Category: politics

Practice Your Bewildered Silence

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David Letterman “Top Ten Things Overheard at Palin Debate Camp.”

10. “Let’s practice your bewildered silence.”

9. “Can you try saying ‘yes’ instead of ‘you betcha’?”

8. “Hey, I can see Mexico from here!”

7. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and there won’t be any questions about Iraq, taxes or healthcare.”

6. “We’re screwed!”

5. “Can I just use that lipstick-pit bull thing again?”

4. “We have to wrap it up for the day — McCain eats dinner at 4:30.”

3. “Can we get Congress to bail us out of this debate?”

2. “John Edwards wants to know if you’d like some private tutoring in his van.”

1. “Any way we can just get Tina Fey to do it?”

Man, Letterman is starting to feel like the Daily Show. I like #10 and #9 the most.

Live-blogging the Presidential debate w/ kitten

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9:12 p.m.  We hear noises upstairs (girls went to bed by 8:30).  We each stall and try to wait to see if the other guy will go deal with it.  Finally when the steps creak on the basement stairs I go and find the girls, who report that we didn’t snuggle on the couch on the porch as we’d said we would.  I hustle them upstairs and tell them we’ll have to do it tomorrow.  Sobbing.  Finally Sarah comes up.  I go down and pause the debate.  We end up losing 7 minutes which we never make up, meaning we’re stuck with the infuriating “Audience Reaction” graph on CNN.

9:29 p.m. Is it really wise for Sarah Palin’s running mate to say “I’m not Miss Congeniality” so often?

9:39 p.m.  Sarah declares that she’s feeling nervous and jittery and wants to make some popcorn to soothe her nerves.  This powdered cheese topping is surprisingly good.  Lose 8 more minutes.

9:52 p.m. Pot Luck comes down the stairs!  Up from his evening nap and ready to party.  Sarah makes me give up one of my Crocs for him to play with.

10:04 p.m.  Cannot stop myself from tracking the Audience Reaction although the graph does not seem to make sense — the colors don’t match up right.  It annoys me to no end that people are sitting there going “oh now Lehrer’s talking, I don’t feel as excited, let me turn this dial down.”  Or is like some kind of lie-detector test where it’s strapped to their chests?

10:12 p.m. It strikes me that Obama is completely holding his own and seeming deeply and precisely informed about all the foreign policy issues.

10:34 p.m. Our minds are blown that McCain tried to insult Obama by comparing him to Bush. (???!!?)

10:41  Pot Luck’s foreign policy is becoming alarmingly aggressive.  Someone needs to explain to this kitten that liveblogging is not a game of hunt the fingers.

10:48 p.m. Sarah points out that McCain gives the impression that he really only cares about veterans.  Freeze ALL spending except for veterans.

11:05 Watching the post-debate talking heads.  Sarah is worried Pot Luck’s legs are too short.  “I think we may have a midget cat here.”  I’m feeling pretty good about the debate.  Did not expect Obama to win big on this one, but he seemed well-informed, authoritative/Presidential, and quite hawkish.

Flailing

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COURIC: Have you ever been involved with any negotiations for example, with the Russians?

PALIN: We have trade missions back and forth. We do — it’s very important when you consider even national security issues with Russia — as Putin rears his head and comes into the airspace of the United States of America, where do they go?

It’s Alaska, It’s right over the border. It is from Alaska, that we send those out to make sure an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right there, they are right next to our state.

Video Excerpt.

Someone on The Daily Dish compared this to a memory of a fifth grade book report that she tried to fake her way through.  I had similar thoughts — it reminded me of one of those really, really bad teaching days when you have a cold or something and are either underprepared or just lose your way and you realize you are mouthing absolute B.S.  That bizarre image of Putin “rearing his head” sums it up — this errant figure of speech, kind of a cliche that maybe she started to think better of midway through.

On a second viewing of the video, it almost seems plausible that Palin truly does not understand what Couric means by “foreign policy credentials.”

LOL Palin

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This (which I found on Americablog.com) is perfect, injecting into the already-inexplicable oddness of the lolcats meme all the madness of this moose-dressing, polar-bear-deregulating, press-conference-fleeing VP candidate.

There’s something about lolcats that weirds me out. Is it just idiotic, or is there something clever there? Is it simply the apotheosis of internet stupidity, or an apotheosis that brilliantly lays bare the underlying conditions? Whatever, whenever I think of the walrus bucket meme I chuckle involuntarily, not sure why I am laughing and disconcerted by that uncertainty.

Btw, Chris Rock was really hilarious in his extended comparison of Palin to Michael Vick (vis a vis animal cruelty).

p.s.  Wikipedia on lolcats.

“We are the lost civilization”

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The notoriously apolitical David Letterman on a lengthy rant about global warming.  Paul Shaffer’s inane little noises of assent add a surreal touch.  Here’s a partial transcript:

Until we get the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, we are screwed.  We are walking dead people.  We are the lost civilization.  You’re looking at us right here.  Time to go, the cab is coming…. I’ll tell you why it’s too late.  We’ve had no leadership… nobody has stepped forward…. We have to find alternative forms of energy.  On the other hand, I don’t even know why I’m talking about this, because it’s TOO LATE.  We are DEAD MEAT.   The Republicans have taken climate change out of their platform.  As far as they’re concerned, everything’s fine.  “96 degrees in March, yeah, just how we like it!”  We are so screwed….

I adored Letterman in his early days in the 1980s.  I eventually cooled on him when the witty, sarcastic irony that had seemed so pointed started to seem to turn into a more predictable show-biz attitude.  I used to feel there was a real edge of absurdist critique there, but the “critique” part became harder to glimpse through all the celebrity interviews and so on.

Anyway, I like it when he surprises me.  I do still think he’s an intriguingly weird & smart guy who has never been 100% swallowed up by celebrity and television culture.

And a Hoosier, of course.  Wiki: “According to the Ball State Daily News, he originally had wanted to attend Indiana University, but his grades weren’t good enough, so he decided to attend Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana.”  I wonder if anyone has ever used that fact to argue against IU’s raising/tightening admissions standards.

Canvassing for Obama

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The whole family went canvassing Saturday on a semi-rural stretch south of town.  Sarah had been assigned this cluster of 30 or so residences in this area and handed a google map with the addresses highlighted.  These were people whom the campaign had reason to suspect of being undecided or wavering or persuadable.  We parked the minivan in the Laminated Tops store parking lot (closed on Sat.) and hauled the girls on the wagon.  We’d brought along coloring books and markers, and had stopped at Kroeger’s on the way for a bag of Tootsie Roll pops to dole out to the girls for good behavior bribe the girls.

Our first pass was in a little mini… not sure what to call it, a tiny subdivision?  Basically just a big driveway off the main road with 5 or 6 multifamily apartments.  My guess is that these places might rent for $500-600 a month, I’m not really sure.  Not fancy at all, with a touch of trailer-park feeling, but in a way, nice; one good thing about living here, if you want to go this way, is that you can have this kind of rural existence with a forest off your back yard and still be a 10-15 drive to town.

Anyway, the first name on our list turned out to have a big POW-MIA poster in the window, so we weren’t hopeful, and he didn’t really want to talk.  Wasn’t rude, but did not want to tell us anything about his political views (part of the task here is to mark down whether the person is leaning toward Obama or McCain, and what political issues matter most to them).

The next guy was a sleepy-faced 22 year old, maybe, with no shirt on.  He was friendly, especially when he saw Celie and Iris — he mentioned that he was a twin too.  He told us that he was probably leaning toward Obama because his sense was that Obama is “probably more for the working man.”  He is a construction worker and a member of the union; he sort of apologized for his appearance and mentioned that he had a shoulder injury and had slept in late because of the medication. He did not seem to know much about the election; when I said something about Biden, I wasn’t sure if he knew who I meant.  I mentioned a factoid about McCain planning to give the top 1% wealthiest members of the population an over $100,000 tax cut, and that seemed to make an impression.  Overall, talking to this guy felt useful if only to associate some friendly local faces with the Obama campaign (Celie and Iris probably helped).  Also, we left him with two voter registration forms which he seemed happy to have.

There was one other encounter like that – a nice mom type whose very friendly 3-year-old daughter was eager to invite Celie and Iris in to play in her bedroom.  I missed this conversation, but S. says that the woman explained that her husband is McCain all the way, much of her own family are Obama supporters, and she’s kind of wavering or in between.  We were excited to hear that she said she was turned off by the bitterness and rancor of the RNC.  Sarah’s strategy was to stress what Obama will do for the middle class and on economic issues and to point people towards the campaign website.  She commented that it suddenly felt very useful to self-identify as a Middle-Class Mom (probably better than an oil painter and hugelkultur practitioner, for this purpose).

We found it kind of surprising to witness how many people are truly undecided.  We talked with a friendly man who explained that he and his wife generally wait until the last week or so to decide.  I wasn’t sure if this indicated a basically personality-based approach to the decision — deciding which candidate they feel most personally comfortable about — or whether it was more a sign of a set of political beliefs that is truly squarely in the center, whatever that means.  Sarah was struck by how determining family seemed to be; many of the people we spoke to immediately made reference to what their husband or wife or siblings thought, and that really seemed to be the most important single factor.

A lot of people were not home and I can’t imagine this little stint was hugely meaningful, but it felt good to have put a bit of sweat equity into the campaign (dragging that wagon is hard work!)

I’d urge everyone to consider doing some canvassing.  Remember, there are people in your neighborhoods (or nearby) who may barely know who the candidates are, or know little beyond what their spouse told them, and people who will not bother registering if someone doesn’t physically hand them a form.  Just call the Obama campaign and say you can do some Neighbor-to-Neighbor canvassing.

http://my.barackobama.com/n2n

McCain/Palin vs. Bears

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The Republicans are now officially the Stephen Colbert party as they rally around a tough anti-bear platform.

“We’re not going to spend $3 million of your tax dollars to study the DNA of bears in Montana,” McCain continued. “I don’t know if that was a paternity issue or a criminal issue, but …”

As Gail Collins points out,

This is an old line… But even if it was the biggest waste of $3 million in history — even if it was money to sedate grizzlies so hairdressers could apply attractive red tints to their fur — do we want a candidate for president of the United States obsessing about it?

It’s now evident that McCain chose Palin as his Soul Mate in part due to her equally fierce anti-bear policies.  As Palin wrote in a January 2008 Op-Ed in the NY Times (weird! didn’t remember that one),

This month, the secretary of the interior is expected to rule on whether polar bears should be listed under the Endangered Species Act. I strongly believe that adding them to the list is the wrong move at this time…..The Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group, has argued that global warming and the reduction of polar ice severely threatens the bears’ habitat and their existence. In fact, there is insufficient evidence that polar bears are in danger of becoming extinct within the foreseeable future.

Palin’s position reminds me of the administration torture policy, where failure to become fully extinct in the foreseeable future is analogous to failure to die, and anything below that standard falls short of torture or environmental crisis.  Anyway, presumably these positions were inspired by Stephen Colbert’s well-known “arctophobia, the fear of bears,” which he describes as “giant, marauding, godless killing machines.”

Maybe this all has some encoded relationship to the Russia-Georgia conflict and a symbolic revival of Cold War politics?

Barney Smith

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I surged with Hoosier pride watching Barney Smith’s little speech.  Here’s a short piece about Barney, a former lifelong Republican who was fired from a t.v. tube factory in Marion, Indiana (to the Northeast of Indianapolis).

He was awesome! And such a Hoosier, totally authentic.  His wife worked at a high school cafeteria; cafeterias are a major part of Indiana culture, e.g. the cult favorite Gray’s Cafeteria on the way towards Bloomington from the airport (long lines of retirees, great fried chicken, totally sweet waitresses who call you honey).

Those “real people” speeches were a stroke of brilliant stagecraft.  Also especially loved the woman from North Carolina who’s voted for every Republican since Nixon but can’t take any more.  Part of the subliminal political “framing” here was clearly to get some chubby white people (Applebee’s riblets consumers, to cite my own recent post on Indiana obesity) up there as counterweight to the beautiful slim, fit leanness of the Obamas, which was starting to become a liability.

I will be very disillusioned if it turns out they came from central casting in L.A.  No doubt Republican operatives are delving into their personal histories as we speak and some nude photos will turn up in someone’s past (not Barney’s, though, I pray).

Obama’s speech

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That was really satisfying.  Every night this week I DVR’d the PBS coverage of the convention and started watching at 8:45 or 9 — that way by 10 or so I’d be nearly caught up after fast-forwarding through all the various functionaries.  Obama’s speech really felt like a culminating payoff to the week (although it was distracting when Sarah showed up in the middle of it with a mewling newborn kitten — more on that later).

I liked Andrew Sullivan’s comment today, which accords with my brother Jake’s theory (expressed to me a week ago) that Obama and his people were engaging in a crafty “rope-a-dope” strategy — letting McCain attack, hanging back and not really responding, waiting it out, and then finally striking back at the right moment.

It was a deeply substantive speech, full of policy detail, full of people other than the candidate, centered overwhelmingly on domestic economic anxiety. It was a liberal speech, more unabashedly, unashamedly liberal than any Democratic acceptance speech since the great era of American liberalism. But it made the case for that liberalism – in the context of the decline of the American dream, and the rise of cynicism and the collapse of cultural unity. His ability to portray that liberalism as a patriotic, unifying, ennobling tradition makes him the most lethal and remarkable Democratic figure since John F Kennedy.

What he didn’t do was give an airy, abstract, dreamy confection of rhetoric. The McCain campaign set Obama up as a celebrity airhead, a Paris Hilton of wealth and elitism. And he let them portray him that way, and let them over-reach, and let them punch him again and again … and then he turned around and destroyed them. If the Rove Republicans thought they were playing with a patsy, they just got a reality check.

He took every assault on him and turned them around. He showed not just that he understood the experience of many middle class Americans, but that he understood how the Republicans have succeeded in smearing him. And he didn’t shrink from the personal charges; he rebutted them. Whoever else this was, it was not Adlai Stevenson. It was not Jimmy Carter. And it was less afraid and less calculating than Bill Clinton.

Above all, he took on national security – face on, full-throttle, enraged, as we should all be, at how disastrously American power has been handled these past eight years. He owned this issue in a way that no Democrat has owned it since Kennedy. That’s a transformative event. To my mind, it is vital that both parties get to own the war on Jihadist terror and that we escape this awful Rove-Morris trap that poisons the discourse into narrow and petty partisan abuse of patriotism. Obama did this tonight. We are in his debt.

Look: I’m biased at this point. I’m one of those people, deeply distressed at what has happened to America, deeply ashamed of my own misjudgments, who has shifted out of my ideological comfort zone because this man seems different to me, and this moment in history seems different to me. I’m not sure we have many more chances to get off the addiction to foreign oil, to prevent a calamitous terrorist attack, to restore constitutional balance in the hurricane of a terror war.

I’ve said it before – months and months ago. I should say it again tonight. This is a remarkable man at a vital moment. America would be crazy to throw this opportunity away. America must not throw this opportunity away.

Know hope.

One observation (obviously not an original one): in the focus on Obama’s “lofty rhetoric” and oratorical powers, it sometimes seems forgotten that for a President, words and language are the primary and almost the only tool at hand.  The President isn’t going to wade into a bar fight, fire a gun, lift heavy weights, run a marathon, or anything like that.  He (or she) is going to use language is various forms, in speeches, policy meetings, bills, diplomacy, and so on.  Even the President’s “actions” are for the most part going to be verbal.  So it’s not as if it’s a minor or trivial part of the job to be a powerful and effective speaker and crafter of words.

This week sent me back to the way I felt a while ago, that it seems crazy and impossible that McCain could stand a chance this year, although that is probably naive.  It does seem like a sign, though, that a hurricane threatening New Orleans may arrive simultaneously with the Republican convention.

Economic Terror

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I thought this was amusing. #4 on CBS News’s “7 Worrisome Signs for Obama“:

Bad times could be good for McCain. If anger helps Democrats, fear advantages Republicans. A growing number of Democratic strategists worry that some swing state voters may opt for McCain if the economy veers from merely awful to downright terrifying.

Wow. So if Heath Ledger as the Joker threatens to blow up all of the nation’s banks, McCain wins.

Always nice to realize that the possibility of our economy becoming “downright terrifying” is highly plausible.