perfidy

Welcome to the Ministry of Minor Perfidy's series Meet Your Candidates!

With the 2008 Presidential season already in full swing, it is important that interested voters be out in front of the ever-evolving cast of characters vying for a place at the big table. With that mandate in mind (man-date... isn't that a little gay? Someone find out where Brownback stands on mandates!), we here at the Ministry will be profiling each of the very early candidates for the 2008 Presidential election over the next few weeks for your general edification and amusement. With such an absurdly long and diverse cast of characters (from Tancredo to Kucinich), it's hard to know who's for real and who's just a white shirt stuffed with ambition and the souls of dozens of big donors. We're here to help.

I myself will be profiling the following contenders: US Congressman and composting enthusiast Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), Former Massachusetts Governer and yachting type Mitt Romney, former Saturday Night Live host and Mayor of 9/11, excuse me, New York City Mayor Rudy 9/11 Guiliani, retired General and George Clooney stunt-double Wesley Clark, former fatty and the other Man from H.O.P.E., Arkansas Governer Mike Huckabee, and Savior Made Flesh Illinois Senator Barack Obama.

First, some little known facts about your candidates:

The combined candlepower of Romney's, Edwards', and Obama's smiles could provide enough energy to power Bangladesh for a full day. Obama has produced a white paper exploring this phenomenon as a practical solution to Southeast Asia's energy crisis.

Places you could safely hide all the candidates: Mitt Romney's hair; Newt Gingrich's self-regard; Bill Clinton's ballsack (with room to spare).

Of all the candidates, Mike Huckabee has the sweetest smell.

WTC 7 did not collapse, as widely believed, due to damage sustained in the collapse of WTC 1 and 2. Neither was it deliberately demolished by Jews, the CIA or the Trilateral Commission. Rather, it collapsed when Rudy Guiliani, in the heat of his 9/11 crisis-management mode, roundhouse kicked it for being, as he tells it "goddamn insolent."

Newt Gingrich once gave a homeless man $20 to dance for him.

Sam Brownback's safe word is "peaches."

John McCain once carried a litter of wolf pups to term and nursed them to adulthood after accidentally killing their mother while hunting in the Rockies.

Dennis Kucinich is a top-notch shooting guard, especially dangerous from the high post.

Tom Tancredo broke up with his first high-school girlfriend for ordering a burrito for lunch.

Barack Obama has only one kidney. The other currently belongs to a Guatemalan orphan named Paco.

Fred Thompson has repeatedly sought counseling for uncontrollable rages. Onlookers mistake for avuncular pauses the times when he must take a moment to master his urge to crush his coffee mug into dust and, as his children put it, "Hulk out."

Rudy Guiliani practices "Hulking out" in the mirror nightly before bed.

First, let's meet the stormin' Mormon, the man with the million-dollar smile and perfect hair, former Massachusetts Governer Willard "Mitt" Romney.

The first thing to remember about Mitt Romney is that he's a second-generation politician, his father being the Michigan Governor, HUD Secretary, American Motors chairman, Presidential candidate and victim of Asian brainwashing, George W. Romney. It is an iron law of American politics that talent is not cross-generational, and it is this warning that should shape America's perception of Romney. Witness such prodigies of witlessness as John Quincy Adams (a strong contender for our worst President of all time), and George Walker Bush (ditto?) - parental ambition and a childhood familiarity with the political world are no substitute for actual talent, integrity, and all the other bullshit that should be for real but isn't that goes on yard signs during election season.

(And before we go any farther, let us stop a moment to wonder if, after eight years of '70s-era Harvard MBA leadership from son-of-a-politician George W. Bush, we want four to eight more years of '70s-era Harvard MBA son-of-a-politician leadership from Mitt. Call me crazy, but that particular, shall we say 'strategery,' hasn't worked out quite as well as might be hoped so far.)

Anyway, back to the facts... Mitt Romney's biggest claims to fame, prior to his election as GOV, were as head of Bain Capital (where he oversaw a wildly successful run of 113% yearly growth) and as CEO of the 2002 Olympics.

Like other candidates with a business background, Romney claims that this experience makes him an ideal fit for the managerial demands of the Presidency. Truth be told, I'd place more trust in my local School Board chairman to run the United States then a CEO. Note to all hopefuls: Presidents can't fire anybody, restructure or spin off any of the fifty operating divisions, or attempt LBOs of rival firms by way of entrenching market share, and the shareholders and entrenched interests are notoriously tetchy. When Germany stops importing American-made goods in protest of a new policy, there isn't anything in any HBS Case Study (not even PeoplePower, Inc.) to help you power through the issue. Frankly, a turnaround specialist is the worst person to step into control of what is still the most powerful and stable economy the world has ever seen - why fix what ain't broke on that level?

As for his Olympic experience, see above regarding the fitness of CEOs for the Big Seat, and add to this the mistaken equivalence between mediating among the two hundred nations participating in a multinational sporting event and engaging in trilateral talks with North Korea, China and Japan about just where Pyongyang is thinking about landing those nukes that are achieving apogee right about... nnnnnnow.

From the moment of his election to GOV in 2002, Romney openly telegraphed his intention to look past the job to bigger and better things. He was a johnny-come-lately carpetbagger with the air of a Republican in search of a state to win, in order to get that on his resume ASAP. While in office, he openly mocked the people of Massachusetts (as in a 2005 appearance in South Carolina). He practically disappeared from public view, emerging only to pick losing fights with entrenched state interests, to chime in on hot-button issues, or to howl for the heads of Turnpike Commission authorities whenever the Big Dig sprung a leak or killed anyone. If there's any justice in this world, Mitt will be branded a bigger "flip-flopper" than his Bay State nemesis, John Kerry. Mitt was against gay marriage before he was for it, and then against it again, for abortion choice and stem-cell research before he declared that life begins at conception, a lifelong hunter who has hunted once or twice, and against big-government mandates before he passed the nation's first state-funded universal health care scheme.

Truth is, nothing is as important to Mitt Romney as politics itself. As I recently wrote in a comment,

Mitt Romney is a mealy-mouthed walking haircut, an empty suit whose political instincts to find the nearest camera and beam into it are as acute and uncontrollable as a dog in frantic search of a leg to hump.

As governor of Massachusetts (and let’s not forget that getting elected governor of Massachusetts as a Republican hasn’t been any kind of feat since Bill Weld in 1992) he did, well, practically nothing. He lost most of the big showdowns, and tied the rest. Billy Bulger retired from the Senate to take a sinecure of equal if more subtle power as head of UMass. The turnpike commission smacked him around like a skinny third-grader. The state’s finances failed to improve measurably by any standard. Although he didn’t actively *hurt* the state, Romney showed absolutely no spark, no genius for leadership, nothing indeed except for a genius for pandering to whatever audience was in front of him at the time. I don’t give a rat’s ass that he’s a Mormon. What matters is that he thinks failing to outmaneuver the Massachusetts Turnpike Commission qualifies him to enter into deep negotiation with Iran (not to mention Senate Democrats).

Next time you see Mitt in front of a camera, look for two things: a statement that exactly contradicts something he said in the past, with no apology or acknowledgement, and that slightly spastic bending-over thing that men in suits do when they need to surreptitiously move a raging erection from one side of the zipper to the other.

Mitt Romney is the worst possible Republican candidate for President, aside from all the others. He is a big-government moral conservative who readily panders to more libertine interests when it's convenient to poll ratings, a smug and overtrained businessman whose governance playbook consists of scribbled quotes from "7 Habits of Highly Successful People," Bain Capital annual reports from the Reagan era, and headshots of himself, and a foreign-policy novice whose positions at this point seem reducible to five words: "I agree with the President."