CPAC: Searching for Obama’s successor

It’s now official: Republicans have an acute “leadership vacuum,” said Dana Milbank in The Washington Post. A parade of presidential wannabes spoke at last week’s Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, dispensing red meat in bulk to cheering audiences, but after the straw polls and lots of internal bickering, “a solid challenger to President Obama” failed to emerge. “The party is fracturing,” with social conservatives, neocons, libertarians, and Tea Party deficit hawks all pulling the GOP in different directions. What the Republicans need is a guy as good-looking as Sen. John Thune, with the business experience of Mitt Romney, “the folksiness” of evangelical Christian Mike Huckabee, the Tea Party appeal of Sarah Palin and Rep. Michele Bachmann, and the budget-cutting record of Indiana’s wonky governor, Mitch Daniels. “But no such animal exists.”

Clearly, “the Republican primary is as wide open as any in recent memory,” said Jennifer Rubin in WashingtonPost.com. Romney is the nominal GOP front-runner, but he’s fatally wounded, because as Massachusetts’s governor he signed reform legislation similar to Obama’s health-care plan. Palin is “most likely” not running. But the GOP has some exciting, if lesser-known, alternatives. If New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a tough, budget-cutting conservative, wanted to run, “he quickly would become the front-runner.” Just “the mention of his name” brought cheers at CPAC. Daniels, the Indiana governor, would also make a formidable dark horse, said Rich Lowry in National Review Online. He gave an “amazingly frank” speech calling for “extensive changes” in Social Security and Medicare to rein in the national debt. But he continues to call for “a truce” on social issues such as abortion and gay marriage, and that refusal to placate social conservatives probably rules him out.

One winner did emerge from the conference—Barack Obama, said Steve Kornacki in Salon​.com. CPAC served mainly to underscore “the degree to which every likely GOP presidential candidate has serious deficiencies.” The GOP’s main problem is that its base is so “virulently anti-Washington and anti-Obama,” said Matt Bai in The New York Times. Presidential elections are won by gaining the trust of centrists and independents, who want effective pragmatists in power, not partisans. To win in 2012, Republicans can’t settle for the candidate who denounces Obama in the strongest possible terms; they will have to find a candidate who can sell independent voters on a credible vision “of where we go next.”

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