Posted: Sun Feb 19 05:09:54 2012 in the Idaho State Journal
“It's beginning to look a lot like President Obama is a lock to earn a second term. My support for the president may be lukewarm, but when he lines up against the field of Republicans vying for his job he looks like Julius Erving (in his prime) playing a pickup basketball game against a bunch of not particularly talented dilettantes. No matter how wound up the rubes get about going one on one with Dr. J., they are going to get dunked on every time that he takes it to the hoop.
How Republicans managed to produce such a weak field for what should have been a slam dunk is a lesson in what's wrong with contemporary American politics. You can go on all you want about Citizens United, etc., but the fundamental problem, as the Republican Party is currently discovering, is that the portion of the American electorate that energizes the Republican and Democratic bases is filled with selfish, parochial chuckleheads who've dismissed anyone not solidly in the fold, and who won't be content until all the world sees things their way.
As I look down the list of current and former challengers in the Republican primaries I'm struck by the names at opposite ends of the spectrum : Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman . How these two arrived at their respective positions is instructive of why we tend to get weak candidates for high political office in this country, in these times.
Jon Huntsman is vastly qualified to be president by any fair standard. He's a former ambassador to China, former governor of Utah and a successful businessman. I don't agree with Huntsman on very much, but I think that he'd make a very good president because he's responsible, bright, compassionate and in possession of an optimistic worldview. Huntsman had two enormous obstacles to overcome: the first was his Mormon faith and the second was his generally moderate temperament . Talk about a double whammy. Huntsman wasn't even going to get even the reliable support that Mitt Romney gets from his fellow members of the LDS faith (and some other religious conservatives) because he's not down on gays, science and most of the rest of the modern world. The fact that the guy who's got some of the best bona fides to lead in either party right now, Huntsman, got outpolled by comedian Stephen Colbert in the South Carolina primary says a lot, none of it good.
Higher on the scale of good fortune is current GOP front runner Willard Mitt Romney. Had Gov. Romney stuck to the moderate principles that got him elected governor of arguably the most liberal state in the country, he'd deserve the same consideration the electorate should have extended to Jon Huntsman. What Romney doesn't seem to fully grasp is that many Christian conservatives in the Republican base would rather vote for Obama than a Mormon if forced, at gunpoint, to go to the polls to vote for either of them (as someone who views all religions with roughly equal disinterest I find this really funny, in a black comedy kind of way). By changing positions on issues all over the map, Romney comes across as an insincere, unprincipled politician who'll say anything to get elected. In fairness, I doubt that any path Romney might have chosen ends with him as the next president of the United States. Romney has been faced with two equally unfortunate, yet discernible, dnouements : one in which he's an ultimately unsuccessful candidate who competed to lead the country with dignity, and the other in which he's an ultimately unsuccessful candidate who sacrificed every principle and still failed. I'm not Romney, but if I were in his position I'd be much more interested in what's behind door number one. Romney's choice was a matter of survival, and all you have to do to see why is look at who's been popular in the rest of the Republican field.
Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann are poster material for the Asimov quote, 'There is a cult of ignorance in the United States nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.' Herman Cain was a get-out-of-jail-free card for racism. Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum represent the it's-those-other-peopleover-there-causing-all-of-our-problems mentality. If that's what winds up the Republican base, it's no small wonder that Romney has been forced to play trick or treat.
On behalf of everyone who'd like to see presidential contests won or lost on the merits of experience, vision, leadership and maturity, I'm sorry that a race between Obama and Huntsman, which would have been good, I think, for the country, is not coming to pass. What's left is good only for President Obama.”
Award-winning columnist Martin Hackworth, of Pocatello, is a senior lecturer in physics at Idaho State University and the publisher of motorcyclejazz .com.
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