“When the Republican National Convention’s rules committee convenes Wednesday to debate the parameters for selecting the party’s candidate for president, moderating the chaos will be Enid Green Mickelsen, the committee’s chair, whom the National Review recently described as ‘a little known, Sunday School-teaching grandmother from Draper, Utah,'” Mother Jones reports. (Read the story here.)
That ain’t the half of it.
“Utahns will always remember Mickelsen as … [the] woman responsible for the state’s biggest and perhaps most embarrassing political scandal of the last 30 years,” Mother Jones continues.
A one-term congresswoman in the 1990s, she’s mainly famous for marrying a flim-flam man who embezzled millions from her wealthy father and then funneled some of that money into her financially struggling campaign in clear violation of campaign laws (not to mention laws against theft).
Mickelsen, then known as Enid Waldholtz, blew into D.C. with the wind that swept in Newt Gingrich and his “Contract With America.” But her budding celebrity status soon turned into soap opera when her husband, unwilling to explain where the money came from or went, went on the lam. He was caught and arrested a few days later, and went to prison (and several years later earned another prison term by stealing from his own relatives).
“In December 1995, Mickelsen gave a legendary press conference, running nearly five hours, in which she declared, ‘Everything I’d known about Joseph Waldholtz, who I’d loved and trusted, was a lie.’ The press conference was riveting, and unparalleled. The late, great Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory described it like this:
“‘Ms. Waldholtz, a black-eyed, bushy-haired freshman favorite of House Speaker Newt Gingrich, wept copiously in the first few hours of her long confession, but later put a sock on the sobbing, and geared down to sniveling. In quavering breaths, she has given us the ultimate confession of the confessing ’90s. She even told us how her husband lied not just about his religion but about his assets and his cooking, and how she took painkillers after the Caesarean birth of her daughter and so didn’t give the proper attention to a false document he waved by her … Unwary viewers who tuned in late and began listening to her lachrymose account of misplaced loved and trust, of seduction, betrayal and abandonment, must have settled in very comfortably.'”
(Was this great writing or what?)
Anyway, this poor betrayed sobbing (and now grandmotherly) Mormon housewife is “the powerful moderator between pro- and anti-Trump forces spoiling for a fight* at the GOP convention.” They couldn’t have made a better choice of a ringmaster for their circus. This show is likely to be riveting and unparalleled, like when the lions eat the lion-tamer in front of the crowd.
*I understand some of them will be armed. This could get interesting.