A Scarcity of Candidates

The Republicans are looking for qualified candidates to run for president. The governor of Texas is the latest hopeful.

As before, there’s still no Republican on the horizon who seems to have a chance of winning against Barack Obama in next year’s U.S. presidential election. The very conservative state of Iowa stood front and center in the party’s deliberations last weekend. Iowa will be the starting point for the primary elections next year. The Ames Straw Poll, the traditional proving grounds for Republican candidates, took place there on Saturday. Tea party movement icon Michele Bachmann of nearby Minnesota won that poll, trailed closely by libertarian Ron Paul. But even if either of them were able to get sizable support from the Republican base, neither appears likely to beat Obama in the general election. One moderate Republican hopeful, ex-Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, finished a distant third in the straw poll, leading him to withdraw his candidacy over the weekend.

But the headlines in Iowa were grabbed by a new candidate. Texan Rick Perry, America’s longest-serving governor announced he was entering the race, giving conservatives new hope. Besides being reminiscent of George W. Bush and his cowboy style, his ability to raise huge sums of campaign money is his principle talent. In this regard, he’s even able to match the charisma-challenged Mitt Romney, who during the second quarter of 2011 raised more campaign money than all his conservative challengers combined.

But Perry appealed to the extreme right wing of the Republican Party right from the beginning, courted the tea party movement and mainly became the wacky Michele Bachmann’s main competitor. In early August, Perry attracted attention with a mass religious service he organized in which he prayed for America’s deliverance.

Perry promised to make Barack Obama’s presidency as insignificant as possible when he announced his candidacy, reminiscent of Ronald Reagan’s similar rhetoric. “I think you want a president who is passionate about America — that’s in love with America,” Perry said. In a follow-up question as to whether he meant that President Obama didn’t love America he replied, “You need to ask him.” At another point, he described Obama as the “greatest threat to our country.”

The start of Perry’s campaign was accompanied by a video released by the liberal group Think Progress in which Perry criticizes Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke. In it, Perry criticizes Bernanke saying, “If this guy prints more money between now and the election, I dunno what y’all would do to him in Iowa but we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas. Printing more money to play politics at this particular time in American history is almost treasonous in my opinion.”

While Obama counseled patience with the fresh field of candidates, reaction from the Republican establishment was not long in coming. Just a few days after his spectacular leap onto the candidate carousel, Perry’s star seemed to be already in decline. Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s former strategist, made no bones about his dislike of the Texas governor saying, “You don’t accuse the chairman of the Federal Reserve of being a traitor to his country. Of being guilty of treason,” he told Fox News, adding that it wasn’t presidential behavior.

While Romney appeared strangely out of place in the field alongside Perry and Michele Bachmann, he nonetheless remains the only credible hope for the party elites. The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, continues to hope other candidates will throw their hats into the ring, candidates who would be attractive to all conservatives. An article in their Monday edition closed with the statement, “If the current field isn’t up to that, perhaps someone still off the field will step in and run. Now would be the time.”