Sometime in the future, when a twenty-first-century Gibbon searches for a moment to use as a starting point for a chronicle of American decline, he or she might want to alight on the late-October and early-November days of 2011. Not that there is much to be gained from such spectacles as the abruptly sundered union of a power forward and a callipygian star of tele-realism—the Age of Kardashian is barely distinguishable from the Age of Hilton—but a chronicler could profit richly from reviewing the week just experienced by those ambitious members of the Republican Party who have put themselves forward as candidates to revive a fallen nation and lead the march down Nostalgia Avenue and up to the City on a Hill.
Let’s begin with Governor Rick Perry, of Texas, who gave a speech in Manchester, New Hampshire, that was so obscurely digressive, so marked by airy hand gestures and slurry intonations that it was as if Foster Brooks were playing a character called Rick Perry. And, in the days that followed, the Governor found himself forced to answer questions as to whether he had in fact been drunk. Until then, Perry had seemed glum and witless, especially in debates, heartbroken by his inability to answer a simple question with a coherent reply. Now, suddenly, he was pumped up with helium cheer and unnerving confidence. Forced to make sense of the performance, Perry told Carla Marinucci, of the San Francisco Chronicle, that this was just a “pretty typical speech for me,” and that, while he had undergone back surgery, in July, he had not been taking painkillers and was clearheaded. Marinucci asked him if he was trying to “reboot” his drive for the Presidency. “Reboot?” Perry said. “I’m already rebooted.”
Neither Michele Bachmann nor Newt Gingrich nor Rick Santorum nor Ron Paul had an especially peculiar week, though it can be fairly said that none broke free from their own patterns of performance art. It was Herman Cain, the unlikely leader in the Republican polls, who found himself doing an unexpected danse macabre_,_ in Washington, D.C. Cain had built his lead after Bachmann and Perry proved unable to hold onto that part of the Republican electorate which finds Mitt Romney prohibitively distasteful or untrustworthy, or both. Cain established his career as an executive at Burger King, where he set up the “BEAMER” program, encouraging employees to smile more, and at Godfather’s Pizza, where he shut dozens of restaurants and invented a single-serving option, the “Hot Slice.” In 1994, in a televised public forum, he made a political name for himself by debating health-care policy with Bill Clinton. (“Mr. President, with all due respect, your calculation on what the impact would do, quite honestly, is incorrect,” Cain said, and Rush Limbaugh aired clips on TV.) Republican leaders like Jack Kemp were thrilled. “Here’s a black guy,” Kemp later told a reporter_,_ “with the voice of Othello, the looks of a football player, the English of Oxfordian quality, and the courage of a lion.”
Cain, like Ross Perot before him, set out to campaign for the Presidency on the strength of personal authenticity, practical business wisdom (he has written management books with titles like “Leadership Is Common Sense”), and a pick-it-up-along-the-way sense of the issues. He has won over some voters with his undeniably entertaining presence and others by telling them that, when he was suffering from colon cancer, he knew he would be cured because he met a hospital worker named Grace and had a surgical incision in the shape of a J, for Jesus. Yet Cain is shaky on elementary things. Even after supporting the bailout of the banks, he called Obama’s economic policies “bullshit” and proposed a “9-9-9” tax plan, which amounts to Robin Hood in reverse—take from the poor and give to the rich. On issues from gay marriage to abortion, he does not know his own mind, flopping on the deck, side to side, as fast as he can.
Cain has uttered so many falsehoods and half-truths that his catalogue of whoppers takes up epochal space on the St. Petersburg Times’ invaluable Web site PolitiFact.com. This habit came into sharp, personal focus when, on Halloween, Politico broke a story about charges of sexual harassment made against Cain when he was the head of the National Restaurant Association, in the late nineties. Like Clinton before him, Cain employed a serial strategy of denial, feigned forgetfulness, sudden remembering, preposterous fudging, and ideological martyrdom. Among Cain loyalists, the scandal produced an outpouring of defense and treasure. Mark Block, Cain’s chief of staff, reported that on the first day of the unpleasantness Cain “doubled his normal daily average” of contributions. At week’s end, he still led in the polls.
The knowing people who know things in Washington generally believe that, once the electoral process begins, in January, Romney will shed Cain, Perry, Bachmann, and the rest in rapid fashion. Perhaps. To look at Romney is to see plausibility. But a large portion of the Republican electorate seems determined to hop from one fantastically flawed alternative to the next rather than settle on him. A few may be loath to vote for a Mormon; others have ideological differences that make it hard to embrace him. It is Romney’s spooky elasticity, his capacity to reverse himself utterly on one issue after another—health care, climate change, abortion, gun control, immigration, the 2009 stimulus, capital-gains taxes, stem-cell research, gay rights—that seems to bother voters most. They might rightly ask if there is even one thing that Mitt Romney believes in with greater conviction than his inevitability.
The Obama-Clinton race in 2008 did not want for spectacle—it was like a full-employment plan for journalists—but, on the whole, it was a revealing contest between serious candidates. Who among the Republicans this time around is serious? Last week, while the carny caravan blared in Iowa, New Hampshire, and beyond, the business of governing in Washington, D.C., included the complexities of reviving a failed economy; Greek and Italian debt debates; the uprising in Yemen; a crisis at UNESCO. Who among the Republicans would set aside pandering rhetoric to convince Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet that a unilateral strike against Iran and its nuclear program is a dangerous idea that courts regional war? Who would set aside magical thinking about tax cuts and propose something more than scams like “9-9-9”? The notion that you can cut everyone’s taxes and fix the deficit belongs to the same Kardashian world in which you can collect wedding gifts without the burdens of marriage—a tempting scenario but, in the end, a hot slice of nothing.
You don’t have to agree with Barack Obama on every particular, or on much at all, to admit that the spectacle of the Republican field is a reflection of the hollowness in the G.O.P. itself. With the new week, there is more of this to look forward to. There are debates in Texas, Michigan, and South Carolina. And Nate Silver, of the Times, reports a rumor that Sarah Palin may change her mind about running, and that, though it’s unlikely, “the door is at least theoretically open.” ♦
