No one has asked my thoughts on the 2012 US presidential race. And no one has paid me to consult or write about the US presidential race. Nonetheless, I will offer a couple of opinions on what is going on.
- Barack Obama will win with results very close to Nate Silver’s predictions.
- Yes, Obama has a pretty mediocre record and the US economy is still pretty weak. In a normal election cycle, he should have been quite beatable.
- However, one of the biggest reasons he has such a mediocre record has been the historic levels of obstructionism by the Republicans.
- The strongest candidate the GOP could have offered would have been a conservative who is intellectually honest and competent. But if today’s Republicans were intellectually honest and competent, they would have cooperated with the Obama administration over the past four years, and the United States would be in much better economic shape today. Which would have made Obama much less beatable.
- This was a deliberate and calculated strategy by the GOP — that party discipline and intransigence was a winning electoral strategy. 2010 seemed to prove that right. Fortunately, in the long run it appears to have been a losing strategy.
And one more big, depressing point:
- Until the Republican party becomes convinced that their strategy of the past four years (and, really, since Newt Gingrich ran the House 20 years ago) is a losing one, nothing is going to change in US politics.
One of Obama’s biggest failings as president has been his inability to lobby, cajole, and politic Congress effectively. He is way too passive before both his party and the opposition. Four years ago I totally supported Obama’s candidacy. But in retrospect I think the United States would have done better with Hillary Clinton as president (as painful as it is for me at admit that).
Oh, and one last closing thought about politics that I have learned over the past four years, from living in Asia and Europe and following US politics:
- Any and all nations’ internal politics look just as moronic and painful as the United States’ if looked at with the same level of detail.
Not sure sure about that last item. I’m starting to think that India has everyone else beat when it comes to incompetence and paralysis. In a country of 1.2 billion, no one’s feelings are allowed to be hurt.
Well, I did not mention competence, just how stupid things look. 😀
I of course defer to you on all things India. But I can tell that Spain’s political class has a special level of incompetence too — not worried so much about hurting feelings as losing patronage.
I just meant that the worst aspects of the United States, at least in part, look as bad as they do simply because they are so visible to most of the world. If you don’t live in Spain, you rarely care much about Spanish political disfunction (at least before it began to threaten the entire euro). Some with Canadian political silliness or Korean or Mongolian, or whatever.