Mitt Romney: “Barack Obama Has Failed America”

The Republican candidates for the 2012 presidential election are jockeying for position. Mitt Romney has the best chance, but the former governor of Massachusetts is a flip-flopper.

According to the statistics, he is the leading Republican candidate for the 2012 presidential election who has a chance of defeating Obama. According to the national mood, he is not. He has led the polls for months, but even he only has the support of 18 percent of Republican voters.

None of the 10 conservatives in the field has been able to generate any enthusiasm. Only 12 percent of those polled say they are “impressed” by the current field of candidates, and 44 percent have a negative opinion, with the remaining 44 percent expressing no opinion at all.

So far, so good for Barack Obama. Fifty-two percent of those polled are satisfied with the job he is doing as president, and even more view him favorably.

Now the Republicans have gone on the offensive to change these numbers. Sarah Palin is taking her family on a bus tour through the states. She will be stopping at monuments and battlefields to show how patriotic she is. Mitt Romney declared his candidacy on Thursday. The timing and the place were carefully thought out: New Hampshire in a week when new labor market and economic numbers will be announced.

Who becomes a candidate is not decided by party officials in the United States, but by the voters in primary elections. The first of those will take place on Feb. 6, 2012 in the farm state of Iowa, where conservative Christians dominate. Romney, as a Mormon, has little chance there. But he has to win the second primary a week later in New Hampshire.

Moderate conservatives set the tone there; citizens in the Northeast do not care much for ideology. They prefer bipartisan compromise in solving the major problems — better terrain for the 64-year-old Romney. Besides, he has a successful record as governor of neighboring Massachusetts.

He is running on his business acumen. As co-founder of the investment company Bain Capital, he accumulated hundreds of millions in earnings. His fame spread far and wide when he took on financial management of the bankruptcy-threatened 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City.

He saved the games from ruin and even managed to turn a profit. Now he promises to do likewise for America, saying that Obama does not understand enough about business as evidenced by the sad unemployment figures and gloomy economic outlook.

His problem: He is considered a flip-flopper. He tears into Obama’s health care reforms, but introduced a very similar system when he was governor of Massachusetts. He was previously in favor of gay marriage and a woman’s right to abortion. Today he opposes both. He will find it a rough road to the candidacy.