Ich Bin Ein Miserably Boring Presidential Candidate

July 27, 2008

Ohio Greetings (shrunk).jpg

Let me start with some family background.

Although I‘ve never seriously uttered the phrase “y’all” (and never will, in lieu of numerous, grammatically-correct alternatives), I grew up in northern Alabama. But I was born in a little slice of heaven known as Cleveland, Ohio, home of the Browns, the Indians, kielbasa, babushkas, pierogi, and the highly flammable Cuyahoga River. My family moved down south during the Summer of Love, which was so-named because you weren’t allowed to factor in the Vietnam war and the race riots.

For whatever obscure reason, the chemical company my dad worked for decided to build a new plant south of the Mason-Dixon line, so my parents packed us up and we relocated to the wide-open fields of God’s Country. Mom and Dad must have been bowling the night the riots were on TV.

This meant that, from mid-1967 until shortly after I graduated from college, I lived in Alabama. But, in very significant ways, the Tataras forever remained Clevelanders. My dad was a loyalist, you see. So, every year, the entire family would climb into his latest whale-boat station wagon and endure an excruciating trip to visit the relatives in Cleveland.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my aunts, uncles, and cousins, and always enjoyed seeing them. But we’re talking about a 700 mile drive, usually accomplished in a single, three-pee-stop day! When you’re 6 years-old and have five other people in the car with you, this is only slightly more enjoyable than being kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army. It seems like Dad would have eventually had someone mail him the damn kielbasa.

After several summers of this insanity, it got to be a tradition of sorts for us to pull off the Interstate mid-way through the hell-jaunt to eat lunch at a terrific German restaurant called Schmidt’s Sausage Haus, in Columbus, Ohio. In retrospect, I now see that ours was a sausage-themed existence.

                                                ***

McCain (shrunk).jpg

Now I’ll be talking about John McCain. But, incredibly, I won’t even have to shift gears to do it.

You may have noticed that Barack Obama was managing a fairly convincing John F. Kennedy impersonation before a huge kraut - I’m sorry, that would be “crowd” - in Berlin this past Thursday. People are debating whether this was presumptuous or not, but if Obama was trying to seem “Presidential,” he definitely pulled it off. Then again, given what we’ve endured for the past seven or so years, he could have told knock-knock jokes with a toilet seat around his neck and would have seemed Presidential.

This elaborate photo-op - that’s all it really was, when you get right down to it - sent devastating Scare-Waves through the talking heads at Fox News, where the theory was more or less posited that foreigners gathering in bunches to appreciate an open, intelligent American politician is tantamount to aiding the enemy. People from other countries are to be bombed, after all, not smiled at and treated with decency. If you get all friendly with ‘em, it’s harder to kill ‘em.

McCain, of course, knew in advance what Obama would be up to that day, and that he’d be getting ooh-gobs of press when he did it. So the presumptive Republican nominee and his handlers countered with the only move that could possibly draw some of the luster from what, at this point, can accurately be called Obama’s “hub-cap, diamond-star halo” (Thanks. I stole that from a T. Rex song.)

McCain went to Schmidt’s Sausage Haus.

That’s right. His answer to his dazzling opponent effortlessly ringing the international bell - in the actual Germany - was to huddle with some local business owners at a German restaurant in Columbus, Ohio. A German restaurant in Columbus, Ohio where the specialty is a huge sausage that’s inexplicably called The Bahama Mama.

Honest to God. It really is. I ate several Bahama Mamas during my youth, and, all these years later, they’re still on the menu! I just looked it up.

Schmidt’s also serves the most idiotically massive cream puffs I’ve ever seen, and by “idiotically massive” I mean, of course, “stupendously fantastic.” It’s a little blurry, but this is the only picture I could find of one online. At this point, they’re a little blurry when I think about them anyway:

Schmidt's Cream Puff.jpg

This thing is about as big around as an encephalitic cat’s head, and has enough custard in it to generate a veritable phalanx of flans. They should have held a pencil next to it to establish the scale. My parents would get a couple of them boxed up, and we’d eat them in the car about an hour after we got back on the road, because our intestines needed to calm down from the pitiless assault of the Bahama Mama before we could soothe them with a valve-clogging, half-pound pastry.

Oh. McCain. He must have said something to the people at the restaurant. But what about that cream puff?!

Paul Tatara

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