What’s The Message From Iowa Republicans?

After a year-long primary election contest and a record number of nationally televised debates, Republican voters don’t have a consensus candidate for president. Despite the fact they’ve had an opportunity to try a cross-section of conservative messages on for size, Republicans aren’t sure what it takes to defeat President Obama and lead this country in a new direction.

Former Governor Mitt Romney will not find being the party’s candidate for president an easy task unless the power of establishment money and endorsements (John McCain being the latest), can swing convention delegates next August. If Romney is the candidate, he appears to lack the emotional capacity to make the case against an incumbent president. All that money can buy negative messaging, but it can’t change the messenger.

Former Senator Rick Santorum has the authenticity people look for in leadership, but he has always demonstrated a rigidness in his beliefs about the role of government that will not serve him well in a general election campaign. Santorum’s late-night speech in Iowa was as impressive as anything coming out of the year-long campaign.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is now angry with the national Republican establishment which he and his “contract with America” colleagues created in the years since 1995. It’s the single issue, special interest, money-as-influence establishment – not his own history of transformational histrionics – that he believes knocked him off his primary perch.

Former Congressman Ron Paul and his stand on national security policy will become less convincing as the party primaries march through the bellicose South and at some point Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) tells dad “enough already.”

Governor Rick Perry heads back to his day job in Texas before heading to South Carolina and Florida and Congresswoman Michele Bachmann heads back to hers in Minnesota’s 6th District. Former Governor Jon Huntsman gets the message in Romney’s New England, and Herman Cain, well, rebuilds bridges.

President Barack Obama benefits from the GOP leadership ambivalence as he ramps up the decisions that only a president, faced with a do-nothing-he-asks Congress, must make. While the need for a decisive president becomes more obvious each day that the news from around the world tests the frail nature of autocratic leadership and the promises of democratic institutions.

Republicans have designed the 2012 campaign around the need for authentic leadership for a better America. The primary rhetoric focuses too much on their own candidates to the point they seem to be talking to themselves rather than the country. And failing to define just what a vote for the Republican presidential candidate can mean for the average American.