Rick Perry

I know I'm not allowed to make predictions anymore, but I really think Rick Perry is the most likely Republican presidential candidate for 2012. Needless to say, it has nothing to do with policy, promises, or, for that matter, politics.

He's tall. He has good hair. He's aggressive. He's Texan tough.

Oh, crap! He's the perfect candidate! Not only can he win the Republican nomination, but he can beat Obama in 2012. Americans, by and large being assholes,will ignore the fact that his brains are up his ass, that he's a total lackey of the corporate elite, and that he doesn't believe in climate change, evolution, women's rights, or the scientifically established age of the world.

Those of you old enough to remember when Clinton beat Bush the First will remember the most important advantage Clinton had: back then, they called it "the wimp factor." Yes, G.H.W.Bush was widely regarded as a wimp. Now, let's consider our current chief administrator.

Oh, shit! This time around, wimp is an understatement.

"President Perry" is, to me, about as awful a situation as I can imagine. If he really is the Christian airhead he portrays himself to be, we're in for big trouble. If he's actually the shit eating dog of the capitalist establishment I suspect he might be, we're in for much bigger trouble.

Wimp-in-Chief Obama seems to be trying to grow a set of, at least, marble sized ones lately, but he'd better grow them a lot faster if he wants to hold onto his office. Once, as I recall, he said he'd rather be a good one-term president than an ineffective two-term president. He didn't mention the possibility of being an ineffective one-term president.

But, on the other hand... Rick Perry?

"Meek and Mild"

Yesterday, I suggested that Barack Obama's problem was that he came to power by not being a "scary black man." Today, I listened to the podcast of WNYC's "On The Media," and heard some relevant commentary. Here's a quotation from Duke historian Tim Tyson:

There's a sense in which Mrs. Parks is very important to our post-civil rights racial narrative, because we really want a kind of sugar-coated civil rights movement that's about purity and interracial non-violence. And so we don't really want to meet the real Rosa Parks. We don't, for example, want to know that in the late 1960s, Rosa Parks became a black nationalist and a great admirer of Malcolm X. I met Rosa Parks at the funeral of Robert F. Williams, who had fought the Ku Klux Klan in North Carolina with a machine gun in the late 1950s and then fled to Cuba, and had been a kind of international revolutionary icon of black power. Ms. Parks delivered the eulogy at his funeral. She talks in her autobiography and says that she never believed in non-violence and that she was incapable of that herself, and that she kept guns in her home to protect her family. But we want a little old lady with tired feet. You may have noticed we don't have a lot of pacifist white heroes. We prefer our black people meek and mild, I think.

Barack Obama is no Rosa Parks. He remains "meek and mild," despite the fact that he is now the President of the United States of America. I guess old habits die hard. Granted, his chance of winning that office would have been about as great as Jesse Jackson's if he hadn't played the "good nigger" so well, but now he's there, and he's there in a time of multiple crises. "Meek and mild" won't cut it.

Come on, Barack! Nobody's saying you have to be an arrogant asshole like Bush, but a touch of "scary black man" might be just what we need right now.

Wimp factor?

Ah, ironies upon ironies!

A woman competing in a testosterone infused environment, Hillary Clinton saw the need to demonstrate her, ah, manliness. It was that need more than anything else, I believe, that led her to vote in favor of authorizing GWB to invade Iraq. After all, saber rattling is a very manly activity, and those who demur might be considered, well, effeminate. We can't have some pansy leading the Free World, now -- can we?

And so Hillary never missed an opportunity to demonstrate that her lack of literal balls should not be construed as a lack of figurative balls. Yes, her political posturing did help to encourage the widespread suspicion that she might be a lesbian, but there was no helping that -- not if she ever was going to get a shot at the presidency.

Barack Obama, on the other hand, should have had the manliness thing sewn up. After all, in popular culture the black male is the very embodiment of unbridled male hormones. His problem, though, was exactly that -- our popularly conceived black man is entirely too scary to be elected President of the Harvard Law Review, much less President of the United States.

Obama found it necessary to cultivate his public image just as carefully as Clinton cultivated hers, except from an opposite perspective. He had to learn to be consistently calm, even tempered, and conciliatory. He had to eliminate any show of anger or aggression from his behavioral repertoire. Barack had to appear as "un-black" as Hillary appeared "un-feminine."

The result, as you must have noticed, is that Hillary out-machos Barack by a factor of three to one. She knocks back shots of whiskey while he's counting calories. I don't know if she could beat his bowling score, but now she doesn't even have to try. She even came up with a scenario for nuking Iran -- granted, a pretty far-fetched scenario where Iran nukes Israel first, but clearly that makes her a mensch. That schmekele Barack, though, won't even talk tough to Ahmedinijad. As it begins to look more and more like he'll be the Democratic candidate this Fall, Obama had better start dealing with what could be a serious problem.

It's commonly called "the wimp factor." Although the term was first used to accompany a photo of Bush Senior on the cover of Newsday in 1989, it's been a problem for many Democrats in the past. Think of Dukakis in the tank, Kerry windsurfing, even Adlai Stevenson offering his brilliant, intellectual analyses while the rest of America was chanting "I like Ike." Now think of how the press jumped all over Obama's allegedly "elitist" comments about the white working class from that speech he delivered in San Francisco last month.

Let's face it: there's nobody left in the United States who's really concerned about Barack Obama turning out to be a violent, gun toting mugger intent on raping white women. His real problem now is to start looking less like an Ivy League twit. It may not be easy, not after a lifetime of consciously assimilating himself to the culture of Ivy League twitdom, but it's something he must do -- and soon. He has to demonstrate that he is capable of real, down and dirty, testosterone laced aggression.

The fact is, though, that he can't demonstrate it against Hillary Clinton. A "real" man doesn't beat up on women -- not even women as formidable as Hillary. It's time for him to ignore Hillary (because real men are allowed to ignore women) and start consistently and systematically attacking John McCain. But how?

John McCain is not the sort of man who ever could be tarred with the brush of intellectualism. He has no connection to the Ivies, and graduated near the bottom of his class at West Point -- but that doesn't mean a populist attack on McCain can't work. McCain has flip-flopped like a beached mackerel since winning the Republican nomination. It shouldn't be hard to label McCain a sell-out -- a one-time maverick who's now in the pockets of the same mortgage bankers, oil company tycoons, and super-rich businessmen who are foreclosing, extorting, and cutting the jobs and wages of the rest of us.

The attacks should be personal, not generic. It's not enough to attack the financial elite -- Obama has to put aside his fastidious good manners and attack McCain himself. He has to forget all about McCain's war record and his age and anything else that might make him pull his punches. With luck, McCain even might lose his famous temper and say something stupid.

It's also time for Obama to drop the high-falutin' oratory about "coming together" and upgrading American political discourse. He's already cornered the market on what Bush Senior, in that same 1989 election, called "the vision thing," so it's time to move on. You can bet the Republican attack machine's political discourse will be just as brutal as it's ever been, and the only way to beat it is with a strong offensive.

Don't be a wimp, Barack. Hit hard, and hit now.