Buddy Roemer’s Long and Winding Road to the White House

Former Louisiana Gov. Buddy Roemer has been quietly roaming the New Hampshire countryside in an RV, gauging support for a possible presidential bid.

Nobody seems to believe he has even a remote chance of winning the Republican nomination, including voters in the state that has traditionally hosted the nation’s first primary of the presidential campaign season.

In a CNN/WMUR poll released Monday, Roemer ran dead last, hopelessly tied with long-shot hopefuls Fred Karger, the first openly candidate to seek a major-party presidential nomination, and perennial candidate Andy Martin, one of the original “birthers.”

Like the little-known Karger and Martin, not a single respondent in the University of New Hampshire Research Center survey of 347 likely Republican voters selected Roemer as their candidate for the Oval Office.

And that’s a shame. Roemer is a man of ideas and certainly has the smarts and experience to run for president.

He also has a success story to share. In 2006, he founded Business First Bank, a Baton Rouge-based business community bank with approximately $650 million in assets. Roemer, who serves as the bank’s CEO and president, proudly tells almost anybody who will listen that his relatively small bank — founded only a couple of years before the financial meltdown that rocked Wall Street and sent the U.S. economy into a tailspin from which it has yet recover — took no bailout money from the federal government.

Mitt Romney isn’t the only Republican candidate with some business acumen.

With a bachelor’s degree from Harvard College and an MBA from Harvard Business School, the silver-haired Roemer, moreover, can probably out-debate anybody else currently in the Republican field on almost any given subject — not only banking, but also energy, which he knows a thing or two about.

Among other things, the long-shot hopeful wants to make the U.S. energy independent by the end of this decade. That’s something no other candidate is talking about.

Alone among the GOP contenders, Roemer’s proposal calls for ending all subsidies to the oil companies and slapping a tariff on oil imports from the Middle East with the revenues raised from the taxes going to pay off the country’s staggering $14.3 trillion national debt.

He also wants to bring our troops home from what he calls “oil duty.”

The issue in 2012, he says, is curbing corporate influence in our politics. The corrupting influence of money in American politics is certainly not a new idea, as Jerry Brown can attest, but it’s an issue that could resonate in a year when President Obama’s reelection effort could cost upwards of a billion dollars, an unprecedented amount shattering the $750 million record that he set in 2008.

Obama’s haul in that campaign more than doubled the $368 million raised by Sen. John McCain.

Roemer just needs a chance to be heard, something that didn’t happen earlier this month when the former four-term conservative Democratic congressman and ex-governor was excluded from the first nationally-televised Republican presidential debate on May 5 in Greenville, S.C. 

He was kept out of that debate because he was unable to garner at least 1 percent in five national polls.

“The criteria that participants garner at least one percent of a national poll is an unrealistic barometer that exclude smaller campaigns such as mine,” said a disappointed Roemer, whose name was rarely included in any polls at the time.

The 67-year-old Roemer, however, isn’t discouraged.

He believes he’ll still get his moment on the national stage.

“I am not known yet. But when I get through in New Hampshire, and South Carolina and Iowa, and going across this country, I think we’ll have a chance to turn this country around,” he told FOX News earlier this month.

Reminiscent of Jerry Brown’s ill-fated bid for the presidency in 1992 — which, coincidentally, was the same year Roemer last served in public office — the former Louisiana governor refuses to accept any contributions over $100, leaving him with a meager $55,000 in contributions, more than half of it coming out of his own pocket.

That’s barely enough to finance his low-budget tour of New Hampshire, South Carolina and Iowa, the three critical early states in the 2012 nominating process.

If the under-funded Roemer, whose candidacy is still in the exploratory stage, can survive beyond the Iowa Straw Poll in Ames in August and make even the slightest dent in Florida’s “Presidency 5” straw poll in September, he could add a lot to the Republican presidential contest — a bona-fide dark-horse who actually has something to say.

In the meantime, the former governor continues down the back roads of the early primary and caucus states, winding his way from one community to the next telling voters and reporters alike that he’s the candidate who can restore prosperity to our recession-ravaged nation.