Yet another working Saturday for Gretchen and me – and a solid nine-hour day it was, too. I was so busy with consultations concerning aid to the Syrian rebels, terrorist attacks in the Sinai peninsula and anti-Muslim arson riots in Burma that Gretchen found it necessary to wait until my rather late lunch to tell me Mitt Romney had selected Representative Paul Ryan as his vice presidential running mate.
So it was, at about six on Saturday evening, that I dropped by the Round Robin Bar to find the booths and tables about evenly divided into groups of ebullient Democrats, sullen Republicans and ecstatic members of the Tea Party, all raising both glasses of expensive hooch along with a truly righteous ruckus.
“Tom! Over here!” I heard Dickens, an aide to Joe Biden volubly shouted above the din. Since he asked first, I decided to take him up on it.
“You fellows look pretty happy about Romney’s taste in veeps,” I remarked as I joined Dickens and his colleagues.
“We couldn’t be more pleased,” a White House staffer vouched with a wide grin. “We were sweating bullets there for a while,” he confessed.
“Absolutely,” an Obama campaign pollster concurred. “Everybody in the President’s camp was worried Romney might do something sane, like pick Marco Rubio…”
“Or Chris Christie,” Dickens interjected. “To tell the truth, we were praying that Romney would pick that pathetic flake Tim Pawlenty…”
“Seriously,” an advisor to Senator Harry Reid chimed in, “we figured that was the best we could hope for. Never in our wildest dreams did we ever think we could possibly get so damn lucky!”
“We figure,” opined an economist who works for Nancy Pelosi, “it’s like picking a Frankenstein monster that’s half Jack Kemp and half Sarah Palin. It simply couldn’t get any better than Paul Ryan!”
“No doubt about it,” chuckled a confidant of Steny Hoyer, “Romney slipped on a banana peel and shot himself in the foot while screwing the pooch!”
“Triple play!” Dickens exulted. “Hallelujah! Thank you Jesus! Four more years!”
At that, the Democrats all clanked their glasses together in a mutual, celebratory toast and chanted “Four more years” nine times before dissolving into a fit of laughter and backslapping. As they did, I couldn’t help but notice Lichtensteiner, a fellow who works for Reince Priebus at the Republican National Committee, staring at the Democrats morosely from within a knot of fellow Republicans who were all crying in their beer. I decided to go over and try to cheer him up.
“Come on, good buddy,” I said as I sat down next to him. “Things can’t be all that bad, can they?”
“That’s easy for you to say,” Lichtensteiner moaned as he rolled his eyes in the direction of the Democrats – who by now had broken into chanting “Keep hope alive” and “Yes, we can” over and over again. “Just look at them, gloating like Obama’s already standing on the steps of the Capitol in front of John Roberts with his hand on the Bible. I don’t mind telling you Tom, this whole Ryan thing really, really burns my onion. How the hell could Romney do something so stupid?”
“Maybe,” I suggested, “we’ll find that he hasn’t been so stupid after all. Maybe having Ryan on the ticket will energize undecided voters.”
“More likely,” Lichtensteiner sighed, “it will alienate them.”
“Well,” I continued, “maybe Ryan will bring in the jobless vote.”
“More likely,” Lichtensteiner groaned, “they’ll figure out he thinks they’re supposed to take personal responsibility for losing their jobs and peg him for total jerk.”
“Still,” I persisted, “perhaps Ryan will triumph over Joe Biden in the vice presidential debates.”
“Oh yeah, right,” Lichtensteiner sneered. “And perhaps, pigs will fly to the polls in November, show their photo IDs, vote for Romney and deliver Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania to the Electoral College for him.”
“But you must have heard how Newt Gingrich gave Ryan a very enthusiastic endorsement today,” I pointed out. “That ought to count for something, shouldn’t it?”
“Gingrich? Yeah, it counts for something,” Lichtensteiner grumbled. “It counts as the Kiss of Death, that’s what. Don’t you remember? In the middle of the worst unemployment crisis since the Great Depression, he announced he wants to colonize the freaking moon! Newt Gingrich is about as popular with moderate Democrat and independent voters as genital herpes. What’s next, ringing endorsements from Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann?”
“But you must admit, at least,” I pressed, “that putting Paul Ryan on the ticket presents the American voter with very a clear choice between the Democrats and Republicans. No Tweedledum-and-Tweedledee politics in the 2012 election, no sir, not this time! With Romney and Ryan versus Obama and Biden, the policy and ideological choices couldn’t be any more starkly drawn.”
“That’s just it!” Lichtensteiner groused. “The way we were supposed to win this one was to loudly and constantly harp about the rotten economy while continuing to use the Senate filibuster to block any substantial Democrat-sponsored federal initiatives which might improve it. The last thing the Republicans need in this election is a substantive debate on politics and ideology. Given what Joe and Jane Sixpack’s reaction to speeches about repealing Roe v. Wade, taking Medicare private and globalized applications of supply-side economics will be, that’s practically the only way we could lose.”
“You really think,” I beseeched, “having Paul Ryan on the ticket with Mitt Romney will actually be that bad?”
“It’s going to be a freaking disaster,” Lichtensteiner muttered.
“What makes you so sure?” I probed.
“Because,” he ruefully explained, “Paul Ryan has a terrible, irreparable and guaranteed fatal political flaw.”
“Which is?” I pursued.
“He believes his own hogwash,” Lichtensteiner spat. “And while bozos who believe their own hogwash can get elected to the House, and even to the Senate sometimes – in a truly backward state, like Mississippi or Alaska – and maybe even get into the governor’s mansion in weird, ignorant places like Texas or Wyoming, there’s no way somebody who believes his own hogwash can get elected vice president of the United States. It just doesn’t work at a national level.”
“You figure his ideological demagoguery is going to do him in, then?” I surmised.
“Him… and Romney,” Lichtensteiner added. “And the possibility of Republican control of the Senate. And who knows? If he goes off on enough of his pet ideological tangents in front of enough TV cameras in late October, he might even lose us the Republican majority in the House. And do you know what the worst part is? Do you know what the most galling, degrading and humiliating part is, huh? Well, I’ll tell you! Publicly, we can’t say a damn thing about it! No, we Republicans have to present a united front, otherwise we won’t have the chance of an ice cube in Iraq against the Democrats in November. So whenever we talk to the media, no matter what we actually think of him, we Republicans are going to have to pretend that Ryan is an excellent choice for vice president and that we’re absolutely thrilled to have him on the ticket!”
“You’re simply inconsolable, aren’t you?” I said.
“Afraid so,” Lichtensteiner sadly affirmed as he raised an accusing finger to point at the Tea Party fanatics cavorting merrily at a table on the far side of the Round Robin. “And it’s all their fault!”
At that, Bodine, a founding member of the Kentucky Tea Party and currently working on the Hill for Senator Rand Paul, noticed which finger Lichtensteiner was pointing with and returned the favor. Then he noticed me and jovially beckoned in my direction. Considering that I could do no further good for Lichtensteiner, I figured I might as well accept Bodine’s invitation and see what he and his cohort were up to.
“Tom Collins, you ol’ hound dog, you!” Bodine enthused as I approached. “Y’all come on a set a spell here! These are great times for America, Tom, great times, I tell ya! Ol’ Mitt, he’s gone and done us proud, pickin’ Paul Ryan for vice president!”
“Well now, let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” I averred as I made myself comfortable and ordered a branch water mint julep, indicating my intentions to the cocktail waiter by pointing at what Bodine as drinking, “Ryan’s not exactly vice president yet.”
“Only a matter of time, my friend,” Bodine assured me. “Only a matter of time. Once Ryan gets out there on the campaign trail and the folks in Peoria and Dubuque and Jacksonville and Bakersfield and Fargo hear what he’s got to say, him and Romney, they’re gonna roll over that [expletive] we got in the White House now and that [expletive] liberal [expletive] sucker Biden like a [expletive] M1 Abrams tank squishin’ [expletive] Taliban [expletive] [expletive] on a [expletive] dirt road!”
“You’re certain,” I sought to verify, “that Ryan’s obsession with Ayn Rand, for example, won’t prove to be a bit… much? Do you really think controversial concepts from a chain smoking Russian fringe intellectual who said things like, ‘Evil requires the sanction of the victim,’ ‘Government is the most dangerous threat to man’s rights,’ ‘Contradictions don’t exist,’ and, ‘Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue’ are going to sell with mainstream American voters?”
“It don’t matter what Paul Ryan says,” Bodine countered. “What matters is how he says it. Ain’t you heard him talk? The man could sell cigarettes in a lung cancer ward!”
“But don’t you think Romney’s selection of Ryan betrays a certain… problem with Romney’s campaign?” I inquired. “If he had selected somebody more… ah… safe… like Tim Pawlenty, for example, somebody less… extreme, it wouldn’t be so obvious that Mitt’s scared of losing his conservative base and it wouldn’t so blatantly appear that…”
“It don’t matter what it ‘appears’ like nohow,” Bodine objected. “Ryan’s gonna be Romney’s idea man, you just watch!”
“But aren’t you concerned,” I wondered, “that people might not… um… cotton to some of those ideas? Tax cuts for ‘the deserving rich,’ huge reductions in government programs that help the middle class, no help at all for the working poor, deficits running all the way out to 2040 before the federal budget balances, you know, little things like that?”
“Nope,” Bodine assured me, “I ain’t the least bit worried at all.”
“How about Ryan’s lack of experience, then?” I prodded. “He’s got absolutely no background in foreign policy, no experience in social policy, and practically nothing going for him in practical business acumen on his resume. Look at the facts – what’s he done in the private sector? He was a personal trainer, a waiter and drove an Oscar Meyer Wienermobile. When John Q. Public gets a load of that, isn’t it possible he’s going to think, ‘What if something happens to Romney and this guy ends up President of the United States?’”
“Think?” Bodine’s eyebrows shot up in frank astonishment. “Where in hell did you get the idea that voters think, for Jesus H. Christ’s sake? Voter’s feel, Tom, that’s what they do! And Paul Ryan knows how to make them feel scared, he knows how to make them feel angry, he knows how to make them feel decisive and he knows how to make them feel powerful! And that’s all he needs to do – make them feel how we need them to feel when we need them to feel that way so they’ll vote him and Romney into office! Then we can take over and turn this country around!”
“Turn it around,” I speculated as my branch water mint julep arrived, “as in hang a one-eighty and take us all back to 1956?”
“What? Hell no!” Bodine barked. “This is the [expletive] Tea Party! Make that 1776!”