Candidate-for-Life

People continue to express a degree of bemused respect for Candidate-for-Life Benito Giuliani, for he leads his Republican Rivals in the polls despite being a fag-loving, cross-dressing, cosmopolitan pussy hound who, were it revealed that he'd been getting sucked off by dudes in public restrooms, would shrug and tell you that one mouth feels very much like the next when there's a 3/4-height partition between the stalls. As Matt Bai's goofy article in the Times Magazine notes, Giuliani's principle distinction is that among a field of death worshippers, he's managed to turn himself into something like Dr. Strangestlove, orgiastically committed to letting a mind uncluttered by moral philosophy or practical considerations wander into vicious, conspiratorial fantasies about an international hydra as dangerous to the West as the Jews once were before what's-his-name, the German fellow, took care of that one, more or less. Bai notices this, and writes, "What Giuliani hadn’t done by the time I saw him in Iowa, however, was lay out in any detail how he planned to win this supposed new world war." It's a clunky sentence--Bai is among the worst stylists of American long-form journalism--but it's the most important sentence in the article, the point from which Bai launches a long discussion of how Giuliani, he of the protean personality, doesn't have a plan, and doesn't really plan to have a plan, but conceives of himself as a representative of a series of themes, most of them either bloody as hell or transparently crackpot, in a process of perpetual self-presentation to the very people who keep giving him a lead in the polls. In other words, Benito Giuliani, Candidate-for-Life.

In the Giuliani campaign is the clear model for the future disposition of America's democratic institutions. When did this current "election cycle" begin. In 2006? In 2004? Earlier? Who can really tell. Soon, there will be no more elections, but only one singular election, and it will never actually occur. Committees will be formed, funds will be raised, dinners will be held, speeches will be given, candidacies will be officially announced, debates will be held, town halls will be attended, polls will be taken, frontrunners will emerge, former frontrunners will decline, vanity candidates will be asked how they expect to win, the newsmedia will cover it all with a joint feeling of breatheless anticipation and world-weary familiarity. Yet the polls will never open, the voters will never vote, the results will never be tabulated, and no one will win. The inconvenient and frankly extraneous naming of a winner, the hokey solmenity of the inauguration, the actual occupany of the White House--all these things shall pass. Barack Obama will always attack Hillary Clinton; Tom Tancredo will always hate on immigrants; Ron Paul will always talk sensibly and be popular on the internet; Mike Gravel will follow his bliss; Fred Thompson will go on late night. And Candidate-for-Life Benito Giuliani shall outcampaign them all.

The American people will be perfectly happy with the arrangment. Voting is a pain in the ass, anyway, and soon, absolved of any obligation to cast a ballot, they can let their registrations lapse and also absolve themselves of jury duty. Oh, beautiful day. Congress and the Senate will have adopted the same approach, then state legislatures and at last local governments. Within fifty years, the sole driver of the American economy, which will still be the largest in the world, will be the new service industry of campaigning. Three hundred million new offices of the Republic will bloom, like the household gods of Hinduism, one practically for every man, woman, FtM, MtF, and child in America, but none of them will ever be filled, as we'll all simply run for them ceaselessly. We'll borrow the money from China, and spend it all on Chicken Cacciatore or the Seafood Entree at $500/plate. The only other industry, of course, will be military. Fortunately, we all support the troops, whatever our differences on the campaign trail. Since no one will have been elected, no one will have had to decide at long last to bring the army home from Iraq. We will have the freest elections in the world and also be free from elections. Each of us will testily declare that we will not govern according to the polls. According to the polls, this will be a popular position.