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.

Finite Jest

Posted on September 15, 2008 by Sean Elder

I was flabbergasted to read that David Foster Wallace killed himself Friday. I was not his biggest fan, though I had read his biggest book, Infinite Jest, when it came out twelve years ago and argued passionately for it and its characters at the time. It wasn’t just that it was a Big Ambitious American novel, written at a time when people seemed to no longer believe in the importance of writing a BAAN: it took life seriously by making fun of it (and vice versa).

The jokers and jesters of IJ suffered terribly; one of the book’s heroes, Hal Incandenza, was a big-hearted recovering alcoholic and drug addict who, as Laura Miller says in her fine appreciation of DFW in Salon, “[fought] to stay on the road through the desert.” What more are any of us trying to do? As lesser writers copied his tricks and tropes (the endless footnotes, especially) as a means of distancing themselves from the reader, Wallace seemed to always be trying to get closer to both his subjects and you.

The same was true of his nonfiction. I still teach his profile of David Lynch to my journalism students as a brilliant example of what a great profile you can do of someone without talking to them. I asked Jim Meigs, the editor of Premiere who assigned the piece how much editing was involved. “It came in just the way you read it,” Jim said. Suffice to say it made me go back and watch Lost Highway, and almost made me understand it.

Many of the people who didn’t like Wallace hadn’t read him. They assumed he was a show-off, hiding behind irony and verbosity. I thought he was throwing everything he could into the mix, trying to make a case for living, for continuing. The fact that he couldn’t make that case for himself is devastating.

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…

Nothing Is Inevitable

Posted on September 5, 2008 by Sean Elder

These were among John McCain’s last words in his acceptance speech last night, and as bumper-sticker mottos go, I think it’s pretty catchy. Of course, it causes you to think of the inevitable exceptions to that maxim — death and taxes (though not, Republicans would posit, the “death tax”). They would also like to add to the list: the short memory of voters.

As he heads into the battle season, McCain’s playing a complicated game. He has appeased the base with red meat from this year’s Spiro Agnew, Sarah Palin, while reminding even the most casual viewer of what a white party the GOP is. And now he is trying to get those moderates that remain to remember the earlier McCain: the reformer, the iconoclast, the maverick. (Did you hear that word often enough this week? I half expected them to play the theme song from the old TV show of the same name, though McCain may have been the only one on stage who would remember it. Instead they played Heart’s “Barracuda,” which prompted the song’s author, Democrat Nancy Wilson, to tell EW, “I feel completely fucked over.”)

It is going to be interesting to see how, from his position on the prow of the ship that brought us endless war and a tanking economy, JMC continues to disassociate himself from it. Watching all those red-faced men in blue blazers chanting for change was funny in a Brooks Brothers riot kind of way, but don’t laugh too long. An Obama victory is far from assured; I believe this election, like many before it, will be settled by the least attentive voters, who are moved by their last impression. If theirs is one of John McCain, Moderate Guy, we could lose.

I’m still counting on the stink bomb set off by the W White House to move people in the other direction. The president’s plummeting approval rating over the last four years was not a blip on the screen but a true case of buyer’s remorse. And those who voted for him in ’04 did not just buy the man, they bought the party and the party line. Maybe those who have been burned will remember this time. Another thing that is inevitable is change.

Bring on the Orcs

Posted on September 3, 2008 by Sean Elder

It has become apparent since John McCain announced Sarah Palin as his running mate that this was less of a hail-Mary pass (hoping to pick up alienated Hillary voters and any other woman who would vote for any woman) than it first appeared and, more predictably, a play for the GOP’s born-again Christian base. As a story in the Times, or even a ten-minute visit to the Republican National Convention makes abundantly clear, her selection has been hailed as divine. Literally.

It was this same bunch that was so instrumental in winning the election for Bush in ’04; these people are like Orcs, the unstoppable broodlings in the Lord of the Rings that battled the hobbits and fairies and trolls and men who were trying to defeat the dark empire of Mordor. They can go for days without food or drink and certainly don’t need to be paid to stuff envelopes and ring doorbells. They believe they are doing God’s work, and many of them would be insulted by the offer of money.

I had the experience, canvassing for Kerry in the Scranton and Wilkes-Barre areas of Pennsylvania (a state we won by the way) of driving through the exurbs to ring the doorbell of some registered Democrat and passing all these other houses and McMansions and wondering: who’s ringing their doorbells? In Ohio it was the Orcs, stirred into action by that Lord Sauron of the GOP, Karl Rove (who told the Washington Post.com that choosing Palin was “a campaign decision, not a governing decision.”

Translation: we just want to get this guy elected. Motivating the Christian right, for whom abortion remains the signature issue, is more important than gambling on any voters in the middle, many of whom live in those exurbs and smaller cities in the swing states. We can only hope that this strategy will backfire, that voters who support a woman’s right to choose (a clear majority of Americans) and who are tired of the God-gays-and-guns gang having such sway in government, as they have under GWB, will hit the Change button come November 4. (Most of my wife’s Republican family, who live in the battleground county of Washington in the battleground state of PA, are already leaning that way.)

But hoping (or praying) alone won’t do it. If you haven’t already, find a way to volunteer to work for Obama. Calling the fairies and trolls you know in California and New York (and I know plenty of both) won’t help; we’ve got those states. You need to start reaching out into the red states and trying the gentle art of suasion instead of the bellicose rhetoric of partisanship. Ask people: do you care about climate change? Because Palin and all she represents think it’s part of God’s plan, and the war in Iraq was a Holy War. (Check out this church video from June of this year if you think I’m exaggerating.) Despite McCain’s past statements about the environment, he has backed away from that stance in the last year, and I guarantee he will do far too little too late as president, and has already said he will choose anti-Roe judges for the Supreme and federal courts. You’ve got to dance with the Orcs that brought you.