The War Party

Romney's plan is clearly to wear a straight tie, call Hillary Clinton a commie (she's "out with Adam Smith and in with Karl Marx") and say almost nothing else. And it might work; that's what makes his stump shtick so interesting. In Orlando, he surfs through a nervous presentation that carefully avoids the Iraq thing, taking a shot at John Edwards' plan to create a $250 tax deduction for low-income Americans ("It wouldn't buy John Edwards a haircut," he cracks to pseudoapplause, trying not to touch his own perfectly sculpted hair helmet) and railing against those damned perverts the Democrats won't keep from raping our kids. "There are 29,000 convicted sex offenders on MySpace alone!" Romney cries. He's big on the whole protect-our-poor-innocent-children thing, blabbering about how we have to "clean up the water our kids are swimming in."

Not, of course, our kids in Iraq, who have some interesting water of their own to swim in lately, but our poor kids at home who have to brave the real dangers of the Internet, Hollywood movies and men holding hands. Nor, for that matter, Romney's own kids -- five sons who, rather than fighting in Iraq, he said recently, are "showing support for our nation" by working on their dad's campaign.

Of course, some of our kids are enemies themselves; one audience member picked by Romney's staff of breasty volunteer chicks to "Ask Mitt Anything" is a middle-aged white woman with a fine command of Rovian code words. Explaining that she is a teacher who works in a "socioeconomically low" area, she complains that her students are not motivated to get better test scores because, they tell her, "We don't have to work -- we'll get a check just like my mama does." Romney delivers a heartfelt solution to the lazy-Negro problem, saying you can predict which black kids will fail in school by seeing which ones have two parents come to parent-teacher night.

Romney is easy to make fun of, but he knows his business; in a world where bullshit rules the day, he does bullshit better than anyone. Hence, it is significant that this candidate -- who only a few months ago was gamely clutching his balls in a South Carolina debate and making macho pledges to "double Guantanamo" -- has suddenly abandoned his foreign-policy bluster. In Orlando, he doesn't touch Iraq until asked about it in Q&A -- and even then only mumbling something about how "the surge is, in my view, the right thing to be doing." Then it is quickly back to the usual stuff, commies and perverts and immigrants and lazy black people, the real sources of trouble in this country.

After the event, I actually find a few people who express muted enthusiasm for Romney's performance. Jim Broughton, an Orlando native who proudly describes himself as "to the right of Attila the Hun," is a Tancredo man who likes Romney as a second choice. He thinks we should "hurry up and end the war," but Iraq isn't his top concern. "Our culture and civilization, it's under . . . let's just say I don't want to learn Spanish," he says, frowning.

Another man at the event who appears to be mentally disturbed says he likes Romney because the candidate's slogan, "True Strength for America's Future," communicates to him that "the Space Center makes the United States a superpower." And a couple emerging after the speech say they now much prefer Romney to Giuliani; when I ask what they think the difference between the two is, they say they don't know, but that "Romney talks good."

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There is a joke to be made here, but it's probably best left unmade. Suffice to say that this is not the year for any party to feel positive about relying on voters who are content with "talking good" or who worry more about dirty Mexicans than a bloody trillion-dollar war. But that is where the Republican Party is right now -- and there are signs that some of the candidates are finally collapsing under the weight of this painful equation.

Take rapidly decaying political rape victim John McCain, who has become the symbol of America's newfound impatience with the war. The one-time consensus front-runner was recently humiliated by a poll that shows him trailing Barack Obama among Iowa Republicans. (In fact, Obama outpolled McCain, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and U.S. senator/Christian lunatic Sam Brownback combined). Pilloried for his "principled" stand of refusing to give up on the war, McCain is now, hilariously, trying to reposition himself as a war critic. "I was the greatest critic of the initial four years," McCain claimed on CNN, failing to note that his "criticism" is that there are too few troops in Iraq.

McCain has taken the biggest beating in the press for his war stance, but really there is no meaningful difference on Iraq between any of the Republican candidates, who all waver along the same narrow spectrum of embarrassing self-delusion ("the surge is working") and blind idiocy ("taking the fight to the terrorists"). Brownback, a candidate of the Tancredo school who mostly avoids Iraq talk by yammering the loudest about dead fetuses, talks about needing a "political compromise" -- one that does not include withdrawal, that is. Rep. Duncan Hunter is trying to sell war-weary Americans on a really tall fence to keep rape-seeking Mexicans out of San Diego; his Iraq position is the same as everyone else's, except that he stresses the need for more training -- something, apparently, that the Bush administration hasn't thought to try in the past four years.

Huckabee offers the most novel explanation for why the candidates keep skirting the war. "The reason you don't hear a lot of Republicans bringing Iraq up in the front end of their stump speeches is that, frankly, we don't have to," he tells me at a fund-raiser in Great Falls, Virginia. "It seems to dominate so much of our interaction with the media, so therefore, that part's covered pretty well."

Wait, I think. Isn't that . . . bullshit?