“Maybe we couldn’t”: Are Americans about to elect Mitt Romney as their President?

Four years is a long time in politics. It must feel like a lifetime for Barack Obama. In 2008, he was the young, charismatic Senator from Illinois who wowed not only America, but the world. His powerful and emotive rhetoric, his convincing and reassuring tone, made him one of the most popular political figures in the world. Today, he is but a shadow of his former self. The message of hope as exemplified by those iconic posters and the slogan “Yes we can,” has been replaced by a sense of disappointment. Last week, in the first Presidential debate of the 2012 campaign, Obama was soundly beaten. In a political landscape where personality often takes precedence over policy, Obama has somehow let slip from his grasp the affections of the American electorate. What was at one stage unthinkable might, on 6 November, become a reality. Barack Obama might fail to be elected for a second term as President of the United States of America.

Fortunately for Obama, the 2012 crop of Republican candidates for the presidency left a lot to be desired. There was Newt Gingrich, whose policies included a vow to build a moon base. There was Rick Perry, the Texan governor whose hilarious inability to remember the third agency of government he intended to cut destroyed his chances. There was Herman Cain, former chairman of a pizza company (no joke), who stumbled on a question about Libya as though he had never heard of the country, and then ended his campaign after accusations of sexual harassment. There was Rick Santorum, who held rather antiquated views on same-sex marriage, abortion and contraception. Even more fortunate for Obama, some of the more charismatic Republican figures, such as former Alaskan governor Sarah Palin and New Jersey governor Christ Christie, chose not to run on this occasion, as did the businessman and television star Donald Trump.

So Barack Obama will compete with Mitt Romney for the chance to serve as President of the USA for the next four years. Romney is an enigmatic character. The platform for which he stood to become the Republican candidate was incredibly far removed from the platform he once used to be elected as Governor of the liberal state of Massachusetts. Even now, weeks before the election, it is difficult to get Romney to commit, one way or the other, on most issues. Romney is the archetypal “baddie”. He wouldn’t be out of place in Jim Henson’s Muppet Show, as a character intending to knock down the Muppets’ theatre to drill for oil. His announcement in last week’s debate that he would cut funding to PBS, home of another of Henson’s creations, Sesame Street, might just make that a reality.

The election campaign has been gaff-central. The advantage Obama has had, however, is the scale of his gaffs. The President has been found wanting on numerous occasions, but he hasn’t committed the cringeworthy offences of his opponent. A recently surfaced video, in which Romney writes off 47% of the population of the USA who will never vote for him, is remarkable. It is true that Romney is terminally unable to win over African American and Hispanic voters. But surely it is his job to try, rather than castigate them (or, as has been the case in some Republican governed states, change the voting regulations to try and make them ineligible). Obama has not yet faced such a disastrous gaff. Trust me, if he had, Fox News would be all over it and we would all know about it.

Obama’s problem, though, is the disappointment of his first term. It is human nature that, when given a choice between “likely to fail” and “proven failure,” people would chose the former. I am not suggesting that Obama’s term has been totally disastrous. But his opponents have been able, with relative ease, to portray his economic, foreign and in particular healthcare policies as having missed the target. Obama brought much of this on himself through his undoubtedly feel-good but perhaps too ambitious campaign in 2008. Expectations were high, and despite some bright moments, there have been far too many disappointments. Suffice to say, any other year, with a strong Republican candidate, and Obama would be packing his suitcases and moving his papers out of the Oval Office.

The American electorate, then, finds itself between a rock and a hard place. Neither candidate has instilled confidence that they can bring positive change in the next four years. To be brutally honest, neither has yet said much at all about what they would do in the next term, instead resorting to the personal attacks on their opponent and vague statements which have made the aftermath of elections so hard to predict. The fact that Mitt Romney is anywhere near Obama in the polls shows just how dissatisfied the American people have become with their President. That Romney currently leads is a damning indictment. And come 6 November, if the American people chose to elect a man like Mitt Romney, then Barack Obama can only have himself to blame.