Newt: a Hollywood anti-hero *UPDATED*

Why, oh why, oh why can’t I get more excited about Mitt?  On paper, he’s a very good candidate.  Yes, there have been flips and flops, but it’s naive to expect perfect political purity from any candidate.  Aside from that, he’s straight out of Hollywood’s central casting, circa 1944:  well-educated, handsome, wholesome, loyal, intelligent, efficient, effective, reliable, fiscally savvy, and, apparently, quite nice to have around the office.  (Either that, or he’s a German Shepherd, a breed that shares many of those traits.)  He should be a dream candidate, but for so many he isn’t.

It’s the Hollywood reference that got me thinking.  Pardon me for sounding like Maureen Dowd here, but isn’t Newt the quintessential bad boy from the Hollywood movie?  You know, the one who runs around in the leather jacket, with his hair slicked back, but who is actually the hero of the movie, while the clean-cut good guy turns out to have feet of clay?

Yes, I know that it’s hard to see this man

in the role of this man

but I am here to assure you that Mitt’s problem, and Newt’s saving grace (so far) is that, poor Mitt, creature of the 1950s that he is, has wandered into the wrong 1950s movie, the one in which the anti-hero, not the hero, saves the day.

UPDATED:  I feel a little embarrassed looking at the above post, a very fluffy post, as Keith Koffler makes plain that the upcoming election is a pivotal one, when that will definitely determine the direction the United States takes in the foreseeable future.

I’ll say here what I’ve said before and that’s that I will vote for whichever candidate is not Obama.  That’s the bottom line for all of us.  We have to support ferociously whomever gets the Republican nomination.  (And that will be a bitter pill for me if Ron Paul does.)