Debate Impressions

If one has a Republican friend or acquaintance, be nice and don't make many loud noises this morning.  Last night's debacle in New Hampshire was enough to provoke the most committed, teetotaling Republican to down a fifth of Jim Beam, straight and hot.

Let's get the candidates who have absolutely no chance off the table first.  They may be around for the next seven months or so, but once the buses leave South Carolina, they will be gone.

Herman Cain is a condescending jerk who has a bunch of ideas, and absolutely no idea how to make them work in the context of Government.  His skill set requires the absolute authority of a business executive, not a contentious Congress.  Cain is one bad interview from gone.  He's smug, arrogant, and the wrong color to get any traction with the full Republican electorate.

Ron Paul is a great cult figure, but that is exactly what he will remain.  His greatest obstacle is that he speaks the language of his cult.  The rest of us are sitting there listening to the theme from The Twilight Zone going through our heads.  He's not going away, but he is unlikely to connect with more than the ten to fifteen percent of the Republican Party that he already holds. 

Rick Santorum has one major problem which will not go away: he was thrown out by the voters in purple Pennsylvania.  The Keystone State leans slightly blue, but you would be hard pressed to know it because they will pick some of the most conservative candidates known to God or man.  If Santorum could not hold Pennsylvania, how in the world does he expect to hold Ohio or Florida?  He should run out of money before long.

Tim Pawlenty has more than one issue which will not go away.  He has a competitor from his home state in Michelle Bachmann.  He looks enough like Rick Santorum that their respective wives could view the photograph and ask, "What's wrong with this photo of my husband?"  By screwing with Romney, he has tinkled in the Rotarian Republicans' corn flakes.  And he is almighty dull.  He might last until Super Tuesday as the non-Mormon version of Romney.

The scariest moment your Wandering Gentile had while watching the debate was looking at Newt Gingrich and thinking, good Lord, he's the best one up there.  His answers were comparatively clear and articulate.  He showed a sense of having an idea of how to do things.  Hell, Gingrich was Clinton's tough old adversary, and almost worthy of nostalgia.

Newt Gingrich also sounds like a capon being strangled, and Romney does competent equally well.

Mitt Romney looked better.  He was clear, concise, articulate, and he is blessed with one of the better speaking voices in a party filled with men who sound as if they are waiting for puberty.  He is a little bit less dull than Pawlenty, who remains his closest competitor on the issues.  He was the best communicator on the stage on 13 June.

Michelle Bachmann was the other candidate who mattered. With her unofficial declaration as a candidate, she slapped the elephant in the room in the tusks. The elephant in the room is Sarah Palin. 

Palin will be the shadow over any candidate on the stage until she formally declares her decision.  Her name recognition exceeds that of Mitt Romney.  Palin has a national apparatus in place waiting for her to jump in, and by avoiding the early debates, she is finally listening to the wisest advice she could get: Better to be silent and considered to be a fool than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt.

The last thing Sarah Palin needs right now is a lucky punch from a second tier candidate that lays her candidacy on the ground.  The only ones who could get that in might be Gingrich or Santorum.  In spite of their being insufferable, the two of them are also much smarter than Governor Palin.  Santorum and his ideological twin Bachmann have the most to gain by the absence of Palin.  They are similarly paleoconservative in philosophy, and Bachmann has an outside chance of winning the nomination compared to Romney.

What one should watch for in the short term of this most off of off-years follows.

There will be attrition in the very near term of candidates with little or no traction.  Cain, Gingrich, and Santorum do not appear to have very strong campaigns and may not make it to Iowa.  The heat and light Pawlenty needs to grow in Minnesota will be consumed by Michelle Bachmann competing for much of the same supporters.

Ron Paul's supporters will be a spoiler, and will likely go to ABR, i.e., anyone but Romney.

If Michelle Bachmann gains traction over the next three months, she will serve as Palin's surrogate.  That is all Michelle Bachmann will ever be.  She lacks adequate name recognition, and she is unlikely to build a national base beyond those who would have written Palin in, anyway.

Look for Palin to get in late, possibly as late as December 1.  This keeps her out of debates where she has always done poorly, but leaves her viable in the Iowa caucuses.  Michelle Bachmann holds the enthusiasm of Iowa congressman Steve King, which puts Tim Pawlenty at a huge disadvantage.

Mitt Romney will continue as the moderate alternative to Bachmann Palin overdrive.  The fatal error that Romney's campaign will make is that he will continue to run to the right.  Romney's problem is that he is not credible as a paleoconservative, not if he had a successful career achieving statewide office in Massachusetts.  Indeed, the waning support for the tea parties indicates that he would have a chance as a moderate in the general election.

However, in order to get to the general election, one must cater to the party's base.  And that base will prefer someone with a better set of credentials as a Conservative, be it Bachmann, or more likely, Palin.  Mitt Romney would be well served by campaigning for the Vice-Presidency, because Governor Palin has a history of not bearing up well under scrutiny from the national press.

The future of the Republican Party will be dependent upon the strength of bringing moderates into the fold. 

It shall be seen if they remain to do so in 2016. 

The Parable of Republican Fiscal Responsibility

A Republican goes on vacation.  A thousand miles from home he decides he wants a bacon sandwich.

So the Republican spends thirty dollars renting a car.  He spends an hour of time and and three gallons of gas searching for a supermarket.  At the supermarket he spends ten dollars on bacon, mayonnaise and bread. 

The Republican makes a huge mess in the hotel microwave for the maid to clean up.  She will not be tipped because the Republican presumes her to be illegal, despite the fact that she is blond, 6'6" tall, and named for her legal immigrant grandmother, Inga.

The Republican realizes that he has no method for taking care of the bacon and the mayonnaise, so he drives out to the truck stop and buys a portable cooler for a hundred dollars.

After the end of his three day visit, The Republican has a cooler he cannot take on the flight back, filled with food which, while not spoiled, is more than he requires.

Giving the surplus food to people who haven't got enough to eat goes against The Republican's work ethic, so he sticks it in the commercial waste-collection dumpster at the hotel.  The cooler, likewise, is not something which can be allowed into other hands, for fear that it may be repurposed for some nefarious end.

So the Republican stands at the airport, proud and pleased that the sandwich itself only cost two dollars.  But he wasted $158 to make that two dollar sandwich.

A Democrat is on vacation. A thousand miles from home, he decides he wants a bacon sandwich.  The Democrat walks to a nearby restaurant and asks for a bacon sandwich.  When he is done eating, he gives the waitress about seven dollars, including tip. 

The Republican shakes his head in amazement at how wasteful the Democrat is, when the Democrat could have done the job himself.

But...We're Not Dead Yet

All reports of the demise of the Republican party are as of yet, sadly, untrue. But there is hope, because they are on life support and their recent behavior is evocative of a stage 4 lung cancer patient walking into the QT for a pack of Marlboros.

A Democrat has to love Dick Cheney. His actions and outcomes are as predictable as an Univision telenovela. What Cheney says has ceased to matter as much as his smug, sarcastic delivery. Every time the man opens his mouth, he finds ways to turn off those within the eighty thousand or so people left willing to self-identify as Republicans.

Not only is Cheney unwilling to admit that his party lost six months ago, he keeps reminding the electorate as to why. Choosing a public confrontation with Barack Obama and Colin Powell is not the most appropriate form of swaying the independent voter back to the Republican Party. What is amusing is that despite both Obama and Powell being black, there has been little attention paid to the possibility of a prejudicial component.

Of course, no one harbors any illusions about Mr. Cheney having the first type of commitment to diversity-his crowd being diverse enough to include both Wonder Bread and Hellmanns Mayonnaise. The Republicans have lost all opportunity to connect with socially conservative african-american voters through Nixon's Southern Strategy. Latinos have been turned off by economic isolation strategies directed toward latinos while conflating all immigration with illicit behavior.

Thanks to Cheney coming off as a condescending (bag of fertilizer), a point has been reached where there are Republicans who feel that they no longer are white enough for their party...(see: Specter, Arlen. Before too long, also see: Steele, Michael.) An alliance with Rush Limbaugh and other quasi-sophist pundits has filled the party's ears with the idea that they're all right, but gosh dang it, they're just not conservative enough.

And Al Gore lost because he wasn't Liberal enough. That premise cost the Democrats several years of kowtowing to the anti-semitic, authoritarian Ralph Nader/Cindy Sheehan left. Leaving the center and surrendering a party to the most anti-libertarian forces of its base is a recipe for disaster. Had Gore moved further to the left in 2000, he would have lost twice the votes he got from Nader to Bush, and the whole Florida thing never would have happened.

If a party does not have a leader, they cannot manufacture one. The Republicans should ask John Kerry about that. At the moment, the choices for still-active political figures are limited to Sarah Palin and "Other," because every time Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) inserts himself into the discussion, one hears the late, great Harvey Korman saying "...too Jewish," in Blazing Saddles.

And the base is choosing to embrace Governor Palin in droves. Should Palin be the best that the Republicans can get, there is hope that the Yankees will be calling your pudgy, out-of-shape, 42-year-old Wandering Gentile to pitch...hopefully against the Red Sox. Mrs. Palin is not the cure for what ails Republicans...she is exactly what ails them; poor communication skills, a stale agenda, and an authoritarian political tack well to the right of the mainstream.

Should Republicans wish to rejoin the political forum, they have a few steps to take.

One: Conservative is not necessarily arrogant and caustic. The whole caustic and arrogant thing took off with Morton Downey, Jr.'s TV show in the late eighties, which was evocative of the radio show which predated Limbaugh in Sacramento. Reagan could be acerbic and inappropriate, but was rarely anything less than a perfect gentleman.

Democrats should not fear Sarah Palin, but they need their A game for Mike Huckabee.

Two: The whole State's Rights/Tenth Amendment resurgence that Governor Rick Perry (R-TX) has put back on the table? It doesn't work. Primarily, it appears to be a vehicle for old confederacy types to retry institutionalized bigotry against latinos. Smaller jurisdictions enacting ordinances to review nationality documents with regard to rental properties and business licenses, 287g, and like laws are a pretext to harass latinos of all legal dispositions.

What happens when a progressive state whose economy is in the toilet uses the tenth amendment to vacate the parts of federal immigration laws that they don't like. (I'm talking to you, Michigan and Rhode Island) If driver's licenses and business licenses bring in new entrepreneurs without papers and the economy takes off, the current tenth amendment fans will howl for a constitutional convention to repeal the thirteenth through the seventeenth amendments.

As if they liked those amendments in the first place.

Three: Whether they like it or not, Republicans are going to have to move left to survive. At the moment, there is a very weak railing holding their political vehicle away from a looong drop into the drink. Republican potential lies in the increase of old, angry, affluent white Christians, which is a demographic which shrank under their watch, and the trends aren't looking too good for the future.

You see, their children grew up knowing Dora as well as their parents knew Miss Piggy. Those are children comfortable with diversity. They saw the government break the country's image, social compacts, and economy within five years of a surplus of goodwill, tranquility, and money. Those children reaching voting age this year know Democrats as the party of peace, prosperity, and minimal governmental intrusion.

Remember, the people that Republicans promised us that they would be?

C'mon. Put Your Back Into It.

I regret that the idea of having the earth give way under Mr. Limpbaugh's mass did not occur to me until after the cartoon was inked.

And the Hits Just Keep A-Coming

John McCain has had a worse day than last Friday, but it was the beginning of a long presence in Hanoi. If Senator McCain's performance in the debate was not a deal-breaker for undecided voters, then Sarah Palin will be the bullet that ends the pulse of the Republucan campaign in 2008.

It is not appropriate to blame McCain. The handlers from his party have managed to take the likeable, engaging maverick operating on a shoestring, and managed to convert him into a cookie-cutter Republican candidate, scarcely distinguished from former Georgia Representative Pat Swindall, who left office in disgrace in the late eighties.

The Republican handlers are under the illusion that voters actually care about their social conservative wedge issues when the car is out of gas, the pumps are dry (as they are in the southeast), the house is getting foreclosed on, and the 401(k) is more like a 179(B). One suspects that an unemployed individual on the edge of returning to the land of the renter would be happy to host the most flamboyant Gay wedding in history on his lawn, if it means he has a job and gets to keep his lawn.

McCain, the ever-aware pilot, is much too savvy a politician to allow himself to come off as the acrimonious, infirm elderly man we saw on Friday night. The rambling rants were characteristic of the misanthropic message of a party which is willing to sacrifice a war hero who did not always hew closely to a party line which makes no allowances for living up to Christian doctrine which it finds inconvenient.

The Republican party wants to sell the voter upon experience. They want the voter to know that Barack Obama is naive and doesn't get it.

Experienced military leaders lost 4000+ American servicepeople, while the inexperienced Barack Obama was of the opinion that they should not have been committed. The best we can hope for is a draw, and now Saddam isn't there to occupy the Iranians. Oh yeah, by the way, WHERE THE HELL IS BIN LADEN?

McCain, and Republicans "got it," that lax oversight in the housing and financial sectors would be great for the economy because we can trust bankers and lawyers to police themselves. Highly motivated financial people can be counted upon to behave diligently and ethically, right?

And there was nothing AT ALL naive about tax breaks that allowed manufacturing jobs to be shipped overseas at a rate that very nearly replicates the giant sucking sound that H. Ross Perot counseled the American public about in 1992-but he never imagined that the slurping would come from the People's Republic of China instead of Mexico...and the Chinese would be holding a trillion dollars of American debt as a result.

Very well, then, maybe experienced, non-naive people who "get it" aren't all that they are advertised to be. So the Republicans are going to bring out their own inexperienced, naive person who doesn't get it. Governor Sarah Palin makes Dan Quayle look like Shakespeare.

One hopes that the awkward interviews with Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric were a tactic to lower expectations for the debate with Joe Biden. Regrettably, one suspects that Governor Palin is as dumb as a bag of hammers. However, she is much easier on the eyes.

Those who had a complaint about Senator Clinton were less motivated by her genitalia than they were by a perception that the Senator from New York is a bit too tempestuous to be effective in the presidency. Governor Palin does exhibit a level of tempestuousness, but her targets are satirists and those who question her qualifications.

One would guess that "Saturday Night Live" is not shown in Alaska at all, but a quick perusal of the website for Palin's former employer, KTUU in Anchorage, indicated that it is an NBC affiliate. Did she expect her loud arrival on the national stage to pass unnoticed by parodists in New York? Making fun of public figures has been part of the program's description since 1975, and the producers and network know their audience is more likely to give Obama a pass.

A cagey tweener could have seen that coming. Why didn't the 44-year-old? Oh, she talks about having gotten into politics by moving from the PTA, but my math indicates that her oldest child must have started kindergarten at 18 months old.

Getting back to the experience issue, (and away from a rant fueled by lust for Tina Fey), if her experience running a city of any size were characterized by some spectacular accomplishment or demonstration of competence one may be inclined to listen. Giuliani's miracle in New York comes immediately to mind.

However, we are presented with a small town which shares many of the same difficulties of towns its size nationwide. Adding the state into the mix, one wishes for a record which reflects the kind of forward-thinking leadership that puts a state in good stead for future prosperity. Zell Miller's helmsmanship in Georgia is a perfectly fine example of a man who did an outstanding job of running a state that cannot simply dig a hole and have it puke up oil.

Regrets to Governor Palin, but without the North Slope, Alaska would be likened to the Mississippi of the Arctic. That is not entirely fair. Mississippi would be justified in being insulted by the comparison.

So the Republican Party now expects us to put on the Emperor's New Clothes, and accept that this is the best ticket that they can offer. No. Mike Huckabee has spoken eloquently about the Republican lack of political prowess this year.

And he is the next Republican who has a chance of ever being elected president.