Elegibilidad

Steve Kornacki, editor de Salon.com, advierte a los demócratas del peligro de confiarse pensando que los rivales del Presidente no dan la talla:

How many times in the last few months have you heard something like this: "Obama would be in serious trouble in 2012, if only the Republicans had a serious candidate"?

This kind of thinking is fairly typical at this stage of an election cycle. Even when an incumbent's approval numbers are dangerously low (as Obama's now are) and when there are strong signs that the campaign will be waged under adverse economic conditions (as there now are), there's a natural tendency to overstate the weaknesses and liabilities of that incumbent's potential opponents.

So even though this has been a particularly rough week for President Obama, Mother Jones' Kevin Drum still felt confident enough to assert on Thursday that "I don't think [Rick] Perry can win the Republican nomination, and I know that he can't beat Obama in a general election." And Tom Jensen, who runs the pro-Democratic (but highly accurate) polling firm PPP reviewed data his firm recently collected from likely 2012 swing states and concluded that "if the Republicans nominate Mitt Romney it's a toss up. And if they nominate anyone else it's 2008 all over again."

This is very dangerous thinking that ignores one basic truth about presidential politics: Candidates start to look very different -- to the media and to voters -- if they are able to win a major party's nomination.

(...) Bill Clinton was considered utterly unelectable in early 1992, even after he fought off Paul Tsongas and Jerry Brown to lock up the Democratic nomination. Polls showed more than 60 percent of Democratic voters wished they had another candidate and believed Clinton would lose to George H.W. Bush (even though Bush’s own approval ratings were low, thanks to the economy). The pessimism of Democrats was palpable: Here we have this great chance to beat Bush, but we’ve wrecked it by nominating a draft-dodging adulterer who will be torn to shreds by the GOP attack machine.

But as the nominee, Clinton had an opportunity to change voters’ minds. And with the economy floundering and Bush’s numbers in decline, he also had a chance to convince the media to rethink its caricature of him. When the Democratic convention wrapped up in July, he was more than 20 points ahead of Bush, and he never trailed in a poll the rest of the way.

(...) The story was similar for Ronald Reagan in 1980. At the outset of that race, he was the Republican Democrats most wanted to face. Supposedly, Reagan’s extreme Goldwater conservatism would be too much even for voters who badly wanted to throw Jimmy Carter out of the White House. Whoops. (...)