With that quote in mind, I figured it was a good time to recap the election from the last time that I posted; I'll eventually move on to other topics, but for right now, it seemed an appropriate way to bridge the gap (at least that's the gap according to my Facebook Notes) without resorting to that "sry I not write mor lol" that most blog-break apologies are. Anyway, so, it's pretty much over, was the moment the economy collapsed.
Last I wrote: First off, there will be quite a bunch of noise in the morning about Obama's victory, Edwards' second-place upset, and Clinton's "stunning" third placement. Here are the temporary numbers, with seventy five of the 1781 precincts still yet to report: respectively, 4520, 4067, and 3947. A hundred and twenty votes does not an upset make, especially when one considers that Edwards has been essentially canvassing Iowa like a well-groomed locust for the last four years, spending more time there than Clinton and Obama combined, and visiting all 99 Iowa counties at least twice. Furthermore, as you can guess from the numbers, there ain't that many Democrats in Iowa to begin with. So as far as this being the triumphant victory of Edwards, not so much. It does however show that Obama has a surprising - shall we say, Kennedy-esque? - ability to turn charisma and inexperience into that "breath of fresh air" cliche that passes for glass-half-full political writing whenever the writer doesn't want to admit that the old party hack is detested by the politically active commoners. Predictions - Obama remains highly competitive with Clinton, who still has the major machines locked up - New York, Florida, Connecticut, and who knows where else - while Edwards dyspeptically burps into erratic contention in the South and militia-heavy Rocky Mountain states.
So, not too bad, right? I got that Edwards was going to flame out, and that it was between Obama and Clinton, that Clinton was going to run on her strongholds - and that the ground presence was what was important. Of course, I don't know how many people saw that Obama in particular - I sure didn't - was building the most effective Democratic grassroots movement since McCarthy back in '68 forced the Democrats into a backroom deal on Humphrey and burned the party to the ground. Except the opposite; it seems that Obama has out-Reaganed the Republicans, to a degree, at least so far as gettting the "intellectual" Republican movement to support him, much in the manner that what are now the neo-liberals supported Reagan's interventionism and globalization. But that's somewhat off topic; what is relevant is that I don't think anyone expected that Obama would win through what are ultimately only the most honorable means. Certainly, politics is nasty, and certainly, it's not like Obama hasn't raised criticisms or had his sharp moments - but you don't see the kinds of volunteer response that Obama has originated unless the candidate both genuinely can get people to show up AND knows what to do with them, which seems in retrospect to be Hilary's greatest drawback. Not the entitlement that everyone claimed, but her "other" sense of entitlement, which was that holding the major organs of the party was sufficient for victory, staffing local campaign offices be damned, rather than that "she felt she deserved it," which is something far more true of McCain than Clinton.
Anyway, I was way wrong on McCain, and I don't want this to be too long; in short, I predicted that it was going to come down to Romney and Huckabee, with Giulani a go-nowhere psychotic (yeah, you try running as a pro-gay Republican anywhere outside of the five boroughs; good luck with that) and McCain and Thompson running for third. Well, Huckabee was the best challenger to McCain at least, who had an equal sense of political entitlement as Clinton, but still had the most fawning media narrative out there. Which is why the narrative of this campaign is actually, believe it or not, genuinely reassuring, insofar as it's a case where people actually getting out and campaigning is the main wellspring of politcal energy this year; let's examine the case, shall we?
The nut of the problem for McCain is that he never, ever, ever ran a campaign. Not really, at least until 2000 against Bush. He inherited the Senate position from Barry Goldwater, which in Arizona carries about as much institutional weight as the Ring of The Fisherman does in the Vatican. This means that McCain has no institutional base outside the Republican Party itself. This is important to remember, because one of the things that we tend to forget about our political parties is that they themselves very rarely have much in the way of "swing"; only about 50% of voters vote based on party affiliation (about 20% vote completely Republican, no matter what, with 30% being the Democratic share, give or take your location/time) which is statistically speaking, a relatively poor measure predictor of voting outcomes, with things like age, religion, race, and education all being relatively stronger correlates to how an individual is going to vote. As such, getting people interested outside of the nomination is key; Bush did this in spades, relying not on an organized, national machine (believe it or not, Bush neither in 2000 nor in 2004 had the money for that kind of campaign) but rather on the pre-existing voting structures reached best, again, believe it or not, through the mass-mailing, Richard-Vigerie-esque campaigns that have brought us such howlingly bad political propaganda, such as this year's "Obsession" DVD that led at least one person to spray tear gas into a mosque. And of course, the most important of all these networks is the religious one, with Dobson's "Focus On The Family" being the most notable. Now, while a candidate can of course purchase the time of mass-mailing groups to bombard sympathetic voters with material, the simple fact of modern campaigning is that getting associated with such slime immediately turns voters off, if they think that the candidate had something to do with it. As such, the Republicans, who in a previous, pre-internet world, relied on the general difficulty of finding out funding and advertising relationships to keep their race-and-red baiting out of the media spotlight; now of course, they can't, and they have to rely on the grassroots to spread the mental pox that Obama is an infant-slaughtering muslim. And, to repeat, McCain has no natural base. He's not a "real" Christian, (at least by the Falwell-Left Behind-Dobson standards); he's not particularly beloved by business (keep in mind that those earmarks he decries so often are the very bread-and-butter of innumerable small businesses across this country; I once knew a guy who hated Democrats, but voted Clinton because he believed that the Dems. had some hand in getting a contract to make a hundred test wetsuits for the Navy); he's not beloved by the elderly, the libertarian, or the rightwing media groups; and he's basically not beloved in Washington much either, and not because he's a "maverick", but because he's an "asshole", which is what we normally call people who call up their colleagues and shout at them, as McCain openly admits. As such, McCain needed someone to bridge the gap between himself and the increasingly disaffected base; Palin, with that in mind, and the immediate effect she had on his relationship with the Fundies and moderate females, was in that sense a great choice. Who turned out to be a shocking moron, but that's what happens with vice presidents sometimes (Quayle, Agnew, Ford, and Eagleton all come to mind in this regard.)
Which brings us back to the quote; it's from Chris Hitchens, who is generally as wrong as wrong can be, and is wrong here too, but is for once wrong in an interesting way. Basically, Palin's problem is not her lack of intellectual curiosity. Nor is it her lack of experience. Palin's problem is that she was an opportunistic political pick that was never, in any way, shape, or form planned to produce an effective leader for this country. And this is what the media seems to miss, in watching the rancor she produces at her rallies, the turn-around in partisan media the way that, say, Limbaugh talks about McCain, and the lack of general media presence she has; she wasn't designed to "re-energize" the base - she was designed to be the base, the entire locus of a kind of relationship that McCain has never bothered to create, but that she herself did in Alaska, out of her own guile. And in this regard, Sarah Palin is vastly more experienced than McCain, which is why there's all this talk about her "going rogue", i.e., making all sorts of statements far to the right of McCain's own positions, and how the McCain people are "hiding" her, blah blah blah, is that she's essentially, because of her background and McCain's, independent of him - something not true of Biden, who is from the institutional side of the Democratic party, and is therefore entirely following Obama's construction of a genuine popular campaign.
Hitchens' resentment to Palin is transparent, especially for someone as addicted to name dropping as he is; most of his articles look like someone threw a guest list for Davos into a shredder and pasted the scraps into an mad-lib for neocon children. A candidate who essentially goes off the radar seems to him like the abdication of leadership, since he's not drinking gin in her presence. In reality, Hitchens' resentment - and the resentment of the media in general to her - is the resentment of someone who doesn't really understand what's going on, or else daren't speak its name; Sarah Palin was a wise choice for a foolish group of people, and her failure to impress the media is essentially meaningless, since she was selected to make up for all the shortcomings that McCain has everywhere else BUT the media. If Sarah Palin is not intellectually curious, she does have a work ethic and a sense of glad-handing that McCain disdains as only a true patrician can, and which comes out every time that he actually faces an angry plebe (as when he got himself into the oh-so-delicious shouting match with a group of union workers about how they wouldn't pick lettuce even for $50 an hour, a statement that could only come from the mouth of someone who cannot even comprehend working a manual job.)
Which is to turn to Obama now, whose groundwork I cannot - cannot, mind you, cannot - praise highly enough, whatever else I believe about his policies. Obama's people show up, seven days a week, to hold up signs in every kind of weather - you know, the kind of behavior normally reserved only for teenage girls on behalf of whomever is this week's plastic groaner on MTV, not politicians. People only do this when their neighbors and friends are doing it, and when there's an expectation from others that you'll do your part. The constant contact that Obama has made a structural part of his campaign is one of those simple things that Dale Carnegie noticed a hundred years ago that helps not only to win friends and influence people, but quite literally, gets them past things like skin color, education, and age in fundamental and permanent ways.
So, that's that - when the race ends, I'm sure I'll go back to writing about the usual conflict between awesome and fail that makes up my own personal beautiful and sublime.
That Is All For Now,
M.
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