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Believe her and Obama can win

With voters moving left and scandal hitting the right, suddenly the president has fresh hope in the forthcoming election race
Andrew Sullivan Published: 13 November 2011
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You can say one thing for certain after the past dreadful week for the Republican party. Rick Perry, the governor of Texas, is not going to be the nominee for president. His now infamous brain-freeze while counting to three in a candidates’ debate last week all but disqualifies him from going up against such a skilled debater as Barack Obama.

If it were only the one incident we would forgive him. But it is just the latest in a series of lacklustre debates, loopy speeches, unhinged policy proposals and poor organisation that has already seen him plummet in the polls.

It makes you realise how trivial the Texas governorship is. In retrospect the Republicans should have remembered their last president and gulped.

However, Perry is not the real story, it seems to me, of the race right now. The real story is the frontrunner, Herman Cain, who has finally copped on to the fact that the lobbying group he headed has made two different legal settlements with women who had complained of sexual harassment at his hands. Three more have come forward to claim abuse or inappropriate behaviour and, in one case, sexual assault.

Cain’s response was to issue an emphatic denial of everything. Of the woman who described the alleged sexual assault at a press conference last Monday, he said: “My first response in my mind and reaction was I don’t even know who this woman is. Secondly, I didn’t recognise the name at all ... I tried to remember if I recognised her and I didn’t.”

The woman, Sharon Bialek, insisted she had confronted Cain at a Tea Party event only a month ago and had a tense conversation with him. More to the point, there was a journalist eyewitness to the episode, Amy Jacobson, who reported what she saw in the moments before Cain was saved by his handlers: “She talked to him for a few minutes, which made me kind of mad because I wanted to talk to him ... There was a smile and then things got tense.”

Who are you going to believe — Cain or your lying eyes? Can anyone believe that Cain really had no idea who this woman was as she stepped in front of the cameras? Or look at it another way: how many candidates for president have you heard of with five women complaining of previous sexual harassment? Even Bill Clinton avoided that in the primaries (he was walloped for philandering, not harassment).

One wonders whether the Republicans can continue taking this candidacy as seriously as they have so far Staggeringly, Cain has not plummeted in the polls. A question about the incident at last Wednesday’s debate prompted boos from the audience. Given an opportunity to criticise Cain on this, Mitt Romney, his nearest rival, passed. Cain’s lead over Romney remains at about two points, but his lead over the next candidate is a whopping 12 points. And so one wonders whether the Republicans can continue taking this candidacy as seriously as they have so far. Or are they determined to exacerbate the gender gap even more? To me the spectacle is beginning to seem surreal.

I have to say the debate was probably the worst I have ever had to sit through and I can now count scores of them over the years.

It was awful because the candidates had no real answers to any deep economic questions. Their consensus was that the way to kick-start growth is to slash taxes even further, balance the budget entirely by cutting entitlement spending and sack Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman. Ron Paul, for good measure, called for an immediate cut of $1 trillion in spending, just as the global economy flirts with recession. Romney actually said the Democrats dislike companies that are profitable. He didn’t note that corporate profits are at record levels in America — and yet growth is still stalled.

No one noted that tax revenues, as a share of personal income, are at a 50-year low or that Obama has cut taxes and is asking the Republicans to keep one tax cut in place (it is due to expire and the Republicans seem fine with that). The level of the conversation — its detachment from most current realities, enveloped in one cliché after another — was like a trip back to the late 1970s.

The voters are noticing. Two months ago Obama was behind a generic Republican candidate among independent voters by a whopping 21 points. Now he is dead level. Last Tuesday’s local elections, moreover, saw defeats for Republicans and their initiatives. A new Ohio law proposing to end collective bargaining rights for public sector workers — the signature move of John Kasich, the recently elected Republican governor — did not just go down, it went down in a 2-1 landslide in favour of the unions.

In Arizona, the official who had pioneered the anti-illegal immigration measures was kicked out before the end of his term in a recall election. In Mississippi, an extreme anti-abortion amendment was defeated soundly. And in a poll just before the Ohio vote, Obama was leading Romney by nine points in that critical swing state. No doubt that gap will close next year. But it remains remarkable that a president in a stalled economy with unemployment at 9% would be crushing all his Republican rivals in the Midwest.

The reason? The Republicans have gone way too far overboard. Thrust into the minority in 2008, they did what Labour did after losing to Margaret Thatcher and what the Tories did after losing to Tony Blair. They moved to their own extreme. The 2010 congressional elections were just enough to delude them that moving to the furthest right was political gold. It wasn’t and isn’t.

Nowhere is this clearer than on taxes. Just as Americans are beginning to absorb the scale of the global economic crisis and US debt, the polls show huge majorities supporting more taxation of the wealthy to cut the debt. A balanced debt reduction package — such as George Osborne’s — is possible in America. Ronald Reagan did it. But today’s Republicans refuse to countenance any net increase in taxation, even as revenues are at 50-year lows and some concessions could open up the grand bargain that eluded Obama and John Boehner, the Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, earlier this year.

The Republicans, in other words, are further to the right than Reagan — at a time when the electorate is, if anything, drifting leftward of Obama. Maybe Romney can reverse this. But any primary season is a large advertisement for the political parties. And right now, what the voters have seen of the Republicans is turning them off. If Cain refuses to go quietly, the damage could spread still further.

andrewsullivan.com

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Comment on thisComment (1)
IHBostonRecommend (0)Yesterday11:44 pm
When Wednesday's Republican presidential debate ended, CNBC switched to a post-debate panel featuring Larry Kudlow, who raved that Herman Cain had an "unbelievably good debate tonight" and said Cain's performance "blew me away."
The Atlanta businessman had help from a friendly audience at the debate, held at Michigan's Oakland University. When moderator Maria Bartiromo asked whether sexual harassment allegations against him raised "character issues," the crowd booed the question. And they loudly cheered Cain's answer: "The American people deserve better than someone being tried in the court of public opinion based on unfounded accusations." When Bartiromo's colleague John Harwood tried to get Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney to address the accusations against Cain, the crowd again booed the question, and applauded when Romney refused to criticize Cain. People "can make their own assessment," Romney said, and that was the last time the topic was raised all night.
It is far too early to say that Cain has put the accusations behind him, but by the time Wednesday's debate ended, his successful performance had apparently changed the narrative of what seemed a potentially campaign-killing crisis just 48 hours earlier.
 


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