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"FacebookPinterestGetty Images\n\nInside the windowless, sprawling pleasure bunker of Las Vegas's Spearmint Rhino strip club, I sit at a quiet table in the corner drinking a Coke and laboring to talk politics with a slim young woman in a black thong and long beads-and-feather Pocahontas earrings. Delicious*, who gives her age as twenty-two, is the third dancer I've interviewed tonight in my last-chance attempt to track down someone with passionate views on the Republican nomination contest, the most mind-squelching story of our time. How come? Because in a sense it never happened. By going from inevitable to uncatchable without ever being in any way remarkable, Mitt Romney did nothing, really, but pass the time. He existed. And that's not a story, it's a condition.\n\nJust ask the dancers at the Spearmint Rhino. The first one I spoke to, who went by the name Charlemagne (\"Because I rule!\" she barked, startling me with both her grandiosity and her command of European history), was so uninspired by the current campaign that she mistook it for the last one. \"The guy I really, really don't like,\" she said, \"is the boring old white guy. I kind of think he's lost it.\" I asked her to be specific, to give a name, since all of the candidates might fit this profile, especially in the eyes of a young stripper whose waist and thighs are covered in tattooed words done in the font used on early Led Zeppelin album covers. \"You know: the veteran,\" she said. \"The soldier guy.\" I asked her if she was referring Ron Paul, the only Republican in the race with a military background as well as the candidate with proven appeal for youthful nonconformists.\n\n\"I'm talking about the pilot,\" she finally said. \"The one they shot down and tortured.\"\n\n\"John McCain?\"\n\n\"That's the one. Him. I couldn't vote for him.\"\n\nI asked Charlemagne if she'd ever voted for anyone and she admitted that she hadn't\u2014but that didn't mean she was closed to the idea, assuming the right person came along. \"How 'bout we find another dancer,\" she said, acting suddenly bored with the whole subject, \"and I can slap her ass and bite her nipples?\"\n\nThe dancer I spoke to next (I didn't catch her name because she was exhaling smoke when she pronounced it) showed greater comprehension of current events. The big jiggly grinning-cheerleader-type girl knew who the Republican candidates were but wasn't sure she liked them, mostly because of her deep uncertainty about her own political identity. To help her, I asked her what her core beliefs were. \"That's easy,\" she blurted out. \"I believe people should take all the Ecstasy they want and have sex with whoever they feel like having sex with.\"\n\nShe thought about this outburst for a few moments. \"I guess that makes me a liberal, doesn't it?\"\n\nFinally I speak to Delicious. It's frustrating. She confesses to having no idea that an election is being held at all. \"I don't have TV,\" she explains. \"I dropped my cable.\" When pressed, she concedes to having a faint inkling that \"something big\" is going on in America (from overhearing her customers, she says) but she tells me she always thought it had to with that \"2012 apocalypse Mayan thing.\"\n\n\"So you don't know the name Mitt Romney?\" I ask her.\n\n\"What?\"\n\nI tell her more about Romney, and watch her perk up when she hears he was a banker once, a detail that doesn't usually cause hearts to race. But businessmen are Delicious's business, and the truth is she's one too, thoroughly drug-free, she proudly tells me, wholly devoted to physical fitness, and bound and determined to save her money, which allowed her to buy her first house just recently and may let her buy another eventually, for investment purposes. Now if Romney can just get Delicious to the polls.\n\nNonetheless, the stripper interviews aren't total failures because at least they remind me that, in America, political freedom is partly freedom from politics. They also help to ease the deep fatigue that came over me that afternoon in the Cosmopolitan Hotel, where I spent several hours at the blackjack tables asking political questions of more engaged types. All of the people I chatted with were men, and most were middle-aged Republicans in town for trade shows and other commercial gatherings. They played blackjack according to \"perfect strategy,\" hitting, splitting, and doubling down according to defined statistical models, not in response to hunches and adrenaline. They were natural \"small c\" conservatives, that is, prudent, efficient, and responsible, and they blamed the Tea Party zealots and evangelicals for making their party unsafe for reasonable moderates. The fact that a moderate has prevailed despite this didn't seem to lift their spirits, though.\n\nThey all wished the race had attracted different candidates. A few of them brought up the usual suspects: Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, and Mitch Daniels, those quintessential men of beige who joker-fate has thrust into the roles of alluring, reclusive Garbo-like exotics merely because they decided to make room for someone even more beige than they. One player, a wholesaler of air conditioners, allowed that when November finally came he'd probably end up backing Obama just for the sake of \"continuity.\" This sentiment drew a weary nod from the player next to him, a beer distributor from the Midwest. \"Two terms is the American way,\" he said. \"It's what's going to happen. It's probably for the best.\" Later, at another table, a third version of this sentiment was offered. \"I like to think there's something I can do, but then I think, 'What so bad again about it?' I mean, I have money to waste in here, at this.\"\n\nOver and over during the last few months we've heard that Romney holds little appeal for the Republican base, the far right wing. What we haven't heard, though, is what I heard that day, which is that he doesn't excite his own base, either\u2014a group that seems to consist, at least in part, of the organically unexcitable. Maybe it's true that once upon a time they were looking for anyone to beat Obama, but an anyone isn't that different from a no one. Or, to put it another way: to middle-of-the-road conservatives seeking a business-as usual candidate, there's no better option, in some ways, than the incumbent. What they hope for is no change.\n\n*Names changed.\n\nWalter Kirn is the author, most recently, of a memoir, \"Lost in the Meritocracy.\" His 2001 novel \"Up in the Air\" is the basis for the film of the same name. His column appears every Friday. \n\nRead more on Death Race 2012\n\nGQ Quiz: Who Said It\u2014Newt Gingrich or Stephen Colbert?\n\n\"Take It From Me: Defending Obamacare is Super-Hard\"\n\n\"Where Would The Black Keys Take Michele Bachmann on a Date?\" \n\nFollow Walter on Twitter for more updates throughout the election."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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