Think what you will of Sarah Palin, but she made a really good first impression on the national stage: remember her VP-nomination speech in 2008?
Of course, she’s been such an unmitigated embarrassment since then that Republicans can be forgiven for thinking that speech was just a political wet dream. Which makes watching her flirtation with a presidential run this year about as titillating and engaging as watching re-runs of the Real Housewives of Washington DC … exactly!
By contrast, the latest darling of the Republican Party, Texas Governor Rick Perry, did not even make a good impression with his first foray onto the national stage during last night’s debate among the Republican wannabe presidents.
In fact he’s starting off where Palin has ended up: as a talking head with no brain. Or, as they say down in Texas, Perry is all swagger and no dick, making a mockery of the myth that everything’s bigger down there. (Well, that’s what they should be saying….)
Anyway, I saw enough during this one debate to hereby declare that Mitt Romney will be the nominee.
He may not send a thrill up and down the spine of the Tea Partiers and religious (anti-Mormon) nuts who comprise the base, but there are enough sensible people still in that party who recognize that only one candidate has a prayer against Obama next year, and it’s Mitt. (And to burnish his right-wing bona fides and, more importantly, to counter Obama’s lock on the black vote, he will choose the Hispanic junior U.S. senator from Florida, Marco Rubio, as his VP nominee.)
Hell, this guy is so electable that he can even boast that Obama stole from him all of the ideas for his greatest accomplishment as president, namely, healthcare reform. Never mind that the Republican Party is so captive to the special interests of big corporations and rich individuals that he’s having to do back flips now to assure the base that he no longer cares so much about healthcare for the poor.
When all is said and done, though, I refuse to believe that the America that reelected the person who got it into this political and economic mess will now reject the person who is doing all that is humanly possible to clean it up.
The reason so many people disapprove of his job-creation efforts is that he has not done enough to call out the do-nothing, just-say-no Republicans for reflexively opposing every job-creation policy he proposes simply because they believe this is their best (and only) way to make him “a one-term president”.
(Why isn’t Obama doing more to create jobs?! The iPINIONS Journal, August 19, 2011)
Enough said.
NOTE: The only reason to mention the other candidates would be to make fun of them. And I’d rather leave that to the late-night comics..
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* This commentary was originally published yesterday, Thursday, at 4:47 pm…