I did some calling around yesterday, trying to get quotes reacting to Mitt Romney’s sudden France-hating, anti-Jihad implosion. And as much as it hurts to say, Howie got it right today – getting dead does do a lot for your popularity. Here’s a guy who, four years after mercilessly excoriating John Kerry as a fake, up and tried to fake his way clear to the White House. It doesn’t work. So what happens? The people in his own party – both those who were with him, and those working against him – praise him for exiting graciously and talk up his bright, bright future. Get your shades, son.
And what of the reaction from Massachusetts Democrats – people who have, more or less, spent the past six years battling Romney, cursing him, serving as the punchlines in his rightward-pandering jokes, and lobbing one nasty quote after another towards reporters? What do they say when this man fails?
Nothing.
The rules of this game are funny. When somebody’s up, it’s fine, if not expected, to throw unsparingly wicked elbows at your enemies (cf. Sal DiMasi to Romney at St. Patrick’s Day, 2006 – “You being president of the United States? That’s a joke!”) But when you spend half a decade calling somebody a fraud, and the rest of the country suddenly decides that you’re right and deals this fraud a humiliating $35 million rebuke, you don’t gloat. You don’t say anything at all.
Politics and gang life share this kind of unspoken code. You can pop off at whoever, but you don’t snitch on your own. Whatever happens, happens within and amongst your own, and it doesn’t involve outsiders. The Dems and the GOP may be rival gangs, but they’re the same breed, and when the vultures come to prey on the fallen, they close ranks protect their own; if it were them on the ground getting stomped on, they’d expect the same.