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.

Cheney Accepts the Nobel Prize for Natural Selection (But Obama Should Have Won It)

Two of the most powerful Americans in recent history just delivered pronouncements on war and peace that not only addressed the topic at hand, but revealed a lot about their outlooks on life, religion, and survival of the fittest.

Dick Cheney and Barack Obama are popularly portrayed by the liberals as embodying the choice between fear and hope, and by conservatives as embodying the choice between strength and weakness.

Personally, I think the conservative juxtaposition is a lot more skewed than the liberal, but both oversimplify the differences between the two men’s positions. If you can read Obama’s acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize as simply his latest elaboration on the theme of “Yes, we can,” then I suspect you haven’t yet come down from the high of November 2008.

If you read Cheney’s latest blasting of Obama’s response to Muslim extremism as nothing but the crazed, discredited bleatings of a foreign-policy dinosaur, I think you underestimate the degree to which his viewpoint can be supported by rational calculation.

Sure, Cheney is a wacko coot, but the method behind his madness was summed up in the 17^th century by the rationalist French philosopher Blaise Pascal. “Pascal’s wager,” as it’s called, famously decreed that given that we can’t be sure about the existence of God, the rational bet is to believe. If He doesn’t exist and we believe, then we’ve just wasted a lifetime of boring Sunday mornings in church; if He does exist and we bet he doesn’t, we burn for eternity in hell.

Cheney believes in the hell to pay at the hands of terrorists not taken seriously. If, in the process of avoiding that hell, we end up torturing a few innocent people or attacking countries that don’t harbor terrorists after all, then so be it. Better to be paranoid with blood on our hands than to be toast.

Cheney stands foursquare with our ancestor cavemen who judged that unexplained rustling in the bushes at midnight to be a wolf, rather than the ones who dismissed it as the wind. In those instances in which it really was a wolf, the paranoid cavemen survived to pass on their genes to millions of God-fearing, wolf-fearing, gay-fearing, French-fearing red-state voters.

Obama’s rather chilly defense of war in his acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize was hardly the testament to wishful thinking that Cheney sees in the administration’s foreign policy, but it was genuinely hopeful in its insistence that mankind possesses the rationality required to figure out the difference between the wind in the bushes and the wolves, and devise rational, practical responses to the wolves.

Obama said in that speech, “I face the world as it is, and I cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism—it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of men and the limits of reason . . . So yes, the instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace. And yet this truth must coexist with another—that no matter how justified, war promises human tragedy.”

Given the coexistence of these truths, Obama laid out “practical steps”—fostering agreements among nations, supporting human rights, promoting international economic development—he said could lead to an “evolution” of human institutions toward peace. He borrowed the idea and the word from John F. Kennedy, but, as he used it, it could have come directly from the mouth of Darwin.

The idea was that rational, step-by-step improvements in the exercise of international relations could be successful, and by succeeding could be replicated, replacing the paranoid lashing out at every stirring in the bushes that Cheney champions and that failed so miserably in the Awful Aughties.

Because, despite the urge toward global paranoia that persists in the American populace, it really did fail us badly under Bush and Cheney. People around the world came to hate Americans. We were behaving like the Germans in World War II, killing indiscriminately in the hopes of shocking and awing our enemies into submission. It didn’t work. It bred disgust among our friends and increased resistance among our enemies. It lost Republicans the last election.

Obama doesn’t say we have no enemies. He doesn’t tell us to surrender to them. He advocates the use of force against them. But he suggests that it is possible not only to do so in a measured, controlled, discriminating way, but to simultaneously work effectively to promote peaceful solutions to conflict and problems that can eventually become part of an evolution toward peace.

And in doing so, he advocates the replacement of fear with hope.

Talk Nice to the Conservatives

Some of my best friends aren’t necessarily Republicans, but I’ve recently had opportunities to discuss public policy with conservative acquaintances and family members. Because of the pre-existing relationships with these people, both sides make Obamian attempts to find common ground and not let discussion degenerate into in-your-face scream fests.

In one case we were talking about climate change, in the other health care policy, and in both instances I found these people espousing views so far to the left of Dick Cheney and Sarah Palin as to be immediately suspect.

Climate change has made formerly safe conversational gambits such as “Hot enough for you?” potentially dangerous. Having slipped into this area accidentally with my friend Dean, I decided to plough straight ahead, and told him I guessed he was perfectly at home with the heat.

“You know, don’t you, that I’m a long-time proponent of a carbon tax,” he replied.

“Me, too,” I said, “except it’s too straightforward to ever be passed into law.”

“Exactly,” he pounced, delighted to have coaxed me onto common ground, and proceeded into a 15-minute diatribe against cap-and-trade. I listened patiently. The longer he went on about it, the more I began to suspect that he wasn’t so much in favor of taking the most direct action against global warming, as he was against doing the one thing that had the best chance of actually happening.

Miami will be under water before any American Congress passes an anti-carbon initiative with the word “tax” in its name. It struck me that Dean is in favor of a carbon tax like he’s a stalwart proponent of rocket service to Jupiter—if it smooths the conversational waters, why the hell not be in favor of it?

Similarly, at another friend’s house liberal pundits came on the TV talking about how the health care bill was a giveaway to the insurance companies and Congress should junk the whole thing and start over. My host, a veteran of the ballot-counting brigades that descended on Florida in 2000 to save America from a Gore presidency, declared that the pundits on the tube were exactly right, and that what the country needed was a European-style single payer system.

“Right,” I said to myself, but not out loud, “and that’s the reason you’ve been voting Republican for 20 elections, to make sure we enjoy the benefits of a government-run health care system as soon as possible.”

Both of the talking heads on TV agreed that Obama had wimped out on health care, and while one guy said we should just go back to the drawing board (“If the Democrats lose control of Congress for six or 20 years, maybe they’ll learn not to kowtow to special interests next time they’re in power”), the other wasn’t so blithe about the political effects of failure this time around, and said the Democrats should hold their noses and pass the bill, public option or not.

“That’s what I think,” I told my in-law. He didn’t reply, and I didn’t keep going, though I had to bite my tongue to hold back. The Republican Party right now is in the hands of people who believe Obama is a foreigner trying to euthanize their grandmothers, and they’re handing away House seats that have been safe for Republicans forever (namely the one in upstate New York) if their nominee doesn’t happen to be as unhinged as they would like him to be.

Democrats should leave this kind of self-destructive behavior to the Republicans. The health care fight is about health care, and that matters, but it’s also about who runs the government and—given what a disaster a return to Republican government would be—that really matters. I’m glad my friends on the right claim to care about a safe and sound environment and the right to health care, and I’m happy to talk nice right back at them. But in the privacy of the voting booth, saving my own sweet ass continues to come first with me.

Peace Prize

The Peace Prize established by Alfred Nobel (who also invented dynamite) will be picked up this week by Barack Obama (who is also running two wars in the Near East). Altogether a thing that makes you go “Hmmm” about guys who make things go “Booom!”

Want Change in Afghanistan? Wait 18 Months

When it comes to Afghanistan, President Obama delivers on his promises. In the 2008 campaign, he vowed to undo what he considered the Bush administration’s neglect of the Afghan war and take the fight to the Taliban, calling it “a war we have to win.”

In February of this year he sent 17,000 additional American troops to Afghanistan. This month he upped the ante again, committing another 30,000 troops to the conflict, which will bring the total number of troops in Afghanistan to more than 100,000.

Newspaper accounts indicate he believes the surge of troops in Iraq begun in 2006 by the Bush administration worked, and he wants to apply the same strategy in Iraq.

Many people who believe, as I do, that this country has essentially become addicted to war—if not against the Russians then against the Vietnamese, if not against the Vietnamese then against the Iraqis, if not against the Iraqis then against the Iranians, if not against the Iranians then against the Afghans—are despondent at this turn of events.

As Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank and others pointed out this week, a lot of liberals bet the emotional farm on Obama and, regardless of his consistency of opinion and action on Afghanistan, feel betrayed and angry at his failure to pull out now.

Me, I’m taking the longer view, if for no other reason than that politically there’s no other option available. The country is effectively split down the middle on Afghanistan, and because of the weight of opinion, history, and money backing war in this country, the tie goes to the warmakers.

This country doesn’t pull out of wars easily. Put the troops in action overseas, and any movement to bring them home becomes a failure to support the troops, with heavy suggestions of weakness and even treason. We’re a country born of war, with a long history of fighting and winning wars, and have been since World War II the number one military power in the world.

Perhaps more importantly, military contractors, the industries that build the weapons systems used by our armies, have learned how to make sure the maximum number of jobs are dependent on continued military appropriations. When these companies learn how to parcel work on particular weapons systems out to a variety of key congressional districts spread across the country, ensuring the widest political backing for the programs possible, then you have weapons makers running the government. Once you’ve built the biggest war machine on earth, it’s hard not to use it.

So why is there any hope at all, long-term or short-term, for a change in Afghan policy?

Even if Obama is deluded now in relying on a surge in Afghanistan, the fact remains that his latest moves do represent change from the positions and policies he laid out in the past. In March of this year Obama backed outright defeat of the Taliban and creation of a stable democratic government in Kabul.

Obama is now telling journalists that he regrets that decision because it led his commanders to view the mission more “expansively” than he intended. Now he says all he is after is ensuring enough stability to keep pressure on Al Qaeda.

Where before he signaled a readiness to do what it took to build a democratic Afghan central government, now he’s talking about giving up on the corrupt Kabul government altogether if necessary and dealing mainly with more reliable local governments.

Where before he seemed ready to stay in Afghanistan as long as needed to beat the Taliban and set up democracy, now he is pushing his commanders to surge up as fast as possible in order to be able to get out as fast as possible.

It took George W. Bush six years to decide that Rumsfeld’s war on the cheap in Iraq was a failure and adopt the surge there, and even then it seemed as if he preferred to pretend that there was no change in policy. To admit there was a change would have meant that there was something wrong with what he’d been doing in the first place. Being George W. Bush, as we know, means never wanting to say you’re sorry.

If you choose to argue that Obama isn’t changing enough, OK. If you think Obama is trying to have it both ways at once, simultaneously advocating advance and retreat, fine. But you can’t say the guy has barricaded himself in the Alamo here. Next to Bush he looks as bendable as a reed, slippery as an eel, similes critics on the right have been using since he was inaugurated.

This guy will change if he sees a reason to do so. Whether we surge for 18 months or not, I believe Afghanistan is going to look pretty much as hopeless then as it looks right now. I believe it will be apparent at that point to everybody but the nutcase right that something’s got to give.

Precedent indicates that this guy is willing and able to recognize when change needs to happen and do it. I’m not relying on Obama to do the right thing now. But I’m not willing to bet against him doing the right thing in 18 months.

Red State Rag

My state, Tennessee, has the fourth most regressive tax structure in America. That's the report of the 2009 edition of Who Pays, the annual analysis by the Washington-based Institute on Taxation and Ecomonic Policy of the distribution of state and local taxes across income groups in different states.

The poorest 20 percent of people in Tennessee, those families making less than $17,000 a year, paid 11.7 percent of their income to state and local taxes, compared to 3.1 percent of income paid by the richest 1 percent of families in the state—families making $414,000 or more a year. This means that the share paid by people making less than $17,000 was nearly four times greater that that paid by people making more than $414,000. In Tennessee the middle 60 percent of the population paid 7.6 percent of income in state and local taxes, more than twice the rate paid by the richest of the Tennessee rich.

As you may have guessed from these numbers, there is no income tax, progressive or otherwise, in Tennessee. Sales taxes make up most, about 70 percent, of total revenues. The state sales tax on food is 5.5 percent; obviously, such necessities are going to take a much bigger bite out of a $17,000 household budget than a $414,000 one.

Clearly this is obscene.

The fair thing to do would be to lower the sales tax, drop the tax on food, and add a progressive state income tax. During the 25 years I’ve lived here, there has been an almost continuous argument over doing just that. Generally the argument doesn’t get too far beyond the word TAX. At that point we are immediately get in tea party territory—we’re angry, we’re not going to take it anymore, don’t tread on me with your big government European socialism—and the discussion is over.

Of course, what this tea party amounts to is 80 percent of the population shoveling their early retirement and their kids’ college education and the vacation in Florida and their daily bread into the harbor, while a tiny group of people making more $414,000 stand on the dock and laugh at them.

If it were just the bottom 20 percent of the population getting screwed here, it would be easier to understand. As we’ve seen in the health care debate, compassion is not a significant political motivator. Nobody above the poverty level, middle class or rich, really cares about the people on the bottom who get shafted the most. We don’t care if they die with no health coverage, we don’t care if they pay taxes that could be going to food and rent. They are the unwashed “them” and they don’t vote and they don’t count.

More interesting is the 60 percent in the middle who are essentially shafting themselves. I live next door to people who get up every morning and start thinking of new ways to shoot themselves in the foot. More often than not these schemes involve shooting me in my feet as well. This is why I’m interested in how these people think.

But I would suggest that what goes on in these people’s brains should be just as important to those who don’t live next door to them. The past year has amply demonstrated that even when the red states lose an election, they can still call the tune for everybody in the country. The majority does not make policy; who makes policy is the guy who casts vote number 60 to cut off debate in the Senate. He can shoot you in the foot, whether you live in Knoxville or Boston or San Francisco.

So, yes, to protect yourself, you first build a majority on your side, and then you build a supermajority.

When was the last durable supermajority? Around 1936.

What do we do while we wait for 1936 to come around again? We make compromises. We sit down with our neighbors and try to talk them down from their ingrained hysteria. We listen to what they have to say. We make the best deal possible, we keep plugging, we do pretty much what Obama is doing right now.

The New Yippies

“The Democrats and their international leftist allies want America made subservient to the agenda of global redistribution and control. And truly patriotic Americans like you and our Republican Party are the only thing standing in their way.”

Jesus, who wrote this stuff? It’s from a fundraising letter attributed to Michael S. Steele, chairman of the Republican National Committee, and sent out with his signature immediately following the announcement that Barack Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize, but I’ve heard Steele interviewed and am certain he’s incapable of producing language this maniacally grandiose and paranoid.

Pronouncements like this come out of the mouths of melodramatic strongmen haranguing the crowd from a balcony in a banana republic; Steele in the interview I heard sounded more like a petty bureaucrat.

I haven’t heard material like this since I my kids and I used to watch Pinky and the Brain, the latter a cartoon mouse with an enormous cranium and a dream of taking over the world. The style is not quite Joe McCarthy; the tail-gunner from Wisconsin had a more working-class, thuggish feel to his rants. Nixon was as paranoid in his style, but more personal; he wasn’t as obsessed with the international plot for global control as he was with the international plot to get Dick Nixon.

No, I think whoever wrote this was channeling Terry Southern, the genius who co-wrote Dr. Strangelove. This is Colonel Jack D. Ripper, barricaded in his office, clutching his machine gun, chomping on his cigar and laying out with utter conviction the Communist conspiracy to drain our precious bodily fluids. What the hell is “global redistribution and control” anyway? What do the international leftists want to redistribute and control? Our wealth? Our minds? Our guns? Our semen?

All of the above, or none of the above, it doesn’t matter. What matters is the feeling, the fear, the anger. We want people to give money to stop the fear. This material is florid, desperate, and interesting, I suppose, because it’s so emotional.

So was Jonestown. I don’t know about you, but this new, cultish Republican Party makes me nervous. These intense lunatics are certainly more fun to watch than Eisenhower or John Foster Dulles, but I really was more comfortable with the Republicans when they resembled the board of directors of a bank more than they did the Yippies.

Pre-Postmortem

Just when did the Obama administration end? Was it was when he lost Saturday Night Live? When Chicago lost the Olympics? When people forgot his dog’s name? When John Boehner emerged from the President’s meeting with Republican senators on Afghanistan this week and said nice things about him?

It’s hard to be president, particularly of a country with the attention span of a may fly. Having elected this guy to clean up an enormous mess, we promptly forgot the enormous mess, until, apparently, we noticed it again several days ago—Look! There’s a recession! Hey! There’s two wars going on! Yikes! Crazy people hate health care reform! Wow! Republicans don’t like Democrats!

Who’s in charge here, anyway?

Barack Obama.

Is this the same Barack Obama who discovered insulin, designed the Chrysler Building, fathered three United States Senators, swam the English Channel? This guy looked pretty good last November, and here we are, 11 months later, and still in deep doo-doo.

As meaningful health care reform looks more doable day by day, the stock market rises, the recession bottoms out, it’s hard to look past Jon Stewart and SNL. Yes, Afghanistan could be a nightmare and the banks are still underregulated and global warming is probably a long-term disaster and no one will do anything about energy conservation in the near future. The ointment is teeming with flies.

But that’s how we came to pick this boy wonder in the first place. Things were so fouled up that, hey, how could he do any worse than the people we’d already tried?

Not exactly a high benchmark for success, but good enough for America, I think. Maybe Obama is struggling, but I say don’t shoot him yet.

Anger Management for the Socialist Slayers

How angry are you? Are you mad as hell? Are you mad as hell and you're not going to take it anymore? Are you locked, loaded, and determined to stop socialism dead in its tracks?

Right-wing populist rage is in the news. Shout-downs of supporters of health care reform have been heard from local town halls to the halls of Congress, together with the more restrained commentaries of conservative pundits and congressmen expressing weak disapproval of the public outbursts, but insisting that the anger is real, justified, and politically potent.

Watching all this, you can't help being reminded of earlier "days of rage" in the late 1960s, another watershed period in our political history. Then the anger came from the left instead of right, from radical opponents of the Vietnam War.

In October 1969, protesters organized by the Weathermen and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) fought the police in the streets of Chicago. This was more serious and violent stuff than what we've seen this summer and fall from the right. But the depth of feeling is similar and the gun-toting patriots who have shown up at anti-Obama rallies have not been subtle about what use they would like to make of their right to bear arms. The Oklahoma City bombing in the '90s, as well as the violent attempts to suppress the civil right movement earlier, demonstrated that anger from the right can bear fruit just as crazy and deadly as anger from the left.

The apologists for the current ugliness cite the million of "murdered babies" lost to abortion and more the tenuous threats posed by Obama's "government power grab." The point they end up making is remarkably similar to that made 40 years ago by apologists for radical, anti-war violence: "We agree with their goals but not their tactics."

I don't know if that's a valid moral stance in either case, but I do know that politically it is very difficult to draw a line between goals and tactics. What matters politically in these arguments between left and right is the people in the middle, the 40 percent or so of the electorate who define themselves as independents, and who decide elections.

Confronted by extreme tactics by either the left or the right, the people in the middle tend to forget the goals that seem so moral to those who feel driven to do anything to achieve them. If you act crazy, the people in the middle think you are crazy, you and your goals both, and they want nothing to do with you.

That's why Martin Luther King's nonviolence ultimately trumped George Wallace's ugly defiance in civil rights. That's why the "revolution" of the '60s radicals resulted in 40 years of dominance by the right.

Obama is right about one thing, this really is a watershed moment in American politics. What happens in the next couple of years could tell us who will be running things for the next couple of decades.

Whatever happens to health care reform, and however genuinely outraged the right may be, it needs to take some courses in anger management. The conservatives might take as an exemplar their Great Hero, and how he came to power.

After all, the defining moment of the 1980 presidential debate and of that whole election, when Carter said Reagan was going to wreck Social Security and Medicare, was not an image of Reagan turning purple and shouting, "You lie!"

It was Reagan's simple, politically masterful grin and shrug, and the genial, "There you go again."

Jane Austen, the Dalai Lama, and Harry Cohn's Ass

I picked up a book of interviews with Dalai Lama at the bookstore the other night, and he was talking about the nature of compassion in an interesting way. It was a discussion of the difference between how we experience our own suffering and the way, in a state of compassion, that we experience someone else's—what the odds were that we can experience someone else's suffering at all, and to what extent.

I was struck by his idea of compassion being more essentially a state of profound awareness, of deep noticing, than an outward action. Compassion as he described it came before any action we might take, like tut-tutting over another person's problem, or telling them they're a Christian martyr, or even doing something to actually help them out of their trouble.

Not surprisingly, the Dalai Lama was more concerned with compassion as a way of existing than with the actions resulting from that state—the implication being that if you're able to reach the true state the actions will follow of their own accord.

So I realize more and more that my ability to act in any constructive way depends on my ability to get my feelers out, to turn my radio on, to notice what's really going on within me and without me.

There's a great Hollywood story about Harry Cohn, the monstrous head of Columbia Pictures. Herman Mankiewicz, the guy who wrote Citizen Kane, says that when he was a writer at Columbia he was talking to Harry Cohn one day about a story idea, and Cohn told him he could tell if a story would be a hit or not by whether it made his fanny squirm, to which Mankiewicz replied, "Imagine, the whole universe wired to Harry Cohn's ass!"

Cohn fired him, but the point of the story (in our context, at least), is that the Dalai Lama would be more likely to share Mankiewicz' perspective than Cohn's. Harry Cohn was a notorious egoist and bully and while he may have imagined that his fanny was in tune with the cosmos, what he really meant was that when it came to the dominant vibe, Harry Cohn's ass was sending and the cosmos was receiving, if it knew what was good for it.

My feeling is that a lot of people, when they try to judge what's going on around them, confuse sending and receiving just like Cohn. I grew up an enormously self-conscious young man and, as far as my perception of my influence on the world around me was concerned, very much in the same place as Harry Cohn.

It wasn't out of a bullying stance, but out of quivering meekness, that I imagined that my every action and even attitudes and thoughts were making the stars whirl through the ether. I thought my mistaken deeds and attitudes were controlling how people acted towards me, and only if I corrected these false transmissions from my error-ridden insides would I be able to get people to like me.

Self-consciousness at this level is not consciousness at all, of course, but an enormous delusion. By assuming such blanket responsibility for other people's actions and reactions, and by casting it is such a negative light, you miss the few things that really are connected to what you're putting out, like people liking you because you're a good person.

How do people get out this hole? How do you reset your receiver to pull in the True Cosmic Consciousness or NPR or the Mr. Rogers or any transmitter of bonafide sanity?

I don't know. Meditate, see a counselor, collect hard knocks in the school of experience, maybe immerse yourself in Jane Austen novels. Austen talks about these problems all the time. Every book is about people misreading social interactions, misjudging the opposite sex, and groping towards some halfway accurate state of awareness. The "good" guys turn out to be actually bad, the "bad" guys turn out to be actually good, and eventually the characters sort it all out and get married.

Austen died unmarried herself, so she surely understood the long odds of bumbling your way to consciousness. But so fetching is her dry, deadly realistic sense of humor, so clearly was she in tune with what's really going on herself, that we buy her happy endings. The essentially realistic part of the books is her characters' ability to make their way to awareness. That happens in real life, whether you end up married or not.

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 Revenge of the Nerds

It never surprised me to learn that Karl Rove was a high school debater. As a former debater myself, I am very familiar with the syndrome. These were the guys who, like Rove, walked into debate rounds with briefcases full of blank evidence cards, just to intimidate the opposition.

These were the guys who, in the first round of their first tournaments, peed in their pants from self-conscious stage fright and who, by about their fourth tournament, had developed into full-blown humiliation monsters ("I don't pee in my pants, I make the other guy pee in his!") They became masters at making their opponents look like brainless, mumbling, incompetent fools, and won a lot of debate tournaments doing so.

These were the acne-faced, pudgy, bespectacled, sexually frustrated, super smart, sophomoric nerds who became acne-faced, pudgy, bespectacled, sexually frustrated, super smart, senior presidential advisory nerds (doing the bidding of the nasty little bullies who, like George Bush, spent their childhoods blowing up frogs with cherry bombs).

I have come to believe that the entire Republican Party has transformed itself into the refuge of socially and psychologically crippled geeks and bullies who are too maladjusted to function anywhere but in a club of equally dysfunctional geeks and bullies.

Consider David Addington, for example. Chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, Addington is often referred to as "Cheney's Cheney." New Yorker writer Jane Mayer has reported in the magazine that Addington was centrally involved in formulating the Bush adminstration's policies on treatment of detainees that resulted in U.S. forces engaging in torture on a systematic basis.

Mayer reported that Leonard Napolitano, a close friend of Addington in high school, described himself and Addington as "nerds."

"Addington stood out for wearing black socks with shorts. He and his friends were not particularly athletic, and they liked to play poker all night on weekends, stopping early in the morning for breakfast. Their circle included some girls, until the boys found them 'too distracting to our interest in cards,' Napolitano recalled."

Irwin Hoffman, Addington's history teacher, told Mayer that Addington "had a very strong sarcastic streak. He was scornful of anyone who said anything that was naïve, or less than bright. His sneers were almost palpable."

Sound a bit like Karl Rove? Consider Rove's recent attempt to label Barack Obama: "He's the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone who passes by."

The projection is obvious ("makes snide comments about everyone") but the resentment and envy of a nerd who never had a "beautiful date" is even more striking.

Year after year, election after election, Republican administration after administration, the whole country has had to pay because social cripples like Rove and Addington were never able to get over high school. They take out their revenge on all of us.

The democratic process is repeatedly subjected to versions of the overstuffed debate briefcase trick. It's one sophomoric dirty trick after another. Democrats get Willie Hortoned, and Frenchified, and Swift Boated year after year by psychologically twisted gnomes who consider elections nothing more than primitive machines easily manipulated to win power.

The democratic process is jiggered to protect rich people's money and, more importantly it seems, fulfill the nerds' own need to show the suave, sophisticated, sexually satisfied high school Caesars who didn't even know the debate team existed how powerful a nerd can really be.

This is why I am sitting through these guys sniggering at Barack Obama for being successful (meaning "uppity") and lying about his energy policy to make him look incompetent (the nifty tire gauge gambit—as if Obama wouldn't easily be able to prove they are lying and make a pretty effective joke of it) and sticking him in an ad with beautiful white blondes Paris Hilton and Britney Spears (the miscegenation visual—a harder bullet for even some one as smooth as Obama to duck).

This is why I have to sit through these guys trying to use this bullshit to hold back the flood of reality that is driving this election—the real gas prices, and the real food inflation, and the real housing collapse, and the real global warming, and the real wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the real strategic collapse of U.S. foreign policy—and that John McCain is having a hard time trying to put out of people's minds.

McCain has got a couple of percentage points out of this baloney, and it certainly is his best hope for winning, and he and the geeks could actually pull the whole thing out of the hat one more time.

But if the geeks get their man in again they will have to govern in a reality growing so much more insistently real that no amount of sophomoric bullshit will ever cover it up.

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.