Romney seeks game-changing
ticket By Dinesh Sharma
The Republicans will nominate Mitt Romney,
a patrician, to run against Barack Obama, a
plebeian, the first multicultural president. But
who will be Romney's running mate? After the
failed, game-changing nomination of Sarah Palin
for vice president in the 2008 election,
Republicans are risk-averse and treading very
carefully.
David Hollinger, the Berkeley
sociologist, has argued that America entered a
phase of post-ethnic politics with the election of
Obama, where traditional color-lines have blurred.
While that may be true for political candidates,
the gathering of ethnic voting blocks in a highly
fluid yet segmented political environment seems
critical to winning elections at the local and
national level.
Will it be a post-ethnic
or post-racial ticket with a Cuban-American or an
Asian-American - Marco Rubio, Bobby Jindal,or
Nikki Haley - as running
mates? Or, will it be a traditional ticket like
the one we have seen for more than 200 years?
The much talked about running mate for
Mitt Romney is Marco Rubio, a young Cuban-American
who was recently elected to the US Senate from
Florida. A Republican straw poll recently showed
him as the top contender. His stock is driven by
appeal to the Tea Party and the growing Hispanic
population.
However, speculation about
Rubio is based on polls, and rumors and innuendo
which he has denied, saying he is not interested
in the position. In an interview with the National
Journal, however, he may have revealed his wish:
"If in four to five years, if I do a good job as
vice president - I'm sorry, as senator - I'll have
the chance to do all sorts of things," he said.
This was clearly a Freudian slip-of-the-tongue,
not unlike the Foreign Policy speech he delivered
at the Brookings Institution recently where the
pages with his concluding remarks somehow went
missing.
The speculation about a possible
Romney-Rubio ticket will not end till the official
announcement clears the air, even though it is
uncertain that a Hispanic running mate can close
the deficit currently suffered by Romney. Bush
received 44% of the Hispanic vote in 2004; Romney
is garnering only 26%, according to Gallup.
Bobby (aka Piyush) Jindal, governor of
Louisiana, who happens to be Indian-American but
openly denies his ethnic identity, had encounters
with Obama over the management of the BP oil
spill. His stock seems to be rising on Romney's
vice-president list. He has proposed an overhaul
of the state's education program which has
received much attention, including a few lawsuits
from the education unions urging to throw out
certain key features of the reform. He won his
second-term with a landslide, getting 67% of the
votes, which was perhaps on of the most
underreported stories of the year.
He
recently declared that the Obama administration is
"the nexus of liberalism and incompetence and
together that's a deadly combination ... . [Obama]
ran a clever campaign in 2008 ... but the reality
is he has governed as the most liberal president
since Jimmy Carter."
He further added,
"The private sector is so foreign to [Obama], he
might need a passport to go visit the private
sector…. he might need a translator" to fully
understand the private sector. He said that under
Obama, America is "lurching" towards eurozone
socialism. Does this sound like a poll-tested
political script to arouse the base of his party
and to claw his way onto Romney's ticket? It
definitely sounds like it.
Nikki Randhava
Haley, the governor of South Carolina, who also
happens to be Indian-American, recently authored a
political biography, Can't is Not an
Option. In the book, she tells of growing up
in a conservative state, where she is repeatedly
asked, "Are you white or are you black?"
When asked about her race in 2001 in a
voter registration card, she claimed she was
white. State Democrats accused her of faking her
race in a state that has only 1% Asian population.
The child of Sikh immigrants from the
Punjab, Haley is one of four siblings whose family
settled in the small town of Bamberg, SC, in the
late 1960s. Her father, who still wears a turban,
left behind "a culture and a political system that
judges people by the family or the caste or
religion they come from," she has written.
While Haley was one of the early Romney
supporters during the primaries, she does not
appear to be on the shortlist. The Republicans
don't seem to have an appetite for another female
Governor of a large state to be nominated on the
national ticket after the Palin debacle.
Palin, who supported Haley when she ran
for governor, does not seem to have much currency
these days. She was a "game changer" that became a
liability, while Haley has literally become a
"pinata" that some union members love to bash. In
South Carolina, the political joke is that Haley's
approval rating (37%) is falling like the comet
with the same name.
When asked about her
interest in the vice-president position, Haley
replied "I think there are amazing candidates for
VP and believe whoever governor Romney chooses
will be part of a dream team…. My preference would
be Bobby Jindal or Condi Rice."
Obama
picked the Senior Senator Joseph Biden in 2008 as
his running mate partly due to his foreign policy
experience. Romney, who has many neo-conservative
advisers, is sounding very hawkish in his
pronouncements about Russia and Iran, according to
former Secretary Colin Powell. Romney might lean
towards former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice
for her international profile, which will
potentially bring the Republican ticket much
closer to the controversial Bush legacy, while
gathering some African-American and women voters.
Jeb Bush, who is also a potential
candidate for the slot and possibly the presidency
in the future, kicked up a storm recently by
suggesting that neither the mythic Ronald Reagan
nor Papa George Bush would feel at home in the
Republican Party today as the party has moved to
the extreme right.
Other VP contenders
include New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and
some very competent but "incredibly boring white
guys" (IBWG), according to a report by Politico:
Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan, Kentucky
Senator Rand Paul, Virginia Governor Bob
McDonnell, Ohio Senator Rob Portman,and former
Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty.
Both
Portman and Rubio have been making hawkish
statements on foreign policy, trying to align
themselves with Romney's views. Portman recently
undertook a trip to Israel to burnish his resume:
"This past year has been very turbulent for the
Middle East, and my conversation with Prime
Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu strengthened my
belief that we need to remain vigilant in our
support of our critical ally," Portman said. Rubio
in his speech at Brookings argued for an
interventionist foreign policy, but failed to
mention the word "Iraq".
The potential
candidates face an "intimate examination", which
Joe Lieberman of Connecticut and former VP
candidate with Al Gore, has described as a
colonoscopy without the anesthesia. Everything is
open for discussion, including a "deep dive" into
disclosures about "sex, drugs and rock-n-roll".
Dinesh Sharma is the author of
Barack Obama in Hawaii and Indonesia: The
Making of a Global President, which was rated
as the Top 10 Black history books for 2012. His
next edited book Psychoanalysis, Culture and
Religion is due to be published with Oxford
Press.
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