The contest for the Republican nomination is stuck in the rogues’ gallery stage
Fredericksburg, Virginia
Choosing the nominee for the out-of-power party is a process of elimination. We start with an omnium gatherum, reduce it to a rogues’ gallery, and end up with a candidate. As I write this we have bogged down in the rogues’ gallery stage. Up until recently, we seemed to have narrowed it down to Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich. Nobody really liked either of them, but Romney, the Establishment Republican, was the favourite because he was said to be ‘electable’, whereas the anti-Establishment Gingrich was said to be ‘unpredictable, erratic, dangerous’, prone to seethe and snarl like Coriolanus calling the denizens of Republican Rome ‘crows that peck at eagles’ and ‘curs whose breath I hate’.
Gingrich is the Wallis Simpson of the Republican party, who has ‘two wives living,’ as the Archbishop of Canterbury might put it, and is now married to number three. In America, ‘family values’ is the bee in every bonnet and the fork in every tongue but basically it means all things conventional. We had a choice between a conservative who scares us to death and a conservative who bores us to death, and so the tide turned away from the fiery Gingrich and toward the bland Romney, who gives off the distinct impression that somebody started to embalm him and then stopped.
With Romney as the putative nominee, Republicans began worrying about the ‘passion gap’. But suddenly, who should step in to fill it but former Senator Rick Santorum, fresh from a sweep of three primary victories, who claimed that he was the only ‘real conservative’ in the race. Romney was a fiscal conservative; Gingrich was a political conservative; but he, Santorum, was a ‘cultural conservative’, openly against abortion, gay marriage, women in combat, feminism’s enshrinement of careers, and the government’s promotion of birth control.
He is also against the French Revolution. It could happen here, he warned, if we persist in voting ourselves inalienable rights instead of receiving them from our Creator as our Founding Fathers ordained. We are on the path to secular humanism and it will destroy us. First we will see statues of the Goddess of Reason erected in churches, next we will have a government-ordained radicalised clergy, and then.... ‘The guillotine,’ he tolled.
He set off a festival of one-upmanship as Romney and Gingrich rose to the bait, vying for the title of Real Conservative until they sounded as if they were playing the scene from Spartacus. Gingrich returned to Coriolanus mode with the sneering observation that Establishment Republicans would do no more than ‘manage the decay’ that has already spread through Washington; while a clearly desperate Romney, tin ear always at the ready, described himself as ‘severely conservative’, a classic example of protesting too much surpassing Hamlet’s mother.
It’s possible that the three of them will so damage each other that the nomination will go to someone else entirely, like Jeb Bush, but most pundits still agree that it will be Romney by default. I agree. The Republicans will go with the mitten even though it’s made of fake wool and full of dropped stitches.
After ‘but’ the deluge — he’s politically tone-deaf, he’s too rich to identify with or appeal to ordinary people, he doesn’t really like people, he has no sense of humour, and — the old Nixon objection — ‘There’s just something about him I don’t like.’
I agree that he seems to have no sense of humour. I see him as one of those men who clears his throat and says brightly, ‘I heard a funny joke today’, and then proceeds to tell it — or try to. His timing is completely off and he interrupts himself to add unnecessary details until he and his audience have lost the thread of the story. This is why men of his type have perpetually bruised ankles: their wives keep kicking them under the dinner table whilst nailing them with the gimlet-eyed message, ‘Shut up!’ (apropos of this, he’s the type of male who turns women into Mildred Rogers, the snarling, sadistic termagant in Of Human Bondage).
Romney would acknowledge his joke-telling problems and buy a book called How To Develop a Sense of Humour with worksheets in the back. He would see nothing funny in that, and indeed would consider it evidence of a serious programme of study.
I also get the feeling that he is a compulsive list-maker, always a worrisome sign. In every one of his speeches he identifies himself as a ‘family man’ and proceeds to list all seven of his children and their progeny. If he doesn’t stop this, some master of ceremonies is going to slip up and introduce him as ‘The next grandchild of the United States...’
Finally, there’s just something about Romney that I don’t like. Nixon’s enemies had trouble articulating their hunches but I know exactly what mine is. Watch Romney talk and note how often he widens his eyes. This involuntary movement invariably accompanies the prevaricator’s giveaway question: ‘You believe me, don’t you?’
I will end on a note of caution: the most imperilled member of our rogues gallery à trois is Rick Santorum. If he stays on his French Revolution kick he just might get stabbed in his bathtub. Who will be our Charlotte Corday? Who else but Sarah Palin? You betcha!