Doesn’t it seem like just a decade since the protagonists of our current national melodrama began taking the stage? John McCain announced his candidacy on David Letterman – only to discover that what Dave giveth, Dave can definitely take away. Hillary Clinton thought she’d prove herself futuristic by announcing from her sofa, via an Internet video message; little did she know how the Internet would eventually help overwhelm her once-inevitable rise. Only Barack Obama chose to do things the old-fashioned way, with a grand speech from a statehouse lawn; it was the first of many occasions when Obama, alone among his rivals, recognized that momentous times call for Big Gestures.

And so here we are, five days before the election and less than 24 hours after the last flurry of those gestures. Thirty-five thousand Floridians gathered at midnight for the Kiss-Up in Kissimmee, watching Bill Clinton — in a manic attempt to restore the bona fides he sullied during his wife’s misbegotten run – make his best full-throated argument for Obama. (I say “full-throated” because Clinton seems to have calculated that if he spoke unbelievably loudly – and in a mad dash of words – we wouldn’t notice that he could have been talking about any Democratic candidate, not just the one perched on a stool next to him.) Obama even managed the video-era feat of being two places at the same time, sitting down with Jon Stewart on The Daily Show even as he and Bubba were simultaneously bounding (if not bonding) on stage outside Orlando.

And then there was the small matter of the 30-minute infomercial with which the Obama campaign commandeered seven broadcast networks and cable channels last evening. In case you haven’t seen it, and have a half hour to kill, here it is:

Whatever else last night’s Obamapalooza accomplished, it achieved the same thing his announcement speech in January 2007 did: It made his opponent’s efforts appear small and petty by comparison. McCain spent the day, as he spends every day, on the attack, playing to the narrow-mindedness and bloodlust of his rally crowds rather than to the concerns and hopes of those couple million voters who may not have made up their minds, yet don’t view the world through a conservative ideological prism. Having turned his back on “honor” and “integrity” and all that crap that had never really worked for him anyway (see South Carolina, 2000), McCain and his Bush-leftover advisors now aim to replicate W.’s 50-plus-one strategy by getting ugly and staying ugly right through Tuesday. (more…)