Ow. My Awesometer just broke.
Sunday was Ronnie’s centennial, and here’s my take on his enduring popularity: Ronald Reagan was the last guy I voted for who didn’t give me the creeps.
We can talk philosophy and track record some other time. I’m trying to put my finger on a basic and near universal quality of our political figures — right, left and center. There’s something wrong with them.
Something creepy wrong. They give off the paste-eating-kid-from-kindergarten vibe.
Not out of touch. “Out of touch” implies normal people who have been isolated for too long. This is something fundamentally not-all-there. Not right.
In the interest of bipartisanship, let’s talk Bob Dole. Talkin’ about Bob Dole, in the third person. (I had a friend — a Republican — who called him Evil Grandpa). Or John McCain, who hums and fizzes with suppressed…ummm…I don’t know and I don’t want to find out. Just hinky, you know?
And ‘fess up — it was pretty hard propping up George Bush, wasn’t it? Particularly that last couple of years, when he couldn’t be assed to stick up for our principles and all we had to rally around was a man who talked funny and moved like a wadded up fist and gave goofy-ass nicknames to everyone he dealt with.
And, Jesus — Al Gore and John Kerry are just flying right off the Nutcake Scale. Linc Chafee. Alan Grayson. Joe Biden. Barney Frank — GAH! Even people in care homes wear their freaking teeth in public.
Political types are like performing animals, with your Axelrods and Roves just off camera poking them with sticks to make them do the tricks right. Gosh, when they stand up on their hind legs like that, they look just like a people!
Ronald Reagan wasn’t an ordinary person, of course. Neither is Sarah Palin. “Ordinary” is not a desirable quality in a leader. But they are among the few people in political life who don’t seem like they probably wet the bed until they were thirty.
February 8, 2011 — 9:39 pm
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