A PRIMARY HISTORY PRIMER

Let me be blunt: when Republicans run against an incumbent Democrat president, they usually choose a damaged war veteran as their candidate. The ‘96 election set the pattern: Bob Dole v. Bill Clinton. (A less caustic analysis is that they pick someone who has run before in primaries and lost. It was Dole’s turn, given that logic.)

The secondary GOP default for picking a nominee is to hand it over to whichever suitable patrician is available, one preferably with strong political family connections. In 2000 that was George W. Bush, who, though absent of most of his father’s abilities, had one large advantage his father lacked: his six-pack ordinariness, his common man touch. It proved to be the right cultural mix for the times, even though Al Gore won the popular vote and had the election stolen out from under him by the Supreme Court.

The Democrats in 2004 threw up their own patrician, John Kerry, also a war vet, perhaps damaged, at least by the Swift Boat forces. Then, in 2008, Barack Obama continued his run of electoral luck and the Republicans broke their pattern and nominated John McCain, yet another damaged war veteran, someone born to lose.

Among McCain’s problems was the conflict that damaged him was the Vietnam war. It was a war no one wanted to revisit. Indeed, when Dole ran in ‘96, it was at the height of the “Greatest Generation” craze. Dole profited from that, but nothing else. The Vietnam war in the 2008 primaries was shouldered by Hillary Clinton and, finally, Democrats turned away from Hillary and it: it was the war her husband, Bill, had managed to avoid. One reason Barack Obama won the nomination is that the electorate was tired of both the Vietnam war and the Clintons.

Obama represented the future. Boy, the public was thirsting for the future, to put behind them the Bush family, the Iraq and Afghanistan war, the Wall Street meltdown. They wanted to turn the page and no page was more different than Barack Obama. But when they fianlly read the page, it turned out to be the same old, same old.

Now, in 2012, we have a GOP with a unappetizing choice, devoid of damaged war vets; in fact, there are two chicken hawks available, with no more military service between them than Bill Clinton had: both Romney and Newt Gingrich had deferments from the draft, and when the lottery was inaugurated, Romney drew a high number. By that time, Gingrich had children from his marriage to his former history teacher.

Everyone, though, of the appropriate generation, has been damaged one way or another by the Vietnam war. Only Ron Paul, ancient as he is, brings up Romney and Gingrich’s lack of service, since he served in the Air Force from 1963 - 68 as a medical officer. It is nothing short of amazing to listen to Ron Paul take on (in his “victory” speech after his fourth place finish in the Florida primary) the mantle of the only anti-war candidate in the field, both Democrat and Republican. Apparently, it is one of the major things that attracts the young to his candidacy.

After Florida, it appears to one and all to be a “two man” race. Romney, like George W., is assuming the role of the patrician candidate, son of George Romney, born in Mexico, but a future presidential wanna-be (the birthers were a generation late; but John McCain had the same problem, since he was born in the Panama Canal zone), a governor of Michigan and a member of the Nixon Cabinet.

Gingrich will continue to be a pest, though it is not out of the world of probability to imagine a Romney/Gingrich ticket, if only to “bind” the splintered party together.

But, and this is a large but, Mitt Romney has one positive precedent hidden in his history that may ultimately benefit him. Romney personifies everything associated with Wall Street and the beleaguered 1%. He is the person who represents the 2008 meltdown, the cause of wealth disappearing everywhere (except into Swiss accounts and banks in the Cayman islands), the reason TARP and both the Bush and Obama administration spent the peoples money to bail out the too-big-to-fail financial industry.

One would think someone who represents to a tee everything the majority of Americans finds reprehensible in recent history could not win the presidency a mere four years after the crash and the start of the Great Recession.

Yes, one might think that. But here is the counter example: what would be the odds that seven years after 9/11 a man with the middle name Hussein would be elected President of the United States? A trillion to one? That is the precedent that Romney may be counting on. That the voters of America will do something totally unexpected and then suffer their bitter disappointment later, silently or not so silently, given their past precedents.

OUR POST-SATRICAL PRIMARIES

One thing is clear: Newt Gingrich is not running as Ronald Reagan, but as Margaret Thatcher, at least the Thatcher caricatured by Spitting Image, the Brit satirical television show, circa 1984. Gingrich has often been lampooned as a puppet, one in particular, the malevolent horror-film character Chucky, but Spitting Image’s Thatcher seems the more pertinent choice.

Watching the new film, The Iron Lady, where Thatcher is portrayed magnificently by Meryl Streep, it was startling how many of Thatcher’s speeches of the 1980s sounded like Gingrich’s recent ones: get those children off their duffs and give them a broom! – all that sort of boot-strap rhetoric Thatcher favored: Let everyone pay the same tax, rich and poor alike, which will end the terrible graffiti in the council house neighborhoods, etc.

The two recent films about 20th century historic figures, the UK’s Thatcher and our own J. Edgar Hoover, are, oddly, both love stories. That might not be strange for Hollywood films (though The Iron Lady has a lot of British support – even, evidently, money from the UK’s public arts program. Thatcher would be spinning in her grave, if she was in a grave.)

Both films have the star power of famous American actors in the namesake roles, and both Streep and Leonardo DiCaprio give more warm human interest to their subjects than either of the individuals possessed. They make both figures somewhat lovable, not a quality either had, or projected, in their public roles.

But love stories both films are: Thatcher and her husband, Dennis, and J. Edgar and Clyde Tolson, whatever Tolson could be called, husband, confidant, bromance boy.

I wrote a book about a trial of anti-war priests and nuns Hoover instigated (The Harrisburg 7 and the New Catholic Left) and, back in 1972, Hoover’s visage kept reminding me of a line from a popular song of the period (MacArthur Park): Someone Left the Cake Out in the Rain. That’s what Hoover looked like back then. DiCaprio’s makeup in J. Edgar isn’t up to the quality of Streep’s; indeed, DiCaprio, however he ages, still looks like a little boy in all his roles, and, for Hoover, it is a strange look indeed.

Back in 1972 Clyde Tolson and Hoover’s relationship wasn’t commonly known; journalists were more discreet then, at least nationally. You had to be in the know. Now everyone’s in the know. When I watched The Iron Lady in a Midwestern cineplex there were only six people in the theater; even if Streep wins an Oscar for her performance, the film will still be a hard sell for Americans. You really need to know a lot about the history of the period to keep anything straight (though that is true even for J. Edgar), and even if you know – and I do: I wrote a novel about the Thatcher era NUM coal-mining strike (Notts) – it remains confusing in the film.

But history is always confusing, I suppose. We’ll have to ask our historian-in-chief candidate, Newt Gingrich. Less confusing if you say everything, as Newt does, with such conviction and bravado. The less conviction one has, the easier it is to sound absolutely certain. Like most serial adulterers, Newt shows signs of being a pathological liar, one well-practiced.

One historical comparison that offers itself is that Newt is playing J. Edgar to Mitt Romney’s Clyde Tolson. Gingrich is the huffer and puffer, a la Hoover, out front, hogging the limelight, while Romney remains the tall, handsome figure in the shadows, looking confused.

Because of the unprecedented number of debates and the compressed onslaught of caucuses and primaries, the Republican primary season has elevated all its participants to the realm of the grotesque. (Just name those who have dropped out and you can see what stalwarts in that regard even the B-team was.) So, it is fitting that the most grotesque figure of them all, Newt Gingrich, is now the Republican frontrunner. Spitting Image, indeed. He’s a Hogarth etching in the flesh, but, it doesn’t much matter, since we are now all living in a post-satirical age.

Dr. Gingrich and Mr. Chucky

Now, we’re done with New Hampshire. The interesting development is the blowback criticism of Newt Gingrich toward the predatory capitalist, Mitt Romney, echoed momentarily by the national nonentity, Rick Perry. Newt made a mockery (and a web address) of Mitt’s “pious baloney,” describing how Romney has been a financial firm show horse candidate since the early 1990s, not the “job creator” he poses as. And, more, pertinently, Newt went after Bain Capital, Romney’s never-ending private equity piggy bank, via his SuperPAC, Winning Our Future, funded by the usual and strange FON, a casino-owning big better. Newt talks about Bain Capital “looting” companies, adding a laundry list of the usual corporate malfeasance.

It’s been effective. Too effective for the GOP and Gingrich is under considerable pressure to walk back all his criticism. I’ll wait to see if the half-hour 60 Minute-like take down of Bain actually runs anywhere. 30 second commercials have thus far, but, again, the question is, Will they continue?

Walking back will be nothing new to Newt. He did so shortly after, rightly, condemning Paul Ryan’s Gut Medicare program as “right-wing social engineering.” Later, he said anyone using the film of him saying so would be uttering a “falsehood”, since he was now unsaying so.

But, this larger change in rhetoric came before Newt’s appearance on Meet the Press back in May charging right-wing social engineering. I suppose one must credit Frank Luntz, or one of his Republican clones. Beginning in 2011 (and perhaps earlier), Republicans started appropriating the language of progressives: so one heard Sarah Palin (remember her?) denouncing “crony capitalism”; and other Republicans were whining about the evils of “class warfare.”

The logic seemed to be: if you use the other side’s words often enough eventually you will make the words meaningless. Since the GOP has been making words meaningless for years, it seems to be a long-term strategy. I’m not sure Luntz got everyone in the Republican fold to switch out “the rich” to “job creators,” but you won’t find the phrase job creators used much before 2011.

But Gingrich, et al., took the word-appropriation business a bit too far, since he was making whole sentences of them, not just phrases and sound bites. Mitt Romney has been speaking nothing but sound bites, pious baloney as Newt pointed out.

Only when Romney goes rogue, speaks for himself, as he did last weekend, saying “I like being able to fire people...” - it didn’t matter, as he claimed, the words were taken out of “context”, because Romney said them with such obvious sincerity – does his true self shine through. Romney may well win the Republican nomination, though, given his background as the former head of a predatory investment firm (private equity), it remains as improbable, given recent history, as someone with the middle name Hussein becoming the nominee of the Democrats in 2008.

Gingrich, though, will continue his usual Jekyll and Hyde performance; but I’m hoping, to update the analogy, that he lets his Chucky side come blazing through, rather than his professorial Dr. Gingrich side, creating mayhem all the while he continues to debase our poor, battered, language pell-mell.