The 2016 Presidential election

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With what joy did I greet the day after the Presidential election! No more shrill television advertisements telling me that this candidate was a criminal and that candidate was a liar!

 

 

There was a very cute Facebook meme circulating that day and the next: a picture of a box full of kittens, with the caption: “Okay, Facebook! The election’s over! Time to get out the pictures of cute kittens!”

 

 

But it wasn’t more than a few days until we were told that Marco Rubio was visiting Iowa (for a friend’s birthday, naturally).

 

 

And Chris Matthews was talking about Hillary Clinton, and how she’s going to spend the next few years preparing for the 2016 election.

 

 

And then there was Fox News, which immediately began talking about the 2016 GOP hopefuls. (Stephen Colbert, drinking a cup of chamomile tea, did a wonderful spit-take over this, but I can’t find a clip of it.)

 

 

Well, who do you think (apart from Marco Rubio) would make a good GOP candidate?

 

 

Hmm. Someone tough-talking. Maybe a Northeasterner, which would (hopefully) screw up the Democratic lock on New England and the Northeast. Someone nationally known.

 

 

Who but New Jersey governor Chris Christie?

 

 

Yeah, I know. He doesn’t scare me much either. He’s a local flavor: he plays well in the Northeast, but maybe not so much in the South and West. He’s too noisy and angry, which aren’t really presidential traits.

 

 

But he would love love LOVE to be President.

 

 

Last week, when Hostess went out of business, he was asked about this. He blustered about it endlessly. Imagine, he said, what Saturday Night Live would make of it! Imagine how many laughs they’d get out of the fat Governor of New Jersey making comments about Cupcakes and Ding Dongs!

 

 

“You know,” Partner said prophetically, “he went on too long about it. He wants SNL to do something about it.”

 

 

And was Partner right?

 

 

In a big way. 

 

 

Not only did Christie get mentioned on SNL, he appeared on SNL. (I wish I could show you the clip, but NBC is very proprietary. Follow this link to Hulu, and you’ll get there.)

 

 

Christie was very cute: funny and natural (more natural than some of their recent guests and hosts).

 

 

If I were a Republican, and the 2016 Presidential election were today, I’d vote for him.

 

 

But – geez – a lot of things can happen in four years.

 

 

So let’s just wait a bit, and enjoy our Facebook kittens and our cup of chamomile tea, shall we, kids?

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The Romney campaign, as seen on Fox News

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Sometimes it’s a good idea to sneak over into the enemy camp and hear what they’re plotting. It’s dangerous, of course; if they catch you, they will kill you.

 

 

So, on Sunday night, while on the treadmill, I tuned into Fox News for about ten minutes. The danger, in this case, was that I might lose my temper and my grip, and go flying backward off the machine.

 

 

But I survived.

 

 

And oh the things I heard!

 

 

It was a little panel discussion – Chris Wallace, Brit Hume, Juan Williams, Bill Kristol, and a couple of others I didn’t recognize – talking about the Romney campaign, and the recently-released Romney video.  A gloomier bunch of mopes you have never seen. Chris Wallace turned somberly to Hume and asked: “Was this video fatal to the Romney campaign?”

 

 

Hume looked sour (well, sourer than usual). “Not fatal. But it sure wasn’t good.”

 

 

This, from the loathsome Bill Kristol: “I’ve been working for twenty-five or thirty years to put forward conservative ideas, and then something like this happens, and it completely muddles the message we’re trying to put forward.”

 

 

(Translation: “For thirty years I’ve been putting forward a strategy to put our people into power, and then this idiot goes and actually spills the beans in front of a camera!”)

 

 

Slowly, and with great schadenfreude, I realized that I was hearing the formulation of Plan B: what to do if the GOP loses the election. If the Republicans go down to defeat, you can be sure that it will be entirely and completely credited to Mitt Romney’s weakness as a candidate, and his terrible campaign.

 

 

Well, all kinds of things can happen between now and November.

 

 

And, as Ann Romney whined the other day: “This is hard!”

 

 

(Not nearly so hard as listening to Chris Wallace and Brit Hume and Bill Kristol, though.)

 

 

And now, drag queen Mimi Imfurst doing a dramatic interpretation of Ann Romney’s statement:

 

 

 

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The Presidential campaign: an update

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I don’t write about politics very often. It doesn’t win me many friends. The people who agree with me still agree with me, and the people who disagree – well, they can just shut their pieholes.

 

 

But I cannot resist commenting on the past week’s Presidential-campaign events, which have been truly delicious.

 

 

The overture was Mitt Romney’s speech to the NAACP. “ROMNEY IN THE LION’S DEN!” trumpeted any number of commentators. See? Mitt is the prophet Daniel, and the NAACP were the lions, or the Persians, or the Assyrians, or something. Anyway, it didn’t take long to see that Mitt was using this as an opportunity to show his (white) supporters that he isn’t going to take any backtalk from any (nonwhite) minority groups when he becomes President. It reminded me of those wonderful moments in professional wrestling when the villain grabs the microphone from the scrawny announcer and begins to berate the audience. He knows they hate him. That’s what it’s all about.

 

 

This is an interesting campaign strategy, trying to win the Presidency with not a single minority vote. (Mitt might still pick a ringer for VP, like Marco Rubio, but I doubt it; it’ll be a whitey like him and me, like Pawlenty or Ryan (well, Ryan sounds Irish, so I don’t know), or that guy from Ohio that no one’s ever heard of. Absolutely not a woman. Not Sarah Palin, and not Condi Rice. She’s pro-choice! She’s been on “30 Rock”! She’s black!)

 

 

Then there was the call for Mitt to release his tax returns. He will not, will not, do it. (Do you wonder what’s in them? So do I. I’m not normally eager to read other people’s tax returns, but these I’ll take a glance at.) Speculation is running wild. Were there years in which he paid no tax at all? Quite possible. Would the itemizations yield up interesting facts about the Romney fortune? Also quite possible.

 

 

There was a day or two of Mitt looking strangled and hopeless over this issue. Then the GOP figured out its riposte: OBAMA ISN’T AN AMERICAN!

 

 

Yes, you heard me.

 

 

Mitt called his policies “foreign” in a speech a day or two ago. John Sununu said that he wished “Obama would learn how to be an American.” (John Sununu, by the way, is an Arab-American. You would think – wouldn’t you? – that an Arab-American would realize that this kind of rhetoric can be inflammatory.  Apparently not.) Sununu said lots of other unkind things. Obama’s team are “liars” (because the Obama campaign has said – with perfect reasonableness, and in the absence of any extenuating evidence – that, if Romney lied about his status at Bain on his tax returns, it might have been a felony. Naturally this can be disproven if Romney were to release his returns.). Also: Obama has “demonized success.” (Not at all. Would that we could all be as wealthy as Mitt Romney! Of course, he inherited part of his fortune, and his handsome sons will inherit even more, from all those fat Swiss / Cayman bank accounts.)

 

 

Most deliciously: Rush Limbaugh has decried the new Batman movie, because the villain’s name is Bane. Obviously this is a reference to Bain Capital. (One Tumblr wit pointed out that, since the Batman villain Bane is a fat drug user who was popular in the 1990s, you’d think that Rush would like him.)

 

 

Oh, it’s all pretty funny.

 

 

So why am I not laughing?

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The "gotcha" question

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Back during the 2008 election period – especially after the selection of Sarah Palin as McCain’s VP candidate – I became exceptionally sensitive to the issue of the “gotcha question.”  A reporter asked Sarah a question about (I think) Pakistan, and she gave an honest and unguarded answer (which happened to coincide with Candidate Obama’s stand on the issue).  She later retracted her answer angrily, saying that she’d been asked a “gotcha” question by the media.

 

 

Speaking as someone who interviews people from time to time for a living, here are some comments on this, and on the current election cycle:

 

 

1)     There is no such thing as a “gotcha” question.  If you’re thinking of something like: “Have you stopped beating your wife? Answer yes or no!”, then you are living in a Marx Brothers universe.

2)     Asking a presidential candidate a question about politics, or foreign affairs, or economics, is perfectly fair.  All of these fall within the job requirements, you see.  Presidents have to work in all of those areas.  If you’re hiring someone for a job, you want to see how well they’ll do under stress, and if they know their stuff.  Sometimes you ask them hard questions.  “Why are you so great?” is a pointless question.  So is “Why is your opponent so wrong-headed?”  Both questions are just opportunities to let the candidate recite his/her talking points. 

3)     Tough questions are what it’s all about. Presidents get asked tough questions all the time.  Presidential candidates who whine about being asked tough questions aren’t really thinking about the job they’re seeking.

4)     Presidents are noted for handling tough questions with good humor and candor.   Really good presidents are able to defuse their questioners with charm and tact.  Roosevelt did it; Truman did it; Kennedy did it; Clinton did it; Reagan did it.  This is a valuable skill (see foreign relations, above).

5)     This one is for Herman Cain: being asked the capital of Uzbekistan is maybe a little bit of a Jeopardy! question, and not so much a foreign-policy question (although, ahem, even I know the answer to that one).  However: being asked about American flyover privileges or airbases in Uzbekistan is perfectly okay, since it has to do with what you will (maybe) be doing for the next four years.

6)     Only stupid people want a stupid president.

7)     Why would a clearly unintelligent / uninformed / untrained candidate (like Rick Perry, for example) run for the Presidency?  Presumably because someone told him that he could learn as he went along.  He’d be able to rely on his advisors and staff for the stuff he didn’t know, and he could rely on his gut for the important stuff.  Sound familiar?  Yes, I thought so. 

8)     Watch the Funny Or Die GOP Presidential Debate.  It says all this better than I ever could.  With Patrick Warburton and Leslie Jordan and Larry King yet.

9)     Presidents work for us, not us for them.  We’re the supervisors; we get a say in hiring them.  We get to ask the hard questions in the interview process.

 

 

I hope I live through this election year.  I honestly hope Romney gets the GOP nomination; he’s not electrifying, he’s like the Republican John Kerry.  If it’s someone (god forbid) like Santorum or Gingrich, I may have to drink strychnine. 

 

 

But don’t worry, everyone – the world ends in December, only a few weeks after the election!

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Herman Cain and Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan

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As of last weekend, the Republican presidential primary race lost a contender: Herman Cain dropped out.  It wasn’t his fault, blah blah blah, it was the media, those women’s accusations were just a distraction, blah blah blah, you will be hearing more from him soon.

 

 

Yes, of course, whatever.

 

 

The Ed Show last night had a nice mini-documentary on the Cain mini-campaign: 99.9 seconds of Cain’s various presentations and speeches, mostly in chronological order, including all of his most famous (and infamous) pronouncements.

 

 

I shivered with embarrassment through most of it.  Nine-nine-nine.  Trying to remember what, if anything, he remembered about the Libya conflict.  Saying that, for every woman who’d accused him of harassment, there were a thousand others who hadn’t.  It was a combination of hubris and ignorance which will not be outdone anytime soon.

 

 

But there was one statement that made me boilingly furious, and when I heard it again the other night, I started fuming all over again. 

 

 

I will pull it from a news story, so that I don’t make any transcription mistakes:

 

 

In an Oct. 8 interview, Cain announced his strategy to combat what he called "gotcha" questions, such as who are the leaders of foreign countries. 

 

 

"And when they ask who is the president of Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan, I'm going to say, ‘You know, I don't know. Do you know?' And then I'm going to say, ‘How's that going to create one job?'" Cain declared. 

 

 

He later added: “Knowing who is the head of some of these small insignificant states around the world — I don’t think that is something that is critical to focusing on national security and getting this economy going.”

 

 

This angers me for so many reasons.  Here are a few:

 

-        Evidently there are candidates who believe that they can win an election by making a virtue of their own abysmal ignorance.  

-        Evidently there are voters who, out of sheer stupidity, would reward this kind of ignorance. 

-        Saying “I don’t know” is fine, if it’s said with humility and with the intention of learning more about the subject at hand, especially if it concerns what you do for a living.  And – here’s the thing – geopolitics are a big part what an American president does for a living.   

-        We will assume that Cain was talking about Uzbekistan.  I can name that tune in four notes, without even Googling: the president’s name is Islam Karimov, and he’s been president of Uzbekistan ever since its independence in the early 1990s.  He is a pretty horrendous tyrant.  Uzbekistan is by no means a small country, and its population outnumbers that of the state of Texas (okay, I had to look that one up, but I’d guessed it had around 30 million people, and I was pretty close).   It, and its various stan-stan neighbors, are rich in resources and control vital strategic locations in Central Asia.  We are not talking about San Marino or Liechtenstein here. 

 

 

(It is interesting to note that, when Hilary Clinton visited Afghanistan a bit later, President Hamid Karzai actually asked her about this.  Word gets around, doesn’t it?)

 

 

Okay.  Cain’s out of the race, so I can stop ranting. 

 

 

But others just as stupid – hmm, could I be thinking of Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann? – are still in the running. 

 

 

And they may actually have a chance.

 

 

And that scares the living bejeebers out of me.

 

 

Sometimes Partner and I half-joke about making a run for Canada, if things get bad enough.

 

 

I do believe it may be time to make sure my passport is in order.

 

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