Our past three articles proposed something new, innovative and smart to the Republicans. But the verdict is in: They did not get the message, in fact, they completely ignored it. The 2011 CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) gathering in Washington D.C. from February 10 through 12 saw multiple potential Presidential candidates for 2012, there were reportedly 11 to 12 thousand Republicans in attendance, most of them conservatives, old and young and what did they do? They let all those speakers fill their ears with slogans, Obama-bashing sound bites and suggestions for a better future for America, and in the end, what did they do? They conducted a straw poll among those present and they gave the highest number of votes to the one person who could not be elected President in a thousand years: Some grumpy old Libertarian, Representative Ron Paul from Texas!
Yes, he received thirty percent of the votes cast ahead of Mitt Romney who received 23 percent, all the other potential candidates received less than seven percent each, some as little as one percent. O.K., Ron Paul for President according to CPAC! If this is not the dumbest thing ever to come from such a gathering, we here at Common Sense University do not know what would be dumber. This man is living most of the time in another part of the universe, his ideas are so far out of whack and removed from reality, it is truly pathetic to think that there was even one person in that bunch who could seriously support Ron Paul’s ideas in today’s world.
And now, while no candidate has officially thrown his or her hat into the ring, the guessing game continues and we hear about some of the “Potentials” traveling to Iowa and New Hampshire to establish some support among the locals and build a campaign team for the early 2012 contests. We assume as soon as one of them formally announces his/her candidacy in the coming weeks or months the other dozen or more individuals will follow suit. This will then be followed with major fundraising efforts by all and the first, second and third multi-candidate forums in late spring and early summer. As before, these televised events will do nothing for the average voter since every candidate will be given thirty to sixty seconds to answer complex questions raised by a moderator. It will clarify absolutely nothing, they will be criticizing each other, they will all be dumping on President Obama, they will all speak in generalities as to how to deal with America’s current problems and how to make things better in the future. Everyone of them will talk about not indebting our children and grandchildren, blah, blah, blah, blah. It will be like watching a movie for the umpteenth time, a movie nobody even really wants to see.
We are deeply disappointed in our realization that we expected to see changes from Republicans but will get nothing more than reruns from the past. The outcome of the 2012 Presidential Election will at best be a game of chance and if we had to bet on the outcome, the smart money would be on a re-election of Barack Obama. He has set a fundraising goal of over one billion dollars to remain President and the Republicans will probably spend a third of that money in their primary fights among themselves and then will have not enough time to raise funds to launch an effective campaign against Obama.
All we know for sure is that we here at Common Sense University will not under any circumstances contribute as much as a penny to the Republican primary fights, we simply do not like to waste money. It seems that the powers to be in the Republican Party have not learned anything from the last election in November 2010 and the establishment of the Tea Party. This could easily lead to the re-election of President Obama for a second term.