Gimme that old time everything

Mar 13th 2012, 14:49 by J.F. | BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA

THE tweet of the day belongs to Jeff Zeleny, a campaign reporter for the New York Times, who said that the Alabama Republican presidential forum, held last night at the charming Alabama Theatre in charming downtown Birmingham, was his "first campaign event featuring a Wurlitzer organ and Milk Duds." I cannot vouch for Mr Zeleny's consumption of Milk Duds, but in the quarter-hour between lights-up and the candidates actually taking the stage, the Wurlitzer was beautifully played. The Alabama Theatre is a gem. It smells of popcorn, both ancient and new. The floors have the perfect amount of theatre stickiness. There is a spotlight, a proscenium stage and a marquee out front. It is charmingly old-timey. But here's something less charmingly old-timey: Alabama Republicans do not believe in evolution and are unsure about interracial marriage. That, by the way, makes them weed-puffing, Hacky-Sack-playing hippies compared with their Mississippi counterparts, who really do not believe in evolution and are even less fond of interracial marriage. A majority of Republicans in both states believe Barack Obama is a Muslim.

So it was little surprise that Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum got their biggest rounds of applause for the reddest and meatiest statements. The crowd loved Mr Santorum's wildly idiosyncratic, contradictory definition of happiness. America, he said, was the first country in the world "to allow people to have radical freedom" to pursue their own happiness. But then he cautioned that happiness does not mean just doing anything you like. It means doing "the morally right thing consistent with God's will because that would lead to true happiness", just like that line of Mr Santorum's led to true applause. Of course, anyone who cheers that statement, much less makes it, must have a pretty good idea of what God's will is. Lucky them. Mr Santorum ended his speech by pointing out that in the 2,000 years prior to the founding of America, life expectancy topped out at around 35. In the 200 years since, "it has more than doubled, because America loosed the spirit of every individual, every family, every church, every civic organisation, every small businessmen." Also, apparently, every post hoc ergo propter hoc.

To my ears, Mr Gingrich got the louder and more sustained applause of the night. He was not three minutes into a castigation of Jay Carney for saying that nobody can credibly promise to reduce gas prices before he offered to debate Barack Obama anywhere, and said once again that if he became the nominee he would challenge Mr Obama to seven Lincoln-Douglass-style debates, lasting three hours each, with no moderator, just a timekeeper. It's strange to see a crowd go wild at the prospect of 21 hours of unmoderated political debate, but it speaks to their visceral desire to defeat, and even humiliate, Mr Obama, which they think Mr Gingrich could do. He brought out the bowing to a Saudi king line; he promised "never to apologise" to America's enemies. He then went into almost an hour-by-hour, repeal-by-repeal description of his first day in office ("On my first day, maybe two hours after the inaugural address, I will start to sign executive orders", etc, etc). Mr Gingrich may be running behind in national polls, but this crowd loved him.

And yet, for all of their successful appeals to their base, Messrs Gingrich and Santorum may well lose today. It's a Prisoner's Dilemma sort of problem. Candidate X can defeat Candidate Y in a one-on-one election. Candidate Z can defeat Candidate Y in a one-on-one election. But Candidate Y can defeat Candidates X and Z if neither X nor Z drops out, because X and Z will split the deepest pool of votes, leaving Y with a plurality. For either Mr Santorum or Mr Gingrich to prevent this, one of them would have had to drop out. Neither did, and who could blame them? In 2016 Mr Gingrich will be 72, and the Republican bench is deep enough to make it unlikely that Mr Santorum gets another bite at the apple. Both men want to be president; neither is short on ego; their paths toward the nomination have been unlikely enough that each can think himself the beneficiary of some special providence. But if Mr Romney is able to squeak by with a plurality tonight in one of the deep South states, the race will effectively be over. Mr Romney will have won in Ohio, Florida, Michigan and either Alabama or Mississippi. And he will have done it with the invaluable help of Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich.

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