In a Lonely Place (d. Nicolas Ray, 1950)

In a Lonely Place (streamed here). Bogie’s finest hour. Nick Ray’s most personal film. And the creepiest meet-cute of the studio era?

Dixon Steele (Bogart) had just been taken in for questioning. The night before, a coat check girl was seen leaving the bar with the sardonic writer, who had asked her to summarize the plot of a trashy book. That girl’s body was found at dawn. In a pickle, Dixon, the most logical suspect, suddenly remembered his alibi: the neighbor with whom he was trading skivvy looks when he showed the girl out.

And so that neighbor, Laurel Gray, is summoned to the police station. She confirms that Dixon showed the girl out. But why did she notice this particular neighbor, the detective asks? “I like his face”, she reveals, nonchalantly, pausing to glance at Bogie’s ravaged face behind her. When a flattered and grateful Steele offers to give her a ride after the interrogation, Laurel immediately brushes him off with a great line, “I always leave with the man who brought me.” Laurel, it appears, holds a black belt in cock-teasing.

There's something extremely creepy about the insouciance of both Laurel and Dixon in the interrogation room. Dix, in particular, behaved strangely: caustic and ill-mannered, he seemed more concerned about his sleep being disturbed than the horrifying fact that a girl, whom she saw just hours earlier, turned up murdered. Dixon perked up only when he saw a chance to hit on his alibi. For her part, Laurel seems way too hard-edged and knowing for a struggling young actress. In the terrific scene following the meet-cute, shown below, Laurel’s self-assurance pegs her as a femme fatale, a woman who seen it all and knows what she wants -- a woman who “won’t be rushed”:


At this point, Ray appears to be carefully lining up all the pieces for a Camus-tinged noir about a guy wrongly accused of murder. But from there, he swiftly rearranges the board, and the movie turns into something entirely unexpected: it becomes a "woman’s film." In the prototypical Wrong Man variant of this sub-genre, the protagonist is unsure about the man she about to choose, or has in fact chosen. In Suspicion, Joan Fontaine spends the entire movie wondering if her rakish husband is actually a murderer. Joan Fontaine falls hard for a self-absorbed dilettante who doesn’t even remember her name in Letter from an Unknown Woman. And Joan Fontaine’s sis Olivia de Havilland finally realizes that Monty Clift is a useless golddigger near the end of The Heiress.

Gloria Grahame*, who plays Laurel, would be the last actress you'd cast in a doe-eyed Fontaine part. With her dismissive sidelong glances and pouty, sensual lips, Grahame exudes a kind sordid worldliness, like someone who might shrug off a date with Cary Grant just to get a quickie with a mobster. It’s no wonder she’s best known for playing bad girls. But Ray gradually shifts our perspective to her, so that we begin to study Dixon the way she does. His confidence and quick wit is attractive to be sure, but he makes her, as he makes us, uneasy. Our guide becomes Ray's frequent reaction shots of an increasingly anxious Laurel.

In a twist on woman's film tropes, the man’s flaw here is a given, both for the viewer and the characters on screen. There's no suspense about the guy. We’re not hanging by a thread trying to figure if Dixon’s a murderer or some other miscreant. Dixon’s innocence concerning the murder mystery was tipped early, and his combustibility was shown at the opening bell, when he clocked an arrogant producer. With his hair-trigger rage firmly established, the drama hinges on a simple question: is love enough to compel Laurel to stay with a loose cannon?

Remarkably, the film has no use for the chimera that the man would fundamentally change for the sake of love. Dix’s no Rick Blaine, a romantic hero in a cynic’s guise. He is who he is: a witty, brilliant asshole with moments of kindness but prone to flashes of insane rage. There’s a lovely scene in which an ecstatic Dixon, swept up in domestic bliss, volunteers to cut some grapefruit for Laurel. But as Dixon awkwardly straightens out the blade, plowing the knife into grapefruit like a serial killer, Laurel, standing by the wall (on the opposite side of the frame) observing him, is consumed by fear. Even performing a small little household task, she can’t trust him.  Laurel was certain to leave Dixon long before the “ironic” phone call (which wouldn’t have saved this relationship even if the phone call was picked up earlier). He’ll never earn her trust, no matter how much she loves him.

In a Lonely Place might have the most adult (or depending on your view, cynical) perspective on love of any movie of the studio era. People don’t change for love. Love doesn’t redeem. You have to either accept the whole enchilada, or walk away.

* Nick Ray’s catches his wife Gloria Grahame in bed with his 13-year-old son (from a previous marriage), whom Grahame later marries?!? Holy shit. How did I not live 37 years on this earth without knowledge of this craziness?

Housekeeping

As you can see, I've tried to remodel the place a bit. Probably will tinker with a bit more as the color scheme is all off.

Sorry, Mike and Waz, I lost the comments from the previous post. That Echo commenting system is a bit forbidding, so I ended up activating the plain old blogger system.

Top 10 Movies from the Past - 2010 Edition

Hi. It’s been a long time. Thought I’d break the ice by doing something fun. And what can be more fun than a top 10 list? Especially a meaningless list like this one. The following is list of older movies I happen to have caught in 2010 for the first time. In other words, it's a meaningless list. But hey, I want to start writing again, and what better motivation than to write about the things you love?

01. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (Powell & Pressburger, 1943). The Archers’ movies are like postcards from God. They look and feel like nothing else in the movies, and even the bad ones are a treat. Their best movie, Colonel Blimp, actually snuck up on me. There I was, happily lapping up the technicolor splendor and Robert Livesey's extraordinary portrait, guffawing at his compassionate send-up of that blustery British type. The complex structure is impressive, and I noted that the Archers have a wicked way of sometimes opening scenes right in the middle of the action. But by the end of it, I was just knocked flat. All the formal razzle-dazzle aside, though, Colonel Blimp is above all about the lived experience, about love and enduring friendships, but also how we end up obsolete, failing to adjust our ideas for a new time and extrapolating too much from past experience. This all comes together in that poignant scene when Candy meets Theo again. The way Candy gamely tries to laugh off the tragedy of his life, that he failed to act on his love when he had his moment, just crushes me.

02. The Tales of Hoffmann (Powell & Pressburger, 1951). Have you seen a clip of this crazy picture? Well, have you? Let me help you out then.


03. Clash By Night (Lang, 1952). A world-weary Stanwyck returns home to a sad little port town where she instantly becomes a prize catch. After a bit of resistance, she resigns herself to a stable, loveless marriage with stolid Paul Douglas. That is, until his best friend, a sweaty, snarling Robert Ryan, begins to vie for her attention. Clash By Night is Lang’s saddest film, a catalog of fear, loathing and self-sabotage among lonely, desperate souls. Framed by shards of deep shadow, Ryan and Stanwyck circle each other lustily but warily, two predators who know that they’re too similar to thrive together. As the film reaches its drippy denouement, I was moved less by Stanwyck’s dilemma than by her own internal drama: the tug-of-war between Phyllis Dietrichson and Stella Dallas, the ying and yang of the Stanwyck persona. What’s at stake is not so much who she chooses to be with, but who she chooses to be.

04. Matador (Almodovar, 1986). The matador penetration-as-murder metaphor is -- I’ll admit it -- a bit labored. No matter. Pedro’s breathless black comedy, about the intertwining of Eros and Thanatos, is both a spectacular work of high camp and a controlled investigation into dark nature of human temptation. It’s impossible to shake off.

05. Ashes and Diamonds (Wajda, 1958). His eyes masked by dark glasses and decked out in a snazzy utility jacket, Cybulski’s Maciek look more like Natalie Wood’s Friday night date than a rebel soldier tasked with a violent mission. And for much of the compressed single-night narrative, Cybulski, all Brandoesque gestures and Dean-like diffidence, acted that way. He spent more time courting a pouty bartender than advancing the plan to assassinate a communist official. In the final installment of the "Warsaw Trilogy," Wadja left behind the sewer-stink realism of Kanal in favor movie thrills. Loaded with symbols and expressionistic flourishes, like the fireworks that punctuate the assassination, the picture closes with a pre-Breathless long-take staged with such conviction and brilliance (especially a shot of a bleeding Maciek hiding amid the white linens) that it’s easy to overlook the excesses.

06. The Music Room (Ray, 1958). Fading noblemen, at least in the movies, would like nothing better than to throw one last party, even if it means emptying their entire vault. In The Music Room, the stubborn Huzur does exactly that. His final gesture, tossing his last coins to the performer, is pitch perfect: petty, proud, and utterly imprudent, this is a character who sowed the seeds of his own demise. And we’re familiar with the trope of the failed VIP standing shamefully before the portraits of his predecessors. But is there one better than the scene here? The ancestral portraits, hanging in a barren room with walls that seem to extend to the clouds, loom over Huzur like a stern parent reprimanding a child. In the end,The Music Room, like Pather Panchali, is as terrifying as any horror movie, since there’s nothing more frightening to me than oblivion reached by way of financial bungling.

07. Ivan’s Childhood (Tarkovsky, 1962). Like Goya’s Third of May 1808, Tarkovsky’s depiction of war is terrifying and anti-heroic, never beautiful. But check out this stunning shot of a soldier kissing while straddling a trench.


08. Violence at Noon (Oshima, 1966). I don’t have very much to say about this. There’s a neat bit of trivia comparing the over 2,000 cuts in this picture to the 40 cuts in Night and Fog in Japan. But anyone with a passing familiarity with Oshima knew about his protean proclivities. I see Violence more as a peak representative of this director and the Japanese New Wave than some kind of outlier. Here we have the New Wavers’ penchant for cant angles and diagonal lines, their way with luminous high-contrast b&w stock (which I can look at all day), and a disruptive, minimalist score. What stands out is a move toward greater psychological realism that Oshima and his cohorts so often eschew. This might sound strange given how the victims here so frequently subvert our expectations about how they should react. But the care given to answering the question of why, even if it’s answered somewhat unsatisfactory, anchors the film and saves it from the old “none of this makes any sense but that’s okay because it captures the hopelessness and irrationality of modern Japan” routine.

09. Boyfriends and Girlfriends (Rohmer, 1987). A classic Rohmerian roundelay concludes the "Comedies and Proverbs" cycle on a cheery note. The masterpieces of this series, The Aviator’s Wife, Full Moon in Paris, and The Green Ray, were suffused with regret. They were about lives not lived and loves squandered. By comparison, there’s very little at stake in Boyfriends. Our heroine, the mousy bureaucrat Blanche, nurses a crush on a classic douchebag while her friend Bea’s a bit queasy about her relationship with earnest Fabien. The movie’s about the misteps of youth, about the way our youthful desire can be coaxed and shaped by friends. I love the way the film moves from the drab office park suburb to the resplendent French countryside, tracking Blanche’s moods and emotional progress. And the proverb here? A wise one: chicks before dicks.

10. On Dangerous Ground (Ray, 1952). Last year, I was finally turned on to the greatness of the underrated Robert Ryan. Possibly the least needy lead of the era, Ryan’s tough guys were often unsentimental pragmatists, with none of Mitchum’s brooding preening or Bogie’s romanticism. He's at his best in On Dangerous Ground. Check out his initial meeting with Ida Lupino. Before arriving in Lupino’s cabin, Ryan’s Wilson was a combustible menace. He's still hard-edged here, but beginning to soften just a tad. Cutting through the maudlin score with his firm voice and hard, stiff body language, Ryan opens up only through his eyes.


As fine as Ryan was, the movie’s far from perfect. Everyone agrees that the first half, with a restless Wilson teetering on the edge of a mega-implosion, is dynamite. But many deride the movie’s jarring shift to the blind Lupino storyline. I admit the shift is unwieldy, as if Bud White stumbled into Dancer in the Dark. Still, let me try to defend it. In contrast to Dix Steele in Ray’s In a Lonely Place, Wilson’s pathology comes from without. He can change, if he gets out of the scummy city. Here’s a character who's entirely self-contained, having never asked for viewer affection or admiration. Shouldn’t we extend our generosity and allow the man his redemption?

Reconsidered: Chloe in the Afternoon (Rohmer, 1972). Rohmer’s masterpiece, the greatness of which eluded me in my twenties. A separate post will address this picture.

Honorable Mentions:The Narrow Margin, A Day in the Country, A Night at the Opera, Remember My Name.

Other excellent films seen in 2010: Hands Across the Table, Offside, The Court Jester, Kanal, The Driver, Forbidden Games, The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, The Steel Helmet, A Woman’s Face, Bed and Board, Air Force, Scandal Sheet, Hour of the Wolf.

Overrated: Fists in the Pocket, What Have I Done to Deserve This?, Big Deal on Madonna Street, The River, Casque d’Or.

Inauguration Speech Thoughts

Postgame pundits describe the speech as workmanlike, and that's probably on the mark. President Obama's inaugural address nestles passages of startling power among prosaic, almost progrommatic declarations. As a speech, it was a bit disjointed. But as a call to arms for a new era? Fairly magnificent.

I'd like to focus on one point that I haven't seen elsewhere, about Obama's ambitious desire to change the mentality of Americans. Or rather, restore a previous, healthier mentality about work and sacrifice, the real values that undergird American greatness, according to Obama:

In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of shortcuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted, for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame.

Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things -- some celebrated, but more often men and women obscure in their labor -- who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.

For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life. For us, they toiled in sweatshops and settled the West, endured the lash of the whip and plowed the hard earth. For us, they fought and died in places Concord and Gettysburg; Normandy and Khe Sanh.

Time and again these men and women struggled and sacrificed and worked till their hands were raw so that we might live a better life. They saw America as bigger than the sum of our individual ambitions; greater than all the differences of birth or wealth or faction.

Obama here is aiming straight at the financial crisis' root problem. Though the economic crisis is mind-bogglingly complex, the heart of our problems is the ethos of easy money (fanned, of course, by the easy credit/low-interest/deregulatory policies of the last twenty years). Think back to 2005, the year when "New Gilded Age" articles were in vogue. It was a hallucinary time, when high school grads in my office suite would be pulling in 250 large to process mortgage applications, when party conversation revolved around the latest real estate acquisition and/or remodeling woes, when folks watched shows like "Flip That House!", and when bonuses for money-swapping middlemen in their late-20s reached 8 figures. Everyone's got a shortcut to riches. And nobody really connected this loot to, you know, productivity, which is how income and wealth are generated. Folks forget, in bubble periods, that this great swell of dough is coming from somewhere. As it turns out, the money came due in 2008.

Obama, an adherent of behavioral economics, reminds us in this address that "those values upon which our success depends, honesty and hard work, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism" This focus on responsibility and hard work is the first salvo in the project to reverse a dangerous mentality that led to so many actors to make so many poor decisions.

In 1994, most people make between $30,000 and $80,000. To make 400K, you better have gotten lucky with the right business, put your money down on a longshot, or you're capable of removing human organs with some degree of precision. You made dough because your work provided economic value commisurate with your income, or you took a commisurate level of risk for your reward. Over the last fifteen years, but especially in the last five, the fruits of economic growth increasingly went to groups that didn't provide the corresponding economic value. Growth, and income was generated by transfers of money and the creation of clever financial instruments that promised risk-reducing miracles by offering derivative insurance and bets against defaults. With these new Wall Street overlords in charge, the banks see no problem lending $300,000 to a guy making 18 grand a year as the risk of default is sold off in packaged securities. The guy making $18 Gs doesn't see any problem buying a $300,000 house, because he thinks he can flip it in a year.

All of this were driven by financial innovations that disproprotionately benefit the middle man. In a sound economy, the middle people -- stock brokers, mortgage brokers, agents, accountants, lawyers, financiers, etc -- keep the wheels greased so the cogs of capitalism can turn efficiently. In our economy, the cogs were the middlepeople; financial services, a field that essentially performs complicated transfers of pre-existing money, became the dominant sector. It's just crazy.

Obama's task as president is nothing short of restructuring the US economy. A big part of that goal is reconfigure the engine so that green technology and its derivatives, rather than consumer, fuels our economy. But an important, if less discussed part of his task is refashioning American thinking so that individuals and institutions aren't driven by bad incentives, fallacies and poor framing of economic choices. Reminding folks that money = work is a good place to start.

* Some good economic crisis materials:

- Giant Pool of Money, from This American Life -- perhaps the best explanation in layman's terms of the subprime mess that ignited the crisis. Everyone should listen to it.
- The NY Times "The Reckoning" series, very good pieces that serve as indictments of the major bad actors.
- The blog Calculated Risk, which was way ahead of everyone in sounding alarms, is worth checking out from time to time.
- This NY Times chart is pretty cool, too:


Update on 1/24/09: Frank Rich has a better piece expressing pretty much the same thoughts.

Aggressive Douchebaggery: It works!

Michelle Cottle has a very perceptive post discussing aggressive careerism in the context of the Caroline Kennedy debacle. Cottle's point is obvious, but some of us with high self-regard need to be reminded that, in order to get where you want to go, especially in this dire climate, proper decorum and "face" are drawbacks, as Cottle notes in discussing Burris vis-a-vis Kennedy:

The man was appointed to Obama's Senate seat by a governor charged with trying to sell that very seat, prompting many folks to ask how Burris could be so vulgar and shameless in his ambition. The entire Democratic leadership vowed that Ron Paul would be president before Burris would be seated in the Senate. But Burris reallllly wanted that job. So he showed up at the Capitol on swearing-in day and got himself very publicly kicked out. Undeterred, he kept on chugging, chatting up the drama-obsessed media, meeting with members of the caucus. And look at him now! Downing ice tea and warm rolls in the Senate dining room with the rest of the club.

Caroline wasn't pushy enough. She wasn't aggressive enough. And she wasn't shameless enough to power through all the hurdles in her path and take what she wanted. On the most basic level, I suppose you could chalk this whole mess up to her individual personality. (Certainly, neither Hillary! nor Sarah! would have folded so easily.) But when we're talking about the number of gals on the political landscape in general, it's worth noting that such Carolinian personality traits are not infrequently cited as contributing to the stubborn gender imbalance within a number of fields, my own included.

Though Cottle arrives at a gender-specific conclusion, the necessity of aggressive douchebaggery should be drilled into the heads of a whole category of talented men and women who don't want to appear too desperate in their career ambitions, leading to stalled lives and thwarted goals.

Election Predictions

Just trying to sneak this post in before heading out to Las Vegas for canvassing and election monitoring. Predictions:

President

Obama - 53% - 353 EV
McCain - 45% - 185

Swing States

Obama will win: Kerry + IA, NM, CO, VA, NV, OH, FL, NC (roughly in that order of strength)
McCain will win: IN, MO, ND, MT, GA

The race has been teetering between 6-8%, and I still expect a small tightening going into election day. But the early voting has shown that Obama's groundgame and enthusiasm advantage is real, and it may be decisive even if McCain moves many of the undecideds to his column with a last minute ad barrage. This GOTV gap, an advantage for Bush in 2004, will provide a cushion for Obama.

Senate

Democrats will win: VA, NM, CO, AK, NH, OR, NC, MN (in a squeaker). GA will go to a run-off.
GOP will hold the rest (including KY) and win no Dem seats.

House

Dems +25 seats.

The last debate

It's really funny that right-wingers think that they are the "true" Americans, because they're almost dangerously untethered to the mainstream, by now having created an alternative culture and media that chronicles an alternate reality, one where ACORN is a mortal threat to the fabric of democracy, where Bill Ayers is one of the world's most dangerous men, and where the financial crisis was caused not by the creation of highly leveraged derivatives, but by the Democrats' pushing for more minority home ownership.

In this bubble, what's scary isn't the dangerous incompetence of George Bush and his disastrous eight years -- recognized by pretty much all non-wingnuts -- but "socialists" like Barack Obama who wants to raise taxes on folks making over $250,00. And ironically, John McCain, one of the few prominent Republicans who has resisted the wingnut echo chamber in the past, is now completely ensnared in it.

If, in the previous two debates, McCain was a little too caught up in his own personal crusades (read: earmarks; taking on his own party), here was a performance that was launched from wingnuttia, where "spreading the wealth around" is dangerous, where $250,000+ earning "Joe the Plumber" is the stand-in for Mr. America, where "health of the mother" is somehow code for zealots, where only liberal wimps are concerned about storing nuclear power "safely", and vouchers are a cure-all for education.

The pundits thought McCain did well because he was aggressive and forced he debate, but the trouble is the right-wing philosophy he was espousing didn't connect to people, and the shorthand he was using made sense only to the cheerleaders over on The Corner. By contrast, Obama didn't launch into sputtering attacks on the Alaska Independence Party, G. Gordon Liddy, Diebold, Troopergate, the torture memos, US Attorney firings, and any number of other liberal blog causes. The rather phlegmatic Obama, in cool professorial mode, explained his policy proposals in detail, over and over. Unlike the 2nd debate, Barack was off his game and missed a lot of obvious retorts. But he did his job.

And more importantly, Obama looked calm and unflappable. McCain looked like a meth fiend, bulging his eyes, and moving around in his seat like a maniac. Is it any wonder McCain got slammed again in the snap polls?

It's clear that McCain is an uncoachable candidate, and that his downfall was trying to run a Bush '04 base/echo chamber campaign that is both wrong for the times and completely unsuitable for himself.

State of the Presidential Race

Everyone's writing the "pre-mortem" of McCain-Palin, and with pretty good reason. It's really hard to see how he comes back. Let's look at the state of the race as of October 14:

Polls, Polls, Polls

Obama's now up by about 8 points in the national polls, and looking even better in the electoral college. Polling guru Nate Silver says that Obama has a 1-2 point advantage in the electoral college, meaning that he'll likely get over 270 even if he's trailing by a small margin. Beyond the obvious trends, Obama appears to have a few hidden advantages as well. Silver looked at the cell phone effect and concluded that it results in a 2.8 point error in this election, meaning that one should add roughly 2.8 points to Obama with respect to any poll conducted only by landlines. Then there's the effect of the groundgame. Due to a combination of massive amounts of money, a deep, abiding commitment to building a highly motivated grassroots GOTV organization, and incredible voter enthusiasm, you're likely to see a historic turnout among African-Americans and the 18-30 age bracket, both of which is likely to be devalued in likely voter models. Ann Selzer, the pollster who called the Iowa caucuses right, has consistently used models that weighed for higher youth and minority turnout, leading to a "house effect" in favor of Obama by at least 2 points. If she's right, then we're looking at 4-5 "hidden" points for Obama that doesn't show up in the typical tracking poll. To be conservative, I'd guess that Obama has a 3-point edge based on groundgame/enthusiasm/demographics.

Wingnuts, though, argue that polls are overstating Obama's lead. They're hanging on to their hopes that the Bradley Effect will doom Obama. Never mind that the Bradley Effect is pretty much a myth, as Silver (again) shows. Not only has it not shown up in recent elections, it's unclear there was a "Bradley Effect" in Tom Bradley race in '82, as his opponent Deukmejian's pollster attests. In the era of robo-polls and character smears, it makes little sense that voters will say they're voting for Obama in the polls, but do something else in the ballot box.

That's not to say there isn't a racism effect. In the primaries, Clinton tends to win over the "made up mind in last 3 days" group by large margins, suggesting that, if race were a factor, it may be that undecideds will flow disproportionately towards McCain.

Just to be cautious, let's give McCain 3 out of 4 undecideds. Even so, given the other effects, if Obama can be at 46% in the last round of polls, he'll likely win the electoral college. So Obama can afford to lose a few points from his total right now and still be okay.

Electoral Map

Here's where Obama has the biggest advantage. Obama needs 270 electoral votes (or 269, as a tie goes to the Democratic House). Right now, there are basically no Kerry states are in danger, amounting to 252 votes. Add Bush '04 states Iowa and New Mexico, which leans strongly towards Obama and you're at 264. Even if the national race tightens up, Obama will have 264 votes in his pocket as he seeks to poach just one state among: Colorado, Virginia, Florida, Nevada, or Ohio (North Carolina, Missouri, and Indiana would move to lean McCain if the race tightens). McCain has to sweep all five states -- win five coin flips in a row, essentially -- to win.

Bizarrely, the McCain campaign spends time trying to poach Wisconsin, Pennsylvania (where Obama has at least a 10 point lead in every poll taken this month), and Iowa. His tactical decisions remind me of Bush in 2000, when they decided to do psy-ops by going to California in the last week. Right now, McCain's only shot is to win a bunch of battleground states by the slimmest of margins, against an opponent with a 2-to-1 spending advantage. That means he needs to pour all of his resources into the five critical states and make a stand. What he shouldn't be doing is spending time in Pennsylvania just to show he's going on offense.


Wednesday's Debate

It'll be about the economy, and I'm afraid McCain simply doesn't have the fluency on this topic to "win." He keeps associating the economy with either tax cuts or earmarks, when in a debate format, discussing the subject calls for half a dose of empathy with half a dose of pandering. That's just not John McCain. And Obama and Biden are baiting McCain to bring up Ayers; I suspect that Obama's got something up his sleeve.

It's difficult to see McCain shaking the race up tomorrow, given the way the two candidates have performed thus far in these forums.

Next three weeks and McCain's constraints

A lot of us expected that the last few weeks of this election will be Wright/Ayers/random bogeyman. But events -- and Steve Schmidt -- have proceeded to neuter the effects of an Atwateresque finale. Events are obvious -- character smears look like obvious petty distractions in the face of this financial maelstrom. And any time McCain goes there, Obama can say he's diverting attention from The Issues.

As for tactics, Steve Schmidt made two enormous mistakes, both of which are stemmed from a kind 2004 mentality that assumes reality will bend to the will of the GOP. The first concerns the voters. It's a widespread assumption that persuadable voters are not knowledgeable and easily manipulated, but Schmidt took this assumption too far and treated voters like complete morons. This tendency to insult the voter was especially pronounced the Sarah Palin rollout, when they came out with doozies like "Palin has foreign policy experience because Alaska was next to Russia" that are just ridiculous on their face. And when nobody bought this story or Palin's vaunted "executive experience", the message team just kept pushing. After the "lipstick on a pig" gambit, it looked like the McCain team were just a bunch of cynical hacks to any voter not in the tank. By repeatedly pushing idiotic messages, McCain whittled away his hard-earned credibility, one of the candidate's longstanding strengths.

The other mistake is the gaming of the media, which is the same mistake Hillary Clinton's team made. Again, the Palin rollout is emblematic. Remember when Palin was introduced, the media took it upon themselves to vet her -- with good reason. And when the media caught her in a lie about rejecting the Bridge to Nowhere, they decided to ignore the media and just brazenly repeat the lie over and over again. This kind of spin is a big F- you to the media, and coupled with Schmidt's furious newscycle-uber-alles approach to politics, really damaged McCain's standing in the media. Remember, John McCain is (or was) the biggest media darling in politics, and instead of capitalizing on that, the McCain campaign re-ran the anti-media Bush 04 campaign. This year, when the GOP's power is at an ebb, the media fought back.

Of course, McCain's media problem isn't just his fault. Barack Obama happens to be the perfect media-friendly candidate: a good-looking, graceful, cosmopolitan, hyper-intelligent black Democrat who is about as earnest as a politician can be in this day and age. He's a once-in-a-few generations type talent, and one precisely plays well with the media. Though I've had serious issues with Obama's message operation, one thing that helps him with the media is that he typically takes a higher road and doesn't press hard on idiotic spin. And the toxic rumors surrounding his exotic background has also triggered the media's paternalistic instincts. This week's newscycles, much of it revolving around right-wing lunatics yelling out hateful remarks at McCain-Palin rallies, evidence this paternalism.

McCain's also been boxed in by two other factors out of McCain's control. One is that the right-wing base consists of a good chunk of troglodytes who shouldn't be let out of the house. The ones they put on TV are of course extremist lunatics mouthing discredited conspiracy theories. Loonies on TV grab viewer attention. But also, the Republican base is way out of the mainstream; these are the Bush dead-enders, the ones that still approve of their leader long after he's been exposed as a total failure to the rest of America. So they're out there hectoring McCain to go nuclear when McCain knows this strategy is a loser. He's in a "damn if he does, damn if he doesn't" position vis-a-vis the base.

The base will also cry foul whenever McCain proposed pandering economic programs -- the only kind that can really help him win over voters. I'm personally opposed to the mortgage buy-back plan proposed by McCain during the second debate, but it seems like with a PR push, it can prove to be quite popular. But alas, with the wingnuts going, well, nuts over it, this proposal really never had a chance. He's not only boxed in tactically, but also on policy as well.

The other factor is the Obama team's savvy pre-emptory moves. Obama and Biden have hammered McCain for trying to "turn the page"; any attempt to engage in character smears will provoke a hearty "this guy's trying to distract you because his plan is the same as Bush's" rebuke. The "erratic" charge, which is taking hold, also restricts McCain's ability to come up with new gambits to try to shake up the race. Both the media and Obama will immediately jump on any gambit and frame it as a desperate stunt. (Obama's team, throughout the election season, has played defense superbly but offense poorly.)

Since the beginning of the general election campaign, McCain's strategy has been to "disqualify" Obama. It turns out McCain probably could've kept it close (and even win) if he concentrated on refining his message and image (which hopefully will be the subject of a "pre-mortem" post). By making so many mistakes, McCain's now in a position where he's simply doesn't have the tools to disqualify Obama. He'll have to hope that some intervening event, or a big Obama slip up, changes the race. In the meantime, I think the experience + POW + divided government message is his best bet to prevent himself from sliding further back as he waits for a prayer to be answered.

Obama's haymaker

Obama likes it smooth and steady. It looks he's sitting on wads of cash, which means he'll win the air wars (even with all of those mediocre message ads). All he has to do is stop McCain's message from penetrating while his GOTV advantage kicks in and Obama should win. So while he's not in prevent defense mode yet, he appears quite content to sit back and trade punts with McCain. It's probably the best strategy; as in the primaries, Obama lacks the killer instinct to finish an opponent off, but why take the chance?

Of course, if he does want a quick knockout, McCain's weak spot is right in the open: Sarah Palin. A concerted effort to hammer Palin (who now have the highest unfavorables of anyone on either ticket) and tie her to McCain's poor judgment (and age) will surely doom McCain. It won't happen, because Obama doesn't need a KO, but I kinda wanna see him try.

Beverly Hills Chihuahua v. Body of Lies

The mood in the country is depressed and anxious; folks what something light, a bit of uplift. Last weekend, the star-studded dark CIA thriller gets walloped by a talking dog comedy in its second week. I hope the Obama team is paying attention and close with some well-produced inspiring, feel-good ads. Like the kind that aired during the Olympics, but maybe with a bit more meat.

blinkmanship

If you enjoy watching poker on TV, you'd rather watch a table that features a bigime LAG -- a loose, unpredictable player who will make a play with trash hands -- than a bunch of methodical "math" players. Unpredictable play makes for far better TV. In the same way, I'm grateful for John McCain, an adrenaline fiend whose drama queen antics have made this election perhaps the best reality television show in history. Even better than Real World, Season 3.

LAGs are fun to watch, but it's a high-risk style that's difficult to master, and McCain, it appears, hasn't quite gotten there. As with the Palin pick, you can't blame McCain for taking a big chance. At the start of the week, he was stalling in the polls, faltering in swing states, and in danger of going down with the Dow Jones as the narrative was turning against him. He needed to shake things up. So it looks like his campaign tried to stage some kind of intervention -- the story was supposed to be that the economy was saved by...John McCain! But between the time he decided on this gambit, and his arrival in DC, the GOP House members had gone into open revolt. The incoherent speech by the president failed to add clarity to the stakes here as the perception that this was a "Wall Street bailout" began to be widely accepted. The political pressure ratcheted up as some of the more cynical GOP strategists saw an opening to triangulate against the Dems and the Bush administration.

So McCain couldn't perform his planned Kabuki and instead faced a real dilemma: If he aligns himself fully with the GOP hardliners, he'll make a mockery of his talk of "bipartisanship" and saving the country. Attaching himself to a plan that offers more deregulation and capital gains tax cuts is also dangerous. But if he goes along with the Democrats and Bush's unpopular bailout, he wouldn't be able to distinguish himself from Obama while further alienating the GOP base. Brokering a deal is out as the GOP insurance scheme is fundamentally incompatible with Paulson's plan, which is about a massive federal purchase of of mortgage-backed securities that regulators believe are not correctly priced.

If McCain truly wanted to go all-in, he could have gone against the Paulson plan and played chicken by proposing some kind of populist alternative (there are no shortage of alternative bailout proposals out there) and stuck to his debate postponement threat. This would be the kind of bold positioning that may win him votes. But this plays risks disaster as, as market losses would be blamed on McCain if the Democrats refuse to play ball.

In reality, the financial crisis offered a menu of terrible political choices for all involved. A bailout is probably necessary, but any plan that aims to free up the credit market is a tough sell to voters. Why money to Wall Street? Why not bailout struggling homeowners? Or why not let Wall Street go down in flames? McCain would have been better off this week sitting back and assigning blame. He should have folded and waited for a better hand. Instead, he looked down, saw a 5-3 suited and thought this was the spot to make a move. So the guy raised preflop, raised the flop, got called by a cool and methodical Obama, and folded on the next bet.

Good LAGs make a read and follow through. John McCain made a bad read, tried to bluff his way out, and then folded after he got called. Maybe a good debate performance will change the subject. But this was an unforced error, a play that makes you look like a clown. A few more high-profile botch jobs like one, and McCain will lose the one big advantage he's had over Obama: McCain was supposed to be the safe choice.

Burn After Reading (Coen) - A-/B+

I've liked Brad Pitt in many things, but I would've guessed that he's far too preening an actor to be effective in this kind of Coens grotesquerie. Pitt's off-key in a few scenes early on, but man, when the plot kicked in, the dude had me in stitches, no more so than when he "menacingly" began to harass Osssboorne Cox. That scene in Malkovich's car -- where Pitt was all squints and nervous giggles ("You thought that was a Schwinn!?!") -- was pure hilarity.

She'll likely not be remembered in the year-end awards, but one actor with no hint of vanity is Frances McDormand, who isn't afraid to play a truly idiotic and despicable loon. Rest of the cast were equally fine. Though many of the other key actors were doing self-parodies, in the Coens hands, these parodies hit exactly the right key: Clooney's his usual garrulous ladies' man, but what's this top-secret device he's constructing in the basement? And Malkovich is Malkovich, but he's the Coens' mouthpiece here, a Man Who Wasn't There, a bitter misanthrope who finally gets fed up with the "league of morons" he's had to suffer all of his life.

This is the Coens at their most delectably nasty, where the [SPOILERS] two likable characters in the picture meet with grisly ends, and the story evaporates into an air of nothingness as the Coens insist, unfashionably, on the meaninglessness of it all. Predictably, the goo-goo critics hand-wring about the Coens' smarminess and misanthropy whenever they go full nihilist, as they do here. But time has validated this line of Coens Brothers movies (Raising Arizona, Lebowski, Burn), comedies that chronicle chains of destructive events caused by overreaching morons. In this one, especially, the Coens take dead aim at aggressive stupidity. We're talking not just about run-of-the-mill dumbness, but specifically the hyperactive, shoot-from-the-hip inanity of folks who devise crazy plans before pausing for a second for reflection. So you can view this as the Coens' comedic coda for the Bush administration -- what with the stupid actors that botch everything they touch and a government that constructs a hopelessly incoherent picture. But for the Coens, this malady was never just a post-millennial affliction: the Coens have been warning us about these kinds of Alpha-tards for over twenty years now. Maybe it's time that people pay them heed.

Coen Brothers Rankings (Updated)

The New Republic's Chris Orr, one of the best commentators around, came up with a ranking of the Coens feature films, and thought I'd do the same. Updated with the inclusion of Burn After Reading.

01. The Man Who Wasn't There (2001)
02. The Big Lebowski (1998)
03. Miller's Crossing (1990)
04. Raising Arizona (1987)
05. Burn After Reading (2008)
06. No Country for Old Men (2007)
07. Barton Fink (1991)
08. Blood Simple (1984)
09. Fargo (1996)
10. O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000)
11. The Hudsucker Proxy (1994)
12. Intolerable Cruelty (2003)

Avoided: The Ladykillers.

It's a shame that The Man Who Wasn't There, the brothers' most moving (and I'd argue, personal) film, has become a footnote in their oeuvre.

Bringing spitballs to a gunfight

Are they even trying to win anymore? Let's check out the Obama ad team's latest handiwork:



Are you kidding me? McCain lies about your tax plans, basically calls you a pedophile and envious liar in his ads, and you respond with a snarky ad poking fun of his inability to e-mail? What. The. Fuck. This is the "hard-hitting" new campaign that the Chicago team is promising? If this is the kind of swift counterattack Plouffe and Axelrod envision, please refund my donations and take me off the damn mailing list.

Here's a partial list of items to hit McCain on:
*putting out a smear ad that is tantamount to McCain defending child molestation
*McCain/Palin's despicable record on rape victims (voting against violence against women for him; making rape victims pay hundreds of dollars for "rape kit" testing)
* McCain taxing health care benefits
* the new Department of Interior coke and sex scandal, illustrating the GOP's addiction to Big Oil;
* McCain selling out his honor in order to LIE, LIE, and LIE to win an election
* McCain's 26 years of votes - time to start trotting out some bad votes;
* Generic scary ad on economic downturn and Bush/McCain policies
* GOP trying to use foreclosure lists to prevent votes ("As Americans are working harder for less, and losing their homes, the Republicans have a plan: stop Americans from voting.")
* McCain as craps player gambling on Social Security
* McCain as camera hog who makes terrible predictions on TV.

I'm not even touching on McCain's temper tantrums, Palin's three hundred problems, etc. You can find this list of McCain weaknesses at any time of the day in any major liberal blog.

This is the most pathetic kind of attack ad: an obvious personal attack that doesn't land a blow. McCain's old. Voters know this. If you want to reinforce the issue, use a picture that makes him really old in ads that actually hit him, not mock him for not being able to use e-mail. What demographic is he aiming for here, Wire Magazine subscribers? Apple Genius Bar employees?

My god. Being a Democrat is like being a Pittsburgh Pirates fan. Your team loses every year, so to shake things up, your new GM decides to trade for Matt Morris.

Dem messaging blows (as usual)

Political psychologist Drew Westen, who is as frustrated as I am with the Obama campaign's message operation (and has written a whole book ripping into feeble Democratic political messaging), lists ten things the campaign needs to work on to get it back on track. His post is pretty much dead-on. Sample passage:

They were similarly aware of the argument--it was published right here a little over a week ago--that allowing Palin to define herself would make it difficult to change public opinion if she delivered a strong, emotionally compelling acceptance speech, because once people have formed a positive impression, they will fend off data inconsistent with it. Precisely how and why this happens in the brain is not a secret. Once again they chose to ignore the relevant science.

This is how Republicans govern. They ignore science and rely on faith and intuition. Unfortunately, it's how Democrats campaign. No one should be involved in messaging or strategy in a Democratic campaign who isn't intimately familiar with the 60 years of research in social psychology on persuasion--on what works and what doesn't. This isn't optional reading. No one aware of that research would have made the strategic error the Obama campaign just made on the Palin nomination.

I see the Obama team doing the same thing Democrats always do: poll test some issue-based messages, get positive responses, and then the campaign runs with it. For eons now, the Democrats have relied on some model of ultra-rational political behavior completely divorced from how swing voters actually think and behave. It might work in statewide elections, but you give up a ton in national elections, when low-info voters turn out. Meanwhile, the Republicans aim their appeal straight at the brain's reptillian core and win, in spite having dumbass candidates and terrible policies.

Westen also talks about the campaign taking some tips from the Daily Show. I'd go further: Obama should fire his message operation and just hire the staff of the Daily Show. It's kind of embarrassing how much more effective the Daily Show has been than the Obama campaign in its anti-GOP messaging.


Why haven't we seen an animatronic Marlon Brando yet from Obama?

Unleashing Hell-ary?

In the Chinese classic The Romance of the Three Kingdoms (part of which was recently adapted into a John Woo-Tony Leung extravaganza), the three warring kingdoms had to deal with a wildcard named Lu Bu, the most formidable warrior in the story. Decked out in pheasant-tailed headdress and perched atop of his powerful steed Red Hare, Lu Bu would take out all comers in battle. He's portrayed as a someone difficult to stir to fight for you, but insanely awesome if and when he fights. Trouble is, unbeatable as he is in battle, he's fatally flawed. At once treacherous and super-ambitious, Lu Bu repeatedly double-crosses his patrons but ends up being an utterly inept strategist when trying to lead his own troops.

Lu Bu came to mind as I read recent accounts of Democrats yearning for HRC to be unleashed against GOP's now not-so-secret weapon: Sarah "Spiro" Palin. I'm part of this crowd, too (and not just because I used to drop all my books and run over and anytime someone yelled "girlfight!" in the schoolyard). I kept thinking just wait, you fucktard, Obama will let his female surrogates fight the dirty fight. If Hillary can be stirred to battle, she'll go to town on this well-rehearsed naif. But you know, the warlords who sought Lu Bu's services all met unhappy ends. And with respect to Hillary, not only is she not the fearsome warrior of the liberal imagination, her strengths are almost completely opposite of Palin's. Palin's a force because she's a very good political performer who's culturally one of them, them being the white, Rust Belt working class vote that may decide the election. Like Bush in 2004, Palin's is a perfect GOP general election candidate -- clearly an inept, dangerous dimwit to anyone who's paying attention and isn't in the tank for the right-wing (those of whom are now tarred as "elites"), but a skilled performer who not only electrifies the fact-avoiding GOP base and can also prey on low-information whites by playing up cultural identification markers.

Hillary's a political force in this election not because she connects to working class voters on some root level, but because she has credibility on economic issues facing these people. So while we think Hillary will just go out there and eviscerate Palin, it's really up to her to do it. In fact, Hillary isn't some wildcard warrior, but someone whose skills fit well within Obama's strategy, which is now to re-run 1992, hammer away at economic issues no matter how loud the GOP beats their culture war drums. As much as I would like to see someone besides Andrew Sullivan and the liberal blogosphere unload on Palin, I do remember 1992 very well. Back then, the inexperienced hippie beat the respected war hero.

I'd still call McCain/Palin's plans not just "more of the same" but also "dangerous" or "extremist." And yes, Sarah Palin is new Bush, the bete noire for Democratic partisans. It would be wise to have surrogates define Palin as someone out-of-the-mainstream as early as possible, a book-banning, managerially inept radical rightist. Keep her lies, scandals and hypocrisy in the media, but as a secondary storyline. In general, it might be wise to keep the eye on the ball and not get drawn into the petty newscycle battles that the McCain team wants to play on. I hate this phrase, but yes, it's the economy, stupid.

The Kool-Aid Drinkers keep saying trust the plan. And I guess I should.

looney tunes

What was the saying about a little man in need of a balcony? Rudy Giuliani, a sniveling would-be generalissimo, brings to mind that quote. What a wretched little critter.

Prior to RNC, this election has been rather painful to sit through, for someone of my sensibilities anyway. Obama is a deft counterpuncher, but he doesn't have a zest for blood and guts, still a source of immense personal frustration. Likewise, it's a bit discomfiting watching John McCain prostrate himself before the wingnut base. McCain's the true Shakespearean (or Lucasian) character this election cycle, a formerly noble man who sold his soul to the miscreants and degenerates populating what's left of the GOP base, the same folks who tormented him and took away what was his. As hungry as I've been for a piece of McCain's flesh these days, it's a little sad to see a politician I once admired live out the Anakin Skywalker story in real time.

Seeing the likes of Mittens and Noun-Verb-9/11 on stage, it's easy to imagine a far more entertaining election cycle. More blood! More explosions! Suppose Hillary went up against Rudy. Wouldn't it be just delightful to see HRC shred that loathsome cretin into mincemeat while Clintonites feed the media wolves the latest oppo research. Or if gasbag Biden went nuclear against Mittens, phony blow-dried politician extraordinaire. Alas.

After tonight, my blood is boiling again. Sarah Palin is obviously an engaging performer and cleared the 4-inch high bar the media set for her. It helps that, like all successful Republicans, she's a fabulously convincing liar. (When there's a photo of you holding up a "nowhere" t-shirt, I think it's time to cut your losses on the lies about opposing the "bridge to nowhere.") But the effusive praise is a bit daft. Is the media overcompensating? This is another instance of a tactically sound McCain move that will lead to no long-term gain. The big miscalculation is the biting, sarcastic tone. Rudy already delivered the red meat to the right-wing lunatics. What Palin needed to do was to cut an image of competence while telling her winning story. Instead, she came off as defensive and smug, throwing bon mots to the whiny ass titty babies in the audience (oh noes! another media hobgoblin will eat us! Oh noes!), and mocking "community organizers" in trying to rekindle the culture wars. This plays well with dittoheads, but with independents and suburban women (typically more focused on pocketbook issues than other voters)? (EDIT: early word is NO!)

Palin would have been a much more effective running mate had she presented a positive story initially. It would've been difficult for the Democrats to hit her hard, and she'd probably come off better to independents. She can clearly turn on the charm. Surely the base needs to get stoked, but Palin's gonna be an issue from now til November 4th. And the more hay the news media makes about Palin (and McCain's judgment and age), the less oxygen for negative Obama stories. Doubling down on the base-feeding is likely a mistake, even if McCain moves hard to the center tomorrow. (Nate Silver makes a very smart case about how an unknown like Palin has very little standing to attack a known quantity like Obama in the manner she did. I'd further add that Palin's attacks largely consisted of sneering allusions to campaign gaffes and memes that made sense mainly to those who've followed it closely, but probably lost on casual election-watchers.) Palin's swallowed the entire newsworld whole this week, and will likely to be a very visible story until election time, as the media hounds continue to sniff around Alaska, looking to break the big scandal. If the idea was to send Palin to the Dick Cheney circuit (interviews with media loyalists only, fundraisers, small rallies with true believers in deep red areas), that's not a reality now. Palin is as much a part of the GOP ticket as McCain -- and that bodes ill in the final calculus.

Truly, Palin reminds me no one so much as a female Dubya, a smug, dumb wingnut who is very adept at pushing Christianist identity buttons. A talent no doubt, but still an eminently definable enemy. And this culture war thing inflames both sides. You can bet Obama raised some serious dough tonight -- I chipped in another Benjy. All the money will be well worth it when they show shots of these fucks on the convention floor ("drill now! burn the Constitution! smart people suck!") weeping in their diapers on November 5th.

Can't say I'm terribly worried as of yet, though it wouldn't kill me if this National Enquirer story pans out.

Palin Rocks the Mad House

Whatever else you can say about McCain's vetting process, you have to figure that Sarah Palin was picked for her personal story and political skills. And surely, all the mini-scandals aside, Palin will knock this speech out of the park, no doubt drawing from the insane energy generated by a bunch of identity-obsessed "movement" wingers. I'll eat my $700 shoes if Palin isn't charming, personable, and confident in her acceptance speech.

The press has set her up to succeed wildly today. In the weeks hereafter? Not so much.

Note to Democrats: Use the word "extremist" frequently in describing Palin. This word is quite effective.

Palin and the Tire Gauge

At a townhall, a voter asked Obama what the average American can do personally to conserve energy. In response, Obama suggested that inflating your tires as a way improving gas efficiency. Seizing on this advice, the McCain campaign decided to create and pass out "Obama tire gauge" to reporters. Get it? Me neither. But you can just envision these Maxim-reading little cretins sitting in McCain headquarters giving each high fives as they come up with the latest taunt. This tire gauge prank is emblematic of a myopic campaign that is defined by its insistence on winning hourly news cycles by any means necessary. Many of these efforts, like this one or the mockery of yesterday's DNC backdrop, involve idiotic frat boy antics that elicit giggles from right-wing mouthbreathers but end up only as fodder for the Colbert Report. Others, like those Hillary Clinton attacking Barack ads, are tactically savvy for a day or two, but serve little more than to fill up cable news dead time.

This sort of Animal House as political campaign is probably the only aspect of McCain's operation that's close in spirit to McCain's appealing 2000 run (there's a wonderful essay by David Foster Wallace in Consider the Lobster that captures the freewheeling, insurgent vibe of the Straight Talk Express; read it and weep at what's become of Mr. Maverick). And this impulsiveness speaks to McCain himself, a man of many virtues but whose disqualifying personal flaw is that he makes decisions on the fly, often as a gut reaction to a provocation.

The choice of Sarah Palin, it seems, is another product of McCain's impulsive, reactive decision-making and the thinking of a campaign that's effective in staying afloat primarily by being good at feeding the news media. McCain surely punk'd Obama for a news cycle or two, and he'll succeed in generating some excitement leading up to next week. But for what?

Thinking about it some more, this pick will almost certainly be a bad one. On August 25, 2008, when Wolf Blitzer went PUMA-hunting and the Democrats took turns mocking McCain's seven houses, this pick would win you a few newscycles. You can see McCain gather up his little advisors that day, wondering how he can poach the Hillaristas and get him some regular guy cred. Hey, how about that Palin? Regular gal. And the wingers like her. How about it?

But have they given thought to this? What's Palin's attack line on the campaign trail? What's McCain gonna say about Obama's readiness, when he can now respond, "you picked a woman a heartbeat away from the presidency, who's never visited Iraq, whose web page on foreign policy was blank space." It gives Obama an easy defense while highlighting Obama's seriousness of purpose in tapping Biden. Then there's the problem of making McCain's age fair game: "On his 72nd birthday, McCain decided that someone two years removed from being a small town mayor will be a heartbeat away from the presidency." What's more, don't they see the huge risk in trotting this neophyte out on the campaign trail in perhaps the most intensely watched and scrutinized campaign ever? And the whole thing looks desperate, especially to Hillaristas fixated on "qualifications." I've seen Hillary dead-enders, and ovaries aside, I just don't see them getting psyched about a beauty pageant winner.

There are the long-term benefits of grooming a GOP future star as McCain's not likely to win. But I'm not sure that's what McCain's really thinking about.

Hitting the Big Shot

The most impressive speech of my lifetime was Barack Obama's speech on race relations delivered in Philadelphia. That speech was a virtuoso display of Obama's dialectical, agile mind, his ability to self-examine and empathize with others, to eloquently explain both the root of white resentment and black anger in what was, at heart, a put-out-the-fire political speech.

In the four years since he's been on the scene, Obama's delivered a number of terrific speeches -- perhaps all of the best speeches of the last four years. Obama's 2004 keynote address, a brilliantly constructed and delivered oratory that's a bit too utopian and gooey for my taste, is certainly one of the most memorable events in political rhetoric of recent years. I'd personally rank the Jefferson-Jackson Iowa address, which relaunched his candidacy and provided the bones of his primary stump speech (including the "a nation at war, a planet in peril..." formulation), the New Hampshire "concession" speech (with the famous "Yes We Can" passage), the South Carolina victory speech, and the Selma anniversary address right up there among Obama's best addresses.



Last night's nomination acceptance speech didn't soar as high. As rhetoric, it was fairly prosaic and disjointed, with long streches of laundry-list prescriptions and responses to trivial campaign memes. Substantively, he made promises that no one can meet and offered proposals and goals that gave off a whiff of yucky paleoliberalism. (This insightful article from the New York Times shows that Obama is actually a very sophisticated economic thinker, seeking to find that right balance between U. of Chicago thinking, Rubinomics, and Robert Reich-human investment liberalism. Thankfully, he also understands that discussions of "moral hazard" or "cap-and-trade" won't win him too many votes.)

But I loved it. I loved it more than any of the more eloquent speeches. I loved it especially because Obama took the wood to McCain and bashed him in the very area that McCain is perceived by voters as strong, but is actually the main reason why McCain should never be president: McCain is a far-right neocon on foreign policy whose instinct is to rattle sabres in response to any and every foreign threat. McCain is too dangerous to lead. Voters don't understand foreign policy, we all know, and typically will gravitate towards "wrong and strong" rather than "weak and right." But Obama never sounded weak as he argued forcefully to reclaim liberal internationalism but talked tough on Afghanistan and al Quida. With Biden on board, Obama can re-fight the stupid skirmish that flared up earlier in the campaign, when Obama expressed that he would take out Bin Laden in Pakistan with or without Pakistan's permission. McCain, then, was talking about getting a hall pass from Musharref.

Politically and substantively, the right political formulation for a Democrat is to argue for "diplomacy and international cooperation" generally, get out of Iraq "responsibly", but take a hard line on Bin Laden himself. Force McCain to be hawkish on Iraq and make him move to the right and look like a unilateralist.

Obama doesn't have to win the political argument. And he probably can't, given that a lot of people simply will trust a war-hero Republican over a young black Democrat on national security no matter what positions they take. But Obama just needs to make up some ground -- make sure he sounds confident and appears to be a credible commander-in-chief. And he should if he continues to speak confidently and offensively about foreign policy. One thing I loved about the Joe Biden pick is that he exudes confidence on national security. He treated idiotic hawks like Rudy Giuliani with the disdain they deserve. Even if voters don't understand foreign policy issues, a lot of folks can sense which side is confident and which side isn't. By signaling that he won't be in a defensive crouch on national security, Obama won't make the mistake of looking like the typical backtracking Democrat who won't fight for what he believes in. That's the real weakness people sense.

More generally, his speech showed an aggressiveness and messaging savvy that seemed lacking in the last couple weeks. Slamming McCain every which way: that was the change I needed.

A Cornered Animal

McCain's VP choice is who? Democratic political obsessives have always feared a female "gamechanging" pick, and Palin always seemed one of the more logical choices. She's a pro-life governor who talks energy policy. But she was a mayor of a small town just two years ago. She doesn't even have much in the way of surrogate experience, unlike a guy like Tim Pawlenty, who at least can be counted on to spew some right-wing talking points in an amiable manner. Palin may pay off big -- peeling off disgruntled HRC supporters -- but she's a big gamble.

When Obama tapped Joe Biden, it indicated that the campaign knows he has some weaknesses that needed to be shorn up, but fundamentally he likes where he's at. If Obama were running scared he would've picked HRC, whom he didn't want, but whose addition would almost guarantee a win.

By contrast, the Palin pick indicates that McCain's campaign believes they're down by a couple of touchdowns, and has figured that their tactical games aren't going to do it for him. With Obama showing last night that he's gonna blitz'em good, McCain's forced to go for a flea-flicker, a big, gimmicky play with high risk and high reward. I think it's a smart move, even if it takes the experience argument completely off the table. The experience angle wasn't going to fly once people see, at the debates, that Obama knows his shit.

Though Palin has winger credentials, she may bolster McCain's tattered maverick image. She's also a pick who will leave no opening for a Bush association. If the key demographic battleground is white middle-income women, McCain's just made a daring play for them.

Pretty savvy, but R.I.P. "Ready to Lead on Day One."

Addendum: After more research, I see the angle. The story that she didn't abort her Down's Syndrome baby will energize Pro-Lifers. That's key. And her presence will soften McCain's "get off my lawn!" image. It also indicates that McCain's entire platform will be Drill, Drill, Drill.

It seems to me the move is smart in the extreme long-term in that, like a Bobby Jindal pick, Palin's new visibility may be the first step in reinventing the GOP not as the party of Angry Old White Guys, but as the party of socially conservative yet competent managers from all backgrounds, the sort of party envisioned by Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam in Grand New Party. McCain and Palin need to distance themselves from the Club for Growth crowd to really start moving their fossilized party in a new direction, but image-wise, this is a good start.

In the extreme short term, this is also smart. Obviously, this "shocking pick" has undercut the Obama DNC speech hype. But McCain also changes the RNC narrative. If it were a more conventional pick like Pawlenty, the story will be "how can McCain distance himself from the unpopular Republican Party?* Now in the days leading up to the convention, the media narrative will be: "who is Sarah Palin, and will she be able to step up and deliver?" The media will set the bar very low for her. All she has to do is not flub a pedestrian, unoffensive speech, and the media will give her a pass.

But what about the medium-term? Here, I think the McCain team is tactically smart, but strategically questionable. You have a Veep whose notable inexperience will call attention not only to the hypocrisy of McCain's "Ready to Lead" argument, but also to his age and health. Second, the more I read about Palin, the more I see the dangers of likely Quayle moments. In this gaffe-attentive environment, a few slip ups will look extremely damaging. In terms of helping McCain win the election, it's hard to see Palin really end up doing much to help. But then, it's hard to see anyone else really helping that ticket short of Colin Powell.

* Speaking of the RNC, I hope the Obama team spins the media to get them to try to hunt down GOP extremists on the convention floor as diligently as they tried to hunt down HRC dead-enders. There are bound to be some serious haters there; they just need a little nudge.

Can anyone here play this game?

Really liked the HRC intro video, liked the speech itself, and her performance reconfirmed that she would have been Obama's best running mate. Hillary's become a very persuasive speaker and performer over the course of the campaign, and would have been a terrific candidate if she were even remotely competent in running a campaign.

But the speech, however good the delivery, did not make a very compelling case for Barack Obama or make a strong case against McCain. In fact the structure is the same: I ran for president because of issue a/b/c/d/e. Obama believes in a/b/c/d/e. Since I'm out, you must support Obama. Bush did terrible things. McCain supports Bush. Therefore vote against McCain.
The law of transitivity may be unassailable logically, but let's throw some red meat out here too.

The only significant line is when she called out the idol worshipping of some of her supporters ("were you in it just for me?"). As noted below, some of the voters needed partisan reminders. But she did not speak to Obama's central problem for many, many Clinton supporters, a problem that she exacerbated: she never made a case about him being qualifed for President.

This is what you hear from Clinton supporters. Click on the comments section of any political news article and any blog. You see the same points. They know that they agree more with Obama, but don't believe he's ready to be commander-in-chief. Someone -- maybe not Clinton herself, but somebody -- needs to make the fucking case that the greatest presidents don't necessarily have a long resume. There's no relationship between a long pre-election resume and a successful presidency. Let's hope Bill take the ball and gets to the finish line on the experience issue. Look, if voters only vote based on agreement on the issues, the Democrats would never lose. So how many fucking elections will they lose before they understand that national elections are about much more than The Issues?

Can anyone play this game here? I've listened to about four hours of this convention so far, and Michelle's moving testimony aside, this is lackluster, aimless stuff. How hard is it to:

* Find a fucking character frame to attack McCain, and keep going. Notice how the GOP one or two character attacks on Obama that they repeat over and over? "Barack Obama is a celebrity who doesn't relate to you. That's why he will raise your taxes/take away your guns." "Barack Obama is a cocky ambitious neophyte who puts his ambition above our troops." I mean, if Dukakis had ran with Ann Richards' "George Bush was born on third base and thought he hit a triple" frame, maybe he would've won.

Here's one: John McCain loves being on the teevee playing pundit, but like pundits he's always wrong. (Hypothetical ad: ten different clips of John McCain on various talk shows saying something proven to be wrong on Iraq, Iran, North Korea, etc. "John McCain loves being a TV commentator. And like TV commentators, he's always wrong. John McCain. Wrong for the country.") Okay, maybe that's too complex, but whatever. You push one or two caricatures over and over and it'll stick. Maybe he's so confused or ambitious that he'll be the puppet of anybody, including the Bush flakies now running his campaign.

It's not enough to keep saying that McCain and Bush have the same policies. Find a character rationale to explain why he's not fit for the office. I have yet to hear one speaker get at McCain on a character level.

* Find someone to reframe the "qualifications" issue. Poll after poll show that this is among Obama key weaknesses. Of course, nobody can give a speech that will boost his resume. But why aren't people talking about Teddy Roosevelt, Bill Clinton, Abe Lincoln, John Kennedy and pound it into people's heads that a long resume has no connection to being a good president.

* Destroy the "cultural elitism" meme. Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy. Astonishingly, these presidents were elected even though they did not affect the kind of pork-grind munching, bruch-clearing persona that connects to "real Americans". To paraphrase Jon Stewart, don't we want presidents who are embarrassingly superior to ourselves?

Books have been written about how the GOP sold this crap to the country. Now the president folks want to barbeque some ribs with has turned out to be the worst president of the last hundred years, the Democrats have a huge opportunity to reframe this issue. You have a guy in Barack Obama who's an electrifying speaker, an extremely smart, sensible guy with a first-class temperament. Instead of spending all your time normalizing him, why haven't people started to push back on this right-wing bullshit? Hey, you want a president who is a smart achiever, not some fucking schmuck who fucking wears cowboy boots but failed at everything he's touched in his life. You know, like that douchebag in the Oval Office. Jon Stewart mocked this kind of idiocy relentlessly. The Democrats would do well to start mocking the GOP for their dress-up populism.

Maybe Barack Obama is the Theo Epstein of the Democratic Party, and this band of losers will finally find a winning formula. Based on what I've seen from this convention, I'm not that optimistic.

Addendum: I just saw James Carville on CNN, and he made a whole lotta of sense. 25 million jobs created under a Democratic president. Real income growth. Budget surplus. When are people going to talk about this? He said, when are the Democrats going talk about how John McCain wanted to put "social security money in subprime mortgages?" Yes! Great way to frame this issue. Hit a couple of these and stop with the fucking litany of traditional liberal goals, and please, please, please for the love of god please fucking stop with the fuzzy paeans to bi-partisanship.

Addendum 2: To put in something positive, I really liked Brian Schweitzer's theatrics. This is the dude I'll be supporting in 2012 if Barack doesn't make it (and I gotta admit, for the first time in this election, I'm not entirely confident about his chances). Watching Schweitzer, I finally understood why I like this guy. Because stylistically he's kind of a Republican in the sense that he can mock the opposition mercilessly and unapologetically. He doesn't need to preface his attacks with some high-minded "John McCain is an honorable man, and I admire his service, his suffering, his devotion to the country, his formerly Mavericky ways, his wonderful wife and children" garbage you get from some others. And he made some good points about energy, a key issue for me.

Addendum 3: Ezra Klein makes a good point about Hillary basically structuring this speech as a party first Democratic call to arms. Which makes this speech perhaps more effective than I initially gave it credit for -- that is, if Obama begins running a more party-oriented campaign as he should.