All is forgiven?

Before getting to the yummy low-hanging fruit of Sarah Palin, let us take a last look at Hillary Clinton’s final act in which an entitled die-hard miraculously became an elegant, gracious loser.

Did anyone seriously think that the Clintons were going to openly take a crap in the Democratic Party nest they both plan to continue to live in? They probably could have hurt Obama pretty seriously (although perhaps not fatally) but only while setting fire to their own ship and being pushed out to sea in it. They would have royally pissed off not just the Obama voters but nine-tenths of her own.

On the contrary, they had to look like team players and avoid taking any blame for an Obama defeat even if they secretly hope for one. (Bill’s faint praise provides a cynic plenty of evidence that he does.) They did their job.

But what’s all this talk about Hillary’s glorious and laudable campaign? You mean the one in which she and her co-candidate dismissed Obama as just another Jesse Jackson (and the same color too!), reminded white people to vote for her, pandered to racist imagery with the 3 a.m.-little-white-girl-in-bed ad, dragged the whole thing on long past her candidacy’s demise, and worst of all, relentlessly pumped up the bogus notion that she really had won more votes and was somehow cheated of the post rather than defeated for it.

That last notion lingers on in the minds of the ignorant and is dutifully parroted by the Republicans, including yesterday as they talked up the goofy Palin. Thanks, Hill.

Nothing in last week’s performances suggests that either the Clintons or their camp followers regret having played a sneaky, dirty game that damaged the party they supposedly want to see victorious. It’s a measure of our debased politics that they get to walk away from their narcissistic slash-and-burn campaign trailing the glow of heroism. In a party truly concerned about national well-being, they’d be anathema.

Memo from Obama to TV Pundits leaked

August 29, 2008
From: Sen. Barack Obama, Denver
To: Chris Matthews, Brian Williams, George Stephanopoulos, Peggy Noonan, David Brooks, James Carville, Joe Scarborough . . . [86 others]

Hey guys,

I want to say I really appreciate all the advice you’ve given me over the last few months. It’s been very stimulating for me and my campaign to hear your opinions day after day about being tougher/softer, to focus on foreign policy/the economy, to choose/not choose Hillary, to play to blue-collar workers/soccer moms, to bowl/shoot baskets—wow, I mean you guys have been busy these last 18 months or so. I don’t know how you do it—so many topics, so little air-time. I feel you, believe me.

Anyway, I took all that into account for my acceptance speech last night in Denver. I won’t say I accommodated all of your advice because, well, frankly it doesn’t always coincide, despite the heat you put behind it on your shows. But in all big families like ours, there will be some dissension and a variety of points of view.

Like last night, for example: some of you guys decided I needed to come out and whip up the crowd to a frenzy once again, the way I did in the primaries, sort of a mega-stump-speech that would leave the young girls fainting and carried out on stretchers. One of those Big Stadium Events like the Beatles early ‘60s tour. Some of you were eager to see that happen and comment on it live, that I-am-here-right-now-where-history-is-being-made thing you do so well in war zones and standing in front of choppy seas and whatnot.

I decided against that, though, since you also thought John McCain had a point when he compared me to Britney Spears—all flash, no substance. Because after the exciting, historical-moment thing, you guys calm right down and remind viewers that we all need a steady hand at the helm and the big emotional rallies, while entertaining (yeah, for you, too, c’mon guys, admit it!), don’t really translate into sober policy. And you analysts are very serious about candidates showing their ‘policy chops’.

So no, I went another route—sorry Brooks, I know you were disappointed! I decided to pare down the rhetoric and get to the question of who I am and who John McCain is and to lay out the different routes we can take as a country in pretty specific (OK, Stephanopoulos, a little boring!) terms. It probably didn’t make for the oo-wow moment you guys were gunning for, but my team was actually thinking more about the viewers who weren’t commenting on the speech but just listening to it.

There’s one thing I found out on this campaign so far: turns out the voters are the ones who decide who wins. I love you guys, don’t get me wrong. But they do, you don’t.

So far, we’ve done okay, don’t you think? Hey, there’s a topic for your Sunday shows—go for it, guys!

Poker game next Friday?

Barack

Clinton, Kerry with base hits; Biden goes down swinging

If John Kerry had put together a speech in 2004 like the one he delivered Wednesday night, he might be president today.

Kerry’s brief appearance had rhythm, humor, one-liners and passion. He dismantled McCain without being nasty, and he gave the Bushites the thrashing they’d escaped so far. He dared to use the word ‘torture’ and effectively fired back at the Republicans the flip-flopper accusation that buried him four years ago—a delicious irony.

Bill Clinton looked comfortable and said all the right things. Thank you and good night.

They were both prefaced by impressive, albeit scripted, testimonies from an array of military officers and amputee vets, at long last hitting the indefensible Bush war strategy while looking convincingly like the party that respects, really respects, the troops.

But Biden, to my taste, was all schmaltz and boilerplate, and reminded me why he pulled down all of 1% of the Iowa caucus votes. I was expecting more takedowns of the failed Bush policies; instead, we got the laundry list of miracles he and Obama will perform once in power, making him sound like a huge promise whore. Before that, we heard a family saga that went on too long and folksy advice from Biden’s elderly mom waving down from the galleries.

All in all, a disappointing end to the most persuasive and hard-hitting session of the convention so far.

Mass tongue-bite

The Democrats’ tiresomely scripted speeches don’t include very much on the topic of the Iraq war, giving the impression that they’re scared of the Triumph of the Surge line. No surprise that Hillary stays away from the historic debacle with which she was and remains fully complicit. But you’d think all the focus on economic issues from everyone else under the sun might include the fact that we’ve taken a vast chunk of our national wealth and thrown it down the Mesopotamian toilet.

You’d think there’d be some criticism of the war profiteers, the unparalleled corruption, the suspicious links between the sitting vice president and the company that hauls in the cash and provides lousy services. You’d think there’d be a tiny reference somewhere to the dismantling of the Geneva Conventions and the shameful treatment of detainees.

Instead, we get only glancing references to failed Humvee armor in tearful recollections of the fallen soldier. Only Nancy Pelosi managed to mention the trillion-dollar waste although she stumbled on the line as if it stirred her guilty conscience. And of course no one has a word to say about Guantánamo.

We’ll hear from Lestat the Undead tonight, and it will be interesting to see if he has anything to say about our collapsing foreign policy or whether he’ll continue the nonstop pandering to the pocketbook. I guess that’s the way you win elections here, but globalization was supposed to make us more aware of our planet and less parochial. So far, there’s not a shred of evidence of that.

All Hail

I couldn’t quite figure why people so badly need the so-called ‘humanization’ of Mr Obama and the endless trivia on display last night, the stories about his courtship of his wife, his brother-in-law’s recollections of L’il Sis, or what Michelle feels about her daughters’ education. I am favorably disposed toward the family, but none of that seemed to me to have much to do with warfare, mortgage foreclosure, gas prices or the Darfur refugees—that is, the issues that should matter to us as electors.

But it does make sense if we are in fact naming a sort of royal family to preside over our state and symbolize our polity for the next four years. If we are eager to watch little Malia grow up and think of her as a future princess or even queen, just as the Brits observe Prince Harry and imagine him wielding the royal sceptre, then it’s nice to get a glimpse of her now and see how cute she is on the big stage.

That places Ted Kennedy metaphorically in the role of the dying king anointing his successor, and given the dynastic aspects of the Kennedy clan and Teddy’s rhetorical evocation of Camelot, that’s a pretty good fit, too.

But American monarchical tendencies aren’t governed by bloodlines, and the Clintons now pass into the category of the usurped, with Princess Chelsea no longer in direct line for the throne. It’ll be interesting to see what kind of former queen Hillary will appear as: Bloody Mary?

Memory Lane

I spent the weekend in the Catskills right near the site of the Woodstock music festival. The museum at the Bethel Arts Center preserves the artifacts of that very curious event, and the ‘farmer’s market’ down the hill shows where part of that generation’s cultural expression ended up—in $18 natural-fiber whisk brooms and $5 loaves of bread.

Having been almost a contemporary of the original event (a tad too young and cut off to have heard of it, even if I hadn’t been slaving for Penn Central Railroad that summer), I recall a lot of the thinking behind the attempt to go back to the old ways, to recapture the hearty, healthy part of country living before the Wonder Bread ‘50s took over. Along with the appreciation of music, marihuana and sexual intercourse, a lot of kids from our generation had an intuitive critique of plastic, suburban life, and a fair number of us made our way into the collective farms and ‘natural’ living movement that included organic food, environmental concerns and respect for fellow creatures. It fit with the peace-loving, antiwar sentiment and the rediscovery of native American values that slowly worked their way back into the nation’s consciousness in some form.

At the food market and crafts fair, there were plenty of authentic farmers down from the hills around the town, looking a good deal like their Swiss and German forbears probably did, slightly awkward and out of place and trailing their kids through the displays of expensive artisan wares that they couldn’t afford. The post-Woodstock soap manufacturers and potters aren’t selling their goods to the few real back-country people left but to urbanized transplants and weekenders who appreciate the aesthetic and can shell out $120 for a handmade earthenware casserole.

In the town I was visiting, gay couples abound, and the locals seem quite pleased with the shot in the arm they’re bringing by setting up their home-furnishings stores and pouring cash into the old farmhouses and barns that they turn into artist studios and impeccably tasteful summer residences. My hosts, not only gay but interracial to boot, were invited for lunch by the volunteer fire department and sat around discussing water management issues with the construction workers and truck mechanics for a couple hours. So the culture has absorbed quite a bit since that much-maligned decade, and Obama could become president, too.

The museum mostly celebrates what happened at Woodstock, and only killjoys like Nancy Reagan are shown trashing it. I couldn’t help comparing the festival to other events of youthful exhuberance around the world and recalling that they don’t always end with hugs and happy memories. Someone was wise enough not to let the National Guard or other law-enforcement bodies near the place, and the Utopian chaos is a sweet memory.

Still, I keep coming back to that $18 whisk broom. I actually need a whisk broom, and seeing that useless, faux-naturelle item made me think about the economics of rural and small-town life in that hilly preserve. Anyway, it’s great to think that they’re still up there piping the Grateful Dead and Janis Joplin through computers into their toolsheds.

Too polite to fight?

It’s amusing to read Patrick Buchanan’s slashing attack on the paid lobbyists for Georgia who are also high-ups in the McCain campaign. Buchanan uses the overheated language of easy outrage you expect to hear from conservatives and Republicans, like ‘treason’ and ‘dual loyalties’.

That’s a little rich but certainly makes you think about McCain and not in a good way. My question is, Why don’t the Democratic candidates or their surrogates ever reach for the jugular that way? How many different ways could the Obama campaign have blasted the many disasters the Bush-McCain camp have caused when instead they settle for defanged, almost polite, objection?

They too could have made hay over the serious setback to U.S. interests caused by the Georgians’ foolishness. One can easily imagine how the narrative would have gone had Senator O been in the White House and the neocons sitting on well-deserved sidelines. They would have jumped all over the encouragement given to the trigger-happy former lawyer from Brooklyn that eventually backfired so disastrously. They would have called it amateurish, dangerous posturing carried out without a back-up plan—Who Lost Georgia? they could have shouted at the rooftops.

They would have said Obama and the Democrats can’t protect us, that the country needs strong, tough, and world-savvy leadership (flags waving in the breeze). And they wouldn’t have cared if their rhetoric made a bad situation worse—that’s the way the game is played on their side.

In fact, someone recently pointed out that the Republicans really don’t have a foreign policy; they have a set of domestic policy goals, and they use the world stage to carry them out. That would be going too far, but why doesn’t the ever-too-loyal opposition ever point it out? Politically speaking, the Dems have a arsenal that would make James Bond jealous, but it takes a wild man like Buchanan to let loose with any of the weapons.