Once again, this time on the auspicious occasion of Willard Romney's clinching of the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, I don my speechwriter's hat, which is a lovely fedora with a green feather in the band, to offer my help as crafter of winning narratives. Willard's big night got rather stepped on, what with the fact that he decided to spend it in Vegas with Donald Trump, who picked Tuesday to start talking about birth certificates again. (Earlier in the day, Romney met with Sheldon Adelson, the former sugar-daddy of the departed Gingrich campaign, and, unlike Trump, a man who never has gone bankrupt owning casinos. This, I believe, will come to be seen as a much more important meeting.) The Romney camp enlivened the day by releasing Willard's birth certificate in response to charges made by almost nobody that he'd really been born on a Mormon baby farm in the desert outside Cuernavaca.

This enabled everyone to talk about birth certificates, even the pundits who were so stirred up by the fact that Romney is dragging his scrotum over broken glass to maintain the support of a carny geek like Donald Trump. (We should have retro fire any minute now so that Lawrence O'Donnell can return from orbit.) The presumptive unofficial candidate plainly needs a better explanation for this than the fact that he doesn't necessarily share every lunatic opinion held by the ambulatory hairpieces who have lined up behind his campaign. As always, and especially in this important time of transition as other men in the Commonwealth (God save it!) are so busy rebooting the Romneybot 2.0 into Mega-Romneybot 3.0, I am here to serve....

***

I'm Mitt Romney, bitches, and I'm all you got left.

I told you grubby worms that I had this back in Iowa. You want to see the receipt for Des Moines? For Council Bluffs? For Davenport? Sure, I didn't get the most votes in the caucuses, and Santorum and Crazy Uncle Liberty (!) spent several months trying to decide who actually did get the most votes, as though that matters the devil's balls any more. The answer was simple: I won. You know how I won? Because the next day, I could drop more money in New Hampshire than either of those two clowns could make in four lifetimes. I won Iowa by buying New Hampshire, which I could get for a song, or at least a brief medley. Gingrich came next, and I let him have his big night in South Carolina because, honest to god, do you think I care about a state full of lizard-brained Bible bangers who wouldn't vote for a Democrat if Jesus Christ himself came down from his spot in the Marriott Corporation boardroom, where he and I share the occasional bearclaw every few months, and whistled "Dixie" while dressed up like Stonewall Jackson and waving the Confederate flag? The base has a problem with me? Let me see if I can solve it. Does the base like small bills? Because...

I'm Mitt Romney, bitches, and I'm all you got left.

You thought this was a campaign? I kept telling you that it wasn't. It was a transaction, from start to finish, and not a very complicated one, either. There was nothing I could do or say that I couldn't buy my way out of. There was nothing any of the others could do or say that I couldn't drown out. They all worked for me. They were actors in my theater, finger-puppets on a master's hand. They were a fun bunch, though, weren't they? Perry, with the English he learned from Ukrainian babelfish? Gingrich's ego? You should have seen how hard it was for his people to wrestle him out of that toga and into a suit before every debate. Cain and Bachmann? What a pair they were. Put 'em both in a barrel, roll it down a hill, and they'll always be a nutball on top. You know what we call those kind of people out in La Jolla, where I'm building a $12-million estate and buying me a sunset?

Lawn ornaments.

And then it "came down," or so you said, to me and Santorum, that wet-eyed Papist who got us all talking about birth control and that kind of stuff, and that was entertaining for a while, and I made those little bows toward what he was saying, as though I really meant it, although, as you all must know by now, I don't mean anything I say nor say anything I mean, because no question about me that can't be answered by the phrase, "$10 million ad buy." I let the rest of the field amuse me for a while, and then do you know what I did? I fired them all, because that amused me most of all, and because...

I'm Mitt Romney, bitches, and I'm all you got left.

I mean, have you watched those lop-ears fall in line over the last month, since it's been clear that I've cleared the deal for the mortgage on their minds and levied the lien on their souls? I mean, seriously, have you? Perry was out the other day defending me on Bain and all, and every verb had a subject and an object. Finally got the dosage right, I guess. And Gingrich? Geez, he was on TV just the other day acting like private equity was the best damn thing he'd heard of since the last time someone told him about that hot number that the Appropriations staff just hired. They'd all form a kick line at the Venetian if I asked them to, and I just might, because I sealed the deal last night in Texas, and they all know just as you all know that...

I'm Mitt Romney, bitches, and I'm all you got left.

So, on the night I sewed it up, I went and hung with Trump. So what? You got a problem with that? Here, let me lay a couple hundred thou' on you and make that problem go away. You think it's going to matter in a week? A month? Or, as we figure things in the campaign, 9000 commercials from now? Give me a freaking break. George F. Will is puzzled by why I'm hanging out with Trump? What do I "hope to gain"? Let me clear it up for you, George. Right now, I could go to California tomorrow, hang out with Charlie Manson at Corcoran for a few hours, and come away with the buck-and-a-half a week he makes folding sheets in the prison laundry. We could both carve X's in our foreheads and call in the AP for a photo op. Watch this: "HELLLLLTER SKELLLLTER! SHE COMIN' DOWN FAST!" You think it's more than a one-day story, a bunch of people I wouldn't hire to clean out the dressage barns mouthing off on TV about what I "hoped to gain" from associating with crazy-ass mass murderers? You keep worrying about LaRussa's bullpen, or that 36-ounce Mizuno you've had stuck up your ass since the Carter Administration, and you let me worry about what I hope to gain from things. I remember guys like you from prep school, hanging back while guys like me did the real work of bullying the people who didn't look like me. Back up on the roof rack, George. We'll be in Ontario in no time.

I got this now. The deal is closed and I invite you to the party, or you don't come at all. I'll say what I want to say and do what I want to do, and I'll hang with whoever I goddamn want to hang with because that's the way it works now. I'm walkin' in Vegas now, the land of winners, every man a king and myself the king of them all, struttin' down the Strip like full-balls Sinatra with my lady at my side, diggin' the scene like I own the place. Maybe I'll start singin'. "I got the world on a string, swingin' on a rainbow..." Do a late show at the Sands. Whaddaya mean the Sands is gone? Build it again, just so I can sing there. Here, let me get my checkbook.

I'm Mitt Romney, and the whole damn world is mine.

I'm Mitt Romney, and I'm hotter than the sun beating down on the sidewalk.

I'm Mitt Romney, and you're not, but that's okay, you can stand there in my shadow and be cool.

I'm Mitt Romney, bitches, and I'm all you got left.

***

Sources close to the Romney campaign have told the blog that the campaign is unlikely to use parts of this speech or follow any of the advice therein.

(Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty)

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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