The GOP campaign: Politics with ADD

In America, per Andy Warhol’s famous line, everyone gets to be famous for 15 minutes.

In America’s Republican Party, it seems, everyone gets to be front-runner for 15 minutes.

Gee, remember Michele Bachmann?

Or that other guy, the one from Utah, or was it Massachusetts, the one who gave the Winter Olympics health care, or something like that?

Or the dude who wanted Texas to secede from the union, which in eyes of some apparently made him just the fellow to be chief executive of said union.

Sometimes, you don’t even have to declare to get your 15 minutes.

Chris Christie’s deft “wait for it, wait for it, here it comes … nah, not so much” routine has had the sensation-hungry political press salivating for a week or two now.

After all, that Rick Perry guy, they’d grown weary of him. He was so last month.

Once you get dusted in a straw poll by the man from Godfather’s Pizza, it’s hard to take you as seriously as when you were suggesting that intelligent design was a much more likely theory than global climate change.

The frantic follies in the GOP presidential campaign are all the more amazing given that the incumbent looks to beatable.

President Obama is a maddening disappointment – and that’s the view of his most fervent backers. For his permanent critics, the bidding begins at Lucifer.

Yet the Party of Lincoln is running around without apparent direction, looking for all the world like the Eagles’ linebacking corps right before the snap.

No wonder that New Jersey’s savvy governor decided this would be a great time to fake at running for president – racking up scads of free PR and campaign cash – without actually agreeing to join the train wreck.

After seeing how quickly Rick Perry tumbled from pundits’ darling to Texas Toast, what other governor would be eager to fling himself into the ADD machine known as the national media?

Could it also be possible that Chris Christie is the rare politician wise enough to recognize that, before seeking the hardest job in the world, one might want to hone one’s skills at governing on a smaller, but still challenging stage, such as Trenton.

After all, the last two presidencies show, to our pain, what happens when someone who’s a lot better at campaigning than at actually running things ends up handling the in-box in the Oval Office.