Dramatic Reversals
January 20, 2012
If you need an indication of how unpredictable American politics can be, consider the following. On Thursday, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney stood a good chance of winning three primaries in a row. By the following morning, he was hoping that New Hampshire wouldn't be his only victory.
That was after the results from the Iowa caucuses from January 3 were corrected so that not the moderate Romney, but social conservative Rick Santorum won the state.
Adding to Romney's dismay, Texas governor Rick Perry withdrew from the race and endorsed former House Speaker Newt Gingrich just before the final television debate ahead of the South Carolina primary.
Romney's once double-digit lead in polls in that state seems to have evaporated. The most recent surveys show him running neck-and-neck with Gingrich, who's widely assumed to be the only other candidate realistically capable of challenging Romney for the Republican nomination.
The dramatic twists and turns in South Carolina this week illustrate how volatile voters' sympathies can be during the primary season. They also highlight all of the Republican candidates' individual weak spots.
Super-rich man of the people
The chief problem for Romney, a multi-millionaire, is public perceptions of him as an elitist who's out of touch with the concerns of ordinary working people.
He admitted earlier this week he pays only around 15 percent capital-gains tax on his income, earned mostly from investments, some of which are located in the notorious tax haven of the Caymen Islands.
He has also been leery about releasing his tax returns for past years, a point underscored by Gingrich, who released his while Thursday night's debate was underway.
Critics say that the private equity firm, Bain Capital, where Romney made his personal fortune specialized in cutting jobs in the interest of profit. All of that does not necessarily play well with voters in the midst of a prolonged American economic slump.
"I think (Romney) may be a bit jaded by his work with Bain Capital," Eric Lawson, a 50-year-old molecular biologist from Boston, told Deutsche Welle. "He's become a bit of a one-percent insider."
Lawson, who voted for Romney for governor of Massachusetts in 2002, says he's not sure whether he'll support him for president.
In Thursday's debate, Gingrich eagerly seized on opportunities to portray the frontrunner as a member of the over-privileged one percent of a society in which unemployment runs around eight percent.
"There's a pattern at some of the companies (Bain was involved with) of leaving them with enormous debt and within a year or two or three of letting them go broke," Gingrich said.
But Thursday also showed that Gingrich himself was equally, if not more vulnerable to attack.
Personal reliability issues
Gingrich has been married three times, and ahead of the debate, his second wife Marianne gave a television interview, claiming that he lied to her throughout their relationship and once proposed they lead an open marriage.
During the debate, Gingrich rejected that depiction as "false" and attacked the debate moderator for even bringing up the issue. But for many, the fact that Gingrich has admitted to more than one case of adultery and yet still frequently speaks of family values amounts to hypocrisy.
In a telephone conference with journalists on Thursday, two former Republican Congressmen and Romney supporters questioned whether Gingrich had the moral character to become president.
"The Speaker is running as a reliable conservative leader who can represent our movement and our party," said former Missouri Senator Jim Talent. "He's not that because he's not reliable."
Former New York Congresswoman Susan Molinari was comparably critical.
"I can only describe his style as leadership by chaos," Molinari told reporters.
But while the candidates were bashing each other, some were bashing the primary system itself.
Premature conclusions?
Perry's decision to throw in the towel narrowed what had been a field of eight candidates in Iowa down to only four: Romney, Gingrich, Santorum and libertarian Ron Paul. Yet only a tiny fraction of Republican voters have been heard from thus far, and a mere 65 delegates to the Republican convention have actually been awarded. (1,144 are needed to win.)
The system, say critics, skews the results in contradictory ways.
"Nobody gets excited about moderation," political scientist Andrea Hatcher from the Sewanee University of the South told AP new agency. "The parties appeal to the extremes who are most likely to turn out in primaries and that produces still more extremism in the process."
At the same time, candidates who are well connected to the party's establishment also benefit.
"One would be hard pressed to come up with a popular nomination process more easily controlled by the (Republican) organization than the Iowa caucus, more supportive of a native son than New Hampshire, and more conservative but malleable than South Carolina," Thomas Brogan, political science professor at Albright College, told AP.
If voters in South Carolina give Romney a commanding victory, it would all but hand him the nomination. If they don't, however, the entertaining and sometimes absurd spectacle that is the primaries will likely continue for at least several more weeks.
Author: Christine Bergmann, Washington/Jefferson Chase
Editor: Rob Mudge