CORBIN, Kentucky — It’s a birthplace of Americana. A shrine. A place where a game of chicken began. Corporate chicken. Literally.
At 688 U.S. Highway 25 West you find Col. Harland Sanders’ Cafe and Museum — the world’s first Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant. Complete with restored original kitchen and the Colonel’s restored office. People eat in the cafe and ooh and ahh at its simple displays. It’s where Sanders perfected his famous recipe, which he took on the road and sold out of necessity, once I-75 opened and hurt his local business. His recipe, business, and persona then took off: chicken became a hot commodity for emerging fast-food mega-corporations. The game of corporate chicken fully came to fruition in 1964 when he sold his company to former Kentucky Gov. John Y. Brown Jr. and Jack Massey for $2 million.
Fast forward to 2011, and America is now watching a new game of chicken: political chicken.
Who will conservatives pick as the new “anti-Romney” to stop former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, a conservative in his present incarnation but once a moderate and therefore not trusted by conservatives? Several conservative heavyweights, including George Will and Erick Erickson, suggest a Romney nomination would defile what conservatism has achieved and perhaps destroy it if Romney “goes moderate” again in the Oval Office.
And so we get the question: amid a recession and an overexposed Democratic President unable to make significant dent in it, are conservatives really willing to nix Romney, the one GOPer who polls show has the best chance of defeating Barack Obama and attracting think-for-themselves Americans who don’t idolize Rush Limbaugh? Would they really snatch defeat from the jaws of a likely 2012 victory?
Until recently, their hopes in this high-stakes ideological game rested with former Godfathers’ Pizza CEO Herman Cain until Cain got enmeshed in a sexual harassment scandal, delivered some tepid debate performances, and blamed everyone but SpongeBob SquarePants for being behind the allegations aimed at him.
Their hopes in this game of political chicken now center on a man who would look like Col. Sanders if he wore a mustache and goatee and donned white suit and string tie: former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.
Gingrich is a polarizing figure who has so much personal and political baggage that TSA may soon inspect him. Gingrich is smart, brimming with ideas, a solid debater, a generator of lively bomb-throwing quotes, tough, a flip-flopper, vain, arrogant, and not a poster-boy for marriage as a sacred vow. If he turns off moderates, non-liberal Democrats and some independents, conservatives love him. He throws more red meat than tiger feeders at the San Diego Zoo.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.