THE NARCISSIST VS. THE WAFFLE KING

By H. N. Burdett

Albert Einstein's definition of insanity was to do the same thing the same way over and over and expect different results. The Einstein maxim applies to the rigid insistence by Congressional Republicans to extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy.

By framing the one percent of Americans at the top of the economic ladder as "job creators" - rather than the job outsourcers and job killers they have been in recent years - GOP lawmakers have closed their minds to the fact that, despite a decade of the tax cuts they hold inviolable, unemployment has risen to near double digits.

Contrarily, when the wealthiest were paying something somewhat closer to their fair share, during the Clinton administration, 23 million jobs were created. As President Obama said in his recent major economic address: "That is not politics. That's just math." That he happens to preside over one of the more math deficient countries in the western world probably discounts the probability that he will adopt those lines as a campaign slogan.

While Republicans stand firm - even on the fault line of economic collapse - when it comes to party orthodoxy, they appear to have narrowed their 2012 presidential nominee choice to one between a pair of political meteorologists, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, who can re-position themselves in an eye blink whenever the winds shift. Both are endowed with sufficient ideological cynicism to vow their allegiance to conservative purity.

The Hobson's choice confronting Republican voters - at least this month - is one between Romney, who has made more waffles than the entire Denny's restaurant chain, and Gingrich, who makes Narcissus, the Greek mythological figure hopelessly in love with his own reflection, look like the Elephant Man.

Despite his well-advertised turnarounds on core right-wing issues, from gun control to abortion to same-sex marriage, Romney shows up in polls as the candidate most likely to give President Obama a run for his money.

Should Romney emerge as his party's standard-bearer, the health care program adopted when he was governor of Massachusetts and was the model for the national health care restructuring Republicans revile as socialized medicine, is likely to give the GOP faithful some pause. Equally interesting would be Romney's defense of the reversal of his position on the federal bailout that rescued the automobile industry from near extinction. In Michigan, America's automotive capital and a swing state where his father served as the chairman and CEO of the American Motors Corporation before he was elected governor of that state, voters may have a problem with Mitt Romney lambasting the Obama bailout.

Gingrich, the poster boy for unregistered Capitol Hill lobbyists, marital infidelity and egomania, has a flipflop problem of his own, on top of his habit of saying anything that pops into his mind at the precise moment when he should say nothing at all. Gingrich's inability to suppress his obsession with the microphone and the television camera may be particularly difficult for Republican voters to digest whenever they view those playbacks of his sitdown with Nancy Pelosi warning of the inconvenient truth of climate change - another Republican ideological no-no. He, incidentally, calls that abandonment of the GOP reservation the "dumbest" thing he ever did. But he might want to reassess that judgment after he has felt the full impact of the fallout from his proposal that students living in poverty be given school janitorial duties to learn lessons in the American work ethic.

The best chance Republicans have for evicting Obama from the White House is to demonize the president for his inability in only three years to clean up the mess of the two off-the-books preemptive invasions/occupations and the economic castrophe he inherited from George W. Bush, the hands-down worst president in U.S. history who held that lease for a full eight years.

Considering that Romney and Gingrich have more baggage than the RMS Queen Mary hauled during its trans-Atlantic voyages, either of these potential GOP presidential candidates would be destined to enter the race from a defensive posture. Even the immortal Sugar Ray Robinson, the greatest counter-puncher ever, would be strongly tested were he placed at that disadvantage.
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