Mark the date. Today the DOW ended over 13,000 for the first time since 2008. Polls out today show that President Obama has opened up a huge gender gap--women have come back to him in droves as the Republicans thought one way to screw up the Affordable Care Act was to eliminate the contraceptive mandate on health insurance companies under the pretext that somehow this was against religious freedom. Even Mitt Romney is singing this song. As of today, President Obama would win the general election with roughly the popular vote he got last time and a slightly less in electoral votes.
But this election will be determined by events that lie in the not too distant future. So far the Republicans have thrown everything at the wall to see whether anything would stick. Most of this is to wait for the moment something will become true--whether it is an economic slowdown or a foreign crisis. Democrats are naive to believe that events in the next few months will be rational and that the underlying political patterns that have emerged in the last few months will hold. Republicans are banking on a perfect storm--a combination of crises that will make their critiques of President Obama hold together. All these crises would be a disaster for this country but the economic powers lined up behind the GOP don't care--they escaped the last disaster with impunity and are banking on the next one to reopen the door to greater de-regulation and a roll-back on any reforms put in place.
I believe that foreign policy will begin to take front stage over the next few months. The GOP is banking on amnesia from the electorate on how they blew 9/11 and the Iraq War to try and regain their national security credentials. In the next week, President Obama will address AIPAC on issues having to do with the Iran nuclear project and following that he will be meeting with Bibi Netanyahu on the subject. It would not surprise me that there may be an October Surprise in the Middle East, which will provoke a crisis. Interestingly enough, we may be at a situation in this country where the nation may not back a President in such a crisis.
Even without a foreign crisis, oil speculators have been running up the price of oil. The entire oil industry is waging war against President Obama as they vowed when he didn't approve the Keystone XL Pipeline. Almost all of Wall Street and the hedge funds have lined up with the Republicans. Put on top the overt hostility of the Catholic Bishops to President Obama, the evangelicals and the Mormons and you have a toxic brew waiting to erupt. Meanwhile, we do not have strong enough elements of a new economy to counter these forces. And that is precisely the point. The old economy will put up a massive fight to preserve their privileges.
Remember the first days of the stimulus package when the employment numbers started to improve and Americans felt that the economy was headed in the right direction. Through the manipulation of the so-called Tea Party through astro-turf organizations, corporate interests managed to sabotage an on-going recovery and almost kill it with the 2010 mid-term elections. They can and will do it again.
There has been a theme throughout the 2008 campaign and Obama's presidency of the GOP waiting for the President to make a fatal misstep. One can only believe in his intelligence and craftiness to avoid one. No matter what he achieves he will not receive credit and that makes his re-election harder than the pundits realize. It is not simply to have an improving economy because then the goalposts will be changed again--foreign policy or culture wars. The problem Obama faces is that he is fighting too many entrenched interests at the same time.
For instance, the President's strategy to move more to Asia since it is now the engine of the world economy benefits the country in the long-run but it also threatens those who want us bogged down in the Middle East forever. What is especially true is that President Obama has done more than anyone to get us off our addiction to Middle East oil. But there is a price--alienating precisely those forces both foreign and domestic who make their fortunes of that trade. If you plan on having an oil-based economy for the foreseeable future without alternative energy supplies, then you have to revisit the Middle East as a source of that fuel. By provoking a crisis where the United States must again use force, you create the conditions for our indefinite stay in the region, something the last administration orchestrated with such ease.
Almost all the general campaign will be waged outside the public eye. The only thing that will mark its intensity will be the virtual endless negative ads against President Obama. It will be the most intense hate campaign against any sitting president. We already know the culprits involved--Karl Rove and his CrossRoads America Pac, the Chamber of Commerce, the Koch brothers,the entire panoply of billionaires for Romney. Nothing will be over the top. One goal will be to depress Obama's base and the other through the Voter ID laws will be to suppress those who do want to vote. In this election, Obama doesn't have the set of friendly Democratic Attorney Generals to make sure voters will be able to exercise their votes.
And some of Obama's base are not reliable voters in the first place such as first-time voters of college age, who now will face more difficulties voting and the Hispanic voters, who exhibit a lower turnout than their numbers imply.
Listening to Romney's victory speech tonight reminded me of his technique of papering over the past. He has always edited when the Great Recession began. In past ads, he simply lumped the collapse of the economy together with the first few months of President Obama's term. The message is that the Great Recession was all President Obama's fault. Tonight he was still at it with lines like we have to "recover from the recovery". As for the Keystone XL Pipeline, we are now back to Drill, Baby, Drill, with Romney promising to get that Canadian oil we "deserve". Romney is good at his own dog-whistle politics saying that he is running against a "society of entitlement" for a "society of opportunity".
If you don't think this will be a nasty campaign, you should check out the comments on the President by the Republican governors. At the national governors meeting, every Republican governor made it a point to meet with the press to list all the faults of the President--real or imagined. You can be sure in 2012 they will not enforce the Voting Rights Act because they believe a higher patriotism requires them to seize power for the Republican nominee. The 2000 election was just a trial balloon to what they plan.
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