I'm not going to lie. 2008 was a very good politically predictive year for me. I bet that Mike Huckabee, the more religiously conservative, yet less well known, former Governor of Arkansas would win the Republican Iowa caucus.
And when every pundit in the land declared that it would be a "New York" election race between Rudy Giuliani and Hillary Clinton (see
here,
here and
here), I successfully predicted in early March that the final Presidential contest would be a race between moderates with John McCain and a young pragmatic upstart Barack Obama. And although many had doubts about whether a black man with Hussein as his middle name could win the presidency, I bet that Obama would eventually be the final winner of the whole shebang. Because let's face it, after eight long years of the Bush administration, you could poop in a bag, write the letter D on it and you'd have a better than 50% shot at winning the Presidency in 2008.
So at the end of 2008, shortly after Obama's election, I proclaimed to my Republican colleagues at the RLO in the Massachusetts State House, that 2012 would continue to be a centrist election and not a base election and that the Republican nominee would be the promising moderate Governor from Minnesota, and almost Republican Vice Presidential nominee, Tim Pawlenty; because a former governor of a desired purple state could be much more easily sold to the more socially conservative base than former Massachusetts Governor, Willard "Mitt" Romney, who behind the scenes in the Republican party, most people dislike for his inability to take stand on
anything that matters to them (this political shrewdness is one of the qualities I admire most in Mr. Romney - but I digress).
Anywho, lo and behold I look at today's news after the (inconsequential) Ames Iowa Straw Poll, that
Tim Pawlenty is dropping out of the GOP race. So not counting Donald Trump, who wasn't really running anyway, my final Republican nominee was the first to drop out! Sarah Scalese, I probably owe you $5 bucks! (When I brought up T-Paw as my 2012 nominee, Sarah said something to the effect of, "snooze-fest"), and it appears that her reading of the Republican electorate was right.
However, this momentum shift probably bodes well for President Obama. Most political parties have two basic choices when battling an incumbent President: crazy heart (see Howard Dean), or safe bet (see John Kerry). And the early indicators show that the Republican Party is leaning crazy heart with Michele Bachmann's win and T-Paw's exit. For the sake of the country, I hope the GOP nominates either Mitt Romney or Jon Huntsman, men who I disagree with but who I know at least have good noggins on top of their shoulders. But the early rumblings of Bachmann and Texas Governor Rick Perry show a party reaching for its heart and not its mind.
