Talking Softly and Carrying America With Me
Or an Evening Of Mike Pompeo and the West Range
Mike Pompeo has no pizzaz, zero, he’s a grind. At the podium in a large room full of people, he has all the charisma of the sales manager for a major Air Conditioner manufacturer trying to pump up his sales force as fall approaches in a conference room at a Holiday Inn Express & Suites in Tuscon. That much is clear as soon as you hear him speak in person.
His brief flirtation with running for President, which ended with a sub-headline in the New York Times saying “this isn’t our moment,” but honestly, I don’t think any moment is Mike Pompeo’s Presidential moment; he’s got the same efficient, brusque staff guy vibe Dick Cheney projected, but can’t hope for the same power—Vice President is probably off the table, I heard from a friend who’d heard it from a former senior Trump campaign guy that Trump’s consiglieres want someone else for Vice President, someone who might appeal to voters..
See? He’s fine, confident, affable, a good speaker, but lacks that X factor; I’ve seen Trump speak, he has a different charisma, a different effect on the audience. I’ve seen Obama in person, he has a different charisma, a different effect on the audience. I’ve met Bill Clinton at another University, and that man is a damn wizard, he terrified me after the fact with how quickly and easily I became mesmerized by his presence; I still think about it sometimes, I don’t know that I’ve ever met another human being as charming.
So then there’s Mike Pompeo; he keeps talking about outcomes up there on the stage, using that word specifically, it’s all very corporate. At this moment, I’m not entirely sure why he’s here, in a packed ballroom named after Thomas Jefferson—the first Secretary of State—at the University of Virginia’s Alumni Hall. The room can accomodate 700 people standing, 380 seated at tables, and as we are, in rows of chairs packed together like sardine cans on a pallet, I’d say there’s about 600 people in the room, ushered into seats by college students dressed in businesswear.
About an hour earlier I’d gotten 86’d from the private reception before this speech at the Colonnade Club in Pavilion VII on the Lawn, where the cornerstone for the University was laid by Masons from the Widow’s Sons Masonic Lodge, led by President James Monroe, a Mason himself, who “performing a Masonic rite of spreading wine, oil and grain on the cornerstone and and then using a level, a square and plumb to verify that the cornerstone was true,” while James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, both former Presidents by this point, looked on.
