The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [122]
I’m still thinking about all of this when I get a nudge from Giants Guy. I look up. Goodell is walking to the lectern. “With the tenth pick in the 2007 NFL draft,” he says, “the Houston Texans select Amobi Okoye, defensive tackle, Louisville.”
“Nice call,” says Giants Guy.
“It had to be him,” I say. “Peterson was gone already. The only other option was a corner.”
“Yeah,” he says. “You’re right.”
I reach down and grab another cookie.
EPILOGUE
Winter Park, Florida, early afternoon, August 2007
MITT ROMNEY is in town making a campaign appearance, and I’m stuck out here covering him. As it is for all campaign reporters, this early stage of the election process is the hardest for me—you sit there at these dreary events in half-filled halls all over the country, listening to computerized speeches and doing the awful math. We all have such a limited time on earth, and here I am, spending another year in places like this, listening to the same drivel, day after miserable day. No matter which candidate you cover, it’s almost always the same flag-and-slogan backdrop behind the lectern, the same canned question-and-answer exchanges, the same pundit-generated opinions bouncing back at you in the “man-on-the-street” interviews on the way out.
In this case, the Mormon ex-governor’s “Ask Mitt Anything” town halls are not, of course, designed to allow people to Ask Mitt Anything; like all such meetings, the potential questioners are at least semi-screened, in this case by a trio of breasty young things the candidate has cleverly sent weaving through the crowd in search of folks with “good” questions. I’ve been to a million of these events, and it’s always the same; the Democratic screeners always manage to find people desperate to know how we’re going to stop that awful George Bush, while at Republican events like this one, the questions always seem to end up being about how we’re going to keep Hillary out of the White House. Batting practice for candidates, basically.
But in this case one of the Romney spokesmodels screwed up and picked out a portly gentleman in a T-shirt in the back row who had a question about Canadian prescription medication. As “John Originally from New York” rambled through his inquiry, it became clear to all the good Republican central Floridians in the crowd that John was mentally disabled—I mean clinically so; he could barely get his question out, and, at the end, no one really knew what he was asking. You could feel the impatience in this stern conservative audience—like they were all thinking, “Who let the retard get the mic?” Romney, unnerved for just a second by his questioner’s stammering, recovered quickly and spouted out some bullshit response about safety concerns. Meanwhile, the crowd glared angrily at the spokeschick for puncturing the veneer of Romney’s would-be Stepford audience. At that moment I decided that John Originally from New York was the only person in the room worth interviewing. Maybe this was a way to do the whole campaign, I thought.
The meeting broke up, and I went outside the building to wait for the crowd to file out. While waiting, I glanced at a Romney poster. It read:
ROMNEY
The Strength for America’s Future
I tried to imagine what it would be like to have the balls to put the phrase “The Strength for America’s Future” under ten million posters with my name on it. Who are these guys who run for president in this country? These constantly lying, blow-dried egomaniacs must all come from a common source somewhere. But where?
Just then John Originally from New York lumbered outside. He was huge and round and grimacing; he looked like a bouncer at a minor-league hockey event. I introduced myself and asked him what he thought of the governor.
He looked into my camera as if