His novelist father famously commented, "If you can't annoy somebody, there's little point in writing."*
Novelist Martin Amis holds up the family side well in his review of the American parties' conventions:
The Republican dialectic, in 2012,
can be summarized as follows. Obama might or might not have inherited a
difficult situation (and Democrats, at least, will remember George W.
Bush’s historic warning in 2008: “This sucker could go down”); but he
hasn’t fixed it, so let’s try Romney, who’s a businessman, not a
socialist. This lone notion was pressed home with repetition, tautology,
platitude, redundancy—and then more repetition.
Madamic
good ole girls in scarlet ensembles, peanut-faced glozers in
ambassadorial suits and ties, puns, rhymes, tinkertoy wordplay (“Give me
liberty—not gimme, gimme, gimme”), alliteration,
iteration, my mom said to me, started a small business, almighty God is
the truth of all we have, inherit our hopes and dreams, my daddy said to
me, started a small business—and all of this seconded by the
brain-dead, couch-potato tweets that looped the hall in illuminated
script: “I’m so proud to be a Republican,” “The Bush family is so
awesome,” “Look at all the Olympians on stage for Romney. SO COOL!” And
the Party was partying, all bounce and yelp and whoop. By the second day
I felt as sour as Bill Murray, mingling for the thousandth time with
the capering revelers (“Pick out your partner and join in the fun”) on
Gobbler’s Knob.
Once
a night, on average, the grim torpor briefly lifted. With Ann Romney,
the interest was human interest. Here was a woman who had submitted, no
doubt with qualms, to the inevitable falsity of political display; and
you warmed to her warmth, even as you realized that much of her speech,
with its emphasis on “working moms,” “the couple who want another child”
but can’t afford it, and so on, was plainly disingenuous. The
strugglers she claimed to champion (and it was allegedly tough for the
basement-dwelling Romneys, back in the day) are the very people that her
husband, if elected, will do nothing for. You realized, too, that Ann
won’t help the GOP’s desperate quest for diversity: she looks like the
worthy winner of Miss Dairy Queen 1970. “Tonight I want to talk to you
about love,” Ann had said. And then Governor Christie waddled on. Chris
wanted to talk about Chris, though he did what he could for the cause:
his mom told him, apparently, that love was bull and what you needed was
respect.
One must, of course, deal with The Chair:
...We will return to Ryan. But first we have to get through Romney. This
was the best thing about the Clint Eastwood warm-up: he ignored the red
light and mumbled on for an extra seven minutes, sowing panic, as well
as excruciation, in the control tower. All we lacked was a live feed to
Romney—to Romney’s characteristic smile of pain (that of a man with a
very sore shoulder who has just eased his way into a tight tuxedo).
Perhaps this partly explains why the nominee remained so opaque and
unrelaxed. He never came close to settling the question that all Marica
must ask: is Mitt the kind of guy you’d like to have a glass of water
with?
In the end, it all comes down to magical thinking:
The GOP, moreover, is doomed by demographics. It is simply running out
of the white people who form its electoral base; as one of Romney’s
strategists conceded, “This is the last time anyone will try to do
this.” We know that Republicans refuse to compromise with Democrats. For
how long will they refuse to compromise with reality?...the audience in Tampa looked practically antebellum, while the audience in Charlotte looked just like the future.
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* Waldo has always been fond of this quotation.
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