Romney's Night...

By DUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ
The Paz Files

AUSTIN, Texas - Ah, those wild and crazy Republicans. They'll break their own hearts sooner or later. Throw a gang of lame candidates up on a stage for a velvet-glove debate and what do you get: No presidential timber. Jab at each other as if the best of high school nerds, one, the only woman on the stage, looking as if she's just come off a long date with the football team's backfield. One Black man doing his best to feel wanted. Boo a Gay soldier?

It was, as they say in boxing, a preliminary bout featuring amateurish nobodies.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry is going nowhere in his bid to gain the Republican Party's 2012 presidential nomination. If ever a Back-40 candidate looked out of place in a national contest, it is Perry, who is fading with each passing debate. He stumbles on questions to do with foreign policy, with immigration and, when the opportunity to roast longshot opponent Rick Santorum on his anti-Gay soldier diatribe, Perry says nothing. The Texan who some say may be Gay took a pass on that softball, even as the crowd began to boo the poor soldier who had asked his question from the war zone via pre-recorded video.

These empty suits are the best the GOP can offer? Jeepers, where is heady Dan Quayle when you need him? Where's Spiro Agnew?

If anyone can claim victory in the latest candidate gathering, this one held last night in Orlando, Florida, that one may be former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. He is the only one who looks remotely presidential. Herman Cain, the sole African-American in the building, did not. Free-thinking Texas Congressman Ron Paul hasn't left the moon. Adulterer Newt Gingrich wants to fight the world. Former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman is strictly vice-presidential material. Emotional Michele Bachmann, the pride of the dreadful Tea Party, is on the wrong bus. Bachmann is better suited for less-important, less-brainy battles. And debate newcomer Gary Johnson, a former governor of New Mexico, seemed out of sorts with the moment, crawling his words as if high on weed.

So, much was left to Romney and Perry.

Again, Perry assumed the position. He bent over when called on his ridiculous posturing in his book, mouthed a non-answer on a question to do with nuclear bombs and Pakistan and went all-out naked on the topic of immigration. The Texas Aggie, not exactly a brain in college, seemed disoriented when Easy Rick Santorum, a former U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania, assaulted him verbally on his immigration stance.

"I don't think you have a heart," Perry said lamely, as Santorum tore into Perry's support of tuition cuts at Texas universities for undocumented students. Santorum drew applause from the audience when he sank his tool deeper, noting that the problem with the Texas program is that it amounts to a taxpayer-funded subsidy of illegal immigration.

Standing alongside Perry, Romney could only smile.

Mitt Romney knows the tide is changing for Perry, a candidate in the fray only for the past 40 days and a candidate whose shine fades with every vacuous utterance he lobs into the winds. One wonders how he would do when debating that other crazed Texan, George W. Bush. Would Perry make Bush, Jr. look like JFK?

He made Romney look more presidential.

Romney is a bureaucrat at heart. His stint as governor was short - one term. He really made his name as the guy behind the 2002 Winter Olympics in his mother state of Utah. A millionaire several times over, Harvard Law graduate Romney looks to much like the Hamptons guy with a nice collection of expensive yacht boat shoes. Is he the answer to anything? How would he fare against smarter politicians such as New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, or against Rudy Giuliani? Would John McCain even take the stage against this horribly-weak field?

Republicans are an easy lot to rile. Throw them some red meat - anti-immigration crap and anti-President Obama lies and anti-Gay slurs - and you have them ready for air-conditioned laughter. They like to deride the poor, to damn public schools, to look at government and ask that it be destroyed...until wildfires and hurricanes torch and shred their belongings; then they are quick to seek that federal emergency declaration.

Hypocrites and military service-dodgers fill their rolls. They are Americans until tax time.

So, when the question surfaces about who won the debate or which of these guys is the answer to America's current malaise, well, the astute would argue that it would be none of the above. Perry as a national leader, as man who would represent you abroad? Insanity. Herman "999" Cain? An utter joke. Michele Bachmann? A ditz who would be over her head alongside the leader of, say, China, or even Mexico. Huntsman? He should have stayed as ambassador to the same China. Santorum? He was beaten in his most recent Senate campaign. Ron Paul? A Jeopardy! contestant on the wrong game show. The physically-eccentric Gingrich? Adultery written all across his grubby little, fat face. Gary Johnson? Artsy-fartsy New Mexico settles you down, perhaps too much. Romney? Just another Democrat, really.

In the end, it was Romney's night, however.

He seems to get a kick out of bitch-slapping the doltish Perry, of swatting him down as a big brother might swat down a little brother, of making Perry look too much like the rube that he is, of sort of knowing that Perry does not have the brains needed to win a political marathon...

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