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The Wild Card in the 2012 election is NOT JUST the non-economic recovery. It is the spreading fear that the USA is in decline.

If the economy continues with this non-job-creating stagnation and its associated hopelessness and pessimism, all bets are off for both the GOP nomination and for the eventual outcome of the November general election.

A sourness is gripping America. A pessimism about our future. And, thus, cynicism about all traditional political candidates.

This began around 2007 as the housing market/mortgage mess began. Katrina, Iraq and other scandals only fueled the feeling that both political parties have failed us.

Thus came the most-out-of-the-mainstream candidate: Barack Hussein Obama, a half-white, half-black newcomer who opposed the Iraq war and was not seen as part of the problem in DC.

Two years later the country has re-assessed that decision; some regret it. Others are looking for another total outsider. A real outsider – not one masquerading as one who the minute he takes office hops in bed with Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid and lets business as usual continue.

The Tea Party Movement is indeed the energy behind a lot of this change.

And as of now no one has yet emerged as the likely Tea Party candidate.

That candidate is the likely GOP nominee.

The New Hampshire debate showed us a few things:

• The 7 GOP candidates – all good people – missed the boat on the Big Picture. None of them even attempted to inspire Americans to believe that we can reverse our present sense of decline. Ronald Reagan was the last politician to do this successfully. It is a special skill – and clearly none of our present political class has it.

• Tim Pawlenty proved himself to be a minor leaguer by his refusal to take on RomneyCare.

• Pawlenty also lost the Battle of the Minnesotans versus Michelle Bachman. She took a giant step forward toward trumping him in Iowa. And that may be fatal to Pawlenty.

• Herman Cain had – at best – a mediocre night. He didn’t build on his break-out South Carolina debate.

• Newt made some good points. But he is a sideshow nowadays.

• Let’s face it: of these 7 candidates, only one – Romney – can win the nomination. And he is – despite last night – a weak front-runner at best.

• Thus the certainty that others are still coming into this race.
• Jon Huntsman – Obama’s Ambassador to China - cannot win the GOP nomination. Period.

• Texas Governor Rick Perry? He probably will enter the race, seeing a vacuum.

• There will still be plenty of room in the fall for a new candidate to enter, get hot, and sweep to victory. This is what indeed will happen.

That candidate will have to be able to inspire Americans like no one we have seen in over thirty years for the challenge ahead is to reverse a Massive National Mental Depression.

Am debuting a brand-new, innovative political show - CAMPAIGN CONFIDENTIAL - Monday from 11 AM - 11:30 AM East Coast Time. Click here and watch - and please give me your feedback:

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Here is what is going to happen later this year – and into 2012:

A candidate we are not yet talking about – and who is not in the race or even on anyone’s radar screen – will enter the GOP presidential race in the late fall – maybe even as late as November or December. Yes, this man may miss the filing deadline for the Iowa caucuses – but that will not in any way be fatal to his campaign.

This candidate’s entire approach is going to be anti-establishment. That means anti-DC Establishment, anti-so-called mainstream media establishment, and even anti-GOP establishment.

This candidate will get hot – H.O.T. – quickly and he will zoom up the polls against a lackluster GOP field.

But the late fall – November/December – we all will be entirely sick of Romney, Pawlenty, Santorum, Gingrich and all the rest. So when this new guy comes along, there will be a thirst for him.

All of the establishments mentioned above will vehemently oppose this new candidate as will –obviously – all the other candidates and their campaigns.

But this new candidate will zoom up the polls even faster than other recent last-to-first risers like Trump, Cain and Bachmann. The point is: in a vacuum fueled by economic despair and heated anti-Obama sentiment, a new candidate who has some pizzazz and a dynamite new message can indeed harness the internet, cable TV and talk radio universe to go from an unknown one day to a household name the next.

“How will he raise the money he’ll need?” you may ask.

He will use the ‘Net go to the grass roots and ask for a mere one hundred dollars from each donor. And if there are 10 million anti-Obama donors out there, then that is a whopping one billion dollars raised – just like that!


This new candidate will get hot at just the right time – just as the primaries are beginning. He will not fade; instead, he will catch the wave and ride it all the way to the GOP nomination.



And maybe all the way to the White House, too.

Look for unexpected news in the fall which will lead the way on the emergence of this candidate. There will be a large news event first – in which he will be the central player – that will rock the political world to its core.

Out of the ashes of that will come our new candidate.

And maybe our next President of the United States.

Today’s Right - Republican voters, Tea Party voters and conservative voters – together these voting groups constitute probably more than 40% of the nation today – are teeming with so much emotion that they want to explode in November 2012.

Anger, fear, resentment, disgust and disillusionment – over the economy, the direction of the nation, the occupant of the White House, the media’s kid-gloves treatment of him, and the entire political culture of the country – are churning inside the Right.

Understand this: today’s Right is not the same Right of the last twenty years.

This Right is the most emotional it has been since the 1980 election.

Only this time, the Right is in part in revolt against its own leadership.

That is exactlywhy in the past year or so boomlets for Palin, Bachman, Trump and Cain all caught fire, despite these candidates’ baggage. Each of these candidates has political and personal shortcomings that subsequently caused them to fade. (Cain hasn’t faded yet, but he will.) But the fact remains: for a moment each connected to this bubbling cauldron of the Right. And during that period of “connection,” they soared in the polls – or in the case of Cain, he zoomed one night on Frank Luntz’ Fox News focus group.

Now we are told by the so-called Main Stream Media – who do not understand the Right at all and, in fact, hate the Right – that the GOP primary field as we see it today is “it”; no one else will enter the race; and these so-called experts say that the eventual nominee will come from the three-man group of Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty or Jon Huntsman.

I do not believe this.

How can Romney lead a party and a movement that was galvanized in opposition to ObamaCare – something he pioneered with his disastrous RomneyCare?

How can Jon Huntzman lead a party and a movement that disdains Barack Obama when he not only worked for the President but also repeatedly praised his “leadership” in letters?

And how can Tim Pawlenty “connect” with this teeming cauldron when he cannot “connect” with anyone at any event because he is – sadly – a total snore?

No, what the Right is waiting for is a candidate who matches their emotional condition today – a candidate who articulates the anger, fear and frustration that we on the Right feel – even when some of that emotion is aimed at our own GOP leaders.

That candidate cannot be dragged down by his/her baggage. Instead, his/her story has to fit together with the mood of the Right.

There remains plenty of time for this still-unknown candidate to appear and get into this race.

In fact, it is to his advantage to wait until the fall – when the Right is even more unhappy over the current field – and then jump into the race, catch fire and sweep to victory.

This can still happen. If it does, we will re-take the White House in 2012.

If not, we will – yet again – pick a dud for a candidate – can anyone spell Dole and McCain – and allow Obama another four years in the Oval Office.

A lot is at stake.

The past week has seen: Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul enter the race, Mike Huckabee withdraw, Mitt Romney dig himself deeper into his self-created healthcare hole, and the vaunted Bush Machine start to declare for Mitch Daniels.

The Indiana Governor, George W. Bush’s first OMB Director, has said – only half-jokingly - that he’d pick former Bush National Security Adviser and Secretary of State Condi Rice as his Vice Presidential running mate. And then former First Lady Laura Bush called Mrs. Daniels – more on her below – to urge her to allow her hubby to run.

So it is clear: the Bush Machine has cast its lot in this field with Mitch Daniels. Why? Is it because he’ll actually end up picking Jeb as his running mate? Or is it because he’ll lose and that will set up Jeb for 2016?

One thing to keep in mind: the Bushes care only about the Bushes. Every move is to help themselves – not to help anyone else.

So if the Bushes are going for Mitch, then there is an ulterior pro-Bush motive.

The facts surrounding Mitch Daniels’ wife, Cherie, are disconcerting and certain to be a major factor in his campaign, if he runs. In short, she left him a few years ago for a married doctor and moved to California, divorcing Mitch and leaving their daughters behind. Then, years later, she came back and they re-married.

She appears to be a political detriment. The Right will not dig her amoral behavior. The media will have a field day with not only her infidelity, but Governor Daniels’ reaction to it.

Of course none of this has anything to do with what kind of president Mitch Daniels would make. But that is – sadly – beside the point. Campaigns automatically find a weak spot and then exploit it. For example, the media and the Right are already focusing on Newt’s sordid and hypocritical marital history. And they love to point out Mitt Romney’s chronic flip-flopping on every issue – and his refusal to flip-flop on the one issue he ought to flip-flop on: his authorship of RomneyCare.

If Mitch Daniels runs, they’ll go after not only his personal marital baggage, but also on his idiotic statement that the GOP ought to downplay social issues. And, of course, if he wins the GOP nomination Team Obama will try to saddle him with his Bush connections. “You were OMB Director and took a surplus and turned it into massive deficits.”

With Huckabee out of the race, where do his values voters go? Not to Daniels. Not after he told them to cool it on abortion and gay marriage and instead focus on fiscal affairs. There is no way they will embrace him. So Iowa and South Carolina and Nevada – three of the first four states – will be Big Trouble for the Indiana Governor, should he run.

Conclusion: we do not - yet - have The Candidate. To the contrary, we do not have even one good candidate.

There is a huge vacuum – awaiting a new, exciting, charismatic candidate who can unite the Right and win over the independents.

If such a candidate does not surface, then we’re probably in for four more years of Obama.

Make no mistake about it: the Republican Party is in a total shambles right now.

Two recent examples:

1) The GOP House Leadership’s sudden decision to abandon the Paul Ryan Medicare Plan – which all but 4 GOP Congressmen voted for a few weeks ago – and which GOP Members had gone out on a limb for when they went home for their Easter Recess and heard an earful about at Town Halls - has shattered the alliance in the House between the Tea Party freshmen and the more traditional GOP members.


The MSM does not – yet – get the staggering effect this back-tracking will have inside the GOP.


To go out and vote for something so controversial - and then get nothing for it – is devastating to the Republicans. Already we see in upstate New York where a special congressional election is approaching that the once-certain GOP winner is now on the defensive precisely because of this House Medicare vote.

Lesson: Do not mess around with entitlement programs until and unless the American people have been overwhelmingly convinced that that program is in dire financial straits and thus changes are absolutely necessary.

The House GOP leadership – Boehner, Cantor and Ryan in particular – are political lightweights.

They did not realize that the precarious state of Medicare needs to be taught to the American people before any plan to fix it is proposed.

Instead, they have performed political malpractice by handing Obama and the Democrats an issue to club the GOP with next year.


2) Thursday night’s South Carolina GOP debate was yet another peek into the so-far dysfunctional, pathetic and demoralizing GOP race for the 2012 presidential nomination.


Of the five candidates there, the Big Loser has to be Tim Pawlenty. He was the only one lumped into the Top Tier (along with Romney, Huckabee and perhaps a non-candidate like Mitch Daniels) – and he got creamed by a pizza executive!!!


Yes, Herman Cain – like Donald Trump – spoke simply and like a non-politician. The Frank Luntz focus group loved Cain! And they did not even like the others much. Why? Because they are bland, boring politicians. And the GOP and the Right are sick of bland, boring politicians. Thus the (momentary) soaring candidacies of decidedly non-boring celebrity candidates like Palin, Bachman and Trump.

Each subsequently faded. Trump is about to disappear as a candidate.

But the lesson is clear: the GOP – because of Tea Party energy and a grass-roots fury over the long-term deterioration of our economy - is ready to nominate a non-traditional candidate.

The only question is: who?