Tuesday night is no

longer 'slump in front

of the TV' night

 

Alan McIntyre

 

Tuesdays can be difficult days. Whatever 'get up and go' there was on Monday morning has dissipated and Friday is a mirage on the far horizon. So there's always the risk that Tuesday evening becomes a 'slump in front of the TV' night, watching trance-inducing reality shows.
     Well, the good news is that if you live in the USA and follow politics, Tuesday night just got exciting again. Wall-to-wall coverage of the Republican primaries may still qualify as bad reality television, but at least I'm not nodding off 20 minutes into the 'X Factor'.
     As a TV event, UK election coverage has a 'one night only' feel to it; a six-week campaign culminating in an extravaganza of talking heads and swingometers on election night. In contrast, the drama of US presidential elections gets to have an extended regional warm-up tour before it hits the big time in November.
     In the run of competitive primaries and caucuses (in this cycle just Republican) from Iowa in January through California in early June, you get a microcosm of autumn's general election campaign, replete with formal debates, attack ads, vigorous muck-raking and of course the media hoopla of election night coverage. Like any good regional theatrical tour, before the show hits Broadway the script has been rewritten a few times, some of the actors have been replaced, and the producers pray they've worked out all the kinks by opening night.
     A week ago the rest of the Republican primary season looked like the boring coronation of Mitt Romney. No one except a sitting president had ever won the first two contests in Iowa and New Hampshire. He was going into South Carolina and Florida with big leads in the polls and the media were starting to talk about him as the presumptive nominee. But one reason I've been sacrificing my Tuesday nights to CNN is the unpredictability of this race. After Newt Gingrich's surging victory in South Carolina on Saturday night and an Iowa recount that handed victory to Rick Santorum, instead of being three straight for Romney we have three different winners and it's 'game on' again.
     One reason for my close attention is the novelty of having a horse in the race. In 2008 I was a mere permanent resident of the US and hence voteless. Like an anthropologist sitting behind the one-way glass, I could watch and hear everything that was going on, but no one was talking to me. At least this time around, as a dual citizen of the US and UK, I'll get to cast a ballot come November. But the real fascination of this extended political brawl is to watch the convulsions of the Republicans as they struggle to back someone who is clearly unloved, but who might actually be electable.
     For at least a generation, the Republican Party has been suffering from multiple ideology disorder. In this presidential cycle that struggle has taken on the feel of a bad Eddie Murphy movie in which each of the competing ideological strands manifests itself in distilled form in one of three candidates.
     In Ron Paul you have a pure small government libertarian with an almost paranoid distrust of authority. This resonates strongly with the Tea Party Republicans who regained control of the House in 2010. The problem with Dr Paul is that he is a true libertarian, so his agenda also includes legalising drugs and letting Iran develop nuclear weapons; policies that almost bring him full circle on some issues to resemble a sandal-wearing left-wing Democrat.
     In Rick Santorum you have the personification of the family values wing of the party. Santorum has pulled off the trick of uniting a coalition of working-class Catholics and the traditionally Protestant 'Religious Right' behind his theocratic vision for America. While Santorum plays well at a superficial level with working-class social conservatives, the problem is that – like Ron Paul – he represents an ideological position taken to its logical conclusion. Not only is he pro-life on abortion, but he'd like to ban contraception even within marriage. Not only is he against homosexuality and gay marriage, he equates it to polygamy, bestiality and paedophilia. While America may pride itself on being an overtly religious nation, these are not the views of an electable national candidate, even if he did in fact win Iowa.

 

     In Mitt Romney you have the standard-bearer for a third strand of Republican ideology: managerial conservatives who think that running a country is like running a business, and whose limited passion springs from the belief that Obama has been a poor CEO of America. They're the 'One Nation Tories' of US politics. Pragmatists who believe it is better to wield power and make steady progress through compromise than to be ideologically pure in defeat.
     Having to play to the gallery in the primaries has obscured the fact that Romney was moderate enough to be elected governor of Massachusetts (considered a socialist state by many Republicans), so he clearly has centrist appeal. The problem is that in primaries where only the politically active are engaged, Romney isn't exactly a 'man the barricades' type candidate. The result has been that he has struggled to break through the 25-30% barrier in polls for the last year and almost 60% of registered Republicans say they aren't happy with the choice of candidates on offer.
     While the Romney campaign had momentum going into South Carolina, the lack of passion for him as the nominee always made that front-runner status fragile. For the last 12 months he's faced a fractured opposition which couldn't coalesce around a single right-wing candidate. For a while it looked like Rick Perry, the governor of Texas, could be that figure until he forgot on national television which federal departments he wanted to close. After South Carolina the anti-Romney consensus choice is now Newt Gingrich rising Lazarus-like not only from his first political death in the 1990s but also from the depths of the last month when he trailed in 4th in both Iowa and New Hampshire. It only serves to underline the weakness of Romney's candidacy that a serial adulterer with questionable ethics who has also been a loose cannon on policy issues now has the momentum.
     As the race heads for the Florida primary on 31 January, Ronald Reagan's 11th commandment of 'thou shalt not criticise another Republican' has long been dispensed with and the mud-slinging around Gingrich's personal life and Romney's failure to release his tax returns is ramping up. While Gingrich is surging, Romney still leads in the Florida polls and has the money and organisation to fight the long war through the spring. The national polls also suggest that, as unpalatable as it may be for many Republicans, the unloved RINO (Republican In Name Only) from central casting with the perfect hair and wooden personality is still the best hope they have of defeating Obama come November.
     If after a long bruising primary battle Romney does indeed win the nomination, can he in fact beat Obama? Romney is clearly competent. His track record of success in both business and politics is impressive and he was smart enough to become a self-made multi-millionaire. But he's also got liabilities.
     The healthcare reforms he introduced in Massachusetts bear a striking resemblance to Obamacare, which infuriates the Right and labels Romney a flip-flopper when he criticises the president. But, as Romney points out, the history of the individual healthcare mandate was in fact a right-wing idea hatched in the era of Bill Clinton's health care reform bill. It was only when Obama adopted it as the mechanism to increase individual health insurance coverage that the right demonised it.
     His business career includes time leading a private equity firm Bain Capital, which has led to the bizarre spectacle of fellow Republicans – the party of turbo capitalism – criticising him for being a corporate vulture. The accusation that he made his money on the back of firing American workers will surface again in Florida and will be taken to another level when Democratic attack ads start appearing in the summer.
     Finally, his Mormon faith hasn't received much attention in the primaries, but in a general election it could function like Obama's race in 2008; something never overtly mentioned, but still an angle of attack for opponents seeking to undermine the candidate.
     As I grabbed a beer from the fridge and settled down with my popcorn on Saturday night to watch the South Carolina results, I hoped a real contender to Romney would emerge. I wouldn't vote for Gingrich, but I did want a few more Tuesday nights in front of CNN watching the crazy gang slug it out with Mr Perfect Hair. The good news is that I also have another 10 months to sort out who I'm voting for come November.

 

Alan McIntyre is a Scottish-born partner in a New York-based financial services company