phamos

It's very hard for me to comment on the Obama "bitter" flap, because I consider myself to be something of an elitist, or at least to exist in an elite situation. I went to a private high school; I have degrees from two of the finest universities in the country, as does my husband (and mine are almost vanity degrees -- seriously, a Human Rights degree isn't actually necessary for a productive career); I live in a lovely apartment (that we can barely afford, but still); I have a gazillion shiny consumer devices; I am able to spend a ludicrous amount of time running my mouth on the internet; I am at this very moment drinking overpriced locally-produced cruelty-free organic milk; I am personally acquainted with famous people; I can't bowl for shit. Sure, economically we're nowhere near the elitist-of-the-elite, and it's not like I have dinner with Bono all the time -- but culturally, we fit the stereotype just as well as Obama does. Well, Obama pre-book deal; we're not gonna be bringing in a million dollars anytime soon. I don't drive a Volvo, and I don't drink lattes, but pretty much everything else, yeah, I'll fess up. So it probably does more harm than good for me to say that I get exactly what Obama was trying to say, and I agree with it wholeheartedly. I'm just another elitist, right?

What burns me up is this ridiculous attempt by Clinton and McCain to position themselves as anything but elite. YOU ARE UNITED STATES SENATORS. YOU ARE MULTI-MILLIONAIRES. YOU ATTENDED TOP-TIER ACADEMIC INSTITUTIONS. (Sure, McCain graduated at the bottom of his class at the Naval Academy -- but it's still on his resume.) Hillary, your daughter went to Stanford and Oxford and works at a hedge fund. John, your daughter went to Columbia and wears designer jeans and posts Muse songs on her personal blog. (Actually, I think I'd probably like Meghan McCain in real life. Probably more than Chelsea.) You've written best-selling autobiographies. You live in mansions and drive fancy cars and I'm guessing have had a Starbucks or two in your lives. So SHUT UP. You are the very DEFINITION of the political, cultural, and economic elite in this country, and it's absolutely disgusting to pretend to be anything but. Hillary the lifelong hunter? McCain the populist? Give me a goddamn break.

But, once again, the real issue at play is the media, and the fact that every tiny misstep in this campaign is just fodder for more roundtable pundit idiocy to sell ads. That Obama has once again not backed down in the face of this silliness (seriously, the fact that he wanted ORANGE JUICE makes him an ELITIST? WHY ARE YOU STILL TALKING, FOX AND FRIENDS??) and let his campaign be shrunken into yet another soundbyte-friendly homogenous politics-as-usual vomitfest is just one more point for him in my internal tally. Again, you can disagree all you want with me about how sincere he is about his desire to do things differently, or how effective he'll be. (Or, you know, rationalpassion, about whether or not he will cripple this fine nation with his Marxist welfare statist Obama Youth personality cult and we'll all be speaking Farsi by 2012.) It's not like he's politics-free -- he's pandered to a certain extent on free-trade, on Israel, and with the bowling. (Personally, though, if I were stuck in rural Pennsylvania for a month and a half and someone suggested bowling might be a good photo op, I'd totally do it -- at least it was a fun way to spend an afternoon, even if he sucked. Hell, bowling's more fun when you suck! And there's rented shoes!) I just love that he won't play by the media's rules, and it is making their brains run out of their ears, and proving to the American public at large, more so every day, that our media isn't conservative or liberal, it is idiotic and lowest-common-denominator and entirely built around profit rather than any sort of journalistic responsibility to the citizenry. So that, at least, is helpful, if absolutely miserable to sit through.

I'm finally reading Liberal Fascism, by Jonah Goldberg -- it didn't take very long for me to work my way to the top of the request list in the Madison Public Library system, which makes me think that a whole lot of people read about one chapter, realized the book was just as silly as all its publicity made it out to be, and returned it within a couple of days. So here we are. Most of my complaints so far are structural rather than substantive. It's actually kind of hard to read the book, because it is pages and pages of three word quotes taken completely out of context and nestled snugly inside Goldberg's overly florid verbiage, with no way for the reader to know whether or not the words are being used as originally intended without constantly flipping back to the endnotes -- which are insufficient and inconsistent and, indeed, often negate their very use. Example: The epigraph for chapter one is a quote from what he calls "an early version of the Cole Porter song 'You're the Top'":

You're the top!
You're the Great Houdini!
You're the top!
You are Mussolini!

The quote is footnoted, and as such I'm immediately suspicious of just HOW early this version is. So I flip to the back.

Many authors have referenced these lyrics to demonstrate Mussolini's widespread popularity, but it is a common mistake to ascribe these lyrics to Cole Porter, the original author of the musical Anything Goes. Porter almost certainly did not write these lyrics. Rather, they were probably added by P.G. Wodehouse when he helped adapt the musical for the British stage. It also appears that there were multiple versions of the song with the Mussolini lyric, which hopscotched back and forth across the Atlantic.

OK, I have a NUMBER of issues with this footnote, starting with the incredibly lazy construction "Many authors have..." -- Seriously? That's the sort of thing you see in high school papers, not supposedly somewhat-scholarly works disseminated by major publishing houses. You're already in the endnotes, why not list a couple of examples of those "many authors" who make this incredibly "common mistake"? And if it's such a common mistake, then why are YOU basically indulging in that same mistake by quoting the damn line out of context as a stand-alone epigraph that you yourself contradict in the endnote? Because the endnote is basically saying 1) the line was written for comedic effect 2) by a British writer for non-American audiences, thus negating any relevance it has to an argument about American political elites. But OK, sure, it makes for a funny epigraph, you'll put it up there at the front of the chapter and then the pedants who bother to read the endnotes will know that you were really just kidding around by using it. Except then you cite the exact same quote in the text itself:

When Mussolini invaded Ethiopia, Americans finally started to turn on him. In 1934 the hit Cole Porter song "You're the Top" engendered nary a word of controversy over the line "You are Mussolini!" When Mussolini invaded that poor but noble African kingdom the following year, it had irrevocably marred his image, and Americans decided they had had enough of his act.

!!!! But! But! You just yourself said that the lyric wasn't IN the original "hit" version of the song, it was in the British version of the song! So what does it have to do with the American public's views of Mussolini? And don't even get me started on the incredibly infantilizing way he calls Ethiopia "poor but noble" -- it's like he's patting Ethiopians on the head, saying, "Look how cute you are with your 'emperor'. Haile Selassie is God? That's ADORABLE. Have a lolly."

So, yeah, he then spends a lot of time taking three-word quotes from articles of the time (like Ida Tarbell calling Mussolini "a despot with a dimple") and making it seem as though you can judge the content of any given article by a blurb pulled out from the middle. Anyone who's watched a movie preview in the past 20 years knows that's not true; did Roger Ebert really say that Daddy Day-Care was "hilarious" or did he say "anyone who thinks Daddy Day-Care is hilarious should be institutionalized"? The word hilarious is in there! Slap some quotes around it! Far too many years of higher education and a childhood subscription to Penny Power magazine have taught me to be inherently skeptical of quotes with no context. Whether this is unfair to Goldberg, I don't know -- it would be helpful if he had a footnote that cited the issue of McCall's in which Tarbell printed her supposedly rapturous toe-sucking of Mussolini. He doesn't. Like I said, the footnoting is incredibly inconsistent. I generally expect that from books published for mass consumption -- but then why bother having endnotes at all? Probably Ida Tarbell did write an incredibly flattering article about Mussolini in McCall's in 1926 -- but I'll never know for sure, because Goldberg quotes so selectively as to make me immediately suspicious, and then doesn't footnote properly. So, I'm not giving him the benefit of the doubt.

What REALLY got my goat enough to make me stop reading and come post this, though, was the following sentence:

Boasting 169 mistresses over the course of his sexual career, Mussolini was also, by contemporary standards, something of a rapist.

What? What, exactly, are our "contemporary standards" that make someone "something of a rapist"? How is someone "SOMETHING" of a rapist? Helpfully, though, Goldberg HAS footnoted this particular assertion. What might Mussolini have written in his autobiography that, by our CONTEMPORARY STANDARDS make him SOMETHING OF A RAPIST?

I caught her on the stairs, throwing her into a corner behind a door, and made her mine. When she got up weeping and humiliated she insulted me by saying that I had robbed her of her honor and it is not impossible that she spoke the truth. But I ask you, what kind of honor could she have meant?

Oh, Jonah Goldberg. I know you like to use 20 words when four would suffice, but in this particular circumstance your verbal diarrhea just makes me hate you. Try this edit on for size: "Mussolini was a rapist." Hey, look at that! It takes out all the offensive moral equivocating you just engaged in! HTH. HAND.

Ugh, Geraldine Ferraro. I just can't even deal with you today. I seriously...I...no.

I will let the macro do the talking.

I think Samantha Power made a really dumb mistake, and I think she had to resign.  I'm sad about this, but more for the potential effect on his campaign than on the idea of losing her.  If he does win the presidency, she will obviously have a role in, if not his cabinet, then his foreign policy approach in general.  That's mostly what I care about.

The Clintons have obviously finally gotten under Obama's skin.  I do think he needs to regroup fast, and I think he needs to come out swinging.  I still don't think he needs to go negative in a nasty sense, but he needs to point out some really big issues.  The McCain thing is a biggie.  His campaign surrogates need to hit that point HARD in every news outlet -- that Clinton is willing to throw a partymate under the bus for the general election.  You're allowed to go after each other in a primary to a certain extent, but you're not supposed to basically flat-out say "The Republican would be better than my opponent"  -- that's crummy, and if the superdelegates REWARD her for behavior that is so obviously destructive to the party, well...then the party is irreparably broken.  I thought both Jonathan Chait and Andrew Sullivan (who I don't love, but has grown more progressive over time) made good points about that.

I'm glad, however, that in the wake of her McCain comment, people starting to call her to task for her claim to be so much more experienced in foreign policy -- i.e that she's a "wee bit silly" to take credit for peace in Ireland, and that her claims to have helped open the borders in Macedonia are ridiculous because they opened the borders the day before she got there.  (She also went on her trip to trip to Bosnia where she was supposedly almost shot out of the sky with Sheryl Crow and Sinbad -- not really a high-powered diplomatic coalition.)  He needs to bring this up.  A lot.  If she's making this about her experience, he has to point out that, although she has a very unique, particular kind of experience, it is NOT actually the sort of foreign policy experience that matches up to McCain, if that's the bar that she's setting.  At the same time, he should reframe things and point out that a whole lot of foreign policy experience doesn't make a lick of difference if you're still making the wrong judgment calls.  i.e. did her trip to Bosnia teach her that it's a good idea to authorize wars without reading national intelligence estimates?  He's currently making all these points, but he needs to be LOUDER.  And he shouldn't throw mud unless he really has to, but I think it's reasonable to say that calling for her to release her tax forms isn't a Ken Starr tactic, but her insistence on bringing up Rezko constantly might just qualify.

Just some thoughts...Mostly, her campaign tactics have just reinforced the view that I held before this all started -- that Clinton politics is machine politics, is GROSS politics, and if we have the opportunity to move away from that, we should grab it with both hands.  Also, Terry McAuliffe and Mark Penn are wretched, insincere hacks who I really don't want to see on my TV screen ever again if at all possible.  (Can't make a judgment on Wolfson, because I don't think I've actually seen him speak in person, but the other two actually ooze political slime from their pores and it makes me shiver to watch them.)

From my Facebook updates, at 9:30 pm:

Russ Feingold has accepted your friend request.

I'm totally close personal friends with Russ Feingold! Wheeeeee!

(I don't know why I have Tribe Called Quest stuck in my head. It's better than when I had the Monkees theme song stuck in my head a couple days ago, that's for damn sure. Stir it up!)

Tonight is gonna be SUPER ugly.  A lawsuit has been filed in Texas already -- someone went around to elderly people's homes in Houston and said they were filling out forms to help them register to vote, when in fact they were getting them to fill out paperwork for absentee ballots.  When these people went in to vote, they were told they had already been recorded as voting absentee.  This hasn't actually been attached to one campaign or the other, but whatever happened, that's seriously criminal.  There's also already a lot of screaming back and forth about the Texas caucuses -- Clinton's camp claiming that their supporters are being locked out, Obama people rebutting that other sites are sneaking Clinton supporters in the back door.  It's gonna make Nevada look like a tea party.

My take on the Times McCain piece? That is one story that has been lawyered to DEATH. They're basically saying everything that they could legally get away with saying, and then ending on a sorta wink-wink-nudge-nudge-say-no-more.

I have no trouble believing that McCain has had affairs. He's pretty much admitted to affairs during his first marriage -- hell, he married Cindy a month after his divorce was finalized. And he pretty obviously has a type -- one which this lovely lobbyist lady fits to a T. I'm seeing a fair amount of argument on the liberal blogs about how the Democrats should play this one out, which I think is good. There's the vengeance camp, and they're all "good for the goose is good for the gander" and pretty much want to destroy him. There's the guilty-conscience folks, who rightly point out how much our side protested about staying out of politicians' pants when it doesn't affect their governance. I tend towards this second group. However, the question is -- did this relationship, which can't currently be defined on the advice of the NYT lawyers, affect John McCain's priorities as a legislator? It's not looking good for the maverick...

Also, you gotta love his camp's total non-denial denial. He's "never violated the public trust"? There are a couple of people who did their banking with the Lincoln Savings and Loan that might have something to say about that.

So I signed up online to volunteer for the Obama campaign this weekend, and they told me to come to a "training" tonight at their headquarters. This wasn't so much a training as a little mini-rally, mostly aimed at college kids who needed to get fired up/ready to go/whatever about pestering people down the hall in their dorms. Unbeknownst to me (and to the other people at the "training" over the age of 22, of which there were about 10 out of a crowd of 60 or so), the big draw for the night was that actors Kal Penn and Brandon Routh were going to come talk about why they support Barack Obama. I manged to pick up through some mumbling who the special guests were. A man in his early 40s asked me if I knew who was coming, who we were waiting for, and I said, "Superman and Kumar." This cracked up the little pod of middle-aged folks around me, one of whom started bemoaning the fact that she first worked on a campaign in '72 and she felt really old. I can only imagine how she felt, since I was already feeling pretty decrepit.

So the main organizers spoke, and basically told us to sign up if we hadn't already and they'd call us tomorrow to tell us when to come in and do our GOTV shift. And then Superman and Kumar came in. It's always funny to see celebrities in person, because they totally look like normal people, just slightly SHINIER normal people, and you feel like you know them but you totally don't. Brandon Routh is pretty tall -- about 6'3", I'd say. Nice broad shoulders. Pretty face, pretty hair. Up close I could see that his skin had a tiny bit of acne-scarring, which made me like him more. He was wearing a blue ringer t-shirt with Obama's face stenciled onto it. Good looking man. Kal Penn is also very cute. Shorter, about 5'10". Looks 100% exactly like he does on screen. Sounds 100% exactly like he does on screen. And he's a REALLY good Obama advocate, because he's obviously passionate, he's funny, he's very well-spoken, and he had some fantastic anecdotes to tell. (His grandparents marched with Gandhi, and he talked about growing up hearing those stories and how Obama is the first person to inspire him in that way since his grandparents. That's a good one.) Routh was less eloquent, more shambly every-man, but he made a great point about how campaigning for Barack Obama is not, for him, about being in the public eye and making a difference that way -- it just that, simply, he recognizes that you shouldn't be completely cynical about politics because politics touches you and everyone you love, and he felt the need to work against that cynicism for the betterment of himself and the people around him. Or something like that. GoBama!

When Penn and Routh got there and started talking, some TV cameras got turned on. This random guy (wearing a leather jacket and a shirt with Bush's face with an x through it) managed to position himself right next to Superman, and as soon as the cameras went on, he pulls out a giant cardboard sign with Obama's quote about being willing to go after Bin Laden in Pakistan plastered across the front, along with the URL infowars.org. (I didn't know whether he was an International ANSWER/Lyndon LaRouche guy or a Paultard at the time...from looking at the site, it looks like Paultard.) You could see that the organizers realized there was a disgruntled nerd trying to make a scene, and didn't quite know what to do...they were smart enough to immediately pick up (as did I) that he totally WANTED them to kick him out so he could shout about free speech shit, so they just ignored him. Brandon Routh was talking, and Kal Penn sorta looked over at the sign and started reading it and raised his eyebrows in a little "are you serious?" kind of face. It made me giggle. So the guy is ticked off that no one is paying any attention to his dumb sloganeering (you know, some of us have more nuanced ideas about foreign policy than just "bomb everyone" or "shiny happy people" and aren't particularly cheesed off about a leader saying that he is willing to use our armed forces for a mission -- when it's the right damn mission), so he suddenly starts shouting "Don't bomb Iran! Don't bomb Pakistan! Don't bomb Iran! don't bomb Pakistan!" A couple people look kind of confused, a couple of people hesitantly clap, like, "Yeah, I don't wanna do that. Are we bombing them? What's happening?" The vast majority of us just sorta stare at him like, "OK, yeah? Dude? Your point?" And he starts sorta mealy-mouthing something about how Obama is willing to bomb Pakistan. And we all continue to look at him like, yeah, duh, we're all politically aware adults, we heard that quote -- who didn't hear that quote? He starts walking towards the side-door of the laundromat (this is all happening in a laundromat which is also a bar which is also the Obama Madison headquarters), and a couple of people from the campaign are standing sorta near him and basically nudge him towards the door, and then he starts frantically shouting about "Free Speech" and says something about "Kumar", and Kal Penn laughs and says "That's not actually my name." So the guy basically just walks out the door of his own accord, because he has absolutely nothing of any substance to say and everyone's just sorta staring at him sadly, but I'm sure he'll be blogging tonight about how Obama goons manhandled him out of the laundromat. They didn't. It was entirely pathetic and spastic. WE'RE HERE! WE'RE QUEER! WE DON'T WANT ANY MORE BEARS!

That was my fun for the evening. I then drove around town trying (in vain) to find an open DQ to get an Arctic Rush, while simultaneously talking to Siobhan on the phone. Multitasking!

Quick thoughts on the Obama rally:

•Wisconsin is cold. Making people in Wisconsin stand outside in the cold for a long time is mean.

•I don't think that making everyone form a huge line to go in through one entrance on the side of the building, and then suddenly going, "ah, fuck it" and throwing open all the doors at the front simultaneously is the best way to manage a crowd. I am stunned that no one got crushed.

•Sports arenas give me vertigo. I do not enjoy this.

•The "Fired Up/Ready to Go" thing didn't really catch on. Obama didn't have particularly good warm-up acts. The dweeby campus leader guy was especially annoying. The rhythm of the event leading up to the speech seemed really off -- I think it's because they were planning to go on at 8 but had to wait for the Maryland polls to close after the weather delay. So there was a lot of filler. I had to listen to "Unwritten" by Natasha Bedingfield twice. DAMN YOU BARACK OBAMA!

•Governor Jim Doyle looks a lot like actor Peter Boyle. (R.I.P.) That woulda been a good way to fill some dead air -- make the governor tap-dance to "Puttin' on the Ritz."

•Is Madison's mayor really named "Mayor Dave" or did Obama just not remember his name? This is such a dippy town, we might well have a mayor who just goes by Dave, who drives a hemp-fueled car and plays hacky-sack between policy meetings. SIMPLIFY, MAAAAAAN.

•Obama really does just have more star power than anyone I've ever seen. Yes, Abby, he beats both Mos Def and PJ Harvey. You could see that his campaign took a BIG turn tonight. He didn't mention Clinton by name once, only made references to "Washington status quo." He aimed all his specific criticisms at McCain -- he's looking at the general election, and it was cool to see. His speech is just so POSITIVE, while making it very clear that he's not talking about blind optimism. This is a man who wants to work to make the world a better place. What a novel idea -- a politician who's not just in it for the glory and the power? I'm down with that. His anti-lobbyist talk fell a little flat with me, because even though he certainly doesn't have the deep, gross ties with lobbyists that people who've been in Washington for decades do, he does take donations from interest groups. Everyone does. But I got a good laugh out of Segev when Obama was talking about Exxon's profits last quarter and everyone in the crowd started booing, and I said, "Yeah, BOO oil! Everyone hates oil! BOOOO!" All I could think of in that moment was the Simpsons bit from the PTA Disbands episode: "Oh no, the taxes! The finger thing means the taxes!" But yeah, in general, the speech was what I expected it to be, and I'm hoping in 10 years I'll be able to tell my kids I saw President Obama speak on the night his campaign broke wide open.

•Final thought: There were 9/11 Truth people in the crowd directly in front of the podium. Not a lot of people got to be on the arena floor, so you'd think security would have weeded them out. But there they were, waving signs about WTC 7 and whatnot. I was so panicked that they would manage to shout something really loud and disruptive and totally fuck up the event, but they couldn't manage to make themselves heard and the cameras seemed to stay off of them. I guess it's easier to screw with a Bill Maher taping than a campaign event with 20,000 people.

Oh, and, here's some clips from the speech as posted by the good folks over at Talking Points Memo:

Holy fucking snow! So very much snow! This winter is nuts. I really shoulda bought more groceries when I was out yesterday.

Also -- as I suspected, Clinton's "decisive" 22 point win (they called it when 12% of the votes were in and they were at 33% to 55%) ended up at 42%-52%. I said I wanted Obama to get over 40 and be within 10 points. That he achieved that is huge; that the expectations were suddenly so warped in this state proves yet another example (see: New Hampshire) of why ONE POLL does not demonstrate some sort of unstoppable Obamomentum. And also -- CAN WE PLEASE stop adding -mentum to the end of candidates names? Joementum was kinda funny four years ago, even though Lieberman is a dick. Obamomentum (I have also seen "Obamamentum") at least makes a tiny bit of pronunciational sense. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS MITTMENTUM. That is not even close to being a word. Also, the man demonstrably HAS no -mentum of any kind, so I don't ever want to hear it again.

More states that we did not learn a lesson from: Florida 2000. My favorite moment of the coverage yesterday was when the wires called Illinois for Obama with 0% reporting. OK, sure, yes, we all knew he was going to win Illinois -- but at least make SOME attempt to make it look like votes count at all. And then to call California "decisive" (that was the NYT's headline around 1 a.m. -- it's gone now) at 12% of the votes? Something about California that I managed to pick up in the run-up to the vote: the first numbers that come in are the absentee ballots, which there are a gazillion of. This was obviously what was happening, given that when they called it, Edwards was at around 11%. This meant they were mostly counting votes that had come in when Edwards was still in the race -- and Clinton was still up by 20% in every poll. I think we should institute some kind of rule that says the news services have to wait until at least 50% of the vote comes in before they "call" anything. Case in point: Missouri. The networks called it too early, Clinton sent out a press release saying she won it -- and Obama ended up snatching it by a full 10,000 votes. Nice work, guys.