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

McCain-Obama Debate: The Dance of the Country

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

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

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

Hilda on the line I

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

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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