<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" Win McNamee/Getty ImagesYOU MIGHT BE A PHONY IF... /// There is nothing in the career of Willard Romney \u2014 part fake, part dork \u2014 that would appeal to Alabama and Mississippi. And the other three clowns aren&amp;#039;t much better. (Optional soundtrack to this blog post...) The Boston Herald, one of my several alma maters in this business, this morning ran the single funniest quote of this presidential campaign. My old colleague, Margery Eagan, went around collecting bemused reactions from our several Republican politicians we have in this state concerning the performance of former Governor Cheesy Grits now that he&amp;#039;s roaming the old Confederacy, taking the Rosetta Stone immersion course in Basic Peckerwood. One of them came from an old political friend of mine named Bob Hedlund, and Hedlund may have broken the old Laff-O-Matic here: &amp;quot;Romney&amp;#039;s not a phony. He&amp;#039;s like a Boy Scout. Who says, &amp;#039;I like to go to bed with a full tummy&amp;#039;? He&amp;#039;s just a super intelligent guy who doesn&amp;#039;t interact with regular people on a regular basis so it comes off unnatural, like John Kerry.&amp;quot; Holy mother of god, that&amp;#039;s funny. Let us put it plainly: If Willard Romney truly were not a phony, he&amp;#039;d have been buried in an Iowa cornfield last January and they&amp;#039;d still be looking for the body. Romney&amp;#039;s entire career as a national politician is based on the implicit understanding between him and the voters of what a complete phony he is. To vote for Willard Romney is to accept the basic syllogism of his career \u2014 either he was a towering fake while he was running for, and pretending to be, the governor of Massachusetts, or he&amp;#039;s being a towering fake now. That is the bargain that every individual Republican voter has to strike within himself. It&amp;#039;s the bargain that the entire party will have to strike in Tampa this summer. (And saying &amp;quot;I like to go to bed with a full tummy&amp;quot; makes Romney a dork, something else we&amp;#039;ve all understood for years. Being a dork and being a phony are hardly mutually exclusive, which is another lesson we can all take from the agonizingly slow ascent of Willard Romney, possible presidential nominee. Being a dork is who he is. Being a fake is his full-time job.) And nowhere have the parameters of this bargain been more clearly laid out than in Alabama and Mississippi, the two states that will have their turn redirecting the clown car on Tuesday night. There is nothing in Willard Romney&amp;#039;s entire career that would appeal to the Bible-banging, gun-loving, designer-mudflap Republican base in these two states. There is nothing about him that would appeal to an electorate made up largely of guys whose mullets creep down the back of their Cat hats, and the good women who have shown them the light and turned them to Jesus from their hell-raisin&amp;#039; ways. Romney is a Yankee from Hellachusetts. He sounds like the bank manager who repo&amp;#039;d your tractor. He belongs to a godless cult that thinks Jesus visited the Indians. His jeans are pressed and they have a crease, may Merle have mercy on his soul. More to the point, he used to be pro-life. He invented Obamacare, which is coming in two years to steal all the Liberty (!) in the South. He saved a sporting event that had no motor sports in it, but which was full of people from Europe, some of whom he even allowed to win some of our medals. He knows NASCAR owners. (Did he weep when Dale bought it at Daytona? Hell, no.) There he is, up on a podium with Jeff Foxworthy, and who do you think wins if you pass around a secret ballot at those events? If you think it&amp;#039;s Willard Romney, you already may be a phony. The problem is that the rest of the clowns are no better. Okay, Ron Paul&amp;#039;s from a district in Texas, but he doesn&amp;#039;t even count in these two states because his campaign is full of hippies in knit hats and because he doesn&amp;#039;t like blowing the everlasting aspirations out of brown people. But Rick Santorum&amp;#039;s from Pennsylvania and, in case I haven&amp;#039;t mentioned it recently, is a colossal dick into the bargain. N. Leroy Gingrich, Definer Of Civilization&amp;#039;s Rules And Leader (Perhaps) Of The Civilizing Forces, may have represented a district in Georgia, but he&amp;#039;s an Army brat from Santorum&amp;#039;s home state who&amp;#039;s always been weaker at home than in Washington, and who now is so serious about his official residence in Virginia that his campaign forgot to get him on the ballot there. There has been no true &amp;quot;Southern&amp;quot; candidate among them since Rick Perry augured in a while back. The standing four all have had to be phonies to one extent or another, but Santorum really believes with the base on the social issues, and Newt likes to pretend he&amp;#039;s Stonewall Jackson and the Iranians are Joe Hooker&amp;#039;s army at Chancellorsville, so they can at least connect on the basis of those things.  But Romney is pure pander. Phoniness as his political raison d&amp;#039;etre has come into sharpest relief over the past week. The terms of the bargain never have been clearer. He is not a good old boy. He cannot even pretend to be one. His attempts to be one are so laughable on their face that he reminds you of Andy Kaufman reading The Great Gatsby as part of a stand-up routine: its effectiveness depends entirely on how well and how deeply the audience gets the joke, and accepts the performance as performance alone. Competent charlatanism is what this peculiar audience has expected, and that is pretty much what Romney has given them. Once the campaign moves on tomorrow, the people to whom he has directed that charlatanism are going to face a very uncomfortable truth \u2014 that, in nominating Willard Romney, the Republican party, for the first time in a long time, will have abandoned the South. --CLICK HERE FOR MUCH MORE ON ROMNEY &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; Follow The Politics Blog on RSS and on the Twitter &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a13201/mitt-romney-alabama-mississippi-7308985/>