The Iowans finally settled on Rick Santorum as the official not-Mitt Romney. However, Mitt’s campaign of dissimulation by faking himself to be not-Mitt Romney also bore fruit by dint of the millions he spent on this image makeover. Roughly the same number of Iowans believed that Mitt Romney was not Mitt Romney as those who believed that Mitt Romney was Mitt Romney but Rick Santorum was not Mitt Romney. Also Iowa showed the rest of America that the state contained about 22% people with a questionable grasp on reality by voting for Ron Paul. This figure was later used by Iowa’s perpetual Governor Terry Branstad to demand more federal funds for the care of patients with mental issues.
Michelle Bachman garnered only 6% of the vote and once again showed exceptionally unsound judgment by dropping out of the race. Bachman’s exit has considerably reduced the leeway to several humor columnists and bloggers. I am sure that I could have collected a substantial amount of money from like-minded people for Ms Bachman to stay in the race, just to get her to expound her theories on other topics similar to vaccinations. With that, my secret wish for another masterpiece like ‘Who’s Pricking Bachman’ (similar to ‘Who’s Nailin Paylin’) or some such corny title faded away. Perry garnered 10% of votes. These 10% had severe mathematical challenges and could not count beyond two; hence they never realized that Perry could not name the third colossal example of federal waste. Jon Huntsman (who dat again?) was perplexed when he actually garnered some votes and mumbled something in Chinese. The most interesting result was the 13% garnered by Newt. Within a couple of weeks, Romney’s Super Pac had pulled down Newt from a front-runner to an also-ran. Newt didn’t take this lightly.
When I was in college, one of our most beloved movies was Tezaab where Madhuri Dixit took our collective breaths away with her ethereal beauty (and much else!). But the movie also had other highlights. One of them stayed in my mind. This is when Munna (Anil Kapoor, the protagonist of the movie) and his pals visit Lotiya Pathan (the villain character played by Kiran Kumar) in his den and destroy it. Just before the interval, Lotiya Pathan surveys the destruction of his empire with a boiling rage and solemnly swears thus: ‘ab Lotiya ki zindagi ka sirf ek hi maqsad hai, Munna ki tabaahi!’ (Henceforth, Lotiya lives for one and only one goal in life, to destroy Munna!). When Mitt Romney’s Super Pac practically destroyed the nascent and ephemeral Newt Gingrich rise in Iowa polls, Newt vowed something similar. Henceforth he would live for the sole purpose of hurting Romney, the fake conservative, the moderate Massachusetts manipulator, the epitome of everything that was wrong with Republican Party in Newt’s exalted opinion. This was going to be just another war of Northern Aggression, where once again the son of soil from Georgia was going to be locking horns with the carpetbagger Yankee from Massachusetts, but the Georgian was damned if he was going down quietly. And anyway, as a History professor from some third-rate college in the South, Newt’s grasp of history was tenuous at best, the millions paid to him by Freddy Mac for giving them history lessons notwithstanding.
And Newt had legitimate grievances against Romney. Newt believed that a few connubial indiscretions were hardly worth commenting upon, especially by his own Party-people. What are a couple of discarded wives and a few extra-marital dalliances, between the torchbearers of the Conservatism? Newt felt that the attacks sponsored by Romney’s Super Pac were a transgression of the oath of a positive campaign that Newt had taken. Nobody had the temerity to ask Newt if his oath of positive campaign was also reciprocated by others in the field. And Newt’s oath of a positive campaign can be summarized by an apt Hindi proverb: ‘Sau choohe kha ke billi chali hajj ko’ (The cat dons the mantle of penance after gorging on a hundred mice. I think the flavor of the Hindi proverb is impossible to impart to an English translation). But in spite of Newt’s height of hypocrisy, he remained a potent threat to the rest of the Republican field. They, especially Romney, never knew when Newt might don a suicide bomber vest and take down the entire Republican field in an orgy of mutual recriminations gleefully thrown about at a nationally televised debate. They wanted the ex-speaker to stop speaking altogether. Bill Clinton had a Schadenfreude moment when he recalled how he had cautioned against this ex-speaker when he was not ex and was merely boinking his soon-to-be ex-wife (the one who had cancer) and also his much later-to-be ex-wife while simultaneously ranting about Bill Clinton’s ex-tra curricular activities. But Newt, like Lotiya pathan, was way past sensible politicking and was baying for Romney’s fake conservative blood. He found some investors (rumor has it that the Obama-camp gleefully orchestrated the financing of Newt’s post-Iowa revenge trip) who financed his Revenge Super Pac that launched TV ads that could really hurt Romney, especially in the general election. Newt always believed in scorched earth policies.
During all this time, Rick Santorum enjoyed his moment in the sun. Finally the thick-headed Iowans had figured out that he was not Mitt Romney, even though he lost that race by 8 votes. He took it as a nationwide endorsement of his bigoted policies of anti-abortions (even though he and his wife had come within a whisker of having their own abortion, in fact, the purists might have accused the Santorums of having opted for an abortion when they opted to inject Mrs Santorum with a drug that probably eventually caused her miscarriage), anti-homosexuality (which he equated with bestiality, polygamy and a host of other Biblical transgressions), anti-federal spending (even though his signature was there on the famous ‘bridge-to-nowhere’ earmark and hundreds of other earmarks) and many other typical right-wing shibboleths. This is a special feature of the Iowa caucuses – they always throw up the most rabid candidates. Mostly they make the rest of the sane America throw up in disgust.
So on the eve of the New Hampshire primary, it still looked like Mitt Romney and his other avatars were likely to romp home, in the granite state at least. Gingrich looks set to self-combust at the altar of revenge, Rick Santorum looks set to eventually self-combust in his zeal to appear like the Old Testament disciplinarians, but that would probably require the Super Tuesday. Ron Paul would peter out somewhere between the Granite State and the Super Tuesday as he always does. Huntsman would make a feeble showing in NH but being a Mormon businessman would realize the futility of throwing good money after bad and retire after endorsing the front-running Mormon. The Iowa caucus was the fun time, from NH onwards the fun will diminish unless either Gingrich or Santorum continue to stand up. I know I will be rooting for either of them.
No comments:
Post a Comment