A Sign of Desperation

This is exactly the sort of thing the conservative bloggers and pundits want to hear me say. They will see it as a sign of desperation and, in a gleeful feeding frenzy, press on with their lies and deceit. They will see this as a sign that they are winning (which they are). I don't care. I'm pissed off, so I am going to say it Hardly anybody reads this blog anyway.

The other day I was standing on the subway platform and I started to think about the very real possibility that John McCain might be president next year, and made me want to step in front of the next train that went by. The thought of a McCain presidency, and more to the point of an Obama defeat, made me want to kill myself.

I am not stupid enough to believe, as many of my liberal brethren do, that Barack Obama can't lose, that John McCain is a tired old man, or that Sarah Palin is a light weight who can simply be mocked and dismissed. That is stupid thinking. All the momentum is on McCain's side now. 53% of white women are now backing him, most of them due to Sarah Palin (a number I'm surprised at, frankly, but that's the only thing surprising me about this so far). National polls have McCain and Obama tied at 46% This election that was supposed to be firmly in the bag is slipping away.

So let me say what's on my mind: if Barack Obama can't get elected president right now, in this environment, in this country, then there is no hope for the future of humanity. None. I don't know if I can handle John McCain winning. I mean I don't know if I can survive it or if life would be worth living after that, after we push our country so far down into this Orwellian nightmare we are living in that there will be likely no chance we will ever wake up. It's the end of decency and humanity and, let's face it, of the world.

I don't blithely dismiss people who will vote for McCain and Palin as stupid or cynical the way Bill Maher does. The conservatives I know and love are all smart. They know that Palin doesn't know much about foreign policy or the Bush Doctrine. They know she requested millions of dollars in earmarks this year alone. They simply don't care. It's not on their priority list. They want someone who will take on what they see as the big enemies: terrorists and liberals, and the details don't matter. This is not an election, it is the culture war, and what they are aiming at is the extermination of me and the destruction of everything I believe in. This is indeed a fight for the survival of what is good in the world.

They also don't care about the lies, the deception, the double speak, or the pure unmitigated evil coming out of McCain's campaign right now. It doesn't matter a bit. McCain staffers, right up to his campaign manager, have come right out and said that they don't care about issues, that they are waging a war of personality. Truth means nothing. When confronted by reporters with the lies they have been spreading in press releases and in campaign adds recently, the drivers of the Straight Talk Express have replied with a collective "So What." Every time somebody examines the candidates' records, asks about the issues, or simply tells the truth, they are immediately attacked as being part of a liberal media elite. One thing Janine Garafolo is right about is that for the Republicans to be accusing anybody of dirty tricks and slime tactics is the height of hypocrisy, since they have relied on nothing but for the past eight years.

Why, oh why, did it take a session on The View, of all places, for John McCain to get put on the spot, asked real questions about his stand on the issues, and be called to task for his lies? Whoopie Goldberg asked him what he meant when he said he wanted to appoint strict constructionists to the Supreme Court, and he said he wanted judges who would view the constitution the way the founding fathers did, Whoopie said "Should I be worried about being a slave, about being returned to slavery? We had to change the constitution." McCain, as usual, had no response. Barbara Walters (whom people seem to forget was once the top journalist on television) pressed him to admit that he want's Roe v. Wade overturned, and he finally admitted that he thought it was a bad decision (and got booed). Then Joy Behar called him on two of his attack adds against Senator Obama, saying "those ads were untrue. They were lies."

Two points here: none of this matters. It was The View, and McCain's supporters have shown again and again that they don't care much about the truth. But why haven't other reporters had the opportunity to grill McCain on his campaign's lies?

Actually, the reason is simple: They haven't had the opportunity. In order to shield him from reporters' questions, McCain hasn been avoiding press conferences. He hasn't had a meaningful one since before the Democratic National Convention other than the introduction of Sarah Palin (and I am not sure if he took questions then). His campaign has been protecting him from having to answer for himself. They think the media is biased so they are going to take thier (unexamined, untruthful) case directly to the people. He used to sit in the back of his bus with reporters and talk about any issue they wanted to talk about. Not any more. After a reporter asked him in July to comment on the fact that Viagra is covered by Meidcare but birth control is not (he voted against bills in 2003 and 2005 that would have required birth control coverage) reporters were essentially kicked off the bus. There is no more talk at all on the straight talk express. One McCain staffer was very clear on the subject, saying they are now running an aggressive, dirty campaign because they tried running a clean campaign and had to talk about Viagra. The McCain camp saw that as an un fair "gotcha" kind of moment--as if a question about healthcare policy, how the candidate voted on health care policy, and an issue that is extremely important to women all over the country is somehow unfair. THE NERVE OF THESE ASSHOLES!!!!!!!!!!

What is comes down to is this: they are no longer even pretending. There is no more straight talk express. They are openly, laughingly, declaring that they are not going to talk about the issues and are simply going to lie and swift-boat their way into the election. They are mean, venal evil people, and 46% of the American public doesn't seem to care!

And it will work. They know another truth they don't really want to talk about. Chuck Todd points out there there is clearly a race element working against Obama in the campaign that will put him at a seven point disadvantage on election day. He illustrates this by looking at Wisconsin and Michigan, two states where Obama should be doing better, states that John Kerry won and where democrats and democratic issues are well received. Among the 12% of undecided voters in these states, there is a large number of them who are looking at Obama and shying away. These are people who support the Democrats, who believe the country is going in the wrong direction, who are opposed to the war, who are voting the democratic ticket right down the line for congress, state elections, and the senate. But when it comes to Obama they can't bring themselves to pull the trigger. They agree with every policy he has outlined but they still can't bring themselves to vote for him. You might say "well, he just hasn't sold himself well enough," but that would be a ridiculous statement. If there is one thing Obama has done better than anyone else in this campaign it is sell himself. You could say that they have been confused by all the negative campaigning and lies about Obama that have come out of the right-wing slime machine (and which Hillary's people contributed to), about him being a black nationalist, about him not being Christian, about him having three Muslim names, and you'd be right: but all of those things have a racist element to them. I've said all along that Obama would have to get an extra ten percent to beat the hidden racism among some white voters, and now it looks like he won't get it. Chuck Todd says that Obama needs to have at least 48% in battle ground states on the Sunday before the election to combat the racism factor.

All of which leads me back to where I started: this is no longer an election about ideas. It has once again been turned into a culture war: small town Christian values against all of us big city elitists (and what is more big city and elite than a black man who was a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago?). They are somehow managing to convince people that a man who grew up with a single mother and lived on food stamps is more of an elitist than the guy with nine (and yes it's nine, not seven) houses. Lies! Lies! Lies! Let's face it, this guy who went to Columbia and Harvard is already at a disadvantage. But in spite of the fact that he was raised in a white family with a white suburban upbringing, he is seen as a mysterious, dangerous, inner-city black dude, a slick and corrupt machine politician right out of some blacksploitation movie in the seventies. Just as the Democratic National Convention represented my America, the real America, not the 1950s Leave It To Beaver all white fantasies of the Republican party, so too Barack Obama represents the real American Dream: a multi-racial man, born in Hawaii to an African dad and an American mom, lived over seas, raised in the heartland, he represents all of America. And could there be anything better for America or the World than an Obama presidency? Nothing else--NOTHING--would do more to raise our status in the world, help to mediate conflicts, or to make us seem less like the great Satan than to have a black man named Obama as our president. And nothing could be better for domestic America than to have someone in office who actually had a plan for health-care and social security and protecting American jobs. NOTHING!!!!!!!!!! But he's got a weird name, he lives in Chicago, and he's never gutted a moose, and, oh yeah, he's black.

Why the Democrats weren't prepared for this I have no idea. The Republicans effectively used gay marriage as a wedge issue last time: why they couldn't see that race, the biggest wedge issue in America, would be the deciding factor in this race is beyond me. If Obama loses it will prove that Dr. King's dream is still a nightmare. It will prove that the best candidate in the race, in the midst of a terrible economic downturn, the one who represents change in a country that hate's the current administration, the one who represents the future instead of the past, the one who is decent and honest and good and true, can't get elected against a war monger who's campaign is packed with lobbyists and who wants to continue the same failed policies of the current moron in chief.

Now imagine if Obama were white.

Let me say this real clearly: it's not that I think people who vote for John McCain are stupid. I don't. I also don't think most of them are racists--just enough to sway the election. I do think--no, I know--that they are wrong, so wrong I have no word to describe it. I thnk their values are warped and perverted. I'm not sure I can accept them any more. This is not a fight about ideas and the future of this country any more. This is about right and wrong, about truth and lies, it is a struggle between good and evil, and anybody who votes for John McCain this year is contributing to evil. Plain and simple. If you vote for John McCain you can no longer be forgiven.

I can't joke or take this lightly any more. It's too serious.

John McCain's School Days

So I had an epiphany the other night. It was during Giuliani’s speech, when he and then the whole crowd of jack-booted minions started laughing at the fact that Barack Obama has been a community organizer in Chicago, and then again when Sarah Palin started mocking that as well. The idea that is was laughable to give up a high-paying career to actually go and help people, to engage in community service and lift people up economically who had been kicked out on their ears when the steel mills closed—this was somehow a joke to the Republicans. They laughed at it and made fun of Obama for it, like they did his Ivy League education. And that’s when it hit me. All of a sudden I was back in the school yard at Riverview Elementary School, where I spent my last semester of grade school after my dad moved us the place where I’d grown up till then. I was being teased and mocked for the things I enjoyed, I was being beaten up and having my face shoved into a pile of dog shit.

That’s my epiphany. This whole republican vs. democrat thing is a high school conflict. It is the jocks vs. the nerds all over again. And it really became obvious with Palin’s nomination.

I suppose there is nothing new here. I am sure I’m not the first person to make this observation, but it all fits so nicely. Sports has always been a very conservative pursuit, but it is much more than that. Look at the way the republicans mock intelligence and denigrate education. Barack Obama has an Ivy League education and it’s treated as un-American. (George W. Bush had an Ivy League education too, but that was something he had to rise above). Barack Obama becomes a community organizer and it’s treated like a joke. It is far too brainy a pursuit. Brainy. Elitist. Football and NASCAR. It all kind of comes together.

In American Nerd: The Story of my People (a book that I didn’t particularly like but which made some interesting points), Benjamin Nugent lays out his angst-ridden childhood as a D&D playing nerd who was constantly harassed and bullied by the jocks of his school. He displays a lot of deep seated anger over how he was treated (and a lot of guilt over the fact that he abandoned his nerdish ways and assimilated in order to stop the beatings). Nugent traces a direct line from Tom Brown’s School Days, which he identifies as the seminal text in the jock/nerd divide, to the Columbine shootings, wherein two nerds finally snapped and took vengeance upon their thuggish tormentors. In Nugent’s angry world, jocks are ignorant bullies and nerds get picked upon for their intelligence. The jocks hate the nerds because they are different, but there’s more to it than that. Nerds value intelligence, something most jocks disdain, and the jocks hate the nerds for being smart.

Just like Republicans and Democrats.

And it doesn’t stop there. Look at the candidates themselves. A skinny, geeky black guy and a wonkish (student) government type on one side, vs. a real man’s man uber-jock and a beauty queen on the other. Seriously, read your T. Roosevelt: war is the ultimate sport, so McCain’s ability to kill people makes him a jock par excellence. Go further. Look at the difference between the two women who represent the Democratic and Republican parties. The one is a totally nerdy student government wonk. She wears those garish pantsuits. Remember back when she got hassled for the plastic head band she wore in her hair? She spouts of statistics and plans and policy as though they actually mean something and are not just a bunch of nerdy numbers that prove what a geek she is. Then look at the other woman. She is a beauty queen. She is true jock: a basketball player who was nicknamed “Sarah Barracuda.” She’s killed a moose. There is no question that this is the jocks vs. the nerds, and the Republicans have nominated the ultimate Jock and Prom Queen ticket (and if it’s true that the presidential election is just a popularity contest, how can they lose?)

But what made it really obvious, what showed clearly the jockishness of the Republican party and laid bare the simple truth of this election, was the rabid, frenzied laughter of the Republican crowd during the Palin and Giuliani speeches, the way the laughed at Barack Obama being a community organizer and coming from Harvard and actually trying to do something productive with his life. As they lapped up and chewed on the red meat the speakers were pitching to them, I suddenly realized that this was the same pompous crowd of popular kids and popular wannabes who stood around and laughed at the nerds on campus as they got tripped, bullied, beaten, stuffed into garbage cans and had their faces pushed into dog shit. This was the schadenfreude of high school kids, now grown and ready to stuff the Democrats back into their lockers with all their Star Trek memorabilia and twenty sided dice.

Of course, that also means that, in the end, the nerds will likely win. The jocks always end up working for the nerds sooner or later. It also means that Barack Obama must be great in bed. You know why. What the Republicans haven’t realized yet, and the Democrats have, is that we are living in a postmodern world. The old hierarchies of Jock/Nerd have disintegrated. Being nerdy is suddenly cool (I thank Bill Gates for this). And that gives the Nerd ticket a big boost come election day.

The nerds will have their revenge.