the SNOB
Saturday, January 05, 2008
DE CAUCUSI IOWANI, or, Huckafuck
If forced to come up with a reason to vote for Hillary this November, you could do a lot worse, but probably not much better than Huckabee, who is possessed of every vice of a contemporary Republican but scarcely any of their virtues. While generally of the opinion that winning with a bad candidate is always better than losing with a good one, a Huckabee loss in the national election would teach the GOP all of the right lessons as surely as his victory would cement all of the wrong ones.
That said, I will not refrain from taking a certain delight in his apparent triumph over Mitt, whose presence in the race has never been really wanted by anyone, least of all by yours truly. Don't get me wrong--I'd rather have Romney dog-sit for me than Shannon "who?"O'Brien--but he showed his true colors when he left the few, the proud Massachusetts Republicans out on the prairie with no one but Sherry Healey to lead us.
It reminded me too much of his folding like an accordion in his 1994 debate with Ted Kennedy, which I remember as vividly as Red Sox fans over a certain age remember Bill Buckner's moment of doubt and pain. It was a race he stood a chance of winning right up until the moderator lobbed up a meatball about raising taxes for to pay for anaesthesia for children dying of early-onset Alzheimer's or some similarly transparent paean to Cantabrigian pieties, whereupon Uncle Ted yawned and crawled out of his den and did things to Mitt Romney that would have been deemed over the line at George Michael's birthday party. It's not that he lost--forcibly removing a Kennedy from office in Massachusetts would have earned Romney a deserved spot in the pantheon of great political conquerors--it's the way he choked and fell to pieces.
My real fear with Romney isn't that he might win, but that if he wins the nomination, that Obama or Hillary would do to him what Deval would have done in 2006 and Ted did in 1994. Romney has made it thus far by being very good at ducking punches, but to win the election, let alone succeed as president, you need to throw a few. Cow Hampshire next Tuesday is as good a setup as he could ask for to stage a comeback--something he's never really had to do. If he doesn't win there, it's back to private equity for the duration.
As for those Democrats...
A while back, when Obama started running for president (was that before or after he dropped the "-elect" from his title?), I mentioned to someone that what I found interesting about him was that he was the sole Democrat candidate that a lot of diehard Republicans would say positive things about without the use of force or alcohol.
Hillary's candidacy is as much of an offense to the Republic as Paris Hilton's celebrity is to whatever self-respect Hollywood wants us to think it has; I mean, the former first lady getting elected president is the sort of thing you expect from a country like Argentina. The amazing part is that I like Edwards even less. Listening to him talk about economics is like listening to Huckabee talk about evolution, with Huckabee having the edge there by virtue of sincerity. Edwards' "the people versus the powerful" schtick is so transparently bogus that, much like spam for v1ag4a, I reserve as much disdain for the people who buy as for the guy selling it.
But Osama, Obama, whatever, the black dude... he is sui generis, and certainly the freshest strawberry in the patch. I would feel a lot better if he had a stint as governor of Illinois, or something else that required him to manage more than a few dozen aides, but we are certainly about to see how he handles a fight, because unlike Monica, Hillary will not go down easy.
Starting in 2004 I was beginning to get the sense that the hard-Left core of the Democratic Party wanted to exorcise the Clintons and their DLC-inspired centrism for good. Kerry was too close to do it, and Bill's abiding popularity continues to hold the Jacobins at bay, but a thoroughly Clintonian sliming of Obama, particularly if not successful (or if, Kerry-like, HRC wins the nomination but loses the election), will seal the end of their political careers. Of course, so would an Obama or Edwards victory. Either way, survey says it's going to get real ugly.
And a good day for Iowa
I won't mince words: I hate Iowa. For years I listened to family members from out yonder tell me that there was in fact interesting life between Las Vegas and that part of the country West of the Hudson River. Then one day I went to work as a traveling IT consultant and had the luck of getting saddled with a client located in Cedar Rapids. After a lifetime of scoffing at people who tried to tell me that the Midwest wasn't the dullest, blandest place you could possibly imagine, going to Iowa was like visiting Paris and seeing every woman walking a poodle and every guy pedaling a bicycle in a beret and striped shirt. But I digress.
Iowa is part of the kabuki of our electoral process and denunciations of the role of a sparsely-populated and depressingly homogenous farm state is as much a part of the ritual as anything else. Iowa is too white, the caucuses are too exclusionary, blah blah. It is a perfect illustration of one aspect of silly liberal pieties that if this exact same process were taking place in an Indian village high in the Bolivian altiplano, you can rest assured that all the same folks would be talking about how charming and authentic it all is. Liberals have never met a tradition they didn't love, so long as it was someone else's. ¶ 8:38 PM
If forced to come up with a reason to vote for Hillary this November, you could do a lot worse, but probably not much better than Huckabee, who is possessed of every vice of a contemporary Republican but scarcely any of their virtues. While generally of the opinion that winning with a bad candidate is always better than losing with a good one, a Huckabee loss in the national election would teach the GOP all of the right lessons as surely as his victory would cement all of the wrong ones.
That said, I will not refrain from taking a certain delight in his apparent triumph over Mitt, whose presence in the race has never been really wanted by anyone, least of all by yours truly. Don't get me wrong--I'd rather have Romney dog-sit for me than Shannon "who?"O'Brien--but he showed his true colors when he left the few, the proud Massachusetts Republicans out on the prairie with no one but Sherry Healey to lead us.
It reminded me too much of his folding like an accordion in his 1994 debate with Ted Kennedy, which I remember as vividly as Red Sox fans over a certain age remember Bill Buckner's moment of doubt and pain. It was a race he stood a chance of winning right up until the moderator lobbed up a meatball about raising taxes for to pay for anaesthesia for children dying of early-onset Alzheimer's or some similarly transparent paean to Cantabrigian pieties, whereupon Uncle Ted yawned and crawled out of his den and did things to Mitt Romney that would have been deemed over the line at George Michael's birthday party. It's not that he lost--forcibly removing a Kennedy from office in Massachusetts would have earned Romney a deserved spot in the pantheon of great political conquerors--it's the way he choked and fell to pieces.
My real fear with Romney isn't that he might win, but that if he wins the nomination, that Obama or Hillary would do to him what Deval would have done in 2006 and Ted did in 1994. Romney has made it thus far by being very good at ducking punches, but to win the election, let alone succeed as president, you need to throw a few. Cow Hampshire next Tuesday is as good a setup as he could ask for to stage a comeback--something he's never really had to do. If he doesn't win there, it's back to private equity for the duration.
As for those Democrats...
A while back, when Obama started running for president (was that before or after he dropped the "-elect" from his title?), I mentioned to someone that what I found interesting about him was that he was the sole Democrat candidate that a lot of diehard Republicans would say positive things about without the use of force or alcohol.
Hillary's candidacy is as much of an offense to the Republic as Paris Hilton's celebrity is to whatever self-respect Hollywood wants us to think it has; I mean, the former first lady getting elected president is the sort of thing you expect from a country like Argentina. The amazing part is that I like Edwards even less. Listening to him talk about economics is like listening to Huckabee talk about evolution, with Huckabee having the edge there by virtue of sincerity. Edwards' "the people versus the powerful" schtick is so transparently bogus that, much like spam for v1ag4a, I reserve as much disdain for the people who buy as for the guy selling it.
But Osama, Obama, whatever, the black dude... he is sui generis, and certainly the freshest strawberry in the patch. I would feel a lot better if he had a stint as governor of Illinois, or something else that required him to manage more than a few dozen aides, but we are certainly about to see how he handles a fight, because unlike Monica, Hillary will not go down easy.
Starting in 2004 I was beginning to get the sense that the hard-Left core of the Democratic Party wanted to exorcise the Clintons and their DLC-inspired centrism for good. Kerry was too close to do it, and Bill's abiding popularity continues to hold the Jacobins at bay, but a thoroughly Clintonian sliming of Obama, particularly if not successful (or if, Kerry-like, HRC wins the nomination but loses the election), will seal the end of their political careers. Of course, so would an Obama or Edwards victory. Either way, survey says it's going to get real ugly.
And a good day for Iowa
I won't mince words: I hate Iowa. For years I listened to family members from out yonder tell me that there was in fact interesting life between Las Vegas and that part of the country West of the Hudson River. Then one day I went to work as a traveling IT consultant and had the luck of getting saddled with a client located in Cedar Rapids. After a lifetime of scoffing at people who tried to tell me that the Midwest wasn't the dullest, blandest place you could possibly imagine, going to Iowa was like visiting Paris and seeing every woman walking a poodle and every guy pedaling a bicycle in a beret and striped shirt. But I digress.
Iowa is part of the kabuki of our electoral process and denunciations of the role of a sparsely-populated and depressingly homogenous farm state is as much a part of the ritual as anything else. Iowa is too white, the caucuses are too exclusionary, blah blah. It is a perfect illustration of one aspect of silly liberal pieties that if this exact same process were taking place in an Indian village high in the Bolivian altiplano, you can rest assured that all the same folks would be talking about how charming and authentic it all is. Liberals have never met a tradition they didn't love, so long as it was someone else's. ¶ 8:38 PM
