Common wisdom says that a sitting president can only blame his predecessor for the state of the union for a brief period of time. After a year or two at the helm, a president has to take ownership of the condition of the country. This is partly because people are forgetful, but also because we expect our leaders to be accountable and get results. So, it’s interesting that people are still more inclined to blame Bush than Obama for the economy. And it’s really surprising that people are more inclined to blame Bush today than they were a year ago. I don’t know what explains this phenomenon, but it’s definitely helping Obama maintain some pretty decent approval numbers despite a deeply grumpy and pessimistic electorate.
I think the main thing is that people really don’t like Republicans. Obama is still crushing all comers in pretty much every poll that I’ve seen. I think McCain’s former adviser John Weaver is on to something:
For Weaver and the rest of the team, [Jon] Huntsman’s intelligence and foreign-policy experience, combined with his strong record of fiscal conservatism and social semimoderation (he supports civil unions for gay couples and believes climate change is an urgent issue), made him the ideal candidate to shake up a Republican field that Weaver calls “the weakest since 1940.”
“There’s a simple reason our party is nowhere near being a national governing party,” Weaver told Esquire. “No one wants to be around a bunch of cranks.”
Weaver sees Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts and the presumed front-runner, as a man afraid to take a stand — or, more accurately, as a man unafraid of taking every stand. “What version are we on now?” Weaver said. “Mitt 5.0? 6.0?”
And in former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty, another leading candidate, Weaver sees what he considers the worst tendencies of his party — pandering to the GOP’s hard-right margins at the risk of falling out of serious presidential contention.
“Tim’s a nice guy,” Weaver said, “and there’s nothing worse than seeing a nice guy pretend that he’s angry. Is that really what we want to be? Is that how we’re going to define ourselves? When’s the last time an angry man ever solved a problem without using a gun?”
Both Huntsman and Weaver think they have the best chance to take on the president next year. “The frustrating thing is that Obama’s beatable,” Weaver told Esquire. “But to beat Obama you have to be bigger than Obama. That’s how we save our party.”
It doesn’t look like Hunstman has a chance, but if he is going to run and not pander to the cranks, at least we’ll have one adult in the room during these debates.
Do you think this is the worst Republican field since 1940?
