Looking like Mitt vs. Obamavilles

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Updated: December 16, 2011 8:09AM

The seemingly endless flow of Republican presidential debates is proving to be an informative exercise in politics. That’s quite the opposite of the Occupy Wall Street “movement” that increasingly represents chaos and hostility to American enterprise. For his part, President Barack Obama keeps finding fault with the nation, the latest being his assertion that the country has gotten “lazy” in attracting new business to our shores.

The GOP forums — debate hardly seems like the right term for a format that limits responses to 60- and 30-second soundbites — have been attracting significant television audiences.

That’s in line with polling from Gallup showing that more Americans are following political news than is typical for a non-election year. Gallup’s analysis attributes the elevated level of interest to the public’s “extreme dissatisfaction with the country’s direction, a high level of worry about the economy, and historic dissatisfaction with how the nation is being governed.” That can’t be positive for Obama’s prospects in 2012.

What Democrats are counting on is a weak Republican field. Yet, the lesson of the long primary campaign between the president and Hillary Clinton in 2008 was that the frequent debates made Obama a stronger candidate.

What have the GOP debates revealed thus far?

Gov. Rick Perry of Texas can’t do debate, and it’s disqualified him as a viable candidate because voters don’t know anything else about him. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich soars at the forums with eloquence, intellect and sharp elbow blows to media. But it has not qualified him to be the GOP nominee because the voters know a lot about him, and too much of it is not favorable. Still, with sexual harassment charges dragging down Herman Cain, Gingrich looks poised to be the next anti-Romney contender. The only question is how long the Gingrich boomlet will last.

Republican money has made its choice and that is flowing to Mitt Romney because he has consistently shone in the televised candidate encounters. He looks presidential and, barring an unexpected breakthrough by long-shot Jon Huntsman in New Hampshire, he is the Republican with the best chance to beat Obama.

More conservative voters in the Iowa Caucuses or South Carolina primary might boost a red-meat candidate, but that would only make themselves irrelevant to the goal of replacing Obama.

After the sour economy, Obama’s newest problem is the Occupy Wall Street crowd turning ugly. Say what you will about the Tea Party, it never turned up dead bodies, sexual assault, drugs, disruption of local businesses, smelly and unsanitary encampments, fires in the streets and clashes with police. Even liberal cities like Oakland, Calif., and Portland, Ore., have had enough and closed what are now being called Obamavilles.

That association and the poor economy may be making Obama irritable. His “lazy” comment at a Honolulu economic summit was his latest blame-America remark. In September, he said the country had gotten “soft” in competing in international markets. Last month he complained Americans have lost “our ambition, our imagination and our willingness” to do big things like building a Hoover Dam.

That’s how far he’s fallen from the soaring rhetoric of “yes we can.” Instead of looking for an inspirational leader in 2012, the nation might turn to a former CEO with a record of getting things done and putting people to work.