Let the merriment begin!
The Republican presidential campaign, which began just moments after it was clear in 2008 that Barack Obama had won the presidency, now shifts to the decision part of the ground game.
This will last until November, and there may not be a quiet moment between the Iowa caucuses on Tuesday and Election Day. This is a fine moment to ponder what is about to play out.
Discombobulated as the contest has seemed, with its unusual collection of candidates and conditions and endless “debates,” remember that it has had only one goal since its inception: Get rid of President Obama.
Phase One clicked in after the Republican victories in 2010. Phase Two played out over the past year, with the sometimes hilarious antics of a big collection of presidential wannabes who were either misunderstood, or understood only too clearly, as they danced through minefields of sexual harassment, dicey history, flip-flopping and dubious rhetoric.
The voting part, Phase Three, starts Tuesday, when a lot of people who don’t look like the rest of America will join in one of American democracy’s strangest events, the Iowa caucuses, in which bunches of folks raise their hands, hence tagging a favorite. It has been said a billion times this event does not pick winners. It identifies losers.
Iowa will be as dated as Christmas before you know it.
The eventual winner of the nomination will be talking all about Obama, because his name is an explosive motivator for the people who hate him, for whatever reason.
The GOP will have enough money to fill up Hoover Dam, although it might not look like it. All of those special-interest folks who have been unleashed by a Supreme Court ruling that allowed everyone to stick their trotters in the trough will be gobbling up dollars with truly porcine passion.
Much of it will be aimed at convincing independent voters that President Obama is a lying, cheating scoundrel sent from the stinking Chicago political machine to poison the pristine waters of a Washington that was virginal before Obama and the Visigoths swept into Rome on the Potomac and sacked it!
Granted, a tad hyperbolic, but you know what I mean.
You might be thinking, “Well, yes, aren’t all presidential elections about getting rid of the incumbent on one side of the battle?” Sure. But my sense this time is they are looking for kitchen sinks to toss.
“The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”
That was Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell back in October 2010. It probably had something to do with the clever cramming of the health care reform bill right down the Republicans’ throats and the subsequent very clear conclusion in the GOP parts of Congress that Obama wasn’t getting any of anything he wanted.
Ever!
The arrival of the sturdy tea party irregulars in the 2010 congressional election and their likely role in the primary contests about to start playing out only makes the objective that much more obvious.
Face it, despite denials, presentation of documents, protestations and extreme eye rolling from Democrats, there are still oodles who believe Obama is a closet Kenyan with marching orders from Moscow (But not This Moscow, that old Cold War Moscow.)
Whatever. He has to go.
So, on to Iowa.
At this point, it is apparent that no one is going to let reality get in the way. From the top on down, the Republicans have been shifting and abandoning and rephrasing and redefining and simply fibbing, to put it politely, as much as necessary to try to appeal to the most conservative slice of the Republican primary electorate.
God is everyone’s co-pilot in the Republican Party in Iowa, where candidates slip into pre-faded jeans in an attempt to look very rural Christian. Soon, they will be plodding through bacon and eggs and snow in New Hampshire, then bathing in barbecue and sweet southern courtesy in South Carolina and then hugging sun-blocked greasy senior citizens at gated compounds in Florida.
At every point, President Obama is likely to be cast as the anti-Christ, or worse, a liberal socialist tax-and-spender with big government in his heart, all points that draw healthy reactions from the most conservative of voters.
There will be many attempts to set the record straight, which media always try to do after they realize they should not have put their imprimatur on something so patently wrong in the first place, a process that happens with some frequency in an era in which no one actually checks much of anything out before broadcasting, tweeting, facebooking or whatever.
It just goes out there and thrives, like mold in the shower.
Outrageous ads will appear in abundance, creating healthy revenue streams for the very news outlets that will then feel obligated to test what has already been dispensed against reality. Dishonesty is the nature of the presidential campaign beast.
Fortunately, we live in an unsophisticated nation where subtlety, complexity, accuracy and nuance are slipped immediately into the dead letters bin.
Otherwise, one risks becoming cynical.
Charles M. Madigan heads the journalism department at Roosevelt University.
