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.
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