Weekend Reads and YouTube Wars

August 15th, 2008

On some days, news looks simple enough and easy to untangle to produce a rousing blog post — those days may be gone forever; this should be cruise time toward the conventions, with only minor blips on the radar — instead it’s a Gordian Knot of incestuous doings, comings and goings.

While some headlines jump out at you, I usually try to make Friday a day of informative or amusing reads we can linger over — or a collection of snippits, for the fun of it. Today it’s “both/and” … an energy we’d be wise to dance with, learn to understand and appreciate.

I’ve thrown you some good YouTube’s in the last days, urged you to pass them around. The phenomenon of YouTube is worth comment … and persuasive to those who are visual and/or auditory in learning curve; i.e., many of us. Of course, the danger is in sucking up ANYTHING without evaluation, no matter how polished or well presented.

If we want to sink the Swift Boaters, we need to fight fire with fire and YouTube gives us opportunity to freeze time to display the stark reality of a moment; it’s a potent tool — although our objective needs to be discrediting the source … not producing swill. While the unburnished truth is incendiary enough, it’s also scorching to everyone involved when you count in blowback. For instance, Andrew Sullivan says this is the ad Karl Rove would have made if he was a Democrat:

McCain - Unfit To Lead

OK — I could have made this one myself, easily and happily. But this is hardly a mind-changing pass-along; it’s more preaching to the choir, while waving a red flag in the face of those who don’t want to think any of this true … and that only liberal-socialist-commie-pinko’s like us do this kind of thing [blindsiding themselves to their own culpability in promoting the vile 24/7 smear-fest on FOX News, the pornographic mind of Rush Limbaugh, or the trash written by Jerome Corsi, articles below.]

The surprise surrogates for Obama in the YouTube Wars are progressive Evangelicals … if you are wondering what “change” might look like in an Obama presidential term — dwell on that for a moment … then, check this out:

Family

Even the topic of abortion, most often a deal-breaker, is taking on new dimensions in this season. Our death-grip on either/or is suddenly looking like both/and. For those of you who find that a caving to mainstream mediocrity, too lukewarm for progressive taste, remember that we’re so far Right in this nation that unless we find a comfortable middle path to transition through, a Left turn would bring us to a screeching halt …

and yes, I know — some of us would like to see what happens if it did. I’m empathetic — but … it’s unlikely at this point. Get over it; or table it ’til later, when the Capricornian Pluto starts digging in its spurs.

Your reads this week are entertaining and amusing, bashing and angry … both/and … and all of interest in the Obama/McCain face-off. Meanwhile, you’ll find 27 videos linked at BuzzFlash — take yer pick. And here’s a Tom Tomorrow ‘toon — ain’t it the truth!

Oh yes. One last bit to discuss — tacky as it is.

As I’ve said recently, the rags give us smoke/fire stuff that MSM won’t touch but, especially politically, they have a kind of instinct that we poo-poo at our peril. We know MSM won’t touch Bush, eight years running; not so the rags. The salaciousness of the Enquirer covers give us occasional truth juxtaposed to absurd leads … so open this link and scroll down to the picture of the Secret Service lifting the Little Prince out of his seat … and mouth breathe in speculative wonder! Unless the man has a pretzel lodged in his throat, that’s a LOT of help getting up, don’t you think? Just sayin’ … Hmmmmmmmmm

Have a terrific weekend. Remember to continue to send Light to the hot spots and to the Conventions, particularly the Democratic — Eric’s weekly piece highlights that problem; mine helps you activate your early warning system.

Jude

Edwards, McCain, Adultery
Andrew Sullivan, Daily Dish
14 Aug 2008

A lively exchange on Fox News. Sean Hannity’s head explodes, which is always good television at the thought that the same standards applied to Democrats should apply to Republicans. The meltdown happens around the 3:20 mark. Hannity also says that the Vietnamese “did not break [McCain's] spirit.” Actually, they did, using the enhanced interrogation techniques Hannity approves of when used by Americans. McCain attempted suicide and made a taped confession of crimes he didn’t commit after torture was inflicted on him. The torture techniques included beating, stress positions, dietary manipulation, withholding of medical care and solitary confinement - all of which are now used by the Bush-run CIA and were used indiscriminately across all theaters of war by the US after 2001 on Bush’s authorization.

McCain’s confession, I might add, says nothing about McCain’s integrity or character, just something about the evil of torture techniques that McCain then acquiesced to when practiced by the CIA in the Military Commissions Act of 2006.

YouTube … here ++

Jerome Corsi’s “Obama Nation” and the Root of Language Crime
P.M. Carpenter, BuzzFlash
Fri, 08/15/2008

Slime-merchant Jerome Corsi’s latest psychotic episode in print, The Obama Nation, is published by Simon & Schuster’s Threshold Editions, whose editor, Mary Matalin (yeah, that one) calls the book “a piece of scholarship, and a good one at that.”

I ran across Ms. Matalin’s literary appraisal-cum-Elmer Gantry salesmanship in Joe Klein’s Time magazine column. Mr. Klein, however, had experienced a somewhat less agreeable encounter with the book; in fact, he called it “trash,” “poisonous crap” and “swill.”

No, Mary, I haven’t read the book, nor do I feel compelled to do so before echoing the universally denunciatory opinions of those plucky souls who have. After all, I didn’t personally live under Hitler’s Nazi regime, either, but I feel reasonably confident in judging that such an existence would have been a most unpleasant one — as would, I’m sure, any close encounter with the Goebbelslike Obama Nation.

Besides, more than a few mainstream media outlets have already sufficiently summarized the book’s neurotic flights of fancy. For example I pieced together this synopsis of Corsi’s “findings” from yesterday’s Washington Post:

The son of an “alcoholic polygamist,” Obama deals with his abandonment issues and “black rage” by experimenting with drugs and radical thought. He makes a calculated entrance into politics despite having accomplished little and having developed some “anti-American” sentiments. Once in office, he regularly manipulates the political machine and becomes a liberal who will “divide America”….

[Corsi] implies that … Muslim faith plays a significant role in [Obama's] ideology, even though he is a practicing Christian. He portrays the senator from Illinois as a savvy opportunist who manipulated Chicago politics and then consistently voted like an “extreme” liberal…. Corsi writes that Obama’s mother chose “men of color” from the “third world” to be her “mates,” and that Obama identifies more with his “African blood” than his American roots.

Had enough? If not, and you’d care to revel farther into the “swill” of the book’s falsehoods, just go to MediaMatters.org, which is somehow suffering through and counting and correcting them — you know, like, oh, I don’t know, say, a Simon & Schuster editor should have done?

Nevertheless, Corsi’s book is about to debut as No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list, a phenomenon achieved principally by right-wing organizations and book clubs buying the bound detritus in bulk. Corsi, however, according to the Post, said he plans “to expand beyond that audience by aggressively marketing to independent voters and those who supported the presidential bid of Democratic Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.”

For now, though, we wait for the fallout. Some scholars of biography claim it won’t be as bad as we expect. Said, for instance, Tom Smith, one such scholar at Pennsylvania State University, “Readers aren’t as gullible as they used to be.” Well, we’ll see, but in the meantime I return to Joe Klein’s column: “I heard about Jerome Corsi’s book a few weeks ago from my mother, who said that her great fear — that Barack Obama has covert Islamic associations — had been confirmed by a new book.”

So what’s Obama to do? Refreshingly, his front-line joint chiefs of staff have launched a retaliatory campaign with some warlike punch, unlike John Kerry’s initially AWOL campaign against Corsi’s little crew of operationally effective Swift boaters. It’s called “Unfit for Publication: An Investigative Report on the Lies in Jerome Corsi’s ‘Obama Nation,’” and this 41-page pushback is available online as a pdf file.

Yet there is one other pushback — a very, very elementary one — whose idleness I have long puzzled over. To explain …

In the days and weeks to come, we will witness one GOP representative after another join in debate over Corsi’s book with Democratic Party representatives on countless political talk shows. And each and every one of these GOPers will refer to Obama’s “Democrat Party” as further representative of Obama’s “alien” views.

At that point — each and every time — the Democratic Party rep should say: I’m sorry, but you don’t even know the name of Obama’s party. And that’s pathetically uninformed. It’s the Democrat-ic Party, and until you comprehend at least that much I don’t see how we can possibly intelligently discuss books.

Sure, the pushback tactic sounds immature; but remember, the GOP’s propaganda machine is that which has operated on a profound and even psychotic immaturity itself (such as Corsi’s book) for a number of decades. And it’s time to start nipping it in the bud. The effort would be much like the NYPD’s “broken window” rule that successfully reduced crime in the city: in the policing of smaller offenses, the foundation of larger ones shrank perforce.

Plus, it would be just plain good fun to watch the GOPers stutter and stammer over and resist the required enunciation of “Democratic” — required, that is, before attempting their bigger linguistic crimes. ++

Par for Mr. Corsi
An expert at misrepresentation takes on Barack Obama.
Washington Post Editorial
Friday, August 15, 2008

THERE’S A cottage industry in books about Barack Obama; by one count, more than 20 are just out or are in the works. But few debut in the No. 1 spot on the New York Times bestseller list, as Jerome R. Corsi’s “The Obama Nation” will do among nonfiction hardcover titles this week. Unfortunately but unsurprisingly, given his earlier hit job on the last Democratic nominee, Mr. Corsi’s latest is rife with inaccuracies and innuendo. If the fundamental smear of “Unfit for Command” was that John F. Kerry was no war hero, the insinuation of Mr. Corsi’s latest is that Mr. Obama is a closet Muslim and militant, black activist drug-user.

“The Obama Nation” — the ungainly play on words (abomination, get it?) is “fully intended,” the author tells us — reprises the Corsi method. Mr. Corsi boasts that “I fully document all arguments and contentions I make, extensively footnoting all references” and asserts that “my fundamental opposition to Obama’s presidential candidacy involves public policy differences.” But footnoting to a discredited blog item does not constitute careful scholarship, and the bulk of Mr. Corsi’s book has nothing to do with issues.

He gets facts wrong, from the date of Mr. Obama’s marriage to whether he dedicated his autobiography to his family (he did) to whether he revealed that he took his future wife on his second trip to Kenya (he did.) He makes offensive statements: “The sexual attraction of his mother to her African husband jumps out from the page.”

When facts are lacking, Mr. Corsi makes his point by suggestive questions. Noting that Life magazine could find no record of an article that Mr. Obama remembered reading as a child about a black man who tried to lighten his skin, Mr. Corsi asks, “How much more imagining, hypothetical lying, or just plain lying is Obama capable of doing?” When facts are present, he twists them to make Mr. Obama bad.

Mr. Corsi’s discussion of Mr. Obama’s drug use — disclosed by Mr. Obama in his autobiography — manages to combine a few of these techniques. “Still, Obama has yet to answer questions whether he ever dealt drugs, or if he stopped using marijuana and cocaine completely in college, or whether his drug usage extended into his law school days or beyond. Did Obama ever use drugs in his days as a community organizer in Chicago, or when he was a state senator from Illinois? How about in the U.S. Senate?” In fact, Mr. Obama has said that he stopped using drugs when he was 20. Mr. Corsi is similarly misleading about Mr. Obama’s religious background, questioning his claim to be Christian. “Obama had to know that running for political office, even state office, would be much more difficult to do if voters suspected he was a Muslim,” Corsi writes. “Yet once Obama became a member of Trinity, he had proof he was a Christian, as he professed to be.”

Mr. Corsi has dismissed criticisms of his book as “nit-picking,” an odd defense coming from an author happy to inflate any possible omission into a full-blown evasion. Mary Matalin, the Republican political strategist who heads Threshold Editions, the Simon & Schuster division that published “The Obama Nation,” described the book to the New York Times as “a piece of scholarship, and a good one at that.” That would not be our description. ++

Jet Ski Veterans for Truth!
How to Swiftboat McCain
LEE PATTON, CounterPunch

We, the Jet Ski Veterans for Truth, aim to destroy McCain’s candidacy. We resurrect the evil but ingenious tactic of the Swift Boat Veterans in their 2004 character assassination of war hero John Kerry: transform the candidate’s greatest strengths into disgusting liabilities.

As an organization, we have been careful to avoid honesty at every turn, including our origins. None of us are jet skiers or veterans. We may not even be an “organization.” We may not even be a “we,” but a lone crackpot with a laptop.

Let’s start with simple stuff, parts of names and madrassas, and move on to serious derelictions of wartime duty. We’ll end with old lions being whipped.

Raising Cain with McCain

While Obama is blessed with that famous middle name—glad reminder of our late ally King Hussein of Jordan—McCain’s name seems innocuous. But look at it again. What comes after the “Mc”? CAIN. CAIN! The very name of the Bible’s first murderer, a brother-killer, no less. Given the bullying McCain is notorious for, does his uncontrollable rage spring directly from Cain’s own dark DNA? If he is the great-great-great-great-grandson of humanity’s original killer, little wonder McCain wants to extend the carnage in Iraq for another hundred years.

Gay Episcopal Madrassa Jihads

Those affiliated with McCain’s homosexual-led Episcopal Church might admit that a school similar to the one young John attended may share characteristics with a Muslim extremist madrassa—both are religious-affiliated schools. It follows, therefore, that young McCain must have been indoctrinated in a holy-book-obsessed madrassa-type school and may to this day continue to practice the Episcopal “jihad,” whose predecessors waged Holy War in the Holy Land—and for a hell of a lot longer than a hundred years.

Hero, or Slacker at Hanoi Hilton?

McCain’s greatest purported asset is a heroic narrative as an airman shot out of the sky over North Vietnam, then imprisoned in the “Hanoi Hilton.” This tale seems impervious to inquiry; we’re supposed to salute his courage and endurance and go all misty-eyed. Even more, part of the Hanoi story is how McCain refused an offer of release so he could stay with his fellow detainees. Yet that’s exactly where the Jet Ski Veterans for Truth work their greatest magic: McCain’s decision wasn’t valor. Some dare call it dereliction of duty.

We won’t even pursue what kind of pilot gets himself shot down in a pleasant lake in the heart of the enemy’s capital, leaving a valuable jet in enemy hands. But what the hell was McCain doing, refusing release from those enemy hands in the midst of a war he so strongly supported? He was supposed to be providing air support for thousands of American troops, among them future Senate colleagues John Kerry, Jim Webb, and Chuck Hagel. His fellow warriors were risking their lives down in the mucky, booby-trapped jungles and deltas, yet McCain chose to hang out in his cell with a few other prisoners of war. Why didn’t he jump back in the cockpit and do his job? You might say McCain refused to report for duty.

Remember, McCain’s mission ended in spectacular failure—like the American war in Vietnam itself. Rescued by locals, the young pilot remained sequestered in a former French chateau-like facility as the war raged for over five more years. Is that why McCain remains so blind to the catastrophe of U.S. aggression in Vietnam? He continues to nurture justifications contrary to every reputable historian and even the architect of the American war in Vietnam himself, Robert McNamara. Having remained by choice in a colonial chateau, McCain to this day seems clueless that the American War was a nightmare for everyone else serving in Vietnam, our nation disgraced and utterly defeated.

Maybe this explains why McCain doesn’t support funding for the Veterans Administration or our struggling, decrepit military hospital system. His aerial detachment could be why he shot down the new G.I. Bill for Iraq War veterans. The failed aerial bomber still can’t see what he destroys below, can’t detect the wounds, the severed limbs, the lost eyesight, the mental torments of our mere foot soldiers on the ground.

Old Lion or Cindy’s Boy?

Another of McCain’s supposed assets is his masculine image—the older lion with younger trophy wife. This is easily reversed, for McCain is actually Cindy’s “trophy.” Alcohol-distribution heiress Cindy McCain has the prize politician on a leash—he’s old, battered, unsexy, maybe–but adequate as her rich and powerful family’s water boy in Washington.

On April Fool’s Day, while Cindy tended to the family business, providing beer to college kids, the old lion-on-a–leash made sure his strolls through Baghdad markets were caught on all channels. Yet despite McCain’s panting swagger in advance of his Baghdad visit, the street violence spiked–again–again–in the occupied city.

The truth on the ground spoke for itself: a doddering old guy arrayed head to toe in Kevlar, almost invisible behind his cordon of virile young bodyguards. It’s hardly sporting to point out the obvious: The lion is a pussy.

The Pillsbury Dough Boy in the Final Twilight of Life

An old pussy: McCain pushes his “experience” as his most vaunted asset, but it’s the most easily demolished. For McCain could only acquire all that experience by growing so aged and feeble. The talk-show joke on McCain casts him as the mean old man chasing kids off his lawn. Yet this disease-riddled grouch probably can’t hobble that far–he’d have to dispatch his bodyguards to torment the kiddies.

Though “only” in his early seventies, the pile-on of decades has been cruel. He looks pasty, bloated, as if he has eaten so many biscuits he has actually become a geriatric Pillsbury Dough Boy.

McCain likes to point to his mother’s amazing longevity, with justifiable pride in her vigor, yet when seen in Momma’s company, it’s obvious that he did not inherit those genes. She seems younger than the old boy, stronger, more upright and certainly more lucid and witty, as if always about to pound her militarist “maverick” with her handbag. It’s another wild, compelling image of the Lion as Pussy—the decrepit yet bratty momma’s boy, whupped in turn by the old lady and his much-younger wife.

In Sum: Sun City Retirement

It should be obvious that the old airman needs to retire to a cul-de-sac in Sun City while he guards his cancers from the Arizona sun. He can putter around in a golf cart, my friends, refusing to speak to Iran—or was it Iraq?—and spare America another eight years of being whupped. ++

Rushmore or Less
Timothy Egan, NYT
August 13, 2008

In most every profile of Senator John McCain, there is some mention of his hero and role model — the bespectacled progressive who is one of the fab four on Mount Rushmore, Theodore Roosevelt.

Teddy has aged well, beloved both by Democratic environmentalists who feel he would appreciate the Emily Dickinson line that “hope is the thing with feathers,” and by Republican foreign policy hardliners who see a bird of a different type — the hawk.

I’ve spent the last two years trying to understand Roosevelt’s life and political convictions, reading his letters, books and speeches, as well as press accounts of him. From nearly every perspective, the John McCain of 2008 is no Teddy Roosevelt.

You start with the obvious: Roosevelt was the youngest man to become president, sworn into office in 1901 at the age of 42, after McKinley was shot. McCain, if elected, would be the oldest at 72.

McCain has attacked Barack Obama for his popularity, on the advice of Karl Rove acolytes in his camp who think that being a global celebrity is a bad thing.

You want celebrity? As the most popular American in the dawning decade of the American Century, Teddy Roosevelt was a global superstar — “the most popular human being that has ever existed in the United States,” as Mark Twain wrote.

He spoke to throngs in Europe, gave lasting speeches at the Sorbonne and Oxford. Often, he parried with his foreign guests in their own language. During his travels throughout Europe, South America and Africa, he could not so much as bite into a sandwich without being asked to comment on the bread.

Stirring words meant something coming from Roosevelt. The man and the persona could shape world opinion.

Both McCain and Roosevelt are Republicans, though Roosevelt famously bolted from his party to run as a Progressive in 1912, trying for a third term after sitting out four years in favor of the befuddled William H. Taft.

But Roosevelt clearly tried to steer his party away from what would now be seen as its hard-right elements — big money, anti-environmentalism, race-baiting — into what he called in his autobiography “the fairly radical progressive party.”

Born of money in New York City, educated at Harvard and fussy in dress, Teddy Roosevelt might today be seen as, um, an elitist. But he turned against his class, not just busting the monopolies and promoting public ownership of natural resources, as most students of his presidency know, but taking hard verbal swipes at the predatory rich.

He called them “malefactors of great wealth” and “the most dangerous members of the criminal class — the criminals of great wealth,” in two of his best-known phrases.

Appalled by the historic gap between rich and poor, Roosevelt favored a national inheritance tax. “Of all the forms of tyranny, the least attractive and most vulgar is the tyranny of mere wealth, the tyranny of plutocracy,” he said.

A century later, in a time of similar disparity between rich and poor, McCain wants to cut the corporate tax rate, and keep those tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans that ushered in the Bush age of privilege. His campaign is thick with lobbyists who embody everything about how power in Washington has shifted to the well-connected moneyed class.

“I have often been called a socialist,” Roosevelt wrote. In fact, he despised the far left as much as the far right. But he said, “I have always maintained that our worst revolutionaries today are those reactionaries who do not see and will not admit that there is any need for change.”

McCain sidles up to Big Oil and calls for more drilling, whereas Roosevelt went after the resource monopolies. When Standard Oil donated $100,000 to his campaign, he requested that it be sent back.

Teddy was also known for a big stick foreign policy and his heroics as a warrior; in that sense the McCain comparisons may be closer to the mark. Roosevelt was honest enough to admit that war could be stirring.

“All men who feel any power of joy in battle know what it is like when the wolf rises in the heart,” he wrote.

Yet, this saber-rattler was also a master diplomat, winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906 for helping to resolve the Russo-Japanese conflict.

In at least one way, Roosevelt is closer to Obama. A prolific author who also penned more than 100,000 letters, Teddy wrote 15 books by his 40th birthday.

Obama got his start as an author, and shows a literary flair rare among politicians.
On race, Roosevelt was a man of his time, sharing some of the more absurd anthropological notions of the day.

Yes, he brought the wrath of the South on him by hosting the black leader Booker T. Washington in the White House. Yet it was a different Roosevelt who wrote his friend Owen Wister on the question of what to do about “the negroes” in 1906.

“I entirely agree with you that as a race in the mass they are inferior to the whites,” he wrote. But he added, “I do not know a white man in the south who is as good a man as Booker Washington today.”

The John McCain of old — who stood up to his party’s nasty demagogues, fought special interests and embodied the word maverick — was someone Roosevelt might admire.

The John McCain who ran a Paris Hilton ad, mocked Obama for inspiring people abroad and has proposed nothing to right the ship of economic inequality would be his fierce opponent. ++

The Exotic Candidate Is The One With Eight Houses
Bob Cesco, HuffPo
August 13, 2008

“It is possible,” Gore Vidal once wrote, “for any citizen with time to spare, and a canny eye, to work out what is actually going on, but for the many there is not time, and the network news is the only news even though it may not be news at all but only a series of flashing fictions.”

The barbecue media script for this election, a work of unabridged fiction and co-written by the modern Rove Republicans, has crow-barred Senator Obama into the incongruous frame of the exotic effete elitist, irrespective of the fact that, on all counts, he’s absolutely none of those things. It’s the same script that’s been wheeled out during the last several presidential elections — designed as a way of sculpting reality into a neatly packaged prime time dramatic narrative that both reinforces and exploits fear-based stereotypes.

This week, for example, Cokie Roberts and Michael Crowley, along with a creepy monster squad of Republican stalkers, have been trying to peg Senator Obama’s vacation in Hawaii as proof that the script is accurate. Hawaii, they say, is only for exotic elitists. Senator Obama is in Hawaii.

Therefore, Senator Obama is an exotic elitist. See how that works?

Never mind that this Hawaii-is-exotic-and-elitist gripe came from a not-elitist millionaire with the not-exotic name “Cokie.” This Cokie phenomenon is a solid example of the script’s paradoxical, fictitious awfulness. Despite similar griping from the McBush Republicans, the truth is that Senator McCain is far and away the more elitist and exotic of the two candidates. Fact. No bias here.

Let’s start with Hawaii and do the list.

Senator McCain met and fell in love with his current wife, Cindy Hensley, while on vacation in… exotic and elitist Hawaii. He was 42, she was 24. He was still married to his first wife at the time, who was disabled as the result of a car accident, by the way. The whole scene — Hawaii, cheating on a disabled wife with a super-rich beer heiress — is just about as exotic and elitist as it gets according to the standards of the script.

So… Cokie?

For the sake of contrast, Senator Obama and Mrs. Obama’s biography as a couple is about as ordinary and traditional as Americana itself. No weird cheating or ugly divorces. No trophy heiress nearly half his age. Just an ordinary American love story. How the barbecue media and far-right talk radio has managed to spin the Obamas as the African-American version of Mickey & Mallory is one of the most wicked examples of dishonesty from this dark ride — worthy of the most backwards of Karl Rove’s non-reality-based conspiracies against the truth.

Cindy McCain’s beer distributorship pulls in upwards of $300 million annually. Hardly relatable to the middle and working class families who are losing their homes to foreclosure — one of many consequences of the last 30 years of the Republican war on the middle class. So it’s not a stretch to suggest that being married to a woman whose family business is worth a quarter of a billion dollars is — what’s the word? — unusual? Atypical? Irregular? How about exotic?

Such cash allows for certain not-elitist and not-exotic perks. A private jet for example. According to Mrs. McCain, getting around Arizona is hard work so thank goodness the McCains have their own jet. Just like you and me and the Obamas, right? But maybe it’s unfair to badger the McCains about their personal jet airplane. How else are they going to travel around to their eight houses (this one, for example). Walk? Drive a car? That’s just silly talk. Senator McCain would totally ruin his not-elitist and not-exotic $520 Italian shoes engaging in such an effort. Then what would he wear while he’s hosting SNL or visiting the set of a movie he’s appearing in? Jelly shoes from Payless? Yeah right. Try installing Senator McCain’s lifts inside of those hideous things.

The only truly “ordinary” thing about Senator McCain is that his first name is “John” (there are just over 5 million guys named “John” in the United States, so they win this one). He’s also white. Really, really white. Like, squishy subterranean cave dweller white.

Yet irrespective of what white, upper-class Republicans or Mark Penn or Very Serious Mark Halperin or Pat Buchanan might think, Senator Obama quite literally looks like 21st Century America. Mixed-culture, mixed-heritage, middle class roots. Senator Obama, in terms of his racial composition and family history, has more in common with average Americans than just about any modern Republican presidential nominee.

The only way he’s not is if somehow we’ve been transported into an episode of Leave It To Beaver — or if by “America” the Republicans and the barbecue media mean to suggest “Kentucky.” Even with that as a qualification, half of Senator Obama’s racial composition is rooted in rural Kansas. His parents were divorced. He barely knew his biological father.

Now, Cokie, drive down (or have your driver take you) to the nearest Wal-Mart. Line up 100 people and ask them whether they can relate to a man who owns eight houses and whose wife is a gazillionaire, or if they can relate to a man who represents the American melting pot — a man who just recently paid off his student loans — a man who was raised by a single mother — a man who is (shock horror!) still happily married to his only wife. Then drive back (or have your driver take you) down to ABC’s Newseum studio this Sunday and look directly into the This Week cameras tell us that Senator Obama is the more exotic or elitist of the two candidates.

And that goes for you, too, Buchanan. (Pat Buchanan has recently been engaging in some concern-trolling by wondering aloud, “Why can’t Senator Obama close the deal?” This is one of Buchanan’s more subversive race-baiting tricks. The answer he’s begging is very likely his favorite lamentation about the senator: “Because he’s too exotic.”)

The modern Republicans have hijacked the label “real American” and stapled it onto the foreheads of a platoon of phonies. George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Mitt Romney, John Sidney McCain, Rush Limbaugh. Hell, even the poster boy for this hillbilly dark ride, Larry the Cable Guy, is a fraud in redneck drag. And the very serious barbecue media has accepted this trickery as reality because it fits perfectly into their antiquated election year narrative.

Throughout the course of this seemingly interminable election cycle, it’s been well-documented by various blogotubers that the key to winning this election will be to fight the barbecue media’s script — to debunk the “series of flashing fictions.” I would suggest that reversing this “exotic elitist” frame is, to borrow a familiar phrase, a central front in the war on the barbecue media. In the case of Senator Obama, reality is on our side.

It’s simply a matter of repeating the reality until the script is slowly immolated and the truth rises to the surface. And in the process, perhaps the barbecue media will begin to realize that the modern liberal movement has more in common with “average Americans” than any fraud or flimflam artist the Republicans have dropped onto the stage. ++

McCain: “The Eddie Haskell of Politics”
Dayo Olopade, The National Review
14.08.2008

Reporter and longtime John McCain coverer Amy Silverman of Arizona’s New Times has an astounding long feature detailing the senator’s history in Arizona politics. Silverman has compiled a treasure trove of data on McCain’s political biography–all of public record, but long buried in Arizona, it seems–including episodes in which she was an actor. She details the circumstances of some of the most unsavory political moments of McCain’s public life, including the Keating Five scandal, barbs and brawls that reek of misogyny, and his steady courtship of the press. It’s a must-read; some of the details are really cutting:

“During lunch, McCain said, almost with mischievous glee, that he had slipped some highly technical questions to [James McClure] to ask Mofford — questions she wouldn’t be prepared to answer or expected to answer.

“Flabbergasted, I asked McCain why would he want to sabotage Mofford’s testimony, when in fact the CAP was the nonpartisan pet of Republicans and Democrats — such as far-left Udall and far-right Goldwater — since its inception.

“His reply, as near as I remember, was, ‘I’ll embarrass a Democrat any time I get the chance.’

Callowness and opportunism seem to shade other of his behaviors, particularly regarding the legacies of the two most famous legislators from Arizona. Most interesting to me–if not surprising–is the disconnect between his hard-fought filiation with Morris Udall (and to a lesser extent, Barry Goldwater) and his actions, particularly when it comes to environmental policy:

McCain tends to support big-picture issues that will play well with voters, but when it has come to protecting Arizona over the past 26 years — well, not so much.

In the 1980s, McCain made a name for himself, supporting the limitation of air flights over the Grand Canyon, but in recent years, backed off the effort when environmentalists wanted to expand the limits from small tour planes to commercial aviation. And he’s taken a lot of heat recently for refusing to weigh in on efforts to mine uranium near the Grand Canyon.

In fact, despite a vague statement issued last week saying he might, at some point, support mining reform, McCain has failed for years to back proposed changes to the horribly outdated Mining Act of 1872 — and evidence of that is strewn all over Arizona in the form of large strip mines and environmental degradation.

When it comes to Arizona environmental issues, though, McCain’s best known for an infamous U.S. Governmental Accountability Office report that details threats he made to the job of a forest service official who dared to disagree with him on the topic of the endangered Mount Graham red squirrel.

Anger, inattention, and a preening instinct–check! Nevertheless, Silverman writes,

the Udall comparison has stuck, mostly because McCain makes it whenever he can. Even Newsweek, in an April cover story, noted the phenomenon, writing of McCain:

“He traces his environmental awareness to the sainted Rep. Mo Udall, an Arizona Democrat who took McCain as a young congressman under his tutelage . . . To environmentalists, that’s like saying you learned about civil rights by driving around Alabama with Martin Luther King Jr.”

Which, of course, McCain most certainly did not do. Ultimately, the whole story–which also covers Cindy McCain’s drug addiction and more scenes of press bias–conveys nothing more than one inside take on hardball political life. But the final chapter of the Udall saga is very sad:

[McCain] does deserve credit for the time he spent with Udall during his final years. “There was no steadier visitor,” Bob Neuman recalls of McCain’s visits to his old boss’ bedside during Udall’s very long struggle with Parkinson’s disease. And for that, Neuman says, McCain earned his “respect and admiration and affection.”
–Until McCain went public with it.

In 1997, Michael Lewis profiled McCain for the New York Times Magazine. Lewis’ piece was well-written, and he did get great access to McCain. In fact, the senator even took the journalist to the veterans hospital in Washington, D.C., for one of his visits with Udall. According to Lewis, McCain tried in vain to wake Udall that day. (Udall died the following year.)

About the encounter, Neuman says, “That was devastating to me, that he brought in a reporter. I thought that was crossing the line, and it destroyed me.”

Woof. Silverman also links to several (brilliantly titled) articles she has penned since the 1980s, which are themselves worth a read. And in them, I daresay I can’t see many instances in which McCain puts “country first.” Leading Neuman to call McCain “the Eddie Haskell of politics.” Silverman concurs, writing of the senator’s still-pristine image, “something seems to be getting lost in translation.”

Indeed. Obama’s skinny resume cuts both ways, I guess–and I doubt this mixed legacy is enough to put Arizona in play–but if even half the tales offered by Silverman’s lengthy rundown are true, it’s remarkable what relative success McCain is having running a bruising characterological campaign against him.

UPDATE: Headline hyping tomorrow’s candidate appearances at Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church: Warren “Plans to bring up Obama, McCain’s Personal Life.” I’ll believe it when I see it. ++

Lincoln Chafee and other prominent GOPers are lumbering toward the left—but at the grassroots, the “Republicans for Obama” movement has been growing for a while.
Bruce Falconer, Mother Jones
August 12, 2008

“My grandmother’s house is right there behind us,” Anne DeCourcy says, pointing past a tall, flower-lined fence to one of the many single-family homes that now crowd the streets of suburban Leesburg, Virginia, about 45 minutes northwest of Washington, DC. “I grew up playing in what was a field right here, but it’s not the same; it’s very different, and it happened so fast that the people in the rest of Virginia are kind of shell-shocked.” Shell-shocked by northern Virginia’s explosive growth, yes, but also by the cultural and political transformation that has accompanied it—a transformation that, come November’s presidential election, could make itself felt at the national level.

DeCourcy, middle-aged with long blond hair and blue eyes and described to me before we met as a “rabid Republican,” has never voted for a Democrat in a presidential election, but this morning she drove in from her home in nearby Lovettsville (pop. 1,160) to tell me why she is supporting Barack Obama. We sit at her friend Joan Tellechea’s kitchen table. While Tellechea, a self-described independent, plies me with coffee and fresh banana bread, DeCourcy explains her decision to defect. “I’ll vote for anybody who can get more than half the vote,” she says. “It’s upsetting to me that the country is 50/50. I’m sick of it! And I think a lot of people that lean more conservative feel the same way.”

The Obama campaign is counting on it. Virginia, with its 13 electoral votes, is thought to be in play for the first time since 1964, as are other traditionally red states like North Carolina, Missouri, Montana, and Colorado. On the face of it, peeling Republican voters away from John McCain may seem like a stretch for a senator who last year was dubbed “most liberal” by National Journal. (Chris Saxman, McCain’s state campaign cochair, has characterized Obama’s positions as, “‘I don’t like guns. I’m going to raise your taxes. I don’t like coal.’ That’s a tough sell in Virginia.”) But Obama has made a point of reaching across the partisan divide, targeting the state’s moderate Republicans, primarily fiscal conservatives, concentrated in northern counties adjacent to the nation’s capital. The almost 2-1 margin by which Obama defeated Hillary Clinton in last February’s Virginia Democratic primary was attributed to record turnout among African Americans, but was also augmented by Republicans who took advantage of the state’s open system, allowing voters to cast ballots in both primaries; of the 7 percent of Republicans who voted in Virginia’s Democratic contest, an estimated 70 percent backed Obama. (McCain prevailed in the state’s Republican primary.)

It was no accident, then, that Obama’s first campaign stop after clinching the nomination was an amphitheater in northern Virginia—even if in many cases the so-called Obamacans had cast their votes not so much for Obama as against Clinton. That was what DeCourcy originally planned to do. “I was going to do it simply as a spoiler with no idea in the world of voting for him later on,” she says. But then, after Obama won in Iowa, she heard his victory speech. “He said, ‘We’re not red states or blue states; we are the United States,’ and I thought, ‘Finally, somebody said it!’ It literally made me cry. Then again, I’m menopausal.” The story reminds Tellechea of her own Obama conversion, which she also experienced while listening to one of his speeches. “I was washing the dishes,” she tells me. “The TV was turned this way. I wasn’t watching it; I was just listening. All of a sudden, I just got chills all over me, and I started laughing because it was so unexpected. I don’t even remember what it was he said.”

What exactly the Illinois senator says seems of less importance to many Obamacans than how he says it. According to Steve Robin, a land-use attorney in Leesburg who describes himself as an independent, his conservative friends have been surprisingly open to Obama’s candidacy, in large part due to the senator’s “distinctive personality” and “the strength of his charisma.” “Dyed-in-the-wool Republicans are saying Obama is not that awfully bad,” he says.

For Evan Pivonka, the issue is character. A doctoral candidate in political theory who, before enrolling at the University of Virginia, worked for the influential conservative writer Victor Davis Hanson, Pivonka attributes his support for Obama to a “gut feeling.” Last fall, his then-girlfriend dragged him to an Obama fundraiser, from which he left “completely blown away.” Pivonka explains, “He appeals to me at some level that, even though I can’t account for it in terms of issues, I’m going to listen to my gut and support a candidate that is just appealing to me for whatever reason. Whether that’s shallow or because he’s marketed well, I’m not sure.”

Back at Tellechea’s kitchen table, DeCourcy lists all the ways she disagrees with Obama, often passionately, on issues like immigration, health care, welfare, and taxes. She also worries about whom he might appoint to the Supreme Court. Still, she prefers him to McCain, who she doubts will be able to break the partisan stalemate in Washington. “If McCain had stood up and given the best speech of his life and had people electrified to vote for him, then I’d vote for him,” she explains. “But it just so happens that it was Obama. He has touched something in me and in a whole lot of friends of mine that have never voted for a Democrat and in a lot of people who honestly would never consider voting for a black man. We all feel that something has to change, and now, for the first time, there’s the possibility that something can be different.”

Just how much difference will the defection of moderate Republicans make in November’s election? It’s hard to say. According to Larry Sabato, a professor of politics at the University of Virginia, “In presidential elections, you have between 4 and 11 percent of each party regularly defecting to the other side. Think of it the other way: That means 90 percent or more of partisans vote for the candidate of their party.” If so, McCain retains more than a fighting chance in Virginia.

“We will be very strong in the rural areas for a long time,” then-Virginia gop chairman John H. Hager told the Washington Post last winter. “It’s the nascar crowd. It’s our crowd.” Nevertheless, Virginia has been turning purple in recent years, electing Democrats like Jim Webb to the Senate, and Mark Warner followed by Tim Kaine to the governor’s mansion.

In late June, Obama’s campaign manager, David Plouffe, told reporters that he expects to put significant effort (read: money) into the fight for states like Virginia, noting that if Obama wins Iowa in addition to the states won by John Kerry in 2004 he could reach the White House by bagging just a couple more medium-size swing states. And, Plouffe added, in purple states like Virginia the campaign will be relying on Republican and independent Obama enthusiasts to proselytize to friends and relatives as part of a “persuasion army.”

So DeCourcy and other Virginia Obamacans are not mere political oddities. Whether they realize it or not, they are part of Obama’s grand plan for victory. ++

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

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Entry Filed under: Political Waves