In a blog entry at EURweb, Earl Ofari Hutchinson writes that President Barack Obama’s re-election team knows that the Iowa caucus is a sideshow. He says that GOP presidential contender Mitt Romney is the candidate who can make the race competitive, if not a virtual horse race.
*The Iowa caucus is a sideshow, a good one, but a sideshow nonetheless. The one man who knows that is President Obama. He, and his reelection team, publicly slam the only challenger that can make the 2012 presidential race competitive, if not an actual horse race. That’s Mitt Romney. It doesn’t much matter how hard ultra-conservatives, Christian evangelicals, tea party leaders and followers rail at him for being too moderate, too vacillating, too establishment, and too bland. The hard reality is that not one of his GOP presidential rivals is electable, no matter how close they hue to the social and fiscal conservative political faith line.
The GOP conservative base just simply doesn’t have the votes to put any of them in the White House. Independents do. The 20012 election will be won as the 2008 election was on whether Obama or his GOP presidential rival can do the best sell job with them. Obama did it in 2008 and he won.
There’s some truth to the contention that independents conform pretty close to a party affiliation be it Democrat or Republican, and tend to reflect their views and vote for one or another of the parties that they identify with. In other words if an independent is pro-Democrat, the Democratic candidate is likely to get their vote. If they are pro-GOP leaning, the GOP candidate is likely to get their vote. But that doesn’t change three facts. One is that independents are independents because they have serious doubts, criticism, and conflicts with Democrats and Republicans and prefer to keep their vote option open. The other is that they back a candidate based on their positions on the issues first. And they have made it plain that the two issues they will judge Obama and his GOP rival on are the economy and budget deficits and how each one handles both. The other is that independents are inching closer and closer to making up nearly half of the total American voters. This is a staggering number.
Read Earl Ofari Hutchinson's entire blog entry at EURweb.