The Republican Primaries: It's officially become sadder than watching an over the hill porn star scraping the bottom of the barrel to find a fetish film that Ron Jeremy would feel guilty and uncomfortable watching. Here’s a brief guide to the main characters thus far (and lets face it, it feels like these guys are auditioning for a reality show more than running for public office).
First, a heartfelt outreach to two men who seemed perfectly qualified, but just didn’t pop in that Hollywood sense that every candidate must today:
The first is Tim Pawlenty; the T-Paw. T-Paw was just too damn boring, and before long he got spanked at a straw pole and threw in the towel. He endorsed Mitt, and soon Romney was dispatching him like his own political Igor to his Frankenstein. I last saw him waving himself about with the sort of enthusiasm that could otherwise win him a local acting award in a high school in New Hampshire. He was introducing Romney to the crowd like some sort of political fluffer.
The second is Jon Huntsman, a man who is an intelligent moderate whose vast experience with China should qualify him for just about any vacant slot in the government. Unfortunately, the public can seem to tolerate only one moderate Mormon at a time, and Huntsman will doubtlessly go back to his shotgun, protecting his beautiful daughters from creeps like me.
Now, on to the real contenders for the anti-Romney frontrunner spot that the Republican party had been begging for since he became their most attractive option:
We started off with Michelle Bachmann, back at the straw pole once upon a time where we watched candidates struggle to stomach enough corn dogs to make it appear that they had been to a county fair before. She was a fag-bashing homophobe whose husband is proof that the sexual identity reprogramming camp which she and her husband ran doesn't really work (or, at the very least, are still buggy as all hell in these early stages as he skips down the street shopping for chihuahua sweaters in a completely heterosexual manner).
She didn’t have much in the way of executive experience, nor did she have much in the way of brains when she was caught in front of the cameras and intellectually froze like a deer in headlights: she once (wrongly) claimed that the injections Rick Perry had mandated for the prevention of HPV caused retardation, and warned that The Lion King was gay propaganda. She has a sort of Danica Patrick appeal where she’s not exactly going to get by on her looks alone, but she gets enough of a rise out of fat, white, red-meat middle americans to keep them interested in her, and spouts enough rehearsed talking points to keep them nodding with her through her crazier moments. If Danica Patrick’s midwestern sex appeal combined with Glen Beck’s crazy person appeal, what you get is Michelle Bachmann, sort of like a miniature Sarah Palin.
We somehow found the Republicans back in love with Newt Gingrich on two nonconsecutive occasions. On the first occasion, he surged as the potential “not-Romney,” but soon faltered when he: criticized the Ryan Plan budget, admitted that the government had some role in insurance and instantly backtracked and tried to swallow his socialist views on public healthcare and had a scandal when it broke that most of his twitter followers were produced by a firm to generate false publicity, in addition to his trail of terminally-ill wives. He was able to hurl his flabby body back into the spotlight by capturing South Carolina and speculating on it like an investment bank leveraging someone’s mortgage on a coinflip.
This was momentum he picked up solely from being an unreasonable dick to John King when he tore him apart as the debate moderator for opening with a question about his infidelities. It was hard to stop laughing when he hauled his fat verbal ass up to what sounded like the moral high ground momentarily to take a mighty piss upon King, calling him “as close to despicable as I can imagine.” Romney has dragged out that he was a “historian” for Freddie Mac when he was being paid millions by them on many occasions, as well as the older ethics scandals which set records for how low a Speaker of the House can fall when his own party turned against him and voted to fine him for ethics charges. Newt’s real problem is that the bloated political corpus he owns bulges with liabilities and closet skeletons, in addition to years spent in front of cameras before politicians truly understood how to play the 24 hour news cycle.
We had a bit of Herman Cain, the king pinhead. He once bragged about not knowing who the president of “Uzbeki-beki-beki-stan-stan” was, pushing his ignorance of international policy directly into the public eye. He flexed his muscles earned on the motivational speaking tour, giving the sort of speeches, well garnished with “9-9-9’s,” that you would expect of someone about to tell you their secret to get rich quick without working hard. Cain may have been a good public speaker and latched onto the 9-9-9 thing well, but he doesn’t know the first thing about running a country. He was little more than a pair of clown shoes with a thin political coating, playing a mystery less because it was good marketing, and more because he had no idea what the hell he was talking about, every time he opened his mouth in an interview warranting damage control.
Santorum somehow managed to resurrect his political career enough to make it into February. He’s been trying to distance himself from gay marriage, abortion, and other culture war fronts which he used to make his staple. He made every television appearance that I could remember on social issues, and it’s become his trademark. The problem for Santorum is that, even though he’s getting a bit of a surge off of the debate about whether or not Catholic institutions need to provide access to birth control if they’re employers and must provide insurance under new healthcare regulations, nobody really cares. Sure, there’s a Catholic so-and-so, perhaps even a small group of so-and-so’s, who’ll have a fit over each abortion in every town, but the rest of the town is on the pill and having a really fun time with it. When it comes down to crunch time, it won’t make a huge difference in people’s day to day lives if their neighbors have an abortion, but the availability of a government job may.
Rick Perry also bears mentioning. His run was aptly summed up by Bill Maher: He’s the cute guy at the end of the bar that you think you could hook up with, so you go over, and realize that he’s a beautiful idiot.” The guy talks the talk and walks a bowlegged cowboy walk, but he just looked stupid on camera too many times. Sure, there’s the videos where he appears to be stoned enough to give that YouTube video of Hasselhoff on the floor failing to eat a hamburger a challenge for both humor and visible intoxication, but toss those aside and you still have a guy who isn’t qualified to open his mouth about much. Shooting a coyote on a morning jog simply doesn’t make up for the fact that he can’t remember what the third agency he wants to shut down on his first day as president. People were desperate to believe in someone when he came by, he instantly became the frontrunner upon announcing his candidacy, and he almost instantly imploded under the pressure. In this era of instant communication, a candidate needs to be much more careful around the cameras, because one or two bad soundbytes makes the difference between coasting and frantically patching leaks in a ship that’s going down.
All the while, there have been 2 constants: Mitt “The Mormonator” Romney, and Ron “Wrap me in the Constitution” Paul.
Ron Paul has, hands down, the most fanatical devotion of any candidate in this race. The simple reason: conservatives have had nothing decent offered to them since before Bush. Reagan conservatives who cringed yet moved forward with tax increases which were clearly in the countries interest can no longer recognize a party which they see as the party of the rich, promising only deregulation and tax breaks to fix anything. While many candidates are split between bowing to their values crowd that wants government to stop abortions and gay marriage (though has been backing off of both this cycle) and their liberterian crowd that wants government out of everything as professional politicians, Ron Paul is more ideologically pure and incredibly consistent.
I personally think the guy is nuts on foreign policy, but if you’re someone who wants to smoke pot and flip off a cop, he might actually be your guy. He draws the sorts of alternative lifestyles at times that the Freak Power ticket drew under Hunter S. Thomspon that don’t always navigate the culture gap expertly, however, they’re willing to freeze their genetalia off, holding signs at a Mitt Romney rally in each state that we’ve been to.
Finally, we have the guy who’s survived every sling and arrow of outrageous fortune, the Mormonator Himself: Mitt Romney. He’s been finishing in an almost constant second place. Every other frontrunner has jumped into the spotlight, had their shining moment like a lifesaver thrown to a drowning man and then burned into nothing upon entering the atmosphere of public opinion.
Mitt is a political chameleon, a practiced politician who has managed to take all the sincerity and human connection out of his true statements so that nobody can tell when he’s lying. Built like an emotional zombie, I’ve personally seen him take the sort of intellection strikes which would drop a lesser man, and then plow endlessly forward against the momentum. He has a narrative which seems to be that the believes that the United States was perfect when it was created and has only improved since, a sort of blind Leave it to Beaver optimism that cannot exist in a sane, honest man.
Mitt’s had limited success at reaching out to other communities, the Latino community in particular being a demographic he simply can’t win. He’s already come out against the DREAM Act, promising to veto a measure which only roughly 1/2 of the Tea Party wing of the Republican party denounces, but 91% of Latinos are in favor of. With the Latino vote growing in importance, he has been avoiding the immigration question as much as he can, trying to push “self-deportation” for the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. and showing up to interviews at Univision. Even grabbing Marco Rubio and tossing him into the VP spot wouldn’t help too much when Romney is trying to deport every Latino voter’s grandmother and cousins. If he were to reneg on his veto, it would be disastrous as it would paint him a less consistent conservative, but if he doesn’t, he looks heartless to the Latino community. It’s become a sort of cold sore on his political face that, whenever it pops up, he always looks like hell trying to explain away. This, in addition to the fact that conservatives don’t like or trust him, make it seem like there’s no way for him to win, and he’s still the best shot for Republicans.
With the goal of the nomination swinging so tantalizingly close to all the candidates, this race being as crazy as any other than perhaps the California recall where Arnold Schwartzenegger somehow managed to claw out to the top. Unlike last election cycle, Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich have all been out of the game, and this may be contributing to some of the outright nastiness of this campaign: the party has less leverage over them. Ron Paul is the exception, though he’s a single-minded, out of touch old man that will march forward under his own understanding of the consitution. If Romney goes home a loser, he’s lost two in a row and hasn’t been in government since 2007. For Gingrich, he’s gotten his name out there again after more than a decade dormant, and could perhaps pick up another book deal or lesser office after a resurgence in his political career. At the very least, he reminded Freddie Mac that he’s still (somewhat) politically relevant. For the sweater-vested alter boy, Santorum, he’s reviving a career that seemed dead after he was voted out of the Senate in Pennsylvania. He’s one of those guys everyone’s shocked showed up again, but he occasionally gets the anti-Romney spotlight, currently enjoying a 3-state streak through Missouri, Minnesota and Colorado that is all but promised to be short lived in this ADD carnival. This is, of course, in addition to his delayed Iowa victory.
Without a strong, central Republican leadership to reel these guys in, they’re going to continue to savage each other in broad daylight, all the while claiming that it will make whomever survives this pit fight a stronger candidate. Considering the number of labels that have been thrown around that will stick in the general election (i.e. Perry’s incredibly effective “Vulture Capitalism” quip), it’s hard to imagine someone coming out of this rubble intact.