McCain is not amused

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Whether Sarah Palin thinks Barack called her a pig remains unknown, but “her campaign advisers and those blushing violets around the uber-sensitive John McCain are more offended than nuns in a nudist romp,” according to Matt Frei of the BBC. Indeed, “[t]he governor of Alaska has become a kind of campaign superhero who can morph like liquid mercury,” while Joe Biden “has clearly been swallowed up by the witness protection programme,” as Frei puts it.

The McCain campaign combines utterly shameless lies and false claims with a posture of victimization towards the Obama camp’s attempts to fight back. The logic of McCain’s attacks seems to have nothing to do with expecting that anyone will believe the lies and distortions. They are now so shameless that FactCheck.org has objected to McCain’s use of its information and language. But the point seems to be to rattle Obama, to keep him on the defensive, and above all to avoid an honest debate about issues.

It will be interesting to see what happens as McCain again campaigns by himself, without his running mate by his side playing the adoring little woman. I may be a sexist, but I think Palin’s chief virtue for McCain is that she is a cipher. I think the McCain campaign will strive to maintain this situation, to avoid allowing her to individualize herself very much. The danger in her talking to the press except in a tightly controlled situation is not that she might appear ignorant or foolish but that she might begin to look like her own person, a situation that would immediately diminish her value to McCain, first as the adoring cheerleader for America’s great hero, and second as a person who can be played off against countless female stereotypes to McCain’s advantage. The Washington Post, on today’s editorial page, delivers a serious reproof to McCain over his pretended feminist outrage.

No matter that Mr. McCain used the lipstick-on-a-pig phrase himself, referring to (female) Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s health-care plan, or that (female) former McCain aide Torie Clarke wrote a book with that title. In the heat of a campaign, operatives will pounce on any misstep and play to the referees over any arguable foul. We understand that, and certainly the Obama campaign has not been above such tactics. But this cynical use of the gender card is unusually silly.

The lies in McCain’s current “Original Maverick” video, now the lead at The Official John Mccain YouTube Channel, are also silly.

The Washington Post editorial writers still think McCain is a serious man, but a man who chose his running mate entirely as a political calculation, and a disreputable one at that, a man who comes to believe in his own inflated campaign image and who again and again stands behind lies and distortions regarding his opponent is not a serious man; no more serious, indeed, than a woman who allowed herself to be represented on the cover of Newsweek with a shotgun slung over her shoulder. I didn’t realize until today that the Newsweek cover is likely a deconstruction of this. O tempora, o mores!

pogo redux and other snakes

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“Fore-armed: that’s half a octopus!” If you look at my Comics page, you’ll find some good news about Pogo Possum. There’s an official Pogo website here, as is only right and just. One thing for sure, you won’t find Pogo putting lipstick on a pig.

I’ve been a pogo fan at least since high school when Simple J. Malarkey and the Jack Acid Society delighted us (well, some of us) in my high school civics class. I also loved the strip’s spoofs of the then popular Mickey Spillane crime novels, which dressed Albert the Alligator up in a trench coat. The Wikipedia article on Pogo is actually pretty good.

Pogo’s creator, the late Walt Kelly, once wrote a piece in Atlantic, in which he defended the thesis that all humor involves the enjoyment of pain. I couldn’t find that one quickly, but here’s another that muses about children, noise language, and nonsense (so called). Constantine von Hoffman has called Kelly the first graphic novelist. His 2007 birthday salute to Kelly is worth reading. You can read Kelly’s autobiography at the Kelly Website, together with a good deal else that will delight you if you remember Pogo as I do.

Back where the lipstick meets the pigskin, the McCain campaign has now apparently adopted the big lie as a central strategy. As Michael Kinsley pointed out in a column not too long ago it’s hard, even for reporters, to deal with a big, complicated lie. I would add, especially when the lie is presented shamelessly and succinctly in a TV ad or smoothly and with utmost gravity as in the original swift boat campaign. Here’s one of the most recent McCain swift boaters. You have to admire such shamelessness, in a way.

Of course, they’ve already been caught on this one, though I’ll bet they don’t take it off the air. What I’m wondering is what makes McCain’s strategists think there’s a receptive audience for this kind of stuff that’s large enough to justify the expense. With John Kerry it was the fact that his anti-war activism had always been problematic for many Americans. McCain, generally, is trying to link Obama’s opposition to the war in Iraq unfavorably to protest against Vietnam. But what specifically about Obama makes him vulnerable to the kind of lies contained in this video? Are they perhaps developing some theme other than the now familiar Sarah Palin victim trope?

Perhaps when you’re running a relentlessly negative campaign it’s useful to accuse your opponent of the same thing. Or perhaps what’s worth the expense is keeping Obama off his game, and the public distracted. The wolves are a sleazy touch that may backfire, though — more beautiful than frightening to my eye.

after the conventions

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I was finishing this piece when my current copy of Newsweek slid through the mail slot. As Richard Cohen says in an article I quote down at the end, here: “Oy!” That’s one campy cover. In case you can’t tell from the thumbnail, that’s a shotgun the divine Sarah has slung over her shoulder. And the fine print tells you that Palintology means “The Advanced Study of Sarah Palin and How She Sees the World.” The teaser inside the online edition isn’t much better, juxtaposing a promise to describe “The real Sarah Palin” with a picture of the newly notorious Governor of Alaska seated on a settee with a bearskin draped across the back. One trophy after another. My oh my! But as Barack says, Palin’s bio . . . mother, governor, moose shooter (I guess he would include bear shooter) — that’s cool stuff.

But that isn’t exactly what I meant to write about, though it fits. My argument starts with a Huffington Post piece, in which Dave Winer talks about how George Lakoff explained Barack Obama’s rise last February.

I talked with Lakoff about how the word “liberal” had been destroyed by the right wing, and asked if that was going to be a problem for Obama. He said it wouldn’t, because Obama had figured out how to say what many of us believe, that the values people label with the L-word are actually American values.

It’s no secret that a substantial reason for Obama’s popularity has been his appeal to patriotism and his reclaiming of some of the turf of patriotism for left-leaning politics and policy.

But Obama now trails John McCain 44% to 49% in the latest Gallup Poll, having only recently extended his lead to 50% over 42% for McCain. This isn’t news Obama supporters can afford to discount. According to Gallup analysis, “candidates who lead after the second convention usually remain the leader a month after the convention.” McCain seems to have bet the election on an end run, not only around the issues and his party’s unpopularity, but also around Obama’s success as a patriot and a leader.

Winer had more to say back in February:

We already have more leadership from this man [Obama] who hasn’t even won the Democratic nomination yet than we have from the actual President of the United States. . . . [I]n the last two campaigns, I have exhorted the candidates to use the money they raise to solve important problems, and realize that Obama had done exactly that. He’s uniting us as a country. There’s nothing more important, once we remember that we’re all Americans and that that means something, we can do so much more than when we’re divided by the “wedge issues” of cynical political hacks. We always have had the option to take back our country, now we seem to be doing that.

But the cynical political hacks who are cannily running McCain’s campaign managed to reinsert all the tired wedge issues and also to steal Obama’s big theme and claim it for their guy at the RNC. According to Jonathan Martin and Jim Vandehei at Politico, it worked like this:

. . . [W]hile Obama was busy soft-selling the change portion of his campaign at his convention, McCain was busy stealing it — and busy downplaying the sort of issue-by-issue laundry list Obama delivered in his State of the Union-like acceptance speech.

And, of course, the McCain campaign accomplished this by anointing Sarah Palin, whose wide-eyed cheerleading allows McCain to stand on his own mythic shoulders without appearing to aggrandize himself.

Obama may be right to take on Palin directly, but he certainly shouldn’t be foregrounding her. Arianna Huffington puts it wonderfully when she describes Palin as “a Trojan Moose, concealing four more years of George Bush” and argues that Obama must redirect his campaign away from Palin and “back to a discussion over the issues that really matter.” Says Huffington, “McCain’s real running mate is George Bush and the failed policies of the Republican Party. Even if they are dressed up in a skirt, lipstick, and Tina Fey glasses.” Then Huffington says something even more important, that Obama “needs to show some commander-in-chief skills” and that it wouldn’t hurt if he showed some anger.

I’m not talking about calling Palin out for lying about his record and demeaning community organizing. I’m talking about grabbing the political debate by the throat. The country is already angry about what’s happened over the last seven-plus years — he shouldn’t be afraid to give voice to that anger. Obama has spent years adopting a non-threatening persona; but he can’t let his fear that appearing like an “angry Black man” (a stereotype not-too-subtly fueled by Fox News) will turn off swing voters keep him from channeling the disgust and outrage felt by so many voters –swing and otherwise.

I like “grabbing the political debate by the throat.” I think that might just do it. It isn’t just that Obama is being swift boated, as Richard Cohen points out in today’s Washington Post, in a piece that reviews Obama’s performance on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos. That’s been going on since the primaries. What sounded in the parade of the Republican also-rans, Romney, Huckaby, Thompson, Giuliani, and including Sarah Palin, amongst all of whom it would be hard to find a working brain, was nothing more than ordinary schoolground bullying. One can’t dignify it by giving it too much attention, but as Cohen says, an apparently diffident response sugggests that Obama, “for all his splendid virtues, seems to lack fight.”

I don’t presume to know what Obama should have said when George Stephanopoulos asked him what he was thinking when Rudolph Giuliani mocked his experience as a community organizer. But I think Stepanopoulos gave him, perhaps meant to give him, an opportunity not only to fight back but also to let us know something about the bedrock of his life: as Shelby Steele has put it, “what beliefs he would risk his life for.” Obama is a brilliant man; but sometimes his brilliance seems facile, and that invites bullying. I think he needs to open his heart, now, in this present contest.

— And I hope he finds it in himself to do so.

yellow umbrellas

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On Saturday I participated in a commemoration of the Walkless Talkless Parade in support of women’s suffrage at the 1916 Democratic National Convention in St. Louis. About 100 members of the League of Women Voters of St. Louis gathered at Boileau Hall at St. Louis University and walked for a mile or so carrying yellow umbrellas. All the walkers were female, but some of us male members of the league helped in other ways. I directed traffic at one of the parking entrances and attended the speech making, which was good fun. Here’s a photo of the march as it began on Vendeventer Avenue.

The original Walkless Talkless Parade was the brainchild of Edna Fischel Gellhorn, a St. Louis Civic leader and one of the founding members of the League. 7000 women lined both sides of Locust Street downtown so that the DNC delegates had to pass them on their way from their hotel to the convention hall. Gellhorn described it as follows in a 1964 interview:

We decided we didn’t want to have a parade but we did want to be noticed …so thousands of us, in yellow sashes, carrying yellow parasols, lined both sides of Locust Street. . . . In front of the old Art Museum we had a tableau. The tableau was a memorable event. The women representing states that had women’s suffrage were draped in white. Those from states with partial suffrage . . . were draped in gray. Those from states with no votes for women, including Missouri, were draped in black . . . [T]wo little girls . . . represented future voters.

According to a recent biography, one of those girls was Martha Gellhorn, Edna’s daughter who would become the first female war correspondent. Edna Gellhorn was a graduate of Bryn Mawr. My source for the quotation is a page at the Bryn Mawr website where you can see a youthful photograph of Gellhorn and several photos of the original “Golden Lane.” The league also has a page about Gellhorn, where you can see a copy of her portrait and listen to a recorded speech and part of a 1969 television interview.