TWEEDLEDEE, TWEEDLEDUM LOCK HORNS

By H. N. Burdett

With a tip of my 80% wool cap to that sultan of satire, Mort Sahl: George Washington could not tell a lie, Richard Nixon could not tell the truth, and Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich cannot tell the difference.

After Herman Cain departed the primary arena, Gingrich shot past his Republican opponents in the polls like Silky Sullivan, the legendary little horse that could. Back in the late 1950s, Silky ran from 25 to 30 lengths behind in race after race to garner comeback triumphs. Previously mired in single digit perdition in the polls, the former House of Representatives Speaker whizzed by second-place Romney and landed some 20 points in front of him. But the apparent endless volatility of Republican voters has once again surfaced. The latest Washington Post/CBS poll shows Gingrich and Romney running neck-and-neck.

The wonder of the Gingrich surge is that repeatedly mentioning his association with Ronald Reagan, which the current GOP flavor of the month does with monotonous regularity, continues to carry weight among the party's conservative faithful.

Distracted from his focus on the January 10 New Hampshire primary by the down-draft of Gingrich's resurrection from dead in the water to front-runner, Romney dug into his deep pockets to pour $3 million into the Jan. 3 Iowa caucus, which he had previously written off with the nonchalance of a Sunday church-goer shaking free from all vestiges of sanctimony on Monday morning. Four years ago, the Iowa caucus winner was Mike Huckabee, who by Super Tuesday of 2008 became the political equivalent of the proverbial golf ball lost in the tall grass.

On the next Super Tuesday, March 6, 2012, eight states - Georgia, Idaho, Massachusetts, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Vermont and Virginia -- will hold presidential primaries, and two - Alaska and North Dakota - will stage caucuses. Barring a photo finish, the GOP will have unofficially nominated its candidate for president.

For all of his posturing as a "consistent conservative" - forgetting that he held contrary positions on virtually every core Republican anathema, from government health insurance to gun control and a woman's right to have an abortion, while winning the governorship of the Bay State - amnesiac Romney has openly observed that whenever he travels around Iowa, he keeps running into loyal Ron Paul supporters.

Though Romney now finds himself, lo and behold, with an unlikely fighting chance to win the Iowa caucus, he recognizes that a victory for him in the Hawkeye state would be nothing short of a miracle on par with the parting of the Red Sea and the virgin birth combined. But he further believes it is prudent to shell out three Very Big Ones not so much to win there, but to prevent his current nemesis from doing so. Should Gingrich capture the Iowa caucus and, after Romney's expected victory in New Hampshire, also carry South Carolina on January 21 and Florida on January 31, he would gain formidable traction for Super Tuesday on March 6. And only last summer, the campaign staff of the nation's most prominent unregistered lobbyist was bailing out in droves.

Concluding that Ron Paul has nowhere to go after Iowa, Romney would welcome a victory there by the libertarian Texas congressman who has little faith in government solving anything but continues to claim himself to be the only GOP candidate who truly reveres the United States Constitution, which, oh by the way, just happens to be the blueprint for U.S. government.

Gingrich's delusional self-esteem audaciously permits him to wager his candidacy on the shaky premise that he can convince voters he is a historian rather than the lobbyist that he obviously is. And Romney banks on his patrician countenance, even when he is garbed in real-folks flannel shirt and blue jeans, to enable him to lock eyes with voters and enunciate scripted nonsense about being a consistent conservative. Both have daringly shrugged off the timeless wisdom of Abraham Lincoln's celebrated observation: You can fool all of the people some of the time, you can even fool some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.

Even George W. Bush, who won the presidency in 2000, then proceeded to wage two off-the-books pre-emptive invasions and occupations of Middle Eastern countries yet still managed to win re-election, has ultimately learned Lincoln's lesson. Disengaged though he may be, Bush 43 must still wince some in his realization that scant few Republicans would defend him against being flung into the dung pile precinct of history, where James Buchanan and Andrew Johnson currently reside, as among easily the three worst U.S. presidents.

Gingrich stretches beyond hubris in his claim that he was hired by Freddie Mac - the same entity he felt Barney Frank should be jailed for supporting - and collected $1.6 million for his services as a historian rather than the lobbyist he was. Romney promptly challenged Gingrich to return the money that made him the highest paid historian ever.

"There are two kinds of light," James Thurber once observed, "the glow that illuminates and the glare that obscures." While politicians too often rely on the latter to blind consituents from their various misdeeds and other embarrassments, once they reach the top of the polls they are, thankfully, exposed by the former. Romney and Gingrich are learning the humorist's theory of light the hard way.

This, of course, does not dissuade historian Ginrich one iota. He goes right on trying to sound professorial, which apparently works some with less educated voters, though the polls reveal that more educated Republicans tend to be more skeptical about his shameless, self-styled pedantry. As one pundit observed, whenever Gingrich freely peppers virtually every sentence he utters whenever any cockamamie thought pops into his head with four-syllable words, like "fundamental," supporters confuse his shoot-from-the-lip rhetoric with erudition.

As for Gingrich's claim to consistency on conservative values, he is on record as favoring amnesty for undocumented immigrants, as well as single-payer health insurance and he believes, or once believed, climatologists whose research shows that the planet is actually becoming dangerously warmer - positions diametrically opposed to GOP anti-science orthodoxy.

Romney has also mastered politics as the art of the preposterous by robotically staring down the television camera and declaring himself to be the only "job creator" among the GOP candidates. His claim harks back to his days as the manager of Bain Capital, Bain & Company's private equity operation.

Though Romney did not invent the high stakes game of leveraged buyouts, he was certainly among its more masterful practitioners. Bain Capital acquired or heavily invested in such companies as KB Toys, Domino's Pizza and Sealy Mattress. "Job creator" Romney would just as soon forget the 3,400 jobs lost before KB Toys declared for bankruptcy reorganization, the 2,500 jobs lost after Bain Capital's buyout of Clear Channel Communications, or the hundreds of jobs lost after its buyout of Sensata Technology and the 700 workers fired in the wake of the merger of steel companies Bain Capital arranged to form GSI Industries.

The thousands of people who lost jobs as the result of Romney's wheeling and dealing in the legal larceny of leveraged buyouts and sundry other manipulations will not be much cheered by the recent New York Times revelation that Romney is financing his current presidential campaign - as he did his last one four years ago - with the millions he continues to rake in annually from Bain for a job well done years back.

Marc B. Walpow, who as a managing partner at Bain worked closely with Romney for nine years, says, "I never thought of what I do for a living as job creation. The primary goal of private equity is to create wealth for its investors." Indeed Romney deserves high marks in accomplishing the goal described by Walpow.

Gingrich's boasts of consistent conservatism and Romney's "job creator" claims bring to mind H. L. Mencken's observation that a politician, upon learning that he has cannibals for constituents, will offer them missionaries for dinner. Amen.
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