Charles Krauthammer wows a packed house at the Hilton: James Varney
By James Varney, NOLA.com|
The Times-Picayune
GOn October 26, 2012 at 8:05 PM In a riveting speech Friday at the Hilton New Orleans Riverside, national pundit Charles Krauthammer said the Nov. 6 election is the third and final act in a grand political play for the United States.
Krauthammer addressed the New Orleans Investment Conference, which continues Saturday and concludes with a keynote address by former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. While he expressed guarded optimism on Republican challenger Mitt Romney's chances for victory, Krauthammer noted that position seemed impossible when he spoke in New Orleans in 2011.
Then, the prospect of Republican defeat was difficult to envision.
"When I was here a year ago, this election was over," he said, citing GOP enthusiasm from its 2010 midterm successes and an economy in shambles.
Krauthammer outlined why he believes the presidential race between President Obama and Romney is tight, but before doing so he traced what he considered the theatrical arc of Obama's first term.
The first act commenced with Obama's 2008 election. Krauthammer gave Obama credit for his "ambition and intellectual honesty," because Obama laid out a left-wing vision for the United States and then moved aggressively to enact it with or without true popular support.
Act II was the sweeping Republican triumph in 2010, in which the GOP flipped the House of Representatives - along with myriad state legislatures - in its favor.
The victories were a transparent reaction to Obama's health care reform, which Krauthammer described as a Trojan horse for a single payer system modeled on Canada's or Great Britain's, and the stimulus package. Those supposedly signature accomplishments are rarely if ever trumpeted in Obama's re-election rhetoric, Krauthammer noted wryly.
"2010 was less an election than a restraining order," he quipped, in a joke he acknowledged wasn't his.
Act III, of course, is the upcoming election. Krauthammer attributed much of its close nature to innate threads in Romney's personality. While Romney would make an excellent president, he is not the most adept politician. Consequently, Romney eschewed an ideological campaign and instead pursued one of "stewardship."
Romney's reluctance to embrace the ideological struggle surfaces in his verbal hiccups - for example, his primary debate claim he ran a, "severely conservative," ship as Massachusetts governor.
"'Severe' is a word usually associated with head wounds and tropical storms," Krauthammer said. "It shows that conservatism is a second language for Romney; he speaks it well but not fluently."
Still, in light of Obama's proven inability to get the U.S. back on track, Romney's strategy makes sense. It failed to gain traction initially, however, because a Romney wounded by a protracted and messy GOP primary season proved easy prey for the Obama's campaign's gigantic negative advertising investment, according to Krauthammer.
The Romney caricature vanished in the first presidential debate. That proved a watershed moment when, before the campaign's largest audience, Romney passed the 'presidential' threshold for an electorate willing, even eager, to sack an incumbent but uncertain about the challenger, Krauthammer argued.
Romney's achievement in that debate was even more remarkable given it had no defining, "moment." Typically, Krauthammer said, debates are won through memorable stumbles or zingers, but those were absent this time. Instead, Romney emerged victorious through a calm and methodical demolition of Obama's woeful record.
It is a hoary claim to state an election is the most important in the country's history, and while Krauthammer made it nonetheless he quickly amended his remark and labeled November's, "the most important election since 1980." America faces a stark choice between pursuing its cherished historical path, or veering off toward the social democracy favored by our European betters.
"If Barack Obama loses, his four years will be a parenthesis in the American experiment," Krauthammer predicted
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