There are mere days to go before Barack Obama and Mitt Romney go head to head in the first of the US presidential election debates. One would think that the respective campaigns are gearing up to duke it out, stepping out toe to toe as rhetorical pugilists in an effort to secure the kingmakers of the American political system, those undeclared voters in the middle of the American political spectrum. Only 4 years ago, I would stay up to the wee hours to watch presidential debates, swept up by the Obama machine, it was genuinely exciting and interesting. This race though would appear to be as good as over before it really got going.



Obama has recently been dubbed as ‘The luckiest dude in the world’ by the Daily Show’s Jon Stewart and for good reason. Mitt Romney’s campaign has lurched for one disaster to another culminating in a piece of footage being released which would put the best work of Armanndo Iannucci and Chris Morris to shame. In this video the former Governor for Massachusetts successfully alienated even more of the American electorate and joked about how being Latino would have helped his race to the White House. The content of this video has been picked apart in sufficient detail since it surfaced and it is not the purpose of this blog to rehash this material. Let us instead look at how Romney’s campaign had begun to unravel before the video was leaked and the wider reasons underpinning this.



As stated above Romney was the Governor of Massachusetts and in his 4 years in the Governors mansion he presided over a series of policies and political stances which are very much at odds with the policies he is putting forward as the Republican candidate. Perhaps the biggest of these is the universal healthcare bill he introduced and brought to realisation. Since he has entered the presidential race one of the key tenets of his campaign, indeed one of the only concrete things he has said he will do if elected, is to dismantle ‘Obamacare’. Other stances on which Romney has done a 180 are his calls for more gun control, and his policies on abortion.

It would appear that this is a man who will say just about whatever it takes to win and to swing from a socially liberal fiscal conservative to a 100% dyed in the wool conservative Republican. Romney’s campaign is falling apart and Obama is going to be re-elected whilst having the worst unemployment rate of any incumbent president. When you look back at some of the other contenders for the GOP nomination, nutters like Santorum, Perry, Bachman and Cain, you realise that Mitt Romney really was the lesser of several evils. The majority of those nominees came from the loony libertarian right embodied by the Tea Party. It is the Tea Party and Fox News that have morphed Mitt Romney into the flip flopping caricature we see before us today.

The advent 24 hour news coverage means there is an awful lot of time that needs to be filled, 24 hours to be exact. The style, or perhaps brand is a more appropriate word, of news sold by Fox seems to rely on a heady mix of hysterical presenters shouting about red button doomsday topics. The majority of these topics seem to be very close to the heart of the Tea Party movement. The Tea Party itself is a movement, shrouded in thinly veiled racism of the ludicrous ‘birthers’, which is a hotchpotch of conservatism, libertarianism and ‘whoever-can-shout-the-loudestism’. The Fox News Network gave a huge amount of coverage and tacit support to this movement. They made the issues of the Tea Party the issues of Fox viewers. This can be the only reason why the GOP had such a collection of bonkers candidates in the running for their nomination. The candidates were either forced to appeal to the support of the Fox shouty head pundits or run the risk of their campaign dying from a lack of publicity. Romney stood out as the most reasonable candidate up for nomination, which is some feat for a Mormon venture capitalist.

Mitt Romney was right when he stated that there is a chunk of the population that will vote for Obama no matter what; just as there is a chunk of the American public that will vote Republican now matter what. The battle for presidential elections in America has always been a straight out battle for those in the middle who will base their decision on the policies and record of the candidates. Obama has had an incredibly tough 4 years and as stated above the unemployment figures will be the highest of any incumbent President. Romney hasn’t even laid out his policies, instead is relying on the American public to elect him and once he is in the White House he’ll tell them what he’ll do. It would seem that his economic policies are similar to birthday wishes in that if he told us what they were they wouldn’t come true.

The attack dog for the Republican Party, Fox News, is making it impossible for the Republicans to win an election. The agenda set by Fox has forced Romney to flip flop on many issues and ultimately throw away a very winnable election.