TOY STORY—REPUBLICAN STYLE

On Wednesday a campaign aide to Mitt Romney projected an image for the candidate that might not be desirable. He stated that during primary season Mitt had to take more extreme positions to keep his rivals for the nomination from gaining an advantage on some issues. But this aide noted that, once the nomination is secured, for the fall campaign Romney will essentially abandon some of these extreme positions and appeal more to the mainstream electorate.

This aide likened this coming change to an Etch-A-Sketch, the toy on which a child creates images and then, to start over, merely shakes the board up.

Pundits, commentators, bloggers and ordinary people sat up and took notice, probably generating a run on the toys as they appeared everywhere in news stories and on TV talking head shows.

This got me thinking about what toys might best represent the other Republican candidates, current and past. here goes:

Newt Gingrich……Given his reputation, this toy is apt not so much for the toy itself but for its name

Just watching him also evokes images of this:

Michelle Bachmann……She is long gone from the campaign, but in light of her penchant for talking off the top of her head:

   

Ron Paul……Not a toy per se but most assuredly a plaything for ventriloquist Jeff Dunham:

Mr. Paul has also taken a strong stance on another topic on a substance that millions like to play with:

Herman Cain…The Hermanator built his quick-disappearing campaign around his 9-9-9 tax reform plan. The problem was, not even he understood it, resulting in this toy image:

Rick Perry……The Texas governor entered the race as a front-runner but ended up a near laughing stock due to his many mishaps. It’s like his campaign was a toy train and he was doing this:

Rick Santorum……Famous for claiming that homosexual sex/marriage would inevitably lead to “man on dog”:

He also looks extremely unfavorably on contraception, limiting his approval to abstinence and this:

Mitt Romney……Not only can the Mittster be found with Etch-A-Sketch in hand, his frequent change of political positions means he probably carries one of these, too:

Finally, all these candidates have traversed many miles as they’ve careened from debate to debate and primary to primary. This is their principal mode of transportation:

IOWA HAS SPOKEN——-IOWA MUMBLES

The results are in from the Iowa caucuses for the Republican clowns…er candidates…running for their party’s Presidential nomination. The conclusion is they are inconclusive.

Mitt Romney won the good folks’ hearts by the astounding total of eight…that’s right, eight (8) …votes over his chief rival Newt Gingrich. What? You mean it was Rick Santorum who finished second? And Newt came in fourth?

My goodness! You could have knocked me with a shovel over. (A nod to my high school yearbooks’s use of faux Amish dialect as a theme one year).

Rick Santorum, whose appeal lies mainly with those worried homosexual men will be wooing their dogs (http://www.rawstory.com/rawreplay/2011/09/santorum-i-stand-by-my-man-on-dog-comment/) or, god forbid, shopping for condoms for that Saturday night date, experienced a surge in Iowa from his prior position at the rear of the pack of the GOP contenders.

Or, to continue my usual characterization of the GOP field as a “clown car”, perhaps he has finally managed to crawl out of the trunk.

Likewise, Ron Paul drew a greater percentage of caucusers in his favor than what he has ever polled on the national front.

So here is how I capsulize the top three finishers.

Mitt Romney campaigns on the notion that he has been in the private sector, not in political office, unlike his rivals. Well, it’s not for lack of trying. It’s for lack of sufficient votes in all save one campaign he’s run to actually—you know—get elected. Unfortunately for him that is the number one pre-requisite for holding office, being elected.

Rick Santorum, whose appeal I have already described, still looks like the nerd who has crashed the cool guys’ party and remains pretty much ignored, but has suddenly donned the lampshade and drawn stoned laughter from the other party goers who, no doubt, will have no memory of the evening.

Ron Paul has sensibly adopted the idea, foreign to most of our politicians of both parties, that it is unwise to have American government involved in foreign lands. His downfall will be that he decries the involvement of American government in America. Why would we elect a President who only wants to turn out the lights in Washington, D.C. and go home to Texas? Come on, Ron, earn your damned $400,000 a year!

The Also Rans

Newt Gingrich apparently has already peaked. He most certainly has piqued the scorn of any serious voter who has peeked at the campaign so far. Yet, the narrow results in Iowa suggest a serious strategic error on his part. He should have brought all his wives and probable illicit lovers with him to the Hawkeye State.  Those hundreds of votes would have provided a huge boost. I mean, what better evidence of his passion for serving his country could he have exhibited?

Michelle Bachmann announced the suspension of her campaign today. Too bad. Now her wild statements deviating from the truth will not attract the attention necessary for Politifact to rule on them. In that forum she’s a winner, having posted more “Pants on Fire” rulings than any other candidate. Metaphorically speaking, if she had emerged from the cornfield in Field Of Dreams and asked “Is this heaven?”, Ray Kinsella’s response would not have been, “No, it’s Iowa” as it was to Shoeless Joe. Instead it would have been “No, it’s your hell.”

Rick Perry was asked at a press conference before the caucuses to name all six candidates. He counted off on his fingers, “Romney, uh Gingrich, Bachmann, uh Santorum?, Huntsman, and ….wait a minute, I know…hold on…

Rick, the Iowa voters must have had the same problem.

Jon Huntsman, you left a prestigious and honorable job as Ambassador to China, which you performed well, to pursue this prize. Just like on Let’s make A Deal you chose the wrong door. Please let your daughters continue the fight. This voter is willing to be persuaded.

Just as sands through the hourglass denote the days of our lives, so do they mark some people’s end of their fifteen minutes of fame.

p.s.

By the way. Doesn’t Santorum’s surge for the caucuses sound suspiciously like some sexual activity of which he would surely disapprove?

REPUBLICIOUS—THE HIT REALITY SHOW

I’ve been describing the ongoing debates for the Republican candidates for President as a touring clown car, dispensing its passengers in towns big and small to stage yet another comic exhibition for the local townsfolk that also reaches a TV audience.

But perhaps my assessment of the style of entertainment these politicians offer as a circus act is wrong. One could just as easily view it as the latest reality show. Instead of being produced by MTV or Bravo,  various entities have had this responsibility and several networks/cable channels have aired the debates.

Dick Polman in an op-ed piece in the Post-Gazette urges that they continue.

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/11329/1192095-109-0.stm

…the GOP is staging one of the great reality shows, with a rollicking cast of colorful characters who keep getting voted off the island but keep coming back for more.

There’s a cliff-hanger every week.

Will Rick Perry master the English sentence and reclaim his cognitive memory?

Will Michele Bachmann utter another whopper that is light-years from factual reality?

Will Newt Gingrich double-down on his claim that Freddie Mac paid him big bucks for his advice “as a historian”?

Will Herman Cain demonstrate that he knows the difference between Afghanistan and what he has called “Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan”?

Will Rick Santorum volunteer to personally lead the first bombing raid on Iran?

Will Jon Huntsman stop reminding viewers that he looks like Ricky Ricardo on “I Love Lucy”?

And then there’s Mitt Romney, still the likely 2012 nominee, who stares at his hapless rivals with a look best described as polite patrician bemusement, as if to say: “Keep talking, inferiors. The deeper you dig your holes, the easier it will be for me to bury you with my money.”

Despite the comparison to Survivor none of the particpants has yet appeared nude. Aspects of The Real Life are also present but none of the debaters has stumbled in drunk……well Perry has sounded that way a couple of times……nor has there been a scratching, hair-pulling cat fight between Bachmann and Santorum.

The only thing they have in common with Pawn Stars is that their economic policies will probably lead to more Americans needing pawn shop services.

They could easily be on Over Your Head, the HGTV show where folks trying expensive renovations on their own find they are incompetent and seek expert assistance.

All of them have already appeared on Top Shot but were the first ones eliminated, being unable to aim at the correct target.

The behavior of several of them emulates that of the to-be married stars of Bridezillas, insisting their campaign is all about “me, me, me”

The perfect show for them might be American Pickers. In that series Mike and Frank travel the country searching for hidden treasures in old barns, storage sheds and even underground tunnels. Often they turn up objects they buy for a relative pittance and manage to sell at a decent profit.

The problem is their GOP counterparts, especially Romney, would buy an entire stash for pennies on the dollar, fire the people they bought it from, spin off the merchandise to a shell company secretly controlled by them, collect fees for their “services” to each party involved, sell the merchandise at a profit of which they take the largest cut, and put the shell company into bankruptcy but only after receiving a guaranteed golden parachute.

Hmmm. Now that I think about it, my original assesment of the GOP field as a clown act was right. Not to worry. Just as musician Tommy Lee had his Tommy Lee Goes to College reality series, we can follow these birds as they progress through professional training at the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Clown College in Sarasota, Florida.