Obama’s Opponents Between Mania and Moderation

The tea party movement is pushing the Republican presidential candidates election into a hopelessly rigid position. This provides Obama with more leeway than he deserves.

Republican primary enters the final stages

America is a nation with the soul of a church. The American nation has no ideology; it is one. These two principles bring to mind a time when Christianity and education in America were linked by a mix of Christian Republicanism and faith in democracy. This allowed candidates to face the Republican primary, which begins today in Iowa, in a reasonably relaxed manner, since in such a church, high value is attached to not just God, but to pathos.

Pathos serves only one specific purpose, and everybody knows it: Not every speech delivered with fervor can be taken seriously. The same rule applies in the United States as does elsewhere in the Western world: Elections can only be won by appealing to the middle because the majority in a democracy (at least in peacetime) is moderate.

Well, the Democrats and the Republicans know about that. Since the beginning of time, they have tried to win the radical margins in the primaries before dropping any extremist positions during the final election and tuning into the mood of the majority.

Not even Reagan would win any primaries today

One can stay relaxed in distant Europe if one just considers the statements of the Republican presidential candidates, from “king of the polls” Mitt Romney to the outsider Jon Huntsman. Nevertheless, even the calmest observer will shudder when realizing how intellectually feeble and backwards-thinking the candidates appear. This is coming from a party that produced significant presidents from Abraham Lincoln to Dwight D. Eisenhower, as well as the likes of Ronald Reagan or George HW Bush.

Not even the latter two would win the primary in their own party today. Even though Reagan is presently worshiped and glorified like a god in his party, his “compassionate conservatism” and his conduct are bones of contention. Whoever wants to be a presidential candidate in the year 2012 has to hold the following view: He or she has to support the deportation of 12 million illegal immigrants, the majority of which have lived in the country for many years.

The Primary in Iowa

Since 1972, Iowa has been the first state where the primary takes place. This initial election first came into the spotlight in 1976, when the Democrat Jimmy Carter scored unexpectedly high and later became president.

Almost no candidate has won the nomination of the party since 1972 without coming in at least in third place. This led to the saying “Three tickets out of Iowa.”

Only of six percent of eligible voters, on average, participate in these elections. In the 2008 election, however, participation was up to 16.1 percent.

According to the Census Bureau, 91 percent of the three million inhabitants of the state are white compared to 72 percent in the whole of the USA. The unemployment rate is six percent compared to 8.6 percent across the country.

Foreign policy does NOT matter in the primary campaign

Editor’s Note: This section originally appeared in a sidebar published by Reuters.

First and foremost, candidates must ensure voters they would ban gay marriage even in the states where it has been allowed for years. Furthermore, it would be good to issue a blank check to Israel in all areas and to refer to the Palestinians as “so-called Palestinians,” as Newt Gingrich does. Gingrich vehemently defends his thesis that there is no Palestinian problem in the Middle East because the Palestinians are just Arabs who have illegitimately taken on a new identity. If Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was asked, he could teach Gingrich differently. But Netanyahu was not asked. Foreign policy does not matter in the primary campaign.

The global economic and financial crisis in the United States has been taken advantage of not by the left, but by the right wing in the form of the tea party movement. Unlike Occupy Wall Street, the tea party has managed to organize and build clout in the last few years, garnering support which Occupy Wall Street can only dream of.

Under the influence of tea party activists, even the Republican candidates who once had their own identities are trying everything these days to smooth the edges: Newt Gingrich does not want to be reminded anymore that he once published reasonable suggestions on environmental policy. And while Rick Perry is laboring to explain why he, the Texas governor, fought for the rights of the children of illegal immigrants, Mitt Romney is avoiding having to explaining the health insurance plan that he dared to introduce when he was the governor of Massachusetts as a conservative response to Clinton’s plan. It was not even Barack Obama, but the conservative Heritage Foundation, which drafted a comprehensive alternative after Clinton’s failed legislation.

Republicans have the opportunity to replace Obama

Scarcely any Republican dares to mention it at this time. If someone does mention it, they are punished in the primary and have no chance, much like Huntsman, who stuck to his position on gay marriage. Because of that, he will likely only get a bit over two percent of Republicans’ support to become president.

What is worrisome about the situation is that the Republican presidential candidate, whoever it may be, does not have a bad chance of driving President Barack Obama out of the White House. Another rule of America’s politics has to be kept in mind. No president after Franklin Delano Roosevelt has managed to stay in office when the unemployment rate was over seven percent during his term of office.

Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter know about that; during Ford’s tenure, in 1976, the unemployment rate was 7.7 percent, and during Carter’s it was 7.1 percent. Also, father Bush laments about this as well. In the year of his second election campaign in 1992, the unemployment rate was at 7.5 percent. Under Obama, it has risen to 9.6 percent.

This doesn’t bode well for the president. Will he manage to stay in the White House next January nevertheless? Considering his opponents, one tends to keep one’s fingers crossed without being too sure of him. It would be good for the Western world if he had more capable challengers. One of the big problems is the mediocrity of elites on both sides of the Atlantic.