Is Obama now so unpopular even this hopelessly gaffe-prone Mormon moneybags could topple him?
From Toby Harnden
AFTER a wild rollercoaster ride for the past two months since voting began in Iowa, Republicans can now calm down and look at the man who is overwhelmingly likely to be the candidate charged with unseating President Barack Obama in November.
It was neither easy nor pretty but Mitt Romney’s narrow three-point victory in his native state of Michigan, the place where he was born, grew up and where his father was governor in the Sixties, puts him firmly in command over his main challenger Rick Santorum.
Three weeks ago Santorum stunned Romney and the party elders who back him, scoring wins in Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri, and then leaping to a 15point poll lead in Michigan. Romney showed he had the determination, resilience and steely nerve to overcome a surging opponent at the moment it really mattered.
Having at times let their fevered imaginations dream up scenarios of a white knight such as Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey or Governor Mitch Daniels of Indiana entering the fray, Republicans are now looking at the reality of a Romney candidacy.
Talk of the first ‘ brokered convention’ since the Forties — a convention where candidates are deadlocked — will now recede. Romney’s double win in Michigan and Arizona, where he cruised home by 20 points, means that order is at hand.
On ‘Super Tuesday’ next week, when ten states vote, the former Massachusetts governor, venture capitalist, saviour of the 2002 Winter Olympics and Mormon is likely to seal the deal.
For most Republican party operatives, this can’t happen a moment too soon because despite the recent upturn in the economy, the slight fall in unemployment and the pratfalls of Romney and Santorum on the campaign trail, Obama is eminently beatable in November.
While to many Britons Obama seems like an unassailable colossus amid the fiasco of the Republican primaries, a titan still basking in the glow of his historic achievement in being elected the first black president, many Americans in the political centre have turned sour on him.
We have been in the midst of what is in some senses the darkest hour for Republicans. Santorum has been accusing Romney of being ‘utterly unqualified’ for the White House and Romney has branded Santorum as ‘ desperate’ and an ‘ economic lightweight’.
But polls show that Obama faces a struggle to get re-elected. This week, Gallup registered a 43 per cent approval rating for Obama and a 50 per cent disapproval.
If an election were held this week, a Rasmussen poll found, Romney would beat Obama by a single point.
Even with every possible negative attribute of the Republicans on full display, Obama is shaping up to be another Jimmy Carter — the last Democratic president to lose his re- election bid.
Under relentless pressure from Romney over the past three weeks, Santorum showed that he would be a disastrous opponent against Obama. Again and again he strayed from his economic message to fixate on aspects of his hard-line Catholic faith.
He told voters that he had ‘wanted to throw up’ when he read John F. Kennedy’s landmark speech about the
‘Romney is not a politician . . . he’s a business nerd’
separation of Church and state. He accused Obama of being ‘a snob’ for wanting more Americans to go to universities that were ‘indoctrination mills’ run by Leftists.
In last week’s debate in Mesa, Arizona, Santorum struggled to explain the grubby back-room deals he has cut during 16 years in Congress. At one point he said: ‘I have to admit, I voted for that. It was against the principles I believed in, but you know, when you’re part of the team, sometimes you take one for the team.’
It was one of the most politically inept utterances since John Kerry, Democratic candidate in 2004, said that: ‘ I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it.’
We learned that Santorum believed Satan had designs on America and that Obama practised ‘ a phony theology’. He talked about his opposition to contraception and extramarital sex — a losing stance, one top Republican quipped, because ‘sex is popular’.
While Romney would speak in Michigan for 12 minutes, sticking to what he wanted to say and rarely straying off message, Santorum rambled on for 45 minutes, riffing about every subject under the sun. While Romney’s rallies can seem antiseptic and staged, Santorum’s were chaos — hundreds of people crammed into hotel ballrooms with old ladies wilting at the back.
Romney is far from a perfect candidate. Stiff and distant on the stump, he often fails to evoke passion or even much enthusiasm.
He has made his own mistakes, remarking that his wife drove ‘a couple of Cadillacs’ and that he was not so much a NASCAR (stock car) racing fan as a friend of owners of NASCAR teams.
After saying ‘corporations are people too’ and quipping that ‘I enjoy firing people’ and letting slip he was ‘not concerned about the very poor’, these were unfortunate own goals even if he could quibble justifiably about being quoted out of context.
Worth up to $250 million from his work restructuring companies, he has repeatedly fuelled an image of an outof-touch rich guy, more comfortable in a business suit than the tank tops — known as ‘sweater vests’ in America — that Santorum favours.
While Romney has to be careful not to be defined by Obama as a latterday Gordon Gekko, he recognises his limitations and what he needs to correct. Asked on primary day if he realised his comments about his wealth had damaged him, he responded: ‘Yes. Next question.’
During this election, Republicans have done a good job of coming across as swivel- eyed loons or barely functioning idiots. But even those candidates who have crashed and burned have helped advance the case against Obama.
Michele Bachmann insisted Obama
Obama’s struggling to raise cash for his campaign
would be ‘a one-term president’. Rick Perry asked: ‘Are you better off now than you were $4 trillion ago?’ Newt Gingrich defied political correctness to label Obama ‘the food stamp president’ after the increase in the number of poor people — including blacks — receiving state food handouts.
Just as in 2008 when Hillary Clinton toughened up Obama in a brutal primary battle, Romney is slowly but steadily improving. By this summer, he will be clad in tungsten.
Cherylyn Harley Lebon, an American lawyer and political strategist who worked for William Hague in the 2001 election, told me: ‘Mitt’s sweet spot is that he has this business experience. He is not a politician.
‘Yes, he has a problem resonating with people. It’s that Mormon thing, that Mormon awkwardness. They’re not naturally open, effusive people. They’re a bit more reserved. He loves his family, he loves his wife, he’s proud of his success. He’s not your backslapping, two-glasses- of- Jim-beamevery-night guy. He’s just a nerd.’
Romney does not have the political talents of Obama, Bill Clinton or even George W. Bush. But in 2012 that might not matter because four years ago Americans swooned over a candidate whose soaring rhetoric made them dream big.
Since then, many who voted for Obama have crashed to earth. On inauguration day in January 2009, petrol was $1.78 a gallon. Today it is $3.73.
Although the economic indicators are undoubtedly better, there is evidence that figures are being cooked. A staggering 1.2 million Americans
were cut from the total workforce in January by the U.S. Bureau of Labour Statistics on the basis they were no longer looking for work.
Scarcely a week goes by without Obama attending a Hollywood fundraiser or event hosted by a corporate titan — the truth is he is finding it difficult to raise money. Wall Street, which shovelled cash to him in 2008, has rebelled against his anti-business policies.
Rather than the healing, unifying figure he painted himself as four years ago, Obama is making it clear he is a hard- edged partisan, surrounding himself with fawning cronies and barely able to talk to a Republican. Having boasted about pouring taxpayer cash into ‘shovelready’ projects — by which he meant projects that would provide immediate employment — he later admitted that ‘there’s no such thing as shovel-ready projects’.
Last week, Obama let slip that he believed the U.S. had experienced ‘three of the toughest years this country has gone though in my lifetime’. This is something most Americans would agree with but, unlike Obama, they are not inclined to keep blaming George W. Bush for it. Demands for ‘ fairness’ in taxes — code for redistributing wealth by taxing success — strikes many as fundamentally unamerican.
In 1992, President George Bush Snr lost his re-election bid to Bill Clinton despite the improving economy. The problem was that although Bush had declared the recession was over, most Americans felt it wasn’t and they believed he was out of touch. Obama is in danger of falling into the same trap.
If the election turns out to be about Romney, Romney will probably lose. But the election will almost certainly be about Obama. Appealing to a yearning for hope and change will not cut it this time around. Neither will being the first black president make much difference.
Obama has shown himself to be inept at building alliances on Capitol Hill. His deeply unpopular healthcare reform was rammed through without a single Republican vote.
Romney has vowed to repeal it. And in foreign policy there is a growing consensus that he is far too eager to say sorry for America.
The response to his apology to Afghans last week, after Korans defaced by Taliban prisoners were inadvertently burned, was two American officers being shot in the back of the head inside Kabul’s Interior Ministry. The commanderin-chief’s timidity in the face of this outrage did not go down well in the heartland of America.
Lebon, who happens to be black, said: ‘Obama is experiencing the pleasure and the peril of being President. The pleasure is you get to take credit for killing Osama Bin Laden. The peril is you get blamed for everything that happens in the country.’
Alex Castellanos, a veteran Republican strategist and former Romney adviser, believes Obama has made a big strategic blunder by ‘choosing the path of less for all, divided more equally’ leaving Republicans with the argument ‘we can do better, you can have more’.
In his victory speech in Novi, Michigan, the most important thing Romney said was: ‘For me, this is all about more jobs, less debt and smaller government.’
As he moves on from having to tear apart the likes of Santorum and Gingrich (who has sunk like a stone in the polls) and concentrates his fire on Obama, this message is likely to resonate.
The gloating cliché among Democrats recently has been that the big winner so far in the Republican race has been Obama.
More grounded Obama campaign operatives, however, acknowledge that the November election will be a real fight.
Being surrounded by the trappings of the awesome office of the presidency makes Obama a narrow favourite to be re- elected at this stage. But it would be foolish to dismiss the chances of one Willard Mitt Romney being sworn in as America’s 45th President on the steps of the Capitol next January.