BARACK & JOE
I loved The West Wing, even after Aaron Sorkin left and the show got a little melodramatic and silly. Rarely did an episode fail to evoke chills, tears, or both. So badly did I yearn for the fiction to be reality—I started season one after Bush was elected—that I often found myself confused about what events were and were not happening in the real world.
What so inspired me was the portrait of a White House in which fundamentally decent people worked tirelessly and fought valiantly for the America they had read about in their fifth-grade textbooks. Their motives consisted—almost exclusively—of an irrepressible, inexplicable devotion to the ideas that are most associated with this nation: liberty, equality, and justice. Sure, ambition played a role, as it always will in human affairs, but it was always subservient to the greater good.
And so, after eight years of leadership by born millionaires—men whose devotion to America has always been trumped by their devotion to capitalism—I found myself in tears this afternoon at the prospect of Barack Obama and Joe Biden in the White House.
These are men whose biographies are comprised entirely of public service. These are men whose lives more closely resemble the lives of 95% of the populace than those of the two current occupants of the White House or that of their opponent, John McCain. These are men who never sought fortunes from the private sector (or married into them), despite having the credentials to do so. These are men whose only discernable, shared motive is their irrepressible, inexplicable devotion to the America they learned about as children.
JOHN
Don’t get me wrong, McCain doesn’t seem to be motivated by money, though it would be hard to tell if he was, given his net worth of $40 million and his wife’s vast fortune. He has an intense, violent, militaristic devotion to America that complicates my efforts to understand him. In 2000, he seemed like a decent, centrist candidate. Today he looks like an empty shell of a man grasping for the prize that he thinks should have been his back when he was younger. In his quest to take the job Bush stole from him (before he stole it from Al Gore), he has sacrificed all of the principles that made his appeal marginally understandable eight years ago. In doing so, he has capitulated to the people in his party who are motivated by money, endorsing a continuation of the BushCo economic policy that has served most Americans poorly.
Yes, he served our country in Vietnam, but so did the clearly insane homeless guy who begs for change when I get off I-95 every day. McCain’s service does not tell me any more about who he is today than does the fact that he had extramarital affairs after coming home from Vietnam and finding that his wife, who had been in a horrific car accident while he was away, was shorter, fatter, and crippled. His service does not tell me any more about who he is today than does his involvement in the Keating Five scandal 20 years ago. All I know about John McCain today is that he has aligned himself inextricably with the policies of George W. Bush. All I know about John McCain today is that he has scampered into the arms of social and fiscal conservatives with reckless abandon and that he seems unable to grasp the economic hardships that most of us are experiencing. All I know about John McCain today is that he is desperately exploiting his status as a veteran at every opportunity. John McCain does not belong in the west wing.
Now I know that it is probably a waste of time, but I have to at least try to address the stupefyingly irrational, circular “logic” of the McCain campaign’s response to Obama’s selection of Joe Biden. Here goes…
They start by saying that Obama has confirmed his weakness in international affairs by selecting Biden. According to this logic, I must assume that if he had selected Michael Phelps, he’d be admitting to a deficiency in winning gold medals for swimming; that if he’d selected Ron Jeremy he would be admitting to a similar weakness in self-fellatio. I thought that the whole idea was to select a running mate who complemented the candidate’s skill set. I wonder whether the McCain camp will accept similar criticism with regards to economic issues if McCain selects someone like Mitt Romney—or whether the selection of someone younger will amount to an acknowledgement that he’s too goddamned old to be the president. Are they actually suggesting that the presidential candidate should select someone who is inferior in every conceivable way—like Dan Quayle? Have they already forgotten George W. Bush’s selection of Dick Cheney—whom I assume these people admire and whose active role in advancing the neo-conservative agenda within the administration they seem to approve of?
They go on to diminish their own candidate by maligning Biden’s 35 years in Washington, apparently forgetting that John McCain has been there for 25 years. They say this undermines Obama’s message of “Change,” which they didn’t approve of in the first place. Biden’s got too much experience and Obama has too little. Let’s talk about that a little…
Too little experience—in what? Foreign policy? Uh, excuse me, but can anyone describe to me the foreign policy credentials held by the conservative messiah, Ronald Regan, when he ran for president in 1980? And dare I remind everyone that George W. Bush had barely left the continent before he ran in 2000? Donald Rumseld has extensive foreign policy experience but not a single fucking iota of sense or humility. Why has the media accepted Obama’s “thin resume” as a relevant factoid to be incorporated into every analysis of this race? Maybe because his resume is verifiable, whereas wisdom and decency are less tangible. It’s safe to say that Obama has a thin resume—less so to say that John McCain is dangerously volatile, not that bright, ethically pliable, and seems to be losing his mental faculties with age.
John McCain’s much-lauded “experience” involved getting shot down over Hanoi (which may or may not have involved incompetent piloting), not having the sense to drown himself in the ocean before being captured, refusing early release out of pride, realizing that that had been a colossally stupid decision, unsuccessfully attempting to take the coward’s way out by killing himself in captivity, making an anti-American confession—the validity of which may or may not be in doubt due to the fact that it was allegedly coerced out of him via the torture he now supports—and returning home to abandon his crippled wife, who had waited faithfully for him. The balance of his experience, in the House and Senate, is incredibly similar to that of Joe Biden’s, whose experience they are now deriding. Insanity, I tell you.
HILLARY
Finally, I need to say another word or two about Hillary. I refuse to believe the reports of Hillary supporters who have not thrown their support behind Obama. Some of them even claim that they’re going to vote for McCain. If these people actually exist, they’ve clearly lost track of what they were fighting for in the first place. It would be one thing if Clinton and Obama had been ideologically opposed—like McCain and the rest of the Republican field—but this was a contest about personality and character. One of them won. The other didn’t. To put it in Olympic terms, this is roughly the equivalent of some American fans of the Serbian swimmer Milovad Cavic trying to deny the gold medal to Michael Phelps for the men’s 100-meter butterfly because he only won by one 1/100th of a second. It doesn’t matter whether he won by one 1/100th of a second or three days. He won. Gold medal. Shut up and take your silver medal…which, by the way, is not the vice-presidency.
The vice-presidency is not a consolation prize. George W. Bush did not offer the vice-presidency to John McCain; Al Gore did not offer the vice-presidency to Bill Bradley; Bill Clinton did not offer the vice-presidency to Jerry Brown or Paul Tsongas; George W. Bush did not offer the vice-presidency to Bob Dole; Bob Dole did not offer the vice-presidency to Pat Buchanan; Michael Dukakis did not offer the vice-presidency to Jesse Jackson. Shall I go on? I thought not.
It doesn’t matter how close it was. Second place is 2nd place, no matter how you type it. If you’d like to propose a constitutional amendment mandating that the vice-presidency goes to the 2nd place contender, good luck with that. Otherwise, your advocacy is detrimental to the causes that endeared Hillary to you—unless your only cause in life is to see someone with a vagina become the president. If your causes include affordable health insurance, an end to the war in Iraq, the environment, the deficit, the economy, or the rapid decline of America’s image in the world, you need to get on the bus.
Okay…I think I’m done now. For now.
OBAMA/BIDEN NOW
you always hit the target though not always the bull's eye. Obama's flip-flopping is bad enough; his ass-kissing even worse; but Bidden is pure slime. Mr. Corporation himself. Obama has lost all claim to "change" as we understood him to mean it months ago. No one and I mean NO ONE who voted for the Patriot Act deserves anything other than a trial for treason. I could have voted to Obama although he no longer occupies a place on the pedestal, but not with Joe Bidden on the ticket.
Posted by: aa | August 25, 2008 at 09:28 AM