A contributing editor for Newsweek magazine since 1994, Clift has covered every presidential campaign since 1976. She is also a regular panelist as the lone liberal on “The McLaughlin Group” TV talk show, where she joked her most frequent sentence is “Excuse me, let me finish.”
Clift said the dynamics of the 2012 election will be shaped in large part by the same Tea Party energy that drove the election in November when the Republicans took control of the House of Representatives. But the Tea Party is also driving a wedge in the Republican party in “a historic confrontation over the role of the government.”
Obama’s election, she said, “seemed to signal the end of 30 years of conservative dominance begun by Ronald Reagan, but the Tea Party put a quick end to that. The 2012 election is now a contest over which will prevail.”
She said the “biggest thing” Obama has going for him is that the Republican’s can’t seem to find “a viable candidate.”
“Donald Trump is not going to be elected president,” she said with certainty, drawing applause from the audience. “I feel confident about that. But he’s like a weed (and is) certainly crowding out the legitimate candidates that need to be flowering right now.”
Mitt Romney, she said, is being defined more for his flaws than his accomplishments, and Tim Pawlenty “has no pizazz... in a celebrity culture where people want pizazz,” though she believes that the two of them would be a powerful ticket. Sarah Palin has peaked and passed the torch to Michelle Bachman, Clift said, “but both should come with warning labels.
“Obama is vulnerable, but you can’t beat somebody with nobody and the prospective candidates are the least of Obama’s woes,” she said. “But they make good foils for Obama because they make him seem like the only grown-up in the room.”
Contact this reporter at (513) 820-2188 or rjones@coxohio.com.
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