TOMC has turned her attention to the Republicans. She says there’s something about Mitt Romney’s perfect grooming, his malleability and his gee-whiz aura that seems to irritate both the other candidates and the voters. Well, he certainly irritates me. Mr. Herbert says the significance of Barack Obama’s achievement is the fact that he might well be fashioning a positive change in the very character of our nation. I think that may be a bit hyperbolic, but I haven’t had my tea yet so I may be being cranky. Here’s TOMC:
Ever since Barack Obama won big in Iowa, Mitt Romney has been running as a “change” candidate. It is a little strange to see a guy whose party has been in power for years standing in front of a big blue “Washington is Broken” sign, but I think we have already determined that Romney is nothing if not really, really adaptable.
“I brought change, and they can only talk about change,” he says in his stump speech, citing his work as an Olympics czar (change is better parking) and businessman (change is fewer employees). He also vows to turn Washington “inside out.”
We will pause here briefly to envision what interesting trinkets would come tumbling out of the Bush Justice Department.
For a long while, Romney seemed the logical Republican nominee since he has a great résumé, a lovely family from whom he is not estranged and a ton of money. (At his campaign stops, Mitt jokingly thanks his wife for agreeing to invest so much of the family fortune on his presidential prospects. Ann Romney’s smile has begun to seem a little thin at this point.)
Unfortunately, there’s something about Romney’s perfect grooming, his malleability and his gee-whiz aura that seems to really irritate both the other candidates and the voters. “Most Americans want the next president to remind them of the guy they work with, not the guy who laid them off,” says a Mike Huckabee ad running in Michigan. (It doesn’t tackle the follow-up question of whether most Americans would like the guy they work with to be handling nuclear proliferation.)
Mitt is making his stand in Michigan, one of the many, many states he calls home. Since Michigan has the highest unemployment rate in the nation, it’s an early test of what the Republicans are going to do if the big campaign issue is the tanking economy.
Rudy Giuliani, who has been lurking somewhere in the Everglades, emerged this week bearing a humongous tax-cut plan for corporations and investors. It showed the wisdom of the current Giuliani campaign strategy, which involves pretending that he is not really running anyplace where people actually vote.
Fred Thompson reacts stonily to any suggestion that the rich should not always get richer, and it was a real treat to watch him in New Hampshire when a debate moderator asked about a windfall profits tax on oil companies. Fred stared at him as if he’d heard a really foul obscenity, or been asked to convert to Scientology.
In the latest debate this week in South Carolina, Mitt laced into John McCain for making the rather obvious point that some of the lost Michigan jobs aren’t coming back.
“I disagree,” Romney announced firmly. “I’m going to fight for every single job in Michigan, South Carolina, every state in this country.” This called up interesting visions of Mitt the payroll-slashing businessman and Mitt the workers’ friend battling one another to the death over an imperiled tool-and-die maker. It would be sort of like “Spiderman 3,” without the weepy subplots.
McCain claims there’s not going to be a recession and that the big domestic challenge is cutting pork from the federal budget. “I saved the taxpayers $6 billion on a bogus tanker deal. I’m called the sheriff by my friends in the Senate who are appropriators,” he said in the debate. In fact, he said it twice. McCain has been sounding as if he’s on autopilot lately, and although he’s a vigorous 71, the endless electioneering has clearly been wearing on him.
Mike Huckabee’s campaign is a mixture of feelings, which are all on the side of the average working stiff, and policies, which are all on the side of the stock exchange. His sidekick, Chuck Norris, has his own stump speech that seems to blame our economic woes on “sheiks and Arabs” who “come over here, buy millions of dollars of merchandise and take it back to their homeland and don’t pay any taxes on it.”
It’s quite an assortment of Republican options. What bothers voters about Romney, as it turns out, is not his Mormonism but his inherent Mitt-ness. Fred Thompson is the Republican establishment dream candidate. (Social conservative, instinctive rich guy and he’s been a lobbyist, so he gets it.) Unfortunately, he reminds most other people of Mr. Potter, the banker in “It’s a Wonderful Life.”
Rudy’s actual problem is not that he failed to campaign enough in Iowa and New Hampshire, but that he showed up just often enough for the voters to get a sense of what he’s really like when he isn’t heroically covered in dust from a terrorist attack.
Huckabee seems to be a nice guy, but conservatives are afraid he’d break up the old evangelical-plutocrat Republican alliance and most liberals are restrained by their irrational attachment to the theory of evolution.
“I feel like Will Smith in ‘I Am Legend’ — I’m the last guy standing that’s not a zombie,” said McCain.
McCain thinks he’s not a zombie? That’s rich… Here’s Mr. Herbert:
We’re about to find out how resilient Barack Obama is.
I was not one of those who thought, during those frantic, giddy, sleepless few days leading up to the New Hampshire primary, that Mr. Obama was on his way to a blowout win.
When I mentioned my skepticism to reporters at an Obama rally in Derry on Sunday, everyone insisted he was romping to victory. “Double digits,” said one reporter.
This certainty was based on poll results and the size and enthusiasm of the Obama crowds. But poll results have been unreliable for decades when it comes to black candidates and white voters. And I wrote in a column that ran on election day that whenever Senator Obama would ask how many people in his overflow crowds were still undecided, about a third would raise their hands.
I was not predicting an Obama defeat. I just had a strong sense that the news media, feeding on itself, had lost sight of reality and that the election was bound to be close.
I could also sense how hard the Clinton camp was working to undermine Senator Obama’s main theme, that a campaign based on hope and healing could unify, rather than further polarize, the country.
So there was the former president chastising the press for the way it was covering the Obama campaign and saying of Mr. Obama’s effort: “The whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen.”
And there was Mrs. Clinton telling the country we don’t need “false hopes,” and taking cheap shots at, of all people, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
We’d already seen Clinton surrogates trying to implant the false idea that Mr. Obama might be a Muslim, and perhaps a drug dealer to boot. It struck me that the prediction of so many commentators that Senator Obama was about to run away with the nomination, and bury the Clintons in the process, was the real fairy tale.
The importance of Senator Obama’s effort was getting lost in the craziness. His message of hope and change had captured the Iowa caucuses and excited many thousands in the snowy precincts of New Hampshire.
The significance of his achievement did not lie in whether he would win the presidency (or any given caucus or primary) but in the fact that he might well be fashioning a positive change in the very character of the nation — in the way we view one another, and in our approach to the political process, and our willingness to climb off the couch and participate in it.
He was drawing young people into the process and exciting people across party lines.
The big deal was that Senator Obama, defying every stereotype, was making it easier for people, frustrated by the status quo, to dare to hope and believe in the country again. The early success of his candidacy, whether it would ultimately triumph or not, meant that the system was still open to outsiders and progressives and the young. Democracy American-style was still vital and dynamic and open to change. That was no small thing.
But the uncontrolled hype, with its predictions of a blowout in New Hampshire that could all but seal the nomination and shatter the Clinton dynasty, meant that even a modest victory by Senator Obama — a one- or two- or three-point win — would be characterized as a defeat.
And there were disturbing signs that Senator Obama himself had bought into the hype. There’s a fine line between brash and cocky. You can’t embark on a quest as audacious as Mr. Obama’s without a certain brashness. But cocky turns people off. And the senator seemed at times to stray across that line.
Until New Hampshire, his tone had been pitch-perfect, and often magnificent. But you knew instantly that it was a blunder during last Saturday night’s debate, in a moment that cried out for a touch of personal grace, to dismiss Senator Clinton as “likable enough.”
And in response to Mr. Clinton’s ranting, Mr. Obama told reporters: “I understand he’s feeling a little frustrated right now.” The senator believed he was winning big, and he wasn’t trying to hide it.
Pride, the nuns told me in grammar school, goeth before a fall. It may not be fair that the Clintons seem to be forgiven every sin while Mr. Obama’s margin of error is tiny at best. But it was Jack Kennedy, one of Mr. Obama’s important models, who liked to tell us that life is not fair.
Mr. Obama has one hell of a fight on his hands. Generals from throughout history would tell him not to cede the high ground.
