The Electoral College

Image & Reality

2008-11-21T00:01:00.000-08:00

Dispatch 16
Image & Reality
David Levi Strauss

I felt early on, from age 10 or so, that a big part of politics was emotional, and had everything to do with the collective imagination and memory. President John F. Kennedy was assassinated when I was 10, and those images remain indelible. My first electoral politics excitement came from the insurgent candidacy of Bobby Kennedy, and those images too have never faded. When Martin Luther King was assassinated, and then Bobby, in 1968, I was 15, and I never stopped mourning those losses, until November 4, 2008. Forty years later, I feel that excitement again. Electoral politics seems possible again. That’s a long time to wait, a long time to be outside, and I’ll admit it feels very strange to be back after all this time.

If Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy were still alive, they would be 79 and 83 years old, respectively. Think about how much different the intervening years would have been if they hadn’t been killed. As a political tactic to influence democratic process, terrorism doesn’t work—but assassination does.

The politics of fear and resentment that has largely determined electoral politics in America for the last forty years just lost. Nixon and Reagan lost. Lee Atwater and his protégé Karl Rove lost, decisively. “Triangulators” like the Democratic Leadership Council lost. The change—and in American democracy, change is still a choice—is palpable. People are moving differently on the street, and sounding different when they speak.

A few days after Obama won, some people began to publicly wonder whether this was “only a symbolic victory,” or constituted real change. This question seems to me to reveal a singular misreading of the present moment. Yes, this is a symbolic victory, but it is one in an environment where symbols matter more than ever. Symbolic change is real change.

It was necessary, in this campaign, to change the way people thought about electoral politics, to create a new image of it. In the recent past, right-wing Republicans had gotten themselves into position to govern by seizing the public imaginary and by controlling images. They turned out to be extremely good at this.

To defeat them, it was necessary to reclaim the public imaginary, to change the symbolic order. Now Obama and his team are in position to govern, to change policy, and they must do so swiftly and decisively, but they must continue to pay attention to the image. In their second term, Bush & Co. neglected the image, gave up on the public imaginary, and ruled with brute force and fiat. Obama can never do that. There are hard times ahead, and we are going to need images to unite us.

In the campaign, Obama had a particular problem that few politicians ever face: he became too popular. At one point, the level of public adulation rose so precipitously that it threatened to get out of control. The opposition (first Clinton, then McCain) took note, and their image of Obama as a callow celebrity—all style and no substance—briefly took hold.

Then, in Denver, in a stadium filled to bursting with 84,000 of his most ardent supporters, high on their own rightness and growing strength, I saw Obama dial back the charisma and cool the image, to make it more convincing for the 40 million people watching the speech on small screens in living rooms, many of whom did not know him well and had not yet made up their minds. He controlled the image, in order to get into position. When this kind of understanding and self-control comes together with great intelligence and a genuine will to change things for the better, many seemingly impossible things become possible again.

If Obama continues to honor this confluence, he will become not just the most unlikely candidate ever to win an American presidential campaign, but one of the greatest presidents we have ever had.

Filed on Monday, November 17, 2008, after the 60 Minutes interview.

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The Day After: Electoral Campaign Lessons

2008-11-07T12:34:00.000-08:00

Comments by Debra Chappell, Douglas County Caucus for Barack Obama Co-chair. Recorded November 2, 2008 at Staging Location 1, just off Jack's Valley Road, following a long day devoted to a get-out-the-vote effort.

The 12 point win in Nevada by President-elect Obama clearly supports her observations.

The conversation continues in "The Day After: If Obama Loses"
youtube.com/watch?v=fQMNuB5cnnk

Ms. Chappell is also featured in "That One," an interview following the second Presidential debate.

I Put This Floor in This House

2008-10-31T08:43:00.000-07:00

Dispatch 15
I Put This Floor in This House
David Levi Strauss

The political campaign ad for television is certainly one of the most degraded forms of public communication we have. It was base to begin with, built on a tissue of half-truths, innuendoes, and outright lies, and designed to appeal to our worst tendencies: fear, greed, insecurity, and selfishness. Most of the ads aired by both sides in this presidential campaign have been negative hits on one’s opponent.

Until last night, when, six days before the election and flush with more donated money than any candidate in history has had at his disposal, Barack Obama bought thirty minutes on prime-time TV, right before what turned out to be the final game of the World Series, to make a final pitch to American voters.

It begins with an image of American beauty and bounty: a field of Kansas wheat blowing in the wind. Then a traveling shot of the prairie as the voice-over begins, “With each passing month, our country’s faced increasingly difficult times . . .” The candidate then appears, already at home in a less austere version of the Oval Office, and sits on the edge of his desk to speak to us. He’ll tell us the stories of four working families and their struggles, and what an Obama presidency will do to help them. “Everybody here has got a story.”

The structure of the ad is consistent and sound. Each family’s story is followed by Obama’s policy proposals to address their issues. These are the problems, and these are the solutions. There are moments of great subtlety and effect, as when Larry Stewart, retired after working thirty years on the railroad, sits in his house in Sardinia, Ohio, and says “I put this floor in this house.” When he retired ten years ago, he lost his health insurance and had to take a job at Wal-Mart at age 72, as an “associate salesman.” “In other words,” he says, “I just sell stuff, that’s all.” That is, I don’t make things anymore, like I built this house. I just sell stuff, cheap, that other people now make elsewhere in the world, to other Americans like me who can’t afford to buy stuff we make ourselves anymore. And we are told that this is now our work, to consume, to buy and sell stuff we don’t make to each other. This is what we’ve been reduced to, far away from “an economy that honors the dignity of work.”

Each family story, from Kansas City, Missouri, Sardinia, Ohio, Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Louisville, Kentucky, tells a part of the catastrophe we’ve been led into: forty-seven million people without health insurance, $10 billion a month in Iraq, and an economy built on easy money, debt, and consumption.

John McCain and Sarah Palin are never mentioned in this ad. George W. Bush is never mentioned. It’s not about them. It’s not even about Barack Obama. It’s about us. The entire ad, from amber waves of grain to God bless America, is about the idea of us, and what would happen if we decided to take back our country.

One of the marks of a world-class practitioner is that he can take a degraded form and breathe new life into it. Political analysts will be talking about this ad for a very long time, because it transcends the form.

But it doesn’t transcend reality. All of these stories of people who are hurting now are haunted by the realization that more pain is on the way. The current financial crisis will certainly lead to terrible economic effects over the first term of the Obama presidency. The real pain hasn’t even started yet. It’s going to be bad, and it’s going to be worst for poor and working-class families. To get through it at all, people are going to have to come together to enter a “new era of responsibility,” and abandon the politics of resentment and fear that have reigned over the last eight years.

“In six days, we can choose hope over fear and unity over division. . . . In six days we can come together as one nation and one people, and once more choose our better history. That’s what’s at stake.”

[Filed on Thursday, October 30 , 2008.]

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WILPF

2008-10-26T16:32:00.000-07:00

Excerpts of Interview with 'Cappy' Israel of Santa Cruz, California. Recorded mid-October 2008 on Pacific Avenue where Ms. Israel was staffing a table for WILPF, the Women's International League for Peace & Freedom. [She is a member of the Santa Cruz chapter.]

Their Web site states: "The Women's International League for Peace and Freedom was founded in 1915 during World War I with Jane Addams as its first president. WILPF works to achieve through peaceful means world disarmament; full rights for women; racial and economic justice; an end to all forms of violence; and to establish those political, social, and psychological conditions which can assure peace, freedom, and justice for all."

Ms. Israel is a member of the "Raging Grannies," a group that sings "topical satirical songs, performed by women in grannie flowered hats and aprons. Always looking for new singers. Sing to public at rallies, actions, meetings and by invitation at the City Council, on KUSP, at the Crepe Place, etc." An upcoming, related video will feature Ms. Israel performing a classic tune, one familiar to U.K. soccer fans, with new lyrics.

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I HAVE FOUND JOE THE PLUMBER

2008-10-23T21:14:00.001-07:00

DOLDRUMS aka MIDDLE ROUNDS

2008-10-23T20:02:00.000-07:00

Maybe it's the unseasonably warm weather, maybe it's the depressed & stagnant economy (mine even moreso than the USA's), I don;t know for sure, but this election campaign is starting to feel like another endless ALCS postseason between a team from a depressed industrial city vs. a team from a Florida retirement suburb - or maybe more like the middle rounds of a stupefyingly boring heavyweight title fight, something along the lines of a Trevor Berbick vs. Gerrie Coetzee match. Both fighters come out of their corners for a few minutes of sparring every few weeks, neither making much contact, then scuttle back to their corners. The ring card girl is from Alaska. So far, Obama has not been Muhammed Ali, more like a Ken Norton: skilled & efficient but not as charismatic as we'd hoped. At the end of the torpid fight, Jerry "Quarry" McCain can't lift his arms. Obama in a 53%/47% "KO." Phillies in five.

THE DEERHUNTERIAN CANDIDATE Part 5

2008-10-19T14:43:00.001-07:00

INT. JOHN McCAIN’s living room in Bethesda, Maryland. McCAIN sits stiffly facing his old friend COLIN POWELL. COLIN lets out his breath. It is as if some great weight had been pressing on him.

JOHN HUSTON as JOHN McCAIN

COLIN
I’m sorry, John. I just - for once in my life - maybe the first time - I had to make the right choice.

THE DEERHUNTERIAN CANDIDATE Part 4

2008-10-19T14:24:00.001-07:00

Cut to EXT. WASILLA DOWNTOWN STREET

SARAH and TODD PALIN walk arm in arm past shop windows that are either shuttered, papered over or have crude hand-written SALE signs taped up above cheap Chinese-made goods & sundries.

TODD
(laughing)
That was great. Now they think you’re cool, funny, easy-going.

They continue walking in silence for several seconds.

SARAH
We’ll see how snarky Tina Fey feels when she’s outside in the snow breaking rocks in a concentration camp outside Minot North Dakota.

They continue walking past more boarded-up storefronts, and homeless men gathered around burning oil barrels.

SARAH
And that nasty little Amy Poehler’s going to be lucky if she ends up as an Ice-Road Hooker.

Autism on the Rise

2008-10-18T09:25:00.000-07:00

Dispatch 14
Autism on the Rise
David Levi Strauss

John McCain has the worst timing of any politician in recent memory. Eight years ago, he was the most popular political figure in America. Shot down by the Bush/Rove team’s dirty tricks in 2000, he was later forced, Stockholm Syndrome-style, to embrace them. Now, after eight years of a Republican administration that will be remembered as among the worst in American history, McCain and his ideas are irrevocably yoked to that catastrophic cart. His statement Wednesday night that “I am not President Bush,” echoed Nixon’s “I am not a crook,” in its bitterness and irony.

Rather than moving toward the center to convince independent and undecided voters (who used to be part of his natural constituency) to vote for him, McCain instead swerved to the right, choosing a polarizing vice-presidential candidate that can only help him on the lunatic fringe, and mounting a negative campaign that attempts to revive the cultural battles of the 1960s at a time when a collapsing economy has voters focused only on the immediate present and future, not the past.

To rely exclusively on the old Republican rhetoric of cutting taxes and shrinking government at this point, when government is the only protection against collapsing markets, indicates a dangerous misreading of political realities. McCain is fighting the wrong war at the wrong time. More and more, he exhibits an abnormal subjectivity, marching to his own maverick drummer as it leads him and his supporters over a cliff.

Watching McCain in the final debate, I was reminded of Bob Dole in 1996, another highly skilled and successful senator who was drastically out of step with the changing times, and made bitter by the knowledge that he’d repeatedly missed his presidential moment. When John McCain looks at Barack Obama, he sees the future, and it galls him. You can see it in his eyes. Bob Schieffer was trying to help McCain by setting him up for his litany of attacks against Obama, but all it did was display the older man’s desperation and impotence. McCain looked better than he has in months in the first forty minutes of the debate, but if this had been a prize fight, Schieffer would have stepped in and thrown up his hands to protect McCain an hour into it.

[Filed on Friday, October 17, 2008, after the third and final presidential debate.]

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McCain-Obama III Debate Watch

2008-10-16T10:25:00.000-07:00

Comments by Dave Jones of Walnut Creek, California, immediately following the third and final presidential debate of the 2008 race for the White House. The conversation took place at a sparsely attended McCain Nation Debate Watch party in the lounge of an apartment complex in Mr Jones' hometown.

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"That One"

2008-10-13T07:09:00.000-07:00

Comments by Douglas County, Nevada Obama supporter Debbie Chappell immediately following the second presidential debate at a debate watch party in Jack's Valley just south of Carson City in rural Nevada. Part of a longer interview.

A pre-debate segment is on The Electoral College YouTube Channel.

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MASQUERADE

2008-10-13T05:49:00.000-07:00

NO MEDIA FILTER

2008-10-10T08:02:00.001-07:00

Overhead Projector

2008-10-08T05:51:00.000-07:00

Dispatch 13
Overhead Projector
David Levi Strauss

Acting partly out of desperation and partly out of hubris, John McCain chose to walk into a fair, refereed fight tonight in Nashville and try to go head-to-head on the issues with Barack Obama. This was a reckless, arrogant, possibly fatal mistake.

Granted, this was supposed to be McCain’s format. He’s done hundreds, maybe thousands of these “town meeting” style appearances, and he feels comfortable in this setting. But from the opening coin toss, Obama had the edge in this one, speaking clearly and convincingly about his new policies and about McCain’s failed ones: “He believes in deregulation in every circumstance. That’s what we’ve been going through for the last eight years. It hasn’t worked and we need fundamental change.” McCain revealed his one new proposal (to stabilize home values by buying up bad home loans) in his first minute, and his timing was shot from then on. His jokes fell flat and he couldn’t connect with the questioners in the audience, Tom Brokaw, or Barack Obama. To conceal his reluctance to face his opponent and look him in the eye, McCain retreated to his stool after each speech and pretended to write furiously in a notebook. When Obama wasn’t speaking, he sat confidently, looking directly at McCain. Obama was more aggressive here than in the first debate, but he never hit McCain when he was down. And McCain was down a lot.

This debate made it clear that John McCain and the Republicans are in the same position that John Kerry and the Democrats were in 2004. By accepting the basic terms of Obama’s original message of change, all McCain has to offer now is a watered-down version of what his opponent is proposing. If voters can get the real thing with Obama, why should they choose a less vigorous form of it with McCain?

Outside the debate, McCain and Palin have gone negative with a vengeance, recycling the old Reverend Wright and Bill Ayres guilt-by-association smears against Obama. This race- and radical-baiting is an attempt to resuscitate the old Vietnam War era animosities, to energize the base. The trouble for the Republicans is that the people who are going to put Obama over the top if they come out in force next month weren’t even born in 1968. The time has run out on this tactic, and it is rapidly running out on John McCain.

[Filed on Tuesday, October 7, 2008, after the second presidential debate, in Nashville.]

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DEERHUNTERIAN CANDIDATE 3

2008-10-04T16:34:00.000-07:00

EXT. STREET - NIGHT

SARAH appears, stark naked, running down the street in front of a growling red Pontiac driven by DICK CHENEY.

CHENEY P.O.V. THROUGH CAR WINDOW

SARAH, seen from behind, is running with her arms spread wide. She opens her fists to allow streamers and glitter to float out of her palms. For a split second CHENEY cannot believe what he is seeing. He turns to KARL ROVE and RICHARD PERL. They also seem astonished by what they are seeing.

SARAH weaves down the icy street. SARAH is not just running. She is leaping and bounding, as if released from gravity and entered into a realm of pure ethereal space.

TODD pounds down the street behind the Pontiac, carrying SARAH’s clothes.

DICK CHENEY
Look at that! Fuckin' chick! Fuckin' Sarah Palin!... Unbelievable!

EXT. STREET - NIGHT

The road forks, one road going high to a parking area, the other descending to the valley below. SARAH swerves up the incline toward the parking area, while the Pontiac goes straight and disappears down the hill.

EXT. HILLSIDE PARKING AREA - NIGHT

SARAH stands motionless, looking out across the valley as TODD approaches. The night is brilliantly clear and the fires from the refinery light up the sky with an eerie glow.

TODD comes to a stop a few feet away.

TODD
Sarah?

SARAH turns. Her face has a strange, distant look, and she
gives TODD an almost feral grin.

SARAH
You think we'll ever come back?

TODD
(startled)
From Washington?

SARAH
Yeah.

TODD moves up beside her. He doesn't know what to say.

SARAH (CONT'D)
I love this fuckin' place... That sounds crazy. I know that sounds crazy, but I love this fuckin' place... If anything happens, Todd, don't leave me there. I mean it. Don't leave me... You gotta promise, Nick. You gotta promise me that.

TODD
(half laughing)
Sarah --

SARAH
Promise! You gotta promise!

TODD
You got it.

SARAH lets out her breath. It is as if some great weight had been pressing on her.

TODD
(with a laugh)
Let's go huntin'. I mean it - let's do it!

Special Needs: Style & Substance

2008-10-03T16:08:00.000-07:00

Dispatch 12
Special Needs: Style & Substance
David Levi Strauss

Two extraordinary things happened last night in St. Louis. First, Sarah Palin showed up for the debate with her A game. She was well prepared and poised, and turned in a sterling performance. After disastrous TV interviews with Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric, in which she looked like a clueless student in a high school current events class, Palin appeared last night as the formidable politician that so excites John McCain. From her very first words to Joe Biden, “Hey, can I call you Joe?” she was on-message and relentlessly appealing. Deflecting Gwen Ifill’s insightful questions like a goalie at the net, she delivered her prepared remarks like a seasoned professional, peppering her speech with trademark folksy Fargoisms that made it seem like your gutsy, sexy mom had gotten fed up, put on her best black skirt and heels, and come to Washington to kick some ass.

The second and, in light of expectations, even more extraordinary thing that happened last night was that Joe Biden observed this miraculous make-over and brilliant performance, read Palin’s tone and body language, and carefully calibrated his own delivery to perfectly counter it. He treated her with the respect due a dangerous adversary. He listened closely to what she said and responded forcefully, letting the greater substance of what he was saying speak for itself. He did not overreact or become impatient. This was the most disciplined, magnanimous, and moving performance of Biden’s long and storied career.

I think operatives on both sides expected and prepared for a quite different debate, so there were a number of odd juxtapositions, with each candidate responding to something the other hadn’t said. But the Biden team’s strategy was essentially more generous, and was, in the end, able to absorb and subdue Palin’s style, which would have worked much better against, say, Hillary Clinton.

When the Roviacs discovered and deployed Palin, they were returning to the old Reagan playbook, to appeal to the psychopolitical narcissism of some American voters, who want “someone just like them” to lead the most powerful nation on earth. This weird perversion of populism (Pop populism?) helped to get George Bush and Dick Cheney elected. Going back to it now, after eight years of failure and devastation, is a desperate move, and last night, Joe Biden shut it down.

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The Best Part ...

2008-10-03T15:30:00.000-07:00

Comments by Brittany Alexander, Blackhawk Republican Women President, immediately following the Biden-Palen debate at a McCain Nation Debate Watch party in Danville, California.

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I heart Mavericks.

2008-10-03T07:26:00.001-07:00

This post originally appeared over on team small dog. Sarah Palin should have been drawn better for this one since I've practiced once before for you, but then I fell asleep.

So Black Beauty might not really have a future in agility. Pero, yo pienso que tiene a future in political analysis.

Black Beauty doesn't CARE if there was no dog running after a long hard day of sitting in the dog pen at work. Black Beauty understands we have to watch the tv at 6pm sharp to see the debate. Black Beauty has manners that do not involve launching one's self across the room at another dog to steal the squirrel and barking REALLY LOUD and obnoxious. Black Beauty didn't even know about the Minnesota accent until now. But she is enthralled.

I'm going to rent Fargo for Black Beauty soon. She can sit quietly and watch Frances McDormand channel all things Minnesota. Like some of my relatives, whose names I won't tell you to protect their identities here, especially if their names are Mom and Auntie Judy. Sarah Palin sounds just like all of them, you betcha. Golly gee. Don't know why. Never been up to Alaska, it's not really my neighbor, it's attached to a foreign country, which is sort of my neighbor, if you count Oregon and Washington as neighbors but neighbors that are patriotic and American and have Main Streets, then the foreign country, then Alaska, then Russia. If you think about it, yeah, Alaska is basically surrounded by foreign countries. It's just way different up there.

There's different customs maybe. So maybe in Alaska, if someone asks you a question, you just answer it however you want.

Let's play Alaska, Black Beauty. I'll start.

"Black Beauty, do you want to live here with us?"

"Pollo!"

"Black Beauty, inquiring minds want to know how old you are?"

"Pollo! Energy Bill! I want to talk about the Energy Bill now!"

"Black Beauty. You are not answering my questions."

"Because of the Job Creation on Main Street for the American People! Job Creation!"

"Black Beauty. What about climate change?"

Black Beauty pauses for a moment. "No esta caused by peoples. Not peoples. But the magical emissions not cause by the peoples! Drill Baby Drill!"

Wait. Weren't we talking about tax relief?

Black Beauty looks so perky. God, she is just such a cute little dog. That way her little eyes crinkle up when she smiles. "Energy Independence is the Key to the Future!"

"What do you mean, Black Beauty?"

"Reform of government and children of special needs. Pollo! 94 times voted for Pollo!" Black Beauty is watching the tv again. Whenever Biden talks, she starts making her cutey face. I can't listen so much to Biden because there goes gosh darn golly gee cute Black Beauty again with the cutey face. Black Beauty, you have such pretty teeth! Sanrio! Black Beauty, you are like from Sanrio! Joe Biden, you scare the children with your non Sanrio face. Black Beauty can only mug for the camera when Joe Biden talks. Sanrio! Hello Kitty and little penguins. Sparkly eyed little penguins!

Tonight we dream of little penguins. Ones that might be experiencing climate change but for all natural causes that might be emissions but not emissions caused by man. By other little penguins? Wait. Sanrio penguins or Alaska penguins? Are there penguins in Alaska? Or maybe extinct from global warming? I forget. I know they taught her that, deep down in the McCain Chamber of Quick Learning for tv appearances. So just ask Sarah Palin. She has all the answers.

THE OPENING CREDITS CONTINUE ROLLING

2008-10-03T07:07:00.000-07:00

THE DEERHUNTERIAN CANDIDATE

EXECUTIVE PRODUCER JON WINET
WRITTEN & DIRECTED BY SCOTT SMITHEE

STARRING:

RICHARD PRYOR as BARACK OBAMA
MERYL STREEP as HILLARY CLINTON
BRUCE WILLIS as JOHN McCAIN as RAYMOND SHAW
MERYL STREEP as ANGELA LANSBURY as HILLARY CLINTON as JOCELYN SHAW
JOE DON BAKER as BILL CLINTON
MERYL STREEP as SARAH PALIN
ROBERT DeNIRO as ED NORTON as TODD PALIN
CHRISTOPHER WALKEN as SARAH PALIN (sometimes)
JOHN HUSTON as GEORGE H. W. BUSH
JEFF BRIDGES AS GEORGE W. BUSH
MERYL STREEP as DICK CHENEY
ROBERT DeNIRO as JOE BIDEN
PAUL NEWMAN as EDWARD KENNEDY
NANCY PELOSI as SABRINA DUNCAN
HILLARY CLINTON as JILL MUNROE
DIANE FEINSTEIN as KELLY GARRETT

The opening credits end by fading back into the white-out of an Alaskan blizzard.

As CAMERA SLOWLY ZOOMS DOWN COLUMBINE STREET we make out, through the heavily falling snow, a group of OLDER WOMEN carrying a huge wedding cake with a miniature bride and groom standing on the top. The WOMEN are all in their seventies and bundled in boots and dark overcoats. They are moving slowly up the street, in the driving snow, with the great white cake held firmly between them.

CAMERA SLOWLY ZOOMS PAST the group of OLDER WOMEN and continues ZOOMING DOWN COLUMBINE STREET towards a vague shape that we eventually, once we get close enough, recognize as a dented two-tone pink and cream double-wide mobile home which looks as if it had been purchased third-hand off a construction site. It stands on cinder blocks in a small lot which has been cut out of the side of the hill. A wrecked school bus decorates it to the right. On the left is a bare branched tree. TODD & SARAH PALIN's snowmobiles are parked in front and a light shows from inside the trailer.

CAMERA ZOOMS SLOWLY AS IF PASSING THROUGH WINDOW OF MOBILE HOME.

INT. MOBILE HOME - DAY

SARAH PALIN and TODD PALIN sit facing each other at the kitchen table, playing Russian Roulette.

QUICK CUTAWAY TO ESTABLISHING SHOT that shows shoreline of Russia visible from kitchen window of the PALIN’s mobile home.

Cut back to INT. MOBILE HOME - KITCHEN TABLE - DAY

SARAH
You can do it, TODD.

TODD
No. No, no.

SARAH
TODD... listen to me, TODD! You have to do it.

TODD
I want to go home, SARAH.

SARAH
You have to think about this, TODD. Listen to me, TODD! You have to
think about this.

TODD
(tears again)
This is horrible!

SARAH
Listen to me, TODD. If you don't do it they'll put us in the pit. If they put us in the pit, TODD, we're gonna die... TODD, do you understand?

TODD
(nods)
SARAH, I wanna go home!

There is an EXPLOSION from the other end of the room. TODD’s eyes go wide and he lets out a whimpering SCREAM. The SECRET SERVICE AGENTS open a path and MITT ROMNEY appears. His knees won't support him and the SECRET SERVICE AGENT who is holding him throws him on the floor.

SARAH
Listen to me, TODD. Do it! You have to do it!

TODD
What are you, God?

SARAH
Listen, asshole, it's up to us!

TODD PALIN hangs his head and whimpers.

SARAH
What are you - hoping?

TODD
What else?

SARAH
I thought you might be - praying.

TODD
I'm doing that too.

SARAH
I suppose you wish you were somewhere else?

TODD
What do you think?

SARAH
TODD, you're wasting your time... Listen to me! You're wasting your time! This is no fucking time for hoping or praying or wishing or any other shit! This is it. Here we are... And we gotta get out!

TODD
You're right... Okay, you're right.

SARAH
(grabs him)
Get off your ass, TODD. Get off your fucking ass and stand up!!!

TODD
(stands)
Okay, okay!
(he straightens his shoulders)
Okay. Okay, you're right...

SARAH DEBRIEFS TODD AFTER THE DEBATE

2008-10-03T06:16:00.001-07:00

On the phone: Jim Domagalski

2008-10-02T15:00:00.000-07:00

On the phone: Jim Domagalski of Orchard Park, New York Erie County Republican Committee Chairman

Phone conversation a few hours preceding the October 2 VP debate between Senator Biden and Governor Palin. Follow-up to an earlier interview on the topic of the Palin selection by the McCain campaign in St. Paul at the GOP convention.

listen

A post-debate conversation is also planned. Stay tuned.

BLINDED BY WHISPERS, CRITIQUES & OPINIONS

2008-10-01T23:19:00.000-07:00

I used the pink flower notepaper for Barack and drew John McCain on the back. Take that McCain.

2008-09-30T07:52:00.000-07:00

McCain-Obama Debate: The Dance of the Country

2008-09-28T09:38:00.000-07:00

Comments by Obama supporter and Executive Chef Kim R. Whittington of Oakland, California. Immediately preceding the September 26, 2008 presidential candidate debate, first of three scheduled.

The interview took place at a debate party at Everett and Jones, Oakland's legendary barbeque where scores of supporters gathered in a festive community atmosphere.

Talking to David immediately afterwards – he had watched the debates in camera at a disclosed albeit secluded location north of New York – was sobering. [See his post below, "Mississippi Mud."] Those in attendance at E & J not surprisingly scored the debate a decisive win for Obama, and although early assessments by the MSM punditocracy suggest a draw, Rasmussen Reports' first post-debate Daily Presidential Tracking poll for Saturday, September 27 gave Obama a 50% to 44% lead over McCain in the race, matching his highest numbers to date. [Note that those numbers held on Sunday, September 28.]

This is the first of a couple of videos from the event. Embedded from Vimeo, an online video site that reaches a much smaller audience, although in higher resolution, than YouTube, where we'll continue to post.

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Mississippi Mud

2008-09-27T23:22:00.000-07:00

Dispatch 11
Mississippi Mud
David Levi Strauss

No one got hurt in this first debate, and under the circumstances, I think that’s bad for Obama. John McCain limped into this thing after two days of wildly erratic behavior, suspending his campaign and announcing that he wouldn’t show up in Mississippi for the debate, because he had to rush to Washington to solve the financial crisis. After demanding a meeting at the White House with President Bush, Secretary Paulson, Chairman Bernanke, and the Congressional leadership, McCain was ambushed by House Republicans, who decided to oppose Bush’s bailout. After that, McCain reportedly sat off to the side mumbling while Obama asked tough questions of the Treasury secretary and others. When Obama announced that he was going to appear at Old Miss with or without him, McCain decided he could spare the hour and a half to be there, too, after all.

The debate proceeded as if none of this had happened. Jim Lehrer orchestrated an elegant, measured discussion of the issues, with each candidate politely remaining within his time limits. There were no outbursts, gaffes, or zingers, to speak of. The problem with this, for Obama, is that it made McCain look like a perfectly reasonable, august statesman and executive, rather than the reckless, arrogant grandstander he’d been just hours before. McCain looked great tonight, much better than he ever looks when giving a speech. Obama always looks good, so there’s no relative gain.

Even though Obama will always prevail over McCain in any public, refereed debate on the issues, McCain still managed to get his broad, old-fashioned strokes in, painting Obama as a tax-and-spend liberal who will raise business taxes and drive jobs overseas, as a cut-and-runner who will lose the war in Iraq and dishonor the deaths of over 4000 service men and women, and as an inexperienced, naïve upstart who won’t be able to stand up to America’s enemies. Obama is impatient with such broad strokes and doesn’t reciprocate, preferring to draw more precise and subtler connections to make more specific points.

The only real advantage to Obama last night arose from body language and speech tone. From the beginning, Obama often looked at and spoke directly to McCain, while McCain spoke only to Lehrer, ignoring Obama and refusing to look at him. The effect of this was cumulative and significant. As the debate wore on, McCain seemed more evasive and equivocal, refusing to face his opponent head-on. He always referred to his opponent as “Senator Obama,” while Obama called him “John,” and came right at him, honestly and without guile. On a number of occasions, McCain’s tone veered into the sarcastic and even contemptuous, and attentive viewers glimpsed two very different approaches to political discourse.

[Filed on Friday, Sept. 26, 2008, after the first Presidential debate at the University of Mississippi’s Oxford campus.]

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PAGEANT POLITICS

2008-09-27T12:14:00.000-07:00

When I was 12 I attended a state 4-H Junior Leaders Conference in Fort Collins, Colorado. It was hundreds of teenagers from around the state, mostly rural communities like my own which then had only 1,500 inhabitants. My town is called “Craig,” the way that Indiana has a city called “Gary,” and it was the coldest place in the nation until Alaska was annexed. We had no Main Street, instead it was called Victory Way, a hopeful vision of America—a Christian town with a bar called “The Office” so that husbands wouldn’t have to lie to their wives when they called late at night to report their whereabouts.

At the 4-H Conference the final and inspirational speaker was Marilyn Van Derbur who had won the Miss America Pageant in 1958. She was in her early 40’s, wearing the power suit of the day, and she started off telling us how she entered the pageant with no talent at all. Invoking the ‘power of positive thinking’ she decided to learn one piece on the piano---well actually two, a medley of “Tiptoe Through The Tulips” and “Tea For Two”. She practiced, she said, hours and hours to get it all down, with both hands flying and most of all: a confident smile. She somehow won the Pageant with this combination of moxie and no doubt beaming through the swimsuit and evening gown competitions. I do not know if she was ever asked the dreaded ‘political question’ that now flummoxes so many beauty contestants. Part of what she won, she went on to explain, was an appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, then the most popular stage in America. Much to her surprise, Ed suggested they do a piano duet together and a piano miraculously appeared. Marilyn said she pinned on her smile and made sure she positioned herself on the piano bench upstage with Ed facing the audience, then she pretended to move her fingers on the keys and smiled winningly through it all. She had just explained to us how she had faked her way through the pageant, and now she ‘inspirationally’ told us how we could fake our way through any situation when we didn’t know what we were doing by donning a winning smile. She ended her speech by singing acapella “To Dream The Impossible Dream,” which proved that perhaps the piano was indeed her more significant talent. I was dumbfounded. Had we really just heard this woman encourage us to fake our way to the top? But I looked around and many of the young girls my age and older were crying, they had boarded the space ship and were flying off.

I’m afraid when watching Sarah Palin on Katie Couric, and even before on Charles Gibson’s interview, I constantly thought of Marilyn Van Derbur. She had become an inspirational speaker who still circulated the country, a back-up to Anita Bryant, and who had added an instance of childhood sexual abuse to her range of topics in reaching out to rural conference communities. I saw the same smile, the same decision to try to dodge a direct challenge with a faked delivery. I became even more worried that she might someday be in a position of real power.

I have my own pageant confessions, for years later I did enter and locally win a Junior Miss Pageant, which in the small town (as part of a tri-county area) was one of the only things that was like a talent show. It had no bathing suit competition, instead you were judged on your academic grades and had to master a fully-clothed physical fitness routine. For talent I had done 5 paintings about the state of politics in America that I presented with an oratory about the confusions of the day. One was a black-edged 3-D frame of portraits of Bobby and John Kennedy with Martin Luther King, Jr. One was a painting of a wounded Vietnam soldier holding his dead friend based on a Larry Burrows photo, another showed a politician ranting, another a group of protesters with upraised fists; the final one showed a map of America with a thousand worried faces. There are eerie echoes of this same worry now. I had not wanted to win, simply make a statement and had assumed the other girls, far more glamorous than I, would take the prize. I was the shy art student who rarely said anything, least of all at home. When I did win, my parents were called onstage—a newspaper photo shows them looking stunned on either side of me, like deer caught in headlights, with me in my conservative gown and the shining rays from my braces emanating to the four corners of the picture.

At the state pageant, the cold ambition of the other contestants totally frightened me and I tried to make myself into a small ball, like a sow bug avoiding attack. There was a new feature at this level: the judges interview. The five judges of the contest took all of us out to dinner where we table-hopped, spending about 10 minutes with each judge explaining our beliefs. I was asked, sometimes with amusement, why I had been doing independent study the last two years, first researching the tribes of East Africa and the next year learning Swahili from a small plastic record and rare book of its grammar. I thought their questions were serious and didn’t hesitate to reply in my naive way. They assumed, they said, I must want to join the Peace Corps. Yes, well, I’d thought about that I said, Or to become an anthropologist, they suggested. I hadn’t considered that so I thought I should make myself clear: “I’d really like to join a tribe.” I said. One fairly hip-looking bearded judge looked at me in disbelief. “Join a tribe?” “Yes,” I explained how I found the tribal structure and housing, the customs to be so far preferable to life in the American high school that I fervently disliked. “I don’t want to change their way of life,” I added, “I want them to teach me theirs.” Needless to say, I did not win the contest, though they gave me a prize for my paintings. And though the naiveté that haunts all of us growing up in remote small towns (which I thought of as “Nowheresville” with the rest of the world as Elsewhere) rears its head from time to time, it has not compelled me (much to everyone’s relief I imagine) to seek public office.

My mother, however, came to the town as a community organizer and still, at 82, holds a prominent role in a wide multi-county area. Over the years she helped local families deal with financial woes and embrace new ways of doing things to improve the quality of their lives. She is on the board of a large area non-profit that looks to the future and joins businesses with other non-profits, with government organizations and public services like the hospitals and community colleges. She has worked to generate this kind of communication for the betterment of all her whole life and to me and so many others, she is a beacon of what one person can do for their fellow human beings. She has done so selflessly, and is the the real thing, the antithesis of faking ones way through anything. She is not like Sarah Palin at all.

(Photo: Marilyn Van Derbur)

ONE NATION UNITED

2008-09-20T15:15:00.000-07:00

Hilda on the line I

2008-09-18T00:01:00.000-07:00

As part of a project for the Buffalo ArtVoice I phoned Buffalo public school junior high teacher Hilda Ramos, who was also a delegate at the Democratic National Convention. She is featured in an earlier video interview from Denver – "Obama: Ready for Change."

First of a series.

Listen

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September 11, 2008: This Is a Test

2008-09-15T22:09:00.000-07:00

Dispatch 10
September 11, 2008: This Is a Test
David Levi Strauss

Lipstick on pigs. Comprehensive sex education for four-year-olds. Sarah’s secrets vs. Joe’s loose cannon. John’s temper vs. Barack’s celebrity.

The high scream of Distraction Culture wrapping itself tighter and tighter around the still turning point of the body politic is deafening, now. We can no longer hear ourselves, let alone others, think. D.C. never sleeps, never takes a breath, never blinks. Its imperative is speed, and it is relentless in its pursuit of . . . fuel. If it ever slows down, as it did on this day seven years ago, its moving parts become visible, and people begin to wake up and look around, beyond the Machine.

That was a dangerous time, and a time of great opportunity, politically. Unfortunately, the Democrats were caught flat-footed, having already walked away from a stand-off in Florida and ceded the field to reactionaries, who turned out to be terrifyingly unprepared to govern, but remarkably well-prepared in Machine maintenance and fuel issues. They advised us to “Get back to work, and your work is consumption.” Consumption and distraction.

The standard excuse for Americans letting happen what they have over the past 7 years is that they were scared, and when people are scared you can get them to do almost anything you want, and get away with it. Distraction becomes a obsession, and politicians who interrupt it risk serious, even violent abreactions.

In this Tortoise & Hare race, the old man who can’t send an email and the past mayor of a sleepy Alaskan town are running on the Speed & Distraction ticket, while the skinny fast forward who suddenly became a global star and the fast-talking senator are running on the Slow Down & Think ticket.

As the clock ticks down, this election looks more and more like a final test of American democracy. If American voters pass the test, nothing will be solved, but the slow work of reconstruction can at least begin. If we fail, time may have finally run out on this noble experiment.

Filed on Friday, Sept. 12, 2008, after Sarah Palin with Charles Gibson, Barack Obama with David Letterman, and the ceremonies at Ground Zero.

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THE SPEECH IS SHORT

2008-09-14T20:07:00.001-07:00

JOHN McCAIN INTERVIEWS PROSPECTIVE RUNNING MATE SARAH PALIN

2008-09-13T23:00:00.000-07:00

BARACK OBAMA DREAMS OF SARAH PALIN

2008-09-11T21:34:00.000-07:00

NEVER FORGET

2008-09-11T21:10:00.000-07:00

Let us never forget the unknown number of people who have died in the “War on Terror” or whatever W’s misguided attempts to rid the world a' them’ terrorists are being called these days. Never forget the media orgy that occurs on this anniversary of the one time in recent history when AMERICANS felt threatened! The gall! The shame! Never mind the kids in Kandahar, there are ‘Mericans in Michigan suffering, having to recall when the TV showed them the motherland [albeit a place where all them queers and liberals live] being attacked, one day, seven years ago.

The charade of the candidates putting politics on hold in honor of the dead today makes me want to join the Taliban. Putting politics on hold? If you are politics, how do you put yourself on hold? I long for leaders who don’t subscribe to this sham. If you are a politician, you can’t turn off your politics. Just like if you are an imbecile…
In today’s New York Times:

“Ms. Palin told them they would be fighting ‘the enemies who planned and carried out and rejoiced in the death of thousands of Americans.’ It appeared to hark back to the disputed connections the Bush administration once made, but no longer does, between Iraq and the Sept. 11 attacks.” (JIM RUTENBERG)

Today Palin also called “the” war [is there only one?] “a task that is from God". While I admittedly find this one hilarious, it is also a real puzzler. Why does the military-governmental-media-complex broadly refer to "jihad" as terrorism and accept a candidate for VP calling war and occupation "A task that is from God"? [I know, I know, cause OUR GOD IS GOD, what kind of a red-blooded patriot wouldn’t know that?]

Maybe I should shut up now. I think I need to go get knocked up or get saved or something. But, if you haven’t heard about “Sarah Palin's Churches and The Third Wave: New Video Documentary”, do check this out—it may score even you points in the Big House.

THE DEERHUNTERIAN CANDIDATE Part 1

2008-09-09T21:31:00.000-07:00

EXT. ALASKA OIL REFINERY - LIGHT SNOW - DAY

The refinery is massive, grime-streaked, squatting in the valley under five massive stacks. No fires can be seen flickering through the windows and no long flames weave and dance from the tops of metal flues. No steam rises in clouds from vents and chimneys and the utter silence of it all is amplified by the falling snow.

In the foreground is a street -- COLUMBINE STREET -- which inhabits the bottom of a narrow ravine and plunges directly down the hillside, straight at the mill. Columbine is a sad looking street, a grim-looking street, a street hanging on by the skin of its teeth. Dilapidated stores hug the narrow sidewalks. Battered signs squeak in the wind. Sandwiched between the stores and scattered on twisting roads along the hillside are narrow Victorian houses. These houses, which run to three stories or more in height, all seem on the verge of toppling over, and undoubtedly would, except that they are all connected one to another by a mad arrangement of utility lines which cross and re-cross between them with occasional aid from a leaning pole.

MUSIC COMES UP -- dissonant, rather frightening music -- as we watch a snowmobile come charging up through the slush on Columbine Street. As it nears CAMERA the snowmobile falters on the slippery grade and slides out of sight. A figure appears, huddled against the driving snow. The figure disappears AS CAMERA HOLDS ON THE REFINERY AT THE END OF THE EMPTY STREET.

MAIN TITLE COMES UP:

THE DEERHUNTERIAN CANDIDATE

(V.O.) JOHN McCAIN’S MOTHER
Everything's going to slip. Everything's going to slide. Everything’s going to crash!

JOHN McCAIN’S MOTHER puts her hand to her mouth and bursts into tears.

JOHN McCAIN’S MOTHER (CONT'D)
I can't believe this... My own little boy... with a stranger!

EXT. COLUMBINE STREET - DAY

Snow is falling heavier and heavier as another snowmobile lunges up the hill, gets about halfway and slides back. As the snowmobile disappears, the door to one of the houses bursts open and a group of giggling REPUBLICAN PARTY DELEGATES begin scampering across the street. They have all been working on their dresses, which are not completely finished, and they all carry ribbons and scissors and pieces of material. As they make their way to the other side of the street they all wave away the snowflakes and grab each other for support. One of the REPUBLICAN PARTY DELEGATES loses her dress entirely and with everyone laughing she rushes back to retrieve it in her slip. When the garment is repossessed a door comes open and the REPUBLICAN PARTY DELEGATES disappear inside.

CAMERA HOLDS ON COLUMBINE STREET. The snow slants across the little stores and piles on the gables of the tipsy little houses. Another snowmobile appears, lunges at the hill and slides back. Snowfall is now approaching blizzard white-out conditions. Screen slowly fades to white as opening credits begin to roll.

No Country for Old Men

2008-09-05T18:32:00.000-07:00

Dispatch 9
No Country for Old Men
David Levi Strauss

John McCain returned to form last night, snatching defeat from the jaws of a victorious convention. His speech was remarkably tone-deaf and stale. “Everyone has something to contribute”? Don’t worry, we’ll find you “a new job that won’t go away”? “We’re all God’s children and we’re all Americans”? Karl Rove must be tearing out his ear hairs. His minions had decked the hall for two nights with fresh red meat, and McCain poured warm milk all over it. The only hope left for his part of the Party is for the revenge and resentment agenda to leapfrog over Grandpa’s corpse.

McCain’s speech had “Old & In the Way” written all over it. He veered from platitude to bad attitude like a drunken sailor. When Thompson and Huckabee and Giuliani and Palin recounted McCain’s moving story as a P.O.W., it sounded noble and true. When he told it himself, it sounded like Gramps nattering on about his glory days.

When he was finally finished, his image men projected big flowing red and white flag bars behind him, recalling George C. Scott’s last speech in Patton, in decline, having become a caricature of his former self. Signal the balloon drop.

The youngest Palin daughter did her plucky best, appearing briefly onstage in a brown sack, looking like Joan of Arc, but it was too late. Her mother now looked for all the world like McCain’s third wife, elbowing aside his current fake glamorous billionaire CEO second wife. And McCain’s mother looked lost in a hail of red, white, and blue balloons. C-e-l-e-b-r-a-t-e Good Times, Come On!

It was all very sad. McCain retired early, leaving Sarah Palin behind to sign autographs, contemplating a future that will, God willing, never come.

Filed on Friday, Sept. 5, 2008, after the last night of the Republican Convention in St. Paul.

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Are you guys freaking out as much as me?

2008-09-05T07:43:00.000-07:00

So is it just me freaking out here? Usually I have a lot longer time to look at someone's face before I draw it and this one just like appeared KAZAM! and I wasn't even home, was at a really long dog show and then I get home and it's like, here. Draw her. Since you broke both your cameras and it's down to all pens and paper now, all the time. I'm like YAY she was a MISS CONGENIALITY OF Miss Alaska. Will be EASY to draw. And maybe even end up being a president in the sad or happy case of President John McCain dying of natural or unnatural causes. Would we be sad or happy about that? I am totally confused now. A religous Alaskan now could be our president instead of Barack? What the hell happened here, I was only gone for a few days??

Look at her little oil sniffer. That little sniffer can sniff out oil All over the place! And her big smiley fangs, so white and smiley they are calling her Sarah Barracuda! Little glimmer in her eye. And has all those kids and even a baby and no bags under her eyes that I can find ANYWHERE! Is that nice Alaska clean air? No damaging particles? Her skin Way Better than mine and we are ALMOST same age but HA! I am actually younger than you Sarah Palin. Um, take that? OK. Wow. Official freaking out over here at my house.

How to Field Dress a Donkey

2008-09-04T13:21:00.000-07:00

Dispatch 8
How to Field Dress a Donkey
David Levi Strauss

So a hockey mom carrying her special needs child walks into a bar, and says to everyone in and outside the joke, “What are you laughing at, asshole? Here’s what I think of your European Ideas.”

Hillary Clinton must be wondering what she did to deserve this. John McCain has, with one deft stroke, made a mockery of her campaign and everything she stands for. You want a woman tough enough to be Commander-in-Chief? Sarah Palin is so tough she doesn’t need to wear pantsuits to wear the pants. She can stand by her man and stand up to the terrorists, while her lily-livered opponent is standing around “worried that someone won’t read them their rights.” And as she marches into history, Palin has picked up the fallen banner of Hillary to use as her own petard.

Unlike Hillary and Joe Biden, she’s “not a member of the permanent political establishment”. . . yet. She’s just been a small-town mayor, which is “sort of like a ‘community organizer,’ except that you have actual responsibilities,” and a big-state governor. Voters like governors, especially of big states. She sees this as a race between “a man who has authored two memoirs but not a single law or even a reform” and the “only man in this campaign who has ever really fought for you.” The sound of Styrofoam Greek columns falling was deafening.

Even Palin’s youngest daughter is so innately media-savvy that she turned Paul Wolfowitz’s telling rough gesture of licking his hand to smooth out his hair (in Michael Moore’s film Fahrenheit 9/11) into an endearing image, using hers to straighten out her baby brother Trig’s. Bristol and Levi looked independent, unrepentant, and fierce, like they could eat the whole Washington Press Corps for breakfast, even without the help of brother Track, who’s on his way to Iraq.

Barack Obama and Joe Biden suddenly have a tremendous problem on their hands. Sarah Barracuda is the new fresh face of revenge and resentment politics, and if enough white evangelical blue-collar and middle-class voters buy it again, things are going to get very ugly. It will no longer be about ideas, European or otherwise. Making sense, telling the truth, and being right just won’t cut it anymore. John McCain has, at least for now, turned the tables, back to a Karl Rovian image- and symbol-storm, in a skirt.

Filed on Thursday, Sept. 4, 2008, after the third night of the Republican Convention in St. Paul.

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I Never Meta Phor That Didn't Turn Me On.

2008-09-04T06:11:00.000-07:00

As skeptical & uninterested in Obama Mia! mania as I am, I am still hoping that the handsome young phenom, the hot prospect from the minors, Barack "Babe" O'Bama can step up and close out this game - before it goes into extra innings - where, as we know from the Florida world series, anything can happen. The other team's equally green* and "hot" prospect, Slammin' Sara Palin**, has been pretty impressive swatting pop flies out to the warning track during batting practice. She's been hitting so many solid base hits that nobody's even talking about "Lefty" Obamayer's "perfect" game*** anymore. And even the Pachyderm's runty little Italian shortstop has been smacking some sizzling grounders through the gap, with attitude. Giuliani's taken to saying something stupid as arrogantly as he can, opening his eyes and hands wide, and waiting for the laughs. It's a page out of GWB's playbook: tell a lie with enough condescension & people will believe you. It's a team we've loved to hate for a lot of years now, and they are the underdogs this season, but don't count them out. They are solid hitters and they make me nervous with the way they have rolled out**** a distinctly American rhetoric of the mundane & cheesy: the moose, the downs syndrome, the pregnant teenager, the bangs, the hockey, the oil, the oil, the oil. Our oil. They have energized their team as much as Obama has his, and more importantly they are hijacking the terms of debate. We are all talking about Sara Palin right now, only a couple days after Obama's "triumph" he has been wiped from the headlines. Sara Palin has finally given me a way into writing about this campaign, she's elicited some incisive thought & writing from Mark NeuCollins, below; she's Danica Patrick with a rifle instead of a car.***** The Republicans may very well have succeeded in snatching Homeland field advantage. They have stumbled, with a little help from dumb luck I think, onto the one approach that can potentially sink the unsinkable U.S.S. Obama deeper than the Titanic: the huge submerged iceberg of American stupidy & cupidity as it latches onto what it perceives as "the proud underdog" standing up for American Values in the face of overwhelming odds. The Democrats are offering us 1960: Martin Luther Kennedy's pragmatic messianism nut to the Republican's it looks like - what - Gore Vidal or Boss Tweed or something vaguely French. Foreign & threatening anyway. Sara Palin is offering us 1897: My oil. My gun. My car. My world. I'm King of the World. (The problem with American Values being, of course, is that so many of them are destructive, self-destructive, unethical, anti-civilization.

*not in the environmental sense.
**I'm thinking she has some Tammy Faye Baker in her, and a little Jane Curtin.
***the first one pitched since the days of the Kennedy brothers. (ps. Hillary as the new Ted Kennedy? I wonder how Diane Feinstein feels about that. In that she would get bumped to the Walter Mondale spot.)
****via Bush speechwriters & Palin's mouth.
*****Walked into Safeway or Long's the other day & saw the most perfect example of co-branding: Harlequin's Nascar series. Absolute genius.

Country First

2008-09-03T21:20:00.000-07:00

To be honest, I'm a bit in awe of Governor Palin's ability to field-dress a Moose. I imagine her as vice-president reaching up with a survival knife inside the still warm body of a placid animal, shot with a high-powered rifle that was, moments before, standing knee-deep in a lake munching on plants; reaching up to sever its trachea and spill its guts on the ground --and simultaneously with a satellite phone in the other hand, conducting intricate foreign policy negotiations that affect the future of mankind-- and there is a certain awful poetry to this image. Having grown up in rural America, I am privy to the practice of "meat processing" (that is, watching the trusting look in the cow's eyes being replaced by fear, being replaced by eyes rolled up in the head, with the sound of the substantial body falling to the ground). I cannot look in a cow's eyes and do that, hence, my vegetarianism. It takes a certain type of person who can put all empathy aside and make the killing cut.

While watching the Republican convention coverage, I could not help thinking of the VFW post in Solon, Iowa. Solon is a small midwestern town like so many others. The names of those who have made the ultimate sacrifice for their country are engraved on a concrete monument in the center of town, and their names are familiar. In the VFW post, there is a photographic mural that covers one wall. It shows a deer (actually a prime buck) silhouetted in a misty forest. We, as viewers, are the first-person-shooters in this picture. It is not the misty forest, but stalking and killing that buck that matters. Surrounding me in the VFW post are ghosts from wars that were fought, purposes unclear, for which youth and dreams and bodies were sacrificed. They are drawn here by the light of the fluorescent sign outside, to drink and smoke and talk of other days. Theirs is a commonality of experience that excludes all others. They pull themselves from their chairs and into the bright sunshine to march in the Independence Day and Memorial Day parades, carrying flags and guns that shoot only blanks. And I am left with the with the feeling that there is something fundamentally wrong with the slogan "Country First." Countries have neither reverence for life nor empathy for those that they roll over.

The Other Side & Their Friends in the Media

2008-09-03T10:14:00.001-07:00

Dispatch 7
The Other Side & Their Friends in the Media
David Levi Strauss

When the Bush/Cheney regime seized power eight years ago, I would not have predicted that they would prove to be so adept at the deployment and control of images to shape public opinion. In fact, they turned out to be better at it than any previous American administration.

Watching the first (delayed) night of the Republican National Convention on TV tonight, I was struck by how different the image rhetoric in St. Paul is from what I saw first-hand in Denver last week. The images projected behind speakers tonight were more subtle and yet more iconic than anything I saw in Denver. Joe Lieberman stood before a clear blue sky broken only by a flag waving from a single pole. The film narrated by Gary Sinise was less mawkish and more moving than any of the Democrats’ films. Only George W. Bush’s visual broadcast from the Oval Office was substandard, and that may very well have been by design. For McCain to win, he must distance himself from the Bush/Cheney image.

The verbal rhetoric of each party is less distinguished and less distinguishable. Like John Kerry, Fred Thompson gave a great speech, much better than anything he did on his own behalf as a candidate. Did he have access to better speechwriters tonight, or does he just perform better in a supporting role? “John McCain knows about hope. [When he was a POW] that was all he knew.” “This is the kind of character that civilizations from the beginning of our history have sought in their leaders.” “Character you can believe in.” “Not because of a teleprompter’s speech designed to appeal to America’s critics abroad.” “The Democrats present a history-making nominee for President; history-making in that he’s the most liberal, most inexperienced nominee ever to run for President.”

The overall message was clearer in St. Paul because it was less complicated. Fred Thompson painted a compelling portrait of the candidate and threw out partisan red meat, and then Joe Lieberman appealed to disaffected conservative Democrats and Independents by saying partisanship isn’t enough. It is strange to see both campaigns running against their respective parties. Both McCain and Obama realize that they cannot win with only traditional party loyalties, that they must extend their reach. And they’re both reaching toward the same undecided voters, from opposite ends of the spectrum.

Filed on Tuesday, Sept. 2, 2008, after the second night of the Republican Convention in St. Paul.

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ICE ROAD SUCKERS

2008-09-03T00:39:00.000-07:00

The sinking feeling I have watching the videos of excited Obama supporters is making me wish that katie grace mcgowan were here to hold my hand or pour me a shot of bourbon or slap me a few times till I come out of my stupor. She seems to know how I am feeling right now: like I've wandered, jet-lagged & hungover, still wearing yesterday's clothes & maybe possibly not completely down off those two hits of windowpane, into a pretty scary church service. I think that everyone's chanting in English, not Latin, but I'm just high enough to not be sure. And high enough to feel like it really matters, and that I better figure it out or my soul's in grave danger. This is no metaphor. I once took far too much mescaline & watched an episode of Marcus Welby M.D. about Christian Scientists who would rather have their kid die than have Dr. Welby treat him. That deeply confusing & disturbing viewing experience turned into a many-layered philosophical onion that never got fully peeled; thank god I was saved by tequila & coke. What I mean is I've been this paranoid & confused before but dammit I don't think this is my fault. Maybe it's more like the Day of the Triffids or something. Everyone wants Obama to win, he's so great, and I mean the people around me in my daily life, not the people in the videos, "he represents change," "we have to change our country," and yeah god knows we have been savaged by our leaders for about the last - oh - since FDR maybe. And don't give me that Kennedy crap. Great speeches make for good video clips but money, guns & pussy run the show. I swear I am trying to find my typical comfortable snark level but I am too deeply disturbed at the moment. Maybe we can figure this out together, katie grace mcgowan. David Levi Strauss. Maybe I just need to use my middle name. Then it will all make sense. And of course what makes incredible sense, a stroke of genius, is the GOP suddenly becoming the plucky underdogs. This is the party of people who should be tried for war crimes, criminal stupidity, treason & barbarous inhumanity, and now all of a sudden here they are: a gimpy old grandad war-hero & his plucky, earthy, ribald, SPUNKY red-neck, white-trash, blue-something beauty-queen running mate, so inexperienced & inappropriate & small-town & ice-road trucker that (a) they couldn't have made her up, and (b) you just gotta be pulling for her. (I'm thinking a young Katy Sagal for the biopic) And here the poor Republicans are all beating little paper drums in their sodden little state-fair of a convention, so OBVIOUSLY bound for a sound whuppin' in that thar' eee-lection up agin that slick-talkin' skinny guy from Chi-town and his legions of weird goggle-eyed teenagers leaping up and down all EXCITED about being EXCITED, and his running mate Paulie Walnuts - er - Joe Biden, well gosh darn it those people make me nervous, I think I'll vote for the plucky, down-on-their-luck underdogs. As Paul Shaffer & The Weather Girls once put it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaP9eiWuX3s

What's happening outside the convention center?

2008-09-02T20:24:00.000-07:00

Anyone able to weigh in on what's being talked about via link below? - ie. arrests of journalists etc. (I'd write more but I just heard two gunshots coming from the vicinity of my backyard...)

http://www.alternet.org/rights/97194/

The Calm of the Storm

2008-09-02T01:34:00.000-07:00

Dispatch 6
The Calm of the Storm
David Levi Strauss

So far the meeting in St. Paul is the Unconvention, and that may be the best thing that possibly could have happened for the Republicans. Bush & Cheney couldn’t make it? Fantastic! The Republican delegates are, after all, the only people left in the world who still think the current Administration is competent (71% of them approve of Bush’s performance). Much better to have Cindy McCain and Laura Bush (decked out in gold and white, respectively) show up only as fundraisers for hurricane relief efforts, although that line about how it’s time to “take off our Republican hats and put on our American hats” begs the question: are the two mutually exclusive?

The reason for the postponement of the convention was succinctly stated by David Brooks: “They couldn’t afford that split-screen image” of party-hearty Republican celebrations juxtaposed with homeless hurricane survivors recalling Bush/Cheney’s criminal neglect during Katrina. It just wouldn’t look right. Some lobbyists couldn’t help themselves tonight, and threw lavish meet-and-greet-and-bribe parties anyway, but they at least tried to lock out the press.

To fully capitalize on their good luck, the Republican ticket should disappear for the next 68 days, perhaps to Wasilla, or South Assetia.

Filed Monday, Sept. 2, 2008, after the first night of the Republican Convention in St. Paul.

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A Ship in the Harbor

2008-09-01T23:30:00.000-07:00

Dispatch 5
A Ship in the Harbor
David Levi Strauss

Who says we can’t afford another big election about small things? Isn’t it the little things that matter most? Like Bristol Palin’s teen pregnancy, and her mother’s little gun? Like John McCain’s age and Barack Obama’s secret Muslim heart? After all, the big things—war, environmental catastrophe, the energy crisis, economic ruin—are too immense to contemplate. So let us turn deftly away, as George W. Bush taught us with 9/11, and the Iraq War, and Hurricane Katrina, and Global Warming. Play some golf, dance a jig, cut some brush in Crawford. What we don’t think about can’t hurt us. Leave it to someone else. One day at a time.

Trivialize women’s rights. Make a cute little button-nosed joke out of the Vice Presidency. Turn the tables on those oh-so-serious Dems, with their sober assessments and dire predictions, and all that downer talk about mutual responsibility. Please. What ever happened to the happy-go-lucky, irresponsible Negro, anyway? Those were the days, remember?

When Blacks and women knew their place and were happy to be there? When the U.S. was the sole super-power and could conduct foreign policy from the air, no matter what Moscow or Beijing or anyone else thought about it? When economic policy consisted of deregulation and privatization and spending the government into bankruptcy? When energy policy consisted of removing all barriers for the oil companies? God created Anwar for us, didn’t he, so we could drill there?

The Democrats’ hand-wringing only encourages the worst tendencies of a Nation of Whiners. It’s Morning in America, my friends. Don’t worry, be happy. Let Sarah and Todd and Bristol and Levi and Cindy and John show you the way, Back to the Future.

Labor Day, Sept. 1, 2008. First day of the Republican National Convention in St. Paul.

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Another Storm Cloud

2008-08-31T23:17:00.001-07:00

Earlier this week I attended a lecture by the author Chuck Klosterman
in Iowa City, Iowa. Mr. Klosterman described something I’ve been fixating upon post-DNC--enthusiastic political groupies--you know, the ones who wave signs jumping up and down in front of the camera. He explained his inability to understand how people feel so sure and so excited about something that, at this point, is only speculative—that Barack Obama will make a good president. I agree, and up the ante. How can we be excited about any of this? About anything?

The bread and circus is replete with Eisenhowers, Clintons, and The Boss blaring…

[The baggage of the old guard]
+
[Being bombarded with images of the electorate, our fellow human beings, decked out in Old Glory, jumping around madly, waving signs]

= About as alienating a formula as I can think of.

Although much of the population participates in some ritualistic form of “woohoo”-behavior, be it at church, sporting events, or political rallies; this brand is particularly hard to swallow. How do intelligent people keep the faith? How does General Lloyd "Fig" Newton stay optimistic? The remarkably endearing Barney Smith from the Indiana Heartland believe someone is going to help him out? How does one quell the cynicism?

Down in New Orleans as people batten down the hatches and seek refuge from Gustav, the press buzzes, and the buzz-machine generates new concoctions. Not unlike the old concoctions, mind you, they use the same recipes. The GOP can use this opportunity to broadcast their oft-missing humanity. Heroic gestures and convention sacrifices will melt the icy image of The Party. And, the poor get screwed again. This time the storm not only means risks to the lives and homes of the people of greater NOLA, it may also mean more votes for “maverick” McBush and thus, another four years of suffering for those who are already suffering the most.

This is why the daily disappointments of politics hurt so much. “Lock, stock, and barrel after barrel” we get the same formulaic answers and the same vague plans for reform.

The mortifying media spectacle isn’t to blame; it’s symptomatic of the same old…
There is a little hope for change here though, a little. But, you don’t see Dennis Kucinich or the like up there, do you? We still demand the pomp and circumstance, still allow the mirage of excitement and camaraderie to cloud our political vision. Traditions run deep in the land of fundamentalist Christianity, waste, greed, patriarchy, and colonialist privilege.

Sure, I vote. I want you to vote. In fact, rock the vote-- or whatever the slogan du jour—but really, the vote? The politicians? The Government?

I think it’s time to figure out how to look each other in the eye.

2008 GOP Convention tune-up at the Xcel Center

2008-08-30T22:34:00.001-07:00

Click to Play

Two views of the hall of the Xcel Center in St. Paul, Minnesota on the Saturday before the scheduled start of the Republican National Convention, as work crews from the trades and media made final preparations for the event.

Earlier this evening the New York Times issued the following news alert:

===

Mandatory Hurricane Evacuation Is Ordered in New Orleans"

City officials ordered everyone to leave New Orleans beginning Sunday morning -- the first mandatory evacuation since Hurricane Katrina flooded the city three years ago -- as Hurricane Gustav grew into what the city's mayor called "the storm of the century" and moved toward the Louisiana coast.

===

Gustav may well delay the beginning of the convention.

Saturday, August 30, 23:45 CDT

Mile High Flickr Album

2008-08-30T06:58:00.000-07:00

Flickr Photo Archive

Dispatch 4

2008-08-29T01:05:00.000-07:00

Dispatch 4
Signed, Sealed, Delivered
David Levi Strauss

Being inside Mile High stadium tonight was a very different experience than being in the Pepsi Center last night. The machine did move, lock, stock, and confetti, but was entirely transformed. Since the main substantive difference between the two was the addition of 50,000 Regular People (civilians) into the mix, I can only attribute the change to them. The music was better, the dancing was much, much better, and the security was more laidback. When I plowed into a black woman guard at a checkpoint with my camera bag, she turned and said, "Oh, my new bump brother," and made me give her a fist-bump before she'd let me pass.

Three moments stand out. The first occurred at 5:30 pm, when will.i.am took the stage to do "Yes We Can," and the crowd (some of whom had walked hours to get here) came together around it and became a unified force. The second came when the film about Barack Obama's life was shown, and the by-then capacity crowd of 75,000 fell absolutely silent. And the third came halfway through Obama's speech, when he said of the last eight years of American politics, "We are better than this. Enough!" and the crowd pushed out the walls.

At those three points, the machine became irrelevant.

Filed in early morning hours on Friday, August 29, 2008, following the final night of the convention.

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SPAR(s)E CHANGE?

2008-08-28T22:00:00.000-07:00

Dispatch3

2008-08-28T12:49:00.001-07:00

Dispatch 3
Bill Clinton: "I Love This"
David Levi Strauss

I'm writing to you from inside a machine for producing words and images. If anything happens here at the Pepsi Center that is not recorded, it is a wasted act, a kind of sin. Everyone here is divided into use-groups, indicated by the colored tags hanging from their necks. Security forces check the tags constantly to insure compliance.

First, there are the Politicians, the stars, the reason we're all here. Some of them are so important that they don't even wear tags. Their images are so ubiquitous and recognizable that they transcend the need for secondary identification.

Next comes the Designated Crowd, also called delegates. Their job is to dress extravagantly and react enthusiastically to everything the Politicians do. They must act as if they're on-camera at all times, even in the most supposedly private of moments, because when you become part of the Designated Crowd, you sacrifice your identity and image to the greater Image.

The Press is here to record and interpret every act and gesture of the Politicians and the Designated Crowd. The Press is divided into Word People and Image People, and in this setting, the Image People have the upper hand. The Press is also divided into the Mainstream Media and the Bloggers. The MSM have whole buildings (called Media Pavilions) dedicated to their every need or want. They have lounges and cafes and bars. And they have degrees of unlimited access. Some of them have such recognizable images that they have themselves become stars: Wolf, Anderson, Katie, Cokie, Matt. One sees them on the Floor, perfect and motionless, until the cameras roll and they spring to life.

The lowest caste of all is the Bloggers. They are image-less drones, crammed into crowded warrens in tents, outbuildings, and basements, plugged into their pitiful terminals, eating scraps falling from above. They exist at the outer edges of the Machine for Producing Words & Images, closest to the Unwashed, the Irrelevant.

Tonight, the Machine moves.

Filed on Thursday, August 28, 2008, following the previous, third night of the convention.

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Denver - Democratic Convention Day 3 [August 27

2008-08-28T10:16:00.000-07:00

Flickr* has experienced a technical glitch with their upload system -- we're among dozens to report this bug, and we are assured they are 'on the case.' In the meantime, we offer up a few teaser images from Day 3 of the convention.

* Our site remains up but without new additions.

red white blue 2

2008-08-28T08:25:00.000-07:00

Wait, someone told me Bill Clinton arrived in a hybrid rocket chariot from the heavens made out of recycled satin sheets and Safeway bags and granted wishes to the first 2008 conventioneers to line up and rub his tummy? Is that true? He's like the new Santa? I didn't get home from dog agility class in time to actually see what happened on tv. I sort of just pick this stuff up on the internet I guess.

We Are Family

2008-08-27T21:48:00.000-07:00

Quite an interesting spectacle from here in the heartland: the mediated message almost embarrassingly transparent; the Clintons, the old masters of politics, with carefully chosen words that place Hillary in a good strategic position whichever way the die should fall ("vote your conscience, delegates" sounds so Democratic and so self-serving in the same breath); Obama's televised visage looming over his children in a vaguely threatening big-brotherish way--oh wait, I get it, that was god talking--(but why is it that a smart woman has to spend so much time convincing us that she is a good mom when it is self-evident anyway); the appearance two days later (no wait, they just messed up, that should have been three days) in real life--or to be more accurate, in first level mediation--of the chosen one, whom it turns out is just hawking tickets to the next show. "And now for the historical perspective we turn to..." and you know that Jim Lehrer is my chauffeur ("Gwen Ifill" -- I need say no more).

But I am loving it. It would be my choice, right now, to be mingling with the delegates shouting "Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can!" I am a sucker for sappiness and emotional appeal; I love being pandered to. I feel latent tears well up in my eyes as Beau-boy Walton talks, addressing us before he goes off to fight the good American fight in foreign lands. I read mom Biden's lips saying "that's true" to her neighbor in affirmation of a story Joe is relating that is much too good and too heroic and too American to be true. Tonight, I am willing to accept the story. I am caught up in the tide washing from Denver through my television set and spilling out in my living room (and you DO realize that we Iowans gave Obama his start, don't you). In my own private war between hope and cynicism, hope seems to have slight edge right now. Perhaps it is not the hope that the organizers envision--I am hoping that the Democrats can hold this constructed image together for 69 more days. Nonetheless it is hope.

outside the convention hall

2008-08-27T14:19:00.000-07:00

Where is today's Senator Ribicoff?
Somebody tell the media to look outside the convention hall:

www.thenation.com/doc/20080901/protest_video

Dispatch 2

2008-08-27T12:35:00.000-07:00

Dispatch 2
The Fallen
David Levi Strauss

The principle drama of the conventions is the relation between the press (now, the MSM) and the politicians. This entire spectacle is built for and caters to the media and the media cannot get enough of it. This year Wolf Blitzer and CNN have set themselves up in the middle of everything, right down on the floor rather than suspended above it. CNN pundits James Carville, et al. wear black Madonna headpiece mics so that they can hear themselves and each other above the din. They look like astronauts in New Guinea.

After eight years of Bush/Cheney-style bunker mentality and press blackout, the conventions are orgies of access, and the MSM is bleary-eyed and gooey with the surfeit.

Last night, the stage belonged to the Clintons, and they showed (if anyone remained unconvinced) how masterful they are at this kind of stagecraft. Chelsea introduced her mother with a film that almost managed to make Hillary look hip, and Hillary gave the best televised speech of her life, artfully intercut with close-ups of weeping women delegates and extreme close-ups and reaction shots of Bill Clinton (often even in splitscreen) laughing, loving, earnestly rapt, and tearful. The words said “Vote for Obama,” but the images said “Look you now upon the President and First Gentleman who could and should have been, and weep.”

Filed on Wednesday, August 27, 2008, after the second night of the convention.

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red white blue

2008-08-27T07:21:00.000-07:00

My favorite part was where the whole army came out in dresses and was banging the drums with Lightsabers under the roof designed by Suede from Project Runway of the Chicken Basket Stadium. Every time we get a medal, I like to stand up on a chair and sing along.

Oh wait. What week is this? No one up there is wearing ANYTHING by Ralph Lauren. Just Hillary buttons.

Dispatch 1

2008-08-26T07:26:00.000-07:00

Dispatch 1
Isn’t She Lovely?
David Levi Strauss

For a mere voter, it was frustrating to watch the overdetermined and utterly predictable Spectacle that is the party’s nominating convention lumber to life tonight in Denver. Our excitement at Barack Obama’s rise, from his incandescent keynote speech at this convention four years ago, to his unlikely early victories and impossible triumph in the primary, led us to believe that something, everything, had changed, and
that perhaps even this hapless ritual might be transformed into a better version of itself. But it was not to be, at least not yet. Just as the opening ceremonies of the Bejing Olympics went all North Korea on us despite extraordinary individual feats, the first night of the Democratic National Convention insisted on Ken Burns without realizing that it had everything it needed in Malia and Sasha Obama.

Something felt wrong from the beginning; not just the self-conscious mawkishness, but something deeper, lurking under the deadend of identity politics. It was as if the worst tendencies of 1980s had come out to make one last attempt to stifle the future. Race vs. gender. And the hall was haunted by other spectres of past failures: Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, Howard Dean. I’m sure we’ll see Al Gore soon. There is something inside American liberalism that forgives too much and gives up too soon. A compensatory, defensive liberalism that refuses to win. Is the Obama campaign a real political movement, or just another empty promise? Having gotten our attention, will Obama Democrats, like their predecessors over the last 30 years, find a way to lose?

This time, the stakes are just too high. Barack and Michelle Obama realize this. They are real leaders, not empty vessels that must be filled up with platitudes, and tonight showed that the Democratic establishment hasn’t yet figured that out. Watching Michelle Obama give that speech was like watching a great miler run through tapioca. I think she came through anyway, but why put your best through that?

If American voters again decide that they want someone in the White House who appeals to their worst selves, who they can feel “comfortable” with, the Obamas will lose. But if they agree with Michelle Obama that “the world as it is just won’t do,” then this spectacle is just a distraction. In his speech at the convention in 2004, Barack Obama invoked “the true genius of America” without irony or cant. If that genius survives, it needs to rise now, and push aside the party faithful. “We are the ones we have been waiting for.”

Filed Monday, August 25, 2008, after the first night of the Democratic National Convention.

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hello world

2007-09-08T07:54:00.000-07:00

hello world