Obama needs Tea Party support in 2012

Obama is counting on tea parties and other disaffected Republicans to help him win the 2012 election. Think I’m kidding? Think again.

It’s true that Obama’s approval rating is in the low 40s. It’s also true that in a normal election these ratings are almost a sure guarantee that voters will boot the president out of office.

2012 will not be a normal election.

In the first place, precedent has been set for presidents with a low job approval rating to get re-elected. Richard Nixon, with support hovering around 49 percent, recovered and beat Democrat George McGovern in a 1972 landslide.

George H.W. Bush’s approval rating stood at a solid 59 percent and he lost the election to Bill Clinton, who was well down in the 40 percent range. All it takes is a third-party candidate to divide the votes.

Obama has a campaign war chest of $150 million, an amount that will rise even higher next year when the Democratic political machine gets underway. He’s also a one-man fundraiser, and no GOP candidate or organization can match the Democrat’s union support, his email lists and Twitter contacts.

What’s more important, while 80 percent of voters say the country is on the wrong track, Obama remains likeable. Voters seem not to care that behind the president’s smile is guile. His is an administration full of political czars who are determined to advance his socialist agenda.

Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, says it is possible for a candidate to have a low-40s approval rating and still win if tea parties fail to support the GOP nominee.

“Nixon in 1968 and Clinton in 1992 each got 43 percent of the vote,” Sabato said. “Wilson in 1912 and Lincoln in 1860 received around 40 percent of the vote in multi-candidate fields. The structure of the ballot will matter enormously, depending on whether we have additional candidates and who they are.”

Tea parties are searching for an ideologically pure candidate, someone for whom principles matter (to quote a favorite tea party expression.) Principles do matter in religion, business and personal relationships. In politics and pro sports, winning matters. If a candidate can’t get elected, principles won’t matter either.

“The victor gets the spoils,” said Senator William Learned Marcy of New York in 1832. “They (Democrats) see nothing wrong in the rule that to the victor belong the spoils of the enemy.”

What was true in 1832 is equally true today. There are always political movements, but a political movement does not a third party make. Tea party enthusiasm has waned from its apogee a couple of years ago. Whether it gets underway again depends on the economy and Obama himself, who needs ideological purists to split the conservative vote and weaken whoever becomes the Republican nominee.

Elections are won in the center, not the fringes. Mainstream Republicans know that, but if tea parties do not support whoever wins the GOP nomination, Obama very easily could be re-elected.