Sol Sanders Archive

The 2012 campaign preview: From style-over-substance
to sheer glamour

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President Barack Obama laughs as Chicago Mayor-elect Rahm Emanuel speaks to him on stage at a Democratic Party fundraiser in Chicago on April 14.     Reuters/Jason Reed

That, in turn, will make it difficult for his opponents to respond with a candidate and a campaign based on issues.

Mr. Obama’s opening speech, supposedly presenting a new economic program, was the tip-off. Cliché-ridden, it was rhetorically a u-turn on his own free-spending budget proposals announced just weeks earlier. Without so much as an apology, he “welcomed” the trimmed 2011 budget — halfway through a fiscal year during which Democrats had held all the three Washington power centers and as though his Democrats had not opposed every cut only days before.

The verbal turnabout permitted Mr. Obama to jump aboard what his counselors obviously see as the Republican Party/Tea Party/conservatives’ bandwagon appeal for renewed fiscal discipline. As an old friend often warned me, never underestimate the role of fads in American life: “deficit reduction” is now “in”, whether understood or not by recently acquired advocates.

Mr. Obama’s teleprompter readings were as golden as ever — a “gift” he once said — even if one tires of a speechwriter obsessed with “xxx let me make clear xxx”, always prelude to another muddled concept. But there were no specific proposals for reining in government spending. In fact, expanding the liberals’ hallowed welfare state would solve problems of debt and unemployment, he reassured us, not surgical systemic reform as his own investigating panel suggested.

But the program to spend the country’s way into new prosperity had crashed, however slow he and his advisers were to acknowledge until the voters told them so first in November 2010, and now with sagging opinion polls. Scarce jobs and rising food and fuel prices are the reality masked by his cooked statistics.

As always it is likely to be the unintended consequences, partially resulting from his own habitual indecision, and unanticipated events dictating the November 2012 outcome.

But some critical facts on the ground are going to be all too obvious.

Mr. Obama’s intent to give the Libyan situation a hit and a miss and bow out to our allies is doomed, as any military observer worth his salt could have predicted. His stand-in, “NATO”, relies overwhelmingly on U.S. initiative as well as hardware and alone cannot dislodge or even modify Gadhafi’s regime.

Despite Sec. of Defense Robert Gates’ repeated pronouncements, American fighterplanes — the only ones capable of doing the job — continue as close air combat support for Libya’s incompetent and suspect rebels. And they will eventually need ground assistance if Mr. Obama’s announced aim of ridding the world of Gadhafi is to be achieved.

As Mr. Obama uses presidential fiat to cancel another pipeline from Canada, the energy fiasco escalates — in all fairness only partly due to his misbegotten policies. But if gas is at $5 a gallon or more by Labor Day 2012, as seems likely, voters will look to their credit cards again before entering the polling booth.

There is no dearth of Republican candidates. But with the emphasis on bling-bling rather than legislative and executive experience, the spotlight is all too likely to fall on those matching the incumbent’s “glamour”. That apparently explains the boomlet for Donald Trump, surely the unlikeliest candidate for the presidency in decades.

That’s a sad thought as we enter the electoral season. One can only hope the good sense of the American people which has held us in good stead for so long will reassert itself and demand more substance and less glitz.