We submit for your approval our take on what year each Republican presidential candidate idealizes and would return the country to if given the chance.
Mitt Romney: 1959. With a pompadour straight from Efram Zimbalist, Jr.'s 77 Sunset Strip days, Romney embodies the look, if not the spirit, of that brief, shining moment between the Eisenhower and Kennedy eras. This period is a proven winner with advertisers aiming for the aging Baby Boomer demographic as well as with those among the Greatest Generation who are still allowed to drive.
A Romney presidency might singlehandedly bring back Brylcreem, if not huge tailfins on cars. Whether his policies would prove him the sort of Eisenhower Republican Rachel Maddow longs for isn't clear, but his haircut is a damn good start. Happy Days is here again. Again.
Rick Perry: 1836-1846. We can picture Perry fitting right into that thrilling decade when Texas was an independent republic, making it all up as they went along, picking and choosing among the bits and pieces of the U.S. constitution they liked and ditching anything that wasn't met with enthusiastic yelps of "Yeeeehaaaaaw!" and random gunfire.
Michelle Bachman: 1429.
Like Joan of Arc, who was at her peak that year, Bachman burns with a fiery passion. Both claim to have been called by God to save their respective nations; Joan to deliver France from the English, Michelle to cleanse America of homosexuals, vaccinations, taxes and anything else she that's just a little too secular for her taste. And, at least in the case of the autism-inducing vaccines, Bachman, like the Maid of Orleans, tends to hear voices no one else can.
If she's not careful, though, Bachman's presidential path might too closely follow Joan's career arc; having rallied the troops, built up morale and won key battles, once her usefulness is over, she could get hung out to dry by those whose power she helped secure.
Ron Paul: 1757.
Paul's call for America to return to self-reliance without any pesky government interference puts us in mind of James Fenimore Cooper's Last of the Mohicans. That is, the libertarian paradise that was colonial-era upstate New York. In this Eden lives Deerslayer (aka Natty Bumpo, aka Leather-Stocking, aka Hawkeye, aka Pathfinder; hey, it's the frontier, you can call yourself whatever you want). He roams the wilderness with his indian pals, slaying deer, pathfinding and what-not, free from all the bothersome rules, regulations, taxes and indoor plumbing of so-called civilized society. This idyll is rudely interrupted when the governments of both sides waging the French and Indian Wars (along with attendant indians) show up and start trampling all over his individual rights, to say nothing of what they do to the Mohicans (spoiler alert in the book's title).
Newt Gingrich. 1866. Providing the Confederacy had won the Civil War. Otherwise, any point in time the antebellum American south.
The Also-Runners
Herman Cain, Rick Santorum, John Huntsman, Buddy Roemer, Tom Miller, Jimmy McMillan, Andy Martin, Fred Karger, Gary Johnson, Vern Wuensche: 2013. They can go back to whatever they were doing in 2011 and add to their list of hobbies showing up on cable TV to scold us about how we wouldn't be in such a mess if we'd elected them. They should start reciting the phrase, "As I said in my presidential campaign..." in front of the mirror every morning as soon as possible.
Withdrawn But Not Forgotten
Sarah Palin: 1898-1901. Even the coy manner in which she teased us for so long over "will she or won't she" run reinforces our image of Palin as a boomtown saloon girl during the Alaskan Gold Rush, entertaining horny miners in some Klondike clip joint. Her flirty ways and sassy talk would keep 'em buying drinks until they got fresh enough that she had to either make it clear she wasn't 'that kind of girl' or name her price. Like voters today, if those lovesick miners didn't have the nuggets, they had to make do with nearest pig in lipstick.
Donald Trump: 1984. That Trump's self-delusions of grandeur would become his most prominent feature isn't news now, but in 1984, few suspected he would go so far around and so many times so many bends. In '84, he was 38, a young millionaire on the make and, having profited from New York City's default years, was busily buying up Atlantic City at bargain basement prices. Not yet dubbed "The Donald," Trump was featured — unironically! — on the cover of GQ that year, his hair still looking more-or-less like something from an actual human head. And, so far as we know, he had no apprentices. Five years from his first bankruptcy and still with his first wife, the only dark cloud on Trump's golden boy horizon was his ownership of the USFL's New Jersey Generals. Good times.