Yesterday is soooo gone …

… and tomorrow is here — this country has moved along and left Mr. McCain behind. Why do we continue to pretend there’s a contest?

The third debate would have been a yawn, had we not seen Republican dreams go up in smoke. He may have masked his vulnerabilities to begin with, but at the end, John McCain never looked so old, so idiosyncratic, so quirky. His initial attack, considered a relatively clear-headed 40 or so minutes by the pundits, gave us the bare bones of an actual debate. That may have been John’s last good moment in this campaign … or maybe period, ending his Maverick status and career options.

Mac was pushed, by Palin among others, to attack the Big O on Ayers and ACORN — when he was given opportunity, he hedged at first; you could actually see him nervously mustering energy like a kid does as he delivers his first valentine to the cute-girl, and then … wooooosh … it all came tumbling out in an explosive garble, like that initial overspill of coffee grounds when you break the vacuum seal on a new can, leaving you to reach for the sponge.

Obama batted the smears back with ease — and McCain never recovered. He just got noticeably older and quirkier from then on. Containing his dislike and disdain for Barack drove his anger into ticks, facial distortions and blinks [over 3,000 of them in a 90 minute period ... as counted by some obsessive pundit.]

YouTube is merciless, betraying Mac’s inner-reptile … as seen here and here and here, with a slideshow of face-shifting here. So are the pundits, who likened him to … gasp … Bob Dole [a candidate so nationally embarrassing that he's been tucked into our mental attic's, consigned to the junk heap of also-ran's. I mostly remember what came after -- his ad's for erectile dysfunction, and his Kool Aid schlepping wife who is being seriously challenged for her Senate seat.]

I couldn’t sit through the entire 90 minutes — I squirmed, I hid my eyes, I paced. I howled, I snorted, I puffed. Good thing a camera wasn’t on me, huh?! My son missed the debate, and as I was telling him about it this morning, he said, “My God, Mom, you’re feeling sympathy for him!” I am — I dislike public humiliation.

I don’t know if Mac reads the web; unlikely, since he’s a novice to computers, only pushed to consider their use by public opinion. Maybe his people will protect him from anything but the Faux NEWS reports, who by 87% of viewers declared his performance a mighty win with the same blind faith that a Pentecostal gathering declares Jesus ready to break down the door and slay all Lefty evil-doers …

… and [she segued] WHEN is the world going to make FOX stop advertising itself as a NEWS agency and declare its status as a 24/7 infomercial for Republican propaganda? Obama called our national attention to it, at least. It was bad enough when the world was steeped in Bushian B.S., leaving the reality-based community in wonderment over Pub lock-step mentality; now, it’s increasingly surreal to watch these people insist down is up and John and Sarah are true representatives of the “majority of Americans.”

Wake up call, Righties! Obama has won over white women and is now winning white men; he’s even becoming viable in West Virgina, for mercy’s sake! He led by 14 points prior to the debate. McCain has to not only sweep every undecided state but turn a blue one red in order to win this election; THAT’s what the majority of America has in mind.

If John does surf around, he’ll find that he’s being rejected by the future — and designated as a relic of the past. His supporters — people like Larry the Cable Guy … ummm, make that Joe the Plumber — are steeped in fearful divisiveness and stuck in the old paradigm emotions that are going to have to be raised up into Light over the coming years.

This will be no easy task: Joe gave us a quote to chew on. Barack Obama, said the plumber who has been mythically distorted by the Right in that that he does NOT make enough to qualify for raised taxes [although he evidently owes some] nor does he appear to have a plumbers license, “”tap dance[d] … almost as good as Sammy Davis Jr.”

Joe is an admitted Palin admirer.

Well. He couldn’t have said Fred Astaire? Gene Kelly? Anybody white? I guess that says it. And the fever pitch of this strata of thought, dangerously fanatical, will be with us in an Obama win, creating worry about what its adherents might do next. Wonder if Timothy McVeigh knew how to tap dance.

Like many of you, I have a tough time throwing respect at “undecided’s.” HOW is this choice not painfully obvious to all of us? But one by one, the undecided’s are coming our way. The non-debates [... have we learned anything new? anything at all?] have had a stunning visual effect. The Mac camp was insistent that this time both candidates be seated … probably so John had no opportunity to wander aimlessly, in another Mr. Puddles moment. It didn’t help.

Part of my discomfort last night had to do with McCain’s left thumb. It stuck up like the flag at Iwo Jima … and I became obsessive about why he doesn’t trim his fingernails; I was having Howard Hughes flashbacks. I know — silly, huh? But there is an energy that comes off this guy in waves and colors everything, blots out everything but the essential wrongness of the man. Mac should count his lucky stars that Obama didn’t join him in that series of early Town Hall’s; his ['nother] 15 minutes would have been reduced to five.

Mac has one political ploy left, I trust he’ll play it — with the Dem sweep, he can whine that a Blue president and congressional majority will put the nation seriously out of balance; something like … ohhhhh, I dunno … the first SIX YEARS of Bush’s run? His people will lap it up — there are none so blind as those who will not see.

Here’s a collection of assessments, rounded up for your convenience; I got a LOL from the Seitzman piece, posted first. Most of them are pretty funny, which confirms my notion that humor is a barometer for our internal pain; and funny at Mac’s expense, which is appropriate for someone who uses air quotes in regard to women’s health. The economy continues in free fall, today, with no end in sight.

The last bit, a bonus read, is a Rolling Stone interview with Obama; add that to the YouTube behind the scenes in Denver, previously posted, to give you a feel of how NORMAL Obama remains.

In an age when most politicians MUST become cartoon characters in order to succeed [and if you don't think so, check out this picture of Mac last night, qualifying him as ... yes ... Mr. Magoo,] Barack’s managed not to become one — it IS an age of miracles, and boy! Am I ready for ‘em!

Jude

John McCain Naked
Michael Seitzman, HuffPo
October 16, 2008

It was like A Tale of Two Smiles last night — It was the best of us, it was the worst of us. One man was a study in calm. The other was a study in batshit crazy.

I kept thinking of that line in As Good As It Gets, when Jack Nicholson says, “You make me want to be a better man.” Honestly, I know how foo-foo this makes me sound but Obama makes me want to be a better man. Maybe I did drink the kool-aid, but you know what? Jimmy-crack-corn.

When is the last time we had a leader that we wanted to emulate? Seriously, tomorrow when some douche cuts me off on Sunset Blvd, I’m just going to open my window at the next traffic light and calmly say, “I’d like to address your driving style. If you don’t mind.”

We’ve had so many years of people who vilify their political enemies, years of Baby Huey Bush and Cheney, of Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity laying claim to a country that only exists in the black-prison sites of their twisted minds (and at McCain rallies). It’s been a blood feud for far too long. Listening to McCain was a big hunk of enough-is-enough. My kidneys are gonna shut down if I have to endure four more years of that bile.

Mccain and Palin and their ilk don’t laugh. They patronize. They don’t smile, they snicker. They don’t debate, they denigrate. They don’t talk, they condescend. They don’t argue, they ridicule. There is a nastiness, a mean-spiritedness, a smug certitude, and a profound and baseless arrogance seething from both of them. These aren’t leaders. They’re not even grownups. They’re not a team of mavericks, they’re a team of schmendricks (Yiddish. Means someone who can’t succeed but thinks he can. Also means penis).

Now, contrast that with Barack Obama. Always respectful, even when disrespected.

Always calm, even when faced with contempt. Always articulate, never talking down. He never rattles and never takes it personally. He’s not just a diplomat, he’s a gentleman. You know what he has? Manners.

I’m exhausted by rigid, condescending ideologues like John McCain. He’s like a circus mirror, showing us some distorted version of ourselves as only he sees us. He says “spread the wealth” as if he were saying “spread the herpes.” He uses air-quotes while saying “a mother’s health,” as if it’s some radical fantasy invented by “those who would seek to destroy us.” McCain’s grin is an undisguised scowl of anger and intolerance. But the worst part is that he thinks that’s our scowl too.

John McCain is a rear-view image of yesterday’s America. Barack Obama is a signpost to the road ahead. It’s that simple. And if the people McCain is so proud of don’t like it?

Jimmy-Crack-Corn. And I don’t care. ++

Off The Meds
Nora Ephron
October 16, 2008

So is this the real John McCain?

No question the man who turned up last night did a better job than he’d done at the previous two debates. But here’s the problem for McCain: he’s either last week’s guy, who seems to be on medication, or he’s this week’s guy, who seems to have been abruptly taken off it.

He gave the game away in his first answer when, in talking about the economy, he said that Americans were angry. But Americans aren’t angry, they’re poleaxed. They’re terrified. They’re afraid they’re going to lose their jobs or their homes or their pensions. They’re worried they won’t be able to send their kids to college. If John McCain thinks they’re angry, it’s either because he’s projecting, or else he’s simply been going to too many of his own rallies.

As he smirked and blinked and raised his eyebrows, I couldn’t help wondering what tonight’s McCain seemed like to all those conservative pundits who’d been hoping a different McCain would show up. Is this what they meant? Is this the John McCain of Bill Kristol’s dreams?

Whichever McCain shows up, some things stay the same. He’s a towel-snapper. He can’t land a joke. He seems old. (As Martin Short said on Letterman just after the debate, “The only time he doesn’t have to pee is when he’s peeing.”) And he’s an absolutely terrible actor. Every time McCain went into his Joe-the-plumber-bit, those undecided voters on CNN were unmoved. They were probably not saying barf, like some of us were, but that’s only because they’re not allowed to talk amongst themselves during the debate.

At the Time Politics conference this week, New York Times columnist Frank Rich asked, “Was there any way that the Sarah Palin choice might have played out differently?” CBS’ Jeff Greenfield gave a wonderful answer. He said the question reminded him of a woman friend who’d said of her divorce, “We would have had a wonderful marriage if he had been a completely different person.”

Isn’t that great? It’s practically a Zen koan, not that I know what a Zen koan is. But one of the most remarkable things about Barack Obama is that he’s the same person every time he shows up. And as for John McCain, a completely different person showed up tonight, and it didn’t seem to matter. ++

Undecideds Laughing At, Not With, McCain
Amy Sullivan, TIME
October 16, 2008

In politics it is generally not considered a good sign when voters are laughing at you, not with you. And by the end of the third and last presidential debate, the undecided voters who had gathered in Denver for Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg’s focus group were “audibly snickering” at John McCain’s grimaces, eye-bulging, and repeated references to “Joe the Plumber.”

The group of 50 uncommitted voters should have at least been receptive to McCain—Republicans and Independents outnumbered Democrats in the group by almost 4 to 1, and they started the evening with much warmer responses to McCain than to his Democratic opponent, Barack Obama. But by the time it was all over, so few of them had declared their support for McCain that there weren’t enough for Greenberg to separate them into a post-debate focus group. Meanwhile, the Obama supporters had to assemble in two different rooms to keep their discussion groups manageable.

Half of the voters thought that Obama “won” the debate, with 24% giving McCain the victory and 26% seeing no clear winner. As with previous debates, however, the divergent personal reactions to the candidates were most striking. And those ultimately may end up defining the campaign for McCain. He emerged from the Republican field as the candidate who was least associated with the damaged GOP brand, the one least able to be tied to George W. Bush, and he has largely maintained that image: a large plurality (40%) see McCain as a maverick, and over the course of the evening there was a 52-point shift on the question of whether McCain offered a different path than Bush.

Yet if McCain has proved resistant to the Obama campaign’s mantra that he would be “More of the Same,” the results of focus groups over the past month seem to show that he has hurt his own chances of winning the White House by misreading the emotional mood of the country. Once again, the focus group dials dove whenever McCain went on the attack, particularly when he talked about Bill Ayers and ACORN in what turned out to be the longest segment of the evening. The audience that started out giving McCain a 54/24 favorability rating (and, incidentally, liked Sarah Palin a lot more than Joe Biden, with +6 and -20 splits) ended up almost evenly divided between warm and cool feelings toward him (50/48).

Obama started off with a lower, and divided, favorability rating (42/42) that climbed to 72/22 after 90 minutes. “Boring” and “zzzzz” were popular reviews of Obama’s performance from blogosphere pundits, but apparently the people have had enough excitement watching the market plummet and are in the mood for some mellowness.

McCain’s strongest area of the night was the issue of energy independence. The dial responses were highest for his comments in that area, and McCain eliminated Obama’s 18-point advantage on the issue by the end of the debate. He also continues to hold strong advantages as the candidate most trusted to handle national security and foreign policy issues, even though the final debate was mostly focused on domestic questions. And McCain is still the candidate voters are most likely to see as a “strong leader,” although his 36-point lead on that issue shrank to 22 over the course of the evening.

One of the most significant factors in the campaign may end up being Obama’s fundraising, which he has used to run ads across the country criticizing McCain’s health care plan. The undecided voters started the evening preferring Obama’s approach 54 to 4. McCain won over an additional 14% of them in the debate while Obama’s number remained unchanged, but the 40-point gap on a key issue is still hurting the Republican candidate.

As for Obama, he continued to win over undecided voters on critical questions: Does he have what it takes to be president? A 38/50 split flipped to 56/34. Can voters trust him to make the right decisions? Obama rose from 30/50 to 48/40. Is he best equipped to handle the economic crisis? Voters split evenly between the two candidates at the start preferred Obama by 30 points by the end of the night.

Perhaps most significant was Obama’s success in reassuring voters that he understands who they are and what matters to them. He went from a 16-point to a 24-point advantage on “Is he on your side?” and made similar gains on the question of whether he would “bring the right kind of change,” from a 18 to 38-point advantage. And while the two candidates were even on the question of “who shares your values?” at the beginning of the debate, Obama held a 24-point lead by the end.

The “values” undecided voters seem to have in mind this year seem a long way from the focus on abortion and gay marriage in the 2004 campaign. Voters reacted most positively to Obama’s remarks during the segment on education that parents needed to take personal responsibility to improve their children’s learning environments—Greenberg noted that the dials went up to 80, the highest score of the night. Similarly, women reacted particularly well to his comments on abortion, but it was his suggestion that there could be common ground in supporting policies to reduce the rate of unintended pregnancies that really spiked the dials in CNN’s focus group of undecided Ohio voters.

Soon enough we’ll have election results instead of focus group responses to tell us which candidate will move into the White House in January. The number of voters who remain uncommitted dwindles by the day. John McCain’s challenge in the last three weeks of the campaign is to make sure that they don’t break the way these Denver voters did. He’d better hope that Joe the Plumber has a lot of friends. ++

McCain’s last stand
The Republican senator’s final debate performance was marked by oddball characters and marginal attacks, as hopes of his political resurrection appeared to fade.
Walter Shapiro, Salon
Oct. 16, 2008

What may well have been the final debate of John McCain’s political career featured oddball characters who seemed like refugees from Seseme Street – Joe the Plumber (an everyman from Ohio), Senator Government (a Freudian slip moniker for Barack Obama) and a sometimes petulant 72-year-old Republican trying to be Mac the Knife. While instant debate verdicts are always suspect, there was scant evidence that McCain, despite a strong showing during the first 45 minutes of the debate, landed a haymaker at Hofstra. As the debate clock wound down Wednesday night, along with McCain’s hopes of political resurrection, the Arizona Republican ended by arguing with Obama over a near-irrelevant issue at a time of economic crisis — school vouchers.

The opening that McCain had been craving came early in the evening when Obama pointedly contrasted the Bill Clinton economic record (a budget surplus) with the scorecard on George W. Bush (doubling the national debt in eight years). “Sen. Obama, I am not President Bush,” McCain declared. “If you wanted to run against President Bush, you should have run four years ago. I’m going to give a new direction to this economy in this country.” McCain, to his credit, delivered the obviously rehearsed lines with conviction. But the Arizona senator then spoiled the moment by immediately veering off to talk about Obama’s tax votes in Congress and the “completely out of control” budget.

Historians of the angry autumn of ‘08, when 700-point drops in the Dow-Jones average became the new normal, will undoubtedly be fascinated to discover that Bill Ayers — that blast-from-the-past 1960s Weatherman — received far more debate airtime than Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. (Neither Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke nor his predecessor Alan Greenspan was ever mentioned, but, hey, who cares about the financial system anyway?) McCain, whose TV ads refer to Ayers more often than earmarks, backed into the subject gingerly, saying, “I don’t care about an old washed-up terrorist.” But seconds later, McCain was channeling his inner Richard Nixon as he demanded to know “the full extent of that relationship” between Obama and Ayers. (Obama’s response was a reprise of his oft-stated position that he and Ayers had merely served on foundation boards together in Chicago.)

This was not a debate in which Obama had many lines destined for the sound-bite hall of fame, but the Democratic nominee did pull off an impressive smile of astonishment on the split-screen TV picture as McCain, without missing a beat, switched from berating Ayers to claiming “my campaign is about getting this economy back on track.” Obama, who long ago learned that there is never a moment during a debate when a camera is not ready to record his expression, also contributed an amused laugh when McCain hyperbolically claimed that the left-leaning independent voter-registration group, ACORN, was on the verge “of destroying the fabric of democracy.” Leading in the polls, with all the momentum going his way, Obama accomplished his simple but vital mission on Wednesday night – don’t make any blunders.

In late September, before the first debate, Bill McInturff, a McCain pollster, predicted that the contours of the race would not be known until a few days after the final debate when public opinion finally had a chance to settle. That is why McCain’s fate will probably be dictated by whether the weekend polls tighten or Obama continues to flirt with a double-digit lead in the national surveys and state-by-state scenarios that could give him as many as 350 electoral votes. Unless McCain makes up ground quickly from either Wednesday’s debate (unlikely but possible) or the simple force of gravity (Obama’s outlandish lead comes back to earth), the Republican nominee will soon be facing a stark choice. Does he want to go out railing about Ayers and ACORN, or does he want to step back and play out his string as a principled conservative, the reputation he held before this down-and-dirty campaign?

Sitting with Obama at the round table at Hofstra — actually it looked more like an old-fashioned partner’s desk — McCain tried to play it both ways. For all of his attack lines, there were also moments when viewers could glimpse the other McCain, the senator who excelled at working with Democrats. Asked about Supreme Court appointments, McCain spoke about his opposition to “litmus tests” and his votes to confirm Clinton appointees Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer. But then McCain, perhaps remembering that it requires more than Sarah Palin to appease the conservative base, added that his search for “the best people in the world” would probably not include “someone who supported Roe v. Wade.”

For his part, Obama carefully avoided spelling out any new detail about the real policy decisions that would confront him on Jan. 20, 2009, if the current polls hold up. Asked about the choice between expanding benefits and controlling healthcare costs as the federal deficit spirals out of control, Obama said, “We’ve got to do both — and that’s exactly what my plan does.” Asked about whether American schools require more money or more reform, Obama gave the same both-sides-now answer when he said, “Now, typically, what’s happened is that there’s been a debate between more money or reform, and I think we need both.”

All three 2008 presidential debates (not to mention the Palin-dominated circus) had a time-warp quality about them. There was never a sustained discussion by either candidate about how the Wall Street whirlpool had totally transformed the domestic agenda of the next president. At a point when the government is taking ownership stakes in the nation’s leading banks, it seemed comically irrelevant to have an old-fashioned political scrap over whether Obama’s plans would put Joe the Plumber in a higher tax bracket. Somehow the phrase “class warfare” brandished by McCain takes on a new meaning when Wall Street gamesmanship appears to have thrown the entire economy into a severe recession.

Obama met the now-famous Joe the Plumber (aka Joe Wurzelbacher) in Springfield Township, Ohio, earlier this week as he was shaking hands between rounds of debate prep.

Wurzelbacher challenged Obama on his tax plan so vigorously that Obama said afterward, “I’ve got to go prepare for this debate, but that was pretty good practice.” It was practice that came in handy Wednesday night as Obama probably deprived McCain of his best last chance to turn Campaign 2008 back into a horse race. ++

The Deal, Sealed?
Timothy Egan, NYT
October 16, 2008

This was the one where Bill Ayers finally came up. The “old, washed up terrorist” in John McCain’s words, who went from entitled brat with bomb fantasies to Chicagoan of the year to Willie Horton with an earring and a PhD.

The braying kooks on the far right demanded it. Sarah Palin threw slabs of Ayers’ sirloin to angry crowds, delivered in that crinkly-nosed, oh-honey-I-shrunk-the-kids style. And even Senator Obama said as much, with his say-it-to-my-face taunt of last week.

And when, a half hour or so into the third and most riveting of the three presidential debates, it finally came up — relieving us for a moment from a fast-escalating panderfest to Joe the Plumber — it fell flat.

At a time when a vanquished conservative president is nationalizing the banking system as his closing act, when millions of American lives are going off financial cliffs, when two wars strain the very thought of Pax Americana, we got this media-fed moment on Bill Ayers.

“We need to know the full extent of that relationship,” said McCain. Oooooh! That’ll change the election.

“It says more about your campaign than it does about me,” Obama replied, professorial as ever.

And that was it. Little wonder that independent voters in CNN’s flash poll favored Obama 57 percent to 31.

McCain, though much better on Wednesday night than he was in the first two debates, looked pained, pickled along with his honor. Some of the reaction shots made Bob Dole at his grumpiest look botoxed into serenity by comparison.

McCain hasn’t been “McNasty” since he was a cadet with that nickname, and it doesn’t suit him in old age. He tried Ayers. He tried ACORN. He even tried infanticide.

But you can tell McCain wants his reputation back; he wants out of this angry old man role. Being the designated white guy for Fox News does not suit him.

His best indignant moment — a line that may follow him to his grave, with many permutations of irony inherent in the words — was his retort: “I am not President Bush.”

But with that cleared up, McCain went back to some of his obscure obsessions, including yet another mention of that overhead projector that Obama helped to get some museum in Chicago. Imagine if Herbert Hoover, debating Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 at the depth of the Great Depression, kept dwelling on the problem with university chalkboards, and some old sympathizer with Sacco and Vanzetti.

In the first debate, John McCain wouldn’t look his rival in the face. In the second debate, he wouldn’t address him by his name — “that one,” as the t-shirts now proclaim.

And in the third debate, he scuffed and huffed, but ended up with a somewhat muddled conversation with a plumber. Little wonder, in the ideological wilderness of 2008, a time when McCain’s dark-side supporters want him to stay dirty, that McCain chose to dwell on a guy who spends a lot of time with his head in the toilet.

Near the end of the debate, McCain was calling him “my good friend, Joe.” And then, in sarcasm, he said, “Hey, Joe, congratulations! You’re rich!” Huh?

But absent was a central, overarching reason for electing the old guy. And as harsh as that sounds, Americans will usually choose young over old, unless young looks callow and empty.

Sometime in the next month or so the real John McCain will reappear. We’ll all welcome back a man of self-deprecating dignity. And we’ll say good riddance to the man who gave us an unqualified running mate with a witch doctor and a pathological inability to tell the truth about herself.

So, forget about radical chic or any other nonsense defining this election. The fantasy of the right has been put to rest. In this year of living dangerously — 20 days that are shaking the world — personal attacks don’t work, as innumerable polls showed in the last week.

And forget about the Bradley Effect, lying about race. We should be looking at the Reagan Effect: did Obama look like a president, as Ronald Reagan had to in the last week of the campaign to unseat Jimmy Carter?

History showed one thing in 1980. It’ll show the same in 2008. ++

What If God Loses the Election?
David Swanson, OpEdNews
10/15/08

God wants John McCain to win the election. I know because I hung out with a bunch of his supporters at a Sarah Palin rally on Monday and they told me. But it looks very likely that McCain will actually lose the election. Which raises the obvious question: If God doesn’t get what he wants, will he take his toys and go home? Please?

Wouldn’t God be happier working his wonders in private individual lives where he’s better able to have his way? When things go wrong there, it’s because God has a bigger purpose that we can’t understand because we’re the sort of creatures who were dumb enough to believe in him in the first place.

But when God lets a socialist darkie who pals around with terrorists and supports infanticide take the reins of the global empire in the only world he ever created, and which he spent a full six days on without bathroom breaks, surely it’s time the deity began looking for alternative employment.

Am I dreaming the impossible, or might we not use the upcoming electoral defeat of the theocrats as an opportunity to politely ask God to stay out of our government? Might we be able to explain to the shrinking sect of trickledowners, warmongers, racists, and corporatists that if they want to be taken seriously in American public life they have to stop glorifying ignorance and subservience and exhibit some signs of contact with thought or knowledge?

Just an idea.

When you watch this video [open link] of these people explaining how they think, it’s tempting to conclude that they mean well and are trying to get it right but are just misinformed, just have some facts wrong, have just watched too much Fox and don’t know these sorts of things. But if you pry just a little further, you discover that they don’t want to know. They aren’t prepared to consider that their nation might have ever done anything cruel. They don’t want to consider the possibility that we might be responsible for any suffering or responsible for failing to alleviate it. They aren’t open to considering that some of the scary things they’ve been told have been told for the purpose of scaring them, that some of the myths they’ve been told about the need to enrich the wealthy have been told purely to enrich the wealthy. They’re deeply frightened, even before turning on Fox, and they have never imagined that they themselves might have played any small role in anything that’s ever gone wrong in the world. Why should they when there are so many people to blame who have darker skin and funny names and like to kiss people with whom they cannot procreate?

So here’s my proposal: We need to make perfectly clear to these people that they can never again impose their bigoted bronze age views on the rest of us through our democratic republic. They can play with their fairytale action figures at home, while we work on providing a system of education and public communications that will make it far less likely that their grandchildren will ever be so pathetically stupid and insecure. ++

bonus

Obama’s Moment
The Democratic nominee for president talks about how George W. Bush screwed up, why John McCain turned ugly and what he’s learned from Bill Clinton.
ERIC BATES, Rolling Stone
Oct 30, 2008

It’s the morning after the vice presidential debate, and Barack Obama strides onto the football field at Abington Senior High School in suburban Philadelphia as Bruce Springsteen’s “The Rising” rings out over the loudspeakers. The bleachers on both sides of the field are packed with cheering students and their parents, and the crowd has spread out onto the lawns beyond the goal posts. Abington is one of the swing districts where the presidential race will be decided on November 4th. It’s overwhelmingly white and solidly middle-class, and it just barely favored Hillary Clinton over Obama in the primaries. It’s a place that Obama needs to win this time around if he wants to take Pennsylvania, and he knows it: He plans to return to Philadelphia in a week for more campaigning.

No matter what you think of Obama, it’s impossible not to recognize that he represents a historic turning point in American politics — and that the momentum of the race has tilted sharply in his favor in recent weeks. Part of the shift, of course, is due to the catastrophic meltdown on Wall Street. Part of it is due to the equally impressive meltdown of John McCain: his erratic and reckless mishandling of the crisis, his desperate unleashing of the same kind of smear campaign he has long condemned. But most of the credit goes to Obama himself, to his sure-footedness as a candidate and a leader. As we wrote in our endorsement of him seven months ago, “Obama has emerged by displaying precisely the kind of character and judgment we need in a president: renouncing the politics of fear, speaking frankly on the most pressing issues facing the country and sticking to his principles.”

Speaking to the crowd in Abington, Obama drives those principles home with a sense of outrage. “The financial crisis,” he declares, “is a direct result of the greed and irresponsibility that has dominated Washington and Wall Street for years.” It is an economic philosophy, he adds, that John McCain has staunchly supported during his 26 years in Congress — opposing common-sense regulation, insisting that “the market is king” and backing massive tax breaks for the wealthy. “He hasn’t been getting tough on CEOs!” Obama shouts, departing from his stump speech. “He hasn’t been getting tough on Wall Street! Suddenly a crisis comes and the polls change and he’s out there talkin’ like Jesse Jackson. Come on!”

Americans may not be taking to the streets over the financial crisis, but they are taking to the streets for Obama. After he finishes his speech and his motorcade leaves the football field, lights flashing, people spill out onto the sidewalks for miles to catch a glimpse of him as he passes. There are salesmen cheering in front of a Ford dealership, workers in blue uniforms waving outside a sewage-supply company, secretaries holding signs, parents holding children. At an elementary school, teachers have gathered a hundred students on the lawn, row after row of five- and six-year-olds, squirming impatiently, hands clasped in their laps. Unable to resist, Obama halts the motorcade and walks over to say hello. The kids go nuts — screaming and running in circles and literally bumping into one another — as Obama flashes a wide smile, surrounded by a sea of tiny hands.

Later, sitting in the front section of his chartered campaign plane, Obama looks weary. “I’m beat,” he says. He is on his way home to Chicago, to celebrate his 16th wedding anniversary with Michelle. During the flight, he takes a half-hour to speak with Rolling Stone about the final days of this historic race — and what is at stake for America.
______

It’s January 20th. You take office. Look at what you’re confronting: the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression, the climate heating up faster than anyone imagined, dangerous nuclear instability around the world…

Two wars. Yeah, we got some problems.

Do you still want the job?

I tell you what — now is the time, I think, to want the job. Because this is going to be a transitional moment for the United States. We have these moments periodically. Obviously, I wish that the Bush administration had not run things into the ground so bad, but no matter what, we would have had some big decisions to make. We have a big decision to make about our energy. We have a big decision to make about health care. We have a big decision to make about how do we revamp our education system to compete in a global economy. We have a big decision to make about our foreign policy and how we deal with transnational threats like terrorism, climate change — eventually pandemic, refugee flows, genocide.

So how do you prioritize with so many explosive crises occurring all at once?

No matter what, there’s going to be the need for a paradigm shift. The problem is that Bush has left us with very few resources to deal with these issues, and the economy’s in a weakened state. But I decided to run this time — which was relatively early in comparison to some other presidents, or other candidates — precisely because I thought the skills I have might be important at this time. So I welcome the challenge, and I think America can rise to it.

What makes you better prepared than John McCain to handle a crisis — whether it’s a terrorist attack, a financial meltdown or a natural disaster?

We’ve had two significant moments where the judgment of a commander in chief would have to be applied in a very deliberate fashion. One is the war in Iraq, and the other is what’s happened just over the last three and a half weeks on Wall Street. In both instances, what you’ve seen is John McCain being impulsive, not getting all the information that he needs, surrounding himself with people who are predisposed to agreeing with him. And as a consequence, I think he’s made bad judgments. In Iraq he embraced a theory of preventive war without thinking through all the consequences. He embraced the intelligence that was patently bad, and we’re suffering the consequences of it. And just over the last three and a half weeks, he’s gone from being always for deregulation to now presenting himself as this champion of regulatory toughness. He’s gone from the economy being fundamentally sound to two hours later saying that we’re in crisis. I don’t get a sense that that kind of approach is what’s going to be needed right now. I think we need somebody who is able to see all sides of an argument, bring the best people together, evaluate all our options, make decisive decisions, correct those decisions when they’re not working out, and has a strategic sense or a vision of where the country needs to go — who’s not simply reacting all the time or thinking tactically.

The campaign has taken a nasty turn in the past few weeks. Has it changed your opinion of McCain personally, the way he’s run his campaign?

I just think he wants to win. And I think he’s decided that the environment’s not a good one for Republicans, so he’s going to do what he thinks is necessary. I am surprised that he would hire people who are connected to the same kind of destructive politics that Bush directed at him in 2000.

Were you disturbed by the disdain he exhibited toward you during the first debate?

No. I think that’s a sign that we must be doing pretty well.

Tell me your reaction when you first heard that he had picked Sarah Palin as his running mate.

I didn’t know her, so it was a surprise decision. Look, you have to give them credit: It obviously energized the conservative wing of the party. And that’s worth something in politics.

Weren’t you shocked, at least a little, by the choice of someone with no real experience on the national stage?

As I said, we didn’t know her, so we were surprised. It wasn’t anticipated.

Speaking of running mates, why didn’t you pick Hillary? There are still a lot of people out there who wish you had.

Look, Hillary was on my shortlist. She is an extraordinary public servant, and she’s going to be a great ally in years to come, should I be fortunate enough to be elected. I thought that the skill set that Joe Biden has — his temperament, the relationship we had built on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — made him a great fit at this time. But Hillary’s extraordinary as well.

You had lunch with Bill Clinton in September. What was that like? Was it awkward trying to patch up what had become a very public relationship?

You know, it wasn’t awkward at all, partly because Bill Clinton’s as charming a person as there is. Although I think that…well, I can just speak for myself. I never felt awkward or uncomfortable with the Clintons. And I think that some of the accusations leveled at him by some of my supporters were probably unfair. The notion that, for example, when he said, “This is a fairy tale” — that that was a racial remark. I didn’t think that was a racial remark. I think he was questioning my opposition to the war in Iraq. So he was factually wrong, and it deserved to be corrected. But one of the things I’ve discovered over the last 21 months is that I don’t take things too personally.

Is there anything you feel you can learn from him, as a candidate and as a president?

Oh, I’ve already learned a lot from him. Bill Clinton, I think, understood earlier than most Democrats the need to correct for some of the excesses of the late Sixties and early Seventies, both in terms of our fiscal policies and our cultural posture toward Middle America. And he was right about that. Democrats, progressives, liberals — whatever you want to call them — should never make any apologies for championing women’s rights and civil rights, for insisting on greater accountability in government, for championing civil liberties. But some of the caricatures of the left as being out of touch, snotty, self-righteous — there have been times when those caricatures were justified. And Bill Clinton did a lot to make Democrats seem like they were in touch with the ordinary aspirations of a great number of Americans. That, I think, stopped the hemorrhaging of independent voters and Reagan Democrats into the Republican Party, and gave us the space and the opportunity to start reaching out to them. So I’m still in debt to Bill Clinton for what he accomplished.

Let’s talk about your role in the campaign’s ad strategy. Every ad begins or ends with your voice saying, “I’m Barack Obama, and I approve this message.” Do you suggest ads yourself? And have there been ones you rejected?

There are times when I suggest a basic framework for an ad. There are definitely ads that I’ve rejected. There are some ads that I’m happier with than others.

Can you give me an example of one that was your idea?

We’re now running two-minute ads focused on the economy. The way it worked was, I suggested, “We need to get above the back and forth of the daily negative ads that both campaigns have been running.” I felt that explaining to the American people in a direct way what we are gonna do about the economy, or what we would do about taxes, could be useful to break through the clutter, if it was done differently. Then David Plouffe, our campaign manager, said, “Why don’t we do a two-minute ad? Let’s buy the time and see how it does.” And I think those ads have actually been very successful during a critical time when people are anxious and nervous about the state of the economy. There’s some sense that this guy’s speaking directly to me, and he’s explaining to me in clear language what exactly he intends to do.

In the last two elections, the Republicans worked to suppress the vote, especially in Democratic precincts. Reporting by Bobby Kennedy in Rolling Stone has raised questions about whether the Republicans stole the 2004 election in Ohio. Are you worried about those kinds of tactics this time? And what are you doing in advance to keep that from happening?

Without leveling any accusations about past misdeeds, I can tell you that we’re paying a lot of attention to how the election a month from now is going to take place. We’ve got an extraordinary team of lawyers in every battleground state — hundreds of them — fanning out across these states. A lot of the work is actually being done now: We have organized such a surge in voter registration that there were clerks having difficulty processing the registration, and there was some question as to legal requirements for them to hire more clerks. So there’s already been a lot of work done, and I feel pretty confident that if there are any shenanigans out there that we’ll be on top of them.

But John Kerry said the same thing in 2004. Lawyers are mainly useful after the fact, when it’s too late. Is there anything you can do before the fact to keep the vote from being tampered with?

Well, in Ohio the thing we did was make sure there was a Democratic secretary of state.

Replacing Kenneth Blackwell, the Republican who was in charge in 2004.

Right.

You’ve talked about the need for Washington to “stop acting like an industry advocate and start acting like a public advocate.” Yet your campaign donors include executives of some of the most troubled financial companies, like Lehman Brothers. You’ve also accepted more money from Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae than any senator except Chris Dodd, who chairs the Senate Banking Committee…

Let me just interrupt there. We’ve raised so much more money than anybody that these kinds of statistics can be misleading. I don’t take money from lobbyists. None of the lobbyists for these industries has organized any fundraisers specifically for me. It’s not as if we had a Lehman Brothers fundraiser or what have you.

You’re not out on their yacht, in other words.

Yeah. What happens is that people have sent us a lot of money. It was interesting with the oil companies, for example. When I talked about how John McCain met with oil company executives and reversed himself on offshore drilling, and that same week raised a whole bunch of money from oil executives, they came back and said, “Well, you’ve raised all this money from oil companies, too.” What they’re doing there is they’re counting the $25 check from some secretary who works in a back office somewhere. Cumulatively, it ends up looking like a lot of money. But there is a very big difference between us getting money from employees of all sorts of industries and us getting bundled big checks from industry lobbyists, which we never do.

For me, the problem isn’t that there’s a quid pro quo, or even access that much. It was interesting — during my U.S. Senate career, I think I’ve actually met with industry lobbyists…I can remember maybe two times. Most of the time you’ve got this staff buffer — they’re meeting with the lobbyists, and then they bring me issues. I don’t have relationships with the lobbyists, I don’t know them. I’m not really a Washington guy. I haven’t done the cocktail circuit — that’s not how I’ve organized my fundraising.

Now, does that make me completely pure? No. Because the fact of the matter is, there is a danger that if you’re spending a lot of time on fundraising, you’re spending time with the one percent of the population that can afford to write you a check. And you may end up losing touch with what ordinary folks are going through. That’s why the model that we’ve built where huge amounts of money are raised in small increments has done two things. One is, it means that they have ownership over the campaign. The other is that it frees me up from having to do a lot of big-dollar fundraisers. I’ve maybe done [pauses]…10 in the last two or three months? Don’t hold me perfectly to that, but I actually don’t spend much time on fundraising, and I don’t really know, most of the time, who is writing checks.

When do you see us being completely out of Iraq — no troops, no bases, nothing beyond an ordinary presence?

I envision us having combat troops out in 16 months. Prosecuting a war as we currently understand it, I anticipate us being finished with that in 2010. The time frame for having no residual troops, no trainers, no strike forces to go after terrorists that may pop up again in Iraq — that is very hard to anticipate, because we just don’t know what the situation is going to be.

Afghanistan: How do you make a course correction without just throwing more troops at the situation? Won’t more troops just give the Taliban more targets and escalate the violence?

I think you have to have what we should have had in the first place: a much better plan for rebuilding the country, a much better plan for making the apparatus of the state functional, a much better plan to replace poppy crops in Afghanistan and, probably the most important thing, a much better plan to deal with Pakistan.

It is going to be difficult for us to execute a long-term success in Afghanistan if the northwest provinces of Pakistan continue to serve as safe havens for Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

At your campaign stop this morning at a high school in Pennsylvania, you made what you called a “solemn vow to the young people of America” that you will make sure they can afford to go to college — “no ifs, ands or buts.” How will you do that in a way that doesn’t simply add to the crushing debt that students and their families already take on in the form of student loans?

We’re going to give a $4,000 tuition credit to every student, every year, in exchange for a minimum of 100 hours of community service a year. That’s above and beyond the additional scholarships we’re offering for people who are willing to teach, nurses — there are certain categories and occupations where we have a shortage, so there will be targeted scholarships there. But everybody would be eligible for this $4,000 tuition credit, which covers pretty much all of the cost of community college and about two-thirds of the cost of a public college or university. In combination with Pell grants and other resources, we can at least drastically reduce the amount of debt that young people are accumulating. One of the ironic things about the war in Iraq, as well as this Treasury rescue plan, is that it reminds us that when we feel a sense of urgency about something, we spend an awful lot of money. And the amount of money required to educate every child and send them to college pales in comparison to the amount of money that we’re spending on things that could have been avoided had we made better decisions.

Looking back over the past eight years, what’s the thing that Bush screwed up the worst?

I think Iraq has to rank number one. Although the economy and his failure, utterly, to anticipate the dangers of such a highly leveraged Wall Street, combined with such a highly leveraged federal government, combined with such highly leveraged consumers, at a time when we knew that baby boomers are about to retire and we need to start storing the acorns for the winter — it’s breathtaking. The level of irresponsibility that’s taken place over the last eight years is breathtaking.

What’s going to be the hardest part of his legacy for you to undo?

The budget. We are going to be in a massive hole. Now, if this rescue package is structured properly and the market recovers, it is possible that it doesn’t end up costing us anywhere close to $700 billion — we might even make money on it. That was true with the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation during the New Deal, which refinanced homes to prevent foreclosure. We’re not putting up $700 billion without getting a return. But keep in mind that we did subsidize Bear Stearns, we did subsidize AIG. We’ve already put a lot of money out. We have a half-trillion-dollar deficit.

Even under my Iraq plan, our military is going to have to be reset. National Guards don’t have equipment. The future cost for veterans care will be enormous. So digging ourselves out of the fiscal mess we’re in is going to be a big, big challenge, and it’s going to require some tough decisions that will not always be popular — particularly when there’s going to be a lot of pent-up energy among Democrats. If I win, every member of Congress on the Democratic side, and some on the Republican side, is going to have ideas about pressing needs and worthy programs.
Trying to set some very hard, clear priorities is going to be tough.

Some people criticized President Bush after 9/11 for not asking Americans for a period of shared sacrifice, like the one the nation went through during World War II. When you spoke about the financial crisis at your campaign stop this morning, you said, “We’re all going to need to sacrifice, because now more than ever, we’re all in this together. I won’t pretend that it’s going to be easy, or that it’s going to come without a cost.” What specifically will you ask of the American people?

Number one, I want to greatly expand our service agenda. Some of that will be formalized in AmeriCorps programs and the expansion of the Peace Corps, but I’d like to see greater volunteerism in general.

The other thing is the whole issue of energy. It’s going to require some very difficult choices. People are going to have to embrace — revel in — the possibilities of a transformed energy economy. Over the long term it will mean a higher standard of living. But in the short term it means doing things we don’t like to do — turn off lights, check your tire gauges, replace your light bulbs. Just being conscious of energy usage in ways other cultures, like Japan, have been for a long time because they’re an island nation and just didn’t have resources.

That can get on people’s nerves, because it’s not what our traditions are like. Jimmy Carter, you’ll recall, had the unfortunate approach of wearing a sweater and telling people to sit in 68-degree rooms. I don’t think it has to be an “eat your peas” moment. It just has to be a consciousness — one that young people already have.

There is a generational element to this. You see in young people a much greater awareness and a certain comfort level with having to think about these things. I even see it in my daughters now, age 10 and seven. If you ask them about what issues they’re concerned about, the environment immediately comes to mind. It’s interesting — that just seeps through the culture in a way that I think bodes well for the future. But one of our challenges is making sure that we can get to that, and stay focused on the future.

Are we in danger of losing the long-term momentum on the environment, given the short-term panic over the financial meltdown?

It doesn’t make it easier.

Today is your 16th wedding anniversary. What did you get Michelle?

I got her a necklace. We’ll see if she likes it. You never know — it’s unpredictable.

You know, there is no official gift like silver or diamonds designated for a 16th anniversary. After 15, it goes to every five years.

So I probably could have gotten away with not giving her anything.

Exactly — you were good until the end of your first term.

Yeah, thanks for the marriage counseling there, buddy [laughs].

Tell me about what you find funny. Is there a comedian out there who captures your sense of humor?

I’ll tell you the guy who these days makes me laugh: Chris Rock. I understand his humor. That doesn’t mean that’s my sense of humor, but it works for me. [Turns to spokesman Robert Gibbs] I don’t know, Gibbs, what do you think? I’m a pretty funny guy.

[Gibbs] We have fun on the road.

When you and the staff tease him, what do you tease him about?

[Gibbs] What do we tease you about? We teased him about this old pair of brown shoes he had for a while.

[Obama] They did. GQ says I’m pretty well-dressed, but Michelle scoffs at this because she sees patches on my pants. These guys finally bought me a new pair of shoes for my birthday.

[Gibbs] We were tired of being seen with him in the other ones.

[Obama] I’m sure that behind my back they tease me about some of my quirks. I tend to be late, although not as late as other politicians. I can get pretty cranky about certain scheduling matters. Like waking up.

If you’re in the White House and could install any one play toy — bowling alley, water polo — what would it be?

Basketball court. If we can get an indoor basketball court, I’d be happy.

Indoor?

Yeah, just because the weather’s kind of fickle in Washington.

In what way will people underestimate you as president?

[Long pause] Because I tend to be a pretty courteous person and I don’t lose my temper, I think people underestimate my willingness to mix it up. I don’t know if they’ll continue to underestimate that after this campaign, but I think you’ll still get columns saying, “He’s too cool, he’s too soft.” [Laughs] That’s OK, actually.

You like being underestimated in that way.

Yeah. No point in having them see you coming. ++

“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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1 comment October 16th, 2008