Damn the Enthusiasm Gap, Show Up at the Polls

Apparently some “progressives” would rather chew off their own balls (and, what’s worse, unleash brainless wacko pitbulls like Palin, Gingrich, DeMinted and that fruitcake in Nevada to chew off MY balls) than pass up an opportunity to say “I told you so.”

Here what some thinker at Salon wrote yesterday: "It would perhaps help, now, if the White House took responsibility for the ‘enthusiasm gap' itself, instead of blaming liberals for it. It might also help if they went back in time a year…and proposed some sort of massive infrastructure and jobs program, back when those things could've helped the jobs situation enough to make the forthcoming Democratic blood bath less inevitable."

A couple of points.

1) Whether it’s Obama’s fault or the writer’s, we don’t have a time machine and won’t develop one before election day.

2) All we’ve got now is election day.

3) The blood bath the writer seems to be looking forward to is “inevitable” only if people decide it’s inevitable. At this writing Real Clear Politics has 37 House seats too close to call.

4) There is a significant difference between Obama and Rand Paul.

5) In case you missed number 4: There is a significant difference between Obama and Rand Paul.

6) If the Salon writer (bloviating from the imagined security of a paying job) thinks 10 percent unemployment is bad, wait till he/she has to experience 35 percent.

People making this argument seem bent on talking themselves into the Alamo just to be able to insist (posthumously, it would be) that somebody remember them.

And they want take you and me with them.

I’m not going. I’m voting Democratic. Enthusiastically.

Drowning the Cat

My wife tells me I have tickets to see Randy Newman next Wednesday, the 15th. I just realized that means I will miss the final debate between Obama and McCain.

The surprise is that I find myself relieved at the prospect. Right now this election has come down to drowning the cat, and it's not going to be a pleasant spectacle. The continuing market meltdown (minus three hundred points in the Dow Jones today) and the increasingly bad news in the economy in general (E-Bay is laying people off!) put the McCain campaign in terminal jeopardy.

You don't have to watch McCain too long to realize that gracious loser is not a role he will play comfortably. Mr. Anger clearly expected this to be his year and in the last debate seemed to be astonished that people were making him stand next to this weenie Negro for an hour and a half and actually have to explain why we should hand the War Hero the scepter that he'd earned in the North Vietnam prison.

Consider the fact that McCain wants this so badly he forced himself through the public humiliation of hugging the miserable draft dodger President who stole the office from him in 2000 by claiming he had fathered a black baby. That's how bad he wanted to win this thing.

Now all we can do is watch this bitter coot writhe, scream, spit, bite, and gasp for air as his ill-conceived and spastic campaign is mercifully held beneath the water in the toilet until it finally ceases to be.

It's not going to be pretty. So I'm going to see Randy Newman, for a helping of healthy bile. 

Not Ready to Lead

The clearest signal that Barack Obama's campaign message is achieving traction with voters is the fact that he is losing the election.

For months Obama and his people have been pounding home the message that a vote for McCain is a vote for a third term for George Bush. Little do the Obama people realize that despite Bush's abysmal approval ratings--or perhaps, in some horribly twisted, quintessentially American gesture of self destruction, because of them--a third term of Bush is exactly what the voters want.

"W, The Warlord," read the parodies of the Bush bumpersticker, but to many people, I am convinced, they aren't parodies at all, they are a more direct expression than the originals of Americans' yearning for The End, one final, spastic, grotesque orgy of violence that takes us, and all the foreigners who hate us, down together.

Ever since 1955, when Fess Parker stood at the Alamo in the closing shot of the Davy Crockett series, swinging his rifle like a club, fending off the enclosing Mexicans, that's been our subconscious national dream, to do down swinging in glory taking as many of the encroaching aliens with us as possible, and John McCain is the candidate most likely to make the dream a reality.

The two issues, I read, that have made the difference for the McCain campaign in the past few weeks are offshore drilling (the heroin addict's answer to addiction is finding more heroin) and getting tough with the Russians (for "Remember the Alamo" substitute "We are all Georgians"). I've watched America waste years, lives, and treasure trying to remake Iraq in our image. After that experience it seems perfectly apt that we should all burn in nuclear fire to save South Ossetia for democracy.

Obama's problem, we are told, is that he lacks experience. Maybe this means his brain has not been sufficient pickled by the ways of Washington to achieve the level of madness attained by McCain. I really don't believe that's the problem the voters are having with Obama, though. It's not that he's too sane for their tastes, it's that his skin is the wrong damned color.

The Sheriff Is a Ni—!

Believe it or not, we are currently living through the plot of Blazing Saddles on a national scale. Perhaps admit it or not would be the more accurate phrase.

Just like the movie's fictional Western town of Rock Ridge, the country is beset by a beastly gang of misfortunes--soaring gas prices, stumbling economy, resurgent inflation, global warming, and two or three unendable wars.

Just as in the movie, a dashing, eloquent, smart, handsome, decent, and charming hero has appeared on the horizon to save the day.

And just as in the movie, the hero is black. The extended joke, in the movie and in this year's election, is in watching the white people of Rock Ridge and the country try to come to terms with this strange turn of events.

As funny as anything is seeing how few people can even bring themselves to acknowledge what might be happening. There are any number of articles about the puzzling fact that while the Republicans are almost universally blamed for the fix the country's in, and while the Republican candidate is an overaged, underinformed, flip-flopper with a wooden speaking style and a platform that promises to stick doggedly to the policies that got us in this fix, the election remains tantalizingly close.

Pundits scratch their heads over Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee, wondering whether it's his "newness," his "inexperience," his "strangeness," or his "inaccessibility" that is holding him back.

Just as people tip-toe gingerly around the N-word, so they avoid considering the most likely explanation for what's happening, that Obama's background, the story he proudly tells us "could only happen in America," is itself generating the old All-American racist reaction that we have seen in action repeatedly over the years.

It's like we've got the inarticulate Gabby Hayes-figure from the movie perched on the tower with the spyglass on the new sheriff coming over the horizon, repeatedly trying to yell down the news that "the sheriff is a ni—" but repeatedly having the end of the word garbled by the noise of the crowd. It's as if the word of the new sheriff's identity hasn't gotten through to us.

In Rock Ridge, the word eventually does get through and the townspeople's negative reaction is immediate, overt, and unambiguous. In America today, there's no way to tell for sure what's going on. 

The infamous older, rural, white males might still be ready to acknowledge their racial hostility. But even among old white men "he's not one of us" is about as clear as anyone feels they can get without being called a racist. Any reporter looking for people honest enough to acknowledge that they don't like Obama's skin color is going to come up with slim pickings. 

We've got plausible deniability on this issue. There are plenty of other reasons people can give for opposing this candidate. Obama is new. He is inexperienced. He is, for all his eloquence, somewhat inaccessible. But he's also black. And that's what makes his success to date the miracle that it is.

The Next Elvis

Politics is the art of pushing people around for their own good. You promote public support to back your policies and put them in place. This involves manipulating people to get what you want. It does not generally attract people with low self esteem. 

This explains why truly great politicians are few and far between. It is very difficult to reconcile awareness of and empathy for other people's problems with a drive to be the big boss of everything.

Right now people are discovering that Barack Obama is a politician, not just a motivational speaker, and it's throwing them for a loop. Liberal supporters are dismayed as Obama announces positions--support for security surveillance, backing for faith-based charities--that appeal to conservatives.

Presidential candidates in a general election classically move to the center to appeal to the broadest range of voters and that always alienates their supporters on the fringes of political opinion. These moves may clash with candidates' previously stated positions or violate their own personal convictions of right and wrong. 

Acting in emergencies, even the greatest presidents have violated basic human rights. Lincoln suspended habeus corpus in the Civil War. Roosevelt interred Japanese Americans in World War II.

In seeking and exercising power, politicians throw their weight around, and sometimes they knock people over. Elections are about deciding which candidates we feel would make the most constructive use of their ability to manipulate or even hurt people, and abuse it the least. 

Anyone running for president of the United States has got to be an egomaniac. We need to pick the egomaniac with greatest dedication to the public good.

I think Barack Obama is a once in a lifetime presidential candidate, both because of who he is and what he makes of it. The first African American nominated as a major party candidate, Obama manages his identity in a way that demonstrates wisdom, great maturity, and the greatest dedication to the common interests of all Americans.

In the 1950s, pioneer rock 'n' roll producer Sam Phillips famously proclaimed, "If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a million dollars."

He found Elvis Presley, with a resulting cultural payoff that was far more important than the millions Elvis made. As controversial and divisive as rock 'n' roll lifestyles and racial revolution have proven to be, I think they have advanced ideals of freedom and national community in ways that have made this country a much better place than it was in 1956.

Now Obama is crossing the same lines between the races that Elvis crossed, in the even bigger arena of national politics. How he, and the country, handle this larger exploration of race, identity, and community could have profound consequences for the well being of the American soul. For better or worse, Obama could be bigger than Elvis.

Political manipulation of race has in the past been one of the curses of American politics. At the start of his national career, and periodically on the campaign trail still, Obama himself has used his racial identity in a fairly dishonest way. 

Invoking the mixed heritage of his Kenyan father and his Kansan mother in his keynote address to the 2004 Democratic national convention, Obama proclaimed, "I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story, that I owe a debt to all those who came before me, and that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible."

This "only in America" stuff is manipulative, pandering hooey. In America, even in the 21st century, Obama's story is a miracle. There are people in Tennessee, my neck of the woods, who would rather see Obama dead than elected president.

Elsewhere, as in his book Dreams From My Father and in his remarkable speech on race during the controversy over the outspoken black pastor of his Chicago church, Obama has presented a more harrowing, straightforward, and constructive account of the struggles he went through to come to terms with his mixed heritage. When he speaks in these ways, Obama promotes racial understanding and healing in ways that only someone with his story could do.

When he speaks in these ways, I find it easy to forgive the ways in which he is a political animal.

If Obama is elected, black people will still be overrepresented in prison and white people will still be overrepresented in positions of power and white people will still be uncomfortable in all-black settings and black kids will still struggle to find an identity and build a future and America will still have miles to go to become a colorblind society.

If he makes it, Obama may prove incapable of delivering on all the promises, stated and unstated that his candidacy represents. If the country makes him president, it may prove incapable of living with what it has done.

This could all go horribly wrong. But right now, it is going different.