G.O.P. Greek Tragedy - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Rick should scat. Mitt Romney needs to be left alone to limp across the finish line, so he can devote his full time and attention to losing to President Obama.
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Robo-Romney, who pulled out victories in his home state and in Arizona, and Sanctorum are still in a race to the bottom.
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In the old days, the Republican ego had control of the party’s id. The id, sometimes described as a galloping horse or crying baby, “the dark, inaccessible part of our personality ... chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations,” as Freud called it, was whipped up obliquely by candidates. Nixon had his Southern strategy of using race as a wedge, Bush Senior and Lee Atwater used the Willie Horton attack, and W. and Karl Rove conjured the gay marriage bogyman.
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John McCain has Aeschylated it to “a Greek tragedy.” And he should know from Greek tragedy. “It’s the negative campaigning and the increasingly personal attacks,” he told The Boston Herald, adding, “the likes of which we have never seen.” When a man who was accused of having an illegitimate black child in the 2000 South Carolina primary thinks this is the worst ever, the G.O.P. is really in trouble. The Arizona senator, who’s supporting Romney, grimly noted: “I know he’s going to be the nominee, but I also worry about how much damage has been done.”
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Once elected, those presidents curbed the id with the ego, common sense and reason. But now the G.O.P.’s id is unbridled. The horse has thrown the rider; the dark forces are bubbling. Moderates, women, gays, Hispanics and blacks — even the president — are being hunted in this most dangerous game.
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Asked in Michigan why he couldn’t excite the base, Romney said he is not willing to make “incendiary comments” or “light my hair on fire.”
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moderate Republicans feel passé, Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine shockingly announced her retirement, decrying “ ‘my way or the highway’ ideologies” and a vanishing political center.
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The apogee of apathy for Romney was on Friday, when the man who says he’s an expert manager spoke to a mostly empty football stadium in Detroit.
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he cited his wife’s two Caddies and his Nascar team-owner pals, and awkwardly mocked the plastic ponchos of Daytona racing fans: “I like those fancy raincoats you bought. Really sprung for the big bucks.”
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Mitt was damaged as a contender against Obama when he was forced to admit that he had a 15-percent tax rate (given, as The Huffington Post points out, that Romney averaged $6,400 an hour at Bain Capital while creating lots of jobs with paltry wages).
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Now Santorum should forfeit his chance after making a far dumber remark: Kids should beware of college because they’ll get brainwashed.
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Pandering to Tea Partiers, Santorum, who has a B.A., M.B.A. and J.D., and who supported higher education in his 2006 senatorial campaign, absurdly turned the American dream inside-out and into sauerkraut.
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He called the president “a snob” for encouraging people to get more educated and asserted that Obama only wants Americans to go to college so they can be remade in his image, while being indoctrinated by liberal college professors.
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Does he think that defining ambition down and asking kids to give up hope is a good mantra? Even Gov. Bob McDonnell of Virginia, who was trying to mandate that women seeking abortions be shamed with vaginal ultrasounds that Democrats dubbed “legal rape,” thought Santorum went too far.
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In an interview with ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos, Santorum offended the Catholics he’s courting by saying that the J.F.K. speech ratifying the separation of church and state made him want “to throw up” because Kennedy had thrown “his faith under the bus.” “I don’t believe in an America where the separation of church and state are absolute,” Sanctorum said.