The leading candidates in the GOP race conformed to expectations
this week. The cautious and moderate Mitt Romney lived up to his
image by initially exempting himself from the debate in Ohio over
public employee unions. Asked where he stood on an Ohio ballot
initiative that will decide the fate of Governor John Kasich’s law
restraining these unions, Romney declined to answer on Tuesday.
“I am not speaking about the particular ballot issues,”
Romney told CNN. “Those are up to the people of Ohio. But I
certainly support the efforts of the governor to rein in the scale
of government. I am not terribly familiar with the two ballot
initiatives. But I am certainly supportive of the Republican
Party’s efforts here.”
Seeing him as forked-tongue flip-flopper, conservatives
lit into Romney for his temporizing, and several media outlets
noted that his suddenly prim respect for states’ rights hadn’t
stopped him from taking a stand on ballot initiatives elsewhere.
The backlash worked. By Wednesday his initial hesitation had given
way to “110 percent” support for Kasich’s law.
Herman Cain lived up to his image as cleverly defiant and
unconventional by releasing a web ad that some interpreted as a
middle finger to the nanny state. The ad features his
cigarette-smoking chief of staff, Mark Block, offering a
testimonial to the candidate that is punctuated with puffed smoke
at the camera and a lingering final shot of Herman Cain with a
memorably mischievous grin. A perplexed and vaguely disapproving
media didn’t know what to make of the ad but sensed it was
effective. Block testified that Cain is running a campaign “nobody
has ever seen” before and the ad proves it. But it also shows that
the nanny state has so succeeded that moments of public smoking
have become singular, much chattered about events.
Cain has all the right people reeling. An elite unable to
see its own absurdities declares him “dumb” and “ridiculous.” A
cocky third-rate pundit who insists that people call him by the
single name “Touré”
pronounced in Time that Cain is a
“clown” and the “Black Sarah Palin.” It hasn’t yet occurred to
“Touré” that his only expertise on buffoonery comes
from his own single-name pretension.
This fraud’s column is an indication of what passes as
high qualifications for seriousness in elite circles.
“Touré” writes that Cain is a dunce because he fails
to see that racism is as omnipresent as “the weather.” Yet
“Touré,” departing from his analogy, also holds that
“modern racism is subtle and hidden.” Apparently it is not as
obvious as, say, a Time column casting an accomplished
black man as a “clown.”
And then there is this gem from the deep mind of
“Touré”: “For my book Who’s Afraid of
Post-Blackness?, I asked about 100 people, What’s the most
racist thing that’s ever happened to you? More than a third of them
said the answer is unknowable. It’s something that they weren’t
aware of happening but that materially changed their lives. There
was no confrontation, no ugly words, just power exerting itself in
a smooth, efficient, prejudiced way to maintain the vast
inequalities of this country.”
So the proof for racism is at once “unknowable” and
certain? Cain would call “Touré”
“brainwashed.”
Rick Perry lived up to his image as a stumbling candidate
this week by entertaining stale “birther” questions at a time when
he should have been exclusively focused upon the release of his
flat tax plan. Wags have noted that Perry’s recent appointment of
Joe Allbaugh, the former FEMA chief under George W. Bush, to head
up his campaign underscores its status as a disaster
zone.
Perry’s flat tax plan had to compete with headlines about
his idle answer to John Harwood on CNBC that Obama’s birth
certificate is a “good issue to keep alive…. It’s fun to poke
[Obama] a little bit and say, ‘Hey, let’s see your grades and your
birth certificate.’ I don’t have a clue about where the
president—and what this birth certificate says.”
It almost looked like Perry didn’t know that Obama had
released his long-form birth certificate. In any case, given
the perilousness of his campaign, one wouldn’t think this the best
time for Perry to join boon companion Donald Trump in frat-boy
joshing of Obama over an exhausted issue.
Perry did come up with at least one noteworthy prop this
week, a tax form in the size of a post card. But even here he seems
a bit late, as a few pundits observed that in the digital-only days
to come cards won’t go in the post.
