WASHINGTON—Is America ready to put another tough-talking Texan in the White House, so soon after the last one? Or is the meteoric rise of Tea Party darling Gov. Rick Perry only a mirage — another here-today, gone-later-today example of a fast-and-fickle Republican leadership race that remains almost anyone’s to win?
That the answer to these questions has changed in barely 48 hours underscores the sheer volatility of the political agonies unfolding stateside.
On Monday, the camera-friendly Perry was on a seemingly unassailable roll, vaulting toward that night’s CNN/Tea Party debate polling head and shoulders above the pack.
And then the pack turned on him live on CNN, hammering away at every moderate chink in the ostensibly archconservative governor’s political armour.
The Texas governor found himself squirming to explain to immigration hardliners why he extended free tuition to the children of undocumented illegals; he vacillated and backtracked on his earlier denunciation of Social Security as a “Ponzi scheme,” and he looked entirely lost when his main rival Mitt Romney, the Massachusetts governor, likened Perry’s role in the oil-rich, business-friendly Texas economy to that of a lucky poker play dealt four aces.
But the deepest cut was delivered by Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, who feasted upon Perry’s 2007 executive order mandating that young girls in Texas by vaccinated against the cancer-causing sexually transmitted disease HPV.
“To have innocent little 12-year-old girls be forced to have a government injection . . . is just flat out wrong,” said Bachmann. “That’s a violation of a liberty interest.”
The HPV attacks against Perry continued long after the debate ended, with Bachmann joined suddenly by former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, who until now had been seen as allied with the Texas governor.
The criticisms one wag described as “Bachmann-Palin Overdrive” hinted at “crony capitalism” as the backdrop to Perry’s Texas injection order. Perry had received as much as $30,000 in campaign contributions from Merck, the vaccine’s manufacturer, and one of his top staffers is a former Merck lobbyist.
It remains to be seen how well Perry, who launched his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination barely a month ago, will weather the sudden storm.
The three-term Texas governor, who assumed office in 2000 when George W. Bush left for Washington, has deep roots in the Lone Star State, boasting a heritage five generations deep.
His bona fides as both a fiscal and social conservative — pro-life, anti-tax, anti-Washington, an advocate for the “inerrancy” of the Bible and a proud proclaimer of having “lost no sleep” over some 234 death-row executions since taking office — position Perry as the stuff of Tea Party dreams.
But those conservative credentials are less than they seems given the fact that Perry, 61, began his political life as a Democrat before switching sides in 1990 and once wrote then-First Lady Hillary Clinton expressing enthusiasm for her earlier efforts to overhaul the U.S. health-care system.
Perry’s recent wobbling political fortunes serve as a sharp reminder of the sheer volatility of a race that isn’t expected to take on firm contours until the new year, when the Republican primaries begin the sort the wheat from the chaff with actual votes.
In some ways, U.S. politics was always thus. Turn back the clock four years and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani was, ever so briefly, the apparent frontrunner in a Republican nomination race that went eventually to Arizona Sen. John McCain.
But in other ways, the whack-a-mole nature of this political season, with polling surges and collapses attached to the likes of Palin, Donald Trump, Bachmann and now Perry, speaks to the complex combination of new media and U.S. political unrest.
“On one hand we have a situation where President Barack Obama is perceived as so very vulnerable in 2012 and that is sparking great excitement for any Republican candidate that seems to have a chance,” said Paul Levinson, a media studies scholar at New York’s Fordham University.
“But the other dimension at play is the way all the new media are accelerating the process. Instant Tweeting, YouTube videos, it all seems to be generating a much faster turnover of potential candidates,” Levinson told the Star.
“The consequence is that everything is moving faster. Yet everything remains unsettled and unclear.”
Ultimately, said Levinson, the tried-and-true mechanics of the nominating process will serve to slow things down. Early in 2012, the Republican candidates will do battle in Iowa, and New Hampshire soon thereafter.
“The primaries are gong to slow down the process. And after two or three primaries it’s going to get whittled down to three or four survivors. Not until then we really have a clue of who Obama is going to face in the race for the presidency in November 2012.”
The other startling factor in Monday’s debate was the sheer fact of its messenger, CNN, acting as host and conduit for an audience of dedicated — and vocal — Tea Party supporters.
The crowd demonstrated a ferocious fealty to rugged, go-it-alone individualism, at one point cheering in answer to host Wolf Blitzer’s hypothetical question of whether an uninsured man with a preventable ailment should be left to die. “Let him die!” shouted one man in the Tampa, Fla., audience.
The audience reaction sparked frenzy on Twitter, with some rewriting country song lyrics to capture the anti-government gestalt. One example: “I uninsured a man in Reno, just to watch him die.”
But media analysts like Levinson welcomed CNN’s efforts as a welcome act of broadening an otherwise balkanized American media landscape, where outlets on the left (MSNBC) and right (Fox News) so seldom make time for opposing viewpoints.
“To hear someone shout out, ‘Let him die,’ reveals a basic cruelty that most Americans would find difficult, I think,” said Levinson.
“But to hear it on CNN is 100 per cent healthy for our democracy. They placed the full spectrum of candidates front and centre and provided their viewers with viewpoints they might otherwise not have heard.
“Far from representing a shift to the right for CNN, I see it as a step forward for the most centrist of our cable news providers. Any time you get see and hear from the candidates directly rather than watching and reading characterizations of what they said is a good day for our country.”
Origin
Source: Toronto Star
No comments:
Post a Comment