By Judith Gayle | Political Waves
It’s official: there are two separate realities playing out simultaneously in the United States of America, and last night, much like a hairball, one of them coughed up a tepid presidential candidate who tried for sincerity and missed the mark. Have you noticed that Mitt looks pained when he smiles? That his gaze shifts restlessly, like he’s trying to spot the wild-eyed leftist in the crowd hiding a Molotov cocktail in his trench coat (more likely from a liberal, a can of silly string!)? Have you seen him when Ann sings his praises? He watches her lips until she’s done, then when the reporter turns to him for comment, he chimes in, too eagerly, “Yes, it’s true … waah waah waaaah,” in the same buzz-like drone of that Peanuts teacher, saying nothing and meaning less.
Those of us who live in the other universe, peeking in, are reminded with a chill down our spines that Mitt isn’t running for warm-blooded representative of the American republic; he’s applying for the job as Grover Nordquist’s final arbiter: the cold-blooded guy who gets to drown a teetering government in the tub. Mitt’s got skills as a scavenger and he’s going to pull this nation apart, scrap it, send its jobs overseas and hustle the profit over to the Caymans. Oh, it’ll take him awhile, he’ll have to play his cards carefully, but it’s inevitable: it’s what he does, what he knows how to do. Mitt makes money on money. When Anne talks about those early days of ‘struggle,’ she mentions how Mitt had to cash in investments to make ends meet. Yes, Mitt is a plutocrat running as a concerned everyman, an elitist better at crunching numbers in the abstract than dealing with humans and their messy problems, and — to my mind, anyhow — he’s the least likely, most unimpressive presidential candidate of my lifetime.
The talking heads long ago pointed to this current moment as one in which Mitt — a chronically late bloomer, it appears — had to knock it out of the park, reveal his inner fuzzy-wuzzy and chart a course to American restoration and pride. Instead, Tampa’s final evening — the 2012 Republican crescendo, if you will — will be remembered as the night when we realized that Rowdy Yates a.k.a Dirty Harry a.k.a. Clint Eastwood is better off BEHIND the camera these days and probably shouldn’t try for a career in standup anytime soon. The one speech NOT vetted, manipulated and tightly controlled by the Romneyites turned out to be a bumbling, ill-timed pratfall by a Libertarian octogenarian who is hardly the bad-ass he played in the movies. And sadly, anyone brave enough to have watched it all without covering their eyes might have taken the point that the Pub crowd loved it anyway, one more reminder that they’re mostly old, white farts in funny hats themselves.