Manchurian Mannequins

Casual observers may believe Obama beat McCain because of things like effective organization, disgust with failed Republican policies, a VP candidate who wasn’t a booger-eating moron, etc. But the GOP poobahs know better: The party that transformed an addled, daddy-dependent, AWOL, prep-school cheerleader into Commander Codpiece understands the power of image.

Before McCain had even delivered his concession speech in 2008, the people who really run the GOP (hint: the money people, not the tea party yahoos, dittoheads, Paultards, etc.) identified the cause of the loss and were busily engaged in developing a new strategy.

No doubt they analyzed McCain’s ill-fated green screen speech, contrasting the image he projected (a pallid scoop of cottage cheese on a bed of wilted iceberg lettuce) with Obama’s image that same night. Here’s what they saw:

It’s important to keep in mind that even following the George W. Bush debacle and subsequent repudiation at the polls, there was never going to be a serious debate about the direction of the GOP, for all the yammering about a return to core principles, etc. The Republican power-brokers are as contemptuous of that kind of crap and their mouth-breathing Sarah Palin fan base as any Blue Dog Democrat ever was of any DFH. The only questions were:

1: How do we wrest back control of the government from the faction that, while serving corporate interests, occasionally pretends to give a shit about working people and hence might accidentally pass a policy or two that could be classified as vaguely progressive?

2: How do we return control to the party that pretends to give a shit about oppressing gays and keeping guns in the hands of god-fearing white folk while continuing the important work of shoveling tax cuts to the rich and stripping away consumer protections?

The image analysis suggested the obvious answer: A good-looking, distinguished fellow with a lantern jaw and broad shoulders. Mitt Romney, with his absurdly presidential hair and ready-made neo-con “intelligentsia” fan club, was the obvious choice.

The strategy set, they carefully laid their plans, floating a trial balloon in the form of Cosmo TruckNutz and scoring a surprise senate seat. Romney was ostentatiously behind that effort, and this week at CPAC, now-Senator TruckNutz lent his new star power to the Romney effort, touting Mitten’s economic prowess.

But the CPAC attendees refused to cooperate in Romney’s coronation. They chose Ron Paul in their straw poll instead. This peasants’ revolt prompted furious back-pedaling on the part of official GOP media organ Fox News, which was forced to spend the rest of the weekend discrediting the gathering they’d spent days shamelessly pimping.

As for Mittens, who put so much work into winning the straw poll (which he’d handily won three times before), it’s likely he spent the rest of the weekend drowning his sorrows in a case of Mountain Dew, spewing carbonated day-glo green jets of vomit all over the white hotel carpet. And while Ann Romney and Hugh Hewitt crawled around on their hands and knees blotting up the stains, Mitt sat around in his underpants muttering, “But I had Scott Brown. Scott! Brown!”

But he needn’t worry: There’s no way the GOP power-brokers will let Paul anywhere near the nomination. Unless they find another more attractive and malleable mannequin, my guess is Mitt’s their man.

Posted by Betty Cracker on 02/22/10 at 08:36 AM • Permalink

Betty—Please close this post IMMEDIATELY as it may jeopardize years of effort in my basement laboratory to produce a suitable GOP candidate to challenge Obama in 2012.

Too late. Our Tories have bagged the prototype for our forthcoming elections.

It is for this reason that I created the MittBot 2.0 tag at my blog.

The new model features more lifelike hair and less hawklike features, but the most pleasant surprise comes when you undress him and find not the restrictive undergarments of yore but instead a smokin’ hottie goin’ commando in his pickup truck.

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