Not a Moment Too Thune

Yesterday, Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota, announced his decision not to run for president in 2012. I breathed a sigh of relief when I heard that. A lot of politics rides on image, and — regardless of what Thune’s actual conservative campaign ideas might have been — he posed, I think, the biggest threat to an Obama re-election bid in terms of the visual factor. At 50 and with a full head of hair and square jaw, Thune looks like the idea of a youthful presidential candidate from central casting. Moreover, he gained his Senate seat in 2004 by ousting the Democratic Majority Leader at the time, Tom Daschle. Had Thune run against Obama, I think that a number of voters tuning into the 2012 debates on TV would have been displeased by the sight of a black man arguing against a handsome young(ish) white man — especially a white man defending “traditional American values” — and that disagreeable image alone would have turned those voters against voting for the black man.

Of course, I’m probably the worst political prognosticator in the U.S. I predicted that Obama would never win the presidential nomination because a majority of Americans wouldn’t vote for a black man as president. I’m glad to have been proven wrong on that one. But the presidency of George W. Bush has given me a dimmer view of the electorate than I had previously.

However, I have gotten a few things right in my time. During the 2008 Republican primaries, I predicted that former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee would be a force to be reckoned with because of his church cred with evangelical conservatives. When Huckabee won the Iowa caucus that year, and continued to be a contender until Sen. John McCain (R-Az.) locked up the nomination, I felt somewhat vindicated about my ability to gaze into the political crystal ball. But by and large, my powers of prediction are less reliable than your local Dial-a-Psychic’s.

Of course, the biggest determining factor in the 2012 presidential race will be how well the economy is doing. As far as the Republican nominee goes, a Tea Party favorite, like Sarah Palin or Michele Bachman, might win some early primary contests, but if that happens — if the past is anything to go by — the economic conservatives in the Republican Party (as opposed to the strict social conservatives) will intervene to make sure a candidate with a realistic prospect of making it all the way to the White House gets the nod, which seems to have been the case when McCain overtook Huckabee in 2008.

Who will eventually get that nod? I’m the last person anyone should ask. Among the professional prognosticators, the early money is on former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, but there are concerns among the Republican faithful that his Massachusetts state health care (the prototype for Obama’s conservative-hated national health-care reform) and his Mormon religion may hinder his abilities. (I believe that if Romney had belonged to a different Protestant denomination, he would have gotten the GOP nomination in 2008.)

And whoever the nominee might be, he or she will have one big advantage over Obama: as a result of the Supreme Court’s Citizen’s United opinion (which freed up unlimited campaign donations by corporations, most of which are conservative-leaning), among other factors, the playing ground for fund raising has tilted considerably in favor of the Republicans. In addition to this, the Republicans have been very good at slickly marketing their candidates because — let’s face it — if you can sell George W. Bush as presidential material, you can sell anything.