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I know I’ve been remiss in jumping into the Hugh/Jim Geraghty dust-up. Further delay would jeopardize my reputation as Hugh’s Mini-Me that I’ve worked so hard to earn, so without further ado…
I blame the whole thing on Peggy Noonan. I’m pretty sure she was the first columnist who began referring to everything that ran afoul of her delicate sensibilities as “creepy.” The Clintons? Creepy. Bush’s 2nd inaugural address? Creepy. Al Gore? Creepy. Justin Timberlake? Creepy. Wait – scratch that. The doyenne of hysterical commentary called the prince of pop “evil”, or at least evil looking.
In case you haven’t gotten the point, I don’t find this brand of commentary particularly edifying or constructive. Worse still, it’s not predictive of anything. The Clintons have been creeping us out on the national stage for 16 years now, and we’re still waiting for their first ballot-box repudiation. While Peggy and her emulators obviously enjoy measuring the relative creepiness of public figures, the general public seems not to share a fondness for this particular metric.
BUT JUST FOR FUN, for kicks and giggles as it were, let’s pretend that a candidate’s creepiness really mattered. Would this be a problem for Romney? Let’s see – he’s had only one wife, five kids, none of whom have ever spent a night in jail and with all of whom he’s on good terms. But wait! Cue the creepy music, because here’s Jim’s Romney Creepiness file:
He said “Battlefield Earth” was his favorite novel.
He strapped his dog to the roof of the car, which was either something the dog actually did enjoy or was an act of unmitigated sadism. Having been a public figure for 15 years, if Romney were a spiritual descendant of the Marquise de Sade, I think we would have heard other examples of this trait by now.
His “director of operations” at times pretended to be a cop. Said “director of operations” was actually the candidate’s bodyguard, but I’ll let you decide if this is the equivalent of a bimbo eruption.
He put out a “home-movie” of his family on the web.
His oldest son has an odd name.
Now let’s compare Romney’s relative creepiness to other stallions in the presidential horserace. Studiously obeying the 11th Commandment now that John McCain is no longer a factor, I will focus my study on the Democratic side of the field, but I bet if you use your imagination you can figure out ways in which the other Republican candidates might qualify as “creepy.”
Hillary Clinton happily campaigns with her husband, a uniquely uxorious figure who made a habit of having an eager young White House intern sexually service him not 50 yards from where the First Lady sat. This came in the wake of countless other bimbo eruptions. And then there’s the limitlessly vindictive way Hillary has historically dealt with her perceived enemies, including anonymous shlubs like the guys who worked in the White House Travel Office who had never done anything to harm her. Oh, and speaking of putting home movies on the web, who can forget the priceless footage of the first couple wearing bathing suits happily waltzing together while on vacation a few weeks after the Lewinsky scandal broke?
Hard as it is to imagine, John Edwards provides even more fertile ground for true connoisseurs of creepiness. Here’s Democratic uber-consultant Bob Shrum telling tales out of school regarding the Silky one:
Kerry talked with several potential [vice presidential] picks, including Gephardt and Edwards. He was comfortable with Gephardt, but even queasier about Edwards after they met. Edwards had told Kerry he was going to share a story with him that he'd never told anyone else — that after his son Wade had been killed, he climbed onto the slab at the funeral home, laid there and hugged his body, and promised that he'd do all he could to make life better for people, to live up to Wade's ideals of service. Kerry was stunned, not moved, because, as he told me later, Edwards had recounted the same exact story to him, almost in the exact same words, a year or two before — and with the same preface, that he'd never shared the memory with anyone else. Kerry said he found it chilling, and he decided he couldn't pick Edwards unless he met with him again.
Does “chilling” count as a synonym for creepiness?
Regarding Barack Obama, the creepiness dossier is admittedly less stuffed. But is there not something inherently creepy about a man who has so little experience running anything (i.e. none) who decides that he’s ready to run the free world? Additionally, I bet there are some people who will find his drug use as a young man a tad creepy, especially since he remains a young man. When Mitt Romney was strapping dogs to car-roofs, Obama was a self-described “cokehead”. Which is creepier?
OF COURSE I CAN’T LEAVE THIS SUBJECT WITHOUT turning my gaze to what I’ll delicately refer to as “the Mormon thing.” Jim frets that the mainstream media will “make the Mormon church resemble Wahhabism without the melanin” if Romney becomes the standard-bearer.
First, let me state where I disagree with Hugh. I don’t think there’s anything improper about this line of analysis. Jim’s a political analyst, and there are no third rails for analysts; they can analyze whatever they think is pertinent. Additionally, I hardly think the New York Times or Hollywood needs Jim Geraghty’s imprimatur as a precursor to going after the Mormon Church. I was making my bones on Mitt Romney’s Senate campaign in 1994 while Jim was still going out with cheerleaders. The fact that the Indispensable One failed to give the green light back then didn’t slow down the Boston Globe or the even the Kennedy family. Congressman Joe Kennedy proved a particularly eager surrogate when it came to bashing all things Mormon.
My only issue with Jim’s piece is I think it’s a poor piece of analysis. Times have changed. In 1994, political correctness was still a relatively new phenomenon. Now, it thoroughly dominates our public dialogue.
Jim’s choice of relating Mormonism to Wahhabism is a telling one. In 2006, Minnesota elected Keith Ellison the first Muslim congressman in our country’s history. As Powerline readers know, Ellison has a rather colorful history cozying up to such distasteful entities as CAIR and Louis Farrakhan. And yet the mainstream media showed no interest in such connections. The fact on the ground right now is that the general public doesn’t tolerate anything that even gives a whiff of being religious bigotry. Ellison’s candidacy should have provoked some serious conversations. It didn’t.
One of the things that changed for Mitt Romney when he ran for governor in 2002 compared to when he ran for the Senate in ’94 is that the state Democratic Party and its house organ, the Boston Globe, abandoned the Mormon-bashing that had been such a featured part of their platform in the earlier election. Some people, including some Romney insiders, saw this as tacit atonement for their misdeeds in ’94. Being the cynical SOB that I am, I never saw it that way. They didn’t try to duplicate in 2002 what they got away with in ’94 because it wouldn’t have worked. Indeed, it would have backfired.
ONE LAST WORD ABOUT OUR PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES: I’m pretty sure that in the speech that ultimately got him run out of office by Harvard’s Stalinist professoriate, Larry Summers made some reference to Harvard economics professors being three standard deviations above the general public in terms of intelligence. This kind of intellectual heft typically brings some baggage with it. People that bright can be a touch eccentric. (I’m privileged to count two such professors as personal friends – I’m not talking about you guys.)
Similarly, our presidential aspirants are a few standard deviations away from the norm in terms of ambition and drive. They, too, will typically not approach normal, which is one of the reasons they works so darn hard at trying to come across as normal.
As fond as I’ve always been of Mitt Romney, I’ve never found him normal. I find him exceptional; not ordinary, but extraordinary. One of George W. Bush’s great strengths as a politician was that he truly was the closest thing we’ve seen to a regular guy on the national stage in generations. At times, his ordinary guy bona fides have been charming and a great strength. At other times, he has seemed not fully capable of handling his enormous responsibilities.
The price for having an extraordinary man as president is that he won’t be ordinary. I can live with that.
Compliments? Complaints? Contact me at Soxblog@aol.com.
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