Dispatch #3

The Arizona and Michigan primaries went to Mitt Romney: in Arizona—47% Romney, 27% Santorum; in Michigan—41% Romney, 38% Santorum. The results came as no surprise to dull, cranky realists like myself. But dull, cranky realists like myself are, by definition, dull; that is to say, less interesting and readable than bug-eyed, right-wing ideologues who need attention (Santorum, Gingrich, and Ron Paul) and the journalists who desperately need something interesting to write and talk about in a 24-hour news-cycle. Writing about Mitt Romney is not interesting, nor is writing about inevitability. So, we read at length and hear ad nauseum about breathless possibilities; intelligent, detailed, and highly-wrought what-ifs, like John Whitesides’ 1000-word analysis, “Santorum Win in Michigan Could be Chaos for GOP” (Reuters 2/26/12). (The GOP=Grand Old Party=Republicans) In any case, that’s a lot of words for a very big IF. But that is what the news, what political discourse has become, both the news and what could be the news, maybe, you know, perhaps—in an alternate universe.

If this is your life or your job, the ceaseless chatter is regrettable but understandable; but if it is not, as it is not for me, and if you are looking on from another country, it is best just not to pay too much attention. If you read the U.S. press coverage closely for a week, you will probably read everything of substance you will likely need to understand the election in November. It will be rehashed and recycled with slight alteration every primary week until the conventions, when Mitt Romney and Barack Obama will be nominated. Then, it will all be rehearsed again during the election campaign, probably to no great effect. If the economy continues to mend, Barack Obama will be re-elected. The smart money right now is on Obama. I refrain from calling it the “conventional wisdom” because nothing about this discourse is genuinely wise.

Next week ten states hold primaries. Romney will finish 1^st or 2^nd in all of them, probably in front in enough of them to remain the front-runner. If he does well enough, the dull inevitability talk could begin. If not, the tedious fantasy cycle will continue through the spring.

Dispatch #2

We are currently in the midst of the Republican primaries, during which that party will choose a candidate to oppose Barack Obama, the current President and the obvious Democratic candidate. No Democrats have come forth to challenge Obama, a not unusual occurrence, but given the President’s indifferent political success, the drop in his popularity, and the sluggish economic recovery, a challenge wouldn’t have been out of the question. Earlier in this ridiculously long process, some hopes surfaced that Secretary of State Hilary Clinton might make a second run at the nomination. Only the Republican Party would have benefited from that scenario, and the Secretary wisely demurred.

The Republican Party has two major problems going into this election: their ranks are divided between a vehemently ideological “base” and a cowed party establishment with no real vision, pragmatic or otherwise, no original, constructive “message”; their second problem is a weak slate of candidates. The two problems relate to one another in that a number of more promising candidates—moderates with some hope of appealing to “swing” voters in the general election—simply deferred from entering a campaign process that promised to be overly long, loud, occasionally vicious, rarely substantive, and never particularly intelligent. That is, the slate is weak because the party is divided, with no candidate to unify them—except Barack Obama.  Hostility toward the President is the Republican Party’s chief animus, the source of its collective spirit, in so far as it can focus any force at all. Visceral, irrational, and rancorous, this mood ferments from primary to primary.

Mitt Romney, a former one-term governor of Massachusetts and millionaire venture capitalist, is the establishment choice, and generally considered the only Republican candidate with a chance of defeating Obama in the general election. The base choice would seem to be any candidate other than Mitt Romney, and they have gone through their quirky, cranky options almost monthly. A flirtation with Michelle Bachmann, a fascination with Herman Cain, a brief, attachment to Newt Gingrich, and currently a hopeful liaison with Rick Santorum, a former senator from Pennsylvania. There is little genuine love for Mitt Romney, but at the end of the long primary days, the Republicans will choose him, though tepidly and reluctantly. There will be a primary in Romney’s home state of Michigan this Tuesday. At the moment, polls show Romney and Santorum in a tight race, which shouldn’t be happening in Romney’s home state, but I suspect he will win reasonably comfortably, hardly decisively, but comfortably, and that outcome will probably mirror the contest in general.

Dispatch: The First

A dear friend and colleague of mine at the Jagiellonian University in Poland has asked me to write something for an academic audience about the impending U.S. presidential election of 2012. She would like me to attend to the public debate surrounding this event and its influence on the outcome. In my own mind I would defer for a number of reasons: 1) While I have an academic background not entirely irrelevant to the task, I have long since relinquished professional, academic aspirations; 2) I have no particular expertise in the contemporary techniques, quantitative or qualitative, of political scientific analysis or media study, either of which would seem required for anything like what she has requested of me; 3) I have serious doubts if anything that gets said or written by or about the candidates in the seemingly boundless discourse on this endless process will have any significant effect upon the outcome. I’ll stop there.

However, because you are a dear and a dear friend, Dr. Banaś, I will humor you with my thoughts on this election and the sound and fury that accompany it. Make of these notes what you will.

For other readers, please know that I would probably be described as a "liberal," and I have no particular problem with that label, except that it broadens, like the label "conservative," to the point of meaninglessness. Perhaps it will be more pertinent to note that I voted for Barack Obama in the last election, though I supported Hilary Clinton in the Democratic primary. On rare occasions in my life, I have voted for moderate Republican candidates at the state and national level. I have no strong affiliation to the Democratic Party, though I had made contributions to it during the most recent Bush administration. I do not have, and will not make, time to undertake more extensive research beyond what I do to inform myself as a citizen, limited and biased as my sources may be. I routinely scan news as it appears on my Yahoo feed, which includes stories from the major media outlets; I read these periodicals regularly—the Atlantic, Harper’s, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books—all fairly mainstream liberal publications, and listen almost daily to NPR, National Public Radio. I am neither a news nor a political junkie, and much prefer literature of a less pop-cultural stripe.