Hope Porn

A few nights ago I was out on a date (shocking, I know!) with a woman who was as liberal as the weather is cold. Over dinner, in a tone of voice as earnest as my 5-year-old nephew's belief in Santa Claus, she told me that, "if Barack Obama doesn't win, I truly think hope will die in our generation."

I'd like to tell you I was taking advantage of some bouncy little Harvard undergrad with a thing for successful, big-boned right-wingers. And she was cute, but also 31, which means she really ought to know better than to say some ridiculous crock of shit like that. "If you're liberal and adult then you have no brain" comes to mind.

Remember 1988? The Duke sure looked like a hot ticket right about this time. Reagan was stumbling off stage right, pursued by the acrid clouds of Iran-Contra, and Bush's dad was stuck explaining the past eight years away as "voodoo economics." Perestroika and Glasnost had even declawed the Soviet bear, so the time looked ripe for a popular governor of a booming (and at that time, swing) state to win the big game.

One of my earliest political memories is the second debate, when Bernie Shaw asked Dukakis if he would favor the death penalty for someone who raped and murdered his wife. There is a way to answer this as an opponent of the death penalty. You can say, "I'm sure I'd want to kill him with my own hands, but our laws are not based on tribal blood feuds." Or, "Bernie, that's an outrageous question and I refuse to dignify it with a response." Well, we all know what Dukakis did--he explained it bureaucratically, in the same tone of voice your mechanic uses when you ask him if you should spend the extra $50 for the synthetic brake pads instead of the ordinary ones.

The lesson that liberals took from that, the tank debacle, and Willie Horton, was that Republicans would pull every dirty trick in the book to "frame" Democrats as something other than what they really were. This line of thinking holds that if the GOP were to run an 'honest campaign' focused purely on the merits of contending schools of thought, then the left would win. 20 years later I am as convinced as ever that they haven't actually learned a thing.

You can talk about Obama's charisma all you want. The smarter members of his team focus on it relentlessly for good reason. Underneath the hood of that shiny new car is the same engine found in Dukakis's and Walter Mondale's campaigns, which were themselves remanufactured versions of Jimmy Carter's one-term wonder. What liberals refuse to acknowledge is that Lee Atwater's devastating hit-job worked because it represented the spirit of the Left on issues of crime altogether too accurately. The Right has defeated the liberal agenda over and again not by mischaracterizing it, but by shining a floodlight on it.

Now if you're a liberal and can't stomach that concept, watch LBJ's infamous "Daisy" ad and think again. It didn't work because it made people think, "well ya know, maybe that Goldwater fellow isn't such a peacenik after all." It worked because it pinpointed that scab that gave people a funny feeling about Goldwater, and ripped it off until it bled and bled. (Imagine if a commercial in 2004 ran showing airliners smashing into the World Trade Towers, while Rudy Giuliani said, "These are the stakes....")

Campaigns can obviously turn on a dime, with every moment an opportunity for each candidate to dig himself into a bottomless hole, so nothing is a sure thing until the last chad is un-dangled. But consider this yet another prediction from me that an Obama campaign could give hope a dirty name for decades to come, should he manage to beat the bride of Stalin next week...  ¶ 7:54 PM