PJ: How many times and in how many ways can New Jersey Governor Christie say that he will not run for President before the GOP and the media believe him? How many times will Sarah Palin tease her fans about her intentions to run for the 'title' of President (I guess it's just like the Miss Alaska title)... a title that she says she can easily win but that she does not need in order to affect change...until her fan-base walks away to support someone else?
The Economist
Lexington
Open goal, useless strikers
After Rick Perry stumbles, the Republican cry goes out for a substitute
HERE is your match report so far, translated into soccer to spare American readers the pain of having their sporting metaphors mangled by foreigners.
It is the penalty shoot-out. Barack Obama stands in a corner of the goal mouth, his leg shackled to a heavy anvil labelled “the economy”. One by one, the Republican presidential candidates line up to shoot at goal. One by one, they trip up and collapse in a heap even before they have had a chance to connect with the ball. The latest figure spread-eagled haplessly on the field is that of Rick Perry, the governor of Texas, who has managed to go from hero to zero after less than two months in the race.
Well, perhaps not quite zero. In fact most polls continue to put him at or near the top of the Republican field, where he took the place of Mitt Romney soon after throwing his Stetson into the ring in August. Our Economist/YouGov poll this week gives him 14% of likely primary voters, just behind Mr Romney’s 15%. But the latest televised debate, in Orlando, Florida, on September 22nd, saw him turn in the second of two dreadful performances in a row, and this has set back his campaign in two separate ways.
First, the man whose big advantage over the too-slick Mr Romney was supposed to be the authenticity of his conservatism has somehow managed to let his rivals paint him as a cringing liberal. He stands accused of allowing the children of illegal immigrants to pay the lower, subsidised in-state tuition fees at Texas’s public universities, and of ordering Texas to inflict what Michele Bachmann, the congresswoman from Minnesota who has appointed herself Joan of Arc in this campaign, calls “a government injection” on “innocent little 12-year-old girls”.
Mr Perry pleads mitigation. In the case of the university fees he says he was handicapped by the possession of a heart (why punish the children of illegal immigrants for their parents’ actions?). As for the injection, he hoped the HPV vaccine would save more women from cervical cancer. But no hint of leniency towards illegal immigrants goes unpunished by a certain sort of Republican activist, so the star of the Lone Star candidate is waning. The unexpected winner of the Florida straw poll, held soon after the Orlando debate, was Herman Cain, a fiery black Baptist preacher and former boss of Godfather’s Pizza.
In theory, Mr Perry has ample time to recover. Straw polls do not count for much; a mere six weeks ago Mrs Bachmann was basking in her own victory in the Ames straw poll in Iowa, only to be eclipsed as soon as Mr Perry made his late eruption into the race. And although the Texan has so far fumbled his attempt to hurt Mr Romney by identifying him, accurately, as the governor who introduced an early form of “Obamacare” into Massachusetts, he will have plenty more chances to do better: the candidates will next debate in New Hampshire in mid-October.
However, proving himself to be a more conservative conservative than Mr Romney is no longer Mr Perry’s most urgent task, because allowing himself to be outflanked from the right was only the smaller of his two recent setbacks. His bigger problem now is that he has lost his aura as an effective campaigner.
Tested for the first time on a national stage, the serial winner of elections in Texas has been found strangely wanting. After his dismal debates, party panjandrums no longer take his famed electoral smarts for granted. He had no defence when Mr Romney hammered him for calling the Social Security (pensions) system on which millions of Americans rely unconstitutional and a “Ponzi scheme”. He fluffed his counter-attack on Mr Romney’s introduction of compulsory health insurance. Asked how he would respond to a nuclear emergency in Pakistan, he mumbled about “the Pakistani country”, as if the existence of this exotic land of 190m Muslims had only just become known in Texas.
Though Mr Perry has since returned to the attack, many Republicans now question whether their latest striker can hit that enticingly open goal. What if the slippery Mr Obama, his head brimming with arcane incumbent’s knowledge about Pakistan and other tricksy stuff, runs circles around the tongue-tied Texan? Or if Mr Perry reminds voters of that other Texan, the unlamented George Bush junior? Hence the renewed enthusiasm for drafting Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey (already at 15% in our poll). He had called himself unready, but promised this week to reconsider—and gave a suspiciously presidential speech at the Ronald Reagan library in California, lamenting the failure of Americans to “live up to our own tradition of exceptionalism”.
Mr Christie has delighted Republicans in New Jersey by cutting spending and bashing the public-sector unions. But like Mr Perry he has taken some moderate positions, in his case on gun control as well as immigration, that might antagonise the conservative base. And the move to draft a governor who has had less than two years in office this late in the campaign cannot but smack of desperation. It underlines the fear in the Republican camp that none of the candidates already in the field looks completely certain to beat even an economy-shackled Mr Obama.
Democrats for Perry
Except, perhaps, for the patient Mr Romney. Interestingly, there are Democrats who say quietly that they are no less disappointed than conservatives by Mr Perry’s recent mistakes. That is because Mr Perry’s errors make it likelier that the Republicans will settle for Mr Romney; and Mr Romney, a centrist who everyone knows is only masquerading as a conservative until the primaries are over, might actually go on to beat Mr Obama in the general. The great flip-flopper does not convince the conservative base. He does not excite much of the wider electorate either. But nor does he scare them. And with the economy the way it is, that may be all it takes to win the White House in 2012.
http://www.economist.com/node/21530979
No comments:
Post a Comment