The other day my Popdose colleague Ted Asredagoo posed the question of how President-Elect Obama — once he is wrapped up in the business of actually, you know, governing — will manage to carry forward the inspirational themes that enlivened his campaign. There’s no doubt that he created an enormous movement toward renewed activism, both in governing and in citizenship – and that he did so mostly through the power of lofty speeches and iconic imagery. Ted closed his essay with an entreaty to Obama: that “as the presidential bubble forms around him and his day-to-day is taken up with the prose of meeting after meeting, as President he must take great care not to forget his poet’s heart displayed on the campaign.”
I couldn’t agree more with that analysis, but I would take it a step further: Obama must also take great care to ensure that we don’t forget his poet’s heart. Americans face tough times over the next few years, despite our newfound optimism in the wake of Obama’s election; chances are pretty good that, no matter what new policies he implements after his inauguration, our downward economic spiral will continue well into his term. Chances are excellent, meanwhile, that as Obama chooses his battles and launches his new initiatives, critics on the left will ask why he’s not doing even more, while critics on the right will simply dismiss everything he’s doing as pointless and misguided (if not Socialist and anti-American).
That’s their job. In times like these, however, Obama’s job must not be simply to sit behind his desk and make the decisions that (hopefully) will steer us out of this mess over a period of years. He must remember that he is his own best salesman, and that many millions of us supported him precisely because of his ability to inspire … to bring out the best and most hopeful in himself and in us. The rockiest moments of his campaign came at precisely those times when he was momentarily cowed by his opponents’ criticism of his lofty rhetoric and huge crowds: in early March, when Hillary Clinton decided to take Saturday Night Live seriously, and in August, when John McCain responded to Obama’s Berlin speech with the “Celebrity” ads.
The phrase “bread and circuses” traditionally has a negative connotation. Coined by the Roman poet Juvenal, it suggests that the masses will ignore their long-term needs and their highest aspirations in favor of any politician who can provide immediate gratification. Hillary’s “just words” argument and McCain’s “celebrity” dismissals attempted to convince us that “bread and circuses” were all Obama was offering in response to the challenges we face; remember all the news articles from last winter fretting about the rise of an “Obama cult”? (more…)
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…)
Last night I had a dream … of long-faded memories, and basic-cable infomercials:
Voiceover:Remember…this? John McCain: “Who is Barack Obama?”
VO:That’s right … they’re the hits you’ve come to know and love… McCain: “He believes in redistributing wealth!”
VO:Here, together, for one last time – the very best of the Republican Party, performed as only McCain-Palin can! Sarah Palin: “He’s not a man who sees America the way you and I see America.”
VO:Yes, they’re all here, all in one place, assembled just for you. You’ll get favorites like these:
(scrolling onscreen)
“That’s the extreme pro-abortion position – ‘health.’”
“We need to know the full extent of that relationship.”
“I’m very concerned that he may have anti-American views.”
“Both have friends that bombed the Pentagon…”
Palin: “…These wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America…” VO: You’ll want to act now to preserve these precious memories, because in two weeks this priceless collection of favorite GOP attacks from across the decades will be gone – and some of these hits may never come back! McCain: “His plan sounds a lot like socialism!”
VO:How much do you expect to pay for a package like this? McCain: “How about 100?” VO:Well, for two weeks only, you can have this fantastic collection on three 24-hour news channels – all for just $42.50! That’s equal to the McCain campaign’s poll numbers! McCain: “That’s not a tax cut – that’s welfare!”
(scrolling onscreen)
“…Palling around with terrorists…”
“Obama and his fellow Democrats got caught putting Hollywood above America…”
“…trying to give liberal judges the power to decide whether criminals are sent to jail or set free.”
“…legislation to teach comprehensive sex education – to kindergarteners.”
VO:So call the number on your screen now, while there’s still time! Operators are standing by… McCain: “…Maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.”
As the McCain campaign has pulled out all the nasty rhetorical stops the last couple weeks, its desperate gasps have come to sound distinctly like a death rattle for the vaunted Republican Attack Machine. Careening from one corner to another like a punch-drunk boxer, McCain-Palin has tried (so far unsuccessfully) every counterpunch in the GOP playbook – a book that dates not just to 2000, or 1988, or even 1968, but all the way back to 1948 … or maybe even 1920. (more…)
Jon Cummings: Why am I so bummed that the debate season is over? Please, Barack, take McCain up on his pleas for a dozen more town halls! I know, I know – these three presidential rumbles have been repetitive at times, excruciating at others. But you gotta admit, there’s a certain entertainment value in watching John McCain implode over the course of 90 minutes, again and again and again.
And I want to meet more archetypal Americans like Joe the Plumber … who suddenly finds himself the center of attention because he sits on the cusp of Obama’s under-$250,000 tax cut. Wow – I knew plumbers overcharge, but do they really make 250 large in a year? Cripes! Maybe Sarah Palin needs to replace “Joe Sixpack” with “Joe Chambord.” If there could only be one more debate, maybe McCain could lament the plight of “Cindy the Beer Distributor” who’s overburdened with employer-provided-health-care costs.
McCain obviously was trying to turn Joe the Plumber into an everyman, but he went to the well too many times and poor Joe morphed into a caricature. As did McCain, to a large extent. To his credit, he did get off the good line about how if Obama wanted to run against George Bush, “you should have run four years ago.” But where was that well-scripted line in the first debate, when it might have done McCain a shred of good?
It was the best shot McCain had in his arsenal, and he got it out of the way 15 minutes into the debate; after that he flailed about like Palin trying to shoot down Vladimir Putin from a helicopter (isn’t that the way that story went?). Veering wildly from topic to topic within a paragraph (or even a sentence), he reached his moment of greatest derangement when he concluded a response that was ostensibly about Colombian trade (that major driver of the American economy) by bringing up, within the space of 30 seconds, “talking without preconditions to Hugo Chavez,” raising taxes, and Herbert Hoover. (more…)
My initial idea for taking in tonight’s town hall debate was to do so with headphones and without visuals. I’ll admit, over the past month or so, the visual component has played a heavier role in how I perceived the outcomes as opposed to what was being said. Ultimately I simply watched the CBS coverage in the standard way. So let’s put aside the vision part of the television, moderator Tom Brokaw’s incessant needling over time constraints, and focus on what was said.
Unlike the dynamic found during the primaries, Barack Obama is attempting to tie what he will do with how he will do it. John McCain relies on a long strand of “just vote for me” and “I know what needs to be done”– which simply drives me insane. First, if he actually knew how to accomplish these things, as he keeps saying with such certitude, why did he wait until he was running for president? If you have a solution and you withhold it until it is politically beneficial to you, what does that say about your decision-making ability or, more precisely, your opportunistic character?
Don’t get me wrong – all politicians are opportunistic. It’s in the red blood cells of the profession. But when it comes to thinking through the haze of a crisis, or a potential crisis, (The hunt for al Qaeda for, example), and focusing everything on that specific mandate, a left turn is taken at Albuquerque to wage war on an unrelated country on the basis of past grudges, Oedipal comeuppance, unverified intelligence and basically shining that sloppy free throw into a “slam dunk.” I need someone to convince me more than just saying: “Vote for me ’cause I know what to do.” I need much, much more convincing. (more…)
This is the first time Barack Obama and John McCain have faced each other as competitors rather than Senate colleagues, and it’s clear that the chumminess of that institution cast a long shadow over the early part of the debate. Both were cordial, often agreed with one another, and had trouble defining themselves as candidates with different ideas on addressing the problems of the country.
It wasn’t until moderator Jim Lehrer pushed the two of them to articulate their differences that we saw that chumminess start to evaporate. One of the overarching themes of Friday night’s debate was about resources and how best to allocate them. Money, jobs, energy, and even troops were the resources in question, and the politics centered on how much for whom. Tax breaks for oil companies and businesses, or tax breaks for families making $250,000 or less? Which was going to do its economic magic and help the economy recover? Trickle down or bottom up?
On energy, the two candidates were pretty much on the same page, and only differed on details of how much and when. What shocks me the most is Obama’s support for nuclear energy. Why, if he’s so keen on preventing nuclear “suitcase bombs” from going off in American cities, does he not see the danger of nuclear reactors as terrorist targets? Also, almost no attention is being paid to the huge costs to taxpayers in setting up nuclear reactors, and once they are set up, how do you deal with the nuclear waste? Yucca Mountain can’t hold it all. His pragmatism on oil drilling is understandable, but it overshadows his commitment to alternative energy — which, when McCain chimes in, makes it sound like both men don’t mean it.
There are fewer members of the Washington establishment that I detest more than Richard “Dickface” Cohen. I noticed yesterday evening that he’s finally soured on his hero John McCain, but I’m willing to predict that within a few weeks he’ll have decided that McCain has somehow regained his honor, and that Obama has committed some unforgivable transgression of campaigning, and at this point Cohen will happily resume shilling for the Arizona senator. Cohen is as much of a turncoat liberal as Joe Lieberman, and soon enough he’ll return, tail between his legs, to genuflect at the altar of power.
One of the most sickening episodes during the Bush administration, one that betrayed so many members of the Washington press as nothing more than sycophantic lapdogs for the establishment power structure, was the conviction of Scooter Libby and the commutation of his sentence by President Bush. Among the litany of abuses of the basic principles of both democracy and constitutional government, this was the one example that stood out to me as an unmistakable signal that our system of representational government, as articulated in the Constitution, was in dire jeopardy.
I’ve seen a number of lists of questions that the press should theoretically be asking Sarah Palin, if they ever get a chance to query her outside of a very strictly controlled setting (such as Charles Gibson’s interview, which was surprisingly adversarial). But I’ve got one question that’s been bugging me that I’d really like to see someone ask John McCain: “Did you think it was appropriate for the President to commute the sentence of convicted perjurer Scooter Libby, and would you have done the same thing?”
The current breathless “Sarah Palin Watch” going on in the mainstream and not-so-mainstream media is one of those political phenomena where the accuracy of her claims doesn’t really matter to those outside the chattering class. That’s because it’s not so much what she says as the image she projects. But that image has to project a certain something with keywords directed to the political base and swing voters (at this point in the game, swing voters are about 21% of the electorate and they have a high opinion of both McCain/Palin and Obama/Biden).
If you had a chance to see Palin’s big debut at the Republican convention, it’s clear she can throw a punch with a red meat speech written for her. However, one thing that’s not too clear (well, not to casual political watchers) is Palin’s inside-the-Beltway political tactics regarding allegations of abuse of power as governor of Alaksa. The so-called “Troopergate” scandal (can we get away from attaching “gate” to political scandals?), and her behind-the-scenes maneuverings to gum up the investigation give us a glimpse of what a McCain administration would be like if Sarah is part of the day-to-day business of governing in the White House. However, because Republicans are masters at changing the political narrative, we’ll have to wait to see how this plays out in the future. In the meantime, it’s an out-and-out hard sell for the hearts and minds of swing voters.
The latest polling indicates that 42% of the electorate are committed to Barack Obama, and 37% are committed to John McCain, so now you see what the game is: make sure your base of support is motivated to show up on voting day, and lure as many swing voters as you can. The 5% difference in committed votes between the candidates means they have to hustle and speak to those who are on the fence. What do the fence sitters want to hear the candidates talk about? The expression “It’s the economy, stupid” is pretty much front and center. Forget “Hockey mom,” or “Executive experience” for swing voters; candidates have to convince them that they can address their concerns.
What are swing voters concerned about? Pretty much the same thing as the majority of the electorate: (more…)
In Mike Judge’s 1999 comedy Office Space, its protagonist Peter Gibbons (Ron Livingston) is described by the downsizing consultants as a “straight shooter with upper management written all over him.” It’s a gross misjudgment on the part of the consultants, as Peter’s casual demeanor charmed them much the way that George W. Bush was able to charm almost half the voters of the United States of America the following year. Peter’s boss, the endlessly imitated Bill Lumbergh (Gary Cole), is a lousy manager himself, but he’s driven by enough of a sense of self-preservation to disagree with them, explaining that Peter isn’t the caliber of person they want in upper management, and that “he’s also been having some problems with his TPS reports.”
Satire is Mike Judge’s strongest suit, and the disintegration of American society into various facets of stupidity is a topic he confronted more broadly in his following film, Idiocracy (2006). But the focus in Office Space was much sharper, where work life in general was the target, but the workplace managers came under the heaviest fire. Playing a cameo as the manager of Chotchkie’s, Mike Judge himself is willing to step in as the target of ridicule, repeatedly castigating Peter’s girlfriend Joanna (Jennifer Aniston) for her insistence on wearing the minimum number of pieces of flair. It’s meaningless minutiae such as this that are clearly a source of such exasperation for Judge; cover sheets on TPS reports and pieces of flair are not important to how a business functions, and are a waste of time for management to concern themselves with.
Jon: What were your impressions of Ted & the Kennedys? He looked pretty good, considering.
Ted: He did a very good job. Kennedy finished probably his last political speech, and it was nice to hear and see him look so vibrant.
Jon: If, as you say, this was Ted’s last political speech, it was certainly high on emotion…if utterly devoid of substance. It was as though he were running purely on motor memory…how to give a rollicking speech full of Kennedy-esque rhetoric, without actually saying something. I found it interesting to hear him speak within 24 hours of reading news reports of Margaret Thatcher’s rapidly advancing dementia. An era is ending, a generation of leaders is falling by the wayside–and I don’t (merely) mean to be snarky when I note that John McCain is only four years younger than Ted, seven years younger than Thatcher. Chris Matthews put it succinctly: “We have watched a Kennedy grow old.”
Ted: He’s a guy who represents the last of the liberals who have attracted so much ire from the Right. Kennedy’s brand of liberalism (characterized by the term “Big Government”) is one that became increasingly marginalized by both the Right and the DLC since the ’80s. To end up on the stage talking about Obama — whom he supported in the primaries — was a nice passing of the torch to a candidate who’s not a Kennedy liberal or a Clinton/DLC type.
Jon: Interesting perspective you have–though I actually think Obama is more of a Kennedy liberal than he would want to admit to the nation in general.
Ted: I don’t really see the same kind of “Big Government” stuff coming from Obama, but…
Jon: It was fascinating watching the choreography of Ted Kennedy’s appearance play out. Beforehand, Caroline Kennedy, John Kerry and others claimed they didn’t know whether Ted would speak at all, and on MSNBC Olbermann and Matthews seemed not to know either. After allowing that suspense to build, only afterward did Olbermann, without a hint of apology or irony, begin his analysis with, “They told us that speech would be four minutes long”–making clear that they knew the speech would be happening all along. I wonder if Fox made the same effort to build suspense for an audience full of Kennedy-haters; heck, I wonder if Fox showed Ted’s speech without contemporaneous heckling from Hannity. Maybe a Fox viewer can let us know… (more…)
I couldn’t agree more with that analysis, but I would take it a step further: Obama must also take great care to ensure that we don’t forget his poet’s heart. Americans face tough times over the next few years, despite our newfound optimism in the wake of Obama’s election; chances are pretty good that, no matter what new policies he implements after his inauguration, our downward economic spiral will continue well into his term. Chances are excellent, meanwhile, that as Obama chooses his battles and launches his new initiatives, critics on the left will ask why he’s not doing even more, while critics on the right will simply dismiss everything he’s doing as pointless and misguided (if not Socialist and anti-American).
VO: Yes, they’re all here, all in one place, assembled just for you. You’ll get favorites like these:
VO: How much do you expect to pay for a package like this?
And I want to meet more archetypal Americans like Joe the Plumber … who suddenly finds himself the center of attention because he sits on the cusp of Obama’s under-$250,000 tax cut. Wow – I knew plumbers overcharge, but do they really make 250 large in a year? Cripes! Maybe Sarah Palin needs to replace “Joe Sixpack” with “Joe Chambord.” If there could only be one more debate, maybe McCain could lament the plight of “Cindy the Beer Distributor” who’s overburdened with employer-provided-health-care costs.
McCain obviously was trying to turn Joe the Plumber into an everyman, but he went to the well too many times and poor Joe morphed into a caricature. As did McCain, to a large extent. To his credit, he did get off the good line about how if Obama wanted to run against George Bush, “you should have run four years ago.” But where was that well-scripted line in the first debate, when it might have done McCain a shred of good?
There are fewer members of the Washington establishment that I detest more than Richard “Dickface” Cohen. I noticed yesterday evening that he’s finally 
The current breathless “Sarah Palin Watch” going on in the mainstream and not-so-mainstream media is one of those political phenomena where the accuracy of her claims doesn’t really matter to those outside the chattering class. That’s because it’s not so much what she says as the image she projects. But that image has to project a certain something with keywords directed to the political base and swing voters (at this point in the game, swing voters are about 21% of the electorate and they have a high opinion of both McCain/Palin and Obama/Biden).
In Mike Judge’s 1999 comedy Office Space, its protagonist Peter Gibbons (Ron Livingston) is described by the downsizing consultants as a “straight shooter with upper management written all over him.” It’s a gross misjudgment on the part of the consultants, as Peter’s casual demeanor charmed them much the way that George W. Bush was able to charm almost half the voters of the United States of America the following year. Peter’s boss, the endlessly imitated Bill Lumbergh (Gary Cole), is a lousy manager himself, but he’s driven by enough of a sense of self-preservation to disagree with them, explaining that Peter isn’t the caliber of person they want in upper management, and that “he’s also been having some problems with his TPS reports.”
Jon: What were your impressions of Ted & the Kennedys? He looked pretty good, considering.