The rise and fall of the GOP primary field continues apace. Herman Cain apparently shat the bed today in an interview with newspaper editors in Milwaukee – blaming low sleep and “all these things twirling around in [his] head” for why he couldn’t say whether he agreed with the President’s handling of Libya.
Which is as it should be. Herman Cain shouldn’t go down because of accusations of sexual harassment, odious though they may be – he should go down because he is singularly unfit to be President, not least because of what appears to be willful ignorance regarding the rest of the world (the “Uzbecki-becki-becki-becki-stan-stan” moment being the shining example there). Similarly, as others have said, Rick Perry shouldn’t go down because he stared into the camera unable to name which cabinet department he would eliminate – he should go down because he essentially represents George W. Bush without the intellectual rigor or the burden of self-awareness, and because if we can’t have Jed Bartlett we shouldn’t have to suffer through Bob Ritchie.
Now Michele Bachmann, she’s going down for all the right reasons – and among them, the most amazing quote of all time:
“If you look at China, they don’t have food stamps. If you look at China, they’re in a very different situation. They save for their own retirement security…They don’t have the modern welfare state and China’s growing. And so what I would do is look at the programs that LBJ gave us with the Great Society and they’d be gone.”
I realize that most people seem to have forgotten that a) Medicare is in fact a Great Society program and b) China is in fact a Communist country, rather than a model of state-supported capitalist oligarchy, but a person who aspires to be President and does not realize these things is a person who would be better served by inpatient therapy rather than media attention. The phrase “dumbest bitch on the face of the motherfucking Earth” springs to mind.
And before either of them was Donald Trump, who mainly served as an existence proof of why NBC News should be shut down tomorrow, its assets resold, and the proceeds distributed to those made stupider by the likes of David Gregory and Matt Lauer over the past decade.
The reason these amazing clowns continue to get their day in the sun is due to the fact that, as Jon Chait has plainly laid out, “Republicans could [not] be making this any more plain: they do not want to nominate Mitt Romney.” Nor can the GOP be blamed for this: a candidate who has taken at least three sides of every conceivable issue over the past six years is categorically unsuited to a party-in-electorate for whom ideological fidelity is the lodestar of their belief system. Multiple Choice Mitt is the polished, blow-dried, smooth-talking apotheosis of the Republican President-as-CEO ideal. It would have worked a treat in 2000, or 2004. It might have worked in 2008, with enough ideological separation from then-President Bush. It is not working on the 2012 GOP primary electorate, because the “Tea Party” is the Republican base and always has been. Like any primary electorate, they are more partisan than the electorate at large, and like any activist electorate, they would rather be right than compromise to win.
This is exactly what they want, and exactly what any Southern-based American politics specialist since 1980 could have predicted without breaking a sweat. Abramowitz, Sabato, the Black brothers, Geer, they’ll all tell you the same: in a Southernized one-party political process, what the primary voters want is the person who will sling the shit. They all ostensibly believe the same things, are on the same side of issues, agree what the issues actually are – the main point of differentiation is who can be the loudest, angriest, most opposed to the Negroes/Muslims/socialists/terrorists/Mexicans. As soon as Trump was made a fool of, Michele Bachmann was right there on the high dive into the crazy pool. Once Rick Perry – who had the advantage of a higher elected office and a Y chromosome – jumped into the race, he naturally took over. Once he flaked and betrayed a hint of sympathy for the educational prospects of children of illegal immigrants, and publicly derailed his train of thought, Herman Cain took charge. Now that his campaign is faltering on the twin rocks of documented grabbiness and a limited grasp of 6th grade geography, and is slowly being revealed as one big Fox News application essay, it’s going to be someone else’s turn.
Right now, polling suggests that will be Newt Gingrich. I’ll repeat myself: if you were able to split Bill Clinton into one person who embodied everything people liked about the Big Dog and one who embodied everything people hated about him, you’d get Barack Obama and Newt Gingrich respectively. And that’s before contemplating that Newt is the guy who decided not to strike until the iron had a decade or so to cool, and that pretty much anyone who pays attention already knows what they think of him. As the Not-Mitt-of-the-week, he will be serviceable for a month or so. As the prospective 2012 nominee, he’s Barack Obama’s golden ticket to four more years of hanging out at Ray’s Hell Burger and getting sideline seats to basketball games on aircraft carriers.
It’s not that the GOP doesn’t want to win, or that they couldn’t win in 2012. It’s that the cupboard is bare after years and years of ideological purification, of Gypsy Moth retirements and Northeasterners going along to get along and Southern dominance of the party machinery. The GOP took the same tack as the Democratic Leadership Council did in the early 90s: we have to move to the right. But whereas the Democrats were trying to tack away from McGovern and Mondale and Dukakis, the Republicans were looking at Ford and Reagan and Dole and McCain and saying, not conservative enough. And it may cost them the easiest shot at winning a Presidential election since 1980…or maybe 1932.