While President Obama has expected, and for the most part dealt evenly, with a stream of criticism from Republican presidential primary contenders, he also faces a less publicized but equally steady hammering from his Green Party challenger Dr. Jill Stein, most recently for a White House overruling of the Food and Drug Administration’s decision to expand access to the Morning After Pill.
“The Obama administration is clearly more concerned about political battle over access to contraceptives during an election year than the health of millions of women in the U.S.,” said Stein, a graduate and former faculty member at Harvard Medical School.
Recent polling indicates that more than 40 percent of American voters would like to have the opportunity to vote for a third party candidate, and while the Greens have been struggling for the past generation to fill that role, now rumblings from supporters of GOP contender Ron Paul articulate hopes that their champion will lead them in establishing a new ballot line. They call for a party fiscally conservative, but socially liberal, a party with a platform of gay rights and gun rights and an end to the war on drugs. A current poll shows Obama running even with Mitt Romney head to head, but winning comfortably in a three-way race with Paul.
Gingrich brings doom to Republican rhetoric
Perhaps the most significant contribution to Obama’s reelection bid has been the continuing clown show the Republican primary debates have become. The major competition among the candidates seems to be finding out who can sound the silliest. There have been doozies, but the current frontrunner is unquestionably Rick Perry. “Was it was before he was before the social programs,” Perry sputtered, throwing a barb at Romney, “from the standpoint of he was for standing up for Roe v. Wade before he was against Roe v. Wade?”
And just as the promise of hope put Obama over the top in 2008, Newt Gingrich enters the fray with a focus on doom, warning of potential for an electromagnetic pulse, an electric shock wave from a nuclear detonation knocking out circuits, computers, cellphones and cars. According to Gingrich, “Millions would die in the first week alone. We have zero national strategy to respond to it today. It’s like going aboard the Titanic knowing it’s going to sink and not putting on the lifeboats. That is why I favor taking out the Iranian and North Korean missiles on their sites.”
Sanity in the midst of silliness
It all kind of makes you miss Sarah Palin, who could have combined for a talking dream team with Herman Cain running as co-presidents, but at least some sanity has been injected to the primary process by Jon Huntsman, recipient of a Joe Klein 2011 Teddy Award, for countering Republican rhetorical silliness on evolution and global warming, and offering a plan to break up the big banks “and move our economy, in the long term, back toward productive investment and away from speculation.”
