Looking back, it was plain to see, although few did at the time. At the beginning of election season (that would be 2009, although it started in earnest in 2011) there were Republican candidates practically falling out of cupboards all over America. Tim Pawlenty, Rick Santorum, Mitt Romney, Michelle Bachman, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, Jon Huntsman, Ron Paul; a bunch who at one time or another "expressed interest": John Bolton, Sarah Palin, Scott Brown, Rudy Guiliani, Lindsay Graham, Rick Perry; and some who declined even before being asked: Mike Huckabee, Mitch Daniels, Chris Christie, Jeb Bush, Haley Barbour, Bobby Jindal, Marco Rubio, Donald Trump, General Patraeus, and others.
There was rumored to be a Republican fellow in Oklahoma who was not running, but I never was able to track him down. Anyway, several of the more likely names declined early (Daniels, Huckabee), and some of the better known flamed out spectacularly (Gringrich, Trump), and the field winnowed, as it always does.
Along came Michelle Bachmann, who many underestimated as "that crazy lady from Minnesota or someplace", but she was telegenic and quickly became a darling of the Tea Party set and the media, who always loves a pretty face. As we learned in 2008, when the "it" girl arrives, all the cameras point in one direction. In fact, she became so popular so quickly that it became hard for any of the other lesser known Republicans to get any airtime outside of the institutional and always boring debates, and those Republicans who might have had a case to make to the America people simply didn't get the media oxygen that's so necessary, not only for name recognition but also for fund raising in the early days.
The early primaries came and went, and while there were a few fizzily bottle rockets, it became clear that the real firecrackers were going to be Romney and Bachmann, who spent the last couple months of the primary campaign politely slamming each other in this winner-take-all contest.
Romney already had the name recognition, so he was relatively unaffected, but Pawlenty, Huntsman, Brown, Graham, even Perry simply couldn't get traction or airtime in the face of the Bachmann juggernaut. Mitt and Michelle might have made a decent ticket, but this was the era of "take no prisoners" and two more different Republicans couldn't be found. It was clear they could never work together or campaign together, and when the nomination came, everyone knew that if it was Mitt, the Tea Partiers would go crazy, and if it was Michelle, the industrial barons of America would shake their heads and pretend to be out of the office when the fund raisers came to call. Mitt's flip flopping on so many issues disenchanted the hard social Right, while Michelle's continuing gaffes and mistakes made the business wing of the party wary of giving her the ultimate power.
And then the race came down to a replay of 1996, the incumbent, not beloved but, after four years, at least respected by the middle, against one of the two extremes of the Republican party, the other being unenthused and at least partially AWOL at election time.
Obama coasted to a modest victory, to the surprise of a lot of people who couldn't imagine voters going for him twice, but there you have it. Michelle Bachman: she turned out to be chief architect of the Obama re-election in 2012.
That's the way it happened, you can look it up.
http://uspolitics.einnews.com/news/barack-obama
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