This morning I head Sam Nunn's name. I thought, "You know what, after Prop 8, I'm really not in the mood for THIS."

Then, as I was thinking about what it means that Nunn was picked for the Pentagon "transition team," I remembered an email I got from one of my mentors a while back with advice on how to be a successful administrator. It was fabulous advice, but what really struck me was this part of it:

"Seek out your enemies and hug them close to you. Give them responsibilities. Praise them when they do well."

The idea behind this is that since you cannot eject your enemies from the organization, the best thing you can do is co-opt them; and the way to do that is to a)give them a stake in your administration and b) make them feel important and appreciated. Of course, you don't want to give them TOO much responsibility in case this doesn't work and they remain your enemies even after all your praise and whatnot. But find them something meaningful to do and make a big deal out of them when they do it right, and they will eventually cease to be functional enemies.

Obama got where he is partly by knowing a lot more about how people work than, say, McCain apparently does. I imagine that the "transition team" would be a good place for him to execute this strategy, since if you're on the "transition team" this means that your role in the post-transition may not be too central.

I do not expect Obama to ever at any point reveal to the Jedi that he is really a fire-breathing progressive. Because he's not. BUT, I do think it makes sense to look at his transition team picks as being at least as much about internal politics and getting party power players on his side (and indebted to/invested in him) as they are about his overall agenda.

For what it's worth,

The Plaid Adder

Yesterday I sent an email to a friend of mine out in California. A little over ten years ago, my partner and I drove a tiny rented Geo Metro through the hills of California to watch her get married to her partner. It was then and is still the best wedding memory I have. Of course, this was in 1997, and there was no legal component to it. It was just a ceremony, officiated by a woman they knew, a rite that the two of them had made up together and were celebrating in front of the community of friends and family they had invited. They had already been together for several years, of course; her family was mostly OK with it but her mother was still not prepared to take the relationship seriously. One of their friends played guitar; they exchanged vows; they asked if anyone in the audience had anything to say in support. I said something, and I can't remember all of it, but part of it was this: "It's a hard thing to keep love alive in an evil world, but no matter how hard it is it's always worth it."

After the wedding, they registered as domestic partners. Many years later, when the mayor of San Francisco decided he was just going to start marrying same-sex couples, the two of them ran down to the state house and became one of the band of renegade spouses who then had their licenses canceled out by the courts afterward. And then, when the state supreme court finally made it really legal, she and her wife went downtown and got married--for the third time.

And now Prop 8 has passed, and they don't know whether they're married or not.

In my email, I told them that they are married, that their years together and the experience of that first wedding can never be taken away from them no matter what happens. But of course that isn't going to be much comfort. I know well enough how hurtful and humiliating this is; I've been through it myself. This December my partner and I will celebrate our 20th anniversary together. There's been a lot of water under the bridge since 1988; a lot of changes in our country and certainly a lot of changes both in what it means to be gay and what it means to be married. We are going to be legally married fairly soon in Boston, where it appears that the attempt to amend the state constitution has been abandoned. But of course that won't do us much good back here, blue as our state is. People we tell about this seem surprised we're not making a bigger deal over it. The truth is that it is a big deal, but that it also isn't. Because we know well enough by now that what the state gives, the state can take away. What we have, we hold, and nobody can take it from us. We want the legal rights that other married couples have. But we also do not want to give anyone else, other than us, the power to say that we are not really married.

It is humiliating to be legally blocked from doing something every straight couple takes for granted. It hurts a lot. It hurts worse to see, every time one of these anti-same-sex marriage initiatives makes it to the ballot, all the latent homopohbia crawling out of the woodwork and dripping down the walls into the voting booth. For us, the passage of anti-marriage and anti-family initiatives against us all over the country during this historic election isn't just a fly in the ointment.

I've now seen several threads here railing about the fact that minority voters who supported Obama still voted for Prop 8 in California. I do not dispute the facts nor do I belittle the anger and hurt under the ranting. I will say only this: Yeah, it's tragic that members of one minority group wouldn't see common cause and act in solidarity with those of another. But you know what, it's been a fact of American political culture for all my life and it happens in all directions. I don't see what's to be gained by beating up on each other over it now. Why not blame fundamentalist Christianity instead? Because that's what's perpetuating homophobia, in white and minority communities alike.

Here is the basic problem: There is simply not enough popular support for same-sex marriage in most parts of the country to make it a reality *except* through the courts. Massachusetts has worked out because the vast majority of Massachusettsians either support marriage equality or don't give a shit who gets married--and because it is harder to amend Massachusetts's state constitution than it is to amend California's. Demographics aside, the truth is this: at least since I've been paying attention, whenever an anti-same-sex-marriage initiative gets on a state ballot, it passes. The only way to win against these damn things is to keep them off the ballot.

Why do they always pass? Because the Bradley Effect is not a myth; it is only misapplied. There are loads of straight people out there who are fine with gay people in most every way but still in their heart of hearts do not want them to get their mitts on marriage. Why? Who knows. Nostalgia for "tradition," maybe; some unarticulated emotional resistance to the idea that they have not tried to identify or examine; bullshit about how we don't really need marriage because civil unions are just as good; refusal to let go of heterosexual privilege; I don't know. All I know is that the number of people in this country who can be perfectly decent to gay people on a day to day basis and even believe that gay people are just A-OK is a lot larger than the number of people who understand why marriage equality matters to us and truly want us to have it. And they don't talk about that, because they know it would only lead to hurt feelings and anger; but they go into the booth and pull that lever all the same.

Until that's not true any more, we're going to keep getting pounded like this. I hope that it will someday not be true any more; but it will be a slow process. Still, if you look at what's happened even in the past 20 years, there is plenty of room for hope there. When my partner and I got together, we could never have imagined that gay people would be able to get married ANYWHERE in this country; nor could we have imagined that we would ever have a child together. Let alone that my mother would ever come around to it, which is really the biggest miracle. The change WE need is coming; it's already in progress. But the charge will not be led by our politicians, because they know that marriage equality is a loser for them. Until popular opinion shifts, they're going to be useless to us on that score. Obama, I fear, included.

But Obama's victory does make things better for us, even though my hopes to see him actually working for us are not high. Because he's president, we will not have another four years--or God forbid, eight--of right-wing Christianity screaming invective against us through every channel of communication that the U.S. government controls. Palin's national humiliation in the media and the crushing defeat of the McCain/Palin ticket have significantly diminished the power of the religious right and sent the message to the rest of the country that they no longer have to train themselves to believe that crazy view of the world. That will make a huge difference in our battle to change public opinion about our right to marry.

In the meantime, though, we can no longer get married in California and unmarried couples (of ANY description) can no longer adopt children in Arkansas. And that sucks. A lot.

The Plaid Adder

Man, I'm still waiting for it to sink in. It's so WEIRD for an election to be OVER on election night!

Yesterday I posted saying I was sick and wouldn't be around much today. Well, today I felt better; but my partner is coming down with whatever it was that I had. So she didn't get down to Indianapolis after all to do GOTV; but as it turns out it didn't matter because Indiana or no Indiana it was a @#$! LANDSLIDE. I was well enough to go vote, though.

Anyway...so tonight, my partner was in the bedroom resting up, and I had a lot of work to catch up on, having been out sick, so I was doing it with the TV sound off, glancing up now and then whenever I heard a screech of elation break out from the election party going on across the street. (We live pretty close to Obama's house. People are kind of excited.) The first outbreak of glee was when they called Ohio for Obama, which I duly ran and reported. "He's won both Ohio and Pennsylvania!" I said. "What about Florida?" said my partner, groggily. "I don't know!" So I got her some more Gatorade and went back out to the TV.

The counter was stuck at 207 for a while, so I stopped paying attention. Then I heard another burst of screaming, looked up at the screen, and ran down to get my partner.

I said, "He's up to 288! I don't know how!"

We ran back down to the TV. We were watching ABC, and they weren't calling it yet. At some point my partner observed that it was sort of stupid for them to not be projecting the winner when they were projecting 288 votes in Obama's column. I said, "But he has to get to 290." She said, "No, he has to get to 270." I went, shit, she's right. OH MY GOD! HE WON!!

Here's the thing. I've seen that 270 number thrown around here all day every day for weeks on end, and yet, when I saw that 288 number, my brain just adjusted the target up. Because God knows, my brain was thinking, we can't actually be WINNING.

But then McCain conceded. And I had to face the fact that in fact, it looked like we had won.

It was a good concession speech. It was, of course, interrupted by boos from his supporters, who apparently don't value graciousness. It must be sad to be McCain right now, knowing that he sold himself to the devil--I'm sorry, to Rove's minions--and all for the chance to not only lose by a landslide but to give his moral high ground speech to an audience of people clearly incapable of appreciating it. But at least he didn't try to drag it out by whining about Acorn.

So we waited, and the numbers kept going up, and finally we watched Obama's speech from Grant Park. And as soon as he came out and started into it, I thought, "Damn, he looks really tired. And he doesn't really look that happy."

Pretty early into the speech he mentioned his grandmother. And then I remembered: oh yeah. His grandmother just died. Of course he doesn't look happy.

And as he got further into the speech, and he started talking about what lies ahead, I thought about what this unexpectedly grave acceptance speech really meant. It's not just that it brought home to me something that I've seen Obama supporters talk about a lot here--the fact that unlike many politicians we could name on both sides of the aisle, Obama seems to have preserved the human being within the shell of the politician's exterior. I've been skeptical of that claim for a long time because I can tell how slick that exterior is and I can see the work that goes into it. But I am starting to come around to it tonight. Not just because you can see--at least I could see--him integrating his personal sense of loss into his performance of this extremely public moment. I think that what I was very, very surprised to be looking at--and surprised mainly because of the 8 years I've spent staring at the train wreck engineered by the Bush/Cheney/Rove axis--was a politician who knows that winning the race is not the point. The point is to do the job, and to do it well. And Obama has defined some pretty ambitious parameters for what his 'job' as president really is. And he must be feeling the weight of all that coming down on him now. And he understands that this is not the beginning of one long party for him and his buddies, but the beginning of a difficult, dangerous, and terribly important mission that will shape the destinies of millions of people here and elsewhere.

One of the things that has maddened me most about Bush was my conviction that he never for one instant of his life understood how serious his responsibilities were, or cared what consequences his actions had. For Bush, it was all about him--his glory, his power, his ability to order up a grilled cheese sandwich from the White House chef at any time of the day or night, his own crazy blood-spilling havoc-wreaking insane plans for how to make himself the savior of the universe. And that is why, as I thought about it, I decided I was glad that Obama didn't seem to have his party face on tonight. Because it shows that he knows that what he does in the next four years is going to matter a lot more than what happened tonight. And he's got to know that he's taking over a country that's in really, REALLY bad shape.

In the Vatican, apparently, there is a room called the Room of Tears. It's where the new popes go to be alone for a while after they've been invested. It is so called because the typical response to being given that responsibility is apparently to break down and cry. I don't know whether the Presidential suite at the Hyatt has a Room of Tears, but I kind of have the feeling that that's where Obama was while he was in the wings waiting to come out to give the speech of his lifetime. I personally don't think it was the best speech he's ever given, as the pundits seem to be saying. But I actually think that's a good sign. The time for political theater is over. The words are still going to matter. But from now on in, it's really about what gets done.

It's important for us, on our smaller scale, to feel the same tears and to make the same transition. We're the party in power now. We've finally got the executive branch back. We have to start thinking not about how to resist power but about how to use it. We have to start thinking about how to prevent our own desires to see our erstwhile overlords dragged through the mud from getting in the way of the work that needs to be done. We have to start seeing ourselves as the ones who are responsible for what happens next, who have been given the charge of making the country and the planet better. The best part of that speech tonight was Obama's call for us to do that. I gotta start thinking about how our family's gonna answer that.

In addition to all that, of course, there is the extra weight of the 400 years of history that Obama's election will change. Others are talking about that better than I can tonight, but I want to say that despite what the media will tell you, Obama's election does not mean that racism is dead in this country. I don't believe that and I certainly don't think Obama believes it. He's got to know that all the people who voted for him did it because they trusted him to make this country a better place for them--and he's got to know how hard that's going to be. He's also got to know that he will have to be at least twice as successful to be thought half as good, and that there will be sharks all around him, all the time, waiting for the taste of blood. And it's just as well that he feels the gravity of that, too.

PJ slept through it all, of course. But she'll wake up in a different world. I do wonder what it will be like for her, the future she will live into, unencumbered by the 38 years we've been dragging around. Maybe she'll be able to be better than we are, to do better things, to take better care of the world, because of what's happened tonight. And thinking about that does kind of make me cry.

To everyone at DU who worked so hard to get us out of this nightmare and into this other history, thank you. Congratulations on winning the first fight of many. I have always been glad to be with you guys, through the bad times and the yet even more awful times. I will value you guys even more in the better times that I hope are coming. In the 8 years since DU was founded, we've all been through the war. Let's hope to God this is the beginning of the end of it.

Yes we have and yes we will,

The Plaid Adder

Well, I have some kind of fever. I've been home sick all day feeling like crap. I sure hope I'm better tomorrow, cause I still need to vote. My partner kept saying I should vote early, but nooooo, I wouldn't listen...

Anyway, I will probably not be around much tomorrow, but know that I am with you all in spirit!

The Plaid Adder

1) The fact that she got pranked is not in itself what matters, really. These guys are apparently very good at what they do and they have done this to people a lot smarter than Palin. One of their diabolical methods is to exploit the rest of the world's almost-total ignorance of the ins and outs of Canada and its politics, which they certainly do beautifully here. As someone who is only about 15% less ignorant about Canada than Palin is, I have some sympathy with her for playing along and trying not to reveal the fact that she had never heard these names that "Sarkozy" was throwing at her. The fact that the call got through to her is, of course, the fault of her press people, especially "Betsy," who I suppose is now not only unemployed but unemployable.

2) Here's what's really horrifying about that phone call: we got to see how Palin acts when she thinks she's talking to a head of state. And it's OMGWTFBBQ HUMILIATING! One DUer on another thread described her as sounding "like a 16 year old meeting Lance Bass for the first time," and by God that's exactly right. Who greets a foreign head of state by squeeing, "We LOVE you!"? Also not pretty was how gushily, desperately grateful she seemed to be--or was pretending to be--to "Nico" for showing her attention and approval. This is something that has just bugged me about her from the beginning, and I may as well rant about it now: What makes it possible for right-wing men to love Sarah Palin despite the threat that she might otherwise represent to the patriarchy as a female VPOTUS is the way she performs that bootlicking, adoration-oozing, oh-thank-you-so-much-for-fulfilling-my-life-by-noticing-me BULLSHIT that patriarchal bastards love so well and which, no doubt by design, contributes to their impression of her as a cute gal who deserves a little help and sympathy because she's gosh darn it trying so hard even though clearly she doesn't have a brain in that pretty little head of hers. She may be a pit bull when she's talking about Democrats but to the guys in her own party everything she does sends the message, "I just love you sooo much and you're sooo great and I'm sooo grateful to you for helping out the helpless little woman that I know I am." Which, OK, works all right when you're sleazing your way up the rungs of the party ladder...but NOT WHAT IS CALLED FOR ON THE INTERNATIONAL STAGE!

3) "Marcel the guy with the loaf of bread under his armpit." Funniest line in the whole conversation.

4) You know what I like best about this? I got done listening to it and I said to myself, "I better go write up a thingy on it now, cause come Wednesday nobody's gonna give a shit about her." And THAT is gonna be a beautiful thing.

C ya,

The Plaid Adder

So, we're headed into the home stretch.

For me, as I imagine for a lot of us here, everything that's happening now is tinged with our memories of the pain of 2004. And 2000, of course; but the thing with 2000 is that a lot of us didn't quite understand how awful that situation was until *after* we'd been through it. By 2004, it was crystal clear--to 51% of the voting populace, anyhow--that the outcome of that election was a big sign reading This Country Is In Crisis And It's Not Coming Out Any Time Soon. For many reasons, then, it's hard for a lot of us to trust anything good that happens for our side. Yeah, we're winning in the polls. But if we can't trust the actual voting process--and we know, we don't just suspect, we KNOW that the Republican strategy involves voter suppression--then all the work that's been done could still lead us to a loss (or at any rate an apparent loss) on Tuesday.

I choose to believe that it will not. I believe it for a few reasons, one being that in 2006 it became clear that whatever manipulations these jackasses engage in, they cannot always achieve the results they intend. Another is that to me, this *feels* totally different from 2004. I've been trying to explain this to people who don't live here, and I guess my summary is this: In 2004, we had a candidate who, good and decent as I believe him to be, had not learned how to become a star. In 2008, we have a candidate who was apparently born to this. The intangibles are finally on our side. That, and the media--who, yes, respond to money and power and whatnot, but what I don't think we have really grasped and accepted yet is that the 'serious' news media has essentially been assimilated by the 'celebrity' news structure. Even news with real content has to be distributed and consumed based on the principles that govern 'stories' about Paris Hilton's driving and Britney Spears's weight. And if I mention those two names in this context, it's because I'm thinking about that McCain "celebrity" ad. It was a ridiculous ad; but perhaps because it was incompetent and sleazy it revealed the very thing that it was attempting to deny: that Obama is, in fact, a celebrity--and that this is why the media love him. Being a celebrity does not HAVE to be a terrible thing, though in our culture it often is. You can become a celebrity for virtually any reason in this country (vide Joe the Plumber). But what celebrities have in common is this: they have something in them that people want to watch. Now, often that something is the capacity for self-destruction, and that's why celebrity culture can get as ugly as it does. But sometimes, it's something better than that. And I think that what people want to watch in Obama is his confidence not just in himself or in his own campaign, but in the possibility that things are changing, can change, and will get better.

Of course we all watch for different manifestations of that. As I think over all this now as we approach the day of reckoning, I find myself thinking mainly about PJ and her world. Her world includes the world of paid child care, and in our neighborhood, that world includes a lot of African-American women. PJ's nanny is one of them. I don't talk about her much because the fact that someone works for you doesn't mean you have the right to blather about them online. But a lot of how I feel about this election has to do with watching her go through, for the first time, the hope/anxiety/fear/dread/excitement/hope/fear/hope emotional ride of a presidential election in which she is deeply invested. We're giving her some time off Tuesday morning so she can go vote. She's planning to take her entire family. All of them, as I understand it, are voting for the first time.

So here's what I hope for now: that when Obama wins, as I believe he will, all the people who voted for the first time, who are invested in American national politics for the first time, who are just getting to grips with this idea that elections are and can be about them and what they hope and believe, do NOT have to go through the same process of disillusionment that I've been through. I hope that all the promise that Obama seems to represent, for them and for me, turns out to be real, and that there will in fact be real change.

It's too late to keep me from becoming a hardbitten cynic who cannot really believe in any politician that still draws breath. But it's not too late for these voters. So please, Obama, if you're listening: Do them right. Don't fuck around, either relative to your marriage or relative to your constituents. Don't get so enamored of bipartisanism and bringing the country together that you lose sight of your own goals. Don't make cosmetic adjustments and call it change. Do something real for them. Give them the faith in the possibilities of democracy that they never had until now, and which I once had and have, I believe, irretrievably lost. Now that you have people hoping, give them something they can use to feed it and nurture it and keep it alive. Come through. For them. Make that word you ran on mean something.

PJ is starting to talk a lot more now. She has learned the word "boo" for Halloween and enjoys saying it. She is too young to know what's going on and she won't remember that she lived through this election. So if all this goes down the way it should, she will never remember a time when all Presidents were white.

I mean think about that. Do you grasp it? I fear I do not. But I try. If what should happen happens, then we are moving out of one world and into another right now. And what I hope is that we keep on moving.

Good luck everyone,

The Plaid Adder

My partner has been trying to figure out for the past few weeks where to go to help out on election day. She's a lawyer, so she originally planned to get trained on voting rights protection in, say, Ohio and then go out there and do that. Well, when you have a kid, it's hard to schedule stuff, and things are kind of disorganized out here, so that didn't pan out; but since we've been getting calls--seriously--several times a DAY trying to get us to go volunteer in Indiana, she decided she would look into that instead. Easier to get to from where we are.

So yesterday she said she had it finally nailed down: she will go down to Indiana--where exactly they have not yet determined--and help with getting out the vote. But the point is, when telling me this, she said, "They don't need any more lawyers. They have so many laywers volunteering they don't know what to do with them. They're full up." So she is going in her capacity as ordinary footsoldier, while I stay here in my capacity as PJ's caretaker and writer of checks to the Obama campaign.

So, for what it's worth, there is apparently an army of lawyers fanning out across the Midwest looking to protect the vote. Godspeed, lawyer horde!

The Plaid Adder

Before the fateful day arrives, I just want to thank all of you who take the time out to post polls and poll analysis in here on a regular basis. It's been very important for me, and I imagine a lot of other DUers, to be able to come here and see people actually looking at the broad spectrum of polls and looking at the big pictures. I especially like that one graph in I believe phrigndumass's report which contrasts Obama's polling graph with Kerry's in 2004. Nothing cheers me up more than looking at those two lines diverge.

A lot of us are extremely anxious right now, despite the fact that all the indicators are going our way, because of 2000 and 2004. Every little bit helps, and I salute those of you who put in the work to do more than just cherry-pick one number and wave it around in the air--the way, say, the AP does. I well remember right after Palin was picked, when McCain got his post-convention bounce, and panic was in the air. Someone--again, I believe it was phrigndumass, unless it was grantcart--posted the Kerry 2004 with the caption, "The correct time to panic will be when Obama's graph looks like this." And I thought, you know what, that's true...and I bet it never will." And look! It doesn't!

Anyway, for all the rest of us who have not the time nor the talent to parse all that statistical stuff but need to know more about what's going on than the media is willing to share with us, thank you! Other DUers, post here to show our polling pundits a little love!



The Plaid Adder

I posted this in one of the "it's already stolen!" threads but I figured I would give it its own post:

This bullshit about ACORN and voter fraud is not primarily, IMHO, about attacking Obama's character or honesty or any of that bullshit. It's about laying the grounds for a challenge to Obama's upcoming electoral victory, for which I now believe most of McCain's supporters are braced.

This is another Rovian tactic: when you lose, never admit it and never accept it. Since they know they're not going to win it, and appear to be concerned that they might not be able to steal it either, they're going to Plan C: challenge the results. Which in a way is good news for us, as it suggests that their internal polling and fraud experts are telling them they're not going to like the outcome.

It's bad news in the sense that if/when Obama wins the actual election, the poison will continue to fester as the hatred and suspicion in the hearts of McCain's last remaining supporters is fanned and fed in order to keep Obama's legitimacy in doubt. So that's gonna be fun.

By the way, please do not reply to this with rants about not becoming "complacent." I just made another donation to Obama's campaign and I encourage others to do the same. But I do think we are starting to see signs that the GOP strategy has shifted from winning on election day to winning *after* election day.

Ah well, it's not the worst problem we could have,

The Plaid Adder

Now that the debates are over, I'm just going to do my core dump about stuff that has bugged me all along:

1) We Are Winning The War In Iraq!

Of all the things that kept coming up, this was the bit I got most frustrated by. Obama never addressed the question of whether the surge was working or not; he always moved back to the decision to enter the war. I'm not saying that wasn't a good tactic, just that I would have liked to see *someone* say this: The fact that violence in Iraq has decreased since the surge does not mean that we are now finally victorious--or, even more infuriating, that we should all have known all along that we would eventually be victorious, which is what McCain is implying by making Obama's opposition to the surge an issue. A strategy that 'works' only after tens of thousands of civilians have been killed, the middle class has been destroyed, the country has become a magnet for fundamentalist terrorist organizations, and violence has been the only law of the land for years on end is not a winning strategy. To say that the surge has "worked" and that we are now "winning" is like saying that Bush's Hurricane Katrina strategy is "working" because three years after Katrina's landfall there are no longer bodies floating in the streets.

2) Same Shit, Different Debate.

This is something both candidates did that drove me nuts: recycling the exact same answers to the exact same questions across all 3 debates. I understand why they do it, but it does not inspire confidence, and it makes the whole process of having multiple debates kind of pointless. I don't think we got anything out of #3 that didn't come out of #1 or #2 except for a few more chances for McCain to ramble on about Bill Ayers and Joe the Plumber.

3) The Middle Class

Does anyone in this country really know what "middle class" means any more? To hear politicians talk it sounds like the "middle class" includes, basically, anybody who has a job and a family. And yet at the same time policies directed at the middle class all seem to be oriented toward a more restrictive definition of middle class which assumes, among other things, homeownership and the expectation of a college education for all the family's children. If you're a single woman working as a housekeeper at a hotel, raising two kids, living in a tiny rented apartment, and focusing on making it to next week with enough money to buy groceries rather than on buying a house or sending your kids to college, are you middle class? If so, why? And if not, how come nobody ever talks about you and what you need?

I get that Obama's concern for the "middle class," however it's defined, is sufficient to distinguish him from McCain, who apparently only cares about the magnate & mogul class. Still. I cannot help thinking that it's a problem that nobody ever acknowledges that for a lot of working Americans, a recognizably "middle class" existence is still pretty far out of their reach no matter what kind of tax cuts they get handed.

4) McCain's Tongue.

I really did not need to see that.

Ah well, it'll all be over soon,

The Plaid Adder

And this is yet another reason why you don't want this guy running the country: he's got no @#$! idea how he comes across to other people.

The reason he was so much more chipper at the end of the night this time was that he really thinks he did well. He got in all the zingers that he'd loaded up with and you could see that every time he let one fly he just sat there grinning and looking hugely pleased with himself. But I do not think that it worked for him, and here is why:

1) In general, it is not a good idea to laugh at your own jokes, unless you are laughing with someone else who has laughed at them first. If nobody else is laughing at your joke but you are, then you look like a loser. Since neither Bob Schieffer nor Obama were laughing at most of them, McCain's self-congratulatory cackling just made their failure resound more loudly.

2) He seriously thought that interrupting Obama a million times to stick the knife in was going to enable him to emerge the victor, I suppose because that's how he figured he was kicking Obama's "you know what." However, since McCain never got a rise out of Obama, that little drama didn't play out either; it just made McCain look like a flea trying to behead an elephant by biting his way through its neck. Maybe you might make a slight look of annoyance cross the elephant's features, but that's about it.

3) Obama's health care plan is still clearly better, McCain's is still clearly insane from the point of view of ordinary Americans.

4) The Joe the Plumber thing might have worked for him if he hadn't kept pushing it so relentlessly, and if he hadn't done that weird self-congratulatory cackling thing over "good news, Joe, you're rich!", and if Obama hadn't stolen his bit by talking directly to "Joe" about the fine--and if this whole exchange hadn't reminded everyone that Obama actually went to Ohio and MET Joe, whereas McCain is just sort of stalking him from a distance.

5) "Class warfare?" Did you really just pull that out? What is this, 1935?

6) The Ayers stuff. It's ridiculous. There's no justification for it and McCain knows that. For him to sit there saying "well I just think the American people need to know all the details" again after Obama's just given them all the details is just...well, I just keep coming back to the word "pathetic."

So, it seems like the PBS talking heads agree, so I can go to bed and perhaps not have nightmares. But anyway, the point here is this: McCain does not seem to be able to sense the mood in the room or to respond to it. He just keeps pushing his bits and he's pleased when he manages to get them out in the right order at hte right time and he has no means of assessing the reaction and adjusting his course. His POV is that if he says what he wants to say, then he wins--regardless of how the general public react. He is always the only important guy in the room, and if in his mind he's killing, then he's killing. Where have I met guys like this before...oh yeah, THAT ONE...

Well. I hope this pushes McCain further down in the polls, because I want a good 20 points separating the two fo them before we go into November.

C ya,

The Plaid Adder

Came up with it after reading all comments on the original thread that disagreed with my assessment of Palin's performance:

I absolutely agree that Palin came across as a photogenic but emotionally and intellectually void android loaded up with canned answers and programmed to spew them in response to particular stimuli. I guess what I'm saying is that I was hoping that the robot would actually break down at some point, and she didn't.

C ya,

The Plaid Adder

At some point during the postmortem on PBS one of the talking heads said, "I think Democrats are disappointed she didn't implode," and I said, "Yes. You have said a true thing. I AM disappointed she didn't implode." Later on in the evening, I summed the experience up thusly: "Well, it's too bad she didn't crash and burn. On the other hand, the chocolate mousse came out well."

I will admit to being suckered by all these 'leaks' from the McCain campaign about how bad her practices were. I should have known it was bullshit that came from the same source as the whole "maybe McCain won't do the first debate after all" stunt. He was clearly prepared, and so was she. I still think she's painful, unqualified, and a disaster; but one cannot say that her performance in this debate was that much worse on substance than what we have seen in previous presidential debates. She took advantage of the format, which allowed her to ignore the question she'd been asked and instead provide the canned response she brought with her; and because she's good at delivering said canned responses while looking into the camera and--LITERALLY--winking at the folks at home, she came off pretty well. It's the same way Bush got through his presidential debates in 2000, and as I've said before, in a lot of ways they're pretty much the same kind of candidate, which is reason enough to fear and loathe Sarah Palin.

(Other, far more trivial reasons provided tonight include: 1) She winks. Despite all the talk about not blinking, she winks kind of a lot. I guess it's part of that whole 'folksy' thing; but I don't see it playing well at the negotiating table. 2) She called Biden "Senator O'Biden" at one point. 3) I can't stand all the "you betchas" and "doggone it"s. Even less can I stand how people look at this and swoon over how authentic she is. If you can't figure out that this is a deliberately crafted speaking style calculated to appeal to Joe Sixpack, whose name she actually mentioned as if he were a real individual, well, then, what's the point of even arguing. Moving on...)

Biden, on the other hand, doesn't do well with this format, and if you look at what happened tonight, it's a pretty familiar story: we win on substance, they win on style. That's what happened in 2000 and 2004, and of course we lost. And this is why it's a good thing that Biden is not at the top of the ticket. The only reason this is working out better for us this year--well, it was the only reason until the economy blew up--is that finally, at the top of the ticket, WE are the ones with the guy who wins on likability.

So, I will admit to having been completely wrong about how Palin would do tonight. Well, no, not completely. There was one moment at which I finally sat back and said, "Thaaaat's the Sarah Palin we came to see." It was her answer to the question about global warming. It was as nonsensical and confused as any of the answers she gave to Katie Couric, and for this reason. The answer she clearly believes--that global warming is a load of liberal hoo-ha and what happens to the planet is up to God and the oil companies--is drastically at variance with the answer that she was clearly told to give, and perhaps so drastically that she literally can't understand the opposite position well enough to bullshit about it convincingly. Her responses on the gay marriage question were less muddleheaded but equally awkward and uncomfortable. Ironically, I think this is a case where the relative absence of wedge issues (except for those two) hurt us because it allowed Palin to continue hiding her religious extremism. Although I do hope there are a few teachers who were pissed off by her crack about how "their reward is in heaven." Which is great, cause as long as the Republican Party has anything to do with it, they'll never have one on earth!

My partner had this to say: "She's so competitive that having her adversary right there on stage actually makes her do better. It's the adrenaline." So, if that's what it is, then I say sit her down in some more comfy Barbara Walters type interview armchairs and then ask her why she thought it was a good idea to charge rape victims for their evidence kits.

Because that's the other thing: Biden, no doubt acting on orders, never actually challenged Palin's record; he made the entire thing a referendum on McCain. I found this deeply unsatisfying, because I really, really want to see Palin taken out. But again, what I want and what wins an election are often and indeed really almost always two different things. At the end of the day, unless death comes for him, it's McCain who's going to be running the joint, and McCain is the guy they have to feel good about turning the country over to. And the most important thing for us right now is that nobody trusts McCain on the economy.

With that in mind, let me point out a few things that Biden did well, which will reap rewards in the long run even if he 'loses' tonight:

* Once again, he clearly explained on national television that the McCain health care plan would actually make things worse for most everyone except for the employers who stop providing health care and the insurance companies who will roll out a load of high-cost low-benefit private plans for people to buy with their woefully insufficient tax credit. As I said, I don't understand how McCain's campaign is still viable anywhere if this is his idea of health care reform.

* When he finally got onto foreign policy, it was clear that he not only knows what he's talking about, but actually cares. I mean this was where finally you saw the anger that has been building up for the past 8 years about the deeply, deeply stupid and dangerous foreign policies of this administration. By contrast, Palin's goal at this point in the debate was to come up with something more credible than vague ramblings about Putin rearing his ugly head over the Bering straits. So if you were watching to find out who would actually be more capable of handling foreign policy, you got your answer. But then if you give a shit about foreign policy and have the brain cells necessary to figure out that Bush's is a disaster, you were pretty much going to avoid the McCain ticket anyway.

* Biden's best answer was the one in which he listed Bush's failed foreign policies one after another followed by "I haven't heard how McCain's is going to be different." Cause we haven't, and Caribou Barbie didn't offer any specifics in rebuttal either.

* In the answer to "what does the vice president do, etc.," the contrast was also made clear: Palin will be VP as spokesmodel/surrogate First Lady, whereas Biden will actually be a partner. But again, I think pretty much everyone knew that.

And here's something else which I think is a good point for us in this election cycle, but which explains a lot about why the Congress has been such an enabler for this administration: Biden's answer about how he would 'reach across the aisle' and all that. He told a good little anecdote about the leader of the Senate taking him aside after he attacked Jesse Helms on the floor and saying, "Never question someone's motives." Good story, makes him look like a stand-up guy. But if he actually believes in that--and if it's the standard by which most of the other Senators operate--then no wonder Bush and Cheney ran over them with a steamroller. Cause if you do not question their motives, then you do not understand what kind of trouble they are.

Ah well. As I said, the mousse was excellent, and Palin Bingo, which was provided by one of the guests, revealed a lot of interesting things about Palin's answers. For instance, we never crossed off "Russia." And one of our friends, who was really hoping to get "Pakistan," noticed that Palin got through almost her entire answer to the Pakistan question without actually saying the word "Pakistan."

Ah well. If there's a bounce, I imagine it'll be brief, and as I said, the mousse was excellent. The recipe was passed on to me by a friend who's French, and I make it available here because it seemed to have the same effect on the assembled company as the "I Got This" icon does on the GD: P denizens:

CHOCOLATE MOOSE

Ingredients:

6 large eggs (buy vegetarian cage-free, it'll piss her off more)

200g dark chocolate (Follow your own taste here. I used 2 1/2 bars of Newman's Own Sweet Dark; dark dark makes it too bitter but I think milk chocolate would be too sweet)

Instructions:

* Melt the chocolate in a double boiler or a microwave with 3 tablespoons of water.

* Separate the 6 eggs into two different bowls, yolks in one and whites in the other.

* Gradually mix the molten chocolate into the egg yolks.

* Beat the living daylights out of the egg whites. This is a very important step. Put your mixer on high and keep it there until they are white, fluffy, and stiff as a politician's hair.

* Slowly and gently fold the egg whites into the yolk/chocolate mixture.

* Pour the mixture into 6 indivdiual serving dishes.

* Chill (the fuck out) in fridge for at least 3 hours before serving.

Trust me...this mousse is AWESOME. As for the debate, well, it could have been a lot awesomer, but it probably won't hurt us that much.

C ya,

The Plaid Adder

For two reasons. No, three.

One: it's about damn time. Two: If Ifill does ask questions Palin can't answer, at least she can't whine about sexism (though it would be interesting to watch Palin try). And three: I think that Palin evokes a special kind of cold and beautiful righteous anger in professional women, and that this is why her interview with Katie Couric was such a frickin' disaster. I look forward to her meeting disaster again tonight, introduced to it by another woman journalist who understands and loathes everything that Palin's ascendency represents about the way the professions treat women.

Everyone seems to have been surprised that Palin couldn't handle an interview with Couric--probably most of all Palin's handlers, who undoubtedly set that up because they assumed Couric would toss her softballs. Couric doesn't have a reputation for being a hard-hitting journalist, despite being a major network news anchor, and in fact from the time she got the job to the present day nobody gave her credit for being qualified or able to do it. I personally thought it was a depressing comment on the dumbification of broadcast news--from Dan Rather to the perky morning host. So if I had a candidate who knew nothing and couldn't convincingly fake much, I'd probably have sent her to Couric first too, and hope they spent the whole time talking about celebrities and their favorite shoe stores.

Well, I underestimated Couric, apparently. But I understand exactly why she chose this particular moment to finally bring out the journalist chops she was apparently hiding all this time. Because all the things that her peers, supervisors, and viewers believed about Couric--she's just a pretty face, she's all surface and no substance, she's not ready for the big time, they gave her this job just because she's cute and looks good in a suit--are, when it comes to Palin, actually true. And I can completely see Couric sitting there at her desk prepping for this interview thinking, "If nothing else happens, I'm going to show these bastards the difference between a cute perky woman who CAN handle the big issues and a cute perky woman who clearly can't."

And this is, I believe, one major source of my strong, strong antipathy toward Palin--apart from the right-wing fundamentalist stuff, and the fact that she wants to take the right to choose away from PJ, and all that kind of thing. She *is* the woman that the sexist pigs we've all worked with start out assuming we will be--bubbly but vapid, cute but incompetent, pleasant to have around but incapable of handling any real responsibility. And what's worse, she encourages that perception, trades on it, exploits it, and uses it to sleaze her way into positions of power that she clearly should never have been given. She's good at three things, basically: 1) pretending to be sweet; 2) ripping the entrails out of her enemies; and 3) conning the powerful men around her into thinking that she's the greatest thing since sliced bread. The governing, not so much. If politics were a bad sci-fi movie, and Karl Rove was ordered to design an android fembot secret agent, she'd come out looking exactly like Palin. Or maybe Tina Fey dressed up as Palin.

So for a woman like Couric, or Ifill, before we even get to her ideological kit Palin is already a nemesis who needs to be brought down. And then we get to her positions on women's issues, and it only gets worse.

So, you know, the more her surrogates bitch about sexism hurting her in the media, the harder I laugh. Without sexism, she wouldn't be in this campaign in the first place. There were a lot of women in the Republican party who would be a lot better at either campaigning or governing than Palin is; they were passed over for Caribou Barbie because she's more telegenic. You can say, well, that's politics; I would answer yes, that's Rovian politics, and that means it's a strategy that includes exploiting the worst aspects of human nature, including the tendency to judge women based on their appearance rather than what lies beneath. And that form of sexism is the only thing that got her onto the ticket and it's the only thing keeping her there--because as we're finding out, what lies beneath is pretty embarrassing.

As for the "I'm voting for her because she's a mom like me!" thing...please. I am a mom now. That does not make me a magical and omnipotent being, and it doesn't make Sarah Palin one either. Being a mom has indeed changed my life. I'm a lot more organized and make better use of my time than I used to. Still. Am I any closer to being someone you'd want a heartbeat away from the presidency? No. Motherhood is a very difficult job which requires the investment of your entire emotional, intellectual, and spiritual being. But the skill set you develop is a little different from the one you'd need to run a country like the U.S.

Anyway. We're having our debate party, and it's going to consist of 5 women who got where they are in *spite* of that kind of sexism. (For those who helped with menu suggestions, thank you; we're doing 'barracuda' fish sticks, asparagus spears (if you work hard you can turn it into a reference to Bristol's pregnancy via Jamie Lynn Spears), chocolate moose, and moose bites (these are really chocolate haystacks, but they kind of look like they have antlers...and moose bites can be very dangerous, you know). And as long as civilization appears to be falling, I intend to enjoy what is certain to be a pretty good show.

C ya,

The Plaid Adder

When I logged in this morning I saw Bush's face next to a headline saying, "Bush: 'We're in an urgent situation'"...so pass the bailout bill, etc.

Yeah. We're in a @#$! urgent situation. And whose @#$! fault is that, you lying sack of @#$%!!?

NOT ONLY is Bush responsible for the deregulation orgy of the past 8 years, NOT ONLY is he responsible for presiding over the decline of the middle class and the ballooning of the national debt, NOT ONLY is he reaping the rewards of eight years of greed, corruption, cronyism, and incompetence...he is ALSO responsible for the failure of the bailout bill he so desperately wants now, and this is why: His own popularity is so low, and his own duplicity and incompetence so well established, that the House reps in HIS OWN PARTY are terrified of going near anything he's touched. And when he says that they need to pass this thing to save the economy, why is he surprised that they don't believe him? Why should they or anyone else believe that bastard about ANYTHING?

He has fucked up so bad and so often, he has lied so continually and foully, that he's used up whatever confidence anyone ever had in him and now he's stuck in his own credit freeze. And you know, I'd enjoy watching him sweat, if we all weren't sweating too.

Enjoy your @#$%! legacy of failure and destruction, it's the only legacy any of us will be getting once you're done with this country,

The Plaid Adder