Hurray for long presidential campaigns -- Sept. 24, 2015 column

By MARSHA MERCER

Brandishing poll numbers that still show him leading the Republican presidential pack, Donald Trump said in South Carolina Wednesday, “If we could call for the election tomorrow…Let’s do it! Do it tomorrow!”

In his dreams.

You can’t blame Trump for wanting the voting over already.  The Trump surge was the story of the summer, but there are signs it may have peaked. He still leads in the polls but isn’t gaining. His last debate performance was just OK. There are empty seats at some of his events. He’s thin-skinned about Fox News and conservative pundits. He bristles at questions about details of his plans.

Time is on the side of those who are waiting for Trump to self-destruct. His campaign of cuts – Carly Fiorina’s face, Hillary Clinton’s shrillness, Marco Rubio’s sweat – is bound to wear thin.

Democrats just hope he keeps talking. Every minute the media covers Trump or Pope Francis or anything else is time not spent on the troubles facing Hillary Clinton -- her own sinking poll numbers, the emails, trust, women, Bernie Sanders and maybe Joe Biden.

In a new book titled “Unlikeable – The Problem with Hillary,” former New York Times Magazine editor Ed Klein says Clinton suffers with headaches, insomnia and depression. A Clinton spokesman said Klein’s claims are bogus.

Our much-maligned, seemingly endless presidential campaign season does work: It gives candidates plenty of rope.  In four months – only four -- voters will start having their say. The dates could change, but the Iowa caucuses are now set for Feb. 1 and the New Hampshire primary Feb. 9.

A disadvantage of the long campaign is the tight focus on the horse race. We know that poll numbers are not predictive; they’re a snapshot. But they’re news.

Trump may be a natural at campaigning, but even hot air balloons eventually come down. Yes, some mainstream Republicans fear that he could be a latter-day Barry Goldwater, who captured the Republican presidential nomination in 1964 only to lose 44 states that November. But he also could be a Rick Perry in 2011 or Rudy Giuliani in 2007.

In September 2011, Texas Gov. Rick Perry was leading in the Republican presidential race. Four years earlier, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani looked unstoppable.  

Each election cycle is different, so we can’t rely on past performance as a guide. 

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush looked strong early, but he may be a Bush too far. The outsiders – Trump, retired pediatric neurosurgeon Ben Carson and former Hewlett-Packard CEO Fiorina – are big now, but will voters really choose another president who lacks experience governing?

The two 2016 Republican candidates who have left the stage – former Gov. Perry and Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin – actually had governing experience, a liability in this year of the anti-politician.  

Perry probably thought the statute of limitations had run out on his gaffe during a debate in November 2011 when he could not remember the third federal agency he would eliminate as president. It hadn’t.

Walker’s star faded as Trump’s rose. At 47, Walker could run again. He made his departure seem ordained.    

“I believe that I am being called to lead by helping to clear the field,” he told reporters. “I encourage other Republican presidential candidates to consider doing the same so that voters can focus on a limited number of candidates who can offer a positive, conservative alternative to the current front-runner.”

No one else seems so inclined. A Muslim civil liberties group urged Carson to give up his quest after he said that no Muslim should serve as president. He says he’s now raising money so fast it’s hard to handle it all. Carson since has retreated, saying he could support a Muslim president who put the Constitution before religion and rejected Sharia law.

The other GOP hopefuls are current and former governors and senators, able politicians who in most years would be contenders. Today they’re barely registering in the polls. But they’re hanging on, waiting and hoping that Trump’s train loses steam.    

The winnowing process has started and likely will last a while. We’ll all be better for the long, arduous, annoying way we choose our nominees for president. I’m just glad the election isn’t tomorrow.     

©2015 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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Giving the president the hook -- July 30, 2015 column

By MARSHA MERCER

Good news: Barack Obama will not subvert the Constitution and grab a third presidential term.  

Most Americans never imagined that he’d do such a thing, but oddball doomsayers have warned for years that Obama was angling for a presidency for life.   

“I actually think I’m a pretty good president. I think if I ran, I could win. But I can’t,” Obama said Tuesday in Ethiopia. “The law is the law.”

He was giving the hook to African leaders who sometimes govern for decades. In this country, though, his comments set off a Seinfeldian debate about nothing. Could he win a third term if he could run, which he can’t?

His comments about age and presidential term limits, though, are worth examining.

“I’m still a pretty young man, but I know that somebody with new energy and new insights will be good for my country,” said Obama, who will turn 54 Tuesday.

“In our world, old thinking can be a stubborn thing. That’s one of the reasons why we need term limits -- old people think old ways,” he said.

If Obama believes this country needs someone younger than he next time around, what does that say about the Democrats’ elderly team of rivals? Grandma Hillary, 67, the presumptive frontrunner, may have a golden resume but Clinton is hard to sell as a candidate of new energy and new insights.

Throngs of Democrats flock to hear Bernie Sanders, who has vinegar, but he is 73. Joe Biden’s humanity makes him the Democrats’ favorite potential presidential candidate who’s not in the race. He’s 72. It may take a Hillary implosion to bring him into the fray.  

Among Republican hopefuls, several are younger than Obama – and all can claim new energy and insight. Bobby Jindal and Ted Cruz are 44, Scott Walker is 47, and Rand Paul is 52. But it’s an irrepressible old guy with no elective experience who’s leading the pack.

Donald Trump, 69, said he wished Obama could run again so Trump could beat him and everyone else. Trump has energy and unusual insights, all right, but he scares most Republicans. Also in their 60s: Jeb Bush, 62, Lindsey Graham, 60, John Kasich, 63, and Rick Perry, 65.

Setting aside the current competition, it’s worth asking: Do we need presidential term limits or should voters decide how long to keep a president?

"If they want to vote for someone, we shouldn’t have a rule that tells them they can’t.”

That’s not a wistful Bill Clinton. That’s conservative superhero President Ronald Reagan who said in 1987 that he hoped to “start a movement” after he left the White House to repeal the two-term limit on the presidency.  The change would not apply to him, Reagan said, but to his successors.

Since the 22^nd Amendment was ratified in 1951, people have been arguing about the wisdom of prohibiting someone from being elected to the presidency more than twice or serving more than 10 years. A vice president who serves more than two years of a previous president’s term and a full term may not run for re-election.  

For example, more than two years remained in Richard Nixon’s term when he resigned and Vice President Gerald Ford took over. Had Ford beat Jimmy Carter in 1976, Ford could have served only one full term and could not have run for re-election.

The Founders saw the presidency as a short-term gig. Delegates to the 1797 Constitutional Convention debated a six- or seven-year term and then agreed on four years. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson set the precedent of two terms, and the tradition stuck until the 1940s.

Only after Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt won a fourth term did the rules change. Bills proposing a constitutional amendment to repeal the 22^nd Amendment have died in Congress over and over.  

As they should. The Founders who feared a restoration of the monarchy had the right idea. No one person should dominate our highest office indefinitely. We should keep the two-term limit. Even Obama is fine with it.     

“You can see my gray hair – I’m getting old,” he said.         

©2015 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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Third time's the charm for Romney? -- Oct. 16, 2014 column

By MARSHA MERCER

Oh, Mitt, they need you.

No, not the out-of-touch, loser Mitt Romney of 2008 and 2012.  

What they want is the new and improved Mitt, version 2016, who would connect with voters by showing his compassion and his competence. And maybe his sense of humor. That, anyway, is the hope of establishment Republicans who have been trying for months to persuade Romney to make his third bid for the White House.

“Run, Mitt, run!” supporters chanted in Iowa last Monday.

As always with political nostalgia, the boomlet for Romney says more about current discontent than a true longing for the past. Romney is the Republicans’ national leader, and he looks positively statesmanlike next to, say, Texas Gov. Rick Perry.

Showing their compassion, the Romneys will raise $50 million for the just announced Ann Romney Center for Neurologic Diseases, which will bring 200 scientists together to study multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s and other diseases. Ann Romney, 65, was diagnosed with MS in 1998; it is in remission. The center is scheduled to open in 2016 in Boston.

Even so Romney, 67, is an odd choice as the GOP’s next big thing. He was a terrible presidential candidate.

To recap, Romney in 2012 lost women, 18- to 29-year-olds, African American, Hispanic and Asian voters to President Barack Obama. Romney’s fan base was whites, people 45 and older and especially those 65 and above. Romney barely won college educated voters, but Obama took the post-graduate school set.

  

Romney’s defenders blame his advisers and insist voters never saw the real Romney. Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., Romney’s running mate in 2012, says he will forgo his own presidential run next time if Romney tries again.

“Third time’s the charm,” Ryan says.

For now, Romney is generating buzz by saying he’s not planning to run for president. His wife also says he has no plans to run. She told the Los Angeles Times the family is “done, done, done” with presidential campaigns.

But Ann Romney told The Washington Post, “Honestly, we’ll have to see what happens.” Romney himself recently conceded that “circumstances can change.” Aha!

Romney says he learned a lot from 2012, particularly that anything he says may wind up on the front page. At a Florida hotel in May 2012, he thought he was speaking only to donors at a closed fundraiser when he disparaged the “47 percent” of the electorate who are dependent on government, pay no income taxes and will vote for Obama “no matter what.” Mother Jones later obtained the video and put it online – where it lives in perpetuity.

Given that the video will live forever, consideration of Romney for 2016 has an air of desperation:  Who else could stop a kook like Rand Paul or Ted Cruz in the GOP primaries? Who else might stop the Hillary Clinton juggernaut? 

Jeb, of course. If former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush decides to run, the pressure on Romney to run could evaporate. Bush also hasn’t decided whether he’s in, although he now says his wife is supportive and his mother has moved to neutral.   

To prove he’s not running for office, Romney actually told a joke the other day. Advisers always tell candidates to avoid jokes. Here it is:

“President Obama went to the bank to cash a check, and he didn’t have his ID. And the teller said, `You’ve got to prove who you are.’

“He said, `How should I do that?’ She said, `The other day Phil Mickelson came in; he didn’t have his ID but he set up a little cup on the ground, took a golf ball, putted it right into that cup so we knew it was Phil Mickelson. We cashed his check.’

“`And then Andre Agassi came in and...didn’t have his ID either. He put a little target on the wall, took a tennis ball and racquet, hit it onto that target time and again. We knew that was Andre Agassi, so we cashed his check.’

“And she said to him, `Is there anything you can do to prove who you are?’

“And [Obama] said, `I don’t have a clue.’

“And she said, `Well, Mister President, do you want your money in small bills or large bills?’”

The crowd loved it. Meet the new Mitt. What a card.

© 2014 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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Hey, Rick Perry, keep on talking -- Aug. 31, 2011 column

By MARSHA MERCER

Two years before the 2008 presidential election, Barack Obama’s “The Audacity of Hope” landed in bookstores. Its subtitle: “Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream.”

Two years before the 2012 election, Rick Perry’s “Fed Up!” hit bookstores. Its subtitle: “Our Fight to Save America from Washington.”

Both politicians addressed the sense Americans had that the political process had gone wrong and offered their own policy solutions. But where Obama, then a senator from Illinois, built on his 2004 speech at the Democratic National Convention, writing about “just how much we share: common hopes, common dreams, a bond that will not break,” Perry, the governor of Texas, attacked the capitol.

“America is great,” he writes.“Washington is broken.” Perry also opines that “Cynics will say that I decided to write this book because I seek higher office. They are wrong: I already have the best job in America.”

Oh, Lordy, that man can talk.

You don’t have to be a cynic to think the author of “Fed Up!” is rounding up voters outside the Lone Star State. As we’ve seen in the last few weeks, though, Rick Perry thrives on extravagant speech.

When he’s not warning it would be “treasonous” for the Federal Reserve chairman to stimulate the economy in a presidential election year, and if he did, “we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas,” Perry is dismissing evolution as “just a theory” with “some gaps in it.”

And, speaking of cynicism, Perry claims research scientists manipulate data on climate change, “so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects.” Social Security is a “monstrous lie,” he says, “a Ponzi scheme.”

And, while insisting that “most Americans do not yearn to be dependent on government subsidies” like food stamps or want Washington as “caretaker,” he conveniently forgets tens of thousands of dollars in federal farm subsidies he and his father received while farming.

He jumped into the presidential race Aug. 13 and already has talked his way to the head of the class of Republican contenders.

A Quinnipiac University poll Wednesday found Perry the favorite for the GOP nomination, confirming recent findings by CNN and Gallup. If one poll is a fuzzy snapshot, two begin to bring the picture into focus, and three or more sharpen it.

Yes, Perry may be enjoying a temporary boomlet in popularity as a newcomer running against the establishment. No matter that he’s a lifelong politician, having held public office since 1984.

Or, he may have ridden onto the presidential rodeo with his cowboy boots and bluster at the right moment. Many Republicans are hankering for someone who talks like they think.

If Obama has been inscrutable and Ivy League, Perry is Texas A&M, a yell leader as emphatic as an exclamation point. Perry’s promise to work every day in the White House to make Washington “inconsequential in your life” goes down like sweet tea with the tea party crowd.

And here’s the cherry on the Perry sundae: He irritates progressives, intellectuals and liberal commentators no end, which adds to his luster among people who have no use for so-called elites.

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman called Perry’s comments on climate change “vile.” A news story on politico.com this week asked, “Is Rick Perry dumb?”
The consensus of political watchers was that while he’s no pointy-headed intellectual, he is a smart politician. Dumb like a fox, several said.

After Karl Rove helped Perry win an election as Texas agriculture commissioner in the 1990s, Perry said his own mind was like a chicken pot pie while Rove’s was a well-organized refrigerator, “pickles here, salad there.”

Perry, 61, a fifth-generation Texan, not only has rugged good looks, a folksy manner and the gift of gab, he lovingly evokes bygone days. In his 2008 book “On My Honor,” about scouting, the Eagle Scout wrote about his childhood:

“Our spot of farmland was perched along the rolling plains of West Texas. Dad called our area the Big Empty. I called it paradise. I had thousands of acres to explore, a dog I called my own, and a Shetland pony. We had every amenity a boy could need: electricity because the Rural Electrification Agency, REA, had made its way out our road…”

Whoa, pony, hold on there. The REA is a federal agency, born of FDR’s New Deal. Washington doesn’t get any more consequential in people’s lives than when it brings the lights.

Even a man who wants to be president ought to know that.

© 2011 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.