New Hampshire is where the race, or should I say snoozefest, for the Republican nomination begins. According to recent polling data, even Republicans are having a hard time getting excited about their candidate list.
The latest polling of Republicans and all voters is out and there are few surprises. More about that in a moment.
It isn't even clear to most who exactly has declared their candidacy on the Republican side. By contrast, as of February 2007 (almost four months earlier in the election cycle), some 17 Democrats had declared their candidacy for their party's nomination. The exploratory committees were closed down, serious fundraising had begun, and even some debates had been held by this time that year.
The most exciting thing for the Republicans so far has been Donald Trump's faux run/PR stunt. Fueling the "birther" conspiracy to grab headlines, Trump, for a brief fifteen minutes, landed at the top of the early polls as a favorite to win the nomination.
For weeks, Trump badgered the President about his birth certificate, garnering media attention and fostering doubts among Republican voters about the President's heritage. Trump shrilly attacked the President's lack of leadership on everything from China to oil to the Middle East.
The tide quickly turned, however, when the White House asked for and received special privileges from the state of Hawaii to get access to the "long form" certificate (which happens to have no legal standing as proof of identity in Hawaii – and most other states) and to present it publicly.
Soon the media turned on Trump. Commentary denouncing the racist implications of Trump's tirade (no one ever questioned McCain's right to run for president despite the fact that he was actually born outside the U.S.) surfaced from many quarters, from Robert DeNiro to Jesse Jackson. Stories about Trump's false claim that he avoided military service during the Vietnam war due to a high draft number embarrassed the reality TV show host. Even his clothing line, manufactured in China, seemed to counter his repeated denunciations of that country and the U.S. relationship with it.
But perhaps most amusing and most harmful to Trump's chances for GOP glory was the spectacle at the White House Correspondents dinner during which the President himself took a few moments to address trumped up birther charges. The President's funniest lines commented on Trump's reality TV show on which the mogul has to decide each week which celebrity to fire. "These are the kind of decisions that would keep me up at night," President Obama joked.
Little did anyone in attendance at the event know, of course, that the president had just made one of the most fateful decisions of his presidency – ordering the mission that found and killed Osama bin Laden.
Since then Trump has seemed less like a formidable political opponent and more like a joke.
Back to that polling data. A Boston-based Suffolk University/7News poll of New Hampshire Republicans released this week put Trump at eight. That is eight percent of N.H. Republicans say they would vote for him – tied for Rudy Giuliani, who doesn't even seem to be running, and one point ahead of the GOP's other reality TV star, Sarah Palin.
Unfortunately for both Trump and Palin, most Americans – almost three in five – say they would not vote for either. According to a new Quinnipiac poll released this week, 58 percent of American voters say they will not back the top two TV celebrities in the Republican Party.
The poll also shows that almost three in four Americans disapprove of Republican policy on undermining Medicare or slashing Social Security benefits. Almost as many Americans don't like another pet Republican project: cutting taxes for the rich – again. About 7 in 10 Americans say raising taxes on the highest income earners should be prioritized over cutting entitlement programs like Medicare or Social Security. Most favor military budget cuts as well.
With policy and image working against the Republican Party, its only serious contender, Mitt Romney, took 35 percent in the New Hampshire poll (and a healthy plurality in the Quinnipiac poll).
Unfortunately, Romney has his own political problems. His passage of Romneycare (supports), which is almost identical to Obamacare (opposes), as governor of Massachusetts has him back-pedaling and flip-flopping on the issue left and right. Will Republican voters overlook this contradiction? They may have no choice.
Further, Romney seems to have come from the Sarah Palin school of foreign policy. In addition to no experience in the field and lacking any clear vision, in a recent op-ed, Romney attacked the President for creating the largest growth of peacetime government spending in American history. Peacetime? Seriously?
I don't want to be taken as advocating an underestimation of the Republican candidates. From their various corporate donors, they will have hundreds of millions, maybe even a $1 billion to spend on this campaign, promoting lies and distortions, creating distractions and divisions, and appealing to the very worst in people in order to move their base to the polls.
Supporters of the President and/or a progressive agenda are going to have their hands full with the work of building the unity of the labor and democratic movements that swept Obama into office in 2008. They will have to put in the extra effort again – campaigning, door-knocking, phone-banking, etc. – to win a larger progressive caucus within a congressional Democratic majority and the reelection of the President.
Photo by Gage Skidmore/cc by 2.0/Flickr
