A Nation in Search of Guidance

The primary election season starts in the United States on Tuesday and voters are seeking a new direction. Republicans are starting the game with their B team, but don’t seem to be particularly concerned.

America is looking for a new direction, a turning point, a way out of a particularly lengthy and depressing economic downturn. Many of the expectations awakened by President Barack Obama’s election three years ago remain unfulfilled, perhaps because they were simply too much for just one president to accomplish. Now, Americans are looking for someone new on whom to pin their hopes. The country is impatient and quite willing to change directions entirely in order to reach the American ideal of quick change and sudden reinvention.

Which means that election year 2012 could be dominated by an uncompromising and highly interesting policy debate. On one side are the Republicans and their unconditional individualism, their at times absurd mantra of excluding the government from playing a role in anything lest it precipitate a slide into socialism. On the other side are Obama’s Democrats with their societal concept that government does indeed have a legitimate role to play, even if it is a far cry from European socialism. Whichever approach American voters choose to restore their economy will determine their presidential choice next November.

Considering the direction everything has taken in this election thus far, the primary skirmish is likely to disappoint. Instead of focusing on realistic alternatives, the Republican slate seems to be made up of underwhelming and embarrassing candidates. It is almost as if they are sending in the second string for the opening kickoff because the first string lacks enough confidence to play.

There’s Rick Perry, a Texan prematurely celebrated as the frontrunner, who, with the resolute tone of a reformer, promised that he would begin by eliminating three entire cabinet departments from the federal government. Alas, he could only remember two of his three choices in the debate. Perry is a man of the religious right whose brash slogans are equaled only by his incompetence. Next up is Newt Gingrich, who campaigns as a rigid 1990s ideologue and focuses more on small-minded partisanship than he does on coming up with pragmatic solutions to the accumulation of problems facing government. Gingrich is a conservative whose rhetoric threatens to slip at any moment into demagogy, a man who says that one can only understand Obama if one understands anti-colonial sentiment in Kenya. That’s a malicious statement that should have resulted in immediate condemnation from the Oval Office’s first black occupant. Then there’s Mitt Romney, who amassed a fortune as a businessman by buying up corporations, breaking them up and saving some parts and allowing others to go bankrupt. Whether he’s capable of leading anything not driven by the profit motive remains to be seen. At any rate, he has a reputation as a business expert who should be flexible enough to know that sometimes compromises have to be made with opponents.

But Romney is not exactly loved by Republicans. He and his party sometimes seem to be strangers, a fact evidenced by the difficulty Republicans are having in choosing him as starting quarterback. In Iowa polls, where the season begins Tuesday, it is another — Ron Paul — who has the edge. Paul is a Libertarian adventurer who wants to do away with the Federal Reserve and cut government spending by a third. It will probably be a while before there’s any sense of direction, at least as far as the Republicans are concerned.