Challenging Obama

With the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary in the books it seems very likely that the 2012 presidential election will be Mitt Romney versus Barack Obama.

I have been underwhelmed by the Republican race to date.  Based upon the polls and commentary it seems like a lot of other people are underwhelmed too.  Romney seems singularly unfit for our times.  He is a politician running in a party that appears bent on angry confrontation.  Romney tries to echo this anger by calling Obama a failure and criticizing his record, principally on the economy and the health care reform act.

The problem is that I believe that Romney is smart enough to know that the economy is being driven by factors largely out of Obama's control.  With respect to his health care reform criticisms, Romney is stuck trying to draw distinctions between what he passed in Massachusetts with what was passed on a national level.  Those differences are minute and largely inconsequential to the broader issues relating to health care reform.  The bottom line is that I do not believe that Romney truly believes that Obama is the failure that he tries to project him to be on the stump. As a consequence, Romney comes across as phoney and disingenuous.

Besides the issue of Romney's authenticity, I believe that Romney has a real problem with his aristocratic background.  Romney is the child of wealth and power who has expanded that wealth and power by working (probably quite well) in the arcane world of private equity. As America slowly recovers from the most significant economic disruption since the Great Depression, the idea of electing a man who made his fortune on buying, selling, liquidating, and rehabilitating corporations using vast amounts of privately held wealth strikes me as something that will rub the American people the wrong way. While the average American voter may not be able to explain how a credit swap agreement or a derivative contract caused a major financial crisis, I do believe that Americans understand that the banking world ended up playing poker with other people's money and was taking some long odds on its bets.  I have a hard time thinking that America will reward someone who profited so greatly from this system when so many are still holding the bag.

At one level the inadequacies of Romney are great from my perspective - I supported Obama in 2008 and was unlikely to support anyone else regardless of who the Republican nominee was this year.  Yet - I believe in the benefit of the adversarial system.  A good opponent makes you better and a bad opponent makes you worse.  I wonder how much better Obama would be if he were able to have a debate with a real opponent with genuinely thought out alternatives to the status quo.  Jon Huntsman would have been such an opponent in my opinion.  Unfortunately, I believe his 3rd place showing in New Hampshire is his high water mark and he is unlikely to remain in the race beyond South Carolina and Florida.

Obama is going to end up debating a hollow idea of what American should be and not a genuine alternative.  I hope that he can rise above the lack of a genuine opponent and rise to the level of leadership we need.