Imagine you're an undecided voter, turning on the news tonight. You hear about the enormous plunge Wall Street took today. You hear about the U.S. government taking ownership stakes in American banks. You hear about a global economic crisis. You hear about the Great Depression.
Then the subject turns to the Presidential race - and if the news channel behaves the way the McCain campaign clearly hopes it will, the first thing you'll see is a short feature on how John McCain has cut a new anti-Obama ad featuring Ayers, Ayers and more Ayers. It's possible that this inspires you to think: Man, that terrorist-sympathizing Obama can't be trusted in an economic crisis. In that case, Steve Schmidt, Andy McCarthy and sundry others are political masterminds, and I am a plain fool.
But I don't think I'm a fool. I think McCain looks, to our hypothetical undecided, utterly disconnected from what's happening in the world, and the details of the Ayers connection, however troubling they might be in another context, blur away into a broader impression of a flailing, desperate, out-of-touch candidate. At this point, the McCain camp seems to be taking its cues more from the liberal caricature of past conservative campaigns - that they've all been fundamentally unserious exercises in culture-war button-pushing - than from the campaigns themselves. It's as though they're being paid under the table by Thomas Frank to goose his book sales and vindicate his thesis.
Gloves, Off
Well, we'll see how this plays on Main Street:
As Ed Morrissey says, this will put an awful lot of pressure on McCain to "say it to his face" at the next debate.
On a not-unrelated note, Nate Silver notes that in the first three debates, Obama/Biden used the phrase "middle class" twenty one times, while McCain/Palin used it twice. And alas, it's not because John McCain read Grand New Party and decided to start saying "working class" instead.
October 7, 2008
Palin's Future (Or Lack Thereof)
Chris Orr lays down twenty bucks that Sarah Palin's future trajectory won't resemble anything like the optimistic scenario I sketched out here. I'd take the bet if he'd give me three-to-one odds! But yeah, at the moment it does seem more likely that Palin will be remembered as someone who was invited on board the U.S.S. Republican Party when it was already caught up in a vortex, and ended up lashing her career to its mast and going down with the ship.
What's the way out? An Ayers/Wright offensive simply isn't going to
hack it; even I can't be bothered with it today between covering my
face and peeking through my fingers at the sinking Dow. A sustained
attack on the left over Fannie/Freddie will help, but I don't know how
you push that message through to low-information voters with the time
left. It seems unlikely in the extreme that people who don't follow
this from day to day are to going react to a meltdown on Wall Street by
electing the guy from the party commonly derided as a pawn of big
business. On the contrary, the worse things get, the better The One's
vacuous rhetoric sounds. After all, what surer tonic could there be for
a looming depression than Hopenchange? Pricetag: $5 trillion. Horrifying exit quotation from an unnamed McCain advisor
suggesting they're ready to give up: "If we keep talking about the
economic crisis, we're going to lose." Note to Team Maverick -- you have no choice.
McCain is almost certainly going to lose this election. He can go down trying to talk about the issues that voters actually care about, and trying to make some headway in the debates that are going to dominate our politics for the next few years, or he can go down trying to change the subject. I really don't see any percentage in the latter.
From Willie Horton To William Ayers
Let's watch some vicious right-wing attack ads:
Okay, what was that ad about? "White racism!" cry the liberals. But table that argument for a moment: What else was it about? Crime. Take out the racial element, and you're still left with a devastatingly effective ad for an era - the late 1980s - when crime rates were near an all-time high.
Here's another one, just as infamous:
Again, what's this ad about? White racism? Again, table that debate - what else? Jobs. The Helms-Gantt Senate race took place in 1990, at a time when the Reagan boom was giving way to the Bush-era recession - and when North Carolina's manufacturing sector, in particular, was taking a big hit - and the ad's effectiveness depended almost entirely on its very direct connection to N.C. voters' economic anxieties.
Discerning blog readers are probably aware that one of the biggest difficulties with the medium is that as far as the size of your traffic goes - and thus, in some ultimate sense, the size of your paycheck - it's much more important to write frequently than to write well. This creates unfortunate incentives for individual bloggers, who see near-constant posting rewarded with high traffic even when the quality of their posts suffer dramatically. And it creates a similar incentive problem for group blogs: The administrator has an incentive to extend posting privileges to an ever-larger crew, even when it means that bad material starts to crowd out the posts that made the blog worth reading in the first place. I can only assume that these perverse incentives explain the sudden election-eve presence of the novelist and professor Richard Stern on TNR's The Plank, usually one of my favorite liberal blogs; whatever Stern's merits as a novelist, his blogging style is near-parodic in its mix of pretension, vituperation, and "no enemies to the left" obliviousness.
Dave Weigel on David Zucker's American Carol, and the difficulties involved in making a slapstick comedy that doesn't mock authority, but reveres it:
If you transported Zucker back to 1978 and pitched him Animal House, he'd direct Niedermeyer: Man of Iron.
Weigel also suggests that the time to make a right-wing comedy spoofing Michael Moore was probably, oh, 2004 or so, back in the Fahrenheit 9/11 days when his celebrity was at its height. Coincidentally, back in '04 I wrote a piece for NR about the (conservative) American Renaissance Film Festival, in which I took note of the "almost pathological obsession with Michael Moore among filmmakers and audience members alike." But at least then it made a certain sense. Now, though - well, just read Weigel.
Palin's Appeal
Yglesias thinks it's all in (male) right-wing pundits' heads:
Now the simple fact of the matter is that Palin is an unpopular figure.
There's no sense arguing about this. Likewise, the polls show
unambiguously that most people who watched her debate performance were
unimpressed. And yet among male conservative pundits .... gushing praise was extremely common. But before this loose talk of a Palin 2012 campaign
takes off, people need to realize that her appeal seems grounded in the
psychosexual hang-ups of conservative men. Her hyper-unpopularity with
women makes her an unpopular figure overall, and talk of her
mesmerizing qualities doesn't change that.
"No sense arguing?" Really? Look, it's certainly true that Palin has relatively low favorable ratings compared to the other candidates in the race, especially among women. But going into the debate, and coming off a week of round-the-clock public mockery following her disastrous interview with Katie Couric, she still had higher positives than negatives (according to Time, 47 percent of Americans viewed her favorably, and 40 percent viewed her negatively), so calling her a flat-out "unpopular figure" seems at the very least debatable. And while the post-debate polls show that most people gave the edge to Biden, I'm not sure that it's "unambiguous" that Americans were unimpressed with Palin's performance. In this CNN poll, for instance, she was judged the more likable candidate by 54 percent of viewers, compared to 36 percent for Biden. This CBS poll, meanwhile, found that "fifty-five percent of the uncommitted voters said their opinion of
Palin had changed for the better as a result of the debate; just 14
percent said they had a lower opinion of her"; it also found that "Palin's rating improved after the debate on being knowledgeable on
important issues - from 43 percent to 66 percent ... [and] Uncommitted voters' views of Palin's preparedness for the job of
vice president also improved as a result of her debate performance -
from 39 percent to 55 percent." These are not world-beating numbers by any means - Biden's knowledgeability and preparedness scores were off the charts - and the public's (completely justifiable) doubts about Palin's preparedness and experience may ultimately make her a liability to McCain in this campaign. But neither are they numbers that suggest that she can dismissed out of hand as an inarguably "unpopular" figure with no future in American politics, who's stock is being artificially inflated by the sexual fantasies of right-wing pundits.
September 30, 2008
Dispatches From The Culture War
Steven Waldman has a lengthy and judicious take on Barack Obama and the born-alive controversy. And Mollie Ziegler Hemingway has a lengthy and judicious takedown of the L.A. Times' report on Sarah Palin and her "fundamentalism." (And no, the fact that Palin looks more and more like a disastrous choice does not justify lousy religion coverage.)
September 22, 2008
Palin and Her (Conservative) Critics
Over at TNR, Michael Schaffer argues that conservative pundits can't have it both ways: You can't simultaneously defend Sarah Palin from liberal snobbery and critique her for seeming unprepared to be vice president, he suggests; either you're in favor of elitism, or you're against it. Of Palin-doubting conservatives (myself included), Schaffer wonders "what, exactly, these bright folks think will help her
do better, or hasten the day when a national candidacy is not in fact 'too much.' The answer is obvious: exposure to the worldly people,
issues, and institutions of Washington and the world beyond it." And then, riffing off David Brooks' line that a lot of Palin's liberal critics object to her on the grounds that "she has never summered in Tuscany" (which I think was meant as humorous hyperbole), Schaffer suggests that actually, if Palin did summer in Tuscany, she'd probably have "an easier time"
with conservative pundits "than the Italy-free version currently on the hustings."
In some cases, he may be right: Conservative elites aren't immune to straightforward class-based snobbery, especially when it dovetails with their own allegiances; witness, say, the contempt for Mike Huckabee's general Dogpatch air among certain Romney, McCain and Rudy-supporting members of the right-wing punditocracy. And Schaffer's certainly right that the line between an elitism that holds politicians to high standards and an "elitism of snobbery and style" can get blurry quickly. But that doesn't mean the line itself isn't worth drawing. It should be possible to believe that Palin's resume and background don't disqualify her from holding high office, that someone can be a fine President without prolonged exposure to life inside the Beltway, and that "elite experience" is not the only experience that's germane to governing the United States ... while simultaneously believing (as I do) that Palin's interviews to date haven't instilled confidence in her readiness to govern. The belief that populism has a place in American politics does not require a belief that every populist candidate should be uncritically supported; and the belief that one can acquire political wisdom outside Washington does not absolve an outsider candidate of the obligation to demonstrate that they have wisdom, as well as talking points, to fall back on.
Like Michael Gerson, I would rather be governed by a "backwoods, religious no-name" like William Jennings Bryan than by many of the sophisticates who baited him; like Ralph Peters, I think it's good for American democracy to throw up leaders whose life experience encompasses start-up churches and strip-mall suburbs, and who attended schools like the University of Idaho rather than the upper-crust institutions that have produced every President since Reagan. But supporting "Great Commoners" when they appear, and pining for them when they don't, doesn't mean that any candidate who happens to be a commoner and a conservative merits automatic support from right-wing pundits (which is more or less the subtext of a rant like this one, which takes a sledgehammer to "northeast corridor conservatives" for their Palin-skepticism), or that conservatives are hypocrites - and snobs who just don't want to admit to the designation - if they support the idea of candidates like Sarah Palin while remaining skeptical about Palin herself.
September 21, 2008
Superstitious Minds
Mollie Ziegler Hemingway looks into the bold, heroic rationalism of unbelievers, and finds - well, something slightly different:
The Gallup Organization, under contract to Baylor's Institute for
Studies of Religion, asked American adults a series of questions to
gauge credulity. Do dreams foretell the future? Did ancient advanced
civilizations such as Atlantis exist? Can places be haunted? Is it
possible to communicate with the dead? Will creatures like Bigfoot and
the Loch Ness Monster someday be discovered by science?
The answers were added up to create an index of belief in occult and
the paranormal. While 31% of people who never worship expressed strong
belief in these things, only 8% of people who attend a house of worship
more than once a week did.
Even among Christians, there were disparities. While 36% of those
belonging to the United Church of Christ, Sen. Barack Obama's former
denomination, expressed strong beliefs in the paranormal, only 14% of
those belonging to the Assemblies of God, Sarah Palin's former
denomination, did. In fact, the more traditional and evangelical the
respondent, the less likely he was to believe in, for instance, the
possibility of communicating with people who are dead.
Hat tip: MBD, who has the requisite reference to the most famous aphorism G.K. Chesterton didn't actually coin.
September 17, 2008
Porn and Adultery, One More Time
If you spend any time on the rest of the Atlantic's site (as well you should) you've probably already noticed the piece, but anyone who's weary of reading my commentary on the election and really misses mycommentary on pornography's place on the infidelity continuum is in for a real treat this month.
September 16, 2008
Getting Culture War Ads Right
A few days ago, Jim Geraghty complained that my critique of McCain's sex-ed ad relied more on how the ad "feels" than on what the ad actually said. Today, Byron York marshals an extended defense of the ad's accuracy. And Rich Lowry writes that McCain's ads "are no worse than Obama's spots ...Obama
just ran an ad saying McCain would cut education funding -- with no
evidence. His response to McCain's supposed out-of-control negativity
is a new negative ad misleadingly creating the impression that McCain
aides are currently lobbying for special interests."
Here's the thing, though: The reason that the sex-ed ad touched such a nerve, and helped create the current "McCain is a lying liar" narrative in the press, is that it's a culture war ad. It isn't about funding or lobbying or any of the other issues where truth-bending ads get cut all the time without the media freaking out; it's about values, and children, and sex. Obviously, I think such topics are completely fair game for attack ads, but a large slice of the commentariat doesn't, and a conservative campaign that runs a culture-war ad has to expect that it will come in for a higher level of scrutiny than your typical attack ad - and a higher level of blowback if it shades the truth at all. In its relationship to the facts, the sex-ed ad wasn't all that different from, say, Obama's semi-mendacious education ad - but given its subject matter, it needed to meet a higher standard.
This ad, meanwhile, seems to meet those standards, while taking up an even hotter-button subject. It'll be interesting to see if and how the press reacts:
It's been a good week for the McCain campaign, to put it mildly, but I think yesterday's "lipstick on a pig" faux-outrage was "win the news cycle, undercut your long-term appeal" mistake, for exactly the reasons Ramesh outlines:
... there may have been good ways to take shots at Obama over the "lipstick
on a pig" comment. But the Republicans are coming across as whiny
grievance-mongers. Don't they realize that this harping on ambiguous
slights is what people hate about political correctness? It was bad
enough when liberals were trying to destroy Palin. Now Republicans are
trashing her brand. They're undermining the basis of her appeal as a
different, tougher kind of female politician.
And then there's the sex-ed ad, which feels more appropriate to a failing, flailing right-wing campaign than a confident, rising conservative ticket. Jim Geraghty marshals the strongest defense of the ad here, which you can compare to Factcheck.org's critique. The bill that Obama supported did, in fact, seek to amend the school code so that the state guidelines for "comprehensive sex education" would apply to grades K-12, rather than grades 6-12 (as had previously been the case); on the other hand, it also required that "course material and instruction ... shall be age and developmentally appropriate." The Obama campaign has argued, and the press has reported, that the only age-appropriate sex ed the bill envisioned for kindergarten involved the distinction between appropriate and inappropriate touching. I'm not sure I quite buy that, since the bill includes provisions like the following: "Whenever such courses of instruction are provided in any of grades K-12, then such courses also shall include age-appropriate instruction on the prevention of sexually transmitted infections." This could be read to suggest that STDs as well as "good touch, bad touch" were being treated as a potentially appropriate topic for kindergarten, which ups the measure's creepiness factor in my book. But the language is somewhat ambiguous, and certainly there's no reason to think that the bill envisioned five-year-olds putting condoms on a banana, which is the image that the McCain ad seems designed to summon up. Moreover, Obama didn't write or co-sponsor the legislation (he voted for it in a party-line vote) and it never became law, so calling it "his one accomplishment" on education is just false. And even if aspects of the sex-ed claim are technically defensible, the whole thing just feels bullshitty and gross - like a parody of a culture-war ad. I have no problem with campaigning on culture war issues, and God knows Obama has vulnerabilities, but there's a right way and a wrong way to do it, and this ad falls into the second category.
The notion that hard-core pornography has something to do with marital infidelity has been floating around the edges of the American conversation for a while now. But maybe it's worth sharpening the debate.
The idea that history might rehabilitate George W. Bush seems too ludicrous to be seriously entertained. But nearly every presidential reputation, however tarnished, eventually finds someone willing to defend it
