AMERICA:The cartoon characters that have emerged, each nuttier than the next, has mainstream Republicans despairing
WITH LESS than a year-and-a-half until the presidential election, there is still no clear Republican front-runner, a phenomenon unprecedented in decades.
The cast of cartoon characters that has emerged, each nuttier than the next, has mainstream Republicans despairing. “What a field!” sighs the conservative syndicated columnist Cal Thomas. George Will and Charles Krauthammer, two of the right’s best-known pundits, describe Sarah Palin’s possible candidacy as “disastrous”.
“Sensible Americans,” Will wrote earlier this month, “must be detecting vibrations of weirdness emanating from people associated with the [Republican] party.” Republican political consultant Mike Murphy says the campaigns of Minnesota representative Michele Bachmann and the property mogul Donald Trump are “about ego and nothing else . . . train-wreck candidacies”.
Bachmann announced on Thursday that she will establish an “exploratory committee” in early June. Last Monday, the former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty became the first Republican to launch his “exploratory committee”, which is tantamount to declaring candidacy.
Pawlenty suffers from poor name recognition and the memory of his flip-flop on climate change. He repeatedly called for a cap-and-trade programme to cut greenhouse emissions, but now says it was a “stupid” idea.
US journalists are gleeful at the prospect of a Bachmann campaign, because the three-term congresswoman and founder of the House Tea Party caucus makes Sarah Palin look like Albert Einstein. In 2008, Bachmann became the first politician since Senator Joe McCarthy to call for an investigation of “anti-American” lawmakers, among whom she included then Senator Barack Obama.
Bachmann is pushing the Light Bulb Freedom of Choice Act (it really is called that) to repeal a 2007 law that will phase out incandescent light bulbs. She has demonstrated her feeble grasp of US history in recent weeks by claiming the Founding Fathers fought slavery (they owned slaves) and by calling New Hampshire the state where “the shot heard round the world” was fired in the revolutionary war (it was Massachusetts).
But Bachmann will do well in the crucial Iowa caucus next year because she’s a seventh generation Iowan, and because Iowa is home to large numbers of evangelical Christians, who admire her defence of motherhood. Bachmann is raising 25 children, of whom 23 are adopted.
Iowa Republicans threw their support behind the socially conservative former governor of Arkansas – and former pastor – Mike Huckabee in 2008. Huckabee, who now hosts a show on Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Television, alternates with Mitt Romney for the lead in opinion surveys on Republican hopefuls.
Huckabee recently said that Obama grew up in Kenya. When the falsehood was denounced, Huckabee’s spokesman claimed “the president grew up Indonesia” – where Obama spent only five of his first 18 years.
Romney is viewed as the least wacky of the lot, but his Mormon faith and Obama’s shrewd praise for Romney’s stewardship of healthcare reform when he was governor of Massachusetts could doom his candidacy.
Republican hopefuls share a single strategy: Obama-bashing. Donald Trump will deliver the keynote address at the Iowa Republican Party’s Lincoln Day dinner in June. This week, on the daytime television programme The View, Trump, like Huckabee, fanned the absurd “birther” controversy about whether Obama is an authentic American, claiming “no one” from Obama’s childhood remembers him.
Asked whether Obama’s birth certificate could have been faked, Trump said there was “something on that birth certificate that [Obama] doesn’t like”. Whoopi Goldberg, one of the show’s anchors, said Trump’s assertion was “the biggest pile of dog mess I’ve heard in ages”.
Newt Gingrich, the thrice-married champion of moral values whom polls rank fourth among Republican hopefuls, was ridiculed for reversing his criticism of Obama’s policy on Libya. On March 7th, Gingrich exhorted the Obama administration to “exercise a no-fly zone this evening”. This week, he said, “I would not have intervened . . . I would not have used American and European forces.” Meanwhile, Sarah Palin, who ranks third among Republican candidates in surveys, burnished her foreign policy credentials in India and Israel.
“Israel is absolutely beautiful, and it is overwhelming to see and touch the cornerstone of our faith,” Palin gushed in Jerusalem, wearing a Star of David necklace before dining with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Palin criticised Obama for “interfering in an Israeli zoning issue” (sic) by supporting self-determination for the Palestinians.
At this stage, Obama needn’t worry too much about his Republican challengers. A Pew Research poll this week showed 47 per cent of Americans want to see Obama re-elected, while 37 per cent prefer a Republican.
