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Tag: disappointment

Republicans Looking For Love

So last week, Chris Christie said no.

This should not have been a surprise. The New Jersey governor has said “no” repeatedly when urged by Republican movers, shakers and donors to consider running for president. Last week’s last and final “no” theoretically puts the question to bed for good.

But it also raises other questions. The fact that it is still cajoling potential candidates at this late date suggests a restiveness in the Grand Old Party. The Republicans are looking for someone to love.

Sure, they’ve got Mitt Romney who is solid and smooth, but does not excite. He is John Kerry in elephant drag. They’ve got Michele Bachmann, but she is handicapped by the fact that she’s Michele Bachmann. They’ve got Rick Perry, but it turns out he can’t get out of his own way.

Christie was the latest hope. Now that’s gone, too.

There is, by the way, nothing uniquely Republican about looking for love. Democrats and independents swooned for Barack Obama in 2008. The ardor has cooled considerably since then, owing to the fact that Obama has turned out to be President Gumby. The caution and pragmatism that once seemed a welcome respite from the unilateral recklessness of his predecessor now comes across as the malleability of one who has rubber in his spine.

At some level, you had to know that that — or some other disappointment — was coming. Falling in love is always easier than staying in love, especially in politics. Yet every four years, like a middle-age divorcee in a singles bar, there we go again, looking for romance.

In his new movie, “The Ides of March,” George Clooney casts a pessimistic eye upon this courtship. Directing himself from a screenplay he co-wrote, Clooney plays Mike Morris, a Democratic governor seeking his party’s presidential nomination. In his raw charisma and refusal to pander, Morris seems the stuff of dreams for voters fed up with the chicanery of — all together now — politics as usual.

But when Morris proves to be less than advertised, one feels not so much the shock of revelation as the sigh of recognition. The manufacture and sale of presidential candidates has conditioned us to expect to heave that sigh, eventually.

Indeed, the interesting thing about the courtship of Chris Christie is that, for all those who were urging him to run, the argument seemed to be based little, if at all, on the notion that he had ideas or held positions that would benefit the country. To the contrary, not much was known about Christie’s positions on many national issues and the little that was, suggested a candidate too moderate for the conservative bloc that now animates the GOP.

It is telling that that seemed not to bother anyone. Christie is likable and plain spoken. He comes across as a guy unseduced by political pomp and folderol. That was enough to start people salivating. His actual ideas, opinions, readiness, ability to lead or even interest in the job, all seemed secondary or even immaterial.

It speaks well of his integrity that Christie said no. It says volumes about our system that he was so vehemently importuned by the GOP establishment to say yes. But that’s the nature of the beast, isn’t it?

They felt they could sell him. They felt they could make us love him. That was all they needed to know.

(Leonard Pitts is a columnist for the Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, Fla., 33132. Readers may contact him via e-mail at lpitts@miamiherald.com.)

(c) 2011 The Miami Herald Distributed by Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Republicans Looking For (Another) Savior

When Rick Perry got in the presidential race, the clamor among Republican activists for fresh blood seemed to ease.

But now that he’s had two poor debate performances where he got hammered for a relatively moderate record on immigration and his mandatory HPV vaccine for young girls — and now that he lost an early test vote at a Florida straw poll he worked hard to win — conservatives find themselves looking once again for another White Knight. And this one is big:

With the party’s frontrunner sagging, Chris Christie is reconsidering pleas from Republican elites and donors to run for president in 2012, two Republican sources told POLITICO.

The New Jersey governor has indicated he is listening to big-money backers and Republican influence-makers, and will let them know in roughly a week whether he has moved off his threat-of-suicide vow to stay on the sidelines of a presidential race that remains amorphous heading into the fall, the two sources said.

Republicans see an electable, tough-talking budget guru in Christie, despite his presiding over a downgrading of his state’s debt (most of the damage was done in previous administrations, to be sure).

And perhaps most important, despite his moderate stances on some social issues, they see someone without the kind of blemishes or political weaknesses that Perry and Romney have displayed over the years.

Arab World Sours on Obama

Despite beginning his term with a boost in Arab opinion of the United States and a well-received reset of U.S./Muslim relations in Cairo in 2009, President Obama has taken a major hit in the region over the last year or so; the U.S. actually polls worse than it did during the last year of George W. Bush’s “crusade” presidency:

When President Bush left office, 9 percent of Egyptians had a favorable attitude towards the United States. After Barack Obama was elected, that number jumped to 30 percent. But today, only 5 percent of Egyptians surveyed said they have a favorable opinion of the United States and its president. Similar figures in Morocco, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates illustrate that the initial optimism in the region has been eclipsed by a widespread sense of disappointment.

Hard to know if this is because of the stubbornness of Israel’s government vis-a-vis settlement construction and making a deal–which even though Obama has pressed it for changes, nonetheless appears to the world, mostly accurately, to have unquestioned U.S. backing–or rather the continued massive American military presence in Afghanistan, Iraq, and now, to a lesser extent, Libya.