Wake me when it's over

As readers of this space know, I like my political palaver better than most. I wake up to NPR, and spend part of my afternoon with the pedantic Wolf Blitzer and the Best Political Team on Television; I always stop to watch Mark Shields and David Brooks on Jim Lehrer's show and sometimes go to bed with Rachel Maddow. (Not literally, of course. Her bio confirms what the suit and haircut she sports on Keith Olbermann's show led me to believe: that she is, as Russell Crowe said of Jody Foster, "playing for the other team.")

But even I am weary of the Clinton-Obama battle, and the prospect of this dragging on until June fills me with ennui. This week saw some killer endorsements for our man in black (first Bill Richardson, then PA Senator Bob Casey), as well as calls from other party machers (and Obama backers), Sen. Patrick Leahy and Rep. Christopher Dodd for Hillary to quit her campaign.

As they say here in Brooklyn: It's going to happen.

First, as much as I wish we could lay down our arms and get to the business of Republican bashing, Hillary Clinton has every right to stick around and spend as much of her donors' money as she wants. The fact that it is statistically impossible for her beat Obama on delegates, barring a disaster (and polls indicate that the Wright contretemps wasn't it) that makes superdelegates run away from him. Second, the robotic business is real: she literally can't stop herself. There is no off switch if you're a Clinton. You just keep going and going, as she learned up close and personal at the White House, watching her husband's endless campaign.

"The main thing," as Bill famously said, "is never quit, never quit, never quit." I run, therefore I am -- it's emblazoned on the family crest. I was in the minority, at least among the Democrats I know, who thought he would have done us all a huge favor if he had stepped down after he admitted to lying about Monica Lewinsky. Gore would have been president long enough to convince everyone he could do the job (instead of standing, stricken, through much of his campaign, afraid to associate himself with the administration he had just served), Bush never would have been elected and we certainly wouldn't have invaded Iraq.

Well, nap time's over. Whoever emerges the victor from this campaign (and even if you don't agree that black is the new president, he's almost certainly going to be the new presidential candidate, bitch) should be able to beat McCain. He just released his first national campaign ad that features footage of him in captivity during the Vietnam War (Thomas Edison introduces the use of sound in motion pictures first) and employs the voice of actor Powers Boothe. Boothe, it has been noted, most recently played an evil Dick Cheney-like vice-president who tries to steal the government from a black president in 24. He also played Jim Jones in a made-for-TV movie about Jonestown. Jones taught people what it meant to drink the Kool-Aid, and he, too, was fond of saying things like, "We're Americans and we'll never surrender!"

posted by Sean Elder @ 11:40 AM  0 comments

Too much information

We were vacationing at an eco-tourist resort on the Osa Peninsula of Costa Rica a few years ago (where the picture of me sitting barefoot to your left there was taken), learning about the rain forest and the peninsula's micro climate when we weren't drinking fruit juice and relaxing. The resort had a naturalist on staff who would take you out and introduce you to the many worlds beneath the surface of everything -- the colonies of cutter ants, the fruit bats that swarmed the skies at dusk. it was a little hair-raising at times to learn just how much life was teeming all around you.

Because of its proximity to Southern California (the Osa is a straight shot, via plane, from LAX) and the excellent surfing to be found on its beaches, the place got a lot of Hollywood traffic. The guide told us about one tour he gave to a famous movie producer, a one-man show in keeping with the producer's schedule and need for exclusivity. This mogul was famously ADD and grew flustered as the guide explained in great detail what was going on in the ecosystems at his feet and above his head. "Too much information!" he shrieked at our hapless docent, putting his hands over his ears like that fellow in The Scream. "Can't you just make it simple?"

This was clearly a man who had heard too many high-concept pitches but our guide was obliging and started giving the producer the bare bones that's-a-bird-and-that's-a-bee version of his tour, but before long he found himself on the receiving end. His guest began bragging about his sexual conquests -- from the models in surfing magazines to A-list movie stars -- none of which the guide gave a damn about. "I wanted to cover my ears and yell back at him: 'Too much information!'"

Having heard yet one more report about newly inaugurated New York governor David Paterson's life as a legally blind buccaneer, I'm starting to appreciate how he felt. In the wake of the Eliot Spitzer sex scandal, Paterson thought it best to talk frankly about his own sexual past before he was sworn in, and in a bizarre news conference, the former lieutenant governor and his wife answered questions about their past infidelities. Then it turned out that there may have been more than one extramarital adventure (bringing to mind one of David Letterman's Top Ten Eliot Spitzer Excuses: "Have you ever been to Albany?").

Now he would like us to know that he also used pot and coke -- okay, I got the message! If you want to get the party started, call the governor. I'd just like to say that if getting high and messing around was all it took to get appointed to political office, I should have been king of the world a long time ago. But for the time being, can't we just give it a rest? Unless you were using the public's money to cover up your shenanigans like the mayor of Detroit, I don't really care what (or who) you were doing. Last I heard, New York State has a $5 billion budget deficit. Why don't you work on filling that hole, and leave the partying to the folks in New Jersey?

posted by Sean Elder @ 5:02 PM  1 comments

Where's Bobby?

I had lunch with my old friend David Talbot last week. He was my boss at Salon and my editor at a number of places before then. Last year David published an illuminating book about JFK & RFK, Brothers:The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years, which championed Bobby as one of the first of his brother's assassination conspiracy theorists. Before he himself was assassinated under shadowy circumstances.

We talked of Obama. I had just seen his speech on race and David, who has the same hopes for the candidate that I do (a president we can finally believe in again) said, "He needs a Bobby." The younger Kennedy was the guy who could do the street fighting while his older sibling played statesman and kept his campaingn, for the most part, on a higher plane. When the Clintons, or whomever, sling mud and Obama retaliates, the press and his detractors react by saying, "Ah, he's just like them! Politics as usual after all."

I thought of David's words this afternoon as I watched the latest bit of Clinton mud fly. It was Bill, Hillary's own personal Bobby, getting his hands dirty again as he addressed a veterans group in North Carolina. "I think it would be a great thing if we had an election year where you had two people who loved this country and were devoted to the interest of this country," said the former president. "And people could actually ask themselves who is right on these issues, instead of all this other stuff that always seems to intrude itself on our politics."

Gee, what stuff could that be? And I wonder which two candidates he means?

Rather than let the candidate himself respond, retired Air Force Genreral Tony McPeak flung the dirt back. "I grew up, I was going to college when Joe McCarthy was accusing good Americans of being traitors, so I've had enough of it," McPeak said. The Clintons of course screamed outrage (Uncle Joe is Satan for members of the old left, though a lot of Obama's younger supporters might be hard pressed to tell you who he was) but what I thought was most interesting was seeing Obama, standing on the stage with his arms folded, while McPeak took his wacks. Maybe instead of one Bobby, Obama will find a chorus of them. Critics of the critics, fighting the armies of the night.

Sure, Obama looked a little awkward letting someone else fight his battle for him. But as Bill Richardson said, standing with the senator at another rally when he endorsed the "once in a lifetime" candidate, his speech Tuesday contained "the eloquence, sincerity and optimism we have come to expect of him." It's hard to handle all that and a switchblade, too.

posted by Sean Elder @ 5:09 PM  0 comments

Grandma's Hands

The finest moment in Barack Obama's transcendent speech on race yesterday was probably when he evoked his grandmother. For those of you who missed it, take time and watch it with your children later. But let me quote from the man himself (and the fact that he actually wrote most of this speech himself means we stand to elect, if nothing else, a great writer to the White House). The set-up, of course, was the flack he's been getting for statements made by his former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who critics have asked him to disown:

"I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community," he said. "I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother - a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

"These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love."

We all have one of those grandmas, somebody in our family or in our past who loved us and let us down with their prejudices and their attitudes. It's not a black thing or a white thing; it's a human thing. Obama is not counting merely on the subtlety of his argument that black men of Wright's generation might be entitled to some anti-American feelings (fear of black rage is something Republicans are dying to pounce on); he's counting on our common, flawed humanity, and that enough voters of all races will recognize themselves, and their larger families, in his dilemma.

Was the speech too lofty for Joe Sixpack? Can't tell yet. It's probably not the kind of speech that is going to push him past Hillary in parts of Pennsylvania (of which longtime Clinton supporter James Carville famously said, "It's Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in between") but I really think he was speaking more to the superdelegates, who represent not only Hillary's only hope but who are also super-Democrats themselves, men and women who drank the Kool-Aid of our party -- the ideals and, yes, the idealism -- a long time ago.

There were a lot of ways Obama could have tackled the Wright problem, which Fox News and other hate mongers are determined to keep alive. He could have ignored it, he could have repudiated him and everything he stands for. Instead he gambled with a reaction that was complicated and intelligent and emotional, all at once, as if inviting us as voters and Americans to join him on a higher playing field. Do we have the guts to go there?

posted by Sean Elder @ 1:18 PM  0 comments

The framed & the framers

If you thought it was going to be simple with Florida, well then you have a really bad memory. That state's Democratic Party has declared, on behalf of its voters, that Florida doesn't want to vote again. Once was quite enough. Even if it was a sort of a pantomime equivalent of voting, in which actual ballots were cast but the results were determined ahead of time to be meaingless (which didn't stop Hillary Clinton from showing up and acting as if she had won the sweepstakes). They were being punished by the national party for having held its primary early and the state's poohbahs have tossed the ball back over the fence -- like those mimes playing tennis in Blow-Up.

"This doesn't mean that Democrats are giving up on Florida voters," the FDP assured everyone in a memo. "It means that a solution will have to come from the DNC Rules & Bylaws Committee, which is scheduled to meet again in April."

As much as that committee, headed by DNC leader Howard Dean, would like to toss that imaginary ball to someone else, the math finally frames the debate and gives us all an out (even those of us who didn't do so well in math): Obama has more candidates and it's impossible for Hillary to catch up. He also has a greater percentage of the popular vote and, barring a bizarre and complete turnaround, the equivalent of all Obama supporters staying home for all the remaining primaries, there is no way she can catch up there, either. Her argument that the Democratic nominee needs to win Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida to take the White House means a whole lot less when polls continue to show Obama beating McCain more handily, even in those states, than she would. What, Hillary supporters are going to stay home in November if she doesn't get the nomination? Never happen. Whereas a good number of Obama's troops, many of them first time voters, would certainly have reason to think the game rigged if the candidate with the most votes and delegates somehow didn't get the nomination. Kind of reminds you of the 2000 presidential election, when the candidate with the most votes lost...

There is nothing wrong with representatives making a momentous decision as long as they truly represent the will of the people. Anyone who watched HBO's John Adams last night got a good historical reminder of how the craven King-fearing representatives of some colonies almost kept us from fighting for freedom. (If you did miss the first two episodes of this bracing series, it's being repeated on hundreds of HBO spin-offs as you read this, including HBO En Espanol. Watching our founding fathers arguing the fine points of the Declaration of Independence in Spanish makes me feel like I have entered one of Lou Dobbs' nightmares.)

As much as I enjoyed the series more bold-faced portrayals -- Paul Giamatti's dyspeptic Adams, Tom Wilkinson's rascally Benjamin Franklin -- I was really taken with Broadway actor Stephen Dillane's quiet take on Thomas Jefferson. It's how Montgomery Clift might have played him: so still you have to pay attention. When you have the right ideas you don't have to scream and strut. Something for all presidential contenders to remember.

posted by Sean Elder @ 10:49 PM  0 comments

Not Dark Yet

Mother of mercy, could this be the end of Obama?

It's hard to tell how political scandals are going to play and what kind of shelf life they will ultimately have. Some like Spitzer's (below) come out of nowhere and swallow up whole careers and families in a tsunami-like instant. Others start off troubling and just get more so. The news about Obama's break with his former pastor was getting a lot of play on the evening news last night, with CNN's Anderson Cooper devoting his entire broadcast to it. and each of the network news program putting it at the top of their political coverage. The junior senator from Illinois made the rounds of the programs himself, telling anyone who would listen that he never heard the Reverend Jeremiah Wright declare this country ran on racism, or say, just days after 9.11, that the attacks were the result of US foreign policy karma.

What's troubling is not the way the contretemps got heated up, either. John McCain pushed an editorial from the Wall Street Journal on reporters (so that's where they get their ideas!) and Rush Limbaugh and the folks at Fox News (who still haven't forgiven Obama for not wearing an American flag lapel pin) fanned the flames, sending thousands to see for themselves on YouTube. No, the thing that's the most unnerving about this fiasco is the Clinton camp's silence.

It's no secret that part of her strategy has been to hang in there until something stuck to Obama, and this time it wasn't even mud she or one of her minions tossed. (Neat how the Wright story pushed that Ferraro unpleasantness off the front page.) They have claimed for months that only once the press started looking hard at Obama's background would his mettle be tested and in this case they might be right. Why wasn't Obama's campaign out ahead of this one? Given the rev's shoot-from-the-hip style, in the already shoot-from-the-hip world of black preachers, shouldn't someone have had a look at those tapes themselves? Now the press is sure to play gotcha, looking for proof that Obama was in church during a sermon when Wright was on record saying something controversial.

The great pity is that Obama wanted his campaign to get beyond the race issue and some of us have joined him in that hope (see more below). Now a bunch of potential voters are going to hear the same sound bites of Wright and confuse his rhetoric with the message of the candidate. Context means next to nothing in a political year: of course our history is racist, just as its obvious that Al Qaeda's hatred of the US stems from our foreign policy history. But truth and nuance won't get you to the White House.

The only good news in all of this was more bad news: stories of the government's bailout of Bear Stearns pushed the Obama-Wright story below the fold ,or later in the program, and the dire predictions of many economists made the rantings of a retired reverend seem quite trivial indeed. On Jim Lehrer's News Hour, the essential oatmeal of evening newscasts, Newsweek's Jane Bryant Quinn was one of a chorus voices on the air last night telling Americans to fasten their seat belts.

"If you look at where America is in the world, relatively speaking, we are getting poorer, because we've been a debtor nation for so long," Quinn told Judy Woodruff. "And the dollar going down means that internationally we are getting to be a poorer country, and we are not doing as well as we did in the past. This is going to be a hard thing for Americans to face."

Feel better?

posted by Sean Elder @ 2:26 PM  0 comments

What rhymes with Eliot?

Is there anything left to say about the Spitzer scandal? It has to have set the land record for fastest revelation-to-elimination cycle of any modern political sex scandal ("In by Monday, out by Thursday") and any TV talk show host who chose to take this week off could probably bring the house down just by opening with the line, "Did I miss anything?"

Our hyper-speed, internet-fueled, media-minded punditocracy sure didn't. It reminds me of those Amazonian pirranha that strip a man down to his bones in a frenzied bloodlust... well, at least in a James Bond movie, which was where half of my childhood education came from. (The other half came from Mad magazine.) Watching the news cycle over the last three days, spending more time than usual at home with my ailing daughter, I have seen each possible angle picked up, run with and ultimately devoured. (The last line of interest is, of course, "Why are we all so interested?)

This time the fate of the political wives got more than usual traction, perhaps because Hillary is casting such a large shadow on our psychic landscape, or perhaps because Silda Wall Spitzer was so clearly devastated, standing beside Governor McLovin. "Why do the wives have to stand up there with them?" Franny asked when we were watching Keith Olbermann Monday night (that's how sick she was!) and my line about the kabuki like dance to the death that is modern political marriage meant little to her. As I heard a comedienne ask at the end of that first evening (forgive me for not remembering who, there have been so many), "Why does the wife have to stand up there? Why doesn't he stand up there with the hooker -- that's the one everyone wants to see!"

And now everyone has. Images of the real Kristen has been paraded all over the tabs and the talk shows and I bet visits to her My Space page came close to crashing the server. (I don't know about you, but internet speed has been very slow here this week -- don't you think it's Spitzer related?) She is, not surprisingly, an aspiring singer from a broken home. Who knows if those aspects of her personality were ever revealed to the governor (they did see each other more than once, you know). I like to envision a scene like those in Citizen Kane where the miserable millionaire and gubernatorial aspirant Charles Foster Kane starts visiting the chorine who would be the undoing of his marriage and political future. Nothing new here, keep moving.

A hundred years ago the Trial of the Century was that of Harry Shaw, a demented scion of a wealthy Pittsburgh family who murdered the lecherous NY architect Stanford White for White's past dalliances with Shaw's wife, a singer herself named Evelyn Nesbit. She came to be known, in tabloid legend and later movies, as the Girl in the Red Velvet Swing. White, who was presented as a serial defiler of young women in Shaw's seven-month trial, had a special little love nest on in the Flatiron District where he entertained the teenaged Nesbit; she would swing in the red velvet swing, unencumbered by unessential clothing until White finally pounced.

It was a little game they played, just their little secret until the whole world came to know about it. (The phrase, "Would you like to come up and see my etchings?" came out of that trial as well -- it was one of White's pickup lines -- and entered the popular consciousness.) It's doubtful anything quite as memorable will come out of the Spitzer imbroglio -- Client Nine just doesn't have much of a ring to it -- but at least it will all be over sooner. The Nesbit story had legs. Why it was just a few months ago that the building that housed White's literal swing house collapsed. That was just an old structure, his former trysting spot, meant to fall apart. White's family was never the same, either.

posted by Sean Elder @ 5:52 PM  0 comments

I'm With Stupidity

What to make of the suggestion being floated by the Clinton camp that Obama might be her running mate? First Bill came out and endorsed the idea over the weekend, saying the match-up would make "for an almost unstoppable force." (What is an "almost unstoppable force," anyway? Is that like the New England Patriots?) Then Hillary said in a campaign rally that she had heard from voters who said they wish they could vote for both her and Obama and she replied, "Well, that might be possible someday." Even PA governor Ed Rendell got in on the act, saying on Meet the Press Sunday, "It would be a great ticket."

The day wasn't over before Obama threw some cold water on the Clinton fantasy, pointing out that he had more delegates than she did, had won more states than she had and in poll after poll was considered a stronger candidate to beat John McCain in November. And he added a reference to the logic behind HIllary's three am phone call ad: "I don't understand. If I'm not ready, how is it that you think that I should be such a great vice president?" he said at a rally in Columbus, Mississippi. "You can't say that he's not ready on day one -- unless he's willing to be your vice president, then he's ready on day one."

The problem with either combo -- Clinton-Obama or Obama-Clinton -- is that both candidates would have to then campaign wearing T-shirts that said I'm With Stupid. You can't trash somebody for being an inexperienced jive-talker or a duplicitous pushover for seven months and then marry them on the eighth, can you? I mean it happens in Shakespeare and Hollywood romantic comedies, and there have been some odd pairings in presidential races within memory. (How about the first George Bush and his derision of Ronald Reagan's "voodoo economics"? Didn't stand in the way of walking down the aisle with the voodoo priest himself.) But if Clinton says Obama is not ready to be president, he's not ready to be vice president, because the stand-in aspect is the most important part of the job. And if part of Obama's argument for him over Hillary is that she has more negatives -- smoking baggage with stickers that say Whitewater and Travelgate on them -- bringing her along would only ruin the party. If not the Party.

Speaking of stupid, it also appears that the little girl seen sleeping so soundly in Hillary's three am ad is not a little girl anymore: she's a 17-year-old Obama supporter named Casey Knowleswhose stock image was used in the ad without her knowledge. Now she is lighting up the morning talk shows, labeling the spot "fear-mongering" and "a cheap hit." Free publicity! And a reminder that you don't want to make a woman look the fool on a national stage, even if she was just pretending to be asleep.

Just ask Mrs. Eliot Spitzer.

posted by Sean Elder @ 9:57 PM  0 comments

Will the Wolf Survive?

I speak here not of Obama but of my favorite first novel of the year to date: Sharp Teeth by Toby Barlow. Sharp Teeth (the title is the only thing about the book I'm not 100% sure of, if for no other reason than I have trouble remembering it) is the story of werewolves in Los Angeles -- great, you say, another one of those. But before you clutter your head with images of Michael Landon or Warren Zevon I should point out that this book features werewolves competing in bridge tournaments, and at least one who grapples with the lure of Kibbles & Bits. Call it the Call of the Domesticated.

And did I mention that it is written in blank verse? You know, like the Aenied. I've been avoiding the reviews, as I usually do when I'm enjoying something, but I gather some critics were put off by Barlow's use of this rather antiquated form. Me, I think it gives the whole proceedings a kind of heroic (and occasionally mock-heroic) quality that the story told straight wouldn't have. Some reviewers also seem to resent the fact that Barlow is the creative director of an advertising agency in Detroit (as opposed to a Trustafarian graduate of some prestigious writing program living in Brooklyn) and suspect everything right down to the packaging. (The hardcover is dust-jacket free, with blurbs from favorable British reviews printed inside.)

But how did the book come to be reviewed in the UK first? Because it was published there first, and I would love to see the rejection letters Barlow collected from US publishers while trying to get someone to have a good look at it here. (Harper Collins no doubt found it easier to print the book once it had enjoyed success overseas.) It's hard out there for a pimp, let alone a lycanthrope: As my friend Charlie Haas said to me recently, the publishing business is run by reading groups. If your book isn't the kind that will stand up to those sorts of questions that are posed in the backs of books meant to get a coffee klatsch started, then your effort is probably dead meat. The kind even werewolves won't touch.

And book groups are mostly made up of women (news flash), and most women reading "werewolves in modern LA" are going to turn the page or put the book back on the table at Barnes & Noble in favor of some Elizabeth Gilbert knock-off. (Barlow's book might better have been titled Eat, Prey, Run.) More's the pity. Sharp Teeth features at least one great female character (yeah, she turns into a wolf too) but more importantly deals, on a pretty visceral level, with a lot of those man-woman questions of the shall-I-trust-him-or-kill-him-first variety familiar to anyone who has ever been in love.

But monster, even monster as metaphor is something I think most publishers don't believe women would gravitate towards. (Which is why they've stayed away in droves from Beauty and the Beast.) I'm glad Harper Collins had the cojones to publish this funny, gripping and original book. Is it coincidence that the same house will be publishing Charlie's first novel, that went through its own share or rejections and rewrites? Only a fool would write a novel in this day and age, I've heard it said, and, as I embark on revising my own, I confess to be one of those fools. At least I can sleep through a full moon.

posted by Sean Elder @ 5:45 PM  0 comments

Look Before You Leap Year

I wanted to watch the season finale of The Wire last night but was stymied by HBO On Demand. Generally HBOOD subscribers have been able to watch episodes a week before they air but now that the series is coming to a close, and my favorite characters are getting killed off (goodbye, Omar! so long, Snoop!), I've been told that I have to wait until March 10 -- a day after the finale airs.

Well, what's the point of that? I want to fast forward to the conclusion -- just like I would prefer to speed through the coming six weeks and get to the Pennsylvania primary to see what's going to happen. Of course I was disappointed in the results of this week (though they're still digging through the TX caucus results as I write) and hate to think that this thing is going to be settled by the kind of fear-mongering displayed in Hillary's three am phone call ad, which seems to have played pretty well in Ohio. But mostly I would just like to get to the part where we're fighting with Republicans again.

I mean, I like political process more than most but at the end of the day, it's hard to really dislike Hillary. She's just kind of a boring scold with a dangerous sense of self-entitlement -- not a possibly deranged, Frankenstein monster of a conservative like the GOP's presumptive nominee. That fight will be a lot more fun. We can all sing "Fie on Goodness," along with the restless knights of Camelot. ("Ah, to spend a tortured evening staring at the floor/Guilty and alive once more!")

But now the rest of these states want to vote and if Hillary does as well as polls (and her people) indicate she will in PA, she will continue to crow about her electability and Obama's amateur status. And he has made a few missteps this week, blaming the press for being mean to him and then giving a mish-mash of a speech Tuesday night that sounded more like a joint effort by Mister Potato Head and Woody Guthrie than the kind of ringing poetry we've come to expect from the man.

But if setbacks like the Ohio and Texas defeats really knock him off his game, he probably doesn't deserve to be president. Hillary is right to say that she has been vetted more than Obama has, mostly because she's been out there longer, drawing fire from the GOP death squads. I think Obama needs to learn to take her kitchen-sink attacks -- deal with the Rezko connection, answer the NAFTA memo questions -- and lob back a few of his own. Might I suggest he look at a little documentary called The War Room? That's where we saw Bill Clinton's then-cornermen, George Stephanopoulos and James Carville perfect the art of the modern political counter-punch.

As far as The Wire goes, I'm not expecting any miracles. Generally each season has ended the same way, with the same old crooks in power, doing the same old same old. But there is also, always, a glimmer of hope. You just have to wait for it.

posted by Sean Elder @ 6:00 PM  0 comments

I will gladly pay you Tuesday

There's a large sign in the window of the Gray's Papaya at the corner of 8th Street and Sixth Avenue: YES SENATOR OBAMA, it says in block letters and then, for reasons only Gray's copy editor could address it continues, in quotes: "We Are Ready to Believe Again."

The primaries in NY are long gone, of course, and I don't think the hot dog vendor was trying to reach folks in Rhode Island or Vermont. (For those of you outside of the area, Gray's Papaya is one of those peculiarly NY establishments that boasts $1.25 hot dogs and papaya juice to help you digest what otherwise might be indigestible -- a sort of metaphor for the city entire, where energy and culture ameliorate all the ugliness and stress.) The sign is more a show of faith, and it voices the kind of sentiment Hillary's people love to hate.

"What does believing have to do with anything?" they wail. "Believe in what? Define your terms, damn it!" It is just such sentiments, reminiscent of Peter Pan's exhortation to clap your hands if you believe in fairies, that makes them want to give all of us Obama people a three a.m. wake-up call.

Unfortunately, the person who does not clap when Tinkerbell is dead looks like a grouch. As Jon Stewart observed when he interviewed HRC last night, it must be hard to run against hope.

It must be hard to run on fear, too. I have a sense that the three a.m. phone call ad (which asked voters who they wanted answering the White House phone at three in the morning while your innocent babies sleep) has not played so well in the heartland, where she meant to strike fear. (Since you are probably reading this after the Super Tuesday Two primaries, you may have a better idea of how effective it was.) And the sad fact is that at a Hillary White House the only person up at that hour would be Bill, home from a night of tomcattin'.

Now the Obama bashing, or at least vetting, has begun in earnest as reporters dog-pile on issues such as the Canadian NAFTA memo in which one of Obama's advisors is reported to have reassured some Canadian government officials that the Senator from Illinois doesn't mean what he says about protectionism and free trade; he's just trying to get votes. It's hard to tell at this juncture if that story has legs, though most good political scandals have some character with a Dickensian, Drudge like name in the center, and this one has a fellow named Austan Goolsbee.

Sunday New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson suggested "that after Tuesday if there’s a clear indication of a solid lead in delegate count, by voters not superdelegates … we as a party … have got to see whether it makes sense to continue a very divisive primary between now and Pennsylvania and then the convention." There is a growing sense among machers in the party (and Richardson is surely one, which is why he can get away with the beard) that more street fighting between our candidates will only embolden the GOP (as well as give them fresh ammo) for the general election. But the idea that Hillary would just walk away at this point seems far-fetched. You might even call it a fairy tale.

posted by Sean Elder @ 1:47 PM  0 comments