| Today's Lincoln Journal-Star reported that Jon Bruning, Don "Quixote" Stenberg and Deb Fischer won't name their preferred Republican Presidential candidate. Responding to a Journal-Star email survey, the three leading Republican Senatorial hopefuls said they're not endorsing anyone in a volatile Republican fight that appears unsettled with four candidates still standing. I can't say I blame them. The last four Republican candidates still standing are a bunch of pathetic misfits.
The putative front runner - former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney - is probably the weakest front runner in modern political history. Thus far, even though he has a huge edge in money and organization, Romney has only won three out of the eight primaries and caucuses. In a stunning poll result that came out today, Romney was trailing former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum by a margin of 38% to 23%. What this tells us is that even after running for President for five years and spending tens of millions of dollars, Romney is still rejected by over 75% of Republicans.
Romney is a weak front runner because he has had to run away from everything he did as Governor of Massachusetts - the only elective office he has ever held. As Governor of Massachusetts, Romney did such heretical (in right wing bizzaro world) things as raise taxes, support abortion rights, gun control and gay rights. His greatest apostasy was his support of the individual mandate - which has now insured up to 98% of Massachusetts residents. As we all know, Romney Care provided the basis for the landmark 2010 health care reform law which the GOP now vehemently opposes. As MIT professor and former Romney adviser Jonathan Gruber said: "(T)hey're the same f-ing bill. He just can't have his cake and eat it too. Basically, you know, it's the same bill. He can try to draw distinctions and stuff, but he's just lying."
In addition to having to be dishonest about his tenure as Governor of Massachusetts, Romney has all kinds of additional baggage dating from his career as CEO of Bain Capital. Romney is trying to run on his business career as a corporate raider at Bain because he has to pretend he never served as Governor of Massachusetts. (Listening to Romney, you would think he was in a witness protection program between 2002 and 2006.) The political problem with Romney's corporate raiding was that he laid off thousands of workers, looted their pensions and received federal bailouts while he made hundreds of millions of dollars. (That kind of career won't go over well with blue collars workers in the swing states.) Those problems are further compounded by the fact that Romney exploits tax law loopholes to pay a 13.9% tax rate on his earnings and utilizes tax shelters in the Cayman Islands and Switzerland to evade taxes.
Equally pathetic is new Republican front runner Rick Santorum. His problem is that he is a radical outside of the mainstream of American politics. As a Senator from Pennsylvania, Santorum was one of the few U.S. Senators who ardently supported Bush's Social Security partial privatization plan. If Santorum and Bush had gotten their way in 2005, millions of Americans' retirement accounts would've been wiped out in the stock market crash of 2008-09. Pennsylvania voters punished Santorum's radicalism in 2006 by voting him out by a 59% to 41% margin when he lost his re-election bid to Bob Casey. This blowout loss was the largest margin of defeat for an incumbent senator since 1980 and the largest losing margin for an incumbent Republican senator ever.
If you don't think Santorum is radical enough, wait until you hear about his stance on birth control. Just last year Santorum said, "One of the things I will talk about, that no president has talked about before, is I think the dangers of contraception in this country," he said last year in a video interview with the conservative blog Caffeinated Thoughts. "Many in the Christian faith have said, 'Well, that's OK, contraception is OK.' It's not OK. It's a license to do things in the sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be." Included in this is birth control used by married couples. Sex, he said, is "supposed to be for purposes that are yes, conjugal and unitive, but also procreative." Most presidents don't talk about such things, he said, but "these are important public policy issues. They have profound impact on the health of our society."
Santorum kept digging today on the birth control issue in his remarks to the CPAC convention where he said that birth control is not something "you need insurance for" because it costs "just a few dollars." Santorum has also recently said that birth control shouldn't be covered by insurance at all: "This is having someone pay for it, pay for something that shouldn't even be in an insurance plan anyway because it is not, really an insurable item." It's pretty obvious that Santorum and his delusional supporters fail to recognize that campaigning hard against birth control isn't a winning issue in 2012.
If you think Romney and Santorum are bad, wait until you hear about former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Mr. Gingrich was the only House Speaker in U.S. history to be formally reprimanded by the U.S. House of Representatives for ethical wrongdoing. In 1997, the House voted by a bipartisan 395-28 margin to reprimand Gingrich and ordered him to pay an unprecedented $300,000 penalty. A year later in 1998, Gingrich was forced to resign from the House in disgrace after support for his Speakership amongst the Republican House caucus collapsed after the GOP lost the mid-term elections. While Gingrich was denouncing President Clinton for his affair with Monica Lewinsky, Gingrich was carrying on an affair with a junior staffer who later became his third and current wife. The media likes to do puff pieces profiling how the future President met the future First Lady. That will be rather awkward in the unlikely event Gingrich wins the GOP nomination.
The GOP hits rock bottom with Representative Ron Paul (R-TX.) Paul is a radical who has said that Social Security and Medicare are unconstitutional. Paul has even gone so far as to compare these two successful safety net programs to "slavery." If you don't think Paul's remarks on Social Security and Medicare aren't crazy enough, the radical Texas Congressman blamed the U.S. for the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 just two weeks after that horrific day.
All I can say about this Republican Presidential field is that it is the weakest crop of Presidential hopefuls in American history. It's no wonder President Obama has rebounded in the polls and now holds a comfortable lead in most of the recent polls.
I have to say this is probably the first time (and may be the only time) when I find myself in agreement with the three leading Republican Senate candidates. If I were running for public office, I wouldn't want to tell the voters which one of these pathetic bums that I supported. Perhaps Bruning, Stenberg and Fischer don't prefer any of these candidates because they are so bad. However, that may giving these three Senate candidates too much credit. |
