Election Day

Although of no interest to out-of-staters and possibly of marginal interest to Californians, here's how I'm voting tomorrow:

Governor: Jerry Brown
Lt. Governor: Gavin Newsom
Secretary of State: Debra Bowen
State Controller: John Chiang
Treasurer: Bill Lockyer
Attorney General: Kamala Harris
Insurance Commissioner: Dave Jones
U.S. Senator: Barbara Boxer

All of these people are the Democratic candidates for their position. I did consider each office on individual basis, and there were a number of cases where I would normally think of voting third party: governor (I doubt Brown can even get himself excited at the though of his possible future term), lieutenant governor (I respect Newsom a great deal for his stand on same-sex marriage, but, even with a collection of shitheads in the Board of Supervisors, he's been a failure as mayor), and, most especially, attorney general (it seems it's a tradition among SF district attorneys that they be absolutely worthless). However, there has never been an election year where the choices are more clearly defined. Thanks to the polarization of the irrationalism, bigotry, and sheer ignorance of the Tea Party (otherwise known as the Republican wing of the Republican Party), I simply will not consider a third-party vote when it might it possibly benefit the Republican candidate on any level. It would be like voting for anyone but the SPD seventy-seven years ago.

As for the propositions:

Prop 19: Yes. Structural flaws or not, it's essential that the push towards drug legalization gets rolling, and state legalization of marijuana will hopefully be a major step towards that. As of today, the War on Drugs has cost $42,524,538,184 this year alone. That's over half of what the federal health care reform bill will cost on a yearly basis, and, while the health care bill gives us something tangibly beneficial, the War on Drugs has provided nothing but misery and frustration for all involved.

Prop 20: No. There is a very simple and easy solution to gerrymandering: mobilize and elect politicians that support your views. Gerrymandering isn't what is keeping the Republican Party out of power in California, it's your baffling adherence to extreme positions that don't play in the sane part of the country. Republicans and other parties have done nothing to deserve an equal representation in redistricting, and if Judge Walker's decision on Prop 8 was against "the will of the voter," then establishing unelected committees to redraw districts is just as equally undemocratic.

Prop 21: No. I like parks. I like representational democracy even more. I elect politicians to have balls and pass taxation when they need money (although I recognize that's not so simple in California, see Prop. 25 below). Vehicle license fees are regressive taxation that pays no mind to the income level of the person being taxed. I will vote for officials that will increase funding to state parks. I will not vote to do the job they should be doing themselves.

Prop 22: No. It sucks that Prop. 13 has set up a budget structure by which city revenues can be so easily raided by the state to pay the bills on the gargantuan administration needed to manage what should be city services that can't be carried by the city because they have no money because their revenues can be so easily raided by the state to pay etcetera et-fucking-cetera. Lockboxing revenue is never a good idea, especially during tough economic times when it needs to be flexible to meet our most necessary demands. The problem is Prop 13, and this is just another band-aid on what has been the ever-growing cancer at the heart of the California government.

Prop 23: No. Do you like Texas oil barons spending millions to keep California's from even attempting to do anything about climate change, regardless of what they've already supported at every level of the decision-making process? Do you like being anally-raped by your corporate overlords? If you answered yes, then vote yes on Prop 23. If you are not a complete tool, vote no.

Prop 24: No. Basically this an attempt by the Californian Teacher's Association to work around tax breaks given as consolation prizes by the Democrats in the state legislature to moderate Republicans to get a budget passed. Regardless of whether those tax breaks hurt or help the California economy, this is another example of an attempt to use the proposition process to micromanage the budget and have voters do the jobs we elect legislators to do for us. Hopefully if we can pass Prop 25, we can end this nonsense. Speaking of which...

Prop 25: Yes. HOLY FUCKING YES. This is the most important item on the ballot. California has tried this experiment of a two-thirds majority requirement for voting in a budget for decades now, and it was all fine until Prop 13 added a supermajority to taxation and screwed everything to hell. We have been living by Howard Jarvis rules for 32 years now and California ain't exactly been the Libertarian Utopia that was promised. As long as we keep the supermajority for the budget, Republicans can continue to stymie the process, Democrats can continue to claim it was all the Republicans fault, and the legislature will continue to pass bonds that are so devaluing the state's credit and no one will ever get held accountable. Only Arkansas and Rhode Island require a two-thirds supermajority for passing a state budget, and that might be all fine and dandy for Sister-fuckingville and Tinyland, but this is the 8th largest economy in the motherfucking world. Do the right thing.

Prop 26: No. See Prop 23, just here the attempt is to neuter Prop 25 and keep the carbon emissions flowing. Do you like the taste of corporate ass? If so, vote yes on 26 and get licking, slave.

Prop 27: Yes. See Prop 20. Right or wrong, democracy means you get the government you deserve people. When less than three-fourths of all eligible voters bothered to make a choice in 2008 for the California state senate, you can't tell me that democracy is being subverted by anything other than apathy in this state. And if it turns out to be true that Californians do overwhelmingly vote Democrat in this state, then change or die, Republicans.

From the Original Draft of the Declaration of Independence

"he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people, who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain, determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce; and this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms against us, and to purchase the liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on which he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another."

We could have been better then, and over the course of hundreds of years, we have become better. The lesson of America's past is not in how great our country has been, but in how much greater our country can still become, so long as we continue the revolution to expand the ideals of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all.

No We Can't

Turns out Jeannine and I will not be attending the presidential inauguration. We didn't get the inaugural tickets as we hoped, finances are pretty tight, and Jeannine was scared off by the size of the crowds and the weather. So no D.C. vacation for us, although it does free me up to attend the January Mini-Con at Endgame. Woo-hoo.

"Some Kind of Special Mustache?"

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Some Final Thoughts on Prop 8

I've spent way too much time today reading through various progressive blogs gauging the reaction to the passage of Proposition 8, and the postmortem that is developing leaves me cold. My thoughts:

Blacks are not to blame for Prop 8 passing: It's disturbing that 70% of African-Americans would vote Yes on 8, while whites and Hispanics averaged out to around 50-55%. This does not change the fact that the vast majority of voters who voted for 8 were the same majority of voters who vote in anything in California: whites. It would be just as easy (and equally fruitless) to blame the over-65 voters for the proposition. This sentiment that it was the blacks that sold out the gays in California seems based more on hurt feelings over the huge positive outcry forthe Obama win in the midst of the hurt over Prop 8 passing. I can understand that sentiment, but it serves no purpose.

Mormons and their out-of-state money are not to blame for Prop 8 passing: The Mormon money that poured into California from Utah was sickening, not simply because the church has a long history of institutionalized bigotry against minorities but also due to their own history of discrimination based on "traditional marriage". Nevertheless, at the end of the day, the No on 8 group had more money in its coffers than Yes on 8, and more of that money came from out-of-state as well. To claim that it was Utah that caused Prop 8 is simply hypocritical.

Californians are to blame for Prop 8 passing: Prop 8 ultimately had majority support (albeit marginal) among a wide variety of ethnic, religious, and economic backgrounds. Claiming it was Blacks or Mormons or some other small portion of the state population is both ill-reasoned and serves no purpose in future action for gay rights. We needed a widespread, grassroots movement, backed by solid canvassing action at the field level to sway undecided voters, rather than fruitless visibility efforts in solidly liberal areas and wasting gobs of money on television commercials that never defined the issue in anything other than a reactive manner. We had the volunteers, we had the money, we simply lacked the leadership.

And ultimately, it was that lack of leadership that resulted in failing to get out the vote, to making certain that progressive voters understand the magnitude of the proposition and remained at the polls even when Obama's victory was certain. Only 49% of San Francisco came out to vote on Tuesday, which is simply inexcusable when the No on 8 leadership was already myopically focusing on GOTV efforts in liberal bastions like SF. If their best effort at GOTV garners only 49% of voters in San Francisco County, then something really stinks at the top of this movement.

Why Prop 8 Lost

There's a really good article on Calitics on why Proposition 8 lost this morning, and I gotta agree with most of its conclusions. While I don't fault those progressives who concentrated on the Obama campaign rather than work for No on Prop 8 (I think it's wrong to assume that the Obama supporters were necessarily No on 8'rs, much less that they were enthusiastic enough to work for the cause), I definitely agree that the movement's emphasis on preaching to the choir in liberal areas and failing to define the argument before the Yes on 8 folks could bring in the "What about the children?!!" shit was a significant mistake.

There should have been no money and effort put into preventing Prop 8 from getting on the ballot, as it's far too easy to get anything on the ballot in California through the referendum process and this issue has too much support on both sides to really hope that it could be marginalized into non-existence. Though Prop 8 may get struck down by the California Supreme Court, we need to get a "repeal Prop 8" proposition out there for 2010, despite fears that it could turn the gubernatorial election for the Republican candidate, and get out the vote in what should be a simpler message to voters than it was this election cycle.

Big Fat Change Day: A Long Way Left To Go

According to the LA Time's nifty gadget, Proposition 8 now sits at 52.4% Yes vs. 47.6% No, with 62.8% of the precincts reporting. There's no true comfort in believing that most of the No on 8 leaning precincts have votes left to report, as the real hope there was LA County, which, at halfway reported, is actually trending towards Yes. My county in Contra Costa, where I put in the work this morning, is admirably trending No and is only half reported; still, my gut tells me that this won't be enough and the writing is on the wall: Prop 8 is going to pass.

This is shameful, but it would've been so much worse if not for Obama's victory tonight. There is some relief now that, if and when the issue of gay marriage does make its inevitable way to the Supreme Court, there will be Obama-appointed justices to see that this kind of hate legislation is overturned and expunged in the manner of Loving v. Virginia. And there is a deeper resolve, engendered by the Speech, that, though this is a setback, we can and will overcome it simply by the consistency of our effort.

This is not over. There will be a day when all Americans will share the same freedoms, the same rights, and bear the same respect. There will come a day when America will live up to its own ideals.

Yes we can.

Big Fat Change Day: Yes We Can

It's not yet up on the Barack Obama Youtube channel or I'd embed the Speech. There is nothing that I could say that could anyway express what I'm feeling after I heard Obama's first speech as the President-Elect of the United States of America. I just wish I could embed it here and simply post "Listen".

Jeannine and I donated, we pamphleteered, we phonebanked, we wrote postcards, and we voted for him. We didn't always do these things together - sometimes it was me on the cellphone and Jeannine writing the postcard - but I couldn't have done any of that without her and she without me. We did this together.

And we did not do this alone. Obama is a good man, and I believe he will be a great President, but this movement was always more than one man, more than one party, more than one color, maybe even more than one nation. I trust that Obama will lead us to a more perfect union, to the America that we have so long been promised but never deserved, not because I believe him to be better than us, but because I believe him to be one of us. We did this, and my heart sings for what we might do tomorrow.

Big Fat Change Day: Much Ado About Nothing

So all my worries about Yes on 8 ugliness turned out to be unfounded. My day working the polls for No on 8 turned out to be remarkably civil, rather hopeful, but ultimately sedate. I got up way too fucking early this morning, and me and my poll partner headed out to Antioch, the ass-end of Pittsburg, the ass-end of Concord. This place is seriously gangsta, and I expected a heavy turnout of religiously-oriented minorities backed by the occasional Central Valley redneck. There was more than a little of that, but in truth, it felt like more than 50-50 between the No vs Yes on 8 supporters. And as for those Yes on 8 supporters, when the banner-wavers figured out what we were doing, they quickly brought some folks over to wave their signs beside us and not do to much else. While I often left my perch to approach folks, hand out pamphlets, and engage them in conversation on Prop 8, the Yes'rs were very docile, doing nothing more than waving their signs and not really stepping forward to hand out materials to voters (we suspected they didn't have enough literature on them to share it). We had conversations together, mostly on non-Prop 8 stuff because whenever they tried to convince us that disallowing gay marriage was somehow not discrimination, I only had to bring up all the joy and love I witnessed in City Hall, and how Prop 8 would ruin that for people, to render them dumbfounded.

About the only bit of ugliness was a man, driving out of the polling place, yelled out to Yes on 8'rs that what they were doing was bigotry and that it paralleled the hateful legislation that banned interracial marriage before activist judges struck those laws down with Loving v. Virginia. I agreed with the man, but there was no reason to scream it from a moving truck to people that were behaving civilly up to that point.

There was an early morning rush, but by the time my shift ended at 2pm, the polling site was virtually deserted. So, with my legs utterly ruined from standing for so long (these legs of mine are meant to sit on an ottoman, not stand), I bowed out for the day. Due to the heavy number of people that confirmed they were voting No on 8 in what should be a relatively conservative part of the Bay Area, I felt optimistic if not convinced that we might win the day.

Big Fat Change Day: Yes on 8 Invades My Home

On Sunday, I underwent training to work the polls for the No on Prop 8 effort, which will have me and others handing out pamphlets and offering quick information to voters as they head to the polls. I was feeling comfortable with this until this evening, when Jeannine and I headed out for our usual Monday restaurant dinner with her family, and saw, amidst a very cold and soggy evening here in Concord, a horde - literally dozens - of Yes on Prop 8 supporters crowding the streets, waving signs and jeering at passer-bys.

This is going to be ugly.

I know an awful lot of the Yes on 8 folks are actually out-of-staters. Most of the money funding Yes on 8 has come from non-Californian conservatives and religious groups, and more than one church has bussed their faithful to the Golden State. The presence of so many of these folks in my city does not fill me with dread: the fight on Prop 8 is tight, both sides are strongly-motivated, and while many Obama supporters are voting Yes on 8, his impending victory is more likely to suppress Republican turnout (certainly enough to offset those Democrats shunning the polls under the false assumption that their man has it in the bag) which make up the core support for Prop 8. Nor do I think this turnout of Yes on 8'rs on Concord's streets is troubling for the state on the whole: Concord is not nearly the paragon of liberalism that exists west of the Caldecott Tunnel, and for every hatemonger on my city's streets tonight there are many more lovemongers that will turn out tomorrow in San Francisco and Berkeley.

No, what is troubling is that these people are likely going to be my problem. The prevailing mood during my training session Sunday was that No on 8 would be focusing their efforts on getting out the vote in areas where they expect heavy support, California precints so blue they look black. Most folks are going to preach to the choir in the progressive heartlands beyond the Caldecott and in the limousine liberal suburbs in my county. I however will be in Concord - heavily Hispanic (and thus Catholic), utterly blue-collar, gloomily regressive Concord. There's always been a part of me that's hated this place, and I think I may hate it no more than I do tomorrow.

Those Yes on 8 bigots I saw tonight are likely to stay here, to work the same polling locations I will. Not only might they outnumber us, but, while my fellows seem well-organized and disciplined, these folks are very much a rabble, and will likely have little respect for common decency. I expect us to be manhandled, our pamphlets taken out of our hands, epithets screamed into our faces, and so on. This won't hurt the No on 8 effort, and might in fact turn some voters, having seen the hate blatantly up close, to vote against Prop 8. And I am not concerned for myself: I was raised by an ex-Marine who believed in corporal punishment and a law enforcement officer whose toughness garnered her the nickname "Sergeant" amongst her fellow feds. This will be a cakewalk compared to coming home to those folks with a report card marked up with D-minuses.

That said, I am worried about what will happen to my fellow No on 8'rs, who, from that training session, seem like a bunch of kind, emotionally-stable, well-raised and well-educated, plain-old-decent people who are absolutely unprepared to be screamed at for hours by a bunch of hate-filled rednecks. So yeah... it may end up getting ugly in my neck of the woods.

We'll see what happens...

Big Fat Change Day: Phonebanking for Obama

You're wasting your time, brother. You can't tell me nothing that'll make me vote for that son-of-a-bitch.

That quote, from an old angry Iowa man, and the one Pennsylvannia woman who, when I called for her much younger son, stated with quiet desperation that "no one in this house is voting for Obama," amounts to the full amount of NObama response I received when I phonebanked for Obama this morning. I went through many sheets of phone numbers from Iowa and Pennsylvannia, and while I mostly talked to answering machines, a surprising percentage of the human beings I did connect with happily passed on that they had either already voted for Obama or were planning to do so tomorrow.

What brought on this last-minute scramble to do something for Obama was a poll I read on FiveThirtyEight.com on Sunday evening, which, for the first time in weeks, gave McCain more than 200 electoral votes in their projection. This ended up being an outlier, as Monday's polls have pushed those projections back down, and once I learned that most of the polls that give Obama only slight leads in the battleground states don't use voters with cellular lines, it's become certain to me that the only question for Tuesday is whether Obama will enjoy a landslide or just a simple victory. Nevertheless, by then I had already signed up for a full 8 hours of phonebanking on Monday.

It wasn't fun, although it was so very encouraging. In the middle of a workday in Walnut Creek - rich, white, and as close to Republican as it gets in the Bay Area - the phonebanking room was filled wall-to-wall with folks of all ages, ethnicities, and backgrounds, so many that people ended up being forced outside to phone under tarps in the rain. If re-evaluating the polls had not encouraged me, that turnout finished the job. That said, it was really tiring work, and when my fully-charged phone finally died out, I was kind of relieved. I can't say I feel satisfied that I did everything I could in this election cycle - either for Obama or for No on Prop 8 - but it was nice to get in a little more activism before this all ends on Tuesday.

The End of Cynicism?

There's a great article this morning by Joe Klein (he of Primary Colors infamy) on Time's Swampland blog. First he discusses how Obama's early days might parallel the rookie mess of the Kennedy Administration (probably wrongly*), but he then goes into how, as it did with JFK, such calamities might not change the national mood, which will brighten and become less cynical about its institutions:

Why? Because Kennedy changed the American zeitgeist. He was a rebirth of American youth and vigor--or, as he pronounced, vigah--after a very hard midcentury slog. His arrival announced the coming of age of a new America: where most people owned their own homes, where a much larger number of people went to college, where the prejudices of the past regarding race and sex--and eventually sexual orientation--had no future. He embodied the return of prosperity, optimism and idealism (a bit too idealistic and optimistic, in fact--in Vietnam). He changed the way the world looked at America, and changed the way we looked at ourselves. He inspired my generation to join the Peace Corps, march for civil rights, get involved in politics. The nation became more adventurous, bolder, sexier, more prosperous and more powerful.

Klein expects Obama will engender much the same cultural changes as JFK, and I agree. My generation has been defined by a cynicism that has been toxic, both culturally and politically. We expect our politicians to be frauds, and thereby wallow in an apathy that self-confirms our worst fears. As for our postmodern culture, irony has replaced insight, leaving us satisfyingly hollow but with little human feeling. When was the last time you saw a film or read a book that presented a vision of the world that was neither depressingly cynical nor some by-the-numbers manufactured pablum? When was the last time we had a political campaign that was any different?

I realize that hope and change might be too ephemeral to truly put a stake in the cynicism that has marked my generation. We have been indoctrinated that all politicians are used-car salesmen, that nothing really changes except to get worse, that everything exists in shades of gray and that "good" and "evil" only exist for the blind fanatics of intolerance and ignorance. Now we accept these cynical tenets as facts, as "common sense", without realizing that they are as much based on faith as hope and change are.

Obama might not live up to the faith people like me are putting in him, but that's not entirely the point: that I have hope for the future gives me peace in the present. On Friday, for the first time in the six presidential elections I've been allowed to vote, I (early) voted for a candidate that wasn't the lesser of two evils, wasn't the one I felt the least cynical about, but for someone that I truly believe in, both out Faith and Reason. Win or lose, succeed or fail, Obama and the rest of us who have created this movement gave me that moment, and that is the kind of change that I believe in.

* History is not cyclical - historians are, because comparative analysis is always the easiest available tool. It's a common but lazy effort to equate our current leaders with those of the past, one that I am definitely guilty of, but the truth is that Obama will be, like those before him, something completely different. I don't expect him to be as radical as FDR, though I expect he will supercede JFK in many substantive ways (LBJ was responsible for much more policy action - both good and bad). We are heading into dark times full of peril but thereby offering much opportunity, and no one can really say how Obama will react, except, IMHO, with significantly greater competence and ethics than anything we've seen in the past 16 years. He is his own man, and will be his own President.

The Obama Ad

I think it was a waste of money. It sounded like a great idea, a way for Obama to control the narrative heading into the homestretch, and, considering how little traction McCain/Palin are getting with their latest fearmongering, maybe that's how it's actually working out. The media is trying to keep the tension up (and their ratings) by making much of the slight tightening going on in the polls, but the outcome doesn't really seem in doubt: Barack Obama will be the next president, and the $3 million spent to run the ad would probably have been better spent helping the DNC with Congressional races to push a 60-senator mandate for Obama. The actual ad was too vague, too simplistic, and ultimately too short to maximize its emotional appeals to have any significant effect on undecided voters.



That said, in its final moments (when it hits 26:42 on the clock), Obama's parting words perfectly encapsulate why I have faith in the man. It's not simply that he's a Democrat, not just that he represents change from the baby boomer incompetence of the past 16 years, nor that he embodies racial transcendence: it's that I believe him when he says that he will listen to the American people, and I trust that his judgment to act upon what he hears from us.

Obama is 44

Ever since I heard a panelist on The McLaughlin Group pass on that Lawrence Summers is all-but-assured to become Treasury Secretary under the new Obama Administration, I've been doing more reading and thinking about what the Obama Cabinet will look like. If it were anyone else (i.e. Hillary), I'd be a lot more worried: Summers is an acolyte of Robert Rubin, Treasury Secretary under the Clinton Administration who bears no small role in engineering the current financial crisis. Furthermore, Summers, while President of Harvard, made some remarkably sexist statements, implying that innate genetic differences between men and women play a role (but not the only role, or even the most important role) are responsible for the gender imbalance in science and math careers.

Now there is an article in The New Yorker that supports the hypothesis of Summers as Treasury Secretary, as well as details other possible members of the future Obama Cabinet. The article reveals (to me, at least) the place of Rahm Emmanuel within the Obama think-tank, placing him almost as close to Obama as his confidante David Axelrod. Emmanuel is a leading figure in the DLC, tried to torpedo Howard Dean as chairman of the DNC, and then tried to frame the 2006 resurgence of the Democrats in Congress (which Dean's 50-state strategy deserves significant credit) as a triumph of conservative "blue-dog" Democrats rather than the netroots and new progressive-derived supporters of the party flexing their muscles.

Essentially, the article paints a portrait of the Obama Cabinet as riven with Clintonites and blue-dogs, and, like I said, if this was any other man, I would be very unenthusiastic. Not worried, because even these are the worst sort of Democrats, they are still Democrats and are unlikely to lead this country down a sequel to the eight years of hell that Bush and the Republicans who've supported/rolled over for him have brought us. But this is Obama, a man from a deeply progressive and liberal background who has consistently been willing to put pragmatism before dogma without betraying his core ideals: whether it was getting elected president of the Harvard Law Review (achieving the central goal of becoming the first African-American to do so) while disinviting controversy by allowing conservative Federalist Society members onto his masthead, to treating the American public like adults in his "A More Perfect Union" speech but finally repudiating Jeremiah Wright when he couldn't act like one. If Obama is surrounding himself with Clintonites, it makes the most sense for his Presidency as it will have to start running at day one (honestly, he's going to have start running the country from a shadow government on day minus 75), seeing as how they are the last Democratic advisors to hold these positions, and they (hopefully) have learned from their mistakes of Bill Clinton's disastrous early Presidency. As the New Yorker article quotes about Summers, he "knows the building" when it comes to Treasury, and won't need to be brought up to speed before he can start putting the new policies into effect.

Emmanuel's presence remains disquieting, but I can't argue that the priorities he lays out for the Obama Administration - "financial-regulatory reform, tax reform, health-care reform, and energy" - are among the most pressing issues on the docket, moreso than any kind of social reforms (which would define the Obama Administration as the kind of "out of control liberalism" that the Republicans were able to tar the Clintons with that ultimately lead to their taking control of the Congress) or ambitious issues requiring long-term development and full support (i.e. education reform) better dealt after the 2010 Congressional elections (assuming the Dems hold power). While I am getting the sense that Obama, at least until 2010, is going to come off a lot more conservative and measured in his agenda than progressives would care for, and that the netroots that are singing his praises now may start to turn on him starting January 20th, it can't be argued that this is the most responsible thing to do. And that, moreso than "hope" or "change" (or "socialist" or"Muslim" or "terrorist" for that matter) is what has defined the calm and measured Barack Obama up to this moment: responsible.

Even McCain Knows It's Over

Rather than appear before a crowd of his supporters inside his election night watch party at the Biltmore Hotel in Phoenix, John McCain will instead speak before "a small group of reporters and guests" on the hotel lawn. Nobody who believes that McCain can still win could possibly think that he might win by more than the thinnest of margins: his path to victory requires that he win every single battleground state, most of which lean Obama, some by nearly double digits. So if he did win, he'd be facing a very divided nation, and giving his acceptance speech before a large crowd of his fiercest supporters would be mandatory (rather like what Obama is preparing for himself in Chicago) to cement his new position. There's no way that McCain will be giving anything other than perfunctory concession speech before a "a small press pool", so this has got to be the strongest indication yet that McCain realizes that the fat lady is well into her opening act.

I pretty much felt there was nothing that McCain could do to change the course of the election
after the second debate. He could still win, but it would take either an act of fate or some blunder on Obama's part to give him the victory. After the third and final debate, it was obvious that McCain was likely going to lose and that the RNC should redirect their resources into shoring up their shakier Congressional elections (to provide some hope of reacquiring a majority in 2010); and, John McCain would best serve his party in some Goldwateresque fashion that, while it wouldn't win him the election, might change its suicidal focus on the far-right Christian extremism of Palin towards the economic and social libertarianism that might give it some appeal to the future of the electorate (i.e. not old people). Now he is left with nothing, except to share his loss with a group of reporters that have lost most of their respect for him over the Ayers/media elite/pals-with-terrorists strategy, and probably end up bearing the (only partially deserved) blame for the loss as his party unites behind Palin for her 2012 run.

I firmly support Obama, and I am well-aware that McCain's "maverick" image is mostly smoke-&-mirrors. Still, I could've voted for John McCain* and there is a part of me that is saddened by how this turning out.

* It would've taken more than simply Clinton getting the nomination - a lot more - in fact, but I recognize the possibility.

W.

After W. abruptly ended and Jeannine and I walked out of the theater, I turned to her and said, "Well, that was deeply disappointing and way too long... kind of like the Bush presidency itself." That pretty much sums up my thoughts on Oliver Stone's Nixon-like treatment of Bush 43, but keep reading if you want the full spoiler-filled review.

If you believe that the inadequacies of George W. Bush can be defined entirely as an epic case of "daddy issues", then this the film for you. If you have other explanations for the incredibly dramatic failures that have marked the Bush Administration (i.e. Bush is a blind, pampered, wannabe-cowboy bully backed by powerful but incompetent business and religious conservatives who have successfully used the fear-induced prejudices of Walmart America to preserve and expand their power until now), then this will be one long bore. The theme of the film is established within the trailer - Dubya is a mildly-retarded redneck who only craves the approval of his distant father - but the film goes on for over two hours, most of which is filled with Josh Brolin's Bush drinking and carousing, interrupted with James Crowell's inaccurately-virile Bush 41 looking on disapprovingly. As Jeannine pointed out to me afterwards, there isn't a single scene devoted to 9/11, nor on on either of Bush's presidential campaigns, Hurricane Katrina, the economic collapse (the first one he inherited in 2001, I can't expect that the film could be that up-to-date), the Republican Congressional loss in 2006, Terry Schiavo, or Bush's questionable stint in the Air National Guard. We do get a long scene about some Texas bimbo Bush may have knocked up after college, at least a couple of drunk driving scenes, dream sequences of him in the Texas Rangers stadium that never pan out effectively, and lots of scenes of him watching ESPN (even when he's not choking to death on a pretzel).

Most of the performances are far too good for the film. Brolin is spot-on, Thandie Newton is even better as Condi Rice, and the dude from Capote does a good job as Karl Rove; but, George Dreyfus can't really pull off Dick Cheney (why not just get Danny DeVito to reprise his Penguin role from Batman Returns?), Jeffrey Wright is forced to play Colin Powell as an uninterestingly earnest voice-of-reason (rather than as the speed-bump of a pussy he was in reality), and Scott Glenn is badly-miscast as Rumsfeld. Ultimately, what really sinks the film is that Stone has nothing interesting to say about Bush, and this is a damn shame. Dubya is the most interesting President in history since FDR, have been in office during (and often directly responsible for) the worst crisises I've known in my lifetime, yet all Stone can muster is that his daddy never gave him enough attention. This inadequacy is brought home by the final scene, another dream sequence where Dubya is in the stadium trying to catch a baseball that never comes, alone in an interminable emptiness. While that might be a powerful statement in the personal drama of Bush's life, it would've been a much more powerful statement to instead have Bush surrounded by the dead soldiers, bombed civilians, and drowned citizens, all the lives he has wrecked in the historical drama that has been the Bush Presidency. I expected politics and instead got psychodrama, and quite frankly, I don't think there's enough to Bush's psychosis to make a good film, especially one this long. He's just an asshole, and what's really interesting (and funny) is why this asshole was able to get away with what he did for so long.

McCain Becomes Human (For A Moment)

Was watching The Rachel Maddow Show this evening when they broke off to cover both John McCain and Barack Obama at the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Dinner. McCain is charming and funny (which is what most folks are picking up on), but what really struck me was when he started describing Obama plainly in terms of the man as President(around 3 minutes in the video):



McCain doesn't just acknowledge the historical importance of Obama's nomination and approaching presidency, but seems (to me) to tip his hat to Obama, not simply as a skillful politician, but as a statesman in whose hands the country need not fear. He didn't need to do this (and I'll admit that I was a bit disappointed that Obama didn't follow suit, although he has always been respectful of McCain), and I am sure there those in his camp that would have rather he didn't. John McCain should not be President: his vision for America is ill-defined and he has no new policies that will change the direction set by Bush, I do not trust his judgment both for the Palin nomination and due to his ill-sighted insistence that the Surge has succeeded when it has not completed its course, and his "maverick" nature can and will result in a possibly even worse form of governance than Bush's incompetent model... but, there is something in him that makes for a good man, and this is the perfect evidence.

I had hoped that we would have seen this McCain in this election, not because he is funny and charming, but because this McCain would've made this race about the issues affecting Americans, and about the differences between each party's plans for dealing with those issues. Perhaps Ayers, ACORN, "class warfare", and "health of the mother" is all that the Republican ideology stands for anymore. If that is true, then this election should not be seen as the failure of John McCain, but as a failure of the party itself.

What Is Wrong With This Picture?

Picked up the story off PTI that Romeo Crennell has suspended any political talk from his players, due to Willie McGinest attending an Obama voter registration drive while Brady Quinn introduced McCain and Palin at a rally. Here's Quinn in all his rugged manliness impersonating a Village Person:


That's former Notre Dame (that bastion of liberalism) QB Brady Quinn, who, when you type his name in Google, the first thing that pops up is "brady quinn gay". These are the young celebrities who personify the future of tomorrow's Republican Party. When the most metrosexual player in the NFL, that holiest of symbols of American masculinity, becomes the icon of young Republicanism, it is obvious that the culture war is over. Now it's simply about waiting for the paleoconservatives to die off.

Passion versus Plastic

Succintly, Biden beat the tar out of Palin, but that was expected. What was unexpected was how comfortable Biden has made me as Obama's choice for VP. He would do more than be a caretaker for Obama's movement should something horrible happen, and he is certainly more than just a choice to fill out certain lines in the campaign resume (experience, old white guy). He is a man deeply in touch with the needs and thoughts of middle-class America.

But beyond all that, there was this one moment in the debate where everything about this election was made crystal clear:



I suspect this clip will get a lot of airplay over the next few days, but what should get equal attention is Palin's follow-on response, that being nothing. Biden connects his own personal tragedy with the struggles of middle-class Americans, and her response is to ignore it, keep to her notes, and rattle off some soulless sound-bites about "mavericks". Her response was completely plastic, and that is what McCain-Palin has in store for America: empty rhetoric that doesn't even acknowledge how badly this country has been shafted over the past 8 years.

As for Palin, she was god-freaking awful, but expectations have been brought so low that talking heads will be able to say she did okay until the polls start going even farther south in the next few days. There were few Miss Teen USA moments, although there was a hell of winner when she responded to the question of whether the VP was a member of the legislative or executive branch by talking up her experience as a business executive.

Grumpy Old Men