Quote of the Week: Political Theory

The Same Man/Crazy Man Theory had been explained to me over margaritas in an L.A. Tex-Mex restaurant a few weeks before by novelist and essayist Michael Ventura. Put succinctly, this theory says: the sanest candidate wins the nomination, the craziest candidate wins the election.
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Sure enough, as far as I could see, this theory had never been wrong. In 1992, when George Bush ran against Pat Buchanan on the Republican side and Clinton against Jerry Brown for the Democrats, the "sane" guys won the nominations only for the cracker son of an abusive drunk stepfather and hedonistic horse-betting mother to take the election. In 1988, while the tediously stable Michael Dukakis survived a megalomaniacal Jesse Jackson in the Democratic contest, Bush ambushed the clearly unhinged Bob Dole for the Republican nomination, and then babbled wanton gibberish at flag factories all the way to triumph in November. Walter Mondale, altogether too well-adjusted for American politics, beat preternatural loose-cannon Gary Hart in 1984 for the Democrats, only to lose the general election to the reality-challenged Ronald Reagan, who four years earlier beat Jimmy Carter after Carter beat back an existentially flipped-out Edward Kennedy. Carter versus Ford in 1976, Nixon versus McGovern in 1972, Nixon versus Humphrey in 1968...thirty years later, did anyone now doubt that, initial appearances to the contrary, Lyndon Johnson was always screwier than Barry Goldwater in 1964?
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In a race involving two undisputed psychotics like Kennedy and Nixon in 1960, for example, the degrees of sanity between them were as pointless to calibrate as they were impossible, which only left people arguing for decades whether the winner really lose and the loser really won. At any rate, applying the Sane Man/Crazy Man Theory to the Republicans in 1996, Lamar Alexander looked pretty good: Dole was a brooding paranoiac, Buchanan an inspired sociopath, and while it might not be fair or exactly accurate to say Gramm was crazy, when a man has a hole where his soul is supposed to be, it suggests a madness almost too profound to measure, except perhaps by the sort of relentlessly sadistic demeanor that Gramm exhibited on a round-the-clock basis. Which left Alexander, since anyone boring enough that he had to wear a flannel shirt and slap an exclamation point after his name to make himself interesting was either sane to the point of inertia, with an id as flat as the Mojave, or so metaphysically, bone-chillingly demented as to evoke the Void and a universe utterly bled dry of God and hope.

 - Steve Erickson, American Nomad, pp.52-3