Blunders

Worn out by the fatigue of the presidential campaign, stunned by too many TV debates and being essentially weak candidates, Barack Obama’s Republican opponents limp and stumble from blunder to blunder in their race toward the presidential dream. By now, the band of seven men and one woman who are fighting for the title of Republican contender has offered a bunch of stupid and unintentional gags, moments of amnesia, mental blanks and squalid trivialities for the TV audience, comedians, satirists and the merciless memory of the Internet.

The empty Mitt Romney, who cuts a nice figure of as a Hollywood-cast president who changes the script at every shooting, the Texan Rick Perry, who makes us sarcastically regret the intelligence and preparedness of the younger George Bush, the frantic extremist Michelle Bachmann and the former king of Godfather Pizza Herman Cain, chased by several accusations of sexual harassment, represent the best hope for the reelection of the president.

As the great baseball coach Joe Torre used to say, “You can’t beat somebody with nobody”; after months of setbacks and bad financial news, Obama can look with new optimism at the show offered so far by his potential rivals, who risk self-destruction every time they open their mouths.* Perry, the Texan who entertained the viewers with his inability to remember the three things he’d like to do, remains the recognized king of blunders.

He started with that determined, anti-federal tone that the Republican right wing likes so much: “It’s three agencies of government when I get there that are gone – Commerce, Education and the um, what’s the third one there? Let’s see. Oh five – Commerce, Education and the um, um.” His rival Romney, showing off a perfect set of professionally remade teeth, maliciously suggests: “The EPA?” “EPA, there you go, no… No, sir, no, sir. We were talking about the agencies of government.” Laughs. He’d remember the third one, the Department of Energy, only hours later. He’d explain that he was tired, that it was a “whoops” moment, a gaffe.

But not to leave him alone, here comes Herman Cain, an African-American businessman (the “tanned version,” like another famous blunderer would have said to Barack Obama) who remained silent for many long seconds at the question about Libya and Obama’s strategy to defeat Gadhafi, desperately trying to remember what Libya is and what the government did.

“What are you asking me, did I agree or not disagree with Obama?” he asked his interviewer. Sure thing. “OK, Libya.” After several tormented moments of silence, he launched into a confused explanation about the intelligence, the Libyan opposition and the rebels. His cruel interviewer insisted on asking Cain whether he would have done as Obama did? The former Lord of the Pizzas, already accused by four women of sexual harassment, who claims to be a decision-maker, says that he can’t answer either yes or no.

He admits he doesn’t know who the president of Uzbekistan is, though that’s more than excusable if he didn’t miserably flounder on the name of the Central Asian country, saying “Uzebeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan” before finally saying Uzbekistan. It’s a cruel game, even unfair, the one that candidates to the White House have to undergo. It’s a kind of secular inquisition to catch them out, to make them contradict themselves and show their limits. It’s supposed to be an innocuous representation of the stress they’d go through if they became Commander-in-Chief and if the telephone in their bedroom should ring at 3 a.m. to announce some global catastrophe, according to a famous formula used in vain by Hillary Clinton against Obama in their 2008 duel.

It’s a game that is hard to play with the former governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney, who changes his mind about everything every day. He is an eel that is impossible to seize, capable of declaring that he’s against the healthcare reform passed by Obama, which is a copy of what he did when he governed his state. However, he remains the candidate most liked by the Republican voters for his beautiful cinematographic figure, since there’s no one else better than him. He is liked in spite of his being Mormon, a Christian denomination that fundamentalist and traditional Christians consider a bizarre non-Christian sect. By not saying anything, he doesn’t make gaffes or commits own goals.

Whoever comes out the least damaged during this season of TV cavalries that give me a headache (as Cain himself, the former king of pizzas and alleged groper, admits) will be the one who triumphs at the people’s assembly in Iowa, the upcoming caucus on Jan. 3.

It’s a knock-out competition that does not reward the best but spares us from the least decent or most stupid — a competition with odds in favor of the old, defeated and recycled navigators, like Romney or Clinton’s former enemy, Newt Gingrich, who chose the always-easy road of the accusing the “left-wing press” anytime he blunders. “They distorted the context.” A classic defense.

There will still be more five debates between the seventh and eighth dwarfs and Bachmann, who are united only by a generic anti-Obama attitude. We have already been subjected to 12 debates since last spring, and there will be the chance of new blunders and abrupt resurrections during the seven weeks to come before the caucus in Iowa.

But the thought that one of these eight might be one that will be at the helm of the biggest economy in the world, the greatest army and the biggest nuclear arsenal in history in January 2013, remains the best ally for Obama’s hopes of reelection. Like Jon Stewart, the comedian who, more than anybody else, has prospered from the comedy of errors by these people, said, “If one of these candidates should win, let’s hope that they turn off the telephones at the White House.”*

*Editor’s Note: This quote, while accurately translated, could not be verified.