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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