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Fatally Flawed White House Wannabes


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White House wannabes are fatally flawed

By Anne Applebaum

Last Updated: 12:01am BST 23/08/2007

Approximately one year from now, the American political conventions will be in full swing. The Democrats will be in Denver, Colorado, wearing silly hats and cheering for their presidential nominee. The Republicans will be in St Paul, Minnesota, chasing pigs at the Minnesota state fair and cheering for their nominee. Then, a year from next November, one of the two nominees will become the next president of the United States.

That's how the election will work, in principle. The trouble is, at the moment it's impossible to see how we get from here to there in practice. By this, I don't mean that something will prevent the primaries or the election from taking place. Other than starting a little early (I know, it's getting worse and worse) this campaign is so far progressing smoothly, from a technical point of view. The problem isn't the procedures, but the nature of the candidates, each one of whom, not necessarily for obvious reasons, seems wholly unelectable.

Certainly by any normal political calculation the Democrats should win the election without any difficulty. But by any normal calculation, neither of the two leading Democrats, Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, can possibly be the victor. This is not because, as the cliché would have it, one is a woman and one is black, but rather because this particular woman and black man have particular problems.

The woman in question is no beloved national figure, no multi-term Congresswoman of solid, centrist views. We are talking about Hillary Clinton, whom some 40 per cent of Americans view with almost hysterical distaste. Because she's the wife of a former president, the very idea of her campaign smacks of nepotism and oligarchy. Because we already know too much about her private life, the thought of her (and her First Husband) in the White House fills us with something like embarrassment.

Because she's Hillary - staged, calculating, chilly Hillary - we don't even really know what she stands for, or what kind of president she would be. Yet she is well ahead of the pack.

Her closest competitor, Barack Obama, isn't an ordinary black politician, a Colin Powell - a treasured national hero with a biography that would be familiar to any American (immigrant parents, pulled up by his bootstraps, long career in the army) - or a civil rights movement veteran like Jesse Jackson. Though clearly brilliant - he writes fluid, best-selling books and was top of his class at Harvard law school - Obama is the son of a Kenyan father he hardly knew and a white mother from Kansas. He spent part of his childhood in Indonesia - and his middle name is "Hussein".

It's an impossible biography, one would imagine, for middle America to accept. Yet in the first six months of this year Obama raised more money than any other candidate. Go figure.

But then, none of the Republicans is any more plausible. Each has at least one fatal flaw that should, on the face of it, disqualify him. By any normal reckoning, the candidate should be Senator John McCain. Fantastically well-versed in foreign affairs, adored by the Washington press corps, with a war-hero biography and a long political career, McCain is nevertheless faltering, badly. He's thought too old - he's 70 - as well as too unwell, with a history of war injuries and skin cancer.

Far more importantly, his party's deep-pocketed funders aren't giving him any money. It seems that his long reputation as a moderate, even a maverick, willing to disagree with the party elders (and the religious Right) in public has come back to haunt him. His campaign is broke.

Though McCain should be the leader, the actual leader is Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, best known as the man who helped the city recover from the trauma of 9/11. He, too, has much going for him - charisma, energy, fame - but many things which, in any normal electoral cycle, would seem to disqualify him, both as the Republican nominee and as a national candidate. He supports abortion rights, is on his third wife, and has children who don't speak to him (so much for Republican-style "family values"). He's famously autocratic, and tends to speak before he thinks. Worst of all, he's from New York, the most unrepresentative city in the nation and one that is heartily loathed by most Americans. How can he win?

But if he can't win and if McCain can't win, neither can Fred Thompson, a former Senator and Hollywood actor without many known opinions. Thompson has the advantage of looking like a president, having played the president so many times in the movies. Yet as a Senator he has a thin record. In fact, as a politician he has a thin record. "Lazy," they whisper about him in Washington - not a great harbinger of success.

That leaves Mitt Romney, a stiff former governor of Massachusetts who has a kind of cookie-cutter averageness that voters tend to like. Romney, however, is a Mormon, a religion that many Americans, particularly evangelical Christians, consider to be strange. The Republican Party being what it is, he can't deny his religion - one is required, it seems, to believe in something - but neither can he be too openly fervent about it.

There are others, of course. The Democrats could also choose Bill Richardson, governor of New Mexico, who is certainly admired in his own state. John Edwards, the one-term Senator and former vice-presidential candidate, is still hanging around. But neither has yet broken through at a national level. Nor, so far, have Senators Joe Biden (Democrat of Delaware) and Sam Brownback (Republican of Kansas), or Governor Mike Huckabee (Republican of Arkansas).

With more than a dozen potential candidates, with the current mayor of New York, Mike Bloomberg, threatening to throw his hat into the ring, with no incumbent and no obvious front-runner, anything can happen. At the very least, don't believe anyone who cites conventional wisdom to predict the winner. After all, this might just be the year that conventional wisdom is overturned - even the year that Americans vote for someone female or black.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jh...8/23/do2302.xml

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