More Divided Than Ever

Primary elections are actually a great opportunity for opposition parties. The candidates and their debates, their victory speeches and their campaign appearances: They get more television exposure than they could normally ever wish for. A sitting president has to dress warmly to ward off the waves of criticism which will mercilessly batter him.

Or not, as is the case for the current primaries. The Republicans had a clear leader very early on in the electoral process with Mitt Romney. Yet now that the tea party movement is running the show with their radical anti-government and socially ultra-conservative slogans, Republicans are calling the shots as never before. Ron Paul, the perennial candidate with his radical libertarian ideas, won’t be chosen to oppose Obama, though he currently occupies second place in Republican opinion polls.

That old curmudgeon, Washington insider and lobbyist Newt Gingrich appears to have forgotten that he once wanted to win this one himself and now expends all his energy trying to get Romney to return to the conservative fold. He rightly attacks Romney for his tenure as a “vulture capitalist” and job-killer as Bain Capital’s CEO – except this should, by all rights, be the job of Obama’s election team if Romney is actually nominated.

Gingrich is displaying the same flexibility that made it possible for him to become a lobbyist pushing for the government health care Republicans hate so much until he showed them how profitable it could be for them. And the religious right have yet to succeed in getting behind a single candidate. Meanwhile, the person profiting from the disunity is Romney, the one candidate they all hate.

All this ensures Barack Obama a good night’s sleep. But this heap of chicken droppings doesn’t augur well for the bipartisan policy reforms that will be needed in the future. That’s the real disaster.