap it all, the surgeon who fixed his colon and liver did it by making a single incision and then working through the body in the pattern of a J. Providence indeed.
Here on the same day, at Halligan Tavern in nearby Derry, a bigger crowd has crammed the upstairs bar to see Tim Pawlenty. The former governor of Minnesota is looking casual and yet somehow presidential in a yellow shirt and jeans. He has a ready smile and a twinkle in his eye. But when he starts his riff the claws come out. He is running for president because Mr Obama has failed America. The change the president promised was not for the better. Unemployment is soaring, spending is out of control and the president does not have an economic plan.
Mr Pawlenty, however, is willing to tell unpopular truths. Hasn’t he already told Iowa that it has to phase out ethanol subsidies? And seniors in Florida that Social Security (pensions) needs reforming? In the coming months, he says, a lot of Republican candidates are going to be marching into bars just like Halligan’s promising just the same things. They will all pledge to cut spending, taxes and regulations and make the economy grow. The question for voters is whom they can trust, who has actually matched words with deeds. That person is himself. His record as a red governor of blue Minnesota is there for all to see. “I’m running for president of the United States because I love this country and I’ve got the record of results to get this country back on track,” he declares.
Every four years presidential races begin this way, with little encounters in pizza places, bars, picnics and house-parties. The race will grow relentlessly bigger until on November 6th next year the whole planet watches America’s decision. And if (as the locals do) you disregard those pesky caucuses in Iowa, it always starts in New Hampshire. As the “Almanac of American Politics” marvels, a state with 43 one-hundredths of 1% of America’s population becomes “the epicentre of the political universe” merely by having its primary first. Next year’s date is not yet fixed. It will probably be in the deep snows of mid-February, the better part of a year before the nation finally chooses a president. But New Hampshire has empowered its secretary of state to move it earlier if some upstart, such as Florida, tries to jump the queue.
Candidates claim to like the face-to-face retail politics of New Hampshire. It is probably a lie. Wooing the Granite State is fiendishly hard. The little place has one of the world’s biggest legislatures, with more than 400 members, and voters expect to meet politicians in person. More than 40% are independents, but are allowed to vote in the primary. They are late deciders but insist on inspecting presidential candidates early. Those who think they can buy or bypass New Hampshire crash and burn. That is why even Jon Huntsman, the former ambassador to China who is about to join the race but skipped the debate, has already been all over the state, eating barbecue and riding his Harley.
It is the night of the debate. Six of the men (Mitt Romney, Ron Paul, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Messrs Cain and Pawlenty) and one woman (Michele Bachmann) seeking the Republican nomination have come to duke it out in Saint Anselm College outside Manchester—a fixture in the political calendar every bit as thrilling to the political class as the Super Bowl is to normal Americans. A throng of reporters watches on monitors from a cavernous hall on another part of the campus. Behind them is the curtained-off “spin room”, containing seven platforms from which the candidates’ spin doctors will strive later to explain away flubs and claim victory for their own man or woman.
How was it for you?
It is the morning after. Mr Cain is glum. “Basically, they shut me down,” he tells your columnist in a post-mortem in the Hilton Garden Inn. He had much more to say about how he would fix the economy but never got the chance. For the moment the media’s attention has swivelled away. There were no great gaffes or coups. But most pundits are talking about the impressive national debut of Mrs Bachmann, the congresswoman from Minnesota who may now have displaced Sarah Will-She-Or-Won’t-She Palin as the champion of the tea-party movement, and the perplexing refusal of Mr Pawlenty to press home his “Obamneycare” attack on Mr Romney for having invented in Massachusetts a version of Mr Obama’s reviled health-care reform.
Mr Romney himself is up early, working the breakfast crowd at Blake’s Restaurant. He is still considered the front-runner and trying to look relaxed—you cannot appear tense if you want to be president—but you can imagine his inner torment. There are, after all, only 510 days to go before America votes.
http://www.economist.com/node/18836380
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