What’s a girl to do?

She’s young, full of energy and dreams, and has her eyes on adventurous horizons. But even in the 2012 world where she is coming of age, her culture is laying out frilly dresses, shiny pumps, and lip gloss that have the potential to turn her into little more than a support system for a future husband’s ambitions. A lot more doors are open to young women in the post-feminist era but the expectations of gender don’t simply disappear.

And Mary Pauline Lowry will have none of it.

Lowry is a thirty-something Austin writer whose new novel, “The Earthquake Machine,” explores the power of sexism and gender through a teenager’s decision to shed her history, her sex, her friends, and almost everything she is in order to find a different existence. The architecture of Lowry’s story is subtle with symbols that are cast upon a stark and unforgiving landscape, which she renders as both inspiring and frightening with her near perfect choice of words.

Rhonda, the narrative’s main character, has a troubled epiphany during a river trip down the Rio Grande as it passes through the canyons of Big Bend National Park. Like John Grady Cole and Lacey Rawlins of Cormac McCarthy’s “All the Pretty Horses,” Rhonda has arrived at a decision to escape the emotional detritus of war. Cole and Rawlins went off on a teenaged Mexican adventure in order to abandon the wreckage of fathers permanently harmed by combat in World War Two. They were also rejecting the limited lives proscribed by West Texas. Rhonda, though, is running from a domestic conflict, which is no less of a war, where she suspects her pharmacist father is doping up her mother and manipulating her into suicide, Rhonda will not have the boundaries of her life drawn by the same cultural mores that are destroying her timid mother.

Crossing over is not easy in the Big Bend. The landscape announces a kind of human insignificance and boldly states that no one has meaningful troubles or the time for introspection. To the people who know the border, the Rio Grande that Rhonda is floating with her friends unifies two cultures and you don’t change much regardless of the riverbank on which you choose to stand. Rhonda feels something different, though, and after a sexual near miss with the group’s river guide, she slips into the water and lets it carry her away to Mexico where she has no more goal in mind than to find Jésus, her parents’ gardener who taught her perfect Spanish and became her friend. She cannot get far enough away from the tragedy that unfolded at home in Austin.

Lowry’s skills are manifest from the opening pages when she establishes tension but she becomes masterful beyond her years as a storyteller when Rhonda comes up from the river, naked, wet, hungry, and born again as a boy. Rhonda encounters a peyote-eating shop owner that helps her cut her hair, provides clothes that hide her gender, and guides Rhonda to assume the name Angel. By the time she leaves the little border town of Milagros, Angel has added the Virgin of Guadalupe to her initial quest to find her friend Jésus. Strangers might see her as a boy or a girl or an androgynous creature wandering in the desert, but that doesn’t stop the neophyte Angel from searching for answers to questions she can’t even articulate and knows are emotionally and psychologically too profound to ignore.

A lesser writer might be accused of too many contrivances but Lowry peoples the road in front of Angel with characters that inform the soul of the little girl lost that she is not alone in her struggle. An expatriated American, who is suspected of dealing in “product,” empowers his wife to build and remodel and saw and hammer because these are endeavors that make her happy, and when she is joyous the sex is great and the house is in harmony. A woman with calloused hands can love, too.

She Writes like the Wind

After the couple agrees to give Angel a ride to Jésus’ hometown, a gang of banditos confronts them on the highway. Angel slips into the jungle with them where she discovers they are “banditas,” and the sharp edges of sexuality and gender begin to soften for her. These are women that united to defy expectations and the law. They are raising hell instead of children and, in spite of their rebellious approach to life, find liberty in having refused to cook and clean house for a man. Even in the machismo culture of old Mexico, Angel finds females who’ve ignored all the gender clues laid out before them by centuries of marriage and custom.

When Angel finally reunites with the beloved Jésus, she is disappointed yet again by a man who refuses to teach her, as he had promised, a special skill. Her memory of the river guide won’t leave her alone, either, and Angel seeks a physical release that leads her to the earthquake machine. She shares this double D battery fun with an elderly woman who has been living alone and miserable for decades since her husband died. Genevieve doesn’t play the role of the ancient seer, though, and instead slouches sadly among the folds of her own skin and reminds Angel of what awaits a girl who ties her fate too closely to a man.

When the earth finally moves for Angel, it is both orgasmic and tragic. Lowry refuses to give her protagonist an easy time of things and she loses love almost as quickly as it is discovered but she has learned enough to know that she can take charge. Sex might feel like it is the most important thing in the world to a post-pubescent girl, but as Angel undergoes yet another transformation, she realizes that sex, too, is “its own little death.” Nothing is more transitory than beauty and lust.

Lowry may have been writing The Earthquake Machine for the young adult reader, but she has created a story that belongs on bookshelves next to other fine literature. She’s as accomplished with her sentences and character development as a young Jane Smiley or Anne Tyler and often as disturbing as Jim Harrison. In the hands of a writer like Mary Pauline Lowry, the human condition can be as brightly illuminated through the plight of a post-pubescent teen as it can through the travails of the Joad family scratching its way westward during the Great Depression. The Earthquake Machine moves Lowry into an elite group of young female writers who know that the feminist movement is about more than equal pay for equal work and that a girl has a right to be a grrrlllll, if she chooses.

And, boy, (or maybe girl,) does she know how to tell a story.

During my high school years up in Michigan, George W. Romney was our governor. The man who told his son Mitt not to run for public office as long as he had to worry about a mortgage also presided over the booming economy brought about as the result of auto manufacturing. Michigan in the 60s was often at the economic and cultural center of the U.S. The jobs and technology were drawing newcomers from California, the intermountain west, the northeast, and all across Dixie. In Detroit, Motown was beginning to crowd rock and roll off of the stage. Work was available. Neighborhoods were being built overnight. Wages were livable. It was mostly a good time to be governor.

There were, of course, problems. Detroit caught fire in July 1967 in race riots and Governor Romney asked for federal troops. Most of the racist white southerners that had come north to work the factories instead of the fields in the south had managed to set themselves up in segregated communities, regardless of their incomes. The high school I attended, Grand Blanc, between Flint and Detroit, was still all white in 1969. Dr. King’s message was rattling around unheard in the tin ears in much of America.

Governor Romney’s son Mitt was at least partially insulated from the times by his family’s wealth. He was raised in Bloomfield Hills, an affluent suburb of Detroit, where his father had become the CEO of American Motors. Mitt was not to be seen in public schools during his high school years. The family sent him across town to Cranbrook, an exclusive boarding school that offered a better education than the public system. One of his classmates was Daniel Ellsberg, a former Marine who stood up to protest the U.S. political mistakes and deceptions in Vietnam by releasing The Pentagon Papers. There was one black student in Romney’s graduating class.

All the Soft Places to Fall

Mitt’s progress from there was predictable. While the sons of southerners were mostly running to the car plants to fill out applications to work on the assembly lines, he was off to Stanford and Harvard and Brigham Young. In California, when students were staging a sit-in at an administration building to resist draft assessment tests, the future head of Bain Capital took part in a counter protest. The Vietnam War he was supporting was a conflict in which he would not be compelled to participate. Mitt got two student deferments and another one for being a “minister” of the Mormon Church while he was a missionary in France. His luck held when he drew the number 300 in the first ever draft lottery.

What, exactly, makes him presidential?

There is something troubling about the collective American consciousness that enables us to elect persons of privilege to a job whose most basic requirement ought to be a first hand understanding of economic struggle. Like the two Republican Bush presidents, Mitt Romney has always had a soft place to fall. In 1975, when he left Harvard, he went straight to Wall Street with a class of business school graduates who became consultants instead of employees. The mortgage his dad told him to deal with first was probably never a big worry and when Mitt landed at Bain Capital in 1977 he was launched on the business career that is somehow supposed to qualify him for the White House. Please explain how being successful at an investment fund trains an individual for dealing with foreign policy, a stubborn congress, and a lagging economy.

We Americans celebrate wealth and business success as if it were a form of religion. Of course, people who work hard and accomplish their goals, financial, material, or even spiritual, ought to be admired because they contribute to the advancement of our culture. But the rich are not necessarily special; they tend to be prepared and lucky. Their money is generally not the consequence of any intellect or insight that can translate to leadership or government. We simply want to believe that is how they earned it.

In Romney’s experience, he has been almost as disconnected from the concerns of the working class as was George W. Bush and his father. W once asked a friend to help him “to understand the poor,” as if the economically disadvantaged had somehow made a decision to not have money. “Why’d they do that?” W seemed to be asking. W’s father loved to tell the tale of leaving Connecticut in an old car with “Bar” and heading out to West Texas to become a wildcatter in the Permian Basin oil patch but he always leaves out the part where his father the senator staked him to a half million dollars to get the oil business rolling. Eventually, H.W. sold the company for millions, set up trust funds for all of his children, and ran for congress.

There isn’t any class warfare in America. We are all participants in the same game and some of us have greater advantages and use them to gain wealth but that doesn’t mean the rich should be president. I’ve often thought the difference between the two political parties was that one was rolling down the highway in a nice new car and ignoring all of those who had fallen into the ditch while the other party was slowing down and pulling over to help get the stranded travelers back on the road. Capitalism is imperfect and x amount of effort does not necessarily produce y amount of results. Some of us end up in the ditch. People fail for many reasons. But almost all of them are trying. Our national discourse is over how we provide assistance.

We’ve had wealthy presidents in the past and some have had greatness. Our greatest president, however, came from a log cabin and understood the common man’s struggle, and it is not about corporate tax cuts. Leadership is a product of intimate understanding, which rarely is a consequence of wealth. But America has only two types of citizens: millionaires and those of us who very shortly expect to be millionaires. The result is we admire money and project onto the wealthy characteristics they often do not possess.

And putting those people into the White House tends to be a grave mistake.

Rick Perry has always been just smart enough to know what he can do and what is a waste of his time. When he was asked to sponsor bills during his days in the legislature, he told proponents not to bother leaving him analysis or draft copies because he would never read them.

“Just tell me what it does,” he said.

When he won his first statewide office as Texas Agriculture Commissioner, he did it by changing parties and having Karl Rove run his campaign. Perry, in fact, later acknowledged, “Karl did everything.” Unfortunately, more than a decade after he left that office, Texas is still dealing with bad debts from an agriculture loan program backed by Perry.

He was not Lieutenant Governor long enough to make major stumbles because George W. Bush left for the White House and Perry moved into the governor’s mansion. If he’d had even the slightest amount of self-awareness, Rick Perry would have looked around that grand old structure and pinched himself while wondering how in the hell it all happened.

Rick Perry has never had a true sense of who he is until he conceded here in Iowa. What he knows, and what most of America has also learned, is that he may be the least intelligent governor in the country. Just like he had never paid attention to those bills he was asked to sponsor as a legislator back in the 80s, Rick Perry ignored issues relevant to winning the presidency. He was always too busy helping his lobbyist friends and corporations seeking taxpayer handouts to bother learning the number of Supreme Court justices or even their names.

He was a gaffe machine in cowboy boots powered by oil money and rich Texans who drooled over the idea that Perry would open Washington’s doors to all of their big dollar dreams. And Perry, on paper, which is where he should have stayed, was the best candidate for the GOP. He had been a governor of Texas for more than a decade and had the political positions that evangelicals and the Tea Party lusted over. Perry would have done better in this campaign if he had never spoken a word and simply walked around and waved his arm at the crowds.

But then he went and talked.

Sort of. His “oops” moment will be taught in political science books for generations to come. And young collegians will wonder how a man so stupid could ever think that he might become president. Hell, even Ronald Reagan learned his lines. But Perry couldn’t be bothered. He’d never had to debate much to get where he was and it’s clear he didn’t read or think on complex issues. He just decided to run for the office and raise money.

He might say he is “reassessing” but he is done. The worst governor in the history of Texas may have set a new standard for the worst presidential candidate. Money and profile and reputation are not sufficient in the race to the White House. Perry has embarrassed himself and his state and is likely oblivious to the scope of his failure. A friend and long time associate of Perry’s said the governor had always been very good at just trying things to see how they unrolled. If he failed, he simply shrugged and moved on. He has failed and failed miserably and a simple shrug will hardly do for a response. How does he explain the $17 million plus that he wasted, including about $4 million on TV ads in Iowa? One analysis indicates he spent $500 per vote. He has done worse than Texas Governor John Connally did here in 1980 and worse the Texas U.S. Senator Phil Gramm in ’96. Rick Santorum did better with $500,000.

His endorsement may end up being sought by Romney or Gingrich or Santorum because Texas will be essential to any Republican presidential plans for Washington. But who wants the dumb guy’s support? Rick Perry can reassess all he wants, but his campaign, which was mangled as poorly as his syntax, is finished.

And if he doesn’t know that, he is even stupider than he appeared during the debates.

Iowa, again, will not be about who wins. The caucuses are about the person who does well enough to be taken seriously as a potential nominee beyond the fuzzy field of dreams that hides here in “the land between two rivers.” In this case, Iowa is about who becomes the Non-Romney.

Polls show Romney poised as the likely winner or second place finisher in a fight with Ron Paul and Rick Santorum. Even Dr. Paul has suggested in interviews that he doesn’t go to bed at night with visions of himself in the White House. His race continues to be more of a movement than a candidacy and he lives under a ceiling of support that rarely rises.

Romney, though, has money and the moderate politics to give the president a tough fight in the fall. But he doesn’t give his own party those sweaty palms of excitement. And everyone in the GOP wants to see if there is a viable candidate that can become the party’s dreamboat, which is the only democratic service likely to be provided by Iowa.

The third place finisher here will get more media narrative and attention than has ever happened to an also-ran. This will be Rick Santorum, Rick Perry, or Newt Gingrich, (unless the Santorum surge has gone so far the polls haven’t measured it accurately and he wins.) The former speaker seems the least likely to take that third slot. Every other ad on television here in Iowa is an attack on Gingrich and his poll numbers have fallen precipitously.

Santorum’s, however, have been rising, and he could finish anywhere from third to first. Unfortunately, this rise in popularity is connected to the fact that he has practically lived in Iowa for the past year and has had the profile of an Iowa gubernatorial candidate. Even with money, he cannot sustain that level of exposure beyond Iowa to New Hampshire, South Carolina, Florida and on to Super Tuesday in March.

The case is harder to make for Texas Governor Rick Perry. He has begun to turn around his campaign’s blunders and has been on an almost endless bus tour of this state but his numbers appear unlikely to reach above the mid-teens. If, however, that leaves him in third place, Perry will get a new narrative as the Non-Romney. A reconsideration of that nature means he gets examined not so much as gaffe machine but as a long-term governor of a very large state whose politics please both the Christian evangelicals and the Tea Party.

But the Iowans who were supposed to reconsider Perry have been looking hard at Santorum. Even though the former Pennsylvania US Senator lost his reelection campaign by a margin of 18 percent, his support has been on the rise here. A surge in the turnout of evangelical voters, which was once supposed to help Perry, now more likely means Santorum will become the Non-Romney. Perry has been directly attacking Santorum because his campaign team is aware of the threat the Pennyslvanian poses for the Texas governor’s chances of a rebound. But there is no data to show the shots have harmed Santorum.

In none of these candidates, however, is there the kind of voter enthusiasm that is tapped when a future president shares a vision of the country’s future, except for Ron Paul. When the Texan contrarian walks into a room in Iowa, his supporters are loud and animated. Romney, Perry, Santorum, and Gingrich get a kind of polite applause as if the crowd were trying to make a final decision on whether to buy a Mac or a PC. They seem to want to get the process concluded and see how their machine functions. But that doesn’t mean Congressman Paul will be able to outlast Mitt Romney over the long run to the convention.

The winner will be the Non-Romney.

And if that candidate can generate money and enthusiasm in the coming primary and caucus states, Mitt Romney will have a very miserable 2012.

When listening to Rick Perry campaign in Iowa, the question that occurs to those of us who have watched and reported on him since 1985 is simple: How in the hell can this be happening? There is a bright shining light on the Texas governor’s ignorance and hypocrisies and yet the latest poll shows him with 14 percent of the Iowa caucus vote.

What’s the matter with Iowa?

His latest bit of oblivion occurred when he was asked yesterday about a landmark Supreme Court case called Lawrence v. Texas. During the early 70s, while the rest of America was worrying about the Vietnam War, the Arab oil embargo, and violence in the streets, free love and cheap marijuana, down here in Texas our state government was fretting over consenting adults of the same sex making love. The state passed a law making it illegal. A quarter of a century later, Harris County sheriff’s deputies in Houston were looking for a gunman and broke into the apartment of two men engaged in sex. They were arrested under the Texas law. Eventually, the men decided to fight to protect their privacy and the Texas Homosexual Conduct Law was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court during Rick Perry’s third year as governor.

The late Tyron Garner and John Lawrence, Jr, who stood up to the Texas law that intruded into their private lives

But yesterday in Iowa, the man who has fought so hard to protect marriage as an institution reserved for the union of males and females, admitted to the Austin American Statesman’s Ken Herman that he didn’t know a damned thing about the Texas law. Perry’s flat-out stupidity on this issue must be difficult for even his most ardent supporters to process. When the Texas GOP nominated him for governor in 2010, the party’s platform had a plank that called for making it a felony for same sex couples to be married and any public servant who performed such a service to be prosecuted as a felon. The measure did not become law but Perry’s going to be back in Texas shortly after his further national embarrassment and he’s likely to be bored and vengeful.

The rank hypocrisy of Perry on the matter of the law and government and same sex partners is a bit astonishing. He has built his political career on the notion that the government’s rights and responsibilities stop at an individual’s doorstep, or, at least that is his rhetoric. Unfortunately, there are voters in Texas and Iowa that appear foolish enough to think he actually practices the principles he espouses. The government only stops at your doorstep in Perry’s world if it is trying to enforce a law that he and radical conservatives don’t like. Perry’s commitment to making “government as inconsequential in your life as possible” is abundant garbage when he wants you to act more fundamentally conservative. In those cases, it’s okay for the law to break into your home and tell you that you are having illegal sex or that your daughter must take an HPV shot developed by one of his major campaign donors and promoted by one of his oldest friends and lobbyists.

A walkin' contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction

Perry has no shame about any of this because he does not have the intellect to even begin to understand what’s wrong with his contradicting ideas. The same principle of political stupidity applies regarding his notion of a part time congress. The Texas governor wants to reduce government spending and stop making life so easy and pleasant for members of congress and make them more accountable. Government spending is okay, however, in fact, even kind of sweet, when it comes time for him to double dip on the taxpayers of Texas. Even though he is still on the state payroll for $150,000 as governor, Perry has filed for and receives a Texas government pension that amounts to $92,000. When congress gets pensions and benefits, Perry calls it excessive spending but in his case he and his staff have referred to it as smart “estate planning.”

In his polemic book that was ghostwritten under his name, Perry yaks and yabbers about activist and interventionist judges subjugating the will of the states and how frivolous lawsuits are destroying America’s economy. He refers to the Supreme Court justices as “oligarchs in robes,” which, apparently, is a lesser being than an oligarch in cowboy boots and hat. Perry thinks federal courts ought to stay out of state business.

Except when he needs them to step in to save his presidential campaign.

He filed a lawsuit asking a federal court to overturn the Virginia ballot access requirement that a candidate collect 10,000 signatures before they be placed on the presidential nominating ballot. Perry wanted one of those awful activist judges to tell the state of Virginia its rules are stupid and illegal. He has also promulgated the idea that when people file what Perry views are “frivolous” lawsuits and they lose their case, they ought to be responsible for all legal costs. It is doubtful that when he was told by a federal court that Virginia’s regulations were the state’s prerogative and were just fine the way they were implemented and his case was lost that he was willing to write a check to pay Virginia’s state lawyers for their time and the court’s costs.

His lawsuit wasn’t frivolous. But yours will be. Rick Perry has worked very hard to close the courthouse doors to citizens who have been harmed by corporate incompetence. Caps on settlements make it almost impossible to cover the legal costs simply to get a case to the point of being placed on a docket. These changes in the law are helping to lure big businesses to Texas. Of course, the multi-million dollar taxpayer checks Perry is giving corporations that promise jobs, which often never materialize, also helps lure industry south of the Red River.

Rick Perry is not a conservative. He is a man of little intelligence who has used charm and looks to build a political career. And his success is a crime against democracy.

How does Rick Perry avoid smirking at himself? Is he completely without a sense of irony or what constitutes hypocrisy?

He talks about budget management and fiscal austerity and then puts the state in a position of spending like a fool on his security. While he decries the Congressional revolving door of lobbyists as “legal corruption,” some of the richest people in Austin tend to be his friends who worked for Perry and then went out into the lobby. There are, according to research conducted by the Huffingtonpost, 40 lobbyists who have worked for Perry and are now making money by carrying messages to him from corporations and conservative causes.

Maybe it’s not legal corruption in Texas. We tend to just think of it as bidness. But Perry is trying to be one of the serious candidates on the grandest of global stages and he thinks no one is noticing his hypocrisies.

Bus Boy in Iowa

The latest absurdity is the money being wasted on his security. The Texas Tribune has reported it’s about $400,000 per month, which is likely to total around $4 million by the time Perry plops back down in his $10,000 per month taxpayer-funded mansion in the hills west of Austin. Perry, like George W. Bush before him, sees a relationship between his self-importance and the number of armed men around him whispering into their coat sleeves.

How many are traveling with the Texas governor is hard to discern. News media outlets have been trying under open records laws to get copies of vouchers but can only acquire general spending information. Details won’t be available until after the presidential campaign has ended but figures reported by the Texas Tribune indicate an absurd level of spending by taxpayers on a candidate who claimed to raise $17 million for his campaign. Between September 5 and 28 of this year, lawmen shadowing Perry spent more than $50,000 on food, $161,000 plus for airfare, and $112,111.00 for lodging. In one instance, they spent $4400 to eat at a restaurant near the Ronald Reagan Library during the debate and another $6400 for plane tickets to San Diego.

Even if there were 44 of them traveling with Perry, $4400 for one meal seems absurd when spending taxpayer money.

And nobody laughs when Perry says he’ll control spending when he gets to Washington. Maybe because it’s not funny. It’s a bit frightening that he is pulling close to ten percent in recent Iowa polls. In the last budget Perry passed before he went north of the Red River to chase his fantasy, he cut the heart out of virtually every government program. Teachers got fired by the tens of thousands, class sizes went above state legal levels, in home care for the disabled was dangerously cut, money for state parks, already in serious decay, was reduced, and hundreds of thousands of children and indigent adults were booted off of basic state health care. (The Texas Tribune’s web page, which carries the latest Perry story, includes a banner ad from the state’s Parks and Wildlife Department asking the public for funding help. The budget has been cut almost every year the legislature has met under Perry’s leadership and the parks system has gone hat in hand to the public.)

But there is money available for corporate giveaways like the Texas Enterprise Fund and the Emerging Technology Fund. Perry has now doled out hundreds of millions to companies that are run by friends of his who make donations to his campaigns or to large corporations that promise to come to Texas and create jobs but the work never materializes in the numbers described.

If god really told Perry to run for president, as he claims, then god has bad judgment. Or a twisted sense of humor. Rick Perry is a certifiably ignorant religious zealot who thinks the world is 10,000 years old and global warming is a hoax and evolution is a theory that ought to be subjugated in textbooks to creationism. The fact that he is given any type of consideration by Republican voters is a condemnation of their party and the American electoral process.

And Perry owes Texans millions for the money he has wasted on traveling security.

Romney’s problem is still that he’s Romney. Don’t expect better than third out of him in Iowa. The reasons are many and manifest and have been talked about and written about until they are likely carved into tablets of jade somewhere. Evangelicals, and there are a lot of them in Iowa, won’t get behind a Mormon. The nice Christian activists won’t say “cult” but they are thinking it. And the conservatives don’t think Romney’s a conservative. Romneycare, abortion, gay rights, global warming, blah, blah, blah. He spends too much time explaining his past and in politics when you’re explainin’ you’re losin’. He’ll do well in New Hampshire since they are more intimately aware of his political evolution. But if he wins, it won’t be by as much as predicted and then he’s off to South Carolina for a big time butt whuppin’. Romney gets to Florida politically wounded. Romney’s not likely to do better than third on January third. He is still the GOP’s best chance to win in 2012 because he is the most moderate but that also makes it impossible for him to win his own party’s primary.

As for Newt, the polls in Iowa and elsewhere have been friendly to him but the voters in Iowa will be less magnanimous. They aren’t likely to be as forgiving as the analysts think. Remember that only 120,000 Republicans took part in the 2008 caucus. Might be more this time but no way to know. Caucuses, as everyone knows, require active participation that goes beyond just punching buttons in a booth. People have to drag themselves out in the cold to community centers, homes, police stations, etc, sit through speeches, and then make a decision. This kind of set up discriminates and the devoted and fervent and devout are the ones who turn out. Note that last word. The devout are the voters who gave ‘08 to Mike Huckabee. This time they’ll vote against Newt. He’s just not convinced them he’s one of them even if they do forgive him is marital indiscretions. And the ones who do forgive him are likely to be pissy about his lobbying and insider status in DC. The main asset working in Newt’s behalf is the electorate’s perception of a guy who can intellectually stand toe-to-toe with the president in a debate. But that will matter less in Iowa where the values voters don’t mind getting their toes cold tromping through the snow to make their opinions known. Newt is the favorite, nonetheless, to win Iowa but if he does, it won’t be by much, and don’t be surprised if he finishes second.

Ron Paul is the guy who could end up as the Mike Huckabee of 2008. He might even do considerably better throughout the spring. Paul’s numbers in Iowa are strong and don’t waver. He needs to break through his traditional ceiling of low to mid-teens but appears poised to do that in Iowa. In fact, as primary and caucus voters grow more and more disgruntled with their available choices as well as the president, Paul’s support may increase. Doesn’t matter, though. He’s going to stay around 20 percent and high teens all through this election cycle, unless one of the more “traditional” candidates catches fire with a message. This is where Paul wins; his message has been consistent his entire political career and it seems more resonant in this election cycle when Romney spends his time explaining who he isn’t and Gingrich acts like he is intellectually ordained and Perry cannot master declarative sentences. There actually isn’t a single candidate in this cycle who has an accessible message that is unmistakable to the electorate in the GOP, which is why Paul may very well win in Iowa in spite of his soft support among evangelicals who want to push religion into public institutions. He has a message and as frustration with Washington grows almost daily, his message gains more believers.

Which points to the tragedy of Rick Perry. On the surface, he looked like the guy. He had the Christian rap, touted the dogma of values voters on abortion and gay marriage, had run a huge state for a decade, looked good on TV, and was a Washington outsider. But then he started talking. A message isn’t of much value if the candidate can’t even articulate it. But Perry’s likely to get a second look. Cain’s supporters ran off to Newt but Newt is like a houseguest who stays a few days too long. He’ll wear out. And the evangelicals and Tea Party types are likely to not give a damn that Perry can’t complete a declarative sentence. His stumble on immigration might still hurt him with some but he’s been hammering the message of shutting down the border with the military the day he takes office and that’s the type of rhetoric right-wingers like to hear. He’s off on a long bus tour of Iowa, capitalizing on his acknowledged retail politicking skills and he’s spending a fortune on advertising in the state. Plus there are internal numbers that now show Perry tracking into the high teens on polls. He might be writing a comeback narrative.

Santorum and Bachmann don’t figure large in the results in Iowa, although Bachmann is on a bus tour through all of the state’s counties. Her message is as unclear as Santorum’s. “I’m the real conservative in this race,” isn’t going to work when every candidate is making a similar claim. They will likely grab 5-8 percent each of the vote total on caucus day. They both expect to do better but they don’t have the money or the following essential to make a big impact in Iowa.

Where does this leave us? Bus tours and one more debate and advertising are going to have some impact but Iowa is going to be the first state in the process and will reflect what we will see on the long road ahead, which is a difficult campaign. We might end up with four candidates sharing totals in the high teens to the low twenties coming out of Iowa and into NH. One scenario might have Paul with 21 percent, Newt at 19 or 20, Romney and Perry both around 18, and Santorum and Bachmann sharing the remainders. This is likely the case, though those places could juggle a few percentage points. NH can be expected to be slightly different with Romney winning and Newt and Paul and Perry scrapping for second with not much separation. South Carolina will turn away from Romney and Perry and Paul and Newt will duke it out. Perry could take SC if the electorate has grown tired of Newt and Paul does not appear electable.

We could go all the way through Super Tuesday in the first week of March and still not know who will be the nominee of the Republican Party. There are potentially four candidates who consistently pull 18-20 percent of the vote, which means the GOP will not easily make a choice.

Rick Perry’s new ad is almost universally repulsive. And neither he nor his advisors seem to understand what is so offensive. (The ad is featured at the top of the Moorethink homepage.) In the span of thirty seconds the Texas governor manages to offend gays and lesbians as well as citizens who believe the constitution prohibits the intrusion of religion into public institutions. Good job, gov.

It’s too easy to call him an idjit, regardless of how accurate the accusation might be. In this particular instance, he knows what he’s doing. Republican pollster Mike Baselice, a reputable surveyor with fine credentials, has provided Perry’s team with numbers that indicate the governor may be moving up in Iowa. He’s in double figures at 11 percent. “We’re number four! We’re number four!” The gay bashing and god groping ad, though, is designed to get the attention of conservative evangelicals who turn out in large numbers for the Iowa caucuses. There were only about 120,000 people in the 2008 GOP caucus so it doesn’t take a monumental effort to move voters; especially when you are so eager to pander.

Evangelicals gave Mike Huckabee Iowa in the last election cycle. He’s got a TV show now. They can help Rick Perry win, too. Or get him a TV show. And he’s doing his best to let them know he thinks just like they do; Perry hates gay people, doesn’t want them to be able to marry, wants Jesus to tuck us all in at night, and no matter how many people are hungry or sick or unemployed, we shouldn’t turn to the government except when we want to say the pledge of allegiance or give money Israel. Amen.

And it just might work. Iowa is a steaming cauldron of Republican crazy, even in winter. And it takes a certain kind of motivation to run out into the cold on a school night and listen to political speeches at a community center or the post office and then vote for a candidate based on what you just heard or you saw on a repeating TV ad. When you think about the weather and combine it with the absurdity of the caucus process, it is a minor wonder that 120,000 people came out to play last time.

Which is why Rick Perry is spending $1.2 million on TV advertising to try to pump his poll numbers in the next few weeks. He wants to remind Iowans that he’s just like them – at least the evangelicals who are going to take part on January 3rd. Expect to see more ads showing him with his wife Anita and mentioning how they’ve been together since they met in eighth grade (subtle comparison to Newt Gingrich who changes wives about as often most people change the oil in their cars.) Rick isn’t going to talk much about jobs and the economy in Iowa. He’s got to motivate the people who are worried there are rainbow warriors sneaking down the corn rows to flaunt their same sex love of each other in their universal determination to destroy the institution of heterosexual marriage.

The people Perry is trying to reach don’t give a jolly good damn if he is stupid, (which, demonstrably, he is.) All they care about is that he loves Jesus and hates them homosexuals almost as much as he hates Washington, (though he can’t wait to get there.) Newt might scare them with his pseudo-intellect and his multiple wives and his millions of dollars made off of being a lobbyist for the guys who caused the mortgage and Wall Street collapse. Rick didn’t do any of that. He was down in Texas screwing up his home state.

But if he gets a chance, he’ll sure stick it to America, too.