Au Revoir, Mitt
David Weigel | February 7, 2008, 2:11pm
Katherine Mangu-Ward
blogged the news of Mitt's exit, and grabbed some of the sillier bits of the speech. I was in a fairly muted overflow room (most of them had heard the news before they entered) but
Marc Ambinder was there:
"I must now stand aside, for our party and our country," Romney said. "If I fight on in my campaign, all the way to the convention, I would forestall the launch of a national campaign and make it more likely that Senator Clinton or Obama would win."
Romney supporters began to boo. Others shouted, "No!" At least one woman shouted, loudly, "Why?"
"And in this time of war, I simply cannot let my campaign be a part of aiding a surrender to terror," he said.
More crowd noise: "No!" and "Oh no"
"This is not an easy decision for me. I hate to lose. My family, my friends and our supporters... many of you right here in this room... have given a great deal to get me where I have a shot at becoming President. If this were only about me, I would go on. But I entered this race because I love America, and because I love America. This has never been about me."
The crowd: "Come on! No!"
I saw what came next: old women, young women, young men ranging from the obese to the morbidly obese, streaming out of the ballroom biting their lips and choking back tears. The harder they cried, the more reporters swarmed them. I was standing next to a few friends from Ohio who saw another friend walk by.
"What are you going to do now?"
"I'm gonna, I guess, have lunch. Mourn the demise of my Republican party!"
Romney actually promised to return to CPAC for "many years to come," but all you need to look at are the T-shirts and signs around the hotel. Last year, when Romney was buying the straw poll, they were clogged with winged Romney logos. This year it's a sea of McCainiacs. People grasp their Romney signs and Mitt "mitts" like chunks of the Berlin Wall, bemused, a little bored.
There will be precious little lasting love for Romney on the new right, and this is as it should be. Romney believed in nothing but what a good president Mitt Romney would make. He promised conservatives that he would reboot the Bush era, and even today he whined that our soldiers were so, so brave "but their numbered have been reduced by the Clinton years!" The Clinton presidency promised a peace dividend: "We got the dividend, but we didn't get the peace!" It made as much sense as his excuse for ducking of the race: Yeah, Reagan had battled to the end against Gerald Ford, but "there is a difference between today and 1976. We are a nation at war." But if there was no cold war, why should Clinton have kept military spending so high. Forget it, it's Mitt Romney. It's not supposed to make sense.
I've always thought highly of citizen Mitt Romney, but as a candidate for the White House he was a demagogue and, just as often, a buffoon. Four years from now the people wetting their eyes about this race will have glommed onto someone more credible in his panders.
Eric Dondero | February 7, 2008, 2:51pm | #
Did I disappoint you or let you down?
Should I be feeling guilty or let the judges frown?
'Cause I saw the end before we'd begun
Yes I saw you were blinded and I knew I had won
So I took what's mine by eternal right
Took your soul out into the night
It may be over but it won't stop there
I am here for you if you'd only care
You touched my heart, you touched my soul
You changed my life and all my goals
And love is blind and that I knew when
My heart was blinded by you
I've kissed your lips and held your hand
Shared your dreams and shared your bed
I know you well, I know your smell
I've been addicted to you
Goodbye my lover
Goodbye my friend
You have been the one
You have been the one for me
John | February 7, 2008, 4:45pm | #
Interesting take on Obama on Best of the Web today. Frankly, it is kind of creepy. If people were acting towards Huckabee like this, I can't imagine the kittens Dems would be having.
Romney, in the end, failed to inspire. By contrast, Barack Obama is nothing but inspiring--so inspiring that it is becoming deeply creepy. The Boston Globe reports on a new music video touting Obama:
Inspired by the speech Barack Obama delivered in Nashua the night of the state primary, will.i.am [of the Black Eyed Peas] set Obama's text to simple guitar and a soulful melody, recruited 36 artists to appear in a music video that was conceived, shot, and edited over three days last week, and posted "Yes We Can" online over the weekend. . . .
The split-screen video features clips of the candidate speaking alongside shots of R&B singer John Legend, actress Scarlett Johansson, rapper Common, jazz pianist Herbie Hancock, actor-singer Nick Cannon, rocker Ed Kowalczyk, and others echoing Obama's spoken words in song. Will.i.am set the song's tempo to synch up with the New Hampshire audience, which supplies the song's rhythm with chants of "We want change, we want change!" . . .
"I do think it allows people an accessible way into politics," Jesse Dylan said. "Rallies can be dry, but Will has taken the words and dramatized them with these wonderful artists and it gives people an easy way to become passionate."
The video, which you can watch here, depicts people who appear to be in some sort of trance as they mouth along with Obama's various rhetorical flourishes from his speeches, then repeat the mantra "Yes, we can." The whole thing has the feel of a cult of personality.
We aren't the first to make that observation. The other day one Kathleen Geier, who says she voted for Obama and considers him "a good progressive," took to the liberal TPMCafe site to declare that she is "increasingly weirded out by some of Obama's supporters":
She quotes from a Sacramento Bee article that she (and we) found "unsettling":
"He looked at me, and the look in his eyes was worth 1,000 words," said [Kim] Mack, now a regional field organizer. Obama hugged her and whispered something in her ear--she was so thrilled she doesn't remember what it was. . . .
She urged volunteers to hone their own stories of how they came to Obama--something they could compress into 30 seconds on the phone.
As Geier notes, "this sounds more like a cult than a political campaign":
The language used here is the language of evangelical Christianity--the Obama volunteers speak of "coming to Obama" in the same way born-again Christians talk about "coming to Jesus."
But he's not Jesus! He's not going to magically enable us to transcend the bitter partisanship that is tearing this country apart.
ABC's Jake Tapper notes other enthusiasts and detractors from the enthusiasm, all on the Democratic left. "I've been following politics since I was about 5," Chris Matthews tells the New York Observer. "I've never seen anything like this. This is bigger than Kennedy. [Obama] comes along, and he seems to have the answers. This is the New Testament."
On the other side, Times Joe Klein writes that there is "something just a wee bit creepy about the mass messianism" of the Obama campaign, which "all too often is about how wonderful the Obama campaign is." Adds the dyspeptic leftist James Wolcott:
Perhaps it's my atheism at work but I found myself increasingly wary of and resistant to the salvational fervor of the Obama campaign, the idealistic zeal divorced from any particular policy or cause and chariot-driven by pure euphoria. . . . I don't look to politics for transcendence and self-certification.
What are we to make of Obama himself in the midst of all this adulation? A cynic would say that he is a manipulator if not a demagogue, exploiting the gullible to further his own ambitions. A more charitable view is that his intentions are all to the good, that he has simply figured out how to tap into a genuine desire for inspiration in politics, and that if elected he will use his political powers to do good for the country.
Each view seems plausible, but which is correct? Does anyone know Barack Obama well enough to say? And if not, isn't he the candidate who has a problem with authenticity?
