Does It Matter Whom The Republicans Put Up?

Well, we’re about to enter into the campaigning “season” (if a year can be considered a season), and it appears that the candidates are either failed retreads (Romney, Ron Paul (even with his believers) and Palin) and outsiders who make the retreads look overqualified (Bachman, Perry). One would hardly believe that there would be ANYONE in this list of candidates who would be able to become president.

Thing is, these aren’t normal times. Not the early twenties (1920’s), not post-WWII, not even during the ’80s.

We got a President who has basically sold everything his party believed in down the river. The health insurance bill he passed will, in the end, push more people out from insurance because of sheer cost of the premiums. His inability to pass tax reform when he had the chance had the incidental effect of making the destruction of Social Security and Medicaid a discussable item (before Obama, there was no decline in taxes for either of these programs). And it seems that the Republicans not only pick their plans and get quick victories, but seemingly could do EVERY battle they wanted and gain more than they hope for with every victory.

One could get the impression that the Republican Leadership wouldn’t mind letting Obama win a second term and waltz into the future corporatist future without having to take any responsibility for the carnage (simply because they weren’t around when it was instituted). But something tells me that one of them will get stuck with the Presidential Office on January 21st, 2013 (the first full day of the term).

It’s like this:

• The Democratic base is shaky, having watched the president be pushed around by bullies and hyperminorities to the point where those minorities have a good case of calling themselves majorities…and may get to claim themselves as true minorities by 2013.
• The Republicans are invigorated. When Sarah Palin, the obvious joke candidate of 2008 (and even worse in 2012 if you can believe that) could conceivably defeat Obama, you know something’s wrong.
• The economic news is slowly turning against the guy. Jobs, long a drag with their sub-par performance, have recently gone to 0 (no net gain on jobs) and I wouldn’t be surprised to hear some negative numbers as the campaign gets underway (not that the Republicans would add jobs; they’d just wreck the protections and empty out the shell just to eek out that extra dime of profit).
• Obama was actually elected by being the first serious Black candidate for President, thereby getting a lot of “We Can Do It” votes. How many of these people will vote in 2012 (and how many will vote for Obama) is not yet known.

Right now it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that the Republicans already consider 2012 as theirs and are trying to figure out how far in their pro-corporate/pro-rich/quiverfull-mandatory desires. Perry is the type who’d campaign on the idea that “government is the problem, rising unemployment numbers is the solution” line.

Heck, why not destroy the New Deal. With people on the right itching to attack it and no one anywhere willing to defend it (even though it’s popular, especially amongst those who would love to destroy it), anything can happen – as long as people talk one way and not the other, certain actions will become seen as inevitable.

So no, I don’t think it would seem to matter. Obama will probably be a one-term President, known as the guy who prepared the way for what was to come. Especially when the history books say “people saw what passed as government under his term and voted for ANYTHING but him.”