Can we get serious?

Dorothy Rabinowitz has some advice for Mitt Romney: forget about the trumped up war-on-women and get serious about real issues:

The congratulations-to-women-for-thinking theme continues apace. On April 23, Mrs. Romney told a Connecticut audience of her happy discovery that women she had encountered were interested in the economy. "Believe it or not," she marveled, "they were talking about budget deficits." We can believe it. What's hard to believe is that pronouncements like this are anyone's notion of outreach to female voters. Mr. Romney would do well to skip the obeisances to women, along with all other knee-jerk responses to the programmed war-against-women accusations mounted by Democrats.

He'd do well, too, to discard the established wisdom that his indisputably appealing wife is his most powerful weapon—and to cease regularly throwing her at audiences. There is only one campaign presence that counts for voters, and his name is at the top of the ticket.

If that ticket is to be a winning one, Mr. Romney had better begin doing what Republican primary candidates so assiduously avoided doing for so many months. Other than those pronouncements extracted by debate moderators, there has been no silence more deafening, more ridden with fear—fear of the isolationist wing of the tea party—than that shown by the Republican candidates this year on matters of foreign policy.

So perhaps now isn't the time for Mrs. Romney to try to sell us on the reality of Mitt's inner Steve Martin?

Back to Ms. Rabinowitz, who has a few choice words for the Preezy of the United Steezy:

It would help, finally, if Mr. Romney proved himself the first candidate in years to grasp that aspirants to the presidency who appear on late-night comedy shows invariably end up looking like buffoons. That's in addition to denigrating their candidacy, the presidency itself, and looking unutterably pathetic in the effort to look like regular guys.

Most voters with any sense—this will perhaps exclude a fair number of the screamers in the late-night studio audiences—will understand that the candidate isn't one of them, not even close. That voters in their right minds don't choose a candidate for president because they've had the privilege of seeing him look unspeakably absurd while engaging in obsequious exchanges with late-night hosts.

Americans have good reason these days—count the behavior of the Secret Service as the latest—to value a candidate who not only knows but feels the meaning of the office of the presidency of the United States, its symbolism and of all that's connected to it. Standing up for that symbolism against the showbiz convention of political campaigns today wouldn't be a bad way to begin Mr. Romney's run for the White House—if his handlers allow it.

Read the rest. The theory, to which I heartily subscribe, is that when it comes to the highest office on the planet, it's hip to be square. Lisa Fabrizio:

I instinctively mistrust anyone who has been tagged with the puerile sobriquet of "rock star"; a paean to cool and hipness that is truly a symbol of all that is wrong in America.

RTR. It remains to be seen whether the majority of voting Americans value rock-stardom above all else. I can't say whether we've reached the tipping point and become a nation dominated by Toys-R-Us kids in adult form, but it's close. We'll know more about that on November 7th.

Here's a reminder from Michael Walsh on who the desperate-to-be-hip candidate really is:

[Obama's] upbringing in Hawaii and Indonesia kept him from viscerally understanding the essential nature of our nation; it’s clear after prolonged exposure to his thought processes that everything he knows about this country comes from theory, not practice. And exactly what kind of theory we have in his own (?) words in Dreams From My Father:

To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy. When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet or set our stereos so loud that the walls began to shake, we were resisting bourgeois society’s stifling constraints. We weren’t indifferent or careless or insecure. We were alienated.

And full of themselves. A bit more:

But most students of Obama’s vintage have long since moved on, putting away childish things, as First Corinthians advises. Not Obama. He’s a dandy in aspic, forever suspended in the gelatinous world-view of the angry Baby Boomers who run him. He was their dream candidate come to life, molded and formed in the image and likeness of the “revolutionary” Sixties, his very lack of accomplishment and experience a feature, not a bug. He could be anything they wanted him to be. Unfortunately for him, what they wanted him to be was Abbie Hoffman in a well-tailored suit. It never occurred to them that Abbie would not have made a very good president. Just a destructive one — but perhaps that’s a feature, not a bug, as well.

Read the rest of that, too.

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