Independent News and Politics

April 10, 2012

Well, it is official:  Santorum has dropped out of the 2012 Republican primary race, and Romney stands alone as the only candidate to have won a significant number of state contests.  Although Gingrich and Paul are still technically in the race, there’s no way they can win outside of an incredibly rare and unlikely brokered convention.

However, this victory for Romney is a Pyrrhic one:  every nationwide and state-by-state poll shows Obama winning in November by a comfortable margin.  According to the state electoral tracker at Real Clear Politics, Obama already has the 271 electoral votes required to win re-election.  Even if Romney could carry every single toss up state, it wouldn’t matter in the slightest.

The big shift in this election may be looked back on as the time when the evangelical-led, socially conservative movement finally died.  Before birth control resurfaced, Romney had a slim margin among women voters.  After the ridiculous attack from the right against womens’ reproductive rights, this marginal support turned in to a 2:1 landslide in Obama’s favor.

The first primary event kicks off later today, and the polls seem to indicate that the race has come down to Romney and Ron Paul.

The big money is on Romney, but my hope is on Ron Paul because he’s the only candidate:

• Against the Patriot Act
• Against SOPA
• Against the never-ending wars and imperial foreign policy
• Against the war on drugs
• and in favor of human rights, in general

Since TV is what Americans actually spend time on, Obama has decided to bring the debate to the people.

On February 25th, you might get a chance to watch the circus in high-def.  But we wouldn’t call this definite just yet, because Republican leaders are claiming that they haven’t heard anything “official” yet.  While Obama is speaking of the event as a certainty, there’s no sign that anyone else is quite as sure about whether or not it will actually happen.
There are quite a few reasons, in fact, why neither Republicans nor Democrats would want to be seen publicly defending their ridiculous positions.  For the Republicans, there basically is no argument other than to stop Democrats and therefor preserve the status quo.  While this rallies those who particularly fear or hate the Democrat’s plan, it doesn’t win over that vast majority that is unhappy with the current healthcare situation.

For Democrats, they’re going to be forced to answer why their solutions all involve caving in to the various lobbying interests that have conspired to advance their own self interest at the cost of the broader public.

Then again, who will really call the other out on their sins and who has the credibility to make such an accusation stick in the minds of voters?

If there’s a debate, we’ll be lucky to hear anything truly substantial beyond a few career public speakers trying to score points with witty remarks and snappy comebacks.

While I’m sympathetic to those who believe our government is acting beyond its intended functions and wasting the wealth of the American people, it is hard to not laugh a bit at how the Tea Party movement has been jerked and led around by the Republican party establishment that is most guilty of unconstitutional expansions and unnecessary military spending.

Not long after Ron Paul’s supporters came up with the idea for a Tea Party donation event, conservative PR specialists have been trying to find a way to co-opt the growing anger on the right side of things.

Within a few months of the donation Tea Party, a new “Tea Party protest” was being planned for tax day.  Suddenly though, anyone who had participated in the first grass-roots movement would have sensed that something was wrong.  Whereas the first Tea Party event had been organized exclusively by individuals without political connections, the second one was funded by all of the Republican operatives and front groups you might have come to expect.

When it was announced then that Sarah Palin and Tom Tancredo would be headlining the Tea Party convention and that tickets would cost almost $600 a piece, it should have been clear to even the slowest political analysts that this was little more than the old nativist neo-cons trying to regroup following the epic disgrace known as 8 years of Bush.

I don’t know what they talked about there, but I can take a guess.  Tancredo is one of those who seems to think that all evil in America came here from across the Mexican border, and Palin is so out there that we’re not sure she’s thinking about anything at all.  So frankly, I also don’t care what they were talking about at the Tea Party conference, because as far as I’m concerned this is just the new euphemism for neo-con.

But there’s still a downside here … is it possible for a legitimate opposition to form against the government that’s otherwise out of control?  If voter anger can so easily be corralled into a new establishment font group, what hope is there of reform coming from voter movements?