Category Archives: Obama

Prince of stakes

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I just got back from a weekend of canvassing in Northeast Philadelphia and was happy to find myself a little more welcome this time. During the primaries in April I was ringing some of those same bells and meeting a lot of resistance from Hillary supporters, and she ended up surfing on their love like a rock star stage diving into a most pit: She beat us there soundly, taking nearly 75% of the Democratic vote. 

A lot of those folks told me they had reservations about Obama then, but that they would support him in the general election, and lo: Obama-Biden signs festooned many of the lawns in those neighborhoods, which range socio-economically from solidly middle class to just barely making it. (There were plenty of McCain signs, too, sometimes on the same lawns, and knocking on some of those doors — the doorbells were often broken — I found a house divided, family members split between our man and JMC.)

The tactic this time was to ask targeted voters which issues were foremost for them as the election approached, and not surprisingly the economy was number one. Layoffs and unemployment were a common theme, and the anger they engendered was largely directed at the party in power. In some cases that anger seems to have morphed into anomie: I smelled pot at a few homes, middle-aged guys baking in front of the TV set in the middle of the afternoon, pulling the hole in behind them as they sank. 

The stakes are high in Philly: the staffer running our district informed the volunteers (nearly all carpetbaggers from Brooklyn) that Kerry had carried Philadelphia by 80% in the last election — and they estimated Obama would need closer to 85% of the vote to carry the state. That’s a lot of angry white guys voting for a cool black dude, something unimaginable in previous years. 

But this isn’t previous years. For a lot of these folks, the ship is already sinking and they were ready to try something new. As one of the more visible Democratic signs said simply, “Had Enough?” Even those who saw McCain as separate from his party had to admit he was fronting the same team that had stood by as the walls collapsed and the building burned, and they are ready to change the pitcher, if not the whole team. 

Saturday night, after hitting about a hundred households, I ate an early dinner at a Northeast cheese steak joint called Steve’s Prince of Steaks. The choices are pretty simple — with or without onions? American cheese or Whiz? — and though most of the crowd there did not smile at the sight of my Obama button, they didn’t tell me to go to hell, either. This is also a simple choice. 

Contents under pressure

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Less than 24 hours have passed and the last of the presidential debates has been chewed up and spit out. The consensus seems to be that McCain did better, but mostly because his performance in the first two meetings was so uninspiring, he set his own bar pretty low. I think when people now say that McCain did well in a debate it can be translated as: “His head did not explode.” 

Because any driver watching the proceedings on a split screen was treated to a familiar face: that of road rage. He looked like the guy who pulls up beside you, doing 70, and stays even with your car long enough to flip you the bird. Maybe even point to the side of the road to indicate that if you don’t like it, he’d be happy to settle it like men. 

Yeah, he made his base happy, for what that’s worth. He stewed and steamed and talked about Bill Ayers and ACORN destroying the very fiber of our society. He picked up any thing he could find and hurled it at Obama who looked, for the most part, unperturbed. And like it or not, unperturbed seems to be what people want now. 

In a blog post entitled “Barack O’Reagan,” Carl Cannon compared that sangfroid to that of RWR and he brings a special insight to the table. His father wrote the book on Reagan (a couple of them actually) and he remembers the 1980 campaign, when the Dems tried to make the former California governor look unstable. “In the end, the nasty approach didn’t work because Reagan had a calming presence and an optimistic outlook at a time when Americans weren’t feeling too good about themselves,” Cannon wrote. Today, “A majority of voters want to like Obama, and therefore all he has to do is seem solid and reassuring. This comes naturally to him, just as it did to Reagan.” 

Reagan’s imperturbability drove us nuts back then: When a woman in Berkeley yelled, before he sent the National Guard in during the People’s Park demonstrations, “The blood of the people of California is on your hands!” he replied, “I’ll just wash them with Boraxo.” Of course it was funnier before a demonstrator was killed but you did have to hand it to him: the cat was slick.

Obama looks like one of the Rat Pack next to McCain, who seems to be channeling, in these last weeks, Peter Finch’s unhinged newscaster in Network. He leads the nation in yelling,  “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” and millions tune into watch him rant, collapsing at the end of each show like a fainting goat. Then people got bored and watched something else.

Death of the cool

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Maybe we can only see the real signs of the apocalypse after the fact. While most of us accepted Paul Newman’s passing with the usual homilies (he lived a good long life, after all) it seems now that his death may have heralded the end of the world as we know it. What’s happened since September 27? Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman Bros, Goldman, AIG, and oops here come the four horsemen…

For Newman was nothing if not cool. I remember going to see Cool Hand Luke with my mother and little brother and sister when I was probably 13. Leaving the theater in Sacramento I felt so transformed, so drawn to that vision of a swinging ne’er-do-well that I lurked in the shadows beside my mother’s car, pretending I was ten years older than I was until my little sister blew the mood by yelling, “Hey, look it’s Cool Hand Luke!”

Newman was cool before then, of course, but most remarkably he remained that way to the end. Not just because of the low-key roles he chose (or had scripted for him) but for the way he lived his life: quietly, with the woman he loved, giving all the money from his food business to charity, putting his money where his mouth was in politics too — he was a mensch. He didn’t go all squirrelly in the face of death like Steve McQueen (who tried to fight his cancer with coffee enemas and prayer) or Brando (who we loved for his eccentricities but you can’t really say anyone who puts on two hundred pounds is cool). In fact he barely got around to mentioning it…

Now the world is flipping. Internationally brokers seem to be driving off the cliff together as in some insane game of chicken. Roman candles like James Cramer are telling everyone to sell everything. Things have gotten so bad at McCain-Palin rallies that JMC actually had to tell his supporters that Obama is an honorable man and not to be feared — and was booed for his troubles. Where, my friends, is the cool?

Well, if you watched the last presidential debate you saw it. Obama may be untried, he made be playing his cards too close to his vest for some and not getting riled up enough for others. But what I see is someone who is trying to run out the clock, sure, but who is also sending a signal as the stars fall from the sky that this is how you deal with crises: Stay cool. He’s like one of those great quarterbacks (Joe Montana?) who could pick his man out in a maelstrom and hit from all the way downfield. 

Hey, let’s give him the ball!

Do Not Forward

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Remember chain mail, the idiotic phenomenon of your youth in which otherwise reasonable people would forward a letter to you that you were supposed to forward to a dozen people, and doing so guaranteed you wealth and well-being, while those who broke the chain ended up in the hospital? The whole thing got much easier with the internet, of course; you didn’t need stamps and a list of people you were prepared to alienate. Just hit forward and spread urban legends and unfunny sight gags without leaving your desktop. 

What was an internet craze has become a political cancer; have you seen those pictures of the anti-Palin rally in Alaska? Wait five seconds, the photos with all those darned funny homemade signs will be clogging up your inbox, too. Or how about that PBS online poll that you can take over and over — and forward to your friends! — to show the world how unqualified you think Palin is to be vice-president. You’ve got to believe that McCain is going to be swayed by whatever the viewers of PBS think. 

Far viler is the racist material being forwarded about Obama. I had heard about the Muslim missives but a reader of this space actually sent me an example, from a church in San Diego. It spreads the usual lies — that he is a Muslim, that he was sworn into office using the Koran etc. — but insists you send it to others. “Wake Up America!”

Is our chain mail better than theirs? I didn’t see the ones spreading rumors about Palin’s alleged affair, or the viral video of her getting blessed by some African witch-hunt priest and thank God! After seeing her second appearance on Katie Couric, do you really think we need rumors and distortions to derail this campaign? Didn’t someone tell the GOP campaign to never make yourself look more ridiculous than the late night comics do? Didn’t they get that email?

Action painting

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After casting about for a new identity in the wake of the tanking financial markets, John McCain seems to have hit on a role he plans on sticking with, for a few days at least: magical thinker. Even as the darkening clouds are making many wonder about the very solvency of the government itself, the Arizona senator told the New York Times and CNBC today that he was going ahead with his tax cut plans. “Contrary to the warnings of fiscal analysts, he said he believed he could do so and balance the federal budget, which was falling deeper into deficit even before the financial crisis, by the end of his first term,” said the Times. 

Analysts! Analyze this, baby. In McCain’s world view there are a limited number of forces that really matter: The Surge, of course, the doubling-down of troops in Iraq that he alone championed last year, and that now promises to allow us to stay there long after anyone dreamed we would need to; and congressional earmarks, which are little bits of secret spending that senators and representatives attach to otherwise decent bills in order to get their constituents more of your money. 

The fact that your money is their money — that you are, in essence, them — should not confuse you. It doesn’t confuse McCain! He stood there while some Vietnamese guard drew a cross in the dirt and totally got what the guy was trying to say because JMC, not that egghead Obama with his longterm solutions, is more than a man of action. He is an action painter. You know, like Jackson Pollock. His coherency is in his movement and today he is a tax-cutting guy who also wants to balance the budget and hold Wall Street greedheads accountable for destroying your 401-K. Contradictions? Contradictions are for squares. 

In the crazy mixed-up world we have inherited this political season, this kind of whirling dervish routine might just carry him over the finish line if it weren’t for the party that he is tied to. Sure, he stirred up the base with his choice of Sarah Palin (who is in NY, meeting a dozen world leaders, AND Bono, all in one day — talk about action!) but those people bring the votes, not the bread. The moneybags in the Republican Party really don’t want to hear him do his Huey Long impression. While he and his rival are both skeptical of the government’s proposal to give the Treasury Secretary a blank check, and no one to answer to, Obama sounds more prudent and determined to help craft the right compromise to get us out of this mess and keep the ship of state afloat. McCain’s tossing paint, man — and the red ink might just fall on us.