GOP candidates are better fit for monster’s ball than inaugural ball. So how can President Obama lose in 2012?
The very best Halloween parade this year would feature all the Republicans trying to get their party’s presidential nomination.
At a time of debt and joblessness and so often hopelessness in this country, in a Foreclosure America where the President seems better at raising money than making very much for Americans, the question on Barack Obama ought to be this.
How can he possibly win a second term?
Only the way things are going with the Republicans, right up to Halloween 2011, and only a year out from the next election, you start to think a better question is, how can Obama lose?
Michele Bachmann was the front-runner for about five minutes, then Rick Perry was the front-runner, at least until Perry actually started talking, having all those nights in debates when you imagined him trying to answer brain-busters on “Are You Smarter Than a Fifth-Grader?”
Now the front-runner, according to some polls, is Herman Cain when it isn’t Mitt Romney. You keep thinking that Romney is the only one on the stage who looks like an actual nominee, or the next President. But somehow he can’t shake Cain, the rich pizza guy who keeps giving everybody the kind of show that Ross Perot did until the aliens came for Perot.
Trick or treat.
I was talking to one of the city’s political powerbrokers the other day, one who backed Obama last time and now thinks he has failed miserably as President. And I asked the guy for a scenario where the Republicans lose next November, now that Obama is running on his record and not George W. Bush’s.
“If their candidate somehow becomes more of an issue than the economy,” he said.
Suddenly Cain is in a virtual dead heat with Romney in Iowa, and all that means, at least for the time being, is that the Republican Party, which has had all this time to fall for Romney, or at least get behind him, still hasn’t. It is why Cain, who has no chance to get the nomination, whatever the polls say, none, is treated like a serious contender for no other reason than the guy won’t go away.
There Cain was on “Face the Nation” with Bob Schieffer on Sunday morning, clarifying his position on abortion for what felt like the ninth time, as if it is something else that ought to be included in his loopy 9-9-9 tax plan. By the way? Here is all you have to know about that plan. Perry’s flat tax makes more sense.
“I am pro-life from conception, period,” Cain said.