Peter Bills: Answer to Obama's election prayer

I'd have thought they'd have found brighter, more coherent and credible candidates swimming around at the bottom of a garden pond. You sense you'd better cover yourself by admitting that, somewhere sometime in some particular race, there might have been a more dopey, ropey lot than this. But "might" is the operative word.

If any one of Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty, John Huntsman jnr, Newt Gingrich, Michele Bachmann or Ron Paul makes it to the White House by winning the American election in November next year, the phrase "will the last one leaving the country please turn off the lights" may well come back into vogue.

Senator Ron Paul is the down-to-earth realist who says he'd end immediately America's involvement in all wars. As his country goes to war with the relish of a 150kg giant attacking a plate of cream cakes, his candidature seems at best misplaced. Surely he ought to be running in a pacifist country like Sweden or Switzerland.

Then there's Michele Bachmann, another darling of the Tea Party. Incidentally, is anyone a bit to the right of Adolf Hitler not in the Tea Party? And maybe waiting in the wings is Sarah Palin, the No1 Tea Party pin-up whose appeal is said to stretch all the way from Alaska to the Statue of Liberty, which she probably reckons you can see on a clear day.

Another who has suggested to friends that it might be a wizard jape if he stood for the Republican nomination is former pizza chain boss Herman Cain, who has said publicly that he would not allow a Muslim to serve in any administration because of "creeping sharia law".

Presumably, this is ideal talk if America wants to see another of its landmarks flattened to the ground with the loss of thousands of lives.

Cain sounds like the perfect man to head a commission on how to rebuild al-Qaeda now Osama Bin Laden has been taken out. He'd have millions of recruits queuing for flights to Pakistan in no time at all with that kind of stirring, fighting talk.

The frightening thing about all this is that any of these wannabe Republican nominees - whether it be Romney, the man dubbed the moderate Mormon and the early favourite, Pawlenty, who didn't even impress in a gentle knockabout when most of the group came together recently, Huntsman, President Obama's former Ambassador to China, Bachmann, the evangelical conservative or religious right candidate, Gingrich, whom many consider a clown, or anyone else - could be just a few votes
away from the presidency. After all, they wouldn't be there if they didn't have the private funds to campaign.

I know it's a bit rich for a Brit to complain about the quality of an election field when Britain's last three leaders have been Tony "Phoney" Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron. That's plumbing the depths, admittedly, but I'm not sure it's going as low as the Republicans seem to have stooped to unearth potential candidates for this election.

I'd have thought they'd have found brighter, more coherent and credible candidates swimming around at the bottom of a garden pond.

It is no wonder Obama has been going to church almost every Sunday since he gained the keys to the White House. All his prayers have been answered with this lot lined up against him. He could probably take on the whole lot and beat them, never mind just one of them.

As the New York Times said after the candidates appeared on a TV debate: "This Republican presidential debate in New Hampshire - full of historical error, economic obfuscation, avoidance of hard truths and even ... bigotry - was a feast for connoisseurs of political dysfunction.

"Desperate to avoid being outflanked on the right, the seven candidates tried so hard to outdo each other in finding fault with President Obama that they seemed to forget that they are competing for the same party nomination. By evening's end, they had melted into an indistinguishable mass of privatising, tax-cutting opponents of sharia law."

Obama, like Tony Blair before him on the other side of the Atlantic, has been a crushing disappointment as American President, the worst since Jimmy Carter, one writer claimed last week. As I said at the time of his election in 2008, Obama's nomination was America's "Phoney" Blair moment. The reality has been depressingly predictable.

But with the lot lined up against him, Obama could end up as a virtual shoe-in for a second term. And that would be a real tragedy for America.