The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age
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    Introducing the Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney

    By MuddyPolitics on Tue, 11/01/2011 - 9:14pm |

     

    Roll out the red carpet for Mitt Romney.

     
    El último hombre
     
    His only real challengers in the Republican presidential race have just handed him the nomination.
     
    Herman Cain proved he couldn’t withstand the media profile season once he became a frontrunner, and Rick Perry proved what everybody thought after the first debate – that this Texan is a nut.
     
    Cain is being outed for sexual harassment charges. He denied the allegations, then acknowledged them, denied that a woman was paid off, then acknowledged there was a settlement. He calls this “dirty politics.” I call it “Adios, Herman.”
     
    Like Perry’s brief rise, Cain’s recent polling surge was considered a fluke from the start. There was no way a conservative Republican Party would elect a black man as their presidential nominee. There’s no precedent for it. Still, no one could have predicted he would fall this way. (Most thought it would be his amateurish 9-9-9 tax plan, or his offensive statements about poverty, or his extremist views on abortion, or his singing.)
     
    Perry’s situation is a bit less complex. He gave a speech in New Hampshire. It was so bad I actually wondered if it was in fact a dubbed video from BadLipReading.com. The immediate response from the blogosphere was that he was drunk, or high on meds, or perhaps that he’d bumped his head and turned into a giggling third grader.
     
    Either way, they’re both out of the race now. Not officially, of course. Like Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich, Jon Huntsman and Rick Santorum, Cain and Perry most likely will maintain a presence in the race and hope their campaign chests don’t run dry before the first primaries. But for all intents and purposes, they’re done.
     
    Romney deserves the nomination. He’s not an ideal candidate, and I don’t think he has a chance against President Obama. But he played the role he needed to play in order to win. Politically, the victory-by-default strategy was brilliant.
     
    He laid low and stayed calm despite stagnant poll rankings and constant attacks from his primary challengers. He avoided the overhyped but nonetheless irrelevant straw poll events, ignored the Mormon issue that contributed to his defeat in 2008, and kept relatively quiet while the Bachmanns, Perrys and Cains fought for the national spotlight. They got it, but it burned them alive.
     
    As the presumed nominee, the limelight now turns to Romney.
     
    Let’s just hope the media doesn’t completely turn their backs on Cain, Perry and Bachmann. Their circus acts were the only reason anyone paid any attention to this race.