Will the elections of 2012 be like the midterm elections of 2010? Certainly, if the election were held today, Obama re-election effort would be in deep trouble. The Republicans would win control of the Senate as well as maintain their hold on the House.
If this were to be the case, our country would be in serious jeopardy. We would then have a very right wing government. Social conservative issues would come to the head of the priority list for congressional action and it would be the Democrats who would be trying to stem this tide with filibusters.
In many respects, it would be like turning the clock back to the era when George W. was in charge. We cannot afford this type of government though in the 2012 time. The challenges we face on every front require a visionary and progressive response.
Global warming would be just one such challenge. Republicans are very close to making the denial of global warming part of their official platform. They deny either that global warming is happening at all or, if it is happening, they claim the activities of human beings are not responsible.
There is a strong anti-scientific bias on the part of conservative Republicans. If they dominate our government, we would have lost a great deal of our ability to adapt to the changing realities of the 2012 time.
On the economic side, a government of conservative Republicans would make big cuts in both spending and taxes. The effect would be that the middle and lower classes would bear even more of the burden of supporting government than is currently so.
Wealthier people though would get more tax breaks and benefits. There would be a broad rollback of social services across the board as governmental help to the disadvantaged portion of our society is cut back.
With respect to the presidential race, much depends on who the Republicans put forward as their candidate. The four front runners are Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, and Newt Gingrich. There are many others mentioned, but the reality is that it takes so much money and other resources to win a presidential nomination that, if a prospective candidate hasn’t made a name for themselves by now, it’s already too late.
The best candidate the Republicans could put forward would be Marco Rubio. But, as he’s just been elected Senator, he won’t be running until 2016.
All the major candidates have liabilities. Newt Gingrich is an intellectual and someone whose moral character is so flawed that he is widely despised even by Republicans.
Mike Huckabee is a good candidate in some respects, but he’s the social conservative Republican candidate and that’s too narrow a base to win the nomination. Moreover, he’s been virtually invisible since 2008.
Mitt Romney is the establishment Republican with the best chance to win the nomination and beat Obama. But if the Tea Party doesn’t implode between now and 2012, he is going to be dead meat. Romney supported TARP and still supports it. He’s going to be anathema for the Tea Party people who make up a sizeable percentage of Republican primary participants.
Sarah’s main liability is a 52% disapproval rating among the American public as a whole. There are serious questions about her electability. However, she is widely admired in Republican circles and the darling of the Tea Party.
My reading is that she will run away with the nomination. She has made herself into a media star and been continually in the news since 2008. Moreover, she is more or less immune from criticism, at least in the eyes of her conservative base. She is like one of those science fiction monsters that just get stronger the more you throw at them as they absorb energy. Her appeal is emotional and symbolic. It has little to do with logic or arguments.
Palin’s nomination pretty much makes Obama’s reelection a cake walk. People are going to want someone they can trust for the chief executive. By 2012, some of the projections Obama has been subjected too will have worn off. These are both the projections that he’s the incarnation of the Messiah or that he’s is a socialist and the anti-Christ.
The 2012 election will not be like 2010 in one very important respect. More people are going to be motivated to vote with presidential candidates on the line. Many of the demographic groups which were under represented in the 2010 midterms will come back into play in 2012.
Less than 40% of the eligible voters turned out in the midterms of 2010. It was over 60% in 2008. Moreover, 2010 saw a dramatic decrease in the voting of demographic groups that favored Democrats in 2008. Participation by young voters was down 55%, African-Americans 43%, and Latinos 40%.
If we do indeed have Obama versus Palin, the scary prospect of Sarah Palin in the White House will jolt people out of voter apathy.
My reading is that the economy will continue to improve in 2011 and 2012. There will be modest growth and this will ease the deficit crisis to some extent. I see unemployment remaining relatively high at about 7.5 to 8.0 percent by election time in 2012. However, emergency measures to stimulate the economy will no longer be needed.
The Great Recession will finally be over and the sense of economic extremity will no longer be the only issue on voters’ minds.
However, this doesn’t mean we’ll be out of the woods economically. We’re looking at a 2012 trend of a problematic work force in the United States.
Manufacturing and lower skill work is being shipped overseas to cheaper labor markets. There will be job growth in highly skilled and technical fields, but the escalating cost of technical and higher education will make it more difficult for people to quality for these jobs.
There is economic turmoil in the entire world currently and this is going to continue between now and 2012. The issue is not scarcity of resources, but how these resources are allocated. The wealth inequity issue is a global concern. The world-wide capitalistic economic paradigm is creating a scenario where more and more people are becoming disadvantaged with respect to the Plutocracy.
The economic system of our planet is going to have to be restructured. How this is going to be accomplished draws sharp contrasts between progressive and conservative political factions.
The Republicans have had their wave and now they are going to accountable to the voters. They’ll have to put some specifics into their plans for the economy. When they get down to details, many of the independent voters who supported them in 2010 are going to be experiencing voter’s remorse.
With a divided Congress though, there will plenty of room for each side to blame the other for inaction and ineffectiveness.
Mitch McConnell, the Senator Minority leader for the Republicans was very candid when he said that the “single most important thing that we want to achieve” after the election “is for President Obama to be a one-term President.”
We’ll see then a continuation of the Republican strategy of opposing all Obama initiatives. Power becomes more important than policy and the country suffers as a result. The new Republican opposition to the START treaty is one recent example.
The incoming congress will mark a new low point in congressional gridlock. We can expect brinkmanship around budgets and increasing the national debt ceiling. My reading is that the Republican overreach will lead them to do the same kinds of things they did in 1994. For example, we’ll see a shutdown of the government over the issue of increasing the debt ceiling.
In some respects, the Republican leadership will follow the playbook of the Tea Party. Rather than confronting the real challenges we face, it’s much easier to seek distraction through acting out. Often symbolic moves take the place of substantive change.
The Republican initiative to have a moratorium on earmarks is one such move. If all earmarks are eliminated, however, it will only amount to one half of one percent of the budget. Moreover, it’s not really a cut in spending because federal agencies can still spend the money for the various projects anyway. This is because earmarks are sourced from money already appropriated.
The more partisan and ideological people are, the less open they are to taking in new information. Research on beliefs shows that often individuals actually become more intransient in their opinions when presented with contrary facts. A statement like: “Eliminating earmarks will not by itself reduce spending” would be an example of something super partisan folks just can’t accept.
There are still many people who believe that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was involved in the 911 attacks.
The political peril of the 2012 elections is that the Republican wave of 2010 will continue into 2012 and give us a government of ideological, conservative Republicans who are not open to changing their minds no matter what new information comes into play. This is surely what we don’t need for the tumultuous 2012 time.
Even with the reelection of President Obama in 2012, he is going to be unable to initiate any progressive change with a conservative Republican House and Senate. The Senate is especially vulnerable in 2012. There are 33 Senators up for reelection then and 23 of them are from the current Democratic caucus.
Moreover, there are several Democratic Senators up for reelection in red or purple states: Kent Conrad in North Dakota, Ben Nelson in Nebraska, Claire McCaskill in Missouri, Jon Tester in Montana, Jim Webb in Virginia, and Sherrod Brown in Ohio.
Also, it’s going to be difficult for the Democrats to win the 25 seats they need to take control of the House in 2012 once the Republican legislatures get finished gerrymandering all of the House districts from the 2010 census.
What’s not taken into account yet in the political forecast for 2012 is the impact of world events. Between now and 2012, we’re going to have disclosure of alien presence on planet Earth.
My reading is that this is now going to happen in early 2011. (This is a revision from my earlier forecast of November, 2010. There will be more on this in a future blog.)
This event will give us a more planetary focus. Who we are as a species will come into play. This helps shift the focus from who will be the best party to improve the economy and business to issues of values and priorities.
Moreover, with Sarah Palin as the implicit leader of the Republic Party as their standard bearer for 2012, we can have more attention placed on basic questions of what’s important, real, and true. It’s going to be an election about whose reality do you want to subscribe to.
The split up into different reality consensus groups is one of the features of the 2012 time frame. Eventually we’ll have more consensus groups than just progressives and conservatives.
But for the immediate future, we’ll have two competing realities. One reality will involve those who can embrace the transformations our civilization is going through. A second reality will encompass those who want to stop change from happening or go back to the way the world was in the past.
The nonpartisan, independent voters will be the deciding factor and they will have to choose which picture of reality they want to believe in.
Who would have thought that Sarah Palin would play such a pivotal role in the reinvention of civilization? Her presidential campaign will be a sharp contrast to Obama’s vision. This contrast will get people energized into political involvement.
I am still optimistic about the future and the political outcomes for 2012. The political cycles of which party has the wave on their side are happening in much quicker succession than ever before in history. This is part of the acceleration of change in the 2012 time frame.
However, progressives have to be careful not to succumb to the complacency of thinking that, with Obama as president, all is well with the world. The fraud that the Tea Party represents has to be exposed and the conservative-corporate conspiracy has be acknowledged and confronted.
What needs to be healed is coming to awareness in our culture. This is in part economic and political dysfunction.
It’s disheartening to reflect on what political darkness we need to succumb to before we will yearn for the light. Without the Bush presidency, we would not have a progressive visionary like Barack Obama as our president. And without Sarah Palin, Rand Paul, and the rest of the Tea Party political zealots, we would be still be stuck in the illusion that there is no conservative-corporate conspiracy.
Big changes are needed in our world. Therefore, we unfortunately seem to need big turmoil and truly frightening political possibilities to awaken us from our political slumber and mobilize us into action.
The transformation of culture and civilization that is part of the story of the 2012 story was never going to be a smooth, incremental progress. The reactionary elements of our society are going to push back and try to arrest and reverse change and restore some idealized past that is no longer either functional or possible.
Yet, we still have some semblance of a democracy in our country. With complacency no longer an option, my reading is that there will be a Democratic Party wave in the 2012 elections.
Interdimensional Times 