One thing is certain about 2012. We’re going to see a lot of change and an increased pace of change. I’ve had to scrap two earlier drafts of Part II of this forecast when what I was trying to delineate was no longer that relevant to the changing political landscape. It’s getting harder to distinguish between the future and the present.
There are now three main contenders for the Republican nomination: Romney, Romney, and Romney.
My reading is still that Ron Paul will win in Iowa. I see Romney finishing second. Even with the worst case scenario of finishing behind Paul and Santorum, Romney is on his way to being perceived as the inevitable nominee after the Iowa Caucuses and New Hampshire Primary. With Gingrich’s collapse, there is no credible candidate left who can effectively challenge him for the remainder of the primary season.
This doesn’t mean that all the others are going to quit the race or that he’ll have sufficient committed delegates to clinch the nomination after Super Tuesday on March 6. But the lead that he’s going to have after the month of January will just grow and grow. No one else is going to come close.
Thus, Willard Mitt Romney with a dedicated following of only approximately 25% of the Republican electorate will cruise to the nomination.
For a while it looked as though Gingrich was going to mount a serious challenge to Romney. However, his poll numbers and general acceptance have just fallen off a cliff in a two to three week period. My reading is that Gingrich will still win South Carolina by a narrow margin. However, there just aren’t enough southern primaries to give him a credible chance. Failing to get on the ballot in Virginia effectively ended his run.
Gingrich’s candidacy has had some striking similarities to that of the late great Herman Cain. Like Cain, it would seem that Gingrich initially took to the campaign trail to improve his personal financial bottom line. For a long time, it was more or less an extended book tour. After almost every campaign stop, he would put out the wares of his publishing business and sign books.
Also like Cain, Gingrich saw the primary process as an opportunity for performance art. Only Gingrich’s art was intellectual performance art. The debates were his stage. Gingrich also was doing a one man show with Newt playing the role of Ronald Reagan. As part of his preparation for the debates, he spent a considerable amount of time studying videos of Reagan’s debate performances.
As discussed in Part I, it’s my reading that Gingrich doesn’t really want to win the nomination. His heart’s desire is to remain a private citizen so he can continue with his lucrative roles as political guru and stealth lobbyist.
One particular quotation gives this away. At a dinner party he said the following: “The longer I have thought about the very real possibility that I might have to serve, the more I realize that we have to clean up the Congress as well as the executive branch.”
What kind of serious politician speaks in terms of the possibility of having to serve? It sounds like a worst case scenario.
Also, of course, Gingrich has not done many of the organizational things that are required to win a campaign such as effective fund raising and making sure he is on all the ballots. This is due in no small part to the fact that his campaign manager and campaign staff has consisted, until very late in the process, of pretty much Newt by himself.
Nor has he has effectively waged any effective counterattack to the barrage of negative propaganda that have been coming his way from the other candidates since he took the nominal lead in the race. This would be inconsistent with his role of playing Ronald Reagan.
What we’re seeing in the 2012 campaign is an unprecedented and unexpected fragmentation of the conservative movement. There are establishment conservative candidates, Romney and Huntsman, a social conservative, Rick Santorum, a libertarian conservative, Ron Paul, and various candidates with some claim to Tea Party connections: Perry, Bachmann, and Gingrich.
Whatever credibility the narrative of the Tea Party once had, it seems to have to run its course. Although some of the fiscal responsibility tenets of the Tea Party have been integrated into both the Republican and Democratic parties, it’s clearly a movement with declining popular appeal.
One major reason for this decline is the fact that the Tea Party Republican congressional members that came into power in 2010 have not generated any significant changes that the average citizen can see as benefiting them.
What we have seen is congressional gridlock and brinkmanship around all financial and budget issues to the point where Congress has been dysfunctional to an unprecedented degree.
Moreover, the emergence of the Occupy Wall Street Movement introduces a new narrative centered around the frustrations of people of middle income and below. In the last three decades, the wealthiest people have been making huge gains in income and overall prosperity while almost everyone else has been stuck in a situation of stagnant income or declining prosperity.
The outcome of the 2012 elections will be a pivotal moment in American history. It’s conceivable that the Republicans could hold on to the House, win a majority in the Senate and also the presidency. This would then bring in an era of domination by the far right of the political spectrum.
However, my reading is that this scenario is not to be. What I see is a Democratic wave in 2012 that leads to a near balance of Republicans and Democrats in the House, a loss of only one seat by the Democrats in the Senate, and a reelection of President Obama by a substantial margin.
To achieve this result, the Democrats are going to have to overcome some significant handicaps. In the Senate they have to defend 23 seats including the two independents that caucus with them. The Republicans only have to defend 10 seats.
2010 was a census year and Republican dominated state legislatures have had the opportunity to redraw congressional districts to their advantage.
Moreover, the Citizens United Supreme Court decision of 2010 allows corporations and unions to spend unlimited amounts of money in support of political campaigns as long as this is not being directly coordinated by the candidates.
This gives some advantage to the Republicans. For, if as I see it, the financial welfare of the middle class becomes a dominate theme in the elections, the Republicans and their financial backers will go all out to protect the interests of the wealthiest from their deep pockets and less scrupulous political mentality.
Lastly, the 2010 Republican wave that gave Republicans control of many state legislatures resulted in laws in several states that have the effect of reducing voting by such tactics as requiring photo ids, limiting early voting, and making voter registration more difficult.
In spite of these handicaps, it is my reading that the Democrats are going to have a very successful year in 2012. With respect to the presidential race, it’s going to come down to who do you trust. The more cynical version of this same theme will be voting for the devil you know versus the devil you don’t know.
Since economic themes are first in people’s minds, this becomes the issue of who do you trust to improve the economic situation of the country and to do something to provide hope for those who are struggling to maintain personal economic equilibrium.
We’ve seen a little bit of this wave late in the year when the issue of extending the Social Security payroll tax cut came before Congress. The Tea Party Republican house members were eventually forced to accept a Senate compromise. The Republicans didn’t want to look like they were just the party of the rich. Obama’s approval rating started to creep up.
The 2012 campaign, like all presidential campaigns, will come down to a war of competing narratives. Whichever narrative wins the hearts and the minds of the people is going to determine the winner. Since the presidential candidate becomes the symbol and spokesman for the whole party effort, how he is perceived has a significant ripple effect down through the House and Senate races.
One thing that unites the Republican electorate is the desire to replace President Obama. With the memory of the 2010 Senate races in mind, electability is seen on a par with ideological conformity.
In the 2010 Senate campaign, the Republicans could easily have elected three more Republicans to the Senate. However, nomination of extreme tea party partisans, Sharon Angle in Nevada, Christine O’Donnell in Delaware, and Ken Buck in Colorado, allowed long shot Democratic candidates to win those seats.
Republicans are going to soon embrace Romney in spite of the ambiguity of where he stands on many issues. Mitt has been a blue to red chameleon changing colors depending on which audience he is addressing. Because he was governor of Massachusetts, a very blue state, the perception is that he will appeal to moderates and Democrats more than most of the other Republican candidates.
But who is Mitt really? What we see is Mr. Slick, the archetypal salesman, virtually flawless in his presentation but with questionable substance and sincerity. Romney has run his campaign with the plan of avoiding mistakes and he has not made many. Yet we still don’t know what he really believes or what his real agenda is for the country.
Romney’s Mormon faith gives us some indications. Romney is not just a nominal Mormon. He has been a Mormon missionary and a bishop in his church. My reading is that he is every bit as socially conservative as Rich Santorum.
The most immediate impact this would have on his presidency would be the appointment of socially conservative justices to the Supreme Court in the Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas mold.
However, Romney’s Mormon faith is a substantial handicap for his winning a presidential race. A significant portion of Americans are prejudiced against Mormons on religious grounds. They don’t see Mormons as proper Christians. They say they would never vote for a Mormon.
Although many independent, nonpartisan voters might vote for Romney irrespective of his religious affiliation, this gain is partly offset by religious conservative folks who will not support him just because he is a Mormon. If only five percent of religious conservatives stayed home rather than voting for Romney, this would be a big dent in what should be his most reliable voter base.
If who do you trust is really the decisive question of 2012, Romney has a big challenge to establish that trust. In the first place, Romney, at least so far in his campaign for president, has given almost no one-on-one interviews. Access to Mitt has been in public debates or other forums where Romney can control the political environment to his advantage.
Secondly, Romney is someone with a very secretive nature. I know of no evidence that Romney is corrupt in any overt way. Yet he often acts as if he had something to hide. When he left the governorship of Massachusetts, he orchestrated a complete wipe out of all electronic records of his time as governor. All the hard drives of all of the computers went out the door with his aides.
Moreover, bucking recent precedents of candidates for president, he has steadfastly refused to disclose his income returns. He has also refused to disclose the names of his biggest financial operatives, the so-called bundlers who collect money from others.
For 2012, we want our president to be someone who is intelligent, knowledgeable, and a good manager. Romney qualifies well on all of these counts. But, with the economy the overriding issue in the campaign, we want someone we can trust to make the economy better for everyone.
It would seem that this is Romney’s strong suit since he has a background as a successful businessman. But what kind of business has Romney been up to? For much of his business career, Romney has worked for Bain Capital, a private equity investment firm. There he was responsible for buying and selling companies.
If we look at the number of jobs that he was responsible for creating in his business life, we have to also look at the number of people who lost their jobs when their companies went liquidated.
As an investment banker, Romney has been a rich person working for the interests of other rich people. It’s difficult to imagine how he is going to establish credibility as a friend of the middle class.
If, as I read it, the economic concerns of the middle class become the dominate theme of the 2012 elections, then Romney is certainly got a challenging task to sell himself as the person who fix the economy for everyone.
