May 16, 2011

It's often said that in politics, timing is everything.

If so, the Republican Party hoping to oust President Obama from the Oval Office next year has gotten off to a very weak start.

Five GOP presidential aspirants showed up in Greenville, S.C., for the first candidate debate of the 2012 season -- eight months early. And what they mostly demonstrated beyond the paucity of the field, was their bad luck to be following perhaps the best moment of the Obama presidency so far.

Of the five debaters, only one -- former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty -- is generally rated to have a chance to win the nomination. The other four -- perennial losing candidate Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, badly beaten for reelection in 2006, obscure former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson and Godfather Pizza magnate Herman Cain -- all are odds-on favorites to be also-rans.

Absent were the two most prominent would-be contenders widely being taken seriously -- former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, both of whom have created exploratory committees prior to declaring candidacy -- as well as former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, still considering the race.

Nowhere in sight was New York real-estate tycoon and self-styled television celebrity Donald Trump, the flavor of the month in the polling racket, who somehow missed the opportunity to flaunt his chutzpah. Is it possible the debate was just another thing going on in the world that he didn't know about?

In any event, the 90-minute debate was pretty much a snoozer in which the low-voltage participants were obliged to tip their hats to Obama for the dramatic finding and killing of Osama bin Laden after the nearly 10-year search for him. In the glow of that achievement, the state of the economy, the president's most vulnerable issue, was essentially shunted into the background.

Santorum, among the party's most conservative voices on social issues, grudgingly gave Obama his due on the demise of the al-Qaida leader by arguing he was merely continuing the foreign-policy and anti-terrorist policies of his Republican predecessor. Most other Republican politicians now give a wide berth to any references to Bush and his foreign-affairs adventurism.

Pawlenty came off as gracious and straightforward, but what got much of the coverage was his reiterated apology for backing the cap-and-trade policy on gas pollution, anathema in his party.

"I've said I was wrong. It was a mistake, and I'm sorry," Pawlenty said in the debate, cosponsored by the South Carolina Republican Committee. "You're going to have a few clunkers in your record, and we all do, and that's one of mine. I just admit it. I don't try to duck it, bob it, weave it, try to explain it away. I'm just telling you, I made a mistake."

Pawlenty's candor was in contrast with Romney's efforts to put distance between himself and Obama on health-care reform, whose provisions have been widely seen as modeled on the plan Romney enacted in Massachusetts. Since then, Romney has argued that what was good for his state would not be good as national policy, leaving him open to allegations of flip-flopping.

The debate among the no-names of presidential hopefuls was a rather sad kickoff of the party's 2012 campaign season. Fortunately for all concerned, it is likely to be forgotten by the time the actual voting starts, except perhaps in South Carolina.

As in the last two presidential cycles, the state will hold one of the early Republican primaries and potentially a critical one. In 2000, George W. Bush rebounded from a defeat in the New Hampshire primary at the hands of John McCain and beat him in South Carolina in a bitter and at times ugly campaign.

The day after the Greenville debate, the latest employment and jobless figures were released, showing a job increase of 244,000 for April but a sight rise in the jobless rate, back up to 9 percent. That latter number demonstrated that unemployment continues to plague Obama, challenging his claim that economic recovery is underway. Combined with soaring gas prices, these subjects would have been better topics for the debating Republicans than having to acknowledge Obama's huge coup in the war against terrorism.

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