Mike Huckabee and Sarah Palin have both been in the news lately. A man Huckabee pardoned while he was governor of Arkansas shot and killed four police officers in Washington State. Palin released a book to widespread attention. Both events caused the political noise machine to try and figure out What It All Means in terms of its favorite topic: presidential campaigning.
To call this a complete waste of time is to understate the case. Handicapping the 2012 Republican presidential field at this point is about as useful and possible as handicapping the 2020 presidential field or the 2016 Teen Choice Awards. The most glaring problem is the fact that we have no idea what the political landscape of late 2011/early 2012 (when the selection will happen) will look like. Will Barack Obama be considered “vulnerable” because of problems with the economy or the wars? Or will he be considered all but invincible because those things have gone relatively well? Who knows? In the former case the nomination may attract a wide and diverse field; in the latter case you might see fewer or weaker candidates because the perceived odds of success are so long. All we’re certain of is that there’s going to be a race; everything else is unknown. It’s like trying to predict the winner of the Kentucky Derby before the horses have been born.
Beneath even that fundamental problem though the wildly premature presidential masturbation has an even deeper flaw. Notice anything about who is being discussed? Over here there’s Mitt Romney (private citizen). Next to him are Huckabee (private citizen) and Palin (private citizen). All of these people are famous politicians, they all became so through failed national campaigns, but none of them is a sitting governor or senator. This is an unspoken, albeit understandable, flaw anytime someone purports to be seriously analyzing whether or not recent events have enhanced or degraded Person X’s presidential chances. People dependent on pageviews, circulation and/or Nielsen ratings for their living have an easier time selling stories about people who are already household names.
There are forty sitting Republican senators and twenty-two sitting Republican governors, but going through that largely unknown roster would be too boring even by the dull standards of cable news even though it seems likely that the next Red nominee for President will come from their ranks. You have to go back to 1980 and Ronald Reagan to find a Red nomination that went to someone other than a sitting governor, senator or vice-president. Obviously that’s at least partly due to the fact that the Reds have had a lot of incumbents in that time. But in December of 1997 (which is as far from the 2000 election as we are now from the 2012 election), Bush the Younger was still in his first term as governor of Texas and wasn’t being talked about nationally at all.
It’s certainly possible that Palin, or Huckabee, or any of the rest of the gang from the Red catastrophe of 2008 could be the 2012 nominee. That none of them has actually won an election recently may not hold them back at all. Really, anything’s possible. So for the next two years remember that anything that bills itself as analysis of this topic is a complete fraud and a waste of time. Anything else you might care to do with your time, up to and including absolutely nothing, is time better spent.
