There is an election coming next year and I am not feeling all so great about it. The good news is that the economy is slowly recovering and Obama has honestly done quite well, while the bad news is that the GOP is going to throw everything at him including the kitchen sink to try and knock him out. Can they do it? Well, to be fair, stranger things have happened in American politics.
So far the only real election news is about the candidates who will be running against the President. They don’t seem like much at the moment, but given enough air time they might be able to come across as ready, willing, and able to do the job (that is what media consultants and advisors are for). What I am wondering is, besides the obvious claims of “he’s a socialist and he’s destroying our country,” what the GOP message is? I know that they all don’t want to raise taxes, which means their understanding of economics is juvenile at best, but besides that I don’t really see what their visions and goals are. Being the anti-incumbent only works when the incumbent was really unpopular.
Mitt Romney is the one who has been getting the most buzz of the gang up to this point and that doesn’t bode well for the GOP. Romney is boring and average at best. He doesn’t really shine in any way and what is worse at this time in history is that he is a moderate in a party that doesn’t like moderates very much. How is Mitt going to show that he can be a tough nut on the international scene, when he is the inspiration for Obama’s “socialist” health care system? Add to all this that he is a Mormon (which is a cult by the way), and I start to believe that his whole presidential campaign is just a bunch of fluff that the wind hasn’t blown away quite yet.
Could Newt Gingrich be a contender then maybe? The man is a debacle as a person so I find it hard to believe that he will be able to inspire people to dream of America in new ways. Sure his bark is loud and ugly, but his bite is pretty wimpy and its really kind of sad that he wanted to drag his terrible personal life through the limelight one more time. Then again that is exactly what the presidential race is a good time for: airing your dirty laundry. Newt has a closet full, a houseful, and a couple of summer cottages full to be sure. Hope he can handle the scrutiny!
Tim Pawlenty reminds me of a long and exhausting yawn that you witness from the person sitting next to you towards the end of a long transatlantic flight. Ditto for Paul Ryan. Plus Ryan doesn’t know how to count which the CBO has proved a couple of times now.
Michelle Bachmann is a time bomb that has ticking for quite some time now and is just waiting for the right camera angle to explode. Its just a question of when the Americans who vote for her are going to realize that she is insanely weird, and that her views on the world are at odds with most normal people. It’s a shame that no one has made a documentary about her yet. It wouldn’t even need a sarcastic narrator to get the audience laughing.
