The Fortnightly Rant for August 26, 2011, from The New Hampshire Gazette, Volume 255, No. 24, posted on Monday, September 26, 2011.
The 2012 Presidential campaign has now begun in earnest. Or semi-earnest, anyway. And it’s about time, too. We have, at most, twelve more fortnights in which to catalog all the inanity, fatuousness, and deception coming our way.*
The curtain for this quadrennial executive Gong Show rose on August 13th in Ames, Iowa. Minnesota Representative Michele Bachmann won the Iowa Straw Poll with 4,823 votes. At the going rate of $30 per vote — seriously, that’s how they do it out there — her victory represents an investment of $144,690, exclusive of tent rentals, corn dogs, and all the other requisite paraphernalia.
Bachmann outpaced her closest rival, Texas Representative Ron Paul, by 152 votes, or less than one percent. The notably frugal Paul was penny wise but pound foolish: for another $4,590 he could have won!
Fairly Unbalanced
Considering those squeaky-close results and the event’s rather lax standards, it would not seem unreasonable to consider the Straw Poll a virtual tie. Judging from the media coverage, though, you’d think that Bachmann had crushed Paul into whatever that stuff was that they were all standing in, out there in the barnyard.
Bachmann garnered 108 stories in major news outlets, while Paul drew only 27. Two non-candidates, Donald Trump, with 94 stories, and Sarah Palin, with 85, both got far more coverage than near-winner Paul.†
Tim Pawlenty, the former Governor of Minnesota, came in third with 13.6 percent of the vote, a poor enough showing to inspire him to drop out.
The rest of the Republican field must be operating under some other variety of calculus; none of them drew more than ten percent of the vote, but they’re all still running.
Boldly ripping a page from the Sarah Palin playbook, Texas Governor Rick Perry announced his own candidacy on the same day as the Straw Poll, stomping all over what would otherwise have been Bachmann’s news cycle.
Removing any lingering doubts about his capacity for boorish behavior, Perry suggested that Ben Bernanke, the head of the Fed, may be guilty of treason and ought not to visit Texas if he values his health.
That set the bar pretty high — or low — but Bachmann did what she could to recover the spotlight. Trying, apparently, to draw upon the country’s current mania for zombies, she claimed that Americans are worried about the “rise of the Soviet Union.”
Taking it Downtown
Perry got a contentious welcome here in Portsmouth five days later. While he was telling a small boy in front of Popovers that schools in Texas teach creationism — a statement almost as misleading as the pseudo-science it promotes — Perry was subjected to irate shouts of “Please secede!”, “Hands off our Medicare!”, and “Stop attacking middle-class families, Rick Perry!”
Despite Perry’s unbelief regarding climatology and evolutionary biology, there is one science in which he places great faith: political science. And he’s paying New Hampshire’s own David Carney to run the most scientific campaign possible, according to an article in Monday’s New York Times. One conclusion: the best way of using the candidate’s time is “having Perry set foot in a coffee shop or BBQ restaurant — even if there was only a small crowd to witness it in person — [it’s] the best media strategy available” — even if the candidate gets heckled.
The Lunatic Majority
Full-blown Crackpotism has clearly become the dominant theology of the Republican Party. Bachmann and Perry both want to lead the choir, but Palin herself could well announce her own candidacy, creating a three-way struggle for what now passes as the GOP’s mainstream.
It’s highly unlikely that Palin would really running for President because it would cost her a lucrative career in the self-promotion industry. Masquerading as a candidate for a few months, though, would buff up her alleged credentials nicely.
Fighting Over Crumbs
Meanwhile, back on Planet Earth, a pair of Mormons are fighting hard for the support of that dwindling market, the rational remainder. Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman have both taken the radical step of saying they believe in global warming and evolution.
Romney did not officially compete in the Straw Poll, but he did emerge from one of his luxurious bunkers long enough to declare that “corporations are people, my friend.” He picked up 567 write-in votes, presumably from personal friends such as Exxon Mobil, Goldman Sachs, and McDonnell Douglas.
Jon Huntsman fared even less well. Despite being an official Straw Poll candidate, he came away with just 69 votes.
It’s anybody’s guess who the eventual Republican nominee will be, but Perry has charged to the front of the field in one hell of a hurry. Two polls released Thursday have him 12 or 13 points ahead of Romney, with Bachmann — the most exciting candidate in the field just ten days ago — trailing weakly.
So, going up against an incumbent President with terrible approval ratings, in a bad economy Republicans are actively making worse, they seem to think right now that their best bet of winning is to go with a God-fearing Texas governor who believes the Earth was created 6,000 years ago.
It’s going to be interesting to see how that works out for them — and for all of us.
-30-
* We could have even less time than that if Republicans in other states, jealous of New Hampshire’s First in the Nation© Presidential Primary,™ force Secretary of State for Life Bill Gardner to move the date up from February 14, 2012. While New Hampshire’s is the first real primary in the Presidential nominating process, we do graciously condescend to let Iowa hold two prior events. Their idiosycratic Caucus is scheduled for February 6th.
† This is according to the rigorously nonpartisan Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.