The Real Kingmakers of Election 2012

In the next 10 months we'll be hearing about all kinds of groups and individuals who will be credited for determining which team wins or loses November's election. And there will be some plausible suspects thrown out there about who the real heavy is. Among them will be Angela Merkel and the European Union, Wall Street crony capitalists, Middle Eastern saber rattlers, and SuperPACs bankrolling individual candidates' campaigns with eight-figure cash infusions to render the opposition paralyzed. Any one of these could prove to be the puppetmaster responsible for determining who controls the White House and the Congress in 2013. But my money is on a different player altogether, a group that has been responsible for nearly a decade's worth of misery for Joe Sixpack already and is only getting started.....and that group is oil speculators.

For all the talk of how the economy is gonna determine the election, that's only half true. No matter what's going on with the economy, if Americans are paying an average price of $5 for a gallon of gas, or anywhere over $4.50 for that matter, the incumbent party will take it in the shorts this November because there is no more tangible metric of misery index for the average voter than spending another $40 a week on gas. And now that Obama has passed on the Keystone XL pipeline, he has given Republicans a perfect excuse to blame him for even a penny's worth of gas price increase between now and November, no matter how demagogic that connect-the-dots may be in the real world.

Making matters worse, oil prices have never been this high in January before, meaning that if one domino falls to drive down oil supply (or lead speculators to believe oil supply could hypothetically decline), the typical annual increase in oil prices as summer driving season approaches will be all the more painful. The deeply unsettled situation in the Middle East, including but not limited to Iran, makes it unlikely we'll be able to keep a lid on oil market uncertainty. It's possible the oil markets can be contained to a politically manageable level for Obama, but my money is on gas prices soaring above $4.50 nationally by summer.

About the only thing that could save surging oil prices is another bad scenario....a collapse of Europe's economy and a recession in China driving down demand. The double-edged sword of that is obviously a new set of serious problems emerge for America if the global economy loses its footing.

As cartoonishly bad at politics as both leading contenders for the Republican nomination may be, there are still plenty of icebergs for Obama's reelection campaign to steer around, and few things could hamstring his efforts for a second term more than $5 a gallon gas.

Which One of These Asshats is Gonna Be the Nominee?

Every four years, we hear moans and groans from the media and disengaged voters how terrible the lineup of candidates running for President are. This year it's really true. The eight top candidates from the beginning of last month have declined to seven now that the CEO of a second-rate regional pizza chain had to bow out of the race early after multiple charges of sexual harassment that were starting to appear as though they had merit torpedoed his frontrunner status. Seriously! Graveyards full of founding fathers are spinning like tops in their graves.

Meanwhile, the two most interesting and well-credentialed candidates have been almost completely shut out of the debates and get zero press coverage. Former New Mexico Governor and mainstream libertarian Gary Johnson has just dropped out of the race and may run on the Libertarian ticket. Even more impressive is former Louisiana Governor, Congressman, and small-time banker Buddy Roemer who has brought more to the table in terms of policy points in a few interviews on MSNBC than the other seven lightweights have in more than a dozen televised debates pandering to the basest right-wing urges of Republican primary and caucus voters. The average IQ on the GOP stage would triple if either Johnson or Roemer were allowed to debate.

Instead, we're stuck with seven candidates who are deeply flawed superficially and an even bigger disaster substantively. This country deserves a reasonable choice between two mature emissaries of a responsible political persuasion. None of the major candidates of the more-radicalized-by-the-day Republican Party qualify. Jon Huntsman only seems reasonable within the context of a slate of candidates that openly question science. His tax policy and economic platform is further to the right than any mainstream Presidential candidate in three-quarters of a century up until 2012, but still passes for the genial moderate in this crowd peddling a policy agenda that would have made the John Birch Society blush five decades ago.

Mitt Romney, considered the most cartoonishly right-wing major candidate in 2008 is running to the right of where he ran four years ago, but even positioning himself as a man who wants to "let the housing bubble bottom out" and "let Detroit go bankrupt", taking the American economy out as collateral damage and its devastated people as cannon fodder, still gets to be the guy deemed too "centrist" to be accepted by the tip of the right-wing that has hijacked America's opposition party.

Ron Paul has all kinds of nutty ideas, but it's not his nutty ideas that are keeping enough Republican voters from embracing him to win the nomination. It's the fact that he doesn't want to start even more wars in the Middle East and has called for taking American troops out of South Korea and Germany.

The rest of the malcontents running are not even worthy of mention based on the seriousness of their candidacies, but that doesn't mean they don't still have at least a modest chance of getting the nomination. Rick Santorum may well win the Iowa caucus on Tuesday with his last-minute surge, despite the centerpiece of his campaign being an issue as unserious as "protecting the sanctity of marriage" from those rascally gays. But his campaign makes 2008 Iowa caucus winner Mike Huckabee seem well organized by comparison. Hard to see how he doesn't wither away after Iowa, win or lose.

And while Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry have been stumbling in the polls, both have the financial resources to press on even after defeats in Iowa and New Hampshire, and given that 75% of Republican voters refuse to accept Mitt Romney, it's too early to count them out. The field will eventually shrink and a prime Romney rival will arise, and whoever that is will have a giant glob of votes available to them simply for being the not-Willard.

Things are playing out now similarly to 2008, however, when John McCain prevailed in a perfect storm of opposition incompetence to overcome the fact that most of his party's base hated him and won the nomination. If Romney wins or comes in a strong second on Tuesday, he's gonna be tough to beat for the same reason McCain was tough to beat after New Hampshire in 2008. Then again, amongst an Republican
electorate that threw away winning Senate candidates in favor of Christine O'Donnell, Sharron Angle, Linda McMahon, and Ken Buck, I'm not sure there's any point in the primary cycle where Romney could rest easy until he has passed the necessary delegate count to secure the nomination.

So it's gonna be Romney...unless it isn't...pretty much exactly where this race has been throughout 2011 except for those few weeks where Gingrich and Perry had their respective surges that were briefly taken seriously. The good news for Obama is that Romney is a terrible politician and under any traditional scenario would lose decisively. The bad news for Obama is that there's at least a 50-50 situation that 11 months from now will be anything but a "traditional scenario", and there's almost no chance of Obama facing an ideal political situation.

Even though I still think Obama is more likely than not to be re-elected, primarily because of his good fortune to run against politically tone-deaf idiots who respond to the sorrowful cries of the disappearing middle-class by proudly vowing to take a lead pipe to their knees, 2012 is an incredibly scary year to go into with the possibility existing of having nothing but human wrecking balls unleashed onto our country unbridled next November, destroying everything in sight and puffing their chests out with pride while doing so.