A Rush to Judgement
I well recall the Monkeys…I used to watch that show on TV in the late 1960s… part and parcel of the Saturday night along with Doctor Who and later on the Generation Game. Of course like most families then in England we saw the Monkeys in black and white – though in my memory they’re Technicolor…and I blush in Technicolor too remembering I had a bit of a crush on Davy Jones….
And the zany world of California was an American dream that was powerfully everyone’s dream of good-times and fun and surfing and beaches and golden sunsets…
I used to love the ‘Daydream believer’ song – without ever really knowing what a Homecoming Queen was… and she turned out to be something other than many gay men might have imagined….
She’s the ‘queen’ chosen by alumni to preside over their homecoming – the term used to describe their first time return to the Alma Mater after graduation…..I guess it’s a sort of descendant of the king and queen chosen by the bean to preside over the Twelfth night celebrations all those hundreds of years ago…
I was therefore sad when I heard the golden sun had set upon Davy Jones….his life was in many ways a daydream believer’s dream come true – the apotheosis of the American dream coming good…and at that time I honestly think I envied what appeared from over here to be a life without problems….over there…
Davy Jones lived out most of his life in the Technicolor of California….without coming home much to the black and white realities of England with its strikes; its economic crises and its class consciousness and social insecurities….
Mitt Romney ‘s homecoming to Michigan this week was one that turned out better than his worse fears…a slim win over the resurgent Rick Santorum. Romney’s more decisive win in Arizona was worth more in delegate terms but the win in Michigan at least keeps the wheels on the status-wagon of front runner…by the way Wyoming finished its caucus on the 29th February…10 delegates for Romney 8 for Santorum, 6 for Paul and one for Newt…
Real clear politics show the current delegate count as: Romney: 154, Santorum 69, Gingrich 33, Paul 26…..there are others about but the relative position is much the same….
Today we’ve a caucus in Washington State (43 more delegates) and Tuesday is the big one…ten states voting and four hundred odd delegates up for grabs…of which Ohio is by far the most important symbolically….
This should have been the night Romney’s dream came true and he sewed up the GOP nomination.That indeed now sees to be a daydream. It’s now doubtful Romney can deliver a knockout punch…though as ever the polls are once more rising in his favour after his wins this week. And Romney will sweep Massachusetts and Vermont – and Virginia – where neither Santorum nor Gingrich are on the ballot. So Romney will pick up more than a hundred delegates before he gets to the more contested states like Ohio where he and Santorum run neck and neck. Once more Romney’s Super PACS are pouring in the money in Ohio and like in Michigan and Florida they trust it will work its negative magic…
But strangely the key to the whole business will turn less upon where Romney wins and more upon the results in those states of the ‘true believers’ who hold the Republican Party in thrall. Romney looks unlikely to win outright in Georgia, Tennessee, Oklahoma, North Dakota, Idaho and Alaska.
It is not so much because these will states will determine the Nomination as these will determine whether Santorum continues and whether Gingrich survives. Whatever chances Santorum has of winning the GOP Nomination now most likely rest on Gingrich. If Newt fails in Georgia his run is almost certainly done and Ricks Santorum will be the only conservative left standing…otherwise the war of attrition continues to favour Romney who has the financial resources and who will continue to win delegates without having to win convincingly…and from April this means a single vote will give him the entire delegate slate in each voting state.
So on balance everything tilts in Romney’s favour…but balance seems to be the one thing the Republican Party is determined to upset…..
I mentioned last week the President’s carefully chosen conflict with the Catholic church over health insurance….this week the talk show host Rush Limbaugh threw vitriol on to the flames of prejudice…a young student, Sandra Fluke, at the Catholic University of Georgetown gave evidence to a Senate hearing. These are Mr Limbaugh’s considered words of response:
“What does it say about the college co-ed Susan [sic] Fluke who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex…..It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex. She’s having so much sex she can’t afford the contraception. She wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex…”
The President has telephoned Susan Fluke:
“No woman’s health should depend on who she is or where she works,” adding that his policy will ensure Americans would not have to choose between “religious liberty and basic fairness…”
Whether all this will be forgotten come Fall and the election remains an open question…all modern electorates have notoriously short attention spans…but this cultural war being waged in the USA between the social conservatives in their southern and western redoubts and mainstream America is now turning uglier than ever and is tipping women’s votes towards the Democrats…
This not only plays to the President’s strength it is beginning to strengthen the stomachs of some of the Democrats running for the Senate for a fight. The intemperate language that Gingrich and Santorum have so far refused to dissociate themselves from will not help the Republicans hold on to Teddy Kennedy’s seat in Massachusetts. Bob Kerrey sometime Senator and Governor of Nebraska has been drawn back into politics – letting his name on the ballot for the Democrats in the seat they currently hold hold in Nebraska…and which conventional wisdom says they cannot hold… If Kerrey thinks he’s a chance of winning there then things are indeed moving in favour of the Democrats…there’s talk of maybe the Democrats holding on to the Senate…and that case is further assisted by the announcement by liberal Republican Senator Olympia Snowe that she will not contest her seat in Maine putting another seat into play. And that may be one seat too many for a Republican party riven with cultural divisions…
Come the time the story of the 2012 elections are written-up it may be that the word Fluke becomes the historian’s word of choice…for the right to choose may be the undertow that pulls the President’s campaign into safe waters….
And if President Obama makes it back into the White House… with Democrats still holding on to the Senate and picking up seats in the House that indeed would be what we Brits call an electoral fluke…and as any Historian of the French Revolution tells us… it is the accidents that often make history…
Looking back over the political events of the past two months it seems likely that the producers of the Monkey’s weekly show might have found it improbable even by the standards of their zany plots…and that of itself tells who something of the journey America has taken since Richard Nixon’s victory in 1968 ushered in a period of Republican hegemony with its socially conservative slogans about the silent majority…who now seem to shout vulgar abuse to one and all over the airwaves…. Nixon’s Vice President was Spiro T Agnew. He was much loved by the right right-wing of the Republican Party for his pithy one-liners…he once said:
‘Some newspapers are fit only to line the bottom of bird cages….’
In his Rush to judgement of other’s moral ethics Mr Limbaugh has flown mightily close to that place at the bottom of the birdcage…..’La Cages aux Folles’ as they say….
Update:
First, Mitt Romney picked up 12 delegates in the Washington caucus last night….Santorum 3 and Ron Paul 3 (Real clear Politics) Romney picked up 38% of the total vote of 45,000. He still didn’t manage to pick up 50% of votes cast…though today Fox News is talking up his latest appearance on TV. The trouble with Romney…like our very own Gordon Brown…is though made by the Modern Age of TV politics he is not made for it…and he looks uncomfortable in it…and it isn’t clear to me that with all the money in the world you can give someone something they so patently lack…
Secondly, in 2008 in Washington State 1.2 voters put their name by McCain….so this turnout represents something like 4% of GOP voters. Whatever this means in the longer term… this paltry turnout speaks volumes about how the electorate feels about these Republican candidates…
Thirdly….. Tomorrow, tomorrow and tomorrow….creeps in this petty pace from day to day, to the last syllable of recorded time; and all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death….