This page contains links to recent blogs by Lincoln Mitchell
Tagged with: Chris Christie
Hillary Clinton's increasingly likely candidacy for president in 2016 must be extremely frustrating for Republican strategists. Clinton is a strong candidate, but she is not invincible. If Clinton runs, she will face nominal opposition within her own party, but obviously a Republican will run against her. The most recent polls show her defeating any Republican challenger by between 7-9 points.
Much of the discussion in recent days has been about whether or not Christie is a bully. Being seen as a bully is not something that will prevent Christie from being a strong candidate, particularly because a portion of the population is inevitably going to think somebody who looks and talks like Christie is a bully anyway. If the scandal only reinforced the worst thing that some people thought about Christie, it would not be a big deal. However, the scandal makes is impossible for Christie to take advantage of the best thing that people used to think about the New Jersey governor, that he could put partisan issues aside to address real problems facing people.
This is the situation in which Republican nominee Mitt Romney finds himself, except that this hurricane is also a test of Romney's and, indeed, his party's ideology. The ideology of small government and the belief that taxing people for any reason is not only bad governance, but is also close to immoral, is central to the Republican and Romney worldview. At times like this, it is difficult not to scrutinize that view a bit. During a Republican primary, advocating for abolishing FEMA or making disaster relief the responsibilities of the states is easy, but in the middle of a huge disaster that has wrought havoc across many states, those ideas seem nonsensical. Romney's silence at this time makes it clear that he does not fully stand by his views on FEMA and the role of the federal government. Governor Christie's cooperative approach to working with President Obama also indicates that the New Jersey governor, quite honorably, thinks that helping the people of his state at a very difficult time is more important than his party's ideology.
The slow collapse of Mitt Romney's presidential campaign is good news for supporters of President Obama, but it is, nonetheless, at least on the surface, strange. In a period of about a week, Romney has made two statements, one regarding attacks on the U.S. Embassy in Libyaand the other regarding his views of people who receive government benefits that between them paint a picture of somebody who is deeply out of touch with the country he seeks to govern and, more significantly, suggest that he does not have even a basic understanding of how foreign policy or domestic programs work.
Rather, the main story of the Republican primary season has been that the race has been extraordinarily uncompetitive. Despite the absence of a Republican incumbent or even sitting vice president, the sense among many in the Party that President Obama is very vulnerable and a base energized by the Republican victories in the 2010 midterm election, Mitt Romney has been the front runner for the nomination almost since the day John McCain lost in 2008. With two weeks to go before the first votes are cast, he still occupies that position.
The approaching collapse of Rick Perry's candidacy is not, in and of itself, particularly surprising, but the speed and lack of drama with which it occurred is striking. Perry, of course, is still in the race; and may recover his footing and grow to be a strong candidate, and even win his party's nomination, but that is looking increasingly unlikely. Perry was not undone by some unexpected revelation about his past or major political scandal, instead it is occurring simply because of his inability to make the transition to the national stage, unimpressive debate style and a defeat at the hands of Herman Cain in a minor non-binding straw poll that are contributing to his likely demise.
With Mitch Daniels confirming that he will not run for president, and new polls showing that Mitt Romney is the clear frontrunner for the Republican nomination in 2012, there is a real possibility that the 2012 primary will be over before it really starts. There is a small possibility that one of the candidates like Michele Bachmann or Newt Gingrich will galvanize the far right and make a race of it, and an even smaller possibility that a new candidate like Chris Christie will make a late entrance into the race and win the nomination, but with about eight months before the first vote is cast, Romney is increasingly likely to be the nominee.
Romney has done his work relatively quietly while the decisions by Donald Trump and Mike Huckabee not to run and the disastrous beginning to Newt Gingrich's quixotic bid for the White House have received considerably more coverage in recent weeks. Of these three stories, Huckabee's decision not to run is the most significant. Huckabee is a good politician with excellent communication skills and opinions that would have resonated well with the conservative Republican base. Huckabee also had a very difficult time building an organization and raising money in 2008 and evinced little enthusiasm for doing that again in 2012, seemingly preferring the comfort and compensation of his work for Fox News.
The Republican nomination, on the other hand, for the first time in many years, has neither a clear frontrunner, nor somebody who can legitimately lay claim to having paid their dues and waited their turn as, for example, was the case with John McCain in 2008, Bob Dole in 1996 or George H.W. Bush in 1988. The candidate who comes closest to meeting this description is Mitt Romney who finished second to McCain in 2008, but has not been a mainstay of Republican politics for very long and was an unknown outside of his home state a mere five years ago. Haley Barbour and Newt Gingrich, unlike Romney, have been prominent national Republicans for years, but have failed to mobilize sufficient support to plausibly present themselves as frontrunners.