Mitt Romney looks increasingly like Michael Bluth in the TV show Arrested Development, unable to stop his family from careening towards oblivion
My favourite TV programme of all time is, easily, Arrested Development, the brilliant show about the fall of a once powerful family, brought down by their own weaknesses, corruption and self-centredness. The sensible adult son, Michael Bluth, tries to rescue his family name and reunite his relatives but the family have no interest in helping Michael or themselves, bent as they are on self-destruction. Whether this is down to selfishness, short-sightedness or stupidity is not always clear but, for whatever reason, Michael can only watch as his family careen ever closer to their end, acting more deranged as they go.
I think it is my fondness for Arrested Development that explains my enjoyment of the Republican convention currently taking place in Tampa, Florida. "Taking place" was nearly an overstatement as the convention has been curtailed owing to fears over hurricane Isaac. Strangely, there has been no word from former presidential candidate and dementor Michele Bachmann or modern-day Savonarola Pat Robertson about how this storm signifies holy displeasure, even though both have previously connected meteorological shifts with God. One year ago, Bachmann claimed that hurricane Irene, which caused at least 56 deaths, was God saying: "'Are you going to start listening to me here?' … Government is on a morbid obesity diet and we've got to rein in the spending." Robertson said that Haiti's 2010 earthquake, in which at least 100,000 people died, was retribution for the country's "pact with the devil". Maybe their speeches were among those that had to be cut because of the weather.
This storm, as well as providing political journalists with the most obvious pathetic fallacy and metaphor since Emily Brontë wrote Wuthering Heights, is both practically and historically awkward for Romney. The Republican party does not have good associations with hurricanes, a point only underlined by Isaac, which as well as derailing the convention is hitting New Orleans, seven years after the city was all but destroyed by Katrina, a name as verboten among Republicans as G-E-O-R-G-E W B-U-S-H.
No party is ever homogenised in its views but, as the New York Times reported, the Republican party is "more factionalised – ideologically, politically and culturally – than Republican leaders could imagine in recent history", and many of the factionalisations are diametrically opposed, such as the hardline social conservatives versus the economic libertarians, who are far less interested in abortion and gay marriage than their vocal brethren.
I suspect that the once pro-choice Romney would prefer these aforementioned vocal conservatives to keep shtoom, seeing as their hardline attitude is a proven vote-loser. Since Missouri Republican Todd Akin's infamous interview last week referring to "legitimate rape" he has fallen 20 points in the polls and fewer than two in 10 Americans support all abortions being banned with no exemptions. Yet, like the Bluths, these guys just can't help themselves. Pennsylvania Senate candidate Tom Smith recently justified his "no exemptions" stance by saying that a woman becoming pregnant out of wedlock is "similar" to pregnancy from rape: "Put yourself in a father's perspective; yes, it is similar," he bleated, proving, were proof needed, that these politicians are unable to put themselves in the woman's perspective and so obsessed with what goes in and out of a woman's vagina that they can't distinguish between rape and consensual sex.
As MSNBC's Rachel Maddow discussed last week, these tendencies always existed quietly on the sidelines but "as the Republican party has slipped its moorings post-Bush and Cheney … these folks have taken over" and one of them, Paul Ryan, is now the VP candidate. One of Romney's difficulties is that he has to kowtow to these folks on abortion and immigration, but without alienating mainstream voters.
There is a distinctly apocalyptic feel to this convention. At a Faith & Freedom Coalition gathering, former presidential candidate Newt Gingrich and organiser Ralph Reed waxed firebrand evangelical, with the former claiming that President Obama condones the killing of children and the latter describing Obama's America as "a pockmarked bleak landscape".
This sense of doom is understandable. In a recent WSJ/NBC poll, Romney scored a grand total of 0% support among black Americans. Yet as white babies now account for less than half of the births in the US, something will have to give soon in the Republican party's current incarnation.
Political reporter Jonathan Chait suggests this explains Romney's hardline approach to the welfare state, trying to get in the changes while he can. Or maybe Romney – a man so value-free he, as David Brooks writes in the New York Times, would keep a mood ring transparent – is simply going where the party wind blows, even as it blows him over the cliff. It at least partly explains the self-destructive hysteria that has infected the Republicans.
At the end of Arrested Development, Michael realises there is no saving his family and flees to Mexico. Considering some of Romney's recent statements about immigration, that country probably wouldn't even have him any more.