I must say

I must say, I’m enjoying the Balkanization of the Republican Party. Sometimes in politics one gets to watch marvelous karmic things happen. I’ve grown used to watching my own party disintegrate and snatch defeat from the arms of opportunity. I have participated in endless debates about the relative virtues of ideological purity versus the satisfaction of an imperfect, elected candidate. I have swum upstream for many miles. I have campaigned for George McGovern in Wichita Kansas. Now I get to watch the Republican Party demonstrate the qualities and values which I believe makes it uniquely unqualified to govern.

What makes the rise and fall and rise again of Newt Gingrich — like some enormous methane filled balloon — so delicious is that Super Pac money is having the exact effect that we predicted, and — oh rich karmic doo-doo! – it’s happening to the very people who engineered this supposed “free speech” coup in the first place.

Mr. Gingrich, the non-intellectual’s intellectual, has focused the election on the evils of leveraged buyouts. He has pinned these buyout to Romney’s expensively distressed lapel. He has eviscerated Mr. Romney, in fact, to the point that Romney is no longer necessarily the impending incarnation. Instead of talking about his business expertise, Romney’s actual money making formula has left stains on his metaphorical trousers. Turns out Mitt was a well dressed economic bottom feeder, taking advantage of opportunities presented by the vulnerabilities of others. I guess that’s fair. Sometimes you just have to strap the family dog to the top of the car and get on with things.

The joy of this is that this political grandeur his happening early in the primaries.

Thanks to Super Pac money, for which no one is really accountable, but which no one can really control, Republicans are parading their flaws and lack of vision with regularity and accuracy. The ideological purists of the extreme right wing have pulled the party so far to the right that it looks like a John Birch Society sewing club agenda. Thanks to these empowered Tea Party purists, Ron Paul appears plausible.

Millions of dollars, “earned” each night by the slumbering One Percent, are pouring into Super Pacs funding slimier and slimier advertising, which everyone hates but which are really effective. Newt “Why-not-take-all-of-me” Gingrich is a stylistic pioneer of the sort of slash and burn manure-spreader politics. Watching him wax irate, as though no one but him has any historical memory, is truly delightful. Next on Comedy Central: John Lithgow reads Gingrich’s Ethics Committee findings. I’ll bring the dip. No rural Georgia Junior College Assistant Professor has ever done as well.

My inner fourteen year old, the one walking the mean streets of Wichita in a McGovern ’72 t-shirt, was bracing for our President to be unable to overcome the effects of the worst recession in you tell me how many years, unable to maintain even the lesser amount of change he was able to accomplish. His opponents are fabulously rich and well organized. They cheerfully describe repealing the Affordable Care Act and ignore the subsequent question: “. . . to replace it with what?” In the end, most of them are not about ideas. They are about the acquisition of power.

Our skinny young president with the big ears is really smart, but he was indeed as inexperienced walking into office as his opponents said he was. If you’re dating Sarah Palin you can’t complain about someone else’s girlfriend. Nonetheless, they had a point. Barack is a politician and has been a very lucky one, the past three years excepted. It’s great to be smart, and it’s fabulous to be rich, but it’s even better to by lucky. It may be that the economy is looking a little better, it may be that he’ll get some credit for health care about the time folks realize that repealing “Obamacare” means that all those young adults living at home with no jobs will once again be uninsured and that the words “pre-existing condition” will once again mean financial ruin for families all across this country.

My granddad ran for State’s Attorney in a county in Southern Illinois in about 1907. Graduated from the University of Illinois with a Juris Doctorate, Phi Beta Kappa, he rode a horse into the hills campaigning and debated his opponent. He was twenty three years old. Southern Illinois is Appalachia, really, owing more to Kentucky across the river than to Chicago upstate. Granddad’s opponent was an old, self-taught rural lawyer. In a speech, he is reported to have said:

“This Sam Thompson [I have his name] is an awful smart young man. People say he’s pretty near as smart as Thomas Edison. They say he’s as smart as Abraham Lincoln. Why some people say he’s even smarter than Jesus Christ!” He paused for effect. “Well . . . he’s young yet.”

I’m willing to give Barack another four years. I never was on the fence. We just got him half way trained for God’s sake! We have a real opportunity this year and I would not have believed this six months ago. The unrestrained exuberance of what passes for “free speech” these days is tearing up the Republican party right before our eyes. I believe I heard Jim DeMint lamenting the lack of accountability in campaign politics. I peed a little.

“The time has come,” the Walrus said. . . .