How Rick Perry will win …

The lesson for the press in the last election should be drawn from
Marshall McLuhan’s famous vision that the media are themselves the
vehicle and the message. TV’s popular celebrity commentators are
gatekeepers to a geist of their own time and generation (their own
“kind”); sentries at the portal to tell Sarah Palin that she cannot go
in. She gave her children funny names. She uses a Garfield desk
calendar. She shot a moose and ate it. She dresses like a “slutty flight
attendant.” She does not belong here. She is not “one of us.” Rick
Perry, naturally leery in this otherworld of imagery and style, will not
be likewise taken down. By solstice it will be clear to all that he is
an instinctively agreeable and genuine person with a common grace that
McLuhan’s winged monkeys cannot exile.

I had an excellent brief conversation with Rick Perry at the Barley House after the New Hampshire signing Friday about the astonishing World Series game the night before. It meant something to Texas. Viewership of the World Series jumps way up when the games are between the Yankees and the Red Sox, as if some ancient memory drives us. But the great Series this year advances my theory that America is finding its “center” now in the middle of the country (St. Louis, say) and leaving the New England families — Kennedy, Bush — behind.

This is how I see Rick winning: He needs the endorsements of Trump, Palin, Giuliani and South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley. Cain, who is really on a self-promotion tour, will fall apart — he has no money and has already begun the spiraling descent to cloud-cuckoo land. What I have been calling the “establishment” Republicans — Bush/Rove/neocons — will fall apart as well; they crave ideas whose time has long passed and can’t let go — they have become nostalgicos, relying on the reassuring clichés of their Jesuit priest and the quiet confidence that in the end they can still rig something in Florida — they’ll always have Florida. Bush senior, Bob Dole, the WW II wounded. War is over. We won. But the Republican Party today resembles those lost but loyal Japanese officers still hiding in the jungles of Indonesia decades after the armistice.

Since they can’t get Chris Christie now (and Jeb Bush as VP, of course) they will pour their cash into Romney. But Romney is a shade, a deception, and they will self-destruct just as the Eleanor Roosevelt liberals did in the face of Jack Kennedy rising in the early 1960s.

The 11 percent creep factor will ruin Romney and the establishment Republicans. George Will accurately projects this: “Romney, supposedly the Republican most electable next November, is a recidivist reviser of his principles who is not only becoming less electable; he might damage GOP chances of capturing the Senate.” He seems falling apart by the day now; he seems possessed by New Hampshire’s mountain witches. That leaves only Perry standing, steady and sure. With Nikki Haley as VP he beats Obama and empowers the new generation and the rising heartland movement. Long term I look forward to 12 years; Nikki Haley taking on the challenge of Elizabeth Warren in 2020 (Jim Webb as Warren’s VP) with Jon Huntsman as Haley’s own VP.

Going with the contours of time and economy, America is a peaceable kingdom. Otherwise there is breakage.