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Which Democrat should challenge Obama for the 2012 nomination?

Liberals are unhappy with President Obama, and for good reason. He ran to the left but runs the presidency from the center right.

His abysmal performance in the debt ceiling debate in which he gave Republicans everything they wanted except a balanced budget amendment has liberals fuming.

But what are they going to do about it? Nothing, probably.

Obama is a prodigious fund raiser. He raised $86 million in the second quarter of this year alone for his reelection campaign, though he gave $38 million of that to the Democratic National Committee. Even with the money he kept for his own campaign it is more money than all of the money raised by Republican candidates combined in the quarter. His campaign boasts that it will raise about the same amount of money for the campaign as 2008 in which Obama broke all records, $750 million.

So any Democrat who wants to challenge Obama is already in the hole by tens of millions and would need to be a prodigious fund raiser themselves or of a large enough stature in the Democratic party to generate excitement and siphon some of that cash away from the Obama machine.

Uber liberals such as Raul Grijalva, leader of the Progessive Democrats caucus in the House, or Dennis “Don Quixote” Kucinich, have no such stature.

But no one of stature has the cajones to do it. Democrats are more afraid of the Tea Party than they are of Obama, so they’ll stick with the Coward In Chief rather than take a chance of bumping him off for a liberal to get crushed in the general election by the likes of Michelle Bachmann or Rick Perry.

But if Democrats want Obama to come back to the left, it will take a primary challenge to do it.

You get the government you elect. Don’t like the guy or gal in office? Elect someone else. It’s the American way. But, someone else first has to run, of course.

Which liberal Democrat do you think has the stature to challenge Obama for the 2012 Democratic nomination?
Hillary Clinton: 42%
Andrew Cuomo: 8%
Russ Feingold: 8%
Rahm Emanuel: 2%
Tim Kaine: 0%
Howard Dean: 6%
Debbie Wasserman Schultz: 5%
None of the above: 19%
Other (add your nomination in the comments section): 5%
224 users voted

 

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