O.K., you Wingnuts, listen up. I think I’ve got the solution for what ails you if you really want to win in November: Dump McCain and nominate Hillary.
I’ll let that sink in for a moment. . . .
Right — as I was saying: dump McCain and nominate Hillary for president, running on the Republican ticket. You know you want to. You know you’d love to. So just do it. Si, se puede!
First of all, it wouldn’t be that much of a stretch. After all, the beautiful, smart, attractive woman you so lovingly refer to as the Beast was, in her youth, a Goldwater girl, so it would just be getting back to her roots anyway. For another, the 2000 Democrat candidate for vice president, Holy Joe Lamont Lieberman, has effectively crossed over already, “morally” voting with Bush on the war and then opposing him on everything else that really matters, including control of the Senate. Of course, that would have required real courage and a willingness to face the consequences, such as never being invited on the Imus in the Morning radio show again.
Second, she’s already running as a Republican. She’s out there every day, hammering away at my guy, BO, doing the work the Republican candidate just won’t do. Why, the just other day she complained that if the party of Slavery, Segregation, Secularism, and Sedition followed the same rules as the party of Lincoln, she’d already have won. How much more GOP can you get? And since she has no principles other than the will to power, it would easy for her to make the switch. Call it Operation Chaos in reverse. How do you like them apples, Rush?!
And in any case, you already have a Lefty running for president. John McCain doesn’t give a rat’s patootie about conservatives; he’s too busy expiating the original sin of the Keating Five, abrogating the First Amendment in cahoots with his buddy Russ Feingold, and stabbing Bush in the back whenever it suits his, or Howard Fineman’s, or E. J. Dionne’s, or Evan Thomas’s fancy. Since he already owes you a grand total of freak-all, why would he help you on the off chance he actually gets elected? Which, let’s face it, he won’t.
I mean, get real: He’s old, he’s weird, he’s married to a Stepford Wife who won’t release her tax returns (why — in case America finds out just how profitable beer is?). Plus he’ll nominate some clueless midwestern white guy nobody’s ever heard of as veep, and that will be that. Sure, you Baby Boomers have some vague memory of Vietnam, how you heroically dodged the draft in Canada, smoked dope and had sex for peace, and blew up a townhouse or two in Greenwich Village, but for my generation, “Hey, hey LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” is an ancient as “54-40 or fight,” whatever that was. By the time this election is over, McCain will be lucky to get Bob Dole’s gig as the senior-citizen vet, hawking Viagra, and the clueless white guy will join the ranks of Henry Cabot Lodge and William E. Miller.
No, you’re not going to be able to beat Bambi. Yes, he’s an arrogant, cocksure, elitist, affirmative-action baby, the product of a lifetime of leftist indoctrination, seething with resentment at a racially segregated society he’s only ever heard about in the one or two times in 20 years he actually attended Rev. Wright’s church. He’s Gramsci’s long march through the institutions come to life: the new Soviet Man, American-style: the change we have been waiting for. He could name Wright or Bill Ayers as his veep and he’d still win.
So Hillary’s your only hope. You lost the Congress and you stand to lose more seats this fall in both houses. Thanks to McCain and the Gang of 14, you lost your shot at getting your judges confirmed when the confirming was good. That fifth vote on the Supreme Court is going to elude you forever, and when Obama says he’s going to appoint justices like Ginsberg, Breyer, and (just to be non-partisan) Souter, he means it.
Just look at the tatters of your “conservative” movement. Rush can’t stop reading his press clips; his radio show has become the equivalent of Lenny Bruce reading from his trial transcripts while the paying public heads for the exits. The once-formidable Bill O’Reilly hawks his Factor gear, boasts about his tax bracket, and embarrasses himself every time he talks about pop culture; a show that was once as much fun to watch as a bullfight with a naked matador has devolved into a circle of sycophantic adulation, with Geraldo Rivera appearing periodically as the designated “sparring partner.” Newt Gingrich has gone from visionary to blowhard, whose legacy will eventually boil down to this: bested by Bill Clinton in hand-to-hand combat and forced to give up his seat. And Bush is a spent force, whose last remaining order of business is passing Harry Truman’s record-low opinion polls before he leaves office.
Give it up and embrace your destiny. Go with a proven winner, a gal too dumb to know when she’s beat, a tough broad who takes a licking and keeps on ticking. You think she’s not going to use Obama’s youth, inexperience, Chicago dirt, nutty pastor, and Mad Bomber buddy against him? Hillary Rodham Clinton reminds me of Robert Ryan in The Set-Up, about a fighter who refuses to take a dive in a fixed fight and decks his much younger opponent, thus incurring the wrath of a gangster who breaks his hand in retaliation. But so what — he still has his dignity.
And that’s what Hillary has, in spades. So maybe a better comparison is Jake La Motta, in Raging Bull, getting pounded by Sugar Ray Robinson but refusing to quit, taunting Robinson at the end that he never knocked him off his feet: you never got me down, Ray. She’s that kind of girl.
So go ahead: Just do it. You’ll be glad you did. And so will we.
– David Kahane is the nom de cyber of a handsome, wildly successful writer in Hollywood, who drives a Prius, buys carbon offsets, uses fluorescent bulbs and calls his mother every week. You can complain to him directly at kahanenro@gmail.com.