Do Not Forward

Posted on September 26, 2008 by Sean Elder

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

Posted on September 23, 2008 by Sean Elder

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.

The Bi-Polar Kid

Posted on September 18, 2008 by Sean Elder

No, I’m not talking about the fine piece by Jennifer Egan about manic-depressive children in last Sunday’s Times magazine. I am talking here of John McCain, a man who is changing positions so fast that he must be giving himself whiplash. Does he look at himself at night and say, “Who am I this time?”

This isn’t about the sleazy ads but rather the tactics he once despised. The New Republic reports today that Republicans are using the kind of push polls that Rove & co. used to slander JMC in South Carolina in 2000. Those were about a black child he fathered out of wedlock. (The fact that there was no such child, and the child in question was his daughter adopted from Bangladesh, didn’t stop the racists from running from him.) The polls they are using against Obama ask Jewish voters if it would bother them to learn Hamas supported Obama, and other “statements of fact” sure to put off a few Jews. Though the group behind the polling does not work for McCain, that is the way these groups play. I can already hear JMC defending them as factually accurate, as he did the ad accusing Obama of wanting to teach sex ed to kindergarden kids.

And now the longtime regulation foe is out there trying to reinvent himself as a regulator in disguise. He’s a tough guy, he claims in a new ad, ready to “clean up Wall Street,” when only two days ago he was telling reporters more regulation just meant more bureaucrats, and you know how they are.

Will it play? How stupid are voters? The last eight years might lead you to think: pretty stupid. But even as my Democratic friends on both coasts are wringing their hands and pointing at comets in the sky, a number of conservatives are saying it’s Obama’s election to lose. David Brooks and Rich Lowry were deeply unimpressed with Sarah Palin’s performance on ABC last week, and Carl Cannon (who keeps his political affiliation well hidden) just wrote a bracing blog on the Readers Digest site saying, in essence, the polls are missing the youth of today. And the youth will decide this thing for the Dems.

And that was before this weekend, when Wall Street imploded and the Dow began to tank. Suddenly the Palin pick looks a little less like genius; after hearing her make fun of people with a “big fat resume,” a lot of shaken voters would like some reassurance from people who have been saying for a while that the government needs to be more involved in the financial markets. Now resumes look good, especially if they point to politicians who didn’t look the other way when the bus was headed for the cliff.

Cross pollination

Posted on September 10, 2008 by Sean Elder

There has been much hand-wringing in the last few days about the latest presidential polls. First we had McCain and Obama in a dead-heat and now we have Gallup, CBS and USA Today tracking polls all giving the Republican a definite edge. Given the latest unemployment figures (at six percent, the highest in five years), the collapse of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, and the American tradition of voters punishing the party in power when the economy goes south, you would think our man would be golden.

A few people have even asked me if these polls aren’t skewed by the media either because a) they need a horse race for the sake of ratings & circulation or b) they’re rooting for the status quo, ie entrenched GOP power. I’m no expert on polling, nor do I play one on TV, but I have heard it said, by people who might actually know whereof they speak, that polling is a crossroads now. After the miserable job they did in the last election, pollsters have still not come to grips with the fact that many younger Americans do not use landlines (which is how polling is almost exclusively conducted) and wouldn’t answer a pollster’s call if they did.

This could be statistically significant given the Dems gains in registering new voters and, as of this writing, our numerical advantage. According to an AP report that appeared today, there are about 42 million registered Democrats and 31 million Republicans nationwide, and we have posted huge gains in key battleground states. A related piece in the Huffington Post makes a convincing case that Gallup et al are drawing on a GOP-heavy sampling of voters. And Republicans love their new cavemom, Sarah Palin.

Far more disturbing are the polls that show independents moving to McCain. I like to think that they did not have their dial moved by the addition of Palin; how independent are you if you support a ban on abortion and advocate teaching creationism in schools? Of course, I might just be out of touch with the values of middle America, and one man’s spunky hockey-mom is another man’s Big Nurse. But I like to think that the people whose job is tracking the electorate don’t know what they’re talking about this time. Just like they didn’t the last…