No Room For Complacency
In the race for the presidency, Barack Obama is still the frontrunner despite an underperforming economy. He enjoys a medium sized lead in the polls and the kick-off of his campaign, at the one year anniversary of the killing of Bin Laden, was impressive. Eager to exploit that success and counter the much voiced criticism that Democrats are soft on national security, the Obama campaign stressed that the president made a daring decision and ignored the doubt of many of his advisors. Supposedly, his bravery led to the killing of the most wanted terrorist, something which the Republican Bush failed to achieve during his eight years in office.
His next move was to morally endorse same sex marriage. With the help of his vice-president Joe Biden, Obama conveyed a powerful message on an issue which he had skilfully avoided in the past few years. The move enabled the presidential team to deflect attention from the economic, forcing the non-official Republican nominee Mitt Romney to react. Moreover, the president delivered the message one day before a fund-raising event in Hollywood for liberal minded actors who feel strongly about the issue. Their financial support will enable the president to add around fifteen million dollars to his campaign budget.
Unfortunately, problems are also lurking. Last Tuesday, the six terms senator Richard Lugar of Indiana lost the Republican state primary to Tea-party candidate Richard Mourdock. Lugar is a senior senator who is highly respected for his work in the Senate’s foreign relations committee and his bipartisan approach. This was precisely the reason the Tea-party wanted to remove Lugar from office, because they considered him to be a forgery, a fake Republican who did not defend real Republican ideals.
After the moderate success of the mid-term elections of November 2010 the Tea-party has changed its tactics. In those elections members of the party within the (Republican) Party secured many seats in the House of Representatives, which enabled them to dominate the lower chamber. However, apart from Alaska, they were unable to win Senate seats, which left the Republican faction in the Senate beyond Tea-party influence. Eager to gain more power, the Tea-party is now trying to remove moderate Republican senators like Lugar in favour of more right-wing ones.
This seems a powerful tactic, because the Tea-party is backed by powerful allies, namely by a new sort of Political Action Committees (PACs) which came into law in 2010. These committees are better known as Super PACs, because contributions to them are not limited. Any individual or company may donate as much money as he or she is willing to. The pacs are officially not linked to any party or candidate, but are free to influence the political debate as they see fit as long as they do not use the name of the candidate they support. They are entitled, however, to smear opponents with harmful messages and create a negative image of them.
Under the present circumstances, it is mainly the Tea-Party that has enjoyed the fruits of these political organizations. Driven by strong ideological convictions and an utter distrust and revulsion of Obama many orthodox conservatives have organized themselves into Super PACs in their pursuit of political power. They back Tea-Party candidates who try to gain seats in the Senate or House with significant amounts of money behind them. In Indiana, for example, the Super PACs collected in total more than three times the amount of money Mourdock himself brought in.
Super PACs are not allowed to openly support or campaign for one candidate. Instead, they focus on discrediting the opponent, which means that they play a rather dubious role in the political process. For this reason, many Democratic financiers do not want to be engaged with them. They prefer to donate directly to Democratic candidates, although these donations are restricted in size by standard campaign rules. Hence, they run the risk of being outspent by zealous conservative Super PACs supportive of the Tea-Party. It puts Obama in a difficult position. If the Republicans, inspired by a dominating Tea-Party faction, would gain the majority in the Senate too, this would doom his second term as president. Every space for political compromise will be squeezed out and the president will look like a lame duck.
Obama’s first goal is, of course, to get re-elected, but at the same time he has to fight off a takeover of a determined Tea-Party in the Senate. Indeed, the playing ground for the presidential campaign will not only be the presidency, but the Senate as well.
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