Posted on Thursday night for Friday’s blog.
Mitt Romney’s speech was a single with no one on base. Whether the voters move him around the bases is very much a very open question. The curve balls the Republican national convention threw the country were too simple and the lines too obvious. Hispanics. Check. Women. Check. Marriage. Check. Romney could have hit a homerun, but when you start with another Bush, it is hard to be taken seriously. Jeb Bush defending his brother – certain to go down in history as the worst of presidents – reminded the country of how bad George W. Bush was, how bad a time the country is having recovering and how bad Mitt Romney might be. The video promoting Romney before he spoke included photographs of Romney’s father, who with his record on civil rights probably would not have supported Arizona’s anti-HispanicLatino that are metastasizing across the country.
This whole enterprise is warped somehow. The forced, awkward elevation of the man, the lofty descriptions of his business record, the declarations of self-achievement – they all evoke that old Shakespearean line: “I think he doth protest too much.” And poor Clint Eastwood. He represents the skeletal notions of a make-believe past. The disrespect for the Office of the President with the empty-chair act was astonishing. I felt sorry for Eastwood and for the men and women who felt they had to prop up Romney with faded delusion and crudeness. The computer severs at YouTube might be confused at the NSA with spinning centrifuges in Iran. Not far behind Eastwood were the retellings of family stories – from Marco Rubio’s oddly agitated speech to Ann Romney’s pasta-and-tuna saga of the other night. They sounded hollow and lonely, even, perhaps meant to scare people into loss. I figured out that loss was the theme of the convention. Loss of security. Loss of jobs. Loss of families. The concept of the family was used to frighten, not to inspire. I also figured out that Paul Ryan is Eddie Haskell.