Sarah Palin: Twice As Scary

Sarah Palin scares me.  Twice.  She scares me as a Democrat and she scares me as an American.

The Democrat in me is a little spooked that this brainstorm of McCain’s is so crazy it just might work.  She has a compelling story, a spunky* charisma that makes you want to root for her, and she has strong conservative bona fides.  And lots of hair.  In short, she’s everything McCain is not.

Choosing Sarah Palin was a shameless pander on McCain’s part.  A clear signal to anyone who would listen that his is a dangerously flawed candidacy that cannot survive without a shot in the arm.  And she just may be the right shot.  (They say she has a mean 3-pointer, after all.)

Between the two of them, they are insulated from nearly any criticism – the POW card, the woman card, the infant baby with Down’s, the son heading to Iraq.  And she and her husband are sure to make the NASCAR circuit swoon.

On the other hand, Sarah Palin scares me as an American.  On the off-chance that they do win, and she does become the Vice President of the United States,  she is so underqualified, so unschooled in political thought or maneuvering on a national scale – nevermind the global stage – that she would be a disaster.  Her statement a few short months ago that “I wish someone could explain to me just what the VP does” is perfect proof of that.

Take that and put it in the context of the oldest person ever to run for a first term of the presidency – a cancer survivor with unanswered questions about his health.   Suddenly the choice to put this 44 year old with 20 months of executive experience – the mother of a special needs 4 month-old – one heartbeat away from the presidency is simply negligent.

On Friday, she stood next to a man who is older than the state she governs and spoke to a crowd larger than the entire town she was presided over as mayor and introduced herself to the world.  She did a fine job, getting by on pluck and earnest brow-furrowing – which I suspect is her general MO.

But the last three VPs have taught us something.  Dan Quayle made it painfully, comically clear that good intentions and sit-com facial expressions do not constitute vice presidential mettle.  Al Gore came along to redefine the role of vice president as ax-to-the-grindstone policy wonk and true executive partner.  Then came Dick Cheney, who elevated vice presidential power to unprecedented and dangerous heights.

On the heels of Cheney comes Sarah Palin – Quayle without the chops or the gravitas – and threatens to plunge us back decades.  Which, given the Cold War imaginings of her new boss, probably makes her a pretty good running mate after all.

 

*  On a side note: I’m currently taking bets on which male television pundit will first describe her as “spunky,” and what kind of gender card hell will rain down on him when he does…

McCain To Women: Gullible Is Not In The Dictionary

At noon ET today, John McCain announced his choice for vice presidential candidate: Alaska governor Sarah Palin. And with that pick, the 72 year-old Senator sent a clear message to female voters: I think you’re idiots.

The man known for his public use of the C- word and his conspiratorial laugh when Hillary Clinton, his distinguished Senate colleague, was described as a “bitch” has grown convinced that he can win her voters. He’s spent the past two weeks trying to drive a wedge between Hillary’s female supporters and Obama with triangulation and passive-aggressive, disingenuous messaging.

He's made his strategy no secret. McCain clearly believes that women will vote for other women simply because they’re women. His choice of a pro-life creationist who is dead set on drilling in her own beautiful back yard is proof of that fact. By taking a staunch anti-choice stand, Sarah Palin virtually betrays the interests and longstanding struggles of American women – much the way her position on ANWR drilling betrays and endangers the well-being of her home state.

And John McCain’s statement of his intent to nominate conservative activist judges with the goal of overturning Roe v. Wade is further anathema to women’s rights over their own bodies. But women are gullible, he believes. They'll vote their kind, because they go with heart over head. Emotion over reasons.

Sen. McCain clearly believes that women will vote for him in November – against their own best interests – simply because he tapped a woman to be his vice presidential candidate. A choice that would put a severely unqualified, uninformed person a heartbeat away from The Button – weakening American standing and putting our national interests at risk.

But, according to John McCain, women aren’t concerned with that kind of detail. That’s man stuff.

Palin: Is Her Weakness Her Greatest Strength?

It's Sarah Palin. That sound you hear is thousands of reporters and oppo researchers tapping away at Google and shuffling through papers, trying to figure out what this beauty queen-cum-local pol is all about. There’s the state trooper flap. And the dangerous Stevens endorsement (gotta be worse than Rezko, right? Right??). And there’s the fact that she’s a complete greenhorn, utterly unfit to be a heartbeat (a 72 year-old cancer survivor’s heartbeat) away from the presidency.

But that last point, clearly the most important, valid reason to discount her candidacy, could prove to be a valuable asset. For one thing, the experience issue is utterly off the table for the Obama campaign this election. As convinced as Obama may be that his judgment and life experience qualify him to be president, he knows that it’s a losing topic for him. He has plenty of angles from which to attack McCain / Palin, but experience isn’t one of them. The trick for the Obama campaign all along has been to find ways to keep the word “experience” out of the national dialogue.

Fine, so they don’t have to say it. They can show it. After all, isn’t that what all writers are taught: show, don’t tell? About an hour ago, most Democrats’ mouths began watering and they circled Oct. 2 – the date of the Vice Presidential debates – on their calendars. After all, it’s a widely accepted fact that Biden will tear just about any challenger apart in a one-on-one debate. The man’s head is chock full of national security knowledge and his voting record a veritable Congressional history lesson, and he has a direct, candid, hard-hitting style that is borderline relentless.

There’s no question that Biden would win against Sarah Palin, but there’s a very real possibility that he won’t prevail against Palin. Thinking back to the Gore / Bush and Kerry / Bush debates, Bush was uninformed, a poor orator and generally dismantled by both Gore and Kerry. The vast majority of pundits and commentators had Bush losing those debates. But with each failure of a debate, Bush’s poll numbers rose. Republicans painted Democrats as arrogant and condescending. And, truthfully, it’d be damn hard not to condescend to George Bush.

Biden will have an exceptionally difficult time coming out of a debate with Sarah Palin without seeming condescending or preachy. For every verbal smack-down Biden issues, the GOP will issue statements that Biden was overbearing, cocky or “mean.” I can see it now – and it stands a very good chance of working. People’s hearts will go out to the “poor lady” who is getting schooled on national television by an aggressive older man. The Republicans will release YouTube videos using “Papa Don’t Preach” as a soundtrack. They will do everything they can to hold up her shortcomings as strengths, the same way they did with George W. Bush.

It’s a risky pick, to be sure – and it’s a gamble that the American people, having been fooled twice, will be rubes yet again. If there’s anything we love, it’s narratives about underdogs, come-from-nowhere triumphs, and young, charismatic beauty queens. I still believe that Jan 20, 2009 will inaugurate a President Obama, but the McCain campaign just laid down some tacks and maybe an oil slick on the raceway.

Hothead McCain

Over on TalkingPointsMemo, David Kurtz brings up the Obama camp's new line of attack branding McCain as a "reckless hothead," and asks "does it have a chance of working?"

I say the answer is yes - it has a chance of working. I'm not saying it will work, and I'm not saying it's the best message ever. But it has a definite chance of working, for a few reasons.

First and foremost, it's consistent with the way the public already views McCain. Other memes, which should be more damaging - the Bush III meme, especially - require a bit of swimming upstream. For years, McCain has held the title of Maverick in the eyes of the public and the press. And, while he no longer deserves that title, it will take a lot to convince low-information voters of that fact.

Whereas, with the trigger-happy meme, it goes in lock-step with everything we know about the man. Even what we (and by we, I mean the press & the electorate) like about him. It is one thing that is consistently true all the way back down the narrative line. Now, Obama doesn't have to trot out a bunch of Phillip Butlers the way the Swift Boaters did in '04 or talk about the C-word if he doesn't want to get his hands dirty. There's plenty of poorly chosen one-liners, Senate floor tantrums and Iraq War grandstanding that will do the job just fine.

And secondly, it subtly ties McCain in with Bush - in a way that's much more effective than hammering home "Bush's Third Term" over and over again. It's effective because it plays on the same emotions - the war fatigue, the sense that Americans are dying for our president's (vice president's?) whim.

If Team Obama gets this point across, then the only card McCain has available to him will backfire sensationally. Every time he tries to talk about judgment, experience, the 3am phone call, he will be undermined by his own carefully-nurtured narrative. At least, there's a chance of that.

Contractor Clinton vs. Architect Obama (To Win the Working Class, Obama Must Speak Their Language)

Earlier in the campaign, I used an analogy to illustrate the difference between Sen. Obama and Sen. Clinton: Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama each see a car for the very first time. Hillary opens the hood and asks “how does it work?” Barack gets in the driver’s seat and muses “where can we go with it?”

The analogy was meant to describe their divergent approaches to government: Hillary the policy wonk vs. Barack the big-picture reformer. But as Senator Obama struggles to wrest the fiercely loyal blue collar vote from Senator Clinton, the analogy takes on new meaning.

Beyond the Clichés
For all the clichés of identity politics – the racial divide, the generation gap, the culture wars – the pundits have missed a more fundamental distinction. Call it forest/trees, process/product or left brain/right brain – these are the true differences between the two candidates, and they’re reflected to a T by their supporters.

Demographers are fond of pointing out that Obama is a hit with college-educated populations, while Clinton retains her base of union workers (despite Obama’s near-monopoly on union endorsements) – and the quick translation into economic terms seems like a no-brainer. But “Bittergate” notwithstanding, the causal relationship has been overstated: people don’t support Obama because they’re rich and no one pulls the lever for Hillary simply because they're poor.

There is no logical, policy-based reason for “down-market” Democrats to prefer Sen. Clinton to Obama any more than there is for gun owners to. Hillary’s personal narrative contains little class struggle and her policies are certainly no friendlier to the working man. (In fact, Hillary’s reticence to move the cap on Social Security tax suggests more sympathy for the upper middle class.) The difference between the two lies in how they draw their conclusions and, more importantly, communicate them to voters. Some people respond viscerally to broad calls for sweeping change. Others demand specific, concrete, policy-oriented solutions: what does it mean for me?

While the blue collar/white collar distinction provides a convenient shorthand, it rings true in a manner that goes well beyond income level. By and large, blue collar jobs are tactical jobs. They’re focused on the individual elements that make up a whole: building, assembling, diagnosing, repairing. People who devote their lives to these pursuits are tactical thinkers, they break a mission down to its inherent steps and proceed incrementally.

Architects vs. Contractors
Nowhere is this distinction more apparent than in the construction industry. Architects, famous for their lofty plans drawn up in air-conditioned offices, face a disconnect when trying to communicate with contractors. Unless the architect comes to the table armed with a comprehensive understanding of materials, man-hours and job specs, the architect and contractor quickly arrive at an impasse. The artist’s rendering may be beautiful, but without a sound tactical plan, it’s meaningless.

Similarly, Barack Obama’s rendering of a new American architecture sounds gorgeous, but until it’s translated into a concrete roadmap of steps that directly affect Americans it’s, well, just words. Taking on special interests sounds nice, but how does that fill our tanks with gas? Sure, we’re in favor of bringing our country together, but we also want to bring our kids to college.

So, while Obama shows off his working-class bona fides by recounting his days organizing steel workers or reliving his modest single-parent upbringing, he misses a golden opportunity. These voters aren’t interested in whether he is rich or poor (voters tend to assume candidates are rich, regardless); they may not even want to know whether he can relate to their problems. All they want to know is how he will solve them. He’s already won over the architects, now it’s time to work on the contractors.

The Electability Fallacy

Watching the returns roll in last night and suffering through the months-old analysis, it struck me that everyone is spreading the same premise. Promulgated and disseminated by the Clinton camp, this premise maintains that, if Barack Obama loses a constituency to Hillary Clinton in the primary, he’s bound to lose that constituency to John McCain in November. The premise is so prima facie faulty that it’s embarrassing to see intelligent, studied people support it and spout it as their own. Obvious in its short-sightedness and comical in its leaps of logic, it’s still pervasive.

I call this the Electability Fallacy. It devalues entire blocs of Democratic loyalists, overlooks Sen. Clinton’s revered status in the Democratic Party and completely discounts the power and ferocity of the Clinton political machine.

Fallacy 1: Clinton Voters = McCain Voters
Senator Clinton’s rightward veers notwithstanding (furtive trade agreements, threats of war with Iran, attacks on Senator Obama’s patriotism), this Democratic primary remains just that. Both candidates have captured reliable Democratic constituencies, and their supporters are to be commended in their enthusiasm and devotion. But to suggest that Sen. Clinton’s voters will defect to the Republican Party, should Obama win the nomination – voting against generations of tradition and their own self-interest, prolonging a deeply unpopular war and extending disastrous economic policies – is nothing if not hyperbolic.

We’ve seen “down-market” voters opt for much haughtier candidates than Barack Obama, and a young Bill Clinton captured the senior vote against a much older George Bush in 1992. It’s a wonder her supporters don’t cry foul at the insinuation that a Clinton voter in the primary is simply a McCain voter in the general.

Fallacy 2: It’s Easier to Convert Clinton Voters than McCain Voters
Clinton voters are rabid and loyal. As loaded with negatives as she may be (or “baggage,” in her own words), Hillary Clinton is beloved among Democrats. Moreover, Bill Clinton remains the most popular living ex-President and, of all politicians in either party, no one is more revered among Party faithful than the Clintons. No one, perhaps, but Barack Obama. As any political observer will attest, the Clintons do not part with their voters easily.

The support for Hillary Clinton among the Democratic base is much stronger than McCain’s among the Republican base, and to erode her support by 15 percentage points in two weeks in a state as stacked in Sen. Clinton’s favor as Pennsylvania is nothing to scoff at.

Fallacy 3: A Tight Race with Sen. Clinton is a Sign of Weakness
The suggestion that “if Obama can’t beat Hillary Clinton, he can’t possibly beat John McCain and the Republican Attack Machine” is simply naïve, if not disingenuous. We’ve heard it repeated ad nauseam, even by Dr. Evil, Karl Rove himself. In any other primary, this would certainly be a valid – and fearsome – argument. Their bag of tricks is vast and well-documented. An ordinary politician in an ordinary primary might stop short of such tactics, but no one ever accused a Clinton of being an ordinary politician.

As esteemed commentators have pointed out, the Clintons are not afraid to tear their Party down to get back to the White House. The Clintons have never been stellar Democrats, from triangulating on policy to intra-party quarrels and behind-the-scenes back-biting. To believe that Hillary Clinton will abdicate a place she considers home – 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue – without a bitter, mean-spirited and, yes, dirty fight is not to know Hillary Clinton at all. There is no better opposition research team than Clinton's and no strategist more comfortable in the muck than Mark Penn (whose strategies still guide the campaign posthumously). Beating Hillary Clinton is no easy task, and the fact that Barack Obama has done so and continues to do so is an unassailable testament to his toughness, his poise and the clarity of his own message.

The question of lasting damage to the Democratic Party is one to consider, and there is a strong argument to be made that a protracted, bitter primary will dampen what would otherwise be a favorable landscape for Democrats. But to further the Clinton spin that this race between Sen. Obama and Sen. Clinton somehow casts doubt upon Obama’s ability to “close the deal” or “win Democratic constituents” in a general election against John McCain is short-sighted. At best.

A Sucker Speaks Up

I was recently inspired by Reality TV. Wait, there's more: once, in college, I was moved to write a manifesto (which then spurred a bit of a campus mini-movement) after attending a U2 concert. In other words, I’m a sap. Or worse, I suppose: a sucker.

I’ve looked for ways to explain away this sucker tendency. As a writer of stories myself, have I mastered the ability to suspend disbelief? Am I a character-driven sympathizer who over-identifies with compelling personalities? Am I just gullible?

The answer, before you write me off, is an unequivocal No. I’m a genuine, smirking member of the Snark Generation. A TV-referencing, McSweeney’s reading, eye-rolling Gawker commenter. What’s more, I’ve spent the past decade working behind the magic curtain in the marketing and advertising industry. I understand the tricks. I know how to walk the line between false advertising and “enhancing the positive.” I’m a champion parser.

So, how to reconcile the two? What am I doing crying at movies? Why do I own multiple Bright Eyes records? How is it possible that I get goose bumps during the Star Spangled Banner at Yankee Stadium? And isn’t “inspired by Reality TV” an oxymoron?

Let’s start with the last question. The show was Oprah’s Big Give. Oprah’s Big Give is a thinly veiled, shameless advertisement for, well, as many items as they can cram into 40 minutes: Oprah, first and foremost, Ford, to a slightly lesser extent, followed by each of the donated items, services and celebrities who show up to help out. It features “TVLand” contrivances and counterproductive elements like an incongruous, competitive atmosphere. It’s focused on short-term, bombastic displays of charity, rather than on long term solutions. The recipients come secondary – tertiary, even – to the contestants and to Oprah herself.

But at the end of the day, what’s done is done. There are no actors on the show and unless someone is taking everything back once the cameras stop rolling, these are real life-changing events for real Americans with real needs. In one of the lamer bits of a recent episode, the most self-aggrandizing contestant (Rachael) shows up, hurriedly pays a woman’s delinquent heating bill and forwards her two more months. The segment was not well-produced. The narrative thread was missing, the timing was all wrong. It was incongruous for a million reasons. Practically before the woman can wipe the confusion off her face, the team is back in their customized Big Give Ford SUV and zooming toward commercial break. It’s hard not to shake your head, roll your eyes, blog snarkily.

But even as the cameras are on to the next story of contestant in-fighting and incidental charity, the fact is, a poor woman’s life has just changed. And regardless of what ABC or Ford or Oprah’s handlers – or even Oprah herself – intend to get out of the program, there is one person who just got something immeasurable.

There are a million ways to criticize the program. You can call it rigged, contrived, self-aggrandizing, two-faced – maybe even downright hypocritical. But no one can deny the simple fact that the show makes good things happen to deserving people. And if that needs to be packaged within a derivative game-show atmosphere, so be it.

What's so wrong with a television show that sells ads, fulfills the needs of an episodic prime-time format, appeals to some base instincts in order to get ratings, and is making real, tangible changes in American communities in the meantime? Everybody gets what they want, and the greater good is served, ever-so-slightly. In other arenas, this kind of arbitration is the height of success. The kind of win-win-win that makes legends, sells autobiographies and, well... gets ratings. In those arenas, to support such an effort is not gullibility, but insider savvy.

So call me a sucker, if you must. But I know of a woman in Georgia who will agree that to do so is to miss the point entirely.