What does it feel like to win the endorsement of the worst president in American history? Is it like being anointed king of a leper colony? Like being handed the keys to a Potemkin Village? Like entering a best-ball golf tournament and being informed on the first tee that your partner is Charlie Manson?
You’d think John McCain would have spent the day after clinching the GOP nomination any place except the White House. He’d have told George W. that he was sorry, but he had a previous engagement with his manicurist or his auto mechanic or his proctologist. Instead McCain stood there and accepted Bush’s endorsement, as if Bush is a serious statesman and not the greatest fuck-up since Herbert Hoover.
Memo to McCain: through pig-headed policies and slavish devotion to an empty ideology, Bush hung a rotting albatross around the GOP’s collective neck. It’s called the US Economy and it’s steaming toward a big-time crack-up the likes of which Americans haven’t seen in years.
Sure, the Democrats will pound on one another for another month or so, while McCain takes it easy, has Botox treatments, studies yoga to control his temper and continues sucking up to the Religious Right. Hillary and Barack are egomaniacs who won’t quit until they are splattered with one another’s blood. Fine, American politics is pure blood-sport, and nobody grasps that primal fact better than Hillary Clinton. Like her hubby, she’d strangle a puppy with her bare hands if it helped her win.
Huge amounts of money, time and energy will be spent by Democrats between now and the primary in Pennsylvania.
The Democrats have one glaring problem -- they are still searching for the soul they misplaced when Jimmy Carter lived in the White House. In this regard, McCain and the Republicans clearly have an advantage; Republicans have no soul whatsoever and are proud of it.
But when it comes down to it, McCain is saddled with the Republican record of the past eight years: a failed occupation in Iraq and an economy in tatters, gas prices sky high, the federal deficit ballooning by the day and Wall Street jittery. Even a tree stump like John Kerry could take McCain out under these circumstances. What’s McCain going to do, run on the Bush record!
I hope he does, just as I hope he can get used to the smell of rotting albatross.
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