Idea IS the format

The Obama camp must be worrying about having their man suspend his campaign for thiry-six hours in order to visit his ailing grand-mother. Still, it could be worse for the Democrats. At least McCain hasn’t suspended his:

In a masterstroke, McCain goes on to call Western Pennsylvanians the most patriotic people in America, neatly insulting the rest of the population of the country of which he aspires to become commander-in-chief.

Smooth moves Senator.

When she was asked by Charles Gibson of CBS news if she had paused even for a moment to consider whether she was experienced enough to run as McCain’s VP, Sarah Palin famously told him “no, because you can’t blink”.  You can wink, of course, by all means, wink away, but you can’t blink.  That’s all well and good, but somebody should have told John McCain.

Here’s a little slice of the Blinkmeister in action:

By my reckoning McCain blinks 57 times in just 28 seconds.  That’s more than twice a second. On that basis, he would have blinked a total of 7,332 times through the course of last night’s hour-long debate.  (By contrast, Obama can be seen here blinking just 20 times.  That puts him at a mere 2,571 blinks overall.  Compared to McCain, Obama’s catching flies on his eyeballs.  He’s like a bush-baby on crystal meth.  The man is certainly not blinking every 0.491 seconds, not like Blinky McBlinkster over there.)

Stay with me on this.  A normal person under no undue pressure blink just 960 times in an hour.  Opinions appear divided on whether rapid blinking is evidence that the somebody is trying to be deceitful, but it seems to be more widely accepted that “to assess mental stress, especially in a social situation, blinking is supposed to be one of the more reliable biological measurements.”  McCain certainly appeared to be undergoing a certain amount of mental stress.

Not only did McCain appear somewhat stressed, but, occasionally, just a little frustrated.  One might even say… angry.

It was ironic that McCain was the less composed of the two men, being that Obama was the subject of more frequent slurs on his character.  McCain finally dared to level some of the charges his campaign has put to Obama relating to his various ‘associations’.

Obama provided a brief convincing rebuttal of McCain’s smear, then tried to refocus the discussion on his policies.  McCain followed his lead, turning his attention to… Obama’s policies.  Of course, if you had a platform as makeshift as McCain’s you probably wouldn’t want to stand on it either.  Or under it. Or anywhere near it.

With time running out, McCain needed to find the knockout punch from somewhere.  Stress was turning to anger, anger to desperation, and eventually desperation turned to… melodrama:

(Of course, to appreciate this you’d probably need to know that this…

…is one of the most viewed videos on Youtube. It’s been watched over 5 million times.  Mostly, I’ll wager, by Democrats.)

Obama, meanwhile…

In previous debates, I’ve detected a lot of vitriol directed at John McCain.  When I say vitriol, I mean, say, something like this:

Last night, by the end of the debate, a more generous spirit was starting to emerge.  As McCain summed up telling us all about the long line of McCains who had served in the army, travelling the world, meeting new and interesting people, and killing them, it was hard not to feel a twinge of pity for the old war-horse.  Seeming humble, some might even say broken, he finished by asking the American people to grant him the honour of serving as their President.

“The hardest thing about any political campaign is how to win without proving that you are unworthy of winning.” Adlai Stevenson

With so many different polls tracking the progress of the two election ‘08 campaigns, this is a great at-a-glance view of everything that’s happened since the start of the year.

I found it on my new favourite blog, Daily Kos, an great source of up-to-the-minute info, insight and analysis, coming from a solidly left-wing point-of-view.  Their analysis of the polling so far is well worth a read, but what really caught my eye is the way things have gone downhill for the GOP since the Republican convention.

Whatever advantage McCain gained from the unveiling of Sarah Palin as his running-mate, it turned out to be pure novelty value. It was only a matter of days before the lip-gloss started to come off for the thinking members of the American electorate, many of whom will have watched her famously assert in an interview with Charles Gibson that her governorship of a state within sight of Russia constituted valuable foreign policy experience.

Palin made matters worse by defending this claim in a subsequent interview with CBS’ Katie Couric.  Pretty soon it became obvious that Palin was just getting started, and that there was no question, however simple or straightforward, to which she could not provide a confused, convoluted and often meaningless answer.

The first crime in politics is to lack the knowledge to field a question (especially if that question relates to a basic detail of, say, the policy platform on which you’re standing).  The second, perhaps greater crime is to then lack the charm, articulacy and guile to be able to talk your way out of the corner you’re in without being exposed as the utter bullshitter you undoubtedly are.

On the strength of the Couric interviews you could send Palin down for life. Her shortcomings were so manifest that McCain made an eleventh hour decision to join her for one of the follow-up interviews.  This enabled him to define the direction of their response to Couric’s questions, before deferring to Palin on the benevolent if somewhat belated assertion that she was more than capable of speaking for herself.

If the shine was starting to come off the hockey mom with the electorate, in the hands of Saturday Night Live’s Tina Fey she was an instant hit.  Fey’s impersonation was uncannily familiar, not least because for much of the time she was simply repeating Palin word for word.  As a politician, it’s not a good sign if all somebody has to do is change the context of the things you’re saying in order to create ready-made, weapons-grade satire.

By the time the VP debate came around, anybody who’d been paying any attention at all would have found their mind boggling at the idea of Palin going toe-to-toe for ninety minutes with someone as knowledgeable and experienced as Joe Biden.  History may record that she coped well, but that will only be to say that, so far out of her depth, she managed to tread water.  History ought to record that it was Joe Biden who delivered a truly classy performance, letting his superior knowledge and experience speak for itself without ever appearing unduly superior or condescending towards his opponent.

At this stage McCain and his campaign strategists must have been realising that what they had in Palin was a blunt instrument, and that she should be used as such.  They would also have been realising that, however ardently they might claim to have won the various debates, the polls demonstrated otherwise.  Hence their decision to try and ‘turn the page on the economy’, focusing instead on raising questions about the character and background of their opponent. Palin spearheaded this attack, suggesting in an interview that the electorate ought to be giving more of their attention to Obama’s relationship with reformed domestic terrorist Bob Ayers.

It’s reassuring in this day and age to witness how disastrous the decision to ‘go negative’ proved to be for McCain.

Disastrous, because since then the economy has kept itself very much on the agenda, by continuing to deteriorate in a way that nobody, least of all a prospective president of the USA, could possibly afford to ignore.

Disastrous, because Obama saw it coming, and lay in wait, releasing a series of advertisements exposing the cynicism of his opponent’s approach, and drawing attention to McCain’s own dubious association with the Keating 5 (not to mention Sarah Palin’s links to a secessionist Alaskan independence organisation).

Disastrous, because it introduced the word ‘terrorist’ into the lexicon of the Republican campaign, leaving McCain open to accusations of radicalizing his supporters, reinforced by the sudden appearance of words like ‘treason’, ‘traitor’ and ‘terrorist’ coming from the audiences at his increasing hateful and vitriolic rallies.

And, more than anything, disastrous because, for a reason that I will probably never understand, the McCain camp decided to announce exactly what they were doing, and why they were doing it.  To quote the ‘top McCain strategist’ in question, “if we keep talking about the economic crisis, we’re going to lose.”  Unsurprisingly, Obama has had no difficulty turning these words against them.

Meanwhile, rather than courting the middle ground, McCain has continued to move steadily  further and further away from it.  That is until yesterday, when he finally initiated another change of tack.  He took the microphone from a woman at a rally who had claimed that Obama was an ‘Arab terrorist’, correcting her to the effect he was no such thing, but merely ‘a decent man with whom I have disagreements’, to the audible displeasure of his audience.

Whether McCain did this because he realised that he was in danger of becoming a spokesperson for America’s far right or because he’d seen the polls and knew that he wasn’t going to win an election that way is still up for discussion.  Either way, the danger now is that he finds himself on no man’s land, having to constantly chastise the lunatic fringe his campaign has created a platform for.

It’s hard to see how the Republicans can claw their way back into this race, especially hampered by a such a manifestly inadequate and increasingly unpopular running-mate.  Palin has only looked anything like comfortable since she’s been inciting hatred among the terrifying throngs of white, middle-class pitchfork-wavers she best claims to represent.

As of the last twenty-four hours and McCain’s attack of conscience she’ll probably need to tone that down.  She may find that more of her time is spent explain the findings of the Troopergate investigation, who reported back yesterday that she had abused her power in trying to get her former brother-in-law fired.

For my part, I hope they’re both finished, and I’m calling it that way.

I see Obama going 300+ electoral college votes, maybe even a landslide 350+ if the McCain camp go on running their campaign as badly as they have done until now (and the electorate are good to their word when they find themselves alone in the polling stations).

And God knows it needs to be that kind of margin, it really does, because Rove and his cronies have shown how ready, willing and able they are to steal a close one.

This time though, there’s a difference.  This time the electorate seem to be against them. Because for any thoughtful, compassionate, intelligent human being, it’s surely black and white.

This is extraordinary.

He clearly means to say “Americans”, or “countrymen”, or something like that. You can only wonder what’s going on in that ‘Nam-addled head of his to result in this kind of subconscious declaration.  It’s starting to look as if John McCain might actually be the Manchurian candidate.

Whatever the case, it follows on very nicely from my ‘tweet-up’ of last night’s presidential debate, in which I’ve started to break him down into the five or six different flavours of nut-job he undoubtedly is.

Even as Tom Brokaw was welcoming the two presidential candidates to the floor of the debating hall at Belmont University, Nashville, it was obvious how little all three men wanted to be there, let alone in the company of each other.

The ‘town hall’ format, whereby the candidates take questions from an intimate audience of constituents, is supposed to be John McCain’s forte.  How important then, with his campaign floundering, that McCain take this opportunity to reassert himself in the race?

Above all things, McCain needed presence in this debate. He needed to appear strong like an ox, sharp as a whip, ready to sweep aside a man thirty years his junior.

For the first fifteen minutes, this format didn’t look like anybody’s forte, especially Brokaw, who became cantankerous as soon as it became clear that it took more than a little red light to stop a pair of politicians from talking for as long as they fucking well liked.

It was only a matter of time, however, before the discussion strayed onto something that could be considered an ‘issue’, and that issue was health. Obama was the big winner here, on the strength of nothing more than the assertion that free health care was a right rather than a privilege. McCain, unsurprisingly, took a more conservative position.

As the debate wore on, McCain took on the air of the kid at school who nobody likes, and likes even less for the fact that they make such clumsy attempts to ingratiate themselves with anyone and everyone.

He began sucking up to Brokaw on the increasingly contentious issue of timekeeping, and cracked jokes about hair loss with an audience who, even under the scrutiny of fifty million people, couldn’t even manage a polite laugh.  (His joke is rendered even less amusing by the knowledge that he once called his wife Cindy a “cunt” in front of a group of reporters after she poked fun at his balding pate.) When Obama spoke, McCain ambled around the stage, muttering to himself and blocking the camera’s view. For a while the second of the three presidential debates was starting to look like a really awful amateur theatrical production of Rain Man.

Shrugging off the fact that he was dying on his arse, McCain persisted with his attempts to persuade himself, if nobody else, that he shares some natural affinity with thinking members of the American electorate. “My friends,” he implored, every time he addressed himself to his audience, before embarking on yet another half-baked attempt to discredit his opponents policies or track record. The more he said it, the more hollow it sounded.

If there was an area of this debate where McCain managed to gain any traction, it was in the discussion of foreign policy. Sadly for the G.O.P. it was still Obama who dealt the most telling blow here, reminding us of his opposite number’s essentially bellicose tendencies, not to mention his highly questionable judgement. McCain’s military history ought to be one of his greatest assets in this election, but the voters he is trying to win over are tired of war, and tired of war-mongers.

Obama remained aloof throughout, taking issue on the points that mattered, conspicuously quiet on the ones that didn’t. He was a long way from his best – a long way – but ‘that one’ (as McCain at one stage referred to him) still looked like the Energiser bunny in comparison to ‘the other one’.  As his age starts to catch up with him and the polls continue to get away from him, we could be about to see John McCain unravel completely over the next twenty-six days.

Just so long as the crazy ol’ bastard isn’t elected President at the end of it.

We’ve known ever since the GOP convention that the McCain camp were going to lay it on pretty thick with this ‘maverick’ schtick of theirs.  One boon of the selection of Palin as McCain’s neophyte acolyte running-mate is that she seems ready to endlessly reiterate it without any trace of irony or self-loathing.

Palin managed to use the word six times in the VP debate.  Not to be outdone, Joe Biden threw it back at her a whole NINE times, mainly in the course of the following rebuttal to Palin’s suggestion that she and McCain were, after all ‘a couple of mavericks’:

What I liked about Biden here is that he not only categorically refutes the factual accuracy of the ‘maverick’ moniker, but appears to feel almost bad for Palin that she’s been sent out to mix it with him armed with nothing better than the kind of pea-brained sloganeering more suited to an aspiring class president.

A quick look at Twitter’s ever-enjoyable election channel showed that one particular association was coming through strong, not necessarily in the way that Senator McCain might have intended.

With the campaigns having turned properly nasty over the last day or two, it will be interesting to see who, if anybody, revives this tainted motif.

Unless some GOP egghead reprogrammes Palin she’ll likely regurgitate it ad infinitum as she runs the gamut of local rallies drumming up the kind of indignant national pride fascism is made of.

I can’t quite see McCain picking it up again though.  Far more likely that Obama finds an opportunity in tomorrow’s debate to taunt him with it, as a reminder to all of us that we shouldn’t write cheques our bodies can’t cash.

This found its way into my email inbox over the weekend:

It’s a poster for the new Jim Carrey movie, YES MAN, with one or two minor alterations. The original looks like this:

I’m guessing it found its way to me on the back of this tweet of mine on Friday morning:

I made this suggestion as a response to reading the first few paragraphs of an article by George Lakoff on The Huffington Post, in which he identifies some mistakes he sees the Democrats making with Obama’s campaign.

Lakoff starts by examining Obama’s post-RNC ‘No Maverick’ commercial, in which the Democrats confront McCain’s attempt to position himself as a ‘maverick’, ready to confront mistakes and repair damage done by the current administration.

Lakoff’s view is that negating what he refers to as the ‘Maverick Frame’ actually serves to reinforce it, and that the Democrats should instead be focusing on establishing a new frame for McCain, one that puts him on the defensive.

Highlighting McCain’s record of voting with the current administration over 90% of the time, Lakoff suggests that he could be presented as a ‘Yes-man’, a characterisation originally used by Howard Dean in his speech to the DNC.

Over the course of Friday I saw a few other Twitter users picking up on this, culminating in the appearance of http://the-yes-man.com/

It’s an unelaborate site, concentrating on the key reasons why we should understand John McCain within this frame; his Bush-friendly voting record; his close association with ‘Big Oil’; the fact that his campaign team is haemorrhaging lobbyists, locking him into the traditional Washington political machine of which his presidency would undoubtedly be a willing and compliant extension.

Then, within the last few hours, a sign that the meme has crossed media:

At the same time that this is unfolding, it is being suggested that ‘the liberal bloggers have become McCain central’, and that this is playing into Republican hands. Writing on the Daily Kos, thereisnospoon mounts a compelling response to such claims:

“It is difficult for Republicans to turn on a dime, and there’s very little creativity to come out of their collective establishment. If the campaign and the RNC doesn’t push a meme, it doesn’t get pushed. That has forced Republican candidates to largely have to own the slimy attacks put out by their own people.”

“We, on the other hand, have no such obligation. The Obama campaign has been successful largely because of its inspiring “new brand of politics”. Unfortunately [...] that makes it somewhat difficult for the Obama campaign to get quite as nasty with the opposition as it might need to. But that’s OK–because that can be our job.”

“It’s our job to push memes the campaign can’t. It’s our job to focus on Republican chicanery that would waste the time of an Obama campaign that needs to be focusing its messaging on core economic issues. By talking about McCain’s egregious lies and horrible personal ethics, we can help push the press to cover stories that the Obama campaign can’t seriously push themselves.”

“Everyone has a role to play: ours is to play hardball, to hit where it hurts, and to force the traditional media to cover what it might be uncomfortable covering otherwise.”

The post as a whole reads as a manifesto for negative campaigning among the ‘netroots’, inciting Democrats to leave the moral high-ground to the above-the-line campaign, and to get busy with the nuts and bolts of slinging enough muck to stand a chance of actually winning the election.

I haven’t figured out exactly where I stand on this, although I guess by posting on the subject I’m giving the Yes Man Frame a little bit more oxygen, and nailing my colours to the mast in the process. This in itself begs a number of questions, the most obvious of which is…

What the fuck does it have to do with you (i.e. me) anyway?

Isn’t it arrogant not to mention presumptious of me to try and perpetuate this meme in my own small way, with the intention of interfering in and seeking to influence an election taking place in a country of which I am not even a citizen?

Well, I don’t think so.

I’ve held the view for a while now that this is by far the most important election to have taken place in my lifetime.

I base this principally on the extent to which the Bush administration has damaged the global geo-political climate generally, not to mention the skepticism his stolen elections have inspired as regards the integrity of American democracy itself.

It also seems pretty clear to me that, though the outcome of this election will (hopefully) be determined by the will of the country’s citizens, the impact will be felt throughout the civilised world.

This is epitomised in relation to the issue of climate change. I meet more and more people sharing my view that the adverse effects of global warming are upon us, and that we may find ourselves being forced to change our way of life much sooner than previously imagined, on a genuinely global scale. On this basis alone, the governance and energy policy of one of the world’s largest polluters is of excrutiating importance to us all.

Beyond this and plenty of other practical considerations, there’s a more abstract reason why I feel such a significant stake in this election.

I still believe that if any country in the world could ever claim to carry a flag for human civilisation as a whole, it is the United States of America. I still find substance in the idea of an American dream, albeit that this has been systematically subverted by those with an interest in repackaging it as a crass consumerist call-to-arms. I still have faith in the principle of democracy, and the idea that governance should be designed to best serve those being governed, smiling most kindly upon the least fortunate of us.

I think that now may be a tipping point for the meaningful survival of these values. I’m not sure they it can survive four more years of the incumbent regime, and the defeat of by far the most exciting presidential candidate since JFK.

Like Kennedy, in Barack Obama we find a candidate who seems to articulate and symbolize the libertarian ideals upon which the United States of America claims to be founded, at a time when the country itself and the world as a whole needs so desperately to be reminded what those are.

Contrast this with Mr McCain.

I watched closely as he accepted the nomination at the Republican convention, weaving his rhetoric into a mandate for the continuation of the Bush Doctrine, and it looked like more of the same.

I watched his choice for vice-president condemn ‘unprovoked’ Russian aggression whilst simultaneously endorsing Israel’s right to judge for itself what steps were necessary to defend its borders, and it looked like more of the same.

I’m watching a campaign unfold that’s permeated by double-standards, half-truths and plain, good old-fashioned lies, and it looks like more of the same.

As if that isn’t enough, I just keep picturing the scene, a few months into a McCain presidency, when the first of the calls comes in from Dick, or George Sr, asking after a juicy little piece of legislation, or sowing the seeds of some profitable new foreign intervention. Every time I play it through, I just can’t see John McCain saying “no”.

That’s why I’m hoping the American electorate do, while they still have the chance.

* * *

Postscript:
I just got in after a long weekend ready to put the finishing touches on this post and I found the following unsolicited message in my normally spam-free Gmail inbox, under the subject line ‘re: Important’:

“The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who Is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost invariably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And if he is not romantic personally, he is apt to spread discontent among those who are.”
Henry Louis Mencken

Damn right.