Author’s program note. There can be only one song peppy enough, bouncy
enough, irresistible enough, a song that is the very essence of what is best
about America… that we get hit and hit again and hit again… yet get up, dust
ourselves off and do what’s necessary to win, thank you very much.
That song is “Hey, look me over,” from the 1960 musical “Wildcat” (book by
Richard Nash; lyrics by Caroline Leigh; music by Cy Coleman); and it fits the
mood today at the headquarters of Newt Gingrich, the man who squeezed the bitter
lemon of his contorted and messy relations with women into a lemonade sweet
enough even the good Christian folk could drink by the gallon.
Thus, go to any search engine now. Find this tune and play it loud and proud…
For, in the final analysis, we love the people Teddy Roosevelt described as “the
man in the arena,” the people who have to win because losing is unthinkable.
Even if we have to hold our noses when we get too close, we just can’t help
admiring them, getting off our posteriors and cheering them to the echo. And the
GOP citizens of South Carolina did just that.
They decided to vote for an idea… the idea that it is “we, the people” who
make presidents… not pollsters, not handlers, not pundits and prognosticators…
and if you don’t like it, that’s your problem. Not theirs. Thus did Romney get
his gourmet, tax- deductible lunch handed to him… his contrived designer jeans
ripped, torn, muddy, and a black eye to boot. This doesn’t mean he won’t be
nominated, but it most assuredly means he will not be, cannot be nominated the
way he’s gone about the job so far. South Carolina has dictated that if nothing
more.
Prize day.
To sketch this influential event in a way that even third-graders could
understand, consider this: Mitt Romney is the school kid we all hated; hated
with our heart, soul and brain, for we knew — and could see evidence every
single day, every day he raised his hand and knew the answer — that he was the
kid the teachers idolized, the one they could with abiding pride point to and
say, “That’s our boy.” Whereupon the boy would beam… and our hatred would grow…
and we’d dream delicious ways of taking him down a peg or two… the faster, the
sooner, the most abashing, the better.
Then one day one of the kids couldn’t take it take it anymore… and he pops,
goes nuts. It’s the day school prizes are awarded; Mitt getting the lion’s
share. It was the day something must be done… the time for mere rage gone; the
need for action this day nigh.
Thus does this kid (call him Newt) see picture-perfect,
not-a-hair-out-of-place Mitt coming to school in his chauffeur driven car and
goes postal; he decides enough is enough… that Mitt (whose very name he
abominates and loathes) must be taken out… but without of course implicating
himself. Thus with a “sorry, man” at the ready scruffy, incorrigible Newt
maneuvers Mitt into the nearest, stinkiest, festering mud, thereby rendering the
apple of every teacher’s eye an unholy mess when he walks into class…
How much sympathy does ol’ Mitt get, for all that he’s the victim? None,
absolutely none at all… and they elect Newt Student Body President in a
landslide… because, because… Mitt makes them sick, every last one of them.
And, friends, this is what happened yesterday in South Carolina… the state
oh-so- clearly indicated that they want candidates who fight for their favors,
including the ultimate favor of getting to whack on their behalf, the man each
and every one of them despises… Barack Obama, president of the Great Republic…
for make no mistake about it, the fractured, snarling, uncooperative members of
the Grand Old Party want brother Barack’s head on a platter… this is and has
been since Inauguration Day 2009, their first and preeminent desire.
And they aren’t convinced Mitt can bring home the bacon… stinging the
incumbent, slashing the incumbent, wounding the incumbent, humiliating the
incumbent, for that’s what they insist their candidate deliver… like Salome with
the head of John the Baptist, a reference every Evangelical knows and
savors.
So, what has the great Palmetto State, home of nullifier John C. Calhoun and
war profiteer Rhett Butler, the state that lobbed the first treasonable shot,
thereby launching a war anything but civil, what has this state said?
First, that the Romney Coronation is off. That the carefully contrived,
minutely controlled candidacy of Massachusetts’ least popular governor has
ended. Mitt is going to have to do what Mitt hates: engaging in a bare-knuckles
brawl that must show the GOP he is their boy; a man who can deliver the red-meat
the much challenged and riven party craves. For these folks, rabid
revolutionaries all and Constitution-hugging patriots as they are, are not about
to go gentle into this good-night; they insist upon a candidate who can turn
their white hot rage about the wrongful direction of the Great Republic into a
lifetime lock on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and the nation’s agenda.
They look at Mitt and want to puke… What kind of American is he, they wonder,
who wants the most precious of their gifts, their vote for president; but who,
they feel in their gut, not only does not like or understand them, but faces
them with incomprehension and even disdain? They know that a dinner-party with
Mitt and his dutiful, adoring wife (a role model impossible for today’s woman)
would be proper, dull, an unhappy memory for all… for all that Mitt might say
just the right things with gestures approved by his stable of handlers.
And so while Republican hosts may yet dine with this stiff, control freak and
paragon, they are afraid, and rightly so, that there won’t be any pleasure in
it, no fun, no grandiose joys and memories; worst of all, no White House.
And this is why the GOP has gone through the long, exhaustive, often abjectly
humiliating process of vetting one potential presidential nominee after another,
all ardently desired and even adored at the outset; all found wanting and
disquieting in so very many ways.
Will these folks be happy with Newt, his many wives, his inexplicable
financial arrangements, his blatant self-service and prevarications? Maybe not.
But he is serving their purposes right now — forcing Mitt out of his bubble,
demanding he get real on why his association with Bain Capital unnerves so many
at a time when he has so egregiously mishandled the matter of his tax returns.
We all know, and Romney knows we know, that what we will find when he at last
makes them public — no evidence of illegality but a text-book case of how the
super-wealthy gain and use loop-holes on which they build their empires.
Newt has all of Romney’s many inadequacies going for him… and he has,
mirabile dictu, brigades of Southern women for him, too. They already knew that
men are lyin’, cheatin’, low-down scoundrels. But now it’s official. Messin’
around with women is no big deal, no sin at all, whatever the Good Book says…
just keep our taxes low, hold our Founding Fathers high, make us as special as
we see ourselves, and above all love us… something Mitt Romney just cannot do…
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