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| Diego in hiding |
My friend has a big ol’ cat named Diego. When he senses that
a trip to the vet is imminent, he crouches down in the middle of the living
room, making himself as small as possible. He thinks he is invisible, but he is
a big guy and holding his breath won’t change that. The remaining crop of GOP
candidates for president reminds me of Diego. Each one has so many skeletons in
the closet that he or she has to stand against the door to keep them all from
popping out, but we all know they’re there, barely out of sight. Yet they think
if they just don’t mention them, nobody will see them. Have they heard that
tale about the Emperor’s new clothes?
In order, from most innocuous to most egregious, let us
start with Michelle Bachmann. Rep. Bachmann claims that she was a government
tax lawyer, formerly employed by the Internal Revenue Service. In the next
breath, she claims that she has worked all her life in the private sector. Does
she know that working for the IRS puts her employment history in the public
sector? Moreover, by all accounts she actually worked there very briefly amidst
maternity leaves. Did she work there long enough to gain a real understanding
of the tax code? Furthermore, she berates people dependent on public subsidies
even though she and her husband own clinics that have received tens of
thousands of dollars in public subsidies. She’ll put an end to that, by cracky! Somehow
she escapes the wrath of her Tea Party adherents.
Then there’s Texas’s governor, Rick Perry. His family’s
hunting ranch was named Niggerhead Ranch. He claims the rock at its entrance
bearing the infamous name was painted over long ago but witnesses claim it was
there as recently as two years ago. Even so, whether it was two years ago or
twenty, did they paint over it out of a newfound sensitivity to the
sensibilities of African Americans or out of the uneasy sense that it was no
longer acceptable to be so overtly racist, even in Texas?
The former Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich is so weighed
down with his past sins that he resembles Charles Dicken’s ghost of Jacob
Marley. He is the only speaker in the history of the House of Representatives
to be sanctioned and fined for ethics violations. He closed down the federal
government partly because he resented his seat on a trip on Air Force One. The twice married speaker led the impeachment of President Bill Clinton even as he was conducting an
affair with the woman who would become his third and present wife, Callista. Sounding
rather like his old nemesis, Bill Clinton, who wanted to parse the meaning of
“is,” Gingrich is at pains to differentiate that he earned millions from Fannie
Mae for his services as an historian and not as a lobbyist. I’m an historian;
perhaps he could do a seminar for his fellow historians to share his money-making
secrets. We would all be extremely appreciative but he would have to do it as a
professional courtesy because we’d never be able to afford his fees.
Mitt Romney keeps trying to convince his audiences that he’s
just one of them, even as he adds a $12 million addition to his house and makes
lame jokes about how he knows what it’s like to be unemployed. Pay no attention
to that man behind the curtain!
But another Texan, perpetual candidate Ron Paul wins the
prize for trying to make his past invisible through his dissembling. There are
caches of Ron Paul’s writings that are virulently racist. He claims that they
went out under his name but that somebody else wrote them; that he was busy
practicing medicine. I'm a writer, if someone put out something under my name, I'd be on them so fast, heads would spin. The thing about writing is that once it’s published, it exists. It’s no longer “he said, she said,” it’s hard copy; it’s in people’s homes and in public libraries. Once it is published, “plausible deniability,”
to quote a favorite phrase of another Texan, Lyndon Baines Johnson, is lost.
Ron Paul may think his past is invisible but he’s just acting like that big ol’
cat. That his followers are willing to ignore it is no great surprise; if independent voters choose to ignore it, we're in trouble.
