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 6 Comments

  Ichi the Killer

Just finished watching the DVD based on a recommendation from a friend. It makes Fight Club look like Fried Green Tomatoes. After watching this, you'll realize that not only is Eli Roth a depraved, sadistic voyeur, he's an unoriginal hack about it, to boot.  ¶ 7:38 PM 0 Comments

  How about that unity?

Like a moth flying into a candle, Liberal pundits love few things more than writing obituaries for the "fragile coalition" of social conservatives, small-government libertarians, and defense hawks that comprises the post-WWII GOP. Every great realignment of the body politic--Watergate, the end of the Cold War, Bill Clinton's third-way politics, Iraq--is the harbinger of a decisive shattering of the coalition Frank Meyer named "fusionism." And yet every time they gather for the wake, the casket is opened and found to be empty.

Meanwhile, the Democratic party has been shattered and splintered routinely since 1968. I was always optimistic about Hillary's weakness in the general election, but I am warming more and more to an Obama candidacy with each passing day. Why? Ask Tom Buffenbarger, president of the International Association of Machinists:

“Give me a break! I've got news for all the latte-drinking, Prius- driving, Birkenstock-wearing, trust fund babies crowding in to hear him speak! This guy won't last a round against the Republican attack machine. He's a poet, not a fighter.”

Call him a Clinton shill if you want. But forget that Obama spent time as a community organizer in the minority neighborhoods of Chicago, because those are as far away from Waukesha and Pittsburgh as Harvard Law is from the University of Phoenix. Culturally, the Obamas are card-carrying members of the new meritocracy, the professional overclass that supplies not just private-equity robber barons like Mitt Romney, but college professors and elected officials as well. These days you are probably as likely to find a self-made millionaire in a roomful of machinists as in a gathering of Harvard classmates of equal age. But the machine-shop owner is a lot less likely to know who Frank Rich or Christo are, and less likely still to give a shit.

A generation earlier, these people wanted their kids to go on to four-year colleges because that was the best ticket to membership in the financially-successful class of the US. Not anymore. College today is as much a cultural institution as a financial one. If you want your kid to make six figures in a steady job, he or she is better off learning to weld aluminum and become an auto-body technician than getting a law degree from any but the top 10% or so of schools. Then again, if you want your daughter to meet the sort of boy you'd be flattered to call your son-in-law, you probably want her to go to a 4-year college rather than Wyotech. It's about class, old boy, not money.

Now, John McCain, who no doubt would have joined his father and grandfather before him in the long line of admirals named McCain had he not married the money that got him into the Senate, is hardly an average working stiff. The argument can be made that Michelle Obama is the most self-made person (not) in this race. But to a machinist from Peoria, which one of them appears more "posh," as the British call their class superiors? The military in the US is an exceptional institution that exists more wholly outside the class system than any other. Annapolis is arguably harder to get into (in most every sense) than Harvard or Yale, but aside from the occasional chief petty officer, no one in the US sneers at graduates of the service academies the way they do at Ivy Leaguers. Likewise, surveys routinely find that US military officers are the most universally-respected professionals in the public eye. They may learn to read Virgil in the original Latin, but they are not latte-sipping, sandal-clad elitists.

We have seen the real John McCain for aroudn twenty years. He is often nasty, imperious, egotistical, and self-righteous. No one who isn't gets as far as he has, and that includes Barack Ghandi Boddhisatva Christ Hope Obama, whose soaring message of "you're not f---ed now that I'm here" is wearing thin even now. If pushed to name a top-tier Republican who can draw the votes of machinists who grumble about management pricks like Mitt Romney and hippie fags in the same breath, John McCain is quite simply the best name since Reagan.

Therefore I am going to put my money where my mouth is and say that if Obama is the nominee, that McCain will carry Maine, New Hampshire, and come within 5 points of winning Massachusetts, which is just now getting hit with the spins after drinking too much of the hope-aid.  ¶ 10:25 AM 0 Comments

  I'm So Over You

This is me being so sick of Lost. Just when you think they're about to reveal a meaningful hint of WTF is going on, they throw another ten pounds of red herring at you.

Look, people, I remember what happened with the X Files. Just when it seemed like things couldn't get any better, they didn't. In the interstice between seasons (punctuated by a feature film), the producers lost all semblance of control of the plot, and one of the best shows on television jumped the shark. After slapping us around like a Craigslist hooker for the past three seasons, last year's finale brought me back. I thought, "this time, things are going to be different."

How many times did Tina go home to Ike saying the same thing?

I'm halfway through the second episode of season 4, and I'm done. I don't know if the producers of Lost have a grand plan to tie all the wild tangents together. What I do know is they have two more years of episodes under contract to shoot, and they're not going to keep les bon temps rouler by answering questions. Don't get me wrong: I could watch Evangeline Lilly brush her teeth for hours at a time, and, like 100 Years of Solitude, I can always look forward to the possibility of a major character finally croaking once every eight or ten episodes. Frankly, I'm sick of them all, at this point.  ¶ 8:47 PM 3 Comments

  The Hooker Gap

Mug shots of prostitutes picked up by the St. Petersburg police. No, Beavis, in Russia. I'd like to laugh, but who'd want to bet that the typical lineup of needle-tracked, meth-toothed, ten-years-past-their-prime wildebeests one finds in what's left of the seedy parts of town around here would make these eastern bloc girls look like the freshman class of BU by comparison?  ¶ 12:17 PM 0 Comments