The Republican Party’s delay in defining a front-runner for the 2012 presidential primaries is boosting President Obama’s electability, allowing him to focus almost solely on his job while keeping campaign distractions at bay, political strategists say. “It’s always better not to have to engage in campaigning sooner when you are the president,” says Matt Bennett, co-founder of the centrist group Third Way. “The more time [Obama] is allowed to look presidential and not be a candidate, the better for him.”
Fewer than a dozen Republicans are flirting with a run for the presidency, measuring their fundraising capacity with exploratory committees and testing their star power during visits to the early-primary states.
But only four candidates have formally announced their candidacy, and just one, Fred Karger, a virtual unknown, has officially declared his candidacy with the Federal Election Commission.
The latest CNN poll on GOP primary contenders says it all: The two people topping the poll — former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani — haven’t even said they intend to run.
By comparison, at this point in the 2008 election cycle, 10 Republicans had formally announced their candidacy.
“I think people generally are dissatisfied with the current Republican field because they worry there isn’t someone strong enough to beat President Obama,” said Darrell West, vice president of government studies for the Brookings Institution.
But a delay doesn’t necessarily equal defeat, and Republican challengers still have time to gather the steam needed to defeat Obama, he said.
“A year before the 2008 race, Obama didn’t look particularly strong,” West said. “He didn’t do well in the early debates, and his organization seemed weaker than [Democrat Hillary] Clinton’s … and now he’s president.”
Veteran Republican pollster David Winston says new media and social networking have changed the traditional calendar for candidate announcements so that “people can announce later now without any difficulty at all.” Still, Republican candidates must begin articulating policy agendas now if they want a shot at unseating Obama next year, he said.
“One of the reasons that no one has broken away from the pack is because no one has come up with a clear set of economic policies … at a time when people are unhappy with the president’s economic policies,” Winston said.
West also sees the economy as candidate Obama’s most vulnerable spot.
“Being an incumbent is a disadvantage when many Americans don’t like the direction the country is headed,” he said, citing polls that show voters feeling exactly that way. “That will hurt” Obama.
Republican candidates have until the end of the year to build their case for removing Obama, Bennett said.
In 2004, a Democratic front-runner didn’t emerge to challenge President George W. Bush until after the Iowa caucus, which ended up being too late, he said.
“If that happens to Republicans by the end of this year, I think they are in real trouble,” he said, though he cautioned that it was too early to declare the entire GOP field weak.
“That’s what they said about the Democratic field in ’92 after [Mario] Cuomo decided not to run,” Bennett said. “No one recognized the once-in-a-generation political talent that had yet to emerge in Bill Clinton.”
