The Post Mortem – Part I

The quiet, secluded estate on the Chesapeake shore included a huge mansion, a large hunting ground, a shooting range, a nine-hole Golf course, a small airstrip that could easily serve for landing the corporate jets of the Gulfstream variety. And there were several small servants’ quarters to service the needs of the rich and powerful people when their fancy took them to visit this idyllic vacation spot. And on the weekend following the great Republican debacle in the 2012 Presidential elections, all the high and mighty in the GOP and its sister concerns such as the Faux News, the right-wing talk show circuit, the conservative think-tanks, the billionaires, the pundits; they were all there to conduct a frank and brutal post-mortem of the defeat. They all arrived in limousines or in their Gulfstreams. The only odd man out was… you guessed it! A very obscure Indian American blogger of American political matters. 

As I entered the spacious hall where the Post Mortem Session (PMS?) was to be held, I perceived two large dartboards, about 10 feet in diameter and a smaller one about 5 feet in diameter. All the dartboards were so riddled with darts that I could scarcely make out the pictures that adorned the dartboards. After I looked carefully, I could make out the grumpy visage of Obama on one of them. The other one was obviously Romney and the smaller one was Chris Christy, the NJ Governor who praised Obama’s leadership the week before the election. My host, as he ushered me into the hall, picked up a couple of darts and in a fluid motion flung them simultaneously. The two darts easily found their marks – one on Obama and the other on the Christie dartboard. He looked at me triumphantly and remarked, “I have gotten good at this. I can shoot two darts at a time and can hit Christie and Obama at the same time. Now I am practicing throwing three darts”. I was quite taken aback at this. I could understand why the Republicans were throwing darts at an Obama dartboard (they have been doing it practically since the inauguration in 2009) but why Romney so soon after his defeat? And why Governor Christie, the hero of the Republican Convention? My usher guessed the cause of my perplexity and explained it thus, “Haven’t you read the National Review? Or the Weekly Standard? There are enough of us who feel that Romney’s campaign sucked big time and that snake Christie was responsible for at least 2-3 percentage points on the Election Day.” 

Just then I heard a commotion and looked around. A couple of people were physically carrying away a scrawny, tall, blond woman who was kicking and screaming. My usher’s face turned into a grimace. He commented, “She thinks it is unfair to blame Romney and believes that he was the best possible candidate. She wanted to erect a couple of dartboards of her own, with pictures of Richard Mourdock and Todd Akin but the Tea Party would have none of it”. Then my usher gave me a list of instructions – do’s and don’ts. They were mostly don’ts keeping with the spirit of the contemporary GOP. The only DO was that I was supposed to throw darts at the Obama dartboard every hour if I wished to continue to be a spectator to the PMS. In the spirit of investigative journalism I agreed to the list.

The session started with the prayers and a priest read some verses in the Bible and everybody joined the prayers. Next a Rabbi offered some Jewish prayers and a small but vociferous section of the audience joined in the Jewish prayers. Then the convener of the PMS got up and asked the audience, 

“OK. Now that the Judeo-Christian prayers are finished, do we have any other religions represented here? Any Hindus or Muslims or Buddhists or any other faiths?” Nobody came forward – and I surmised that there were probably no non-Jewish, non-Christian Republicans in the PMS (In fact, going by most of the exit polls, there were hardly any non-Jewish, non-Christian Republicans among American voters, but I kept my observations to myself as it was one of the don’ts in the list of instructions. “Do Not Open Your Mouth” was the explicit instruction in the list of don’ts.). 

Then the convener proposed to offer the prayers in Spanish and immediately there was loud murmur of approval among the audience. Then the rising Hispanic star on the firmament of the GOP, the ‘Great Brown Hope’, took the stage and offered prayers en Española. But I noticed that there were hardly any Hispanics in the PMS audience (In fact, going by most of the exit polls, there were hardly any Hispanic Republicans among American voters, but again I kept my observations to myself).

The convener began,

“We are here to find the reasons for our latest defeat. We don’t have much time as most of us have very busy schedules and millions or billions of dollars to earn or manage (or squander, I mused, again in silence as per the instructions) and we are staring into an abyss if the Democrats continue to win. I want to open the floor for suggestions as to how we can turn this defeat around in 2 years’ time for the next election cycle and more importantly, win the White House back in 2016. I have been talking to all the pundits from our network (he meant the Faux News Network, the fair and balanced boys fighting the good battle against the liberal and commie media sharks) and I have a list of reasons for our defeat. I have circulated a simple one pager with that list. Let’s start discussing each one in the order it appears on the list”.

My usher passed a sheet of paper to me. I will reproduce the list here for my millions of readers:

·         Mitt Romney – The candidate

·         Mitt Romney – The ex-MA Governor

·         Mitt Romney – The moderate

·         Mitt Romney – The nouveau conservative

·         Mitt Romney – Any other Mitt Romney that you may know or despise

·         The Romney Campaign

·         George Bush (the younger one. The older one also lost an election for us but that was too far back so we don’t care about it)

·         Chris Christie – the traitor (he wanted to come to the PMS but we declined)

·         Sandy – the hurricane

·         Non-Christians

·         Pseudo Christians – those who don’t go to church or go to some ungodly/satanic churches that are open to ‘gay marriage and abortion and contraception and Planned Parenthood and taxes on the rich people’ and still masquerade as Christians

·         The Women – the unmarried ones or the divorced ones or the lesbians or the single mothers or in other words, the feminists

·         Un-American people who believe in contraception, abortion, gay marriage, class warfare (that means taxing the rich people) or in other words those who don’t watch the Fox News

·         The Hispanics

·         The Latinos

·         The Spanish-speakers

·         Young People

In other words, all the un-American riffraff that still gets the right to vote and votes Democrat

(My note: I didn’t know that Hispanics and Latinos and Spanish-speakers were different sets of people at least to any major extent. But then I am just an obscure Indian American blogger of American political matters. What do I know?)

I could see that the night was going to be a long one. I poured myself a nice glass of wine and picked up a bag of popcorn and sat down for the long haul.

To be continued…