The leak of plans by Rep. Michele Bachmann’s, R-Minn., to form an exploratory committee to investigate running for president in 2012 brings to seven the number of significant candidates in the race: Bachmann, Newt Gingrich, Jon Huntsman, Haley Barbour, Tim Pawlenty, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum. There is no indication from either former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee or former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin that they will seek the nomination, and Donald Trump’s bid to resurrect the political legacy of Aaron Burr remains the stuff of bar talk but not serious planning.
Pawlenty’s announcement last week of the formation of an exploratory committee signals the great mainstream media snake to begin uncoiling in preparation for feeding on horse race stories for the next year.
The candidates have it in their power to hold off the onset of the campaign by skipping the NBC-Politico debate and others like it that a ratings- and readers-driven Manhattan-Beltway media elite are pushing for May and endlessly beyond.
The country would be better for it. Focus needs to remain on the fiscal crisis edging into the view of everyone but the president and Senate Democrats. The candidates can do nothing to affect the struggle between House Speaker John Boehner and President Obama and his Democratic congressional allies.
But they can help the House GOP by staying out of the picture until the president has cemented his deserved reputation for punting on every serious issue facing the country except for Libya, where he has instead chosen to fumble.
If the race does begin in earnest, conservative activists and Tea Party volunteers are going to turn their steady, indeed unrelenting gaze on the platforms of the would-be nominees, and with demands for a level of detail never before seen in a presidential race except in the days when senior citizens calling themselves “notch babies” demanded specificity on an arcane aspect of the Social Security rules.
This is the lesson being learned the hard way by the new GOP majority in the House, which has discovered that all their talking points about the “biggest spending cut in the history of the Congress” avails them not at all with the information-saturated grass roots that know that $10 billion is chump change against a towering deficit of more than $1,500 billion.
Senators proposing “process fixes” as a cost of going along with a debt ceiling hike are also discovering to their dismay that Tea Partiers don’t want process promises, they want cuts. Big ones. Right now.
The new sophistication of conservative voters on matters fiscal is deeply unsettling to Beltway political elites of both parties because it brings with it a revolution in information-driven expectations.
What might have satisfied a town hall meeting activist a decade ago isn’t going to work as the Twitter-enabled instantly check facts and relay critiques. What used to pass for candor now sounds canned, and what sounded bold even five years ago leaves audiences shaking their heads in wonder at how behind the issue-curve most electeds appear.
This dynamic will profoundly affect the GOP nominating process, as voters look for candidates with comprehensive answers to the incredible array of problems facing the country.
These candidates are going to be pressed — not by the usual suspects of the liberal MSM debates, who will be asking the usual suspect questions designed to satisfy Manhattan-dipped lefty news execs — but by voters, who will be asking for detail.
What would you cut? What entitlement changes will you demand? Will you keep Pentagon spending where it is or embrace cuts there as well (a tricky one, that, dividing the national security conservatives who shudder at the prospect of Tea Partiers who are looking for reductions everywhere.)
The nominee will be the man or woman who convincingly displays a comprehensive grasp of the complexities confronting the country and who persuasively proposes specific remedies. We have had quite enough of Oval Office vacuity and teleprompter dependence.
The display of intelligence and command of fact combined with political courage and refreshing candor will greatly assist any candidate, and the MSM is greatly overestimating how much the electorate cares about the MSM agenda.
“Tall weeds” is where these voters live, even if the sophisticated don’t believe it.
Examiner Columnist Hugh Hewitt is a law professor at Chapman University Law School and a nationally syndicated radio talk show host who blogs daily at HughHewitt.com.
