Still in the Napa Valley. The best way to get some sleep is to leave the television on in my room. The white noise blocks out the steady stream of health professionals who lumber past my room early in the morning on their way to saving lives or sorting out charts and bills and graphs. Of course, this means my sleepy self gets a full night's barrage of television news on CNN.
And so a walk before work with CNN's topic of Iowa on my brain.
Iowa is a good corn fed state. A good solid Midwestern state without the beer that Wisconsin has to offer, nor the fishing and lakes that Minnesota has to offer. Take a good Midwestern state and remove absolutely everything that is fun about it and you end up with Iowa. That means that some insufferably boring people will be choosing the Republicans nominee tomorrow.
Hence the rise in the polls of someone who really should not be allowed to be a dog catcher let alone a President: Rick Santorum. He is the perfect squeaky clean boring person's candidate. This guy has that pasty white look about him that oozes absolutely no familiarity with the more shadow side of a person's psyche. Santorum lives in a world where being gay is a choice and being against government programs for the poor is a Christian thing to do. Christian Evangelicals dig that sort of rot.
It is only in Iowa that a person like Santorum would get anyone excited. When Iowa gave Mike Huckabee the win in 2008, Huckabee, at least, had a couple of redeeming qualities: he could play the bass and he once pardoned Keith Richards. Santorum has none of that. What Santorum does have is a "gee whiz" work ethic and an honest appeal to those who live in little pink houses and go to the local non-denominational, Denominational church. He will be the candidate of those who think the world was made 6,000 years ago. He will be the candidate of those who think Obama is a secret Muslim. He is the white evangelical candidate---and it looks like he will do very well tomorrow.
If Santorum wins tomorrow, the ultra-right, non-Ron Paul fringe will have their candidate. And that will be very interesting.
2 comments:
Thanks for the post. Your comments about Iowa remind me of David, my first openly gay friend. We met in the mid - 70s. I got to introduce him to the Castro and Polk districts of SF and he gave me the story of growing up, obviously (his words)gay, in Dubuque. I'm sure that he would be in complete agreement with your assessment of Iowa.
Hi Teddy, Thanks for dropping by. I'm thinking Rick Santorum has just seen his high water mark. But, well, this is America and things are certainly very weird.
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