Tuesday, November 1, 2011

The Race for the 2012 Republican Candidate Runs Right Through Crazyville

This post is in response to the controversial Herman Cain 2012 campaign advertisement, available for viewing here.

Herman Cain's campaign advertisement featuring his chief of staff smoking a cigarette has sparked a flurry of public outrage, political analysis, spoofs, jokes, and inquiries into the mental health status of Mr. Cain. Despite all the Cain controversy, however, he has twice polled in as the lead contender of the GOP political race. How did this happen?

In defense of this ad, Cain said that it showed "Mark Block being Mark Block" and that his campaign was centered around "letting people be people, and letting Herman be Herman". But many are angered over the use of cigarette smoking to convey this. Although some may point out that President Obama is on and off smoker (according to a recent doctor's visit he is now apparently off), Obama never used this practice to try to get elected by publicizing it in any way comparable to this campaign ad.

But enough about the ad, the problems and critiques of it are too obvious to analyze. The real story here is: How can "Herman being Herman" be so popular? The scary thing about Herman Cain, from saying that he will admit to not knowing the name of the leader of "Uz-beke-beke-beke-bekistan", to his joke/idea of an electrified border fence, is that he isn't even close to being the only questionable contender. Michele Bachmann, for example, wants a "double border fence" (because two is always better than one!), and Rick Perry gets applause in debates for the amount of people he has executed in his state.

The United States is arguably the world's leading superpower, but our current state of political affairs threatens to undermine this status. The race for the 2012 Republican candidate only demonstrates a portion of how crazy things have gotten in politics. From fighting never-ending wars, to heavily subsidizing dirty industries, and never being able to agree on sound fiscal policy, Mr. Obama was right in the phrasing of his job's speech to call it "the political circus".

As political divisions in this country grow wider, elected officials move farther away from representing the interests of the American voters who put them in office. With a disaster of an economy, the American people are hurting. The let down of the past four years has shown the American people that change (or the lack of it) has less to do with who is President, and more to do with political divisions. The two party system may ultimately be our downfall as the world's leading superpower if differences cannot be met in the middle.

- Ysabel Yates

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