In going for an accurate forecast of the 2012 elections, it’s hard to give a reading on what is happening in politics without also including the economic picture. Economic concerns will dominate the 2012 presidential and congressional elections to a degree not seen since the Great Depression. I’m not seeing anything on the foreign relations frontier that will derail this economic domination.
I will be giving a fuller economic forecast for 2012 in a future blog. The following political forecast will be premised on the view that the economic picture in 2012 will not be very different from what we see in the fall of 2011. We will have avoided the doomsday scenarios of economic collapse predicted by various disaster prophets.
Yet, the United States will still be caught up in what could well be called the Whimp Recovery of slow growth and high unemployment. Things will be slightly better than now, but the threat of a global economic meltdown to another global recession or worse will have been averted.
Assuming then that we will have relative economic stability in 2012, what can we look forward to in the 2012 elections?
With respect to my previous forecasts of what is coming in 2012 on the political front, I must say that I’m grateful that we are no longer in the age when a failed prophecy had fatal consequences for the prognosticator. This is indeed a hazardous time for anyone trying to see how the future will unfold. Welcome to the 2012 time frame.
One counterintuitive forecast I made after the 2010 elections does seem to be on track. I predicted that the 2012 election would see a relative Democratic wave.
My prediction is that the Democrats will lose at most one seat in the Senate, gain about twenty-five seats in the House of Representations, and that Barack Obama will be reelected in 2012. I see the Senate remaining almost the same as it is now. The House will see an increase in Democrats with many of the Tea Party freshmen Republicans members losing reelection. This will leave the House almost evenly divided. I see Obama winning relatively easily in 2012, although not with the super margin that he had in 2008.
My big pratfall on the 2012 elections from before was the prediction that Sarah Palin would be the Republican nominee. My thinking was that the Tea Party would be the element in the Republican Party that determined the nominee. I was wrong on both counts.
Sarah Palin decided that she had more to gain by remaining on the sidelines. I underestimated her narcissism. Being a public servant was never her strong suit. I wonder how she feels now that the GOP electorate is engaged in a desperate search for a Romney alternative.
After the 2010 elections, I thought that the Republicans would do another Christine O’Donnell or Sharon Angle type move and nominate some extreme Tea Party person like Sarah that would have no realistic chance of winning the independent, nonpartisan voters and hence no real chance in the election.
Well, Barack is not going to have this kind of a cake walk to reelection. My intuitive assessment is that Romney is going to be the nominee. Of the current eight major candidates, he is, by far, the most electable.
Anyone who has been following the Republican primary process has been treated to a political reality show with drama to rival the most soap operatic major network reality shows. Historians will look back on our time with stern warnings about what happens to a civilization when news degenerates into entertainment appealing to the lowest common denominator of viewer interest.
I see two contrary trends in the current GOP nomination cycle. On the one hand, there is seduction by performance art and, on the other, a very surprising, genuine desire to have a candidate equipped for the challenges of our age.
In our visually dominated electronic age, style as well as content matters for a candidate for president. Style has always mattered in presidential contests. The winner must be someone who can embody our archetypal expectations of a national leader. Physical attractiveness, relative youth and vitality, height, posture, bearing, and various nonverbal quirks go a long way to determining the winner.
Entertainers and actors, then, have an advantage over the rest of the field since their craft is presentation. It’s no accident then that the icon of Republican presidential politics is Ronald Reagan, the former actor, also known as the Great Communicator. He easily prevailed over his Democratic opponents even though he was slowly losing his mind to Alzheimer’s late in his presidential tenure.
Applying a style standard to the current GOP field, we can understand why Michele Bachmann has been having such a hard time making an impression on prospective GOP voters. You would think that Bachmann would be up in the first tier of contenders since she is the most clearly identified Tea Party candidate.
But, sorry Michele. At five feet, two inches, you’re just too short to meet our expectations of who our president should be. Putting her on the stage next to the much taller other candidates in the GOP debates makes her look like the dwarf of the bunch.
Also, Michele’s speaking style comes across as that of a lawyer. Actually she has been a lawyer. We’ve been spoiled by that political entertainer, Sarah Palin, to expect more engagement of our feelings and emotions from a female GOP candidate.
Herman Cain’s candidacy, on the other hand, pushes the envelope of how far style alone can carry a candidate. As radio show host, Herman has a background as a professional political entertainer. He’s promoted himself as the unconventional candidate. During his ascendancy in the polls, he presented himself as an engaging, confident personality with one bold new economic idea.
At one point, it looked like he might be a viable alternative to Romney. One blogger gushed “Is Herman Cain the next Ronald Reagan?” (Charles W. Dunn)
But Herman’s candidacy has been a fraud from the beginning. My reading is that Cain entered the presidential field to milk the occasion for all the notice and attention he could get in order to further his personal fame and fortune.
Rachael Maddow has put forth the intriguing premise that Herman Cain’s candidacy is a kind of performance art. She’s got a strong case. If you look at some of the early Cain political ads, you would be hard pressed to see how they differ from a Saturday Night Live satire on political candidates.
In one ad, Cain’s campaign manager, Herman Block literally blows smoke at the viewer. Another ad named ‘Yellow Flowers’ degenerates into total farce.
If you wonder if Herman is having a laugh at our expense, all you need do is look at the source of some of his quotations. Often these are put forward with a straight face.
In one of the first GOP debates, the candidates were given one minute to make a closing statement. Herman said, “A poet once said, ‘Life can be a challenge, life can seem impossible, but it’s never easy when there’s so much on the line.’” The problem here is that the “poet” he’s referring to is the pop singer Donna Summer and this quote is from the theme song from Pokémon: the Movie.
When he said, “we need a leader not a reader,” this is a quote from one of the characters in the Simpson movie.
Confronted with his connection with the Koch brothers, Cain said he was proud of the connection and that he was “a brother of another mother.” This is a quote from a Jackie Chan movie.
We don’t know to what extent Herman’s performance art is a conscious strategy and to what extent it’s just him having fun with politics. At any rate, it goes a long way to discrediting the whole Republican field. For when a jokester is number one in the political polls as Cain has been, what does this say about the Republican electorate or the GOP presidential platform?
The exposure that the GOP candidates are having in debates and other venues is good for the democratic process because candidates like Cain, who are in it for their own personal gain, are sooner or later unmasked when more detail questions are asked about their views and opinions.
Candidates who really don’t want to be president are going to suffer from a severe case of foot in mouth disease. So, Herman Cain has made egregious political gaffes such as his statement that he was concerned that China might be developing a nuclear weapon.
My take is that this is the unconscious of the candidate protecting them from being taken too seriously. When it looks like they might actually be the nominee, there is the tendency to do something which discredits them before it is too late.
Rich Perry was once the darling of the GOP voters and the solution to the prevailing dissatisfaction with Romney as the nominee. He has both strong Tea Party bona fides and an appealing, earthy, Western style. Moreover, he came into the race with a big bankroll of political donations.
Unfortunately for Perry, his brain and his speaking ability proved not to be on the same team. Perry was simply not able to present himself as someone who could effectively carry on a political dialogue without a specific script. His “Oops” moment where he forgot which of three federal agencies he was going to eliminate was simply the latest of many apparent lapses of cognitive function.
My reading is that Perry has some serious organic brain problem. His cognitive ability is clearly in decline. He got some condition like early Alzheimer’s or something similar. The fact that he refused to debate at all during his latest campaign for governor in 2010 should have been a red flag for his prospective supporters.
In any case, there is no way to recover from the impression that he’s made that he does not having a fully working brain.
If you look at the GOP nomination race as Romney, the establishment Republicans against various anti-establishment and Tea Party types, Romney has had the good fortune of not having to go head to head with anyone to date because the leaders in the Anybody but Romney field have all either self-destructed or proved ineffectual in gaining voter support.
There is Ron Paul, of course. My reading is that Paul will win the Iowa Caucuses. But, in spite of his being the most ideologically consistent candidate in the field, his candidacy has two fatal problems. Ron looks too old and frail to be president. He lacks good posture. These are fatal style issues. Also, his libertarian political philosophy is too extreme even for Tea Party Republicans to fully embrace.
Rich Santorum and Jon Huntsman have been unable to generate any voter interest and are mired in the 5 percent or less level in the polls.
But wait. There is one other candidate in Romney’s path, Newt Gingrich. At this writing, Gingrich is even leading in the polls. He might even be someone that Romney has to take on directly rather than ignoring as he has pretty much all of the other candidates.
I find encouragement in the political process with Newt’s new political lease on life. From a partisan Democratic point of view, Newt as a serious candidate is good news because he is much less electable than Romney.
Leaving that consideration aside, I think it shows some legitimate concern on the part of Republican voters for having someone as president who actually has some workable ideas of how they could make things different and solve problems.
It’s a rare political season in the United States when a philosophical and professorial personality is taken seriously as a presidential candidate. When political intelligence suddenly seems more important than style, we’re in a new political era.
Two factors though have promoted Newt to prominence in the current race that may be irrelevant to the substance trumps style thesis. Firstly, Newt has benefitted from Herman Cain’s political buffoonery. Herman Cain takes apparent pride in being uninformed. It’s part of his performance art of being the anti-candidate candidate.
Newt, as a student of history, and with seemingly impressive knowledge of political realities both foreign and domestic, looks great by comparison.
Secondly, Newt is the absolute last ditch defense against Romney. Anyone is going to look good if the alternative is a perceived worst case scenario.
However, Gingrich’s current popularity among Republican voters will not take him to the nomination. My reading is Newt didn’t enter the Republican primary race to be the next president. Like Herman Cain, he entered it for personal gain. He’s selling books, DVDs, and his ideas.
He’s much more comfortable being the commentator on the sidelines. He’s sees himself as a philosopher of politics. He has no genuine desire to be the focus of the political storm.
Evidence for Gingrich’s lack of commitment to winning the nomination is not hard to find. His campaign manager and most of his staff quit the campaign in June due a perceived lack of interest on Newt’s part in doing what was required to be a serious candidate.
Newt has always had a bad case of foot in mouth disease due in no small part to his philosophical self-image which sees provocation as part of his proper role. Yet, just at the point where he’s number one in the polls, he says things which are blatantly politically self-sabotaging.
In the last debate, for example, he went out of his way to outline a relatively moderate position on immigration that would allow illegal immigrants who had been here for quite a while and were established in their communities to remain in the country. Perry had been castigated for a similarly reasonable position on immigration.
One wonders why he’s giving his opponents the very bullets they need to shoot him in the head.
On another occasion, Newt said “child labor laws are truly stupid.” This is part of his social engineering program to put students to work as janitors in their schools. I wonder what constituency he’s trying to win over with that one?
Also, Gingrich failed to put himself on the Missouri ballot. He just didn’t meet the deadline or pay the fee for the February 7 primary. Even though the Missouri primary is a beauty contest with the actual delegates decided later by caucus, it doesn’t win him any friends in Missouri by negligently leaving himself off the ballot.
Even in Gingrich doesn’t implode like the other recent Romney’s alternatives, the longer he’s in the spotlight, the more skeletons are going to come out the closet. For Gingrich has a sociopathic personality structure. Partly this means that there is a huge gap between the ethics and moral standards he professes and the moral standards that he actually employs in his personal behavior.
Perhaps voters will overlook his marital infidelities and his reprimand for ethics violations while serving in the House. But it’s hard to understand how Newt can be forgiven for prostituting the office of the Speaker of the House since he left Congress. He has sold his power and influence to the highest bidder.
Although he’s never been registered as an official lobbyist, it’s clear that he has leveraged his former position of influence to enrich himself. One of his clients was Freddie Mac, the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation. He advised them in 1999 and again in 2006 and was paid at least 1.6 million for his consulting.
As Freddie is one of the perpetrators of the housing bubble which lead to the world wide Great Recession starting in late 2007, it’s reasonable to conclude that having Gingrich as president would be putting the fox in charge of the hen house.
Of course, it would be an egregious error to confuse the Republican electorate with the Occupy Wall Street crowd so inside and backroom financial dealing might not be a disqualifier for them. Yet the apparent consistency of a candidate still matters. And, in this regard, Gingrich is running a neck and neck race with Herman Cain for liar of the year.
If Gingrich ever became president, his sobriquet would not be the Great Communicator. It would be the Great Prevaricator. For Gingrich, lying is as natural and effortless as breathing. He tells outrageous lies in public venues and then spins the public outcry with masterful manipulation skills.
So, he claimed that his role at Freddie Mac was that of historian and that he was only paid $300,000 for work that lasted only hours. That story lacks credible for even for the most diehard political partisan.
In the last GOP debate, he advocated a reasonable and moderate position on immigration where immigrants who had been in this country for a long while and had a good community standing would be allowed to remain. Then he says this is not amnesty. Forgiving people their illegal status would fit any reasonable person’s definition of what amnesty is. He just saying here that black is white.
In his long political career, Gingrich has an amazing trail of different positions he’s taken on various key issues. In this respect, he runs a close second to Romney in ideological inconsistency.
At one point, he became the target of the wrath of John Birch Society as the most dangerous politician around because he had advocated rewriting the Constitution.
So, if Gingrich has all of these flaws, why is he so popular among Republican voters? I believe it’s because Gingrich is one part social conservative and one part right wing social engineer. Gingrich has a lot of ideas about changing the ways things work in the country. This appeals to voters who intuitively resonant with the sense that we’ve got to do something different to meet the challenges of our age.
From the conservative point of view, we’ve got to maintain our core values while getting out ahead of the changes needed to make our society and country sustainable in the uncertain future of the 2012 time.
And, as mentioned before, Gingrich is the last man standing between Romney and the nomination.
My reading is that the Republican aversion to Romney goes way beyond the religious prejudice about his Mormon faith, although that is certainly an element. The problem with Romney is that he is untrustworthy.
His ideological migrations from one extreme to the other on many different issues are legendary. We’re always left with the question, What does Romney really believe in and stand for?
It might look as though Romney is winning every battle but losing the war. Certainly he was the superior debater in almost all of the many GOP debates. Yet, his voter popularity has stayed mired in the twenty percentage range.
There is something in his style that puts people off. This goes beyond being arrogant and disdainful of his competition. Gingrich is even more arrogant and certainly more egocentric and self-aggrandizing.
However, Romney’s body language and manner of speech connotes inauthenticity and shiftiness. You can contrast his style with Perry’s to see the difference. When Perry’s brain is working, he communicates conviction and sincerity.
Yet, my prophecy is that Romney will be the nominee of the party to run against Obama. This intuition seems to be on target even with Cain’s upcoming abandonment of the race due to the latest disclosure of marital infidelity. With Cain out of the picture, the vote will be less divided among various anti-Romney candidates.
One critical factor in Romney’s eventual victory is proportional voting. Unlike previous primary contests, the GOP in the 2012 primary race are making allowances for candidates to win delegates proportional to the votes they get. This prolongs the nomination contest and makes it more of a marathon than a sprint.
This configuration favors Romney, who has a well-oiled political machine in place in every contested state. Gingrich is too far behind Romney in both financial donations and organization to be able to match Romney’s staying power. And, in spite of what it may appear, in his heart of hearts, Newt doesn’t even want to be the nominee.
