Election 2008

Needless to say (so let's say it anyway), this will be the site for essays specific to the race from mid April until Election Day.

The Dirt Trail	10/13/08	Usually, at this point, just 22 days before the election, I’m at the point where I’m running out of things to say about the campaigns and am looking around a bit desperately for something non-political to write about, just to take a break and maybe restart my brain. This time around, I had an essay about a kitten – yes, a kitten, that’s what I’ve descended to – on the back burner ready to go against the point where I couldn’t post one more Palin quote without puking. But of course, this year has been a little different. The worldwide economic crash is huge, news that is once-in-a-lifetime, vast in its implications. It has been so big that even the campaign for what is arguably the most important election America has seen since 1932 has been pushed to the side. So: three weeks to go, and I’m looking for opportunities to write about politics. Right now, the kitten’s not even on the horizon, even though he is indisputably a very nice kitten. Europe is effectively nationalizing their banks while US “leadership” is dithering. Tick, tick, tick. That’s where the economy stands. We’re at that point in a Roadrunner cartoon narrative where we’re Wile E. Coyote, and we’ve just noticed a shadow forming around us, bugged our eyes skyward, and opened a little paper parasol in an effort to shield ourselves. Paul Krugman just won the Nobel Prize for Economics. I posted congratulations to his blog, noting that if elected, Obama was going to need a really, really good economic advisor. So let’s talk about the campaign. First, there’s the right wing smear machine. Smearing isn’t limited to the right, and you can find Democrats willing to swear that McCain caused the Forrestal accident, or is actually not a citizen and not eligible to run for president, or turned coward and traitor whilst being held captive in North Vietnam. All three can be regarded, at best, as unprovable and more likely to be politically motivated nonsense. But the smears against Obama are organized, coordinated, carefully planned, and crafted, and repeated, over and over. However, between the huge distraction of the economy and Obama’s willingness to fight the smears, they just aren’t gaining ground.
The Great Debate	10/7/08	Well, if anyone was looking for FDR to manifest in tonight’s debate, they will just have to live with disappointment. Both candidates spent more time taking campaign speech potshots at one another, and neither had anything substantive to say about the exploding economic crisis that is threatening to bring down America. Now, in fairness, it has to be noted that during the campaign of 1932, FDR didn’t make any bold proposals. He didn’t talk about a New Deal, or how he would make the government America’s biggest employer in order to “prime the pump”. Instead, he spouted the same genial platitudes about how America would muddle through and business would take care of business that incumbent Herbert Hoover was saying. I’m sure if the Republicans had someone running to replace Hoover that year, the Republican wannabe would be doing the same thing, dealing with the grim, scary realities by tossing rose petals and blowing kisses. And, unfortunately, one of the grim realities of a presidential campaign is that if you take too firm a view, speak too many specifics, lay out a detailed plan, the opposition will use it to tear you apart, even as they steal it. Doesn’t much matter which party; politics is politics. As a result, nobody expected much from Franklin Delano Roosevelt when he took office. He was seen as a bit of a buffoon with only vague ideas on how to tackle the crisis, and it was expected among many that he would, in a genial, vaguely avuncular way, preside over the disintegration of the country. So if you were watching the debate and losing hope, remember that it may not be the candidates that are flawed, but the system they operate in. One, both, or neither might be the next FDR. Or they might be ineffectual in the face of looming national catastrophe, a James Buchanan.
Veep Veep	10/2/08	The most striking thing about the vice presidential candidates’ debate is that neither of them actually blew sky-high or had a complete melt-down on stage. With Joe Biden, the main concerns were that he would either be too didactic, or made an unscripted remark that would cause Obama embarrassment. He avoided that. With Palin, the expectations were slightly lower. The Republicans were hoping she wouldn’t be the serious embarrassment she had been in interviews with Charles Gibson and even harmless little Katie Couric. Well, let’s face it: things had kind of reached the point where Republicans were reduced to hoping that she could field a question like “Do you like dogs?” without fucking it all up. By any conventional standard, Joe Biden was the clear winner of the debate. He was knowledgeable without sounding wonkish, assertive without being bullying, and open and human without appearing weak. And while he sometimes nuanced the truth as a seasoned politician can do (for example, talking about a surge in Afghanistan being opposed by American commander General McKiernan, when the general, while opposing a Baghdad-style “surge” nevertheless wanted a troop increase), he never actually told a bare-faced lie. Sarah Palin did, most notably when she characterized Obama’s tax plan as targeting “millions of small businesses.” The tax would be on the income the owners get from the business, and limited to individuals making over $200K. The businesses themselves would see no tax increase. Both candidates and moderator Gwen Ifill both tiptoed around the ongoing financial crisis, mentioning it obliquely if at all. As a result, it was the 800 pound gorilla in the room.
Debate I	9/25/08	The debate went off after all, and it was probably the best presidential debate we’ve seen since Nixon /Kennedy. For one thing, there were follow-up questions from a competent moderator. Anyone who remembers Charlie Gibson’s poor job of moderating the second debate between Putsch and John Kerry will recognize that a good moderator is essential to a good debate. Lehrer is a good moderator. Second, the two men were allowed – indeed, encouraged – to speak directly to one another. They both had trouble with that in the first half hour, something I attribute to the rules of debate in Congress, where debaters address the chair or the body, and not each other. To a degree, both were using material from their stump speeches, which also doesn’t involve direct interaction with the other. Both managed it sporadically as the debate continued. Third, for the first time in almost 12 years, the Republican candidate wasn’t a complete moron. Putsch was, is, and always will be an idiot. Al Gore, confronted with a type of idiocy he probably hadn’t seen since grade school, sighed in frustration. Ironically, that cost him, since the spinmeisters were able to paint him as an intellectual elitist and Putsch as the type of guy you could have a beer with. (Think about the type of guys you like to have beers with. Would you hire any of them on a bet? Let them take care of your kids? Control your finances? Run your country?). McCain has his flaws, but he is not stupid, and he’s actually good in debate. So the first debate turned out to be one of the best we’ve seen in a long time, and if I was scoring it on rounds of questions, then I would give it to McCain on points. Part of it was the Ali tactic of rope-a-dope, where he would just lean back against the rope and cover up, and let his candidate throw ineffectual punches. In this case it was a strong reliance on talking points. But where for Putsch, talking points was all he had, McCain used them to rattle Obama and eat up the clock while Obama wore himself down some.
The McCain Speech	9/3/08	I suspect the idea was to play good cop / bad cop on the country. Palin would come out screeching fire and brimstone, firing up the base with lurid tales of how all Democrats and the media wanted to do was tax America out of existence and surrender to any terrorist who would put up with America. The following night, McCain would be the statesman-like voice of reason, emphasizing his ability to reach across the aisle and work with all to the betterment of America. With a more diverse audience to play off of than what the Republican National Convention offered, it might have worked. Normal people prefer to work with their fellows, and when they talk about “Country First”, they mean the country, and not just a small pack of religious whacks and various major corporations. But there just weren’t enough normal people in the audience that McCain faced tonight. Palin had given them their 40 minutes of hate the night before, and they visualized a speech at the end of which they would storm the booths, tear apart the media, and go out slaying Democrats with the stripped femurs of their foes, ripping throats out with their teeth, and maybe torching a few winos. That would be the male delegates. The females were thinking more along the lines of the Furies of Grecian myth, only decently dressed.
Obama's Night	8/28/08	For people expecting a grand spectacle, tonight’s show in Denver might have been something of a let down. Beijing’s Bird Nest had far more entertainers, more lavish sets and backdrops, a bigger lightshow, and fireworks that made any fireworks show seen in America look weak. Even people just expecting it to be the fourth night of a political convention would have been underwhelmed. There was lots of confetti, and party stalwarts wearing looks of dumb adoration, and lots of real pretty speechifying. And yet, it was an utterly unforgettable event. There was a sense that something completely out of the ordinary was happening, and that made this much more than just a big political rally, or a half-game show. I watched most of it on PBS, switching to Faux News immediately after Obama’s speech. I caught only the tail-end of Al Gore’s speech, and a brief speech by Joe Biden. Then came speeches from five ordinary people, two of them former Republicans, explaining why they were supporting Obama. PBS, to their credit, stayed with them, rather than pushing them into a background sound while gasbags pontificated about what It All Meant. One of the speakers, a fellow named Barney Smith, brought the house down by remarking, “I want a government that will put Barney Smith ahead of Smith, Barney.” Then came the standard bio film, except that, like so many things about Barack Obama, it wasn’t all that standard at all. Some relatives were white. Some weren’t. Some were American. Some weren’t. But they were all completely human, and worked to make Obama a fully realized person. Then came the speech.
"Yes He Can..."	8/27/08	After Hillary’s speech last night, no reasonable person would conclude that the Clintons weren’t on board for the 2008 presidential campaign. That didn’t stop the far right, and the corporate media lickspittles who give them artificial life in a country that hates them. So for the past 22 hours, we had been hearing about how Hillary wasn’t SPECIFIC enough in her praise of Obama. Of course, if she had gotten into specifics, the right would have put thousands of manhours into combing through every public utterance she ever made in hopes of finding something she said about Obama that might even be construed as slightly different from what she said in the speech. But, they whined, she could have said that about anyone who was the party nominee. And of course, that’s exactly true. She said the things that she said to show that she fully supported her party’s nominee. Then Bill Clinton spoke tonight. The right was so busy watching for any signs of a lack of party unity with Hillary they totally forgot that in many ways, Bill’s voice in the party is even stronger than Hillary’s. One reason for that is that they have spent years assuming that because they hate Bill Clinton, everyone else must, as well. I just love mentioning to them that on the day after the House impeached Bill Clinton, his popularity was above 70%, and it stayed will above 55% until he left office. Bill Clinton was a strong president who brought America eight years of relative peace, and an unparalleled economic boom, and people remembered that.
Hillary's Big Speech	8/26/08	About half way through her 30 minute speech at the convention tonight, Hillary looked out over the sea of supporters in the arena – nearly but not quite half the delegates there – and said, “Were you in this campaign just for me?” That was the exact moment that any worries I had that she would hold back, perhaps vacillate just enough to leave doubts in the minds of her supporters about going with Obama, that was the exact moment those concerns vanished. That was the moment she told her supporters that what it was about, what it had always been about, was far more important than her. The right had been pumping up the notion that Hillary might not only be grudging in her praise of Obama, but might even openly sabotage him. A couple of real dreamers imagined that she might try at the last minute to turn the floor nomination process the following night into a real vote, a real fight. I wasn’t worried about that. If she had done something so stupid–and she is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a stupid woman–she would have been as big a pariah in the Democratic Party as Zell Miller or Joe Lieberman. If she was seen in any way to be sabotaging Obama’s chances, I think even many of her supporters would have turned on her.
A Ruckus in the McCain Campaign	8/26/08	Is Uncle Ruckus working in the McCain campaign as his advisor on Negro Affairs or something? Uncle Ruckus is perhaps the most demented character on TV, a large, slovenly black man who absolutely detests all black people and worships the white man’s god, Ronald Reagan. He is virulently racist, and will spout lines like “That’s a fine pair of pickaninnies you’s got there” or “Just because you is half white doesn’t mean you isn’t all nigrah.” If you’re shaking your head and going, “Whoa! I haven’t seen anything like THAT on American television!” the answer is that he’s a character in “Boondocks,” a late night cartoon on the Cartoon network, produced by Aaron McGruder, who also did the comic strip of the same name and based on the same characters – minus, of course, Ruckus, who would have been a bit much for newspaper editors to handle. The cartoon network, late at night, has some of the boldest and most original social satire to be found. Strange as it seems. If Ruckus was a McCain advisor, he might say something like, “Senator, you know and I know that that boy you’re running against ain’t nothing but an uppity high-yellow who’s learned to hide his inner nigger.” He would discourse on how Obama is “passin’ in both directions at once” and explain to McCain that if he wanted to get some of the black vote (“Although gawd knows why you would want it, it ain’t worth shit”), he was going to have to work on his “nigger cred.”
Three Point Tour	7/25/08	It may be a while before John McCain pushes Barack Obama to take a dare again. For the past several weeks, he had been hammering home the point that Obama didn’t have much in the way of foreign policy experience. It was a legitimate claim, and McCain’s people were making the most of it, putting up a day clock on their website to show how long it had been since Obama had visited Iraq, and McCain himself taunted Obama, challenging him to take a tour of the middle east and to talk to our allies so he would know what was really going on over there. It seemed a safe enough tactic. McCain doubtlessly believed that Obama would privately share his conviction that the Illinois Senator was a lightweight in foreign policy, and would avoid going over to the occupied areas and saying or doing something that would either show he didn’t know what he was talking about, or better still, having a “Dukakis-in-the-tank” moment in which he would look ridiculous trying to show off non-existent military credentials. Then, too, there was the fact that presidential candidates rarely left the country at ALL during the heat of the campaign, let alone on a week-long, highly-publicized tour. In terms of getting votes, Enid, Oklahoma would be more fertile grounds than all of Germany and France combined. The conventional wisdom was that truculent voters would be wondering why he was sucking up to a buncha damn furriners when there were red-blooded Americans right here demanding his attention. The tour turned out to be a disaster, not for Obama, but for McCain. It was supposed to show that Obama would be out of his league dealing with heads of state. He wasn’t. It was supposed to show that he put politics ahead of the troops, and the troops resented it. They didn’t. And it was supposed to give McCain the opportunity to second guess Obama, and suggest better ways he might have handled the situations that Obama bobbled. Except Obama didn’t bobble any.
It May be Over	5/6/08	At Hillary Clinton’s victory speech in Indiana, Bill Clinton looked decidedly downcast. Chelsea Clinton was off camera, but BBS presenter Katty Kaye reported that she looked on the verge of tears. There was a telling moment in her “victory speech” when she said, “I win, he wins, he wins, I win. No matter what happens, I will work for the nominee of the Democratic party because we must win in November. And I know that Senator Obama feels the same way.” That sounds more like a concession speech, and it may well be one. I suspect a lot of people will go to bed tonight convinced that Hillary did win Indiana, and perhaps she did. But normally, when there is a 4 point margin between candidates with 87% of precincts in, it’s time to release the balloons, give the speech, and congratulate the loser on a fine effort. But it’s not quite over in Indiana. Two counties have no returns at all. One of them is Lake County, which adjoins the small hamlet of Chicago, in Obama’s “home state” of Illinois. It features the medium-sized city of Gary, Indiana. It’s expected to go heavily for Obama. The other is Union County, just up the road from Cincinnati. Correction: Lake County just reported well after midnight their time, and with 28% of precincts counted, Obama is leading 75%-25%. No, Indiana isn’t settled yet.
435-305	4/22/08	Well, Rush Limbaugh’s big push to have Republican supporters switch allegiance and vote for Hillary in Pennsylvania in order to keep the race going had a profound effect. The polls from the political analysts suggest that Hillary would win by 11 points. With about 80% of the vote counted, she is leading by ... ten. Back when Rush first suggested voting for her, she still led in the state by about twenty points. So the big dittohead boost didn’t materialize, and while she won by just enough to stay in the race, she faces dwindling donations as her campaign falls ten million in debt. She did win, and she’ll get a boost from that, a small bounce in the polls which may or may not help her in Indiana two weeks from now. (North Carolina isn’t really in play, with Obama enjoying a solid 20 point lead there). But she only gained about fifteen delegates on Obama. But after tonight, she’ll still need 430 or so delegates in order to win the nomination, and Obama only needs about 310. No matter what happens in the remaining primaries, Obama will go to the convention with the most voter-chosen delegates. So Pennsylvania served only to keep Hillary alive, but not improve her position.
A Lazy Breeze	4/16/08	The Scots have a benign sounding term for what is actually a rather nasty thing. “A lazy breeze.” A lazy breeze is a wind so cold and bitter that it goes through you, rather than around you. About now Republicans, CEOs, and Hillary Clinton must be shivering and cursing the way the wind is blowing. For the second time in three weeks, right wingers exalted that something had happened in the Barack Obama campaign that would destroy his run for the Presidency. The first was the Reverend Wright and his incendiary remarks about relations between America and her black population. The second was Obama’s “bitter” remark last week. Faux and right wing talk radio tried pile-driving it, of course, but not many people outside of their little circle of friends pay much attention to what they have to say these days, and that means about 2% of all Americans. The mainstream media, dutiful whores to the GOP, don’t even bother trying to hide their Republican servitude these days. Even Dana Milibank, no friend to liberal politicians, was taken aback, writing, “So much for the liberal media. John McCain and Barack Obama both appeared before the nation's newspaper editors yesterday. The putative Republican presidential nominee was given a box of doughnuts and a standing ovation. The likely Democratic nominee was likened to a terrorist. At a luncheon for the editors hosted by the Associated Press, AP Chairman Dean Singleton quizzed Obama about whether he would send more troops to Afghanistan, where ‘Obama bin Laden is still at large?”’
Elitism!	4/13/08	Back when I was 11 and in Southern California, a time of a too-slowly dying pope and a too-rapidly living president, I had a liberal aunt who loved Adlai Stevenson. As a part of her (eventually successful) drive to liberalize me, she had me listen to some of his speeches. They were on scratchy LPs, mono, and of dicey sound quality. Combined with Stevenson’s still-unfamiliar American accent, they made understanding the speeches a bit of a burden. Part of the problem was that I was only 11. Stevenson, unlike most politicians, spoke as an adult to adults. Compared to what we have today, so did Eisenhower. Neither of them were aiming for audiences that might be mentally challenged by the Teletubbies. But Adlai had a wit that reminded me of my hero, Winston Churchill. And the Cuban missile crisis the year before had taught me that the boring stuff on the front page of the newspaper could kill me if I wasn’t paying attention. My aunt told me of his legendary decision about letting cats roam free*, and the time someone told him that he was sure to “get the vote of every thinking man” in the U.S. Stevenson replied, “Thank you, but I need a majority to win.” Years later, as Reagan ascended and America began a decline, I heard some of those speeches again. He didn’t use sound bites, he didn’t use race or economics or religion to bait and entice his listeners or stir up their anger against commies or beatniks. He spoke to them as if they were thinking adults capable of evaluating the facts and drawing their own thought-out conclusions.