The Kids Are All Right

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Glad tidings! In the 14th Weekly Reader voter survey, the young readers of a magazine you may remember from your own youth have chosen Barack Obama over John McCain. More importantly, these kids have accurately picked the winning candidate in 12 of the last 13 races. (The one they blew was Bush I over Clinton — kids!)

Some might argue that the WR voters, who range in grade from kindergarten to seniors in high school, are echoing what their parents are saying. True, a lot gets filtered down at the dinner table, providing you talk politics at the dinner table. (Actually, how could you not?) But I suspect that there is also that bullshit detector which is more sensitive among young children. Like dogs, they hear Obama and are reassured whereas McCain is a little too scary. 

Halloween costumes are also supposed to be indicative of the winner, but we split the difference this season. This years biggest selling Halloween costumes are the Obama mask and the Sarah Palin outfit (which is bound to get some kinky action come Halloween, especially after the clips to Larry Flynt’s “Nailin’ Paylin'” were made public), with a few additional Joe the Plumber costumes thrown in for good measure. 

McCain’s face, choked with rage, is just a little too real for masqueraders; he is starting to look like one of those doomed dancers at the end of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? plodding along with decreasing conviction until someone sounds the gong. The ghosts he has resurrected — Ayers, Wright, the very specter of socialism, for goodness’ sake — don’t spook anybody any more. They are like his anomalistic historical references: he calls himself a Teddy Roosevelt Republican and compares his opponent to Herbert Hoover. “Huh?” say the kids. When they talk about dead presidents, they mean money. 

Maybe if McCain had found a way to talk about the economy, a consistent way that is, he would have more than a ghost of a chance now. But donning the costume of Wall Street scourge and friend of the working class this late in the game isn’t going to fool anyone. Give that kid a box of raisins. 

The man behind the curtain

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I’ve been almost afraid to write anything in the last few days: with nearly every poll pointing towards a blowout of sorts next Tuesday, I didn’t want to jinx it by getting out the party favors too soon. And there is still the possibility that the poll numbers are skewed wrong, or that America’s treacherous racist heart is actually steeled against our historic candidate. But I doubt it. 

Hearing pollster Charlie Cook on Meet the Press this morning kind of sealed the deal for me. Cook, who does a nice job of remaining noncommittal in these races, is from Louisiana which elected Bobby Jindal, a man of Indian descent, last October. Given that state’s history, said Cook, this was about as likely as hitting a hole in one. On the moon. True, Jindal is a right-wing, right-to-life, born-again Republican — but he doesn’t look like most folks in Louisiana. But things were so screwed up there, said Cook, that even old white racists were willing to let some skinny Indian kid run with the ball. 

And that, said Cook, is just where America is at with Obama. The fear that McCain and the GOP counted on didn’t take and without that they have nothing. The Republican candidate himself had just been on the show talking to Tom Brokaw, laughing in the face of polls that put him 10-14% behind, and defending the Palin pick to the death. What they have left is magical thinking, and a belief that failing campaigns are like crashing planes. “Why I’ve been in tougher spots than this…”

Yeah, but we haven’t. 

In all this last-minute hand-wringing you don’t hear much about the president — Bush, remember? But I think credit must be given where credit is due. What I saw after the disastrous response, or lack of, to Hurricane Katrina was a massive case of buyer’s remorse by some of the very same people who voted for GWB the second time. Some of them were members of my wife’s family, who own a newspaper in Washington, Pennsylvania — the same Western PA Jack Murtha was talking about. And who do you think that paper endorsed for President? Rhymes with “Yo mama.” 

Ghosts of elections past

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If you are looking for giant spider webs, life-sized ghouls or plastic tombstones to adorn your front lawn with, I’m afraid they’re all in Northeast Philadelphia. The voters whose doors I was knocking on may be facing hard times but they’re still looking to give away candy on Halloween. These neighborhoods must be fun for the kids; they’re very family-oriented and many houses are haunted.

Haunted by the past, that is: the time when people had steady work and were optimistic about the future, their kids’ college prospects and their own retirement. Most of the voters I spoke with were talking about the economy, the scare they got when they opened their last 401K statement (George Will said “the Obama campaign is benefiting from a mass mailing they did not pay for”). One dad I talked to, the only black voter I met on my wandering, told me to save my convincing for someone else. “I’m convinced every time I talk to my daughter who’s stationed in Iraq and can’t come home,” he said. “I’m convinced every time I look at my bank statement.”

Many I talked to were close to retirement — or so they previously thought. The idea that McCain supported privatizing Social Security was enough to galvanize them, if they weren’t already. The idea of having their money tied to the volatile stock market was far scarier than those Obama masks they’re selling. 

Health insurance was a big topic, too. There was a woman who told me both she and her husband were voting Democratic but their son, also on my list, was in a vegetative state. (“You can put him down too, if you want,” she said.) There was another mom, thinking of abandoning the Republican party for the first time, whose son had been on a methadone program, since closed: she was plenty scared, too. And there was the woman I met whose hair was missing from chemo. She was wearing a Phillies jersey and knitting a giant Phillies stocking as we talked. “Today’s a good day,” she said. “On good days I have enough energy to get mad at the Republicans.”

The fact that their team is heading for the World Series has made a lot of people happy; signs were everywhere and I even met a cat named Philly. One guy, mowing his lawn, stopped to tell me he and his wife were for Obama all the way and he was making a point of talking to his friends who were on the fence. Hearing I was from NY he shook his head about the fate of the Mets. 

“I tell you what,” I said. “You vote for Obama and I’ll root for the Phillies.”

That’s a promise that’s easy to keep when they’re playing the Devil Rays.

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.