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Tag: 2012 presidential race

Supreme Court Has Its Hands Full

The Supreme Court has a lot on its plate this term, and could well inject itself into the 2012 presidential race by ruling definitively on the healthcare law next spring or summer:

The Supreme Court convenes Monday for what could be the most significant term of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.’s six-year tenure, with an agenda that both reflects the nation’s political landscape and offers the potential to reshape it.

The dominant theme is the one that has divided the country and fueled the debate between tea party Republicans and President Obama since the 2010 election: the extent of the federal government’s power.

The justices are being asked to decide the constitutionality of the landmark health-care act, the ability of states to enforce strict immigration laws and whether the government can continue to monitor the airwaves for indecency.

The court could also reopen the question of affirmative action in college admissions, rule on the rights of gay adoptive parents and decide whether the blindingly fast pace of modern technology has reshaped Americans’ notion of privacy.

“Whatever the last term lacked in blockbuster cases, here’s one that’s really for the ages,” said Paul D. Clement, solicitor general in the George W. Bush administration.

Some high-profile decisions could actually boost Barack Obama’s standing among depressed liberals, as many feel his Supreme Court appointments represent one area where he has delivered the goods.

GOP Establishment And Tea Party Poised To Butt Heads This Fall

Republican moderate officeholders from Jon Huntsman version 2.0 — his campaign recently relaunched with a more aggressively independent and even progressive tone — to George Pataki are coming out of the woodwork, trying to gain traction in the 2012 race to unseat Barack Obama, who because of a lagging economy and cynical obstruction in Washington looks more vulnerable than ever. The only problem? Republican primary voters aren’t on board with the plan.

Things are looking fabulous for potential Republican challengers to the president right now. His every effort to stimulate the economy has either failed to keep up with epic unemployment or been blocked in Congress. His approval numbers are reaching all-time lows. Key demographic groups that propelled his 2008 rout of John McCain are souring on him, and though Labor will surely back his reelection, progressives threaten to be too depressed by a failure to change the culture in D.C. to be “fired up and ready to go” when they need to be. As reputed pollster Tom Jensen put it:

Only 48% of Democrats on our most recent national survey said they were ‘very excited’ about voting in 2012. On the survey before that the figure was 49%. Those last two polls are the only times all year the ‘very excited’ number has dipped below 50%.

In 13 polls before August the average level of Democrats ‘very excited’ about voting next year had averaged 57%. It had been as high as 65% and only twice had the number even dipped below 55%.

It had seemed earlier in the year like Democrats had overcome the ‘enthusiasm gap’ that caused so much of their trouble in last year’s elections. But now 54% of Republicans say they’re ‘very excited’ about casting their ballots next year, indicating that the problem may be back.

The debt deal really does appear to have demoralized the base, and the weird thing about it is that this is one issue where if Obama had done what folks on the left wanted him to do, he also would have had the support of independents. The deal has proven to be a complete flop in swing states where we’ve polled it like Colorado, North Carolina, and Ohio. And in every single one of those states a majority of voters overall, as well as a majority of independents, think new taxes are going to be needed to solve the deficit problem.

So why are Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann dominating the field — and the conversation? The Republican establishment is making known it doesn’t want to waste an opportunity to roll back the most progressive presidency in decades. After all, it may not have been clear six months ago that Republicans would have a solid shot to knock out Barack Obama, but it surely is now.

But it’s that very tension we can expect to play out this fall as opinions harden and the Iowa caucuses approach — an establishment desperate to put a credible, sensible challenger forward to take out their enemy, and a Tea Party equally determined not to waste its energy and activism on a Mitt Romney — or even worse, a Jon Huntsman.

Follow Matt Taylor on Twitter @matthewt_ny

Romney, Perry, And The GOP’s Summer Of Discontent

WASHINGTON — Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign is a cross between the Little Engine That Could and the big chain store fending off attacks from upstart rivals.

Romney gets little love from his fellow Republicans. He’s always confronting rumors spread by people who ought to support him that the existence of such a “weak field” will soon encourage new and better candidates to get in. The “weak field” line means they think Romney just doesn’t have it.

Yet Romney hangs on, methodically chipping away, avoiding mistakes and using his financial and organizational advantages to muscle his way through one month after another.

Romney has been lucky, too. Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty might have become his main rival but lacked the killer instinct. The rise of another Minnesotan, Rep. Michele Bachmann, was a twofer for Romney: She would either split up the right-wing vote, making it easier for Romney to get by, or emerge as an unelectable alternative, sending reluctant but realistic Republicans his way.

Enter Rick Perry, who is supposed to be able to put Romney away. Who better than a big, brash Texan to make the Republican former Massachusetts governor look like Michael Dukakis, the Democratic former Massachusetts governor who is hardly a GOP role model.

Republicans denounce class warfare but engage in it all the time, and Perry slipped in a subtle dig at the starchy, upscale Romney when he declared in his announcement, “As Americans we’re not defined by class, and we will never be told our place.” Perry wants a fight involving Texas A&M versus Harvard Law School and Harvard Business School, the son of a rancher and local politician against the son of an automobile executive and governor.

Not a bad start. But in only a few days, the Texan’s swagger has made a lot Republicans long for the excitement of a little buttoned-down restraint. Perry used the term “treasonous” to try to bully the head of the Federal Reserve. He called President Obama “the greatest threat to our country,” which makes you wonder where he puts the terrorists. Soon, he was drawing down the scorn of Republican big feet, including Karl Rove, who doesn’t much like Perry anyway.

You call tell how unhappy Republicans are by reading The Wall Street Journal editorial page, the one-stop shop for conservative orthodoxy. It fretted on Monday that Republicans and independents are “desperate” for a unifying candidate, and that if “the current field isn’t up to that, perhaps someone still off the field will step in and run.”

To paraphrase John F. Kennedy, having the Journal‘s editorial page criticize the Republican presidential crop is like having Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, fret over the quality of the cardinals who want to be the next pope.

There was also the conservative Weekly Standard, another GOP bellwether, floating one more time the idea that Rep. Paul Ryan really and truly is thinking of running for president, the wish clearly being the father to this thought.

So it’s not easy being Mitt Romney, the man who is right there in front of them but whom so many Republicans keep looking past. Romney hasn’t even gotten to be called the front-runner very often without some diminishing adjective (“putative,” “apparent,” “seeming”) thrown in. Now, he threatens to be displaced in that role by Perry.

But it doesn’t seem to bother Romney. Alex Castellanos, a Republican consultant who worked for Romney four years ago, says he has “a reserve” about him, “a part of him that’s not given over to the campaign or to his audience.” By contrast, says Castellanos, now a CNN contributor, Perry is either “a freight train” who will run Romney right over or “a talking time bomb” who will verbally immolate himself.

The Romney camp is ready with all sorts of arguments against Perry, not the least being that a candidate who says he wants to make government “inconsequential” has been on a government payroll for a quarter-century. It’s a nice counterpoint to Romney, the business guy. And it might not play well in Abraham Lincoln’s Midwest that Perry once talked warmly about secession and then announced his candidacy in South Carolina — in the 150th anniversary year of the onset of the Civil War.

My guess is that if Perry’s freight train doesn’t flatten Romney’s little engine pretty quickly, Romney will keep chugging on. His faith is that of the good business consultant: A shrewd long-term game plan matters more than either swagger or love.

E.J. Dionne’s email address is ejdionne(at)washpost.com.

(c) 2011, Washington Post Writers Group

Obama Launches Political Counteroffensive This Week

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama launches a political counteroffensive this week, weighed down by a stunted economy, wilting support among some of his most ardent backers, and a daily bashing from the slew of Republicans campaigning for his job.

“We’ve still got a long way to go to get to where we need to be. We didn’t get into this mess overnight, and it’s going to take time to get out of it,” the president told the country over the weekend, all but pleading for people to stick with him.

A deeply unsettled political landscape, with voters in a fiercely anti-incumbent mood, is framing the 2012 presidential race 15 months before Americans decide whether to give Obama a second term or hand power to the Republicans. Trying to ride out what seems to be an unrelenting storm of economic anxiety, people in the United States increasingly are voicing disgust with most all of the men and women, Obama included, they sent to Washington to govern them.

With his approval numbers sliding, the Democratic president will try to ease their worries and sustain his resurrected fighting spirit when he sets off Monday on a bus tour of Minnesota, Iowa and Illinois. The trip is timed to dilute the GOP buzz emanating from the Midwest after Republicans gathered in Iowa over the weekend for a first test of the party’s White House candidates. The state holds the nation’s first nominating test in the long road toward choosing Obama’s opponent.

“You have just sent a message that Barack Obama will be a one-term president,” Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann told elated supporters minutes after winning Saturday’s Iowa straw poll, essentially a fundraising event that also tests a candidate’s organizational and financial strength. She spent heavily and traveled throughout the state where she was born, casting herself as the evangelical Christian voice of the deeply conservative small-government, low-tax tea party wing of the GOP.

Bachmann pulled in 4,823 votes, or 29 percent of those cast, edging out Texas Rep. Ron Paul, who drew 4,671 votes, or 28 percent. But while Democrats probably rejoiced that Bachmann’s ultraconservative voice gained strength among Republican contenders, the contest to challenge Obama in November 2012 grew even more jumbled. While the voting was under way in Ames, Iowa, Republicans also had to keep an eye on South Carolina, where Texas Gov. Rick Perry made a cleverly timed entrance into the race.

Like Bachmann and all the other candidates, Perry ravaged Obama. He said the president was presiding over an “economic disaster,” in a declaration that stole some of Bachmann’s political thunder and undercut the front-runner status of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who didn’t compete in the Iowa test vote. Perry clearly cast a broad shadow across the Republican contest.

Obama, expecting the political shelling he would take, fired pre-emptively in his weekly radio and Internet address to the nation on Saturday. He told listeners that it was the Republicans running for president and serving in Congress who were at work crushing voters’ hopes and dreams.

The question for Obama and his backers remains: Will he sustain the counterattack? Of late, he’s been seen by even his most staunch supporters as too ready to retreat from critical ground when confronted by intransigent Republicans.

Polls show voters hold both parties to blame for the stunted economic recovery, an unseemly political fight over raising the limit on U.S. borrowing, an anemic deal to cut the government deficit, the subsequent and unprecedented downgrade of the country’s credit rating, wild stock market gyrations and an unemployment rate stuck above 9 percent.

In the face of that reality, Obama is tacking to put some wind in his re-election sails, apparently convinced that he can gather speed by turning up the attack on Congress.

“You’ve got a right to be frustrated,” the president said in his weekly address. “I am. Because you deserve better. I don’t think it’s too much for you to expect that the people you send to this town start delivering.”

He chastised Republicans for brinksmanship, saying “some in Congress would rather see their opponents lose than see America win.”

That’s an assessment that has some validity, particularly among the new class of House Republicans who have used their outsized legislative power to stymie Obama at every turn since their election last November.

Working in Obama’s favor is a Republican Party still struggling to find a presidential candidate who lights a fire with voters. Questions remain about the appeal of Bachmann and Paul beyond, respectively, the more conservative and libertarian wings of the party.

Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, looking for a strong showing in Iowa to boost his struggling candidacy, ended a distant third with 2,293 votes, or 14 percent. On Sunday, he quit the race.

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the GOP’s 2008 vice presidential nominee, wasn’t on the ballot and isn’t a candidate yet. But she showed up at the Iowa State Fair a day before the vote, drawing huge crowds and saying she hadn’t ruled out running.

Like Bachmann and Perry, Palin is a tea party favorite, but her coyness about joining the race could hurt her chances should she finally declare.

While Obama’s bus tour is meant, in part, to blunt the Iowa Republican festivities, it will have to compete for attention as the country digests Perry’s rhetorical assault on Obama’s presidency.

Perry, a former Democrat and the nation’s longest-serving governor, told his appreciative audience that Obama’s government had “an insatiable desire to spend our children’s inheritance.” He accused Obama of presiding over an “economic disaster” that has been “downgrading our hope for a better future.”

“I’ll work every day to try to make Washington, D.C., as inconsequential in your lives as I can,” Perry said, clearly bowing to his tea party backing. Specifics for turning his promises into realities were absent.

By entering the race on the same day as the Iowa voting, Perry angered some Republicans but saved some campaign cash and energy.

If nothing else, voters won’t be able to ignore the fact that Perry’s speaking style and swagger are eerily reminiscent of another Texas governor who made the transition to the national stage: President George W. Bush.

With his solid credentials on social as well as economic issues, Perry is an immediate threat to Bachmann, Romney and every other GOP candidate.

Romney did not participate in the Iowa poll, which he won four years ago before dropping out of the race when he failed to catch fire against eventual nominee John McCain. Romney did join all the announced candidates Thursday at an Iowa debate.

But it was his pre-debate visit to the Iowa State Fair that produced a political gift to the Democrats.

Responding to a heckler who challenged him on tax policies that benefit big business, he blurted out that “corporations are people, my friend.” The Democratic National Committee quickly used video of that remark in pre-straw poll television ads in Des Moines, the state capital. It was the kind of business-friendly Republican applause line that could haunt him with undecided voters and disaffected Democrats.

Obama and the other GOP hopefuls now face daily scrutiny as well as they try to avoid for the same kind of misstep. That’s a nearly impossible task in the long, arduous and expensive path toward the White House.