Things I Have Learned This Election Season

I feel like I've gotten a PhD in political doublespeak this year.

When John McCain's campaign was BEHIND almost ten points in the polls, what did he announce? "We've got them right where we want them".

At this point in the race, with four days left, I wouldn't be surprised at anything. Some of the other things I've learned this year:

• Huffington Post has headlines that are more misleading than the ones on the Drudge Report.

• John McCain wears $400 Ferragamo shoes - but HE can afford them.

• Sarah Palin has upgraded to a Neiman-Marcus wardrobe - but she has to give the clothes back at midnight on November 4th.

• Barack Obama owned a Chrysler 300 before he ran for president - now he has a Ford Escape hybrid - I don't know HOW he and Michelle fold those long-ass legs in THAT tiny pretend SUV.

• A "capitalist" is someone who takes money from the government when his business goes bad.

• A "supporter of free markets" is someone who takes government campaign funds instead of raising money from private citizens.

• A "socialist" is someone who pays for their own health insurance so their employer can pay out dividends to its stockholders.

• A "supporter of socialism" is someone who raises campaign funds from private citizens and manages to stay with their budget.

• Alaska is an "energy rich" state.

• Lump sum taxpayer financed bailouts are "rescue packages".

• Individual tax rebates to tax payers are 'welfare".

• "Mavericks" are allowed to stab each other in the back and still say they are on the same page.

• Cable news anchormen you see on your TV screen are smaller than they appear.

• One half-digested fact from the campaign trail can hold the interest of the entire cable and network news universe for 24 hours.

• The amount of a candidate's zeal for explaining his tax plan is inversely proportional to the likelihood that it will be implemented if the same candidate gets elected president.

• Casting your vote early only heightens your anxiety until Election Night.

• Black people can suspend "C. P. time" when they feel like it.

Doing The Colin Powell Bounce

In the last twelve hours, I've heard Chris Rock advise white people on when it is appropriate to use the word "nigger" in public, come across a very recent photo of Colin Powell doing the "Colin Powell Bounce" on stage in London, watched the Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin replace her own alter-ego in a cameo appearance on a comedy show AND sing along to a rap song that makes fun of her own candidacy, all capped off by the announcement that Barack Obama's campaign raised $150 million dollars in September.

Whew!

Then "The Last Boy Scout", Colin Powell, decides to finally announce his presidential election endorsement, after shaking up his image this week with an impromptu performance on stage with a hip-hop group.


Powell commented at the Africa Rising Festival on Tuesday in London, ""I stand before you tonight as an African-American. Many people have said to me you became secretary of state of the USA, is it still necessary to say that you are an African-American or that you are black, and I say, yes, so that we can remind our children.

"It took a lot of people struggling to bring me to this point in history. I didn't just drop out of the sky, people came from my continent in chains."

Colin Powell was back to his stone-faced self this morning, though, as he praised Barack Obama, criticized John McCain, and then looked into the Meet The Press camera and said "I'm voting for Barack Obama." His announcement got the cable news pundits atwitter, with some of them, especially the ones on CNN, reading so much into the phrases he used that you thought they were fortune tellers instead of journalists.

Watching Newt Gingrich on the George Stephanopoulos show, I had to force myself to remember that he had been a college professor before entering politics, because the stuff coming out of his mouth this morning was more ridiculous than usual as he recited a laundry list of "leftist" and "liberal" policies that were about to be unleashed by Obama and Congress on the American public.

To hear Gingrich say that Democrats wanted to "redistribute" the hard earned money of ordinary Americans almost made me fall out of my chair. We just gave the biggest wealth transfer in the history of the country to the smallest, most personally financially secure sliver of citizens EVER, a "redistribution" that will dwarf anything coming down the pike for years, and people who can add "2 + 2" are supposed to react to smug faced sound bite?

The thing all the Democratic pundits missed was an opportunity to hammer home Powell's endorsement. The reality of Powell's decision is that he threw his support behind the most conservative candidate in the race. If you can see beyond the rhetoric of the hot button issues, what you've got is what you always get when a black guy rises to a high level in America - someone who does their homework and is prone to act out of an abundance of caution.

I need to go practice my dance steps - looks like Powell might have a few moves on me.

Cut That Zero, Get With This Hero

Is Barack "The Professor" Obama starting to get jiggy with it?

Could he possibly have Doug E. Fresh's Greatest Hits on his IPod?

In the picture above, Obama could be signaling a lot of things. But if you have a multi-track mind like I do, one that can go off in ten directions at the drop of an absentee ballot, you might get the idea he's trying to show us:

• The number of percentage points McCain and Palin increased in the polls today.

• The number of grandchildren Obama expects to have before his daughters finish college.

• The amount Joe The Plumber's taxes will go up on the income he ACTUALLY earns.

• The size of John McCain's eyeballs when Obama told his opponent how much money HIS campaign raised in September.

• The sum total of all the game changing ideas the McCain campaign has left.

• The total quantity of mooseburgers Obama will ever eat in his life.

• The number of text messages Obama has sent Rev. Jeremiah Wright this year.
  

• The amount of times Obama has considered "suspending" his campaign.

• The size of Jessie Jackson's ego after he was recorded saying he wanted to "cut Obama's nuts off".
  

• The number of times Obama wished he'd chosen Hillary Clinton as his running mate.

• The total quantity of bombs Obama helped William Ayers build and detonate.

• The number of terrorist cells Obama heads up.

• The amount of times Obama has had sex with Larry Sinclair
  

• The number of aides Obama needs to help him navigate the internet.

• The amount of chittlins Obama intends to keep stocked in the White House kitchen.
  

Now I'm sure his gesture was in response to something more serious, like the amount he plans to raise taxes on the middle class, or the number of times he voted for the war in Iraq, but with all this repetition of these talking points about the ISSUES, my mind has become the devil's workshop.


November 5th can't get here soon enough.

This Is Not A Horse Race - Again

One of the fallacies that has been propped up by our main stream media journalists for the last three weeks is that this election is still a horse race. What almost all of them conveniently ignore is the tremendous amount of energy, time, money, and an improbable shift in the actual demographics of the remaining battleground states that would be needed for the Clinton McCain campaign to garner more than a 50% total of the outstanding pledged delegates votes in each of these states she is projected to get based on current state by state estimates.

I wrote the original paragraph above back in May, when Hillary Clinton’s campaign was flailing against Barack Obama’s organization. The title came back to me as I thought about the political pundits on TV last night. There was no real tension in their voices as they speculated about tonight’s final presidential debate and the things each candidate needed to accomplish, because they know what you know – John McCain and Sarah Palin have very little chance of winning this election.

The thing that is maddening to me this time around is that every journalist in the country who is on the political beat or is a political columnist, people whose job is to understand the actual mechanics behind getting out the vote, don’t do a better job of focusing on why the feeling of an inevitable loss by McCain/Palin is so similar to the feeling you got back in May when Hillary Clinton’s team was on the ropes.

Barack Obama and his top strategists have taken the business of politics as seriously as the Mafia took the business of crime. Their decision to make the internet and the small donor the backbone of their fundraising efforts was as revolutionary to American politics as Henry Ford’s assembly line was to the manufacture of automobiles. The methods they used to mobilize and deploy their campaign resources - money, manpower and volunteers – are as pioneering to political organizational planning as John D. Rockefeller was to the distribution of oil.

Do you think you will hear any of this tonight after the debate from your favorite political pundits?

This level of execution has changed the dynamics of our electoral process so much that our traditional political bellwethers have become anachronistic. Tonight’s debate is almost a formality. Too many people are planning to vote this year, people who don’t seem to understand that they are supposed to have landlines, like good Americans, and that they are supposed to wait by their phone to be polled. Too many dollars have been raised from individuals who don’t seem to understand how much quid pro quo is supposed to be gotten in exchange. And waaay, waaay too many people are on the internet, talking to each other when the latest "information" being disseminated doesn’t seem to add up.

But the people who get paid the big bucks to analyze this election will be telling you the same old stuff they said last week. The campaign commercials will recycle things you already know, but with a more insistent tone in the narrator's voice. The campaign surrogates on both sides will continue to parrot their talking points, with the Republican ones trying their best to look particularly earnest.

And John King, the guy on CNN who plays with the snazzy electoral vote map, will be working overtime tonight to explain to you just how John McCain and Sarah Palin might still be able to pull this out.

New Voters "Money In The Bank" For Obama

I am slowly beginning to understand Andy Rooney, the curmudgeonly old guy who used to do a five minute segment at the end of the news show “60 Minutes” about things he didn’t like. In the last couple of weeks there are a few words and phrases I’ve gotten tired of hearing:

“gaffe”

“Joe Six Pack”

“energy independence”

"also"

“maverick”

The one that is probably the most bothersome is the one I am sure will be used to death over the next twenty four hours as the punditocracy chatter among themselves on their pre-debate and post debate panels – “gamechanger”.

I was reminded of this as I watched the Minnesota Vikings take on the New Orleans Saints in the Superdome last night. New Orleans amassed four times the yardage of Minnesota in the first half, but just couldn’t get the ball in the end zone enough. There had been too many errors in the execution of their gameplan, and too many fumbles by their star running back Reggie Bush. Minnesota was leading at one point by 10 points. And then, just like that, in the space of a few seconds, Reggie Bush electrified the crowd as he returned a punt from deep in his own territory for a touchdown. A few minutes later, he did it again, to put New Orleans in the lead. What was the first sentence out of Tony Kornheiser’s mouth? “This guy is a gamechanger.”

Finally, I said to myself, someone uses the phrase “gamechanger” phrase appropriately. And as I sat there, watching Reggie Bush’s teammates pat him on the back, I thought about what it was that got me so agitated whenever I heard a political pundit say “will this be a gamechanger” when they attempted to predict the impact each candidate's performance could have on the TV audience. As I sat back, watching the two football teams fight it out on the screen, I could see exactly what it was.

In a football game, you saw it all right there inside the stadium, the players on the field, the players on the bench, the coaches, the back ups, the special teams, the team owners in the skyboxes – everything that could affect the game except the training room was right there on display.

In this election, we are seeing only a fraction of the manpower of the opposing campaigns. The podiums and the cadre of aides each of the Democratic and Republican candidates are usually seen with in news clips tend to be equalizing images. The thing that is so maddening to me is that if you could visualize, as I do all the time, the difference between the manpower and the financial resources of the Obama and McCain camps, you would quickly realize that there is no way John McCain or Sarah Palin could have the kind of effect on this election that Reggie Bush had on the game last night.

There is no running room in virtually any state. No way a Hail Mary pass will make it to the Electoral College goal line. And even if McCain/Palin recover a fumble, Obama/Biden have too many players on the field for them to get very far. One of the bulwarks of Obama’s basic strategy – significantly expanding the electorate – was derided by the conventional wisdom as being a costly, time consuming endeavor. Now these newly registered voters are like money in the bank for Obama - although these days, "money in the bank" might be an oxymoron.

The “gamechanging” has been taking place for the last eighteen months, one door and one voter at a time. The army of Obama volunteers will finally get a break after mounting the biggest voter registration drive by a political party in modern times.


No 30 second TV ads will change this.


No debate zinger will matter.


Reggie Bush's heroics didn't change the football game enough either last night.


New Orleans lost by 3.

No Vice Presidential Candidate Left Behind

Joe Biden is running for the vice-presidency of the United States of America. He looks like it, sounds like it, smells like it, smiles like it.

Sarah Palin better be glad the "No Child Left Behind" program didn’t apply retroactively, because her ass would be sitting in study hall right now, boning up on all the physical science, social studies, and economics concepts she obviously missed. She needs to be running for the nearest library, not the vice presidency of the United States – of MY United States.

To stand behind this kind of incompetence in the name of supporting your party is WRONG.

To dissemble, hedge, and beat around the bush about this woman’s performances on TV is WRONG.

The second worst thing about all this is, Sarah Palin is not a stupid woman. Which means, if she sat through classes on physical science and social studies and history and economics in high school AND college, she had to really work hard at not absorbing ANY of the knowledge floating around. She must have avoided the library like the plague.

Maybe she was practicing winking those big brown eyes - WINK WINK WINK - when she was supposed to be studying.

The worst worst thing about all of this is the insistence by the people who support her that someone is finally on the ticket that can relate to the common man. Would you want the people in charge of your company to go “eeeny meeny miny mo” when making corporate decisions? Would you take your child to a doctor who couldn’t pass the medical boards? Would you have a contractor who wasn’t very good at reading blueprints to build your house? Would you want to be on a plane flown by an airline pilot who thinks the answer to a problem is "all of the above"?

Hell no!

I think it is this insistence, at every level, from the idiot “man on the street” interviews that show clueless voters parroting the bullshit they hear on TV - “well, Soledad, I really they finally SPOKE to me as a person” – to the punditocracy themselves, who seem hell bent on believing that if they simply REPEAT THE SAME BULLSHIT over and over, it will become a part of the narrative, looping back to Main Street in a day or so to give the clueless some direction.

The name of this blog is “Brown Man Thinking Hard” for a reason – because I am committed to promoting deep thinking as a normal, everyday American activity. Clinging to ignorance is as unpatriotic as it gets; willful stupidity in my mind is the most treasonous act you can perpetrate upon your country if you have ASKED FOR PUBLIC RESPONSIBILITY.

If Barack Obama and Joe Biden lose this election because the undecided voters say “I’m with stupid”, then I guess I'll have to live with it, but America will deserve what it gets from these substandard second-rate CARTOON CHARACTERS.

I can’t think of a bigger, more heartfelt way for a citizen to say “God Damn America” than to cast a vote for Dumber and Dumber-est.

Debate Delay Dicey Decision

Here I was, planning on giving up going to the first night of my college class reunion, S. beginning to get ideas about a debate party of sorts, when my boy John McCain's picture popped up as I surfed through the New York Times website.

"McCain Seeks to Delay First Debate Amid Financial Crisis"

I had just finished listening to our resident teenager explain to her mother, with the slick smoothness of a TV defense attorney, why it was perfectly okay for her to go shopping in the middle of the afternoon ON A WEEKDAY when she is flagging her economics class (is this some irony or what?). Although, according to her, her grade is low only because there are some "slight discrepancies" between what she "knows" and the right answers to the latest test questions.

So when I saw that headline, I felt like I was reading about the teen-aged version of John McCain.

Being unpredictable has worked for McCain lately, keeping the Obama campaign off its stride. But once McCain goes over the limit with these kind of decisions, he'll turn from maverick to menace in a heartbeat.

Does it really matter if he and Obama go to Washington? They've been briefed personally by the two architects of the bailout plan on a daily basis. They've focused almost exclusively on national issues the last few months, as opposed to issues that are germane to their constituents in Arizona or Illinois.

McCain is in a tighter spot than Obama. Oppose the bailout to distance himself from Bush, and the public outcry will be deafening. Vote for the bailout, even a new version, and the shadow of the Bush presidency he's been avoiding all summer will come back to haunt him.

If you live with a teenager, you understand the power of pretext better than just about anybody. The pretext of postponing Friday's debate...

...opens the door to postponing the vice-presidential debate with Sarah Palin, who has never debated anything ever on a national stage.

You do the math.

Something tells me that yesterday's fracas over access to the network feeds touched a nerve in someone behind-the-scenes.

Whether I'm right or wrong about this surely won't matter for long, though, as McCain and Palin are apt to change their minds back at any moment - just like our resident teenage diva.

Sticking It To "The Man"

There was a Sprint commercial a while back that portrayed a CEO, grey haired, square jawed and in a pinstripe suit, sitting at his desk in his high rise office, playing with a new phone while one of his lackeys stood to the side.

"Is that a new Sprint phone?" the lackey asked his boss.

"Uh huh. With Sprint's new Fair and Flexible plan, no one can tell me what to do. I can talk when and How I want." The CEO turned to his lackey and sanguinely intoned, "it's my little way of sticking it to "The Man".

His lackey, looking bewildered, blurted out, "but you ARE "The Man".

The CEO stared straight ahead. "I know."

There was something in the absurdity of that exchange that has had me thinking of John McCain more and more these days.

The latest debacle in his logic-defying campaign has swirled around the refusal to allow any reporters to get within recording distance of Sarah Palin, his vice-presidential candidate, as she posed for photos with world leaders in New York today and tomorrow for a United Nations meeting.

CNN pulled the plug on its TV crew after its reporters were barred from attending, leaving the media and the McCain campaign to play a high-level game of cat-and-mouse that has ended with McCain capitulating, agreeing to give a fifteen minute press conference today at 4:00 pm, presumably with Sarah Palin in tow. This will be the first press conference McCain has given since August 13th.

In a lot of ways, McCain's actions over the last thirty days make me wonder when he will have to finally admit, like the CEO did in the commercial, that he is "The Man".

Keeping Our Heads On Straight

I am more than a little disturbed by the comment an anonymous poster left on yesterday’s post.

"I'm having a problem with your premise ...

You are suggesting that when a politician (and their party) declare themselves above the law in every definable way no one has a right to make public that politician (and party's) hypocrisy and malfeasance?

It is precisely that "delicate sensibility" which leaves us now facing the possibility of ANOTHER FOUR YEARS JUST LIKE THE LAST EIGHT despite the carnage that has been wrought by the domination of republican policies for the past 40 years.

Sarah palin used that email account for official business precisely because she believed she could get around the public records laws.

Neither she nor her actions merit respect from anyone.

When I was on the grand jury panel here in Fulton County earlier this year, we had a lawyer in his fifties named “Roger” who was very, very big on due process and very critical of police procedure. I was the foreman, so I had to pay attention to every burglary, every robbery, every theft by taking, every minor traffic stop that was escalated to a felony by the possession of crack cocaine, all the mundane shit that doesn't even rate making the paper but is prosecuted none the less.

The jurors were more liberal than conservative, but after awhile, “Roger” started to get on everybody's nerves. Most of our cases were basic property crimes, with a little domestic violence thrown in for variety, a few shoot 'em ups, and the obligatory murder case of the day.

There was a particularly bad day, when “Roger” was a little testy, that he seemed to want to cross-examine the cop in every case, even when the perp was caught red handed and admitted to the crime. I got some coffee during a lull and was joined immediately by five or six jurors. "You've got to do something about ‘Roger’" they all pleaded. One guy, a pretty cut and dried fellow, said bluntly, "That guy is an idiot."

I thought “Roger” was an idiot myself - the only indictments we ever no billed were the ones where over zealous officers tried to make judgment calls that was not substantiated by any physical evidence or credible eyewitness testimony. These were the kinds of things you could see a mile away - even the people who were dozing off in the back row would wake up when we heard a case like this. Worrying about the intricacies of police procedure for a guy who was arrested on top of a building with a blowtorch, bolt cutters, and a bag with fifty pounds of copper fittings in front of a row of disassembled air conditioning units WAS a waste of our time - he and his lawyer could sort that out in front of a judge.

But I stopped everything, before we heard our next case, and gave a two or three minute speech to everyone about why we were there, why “Roger's” questions were within his rights as a citizen, and how his keen attention to detail helped me pay better attention to the presentations. As tired as I was of "Roger's" antics, as tired as I of signing indictment after indictment listing young black males as the defendants, I HAD to make that statement. This was not just our job, but our duty as jurors, our duty as citizens.

Just like it is with Sarah Palin's legal woes.

This anonymous comment took me back to that jury room. This is kind of thinking that happens when government becomes a large, distant, omnipotent entity that is disconnected from the individual citizen, even as it develops into an overriding force in our lives. As true as this may be, mob rule is the last thing this Brown Man wants to return.

Critical thinking, not testosterone laced posturing, is what we will need by the truckload these next few weeks.

Critical thinking and voter registration.


UPDATE - SUNDAY SEPTEMBER 21st


Now Bill O'Reilly's website has been hacked in retaliation for O'Reilly's stance against the hack of Palin's email account.

This is what I'm talking about.

We CANNOT stand for this Wild Wild West shit.

And I think that Bill O'Reilly acts like a complete and utter moron, "acts" because I know he knows better, to keep his show on the air.

Yada Yada Yada Won't Get VP Job

S. and I watched Charles Gibson interview Sarah Palin last night. I was standing behind the high backed recliner S. was sitting in, watching Gibson look down his nose at Palin while he spoke, when he asked her a question about the right to make cross border attacks from Afghanistan from Pakistan. As Palin rambled on, searching for an answer underneath – well, maybe it was underneath the next participle – or behind the next prepositional phrase – nope, not there, lets try to verbally circle back around the question and just see if we can figure out what he did ask – I felt as if I was watching a job interview.

S. reached her arm up, hand bent back, palm open – I slapped her five. "Lost in a blizzard of words?" S. said, repeating what Charles Gibson had said seconds ago. "She was just rambling all over the place."

As I watched Palin dig in her heels, go on the attack, back off, circle around questions, and proffer standard political jargon instead of direct answers, I thought of my own recent job interviews. Making a transition at middle age from industry to industry meant that, unlike Palin, I didn’t get to start at the top. My interviews have been similar, though, as I have attempted to convince one interviewer after another that there are skills I’ve picked up in the mortgage business that are transferable to their field, and that I am ready to take on the job.

The thing I noticed Palin exhibiting, though, was a sense of combativeness she was trying to hold in check – waiting, like a hitter in baseball waits on the right pitch, for the right opening from Charles Gibson so she could let him have it, could let her indignation and sanctimony come to the rescue, a natural move for a woman who is a learned practitioner in the arts of obfuscation.

She reminded me of one of my old co-workers, a jittery little woman of Pennsylvania Dutch extraction we used to call Yada Yada Yada, who was ready to square off at a moment’s provocation. If she didn’t know something, she would talk faster. She would talk louder. She would ridicule the question. She would try to change the subject.

Yada Yada Yada had already made a transition of sorts several months earlier when she had to go back to being a loan officer. She had been a wholesale account executive for a mortgage company for years, and was well versed in the mechanics of getting a loan closed. But listening to her talk on the phone to some of our high end borrowers, who were usually pretty well-informed people, was a comedy show in itself, with my co-worker often working the hold button like a video gamer as she yelled out for help. "So what index is that margin calculated off of again?"

It didn’t matter if she got someone to answer her, or shoot her a quick email – after about ten seconds of trying to lay out the details to her customer, she would launch into a new language – "well, with these ARM’s, you see, they take the LIBOR, they take the LIBOR, you see, and, and, then its just yada yada yada, ba ding bang boom, ya know, something like that. That’s how it works."

The thing about making a transition, especially when it affects a whole office, is the amount of self evaluation that has to go on in order to point yourself in the right direction. Yada Yada Yada came to my desk one day and slapped a sheet of paper down on my desk like she had the winning hand in a game of spades. “You’re good with words. Look at that for me. Tell me, you think a hundred dollars was too much for this?”

It was her resume, a chronological listing of her life’s work, a format that seemed to reduce all the years, all the struggles and triumphs of our lives down to a simple line item, to be scribbled on or circled by human resources staffers and hiring managers, collated by file clerks, uploaded onto hard drives, your entire life boiled down to a couple of pieces of paper.

According to her resume, Yada Yada Yada had graduated high school thirty years ago, which was the sum total of her educational experience. The words on her resume disappeared as my eyes lost focus, the rudimentary introductions to sociology and psychology coming back to me as I looked at the woman standing beside me with both admiration and disgust. I admired her for her ability to work around her shortcomings, for her ability to refuse to let the lack of an education stop her from finding a career, buying a home, and saving for retirement.

But I was disgusted because of the women I knew like her, verbally agile high school graduates with enough moxie to bullshit their way around the things they didn’t know, brown skinned women with the same work ethic who would never get the chance to "yada yada yada" their way into a job.

Standing behind S., I watched as Sarah Palin, a woman with a resume not much heftier than the one Yada Yada Yada slapped on my desk, dance around questions to which she didn’t know the answers, her jaw cocked, her body arched forward, her eyes fierce.

I thought of Palin, and Yada Yada Yada, and all the women like them, women who had learned to exploit the maxim “a man should never hit a woman” to the fullest, taking advantage of the fact that we weren’t going to hit back with a vengeance.

I thought of S., sitting in the chair before me, a woman with three times as many college degrees as Yada Yada Yada and Sarah Palin combined, who had to suffer the indignity of working with women just like these two - overpaid and undertrained, over opinionated and under informed, the kind of women who could be found in middle management in any enterprise in the country, passing the buck, avoiding decisions, and letting the shit roll down hill.

I wish making a transition was as easy for me as looking an interviewer in the eye and saying, "yes, I am ready," without blinking.

Something tells me, though, that those 8 million volunteers out there working on behalf of the Obama campaign are not going to let "yada yada yada" buy Sarah Palin a free pass this time.

Oprah Stands Her Ground

S. and I were in a movie theatre last December, watching The Great Debaters when I was converted from a passive Obama supporter into a disciple. It wasn’t the movie itself, but the sound of debate team member Samantha's voice booming out of the speakers as she uttered the kind of protest phrases from the thirties and forties that we seemed to still be piddling around with today:

"I say that's a shame, but my opponent says today is not the day for whites and coloreds to go to the same college. To share the same campus. To walk into the same classroom. Well, would you kindly tell me when that day is gonna come? Is it going to come tomorrow? Is it going to come next week? In a hundred years? Never? No, the time for justice, the time for freedom, and the time for equality is always, is always right now!"

My face grew hot, my whole body was aflame, I was feeling a murderous rage overtake me - was the day it would be okay for a black man to run for president tomorrow? A hundred years? Never? – so I walked out to the corridor just outside the door to get some water and calm down. This was the same old shit I was hearing about Barack Obama – seventy years later – when would it ever end?

Back inside, I found my drink and took deep breaths. S. leaned over to me a little later, during a lull in the action on screen. "This movie," she whispered, "is Oprah’s propaganda for Obama. She’s trying to get the country used to seeing smart black people."

"What? How could she have known that he was going to run back then?" I said, before I realized I was talking too loud. Whispering, I continued, "do you know how far in advance they have to plan to do a movie? They were probably putting this together two or three years ago."

"That might be true," S. said, her eyes glowing with the idea of possibly discovering a subliminal message. "But I still think she’s using this movie to try to get the country ready for him. I really do."

I have discovered, over the years, that S. can exhibit an uncanny ability to recognize the hidden motivations of other women, like my co-workers, even if she’s never met them in the flesh. So maybe she was right that night. Maybe Oprah sensed what could be possible for Barack Obama before he did.

In some ways, Oprah and Obama are kindred spirits, with parents who abandoned them, relatives who raised them, a yearning for an answer to the age old question of identity that saw them veer into drinking and drugs, he with the funny name, she with unconventional TV looks, both of them success against improbable odds.

Hundreds of millions of dollars later, Winfrey has become larger than life, her personality and her image suffusing every inch of her tightly controlled empire.

I was impressed back when Oprah went public with her support for Obama's candidacy, knowing full well what kind of demographics her television empire depends on.

Then the fall campaigning began in earnest, and the McCain strategists came roaring out of the gate with a quick left-right-left combination that managed to raise the specter of race, spotlight the scourge of favoritism, and threaten Winfrey's cash flow at the same time.

I was doubly impressed last week with Oprah's unequivocal "no" to hosting a show introducing Sarah Palin to her viewers.

Winfrey's decision about this alleged request from the McCain/Palin camp has riled some of the more vocal members of her audience who frequent her online forums. I am sure there are more than a few McCain/Palin operatives who have registered since Thursday. Whether or not this dissension extends into the ranks of Oprah’s staffers, as it has been insinuated, cannot be determined.

None of these things really matter.

Winfrey has her own "earmark" program. She doesn’t need a lobbyist to go to Washington to see if he can “bring home the bacon”. She simply turns to her own bacon factory and hands out a few slabs.

How much bacon? Somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 million dollars worth a year.

Oprah's money has been doled out generously here in Atlanta, with millions donated to Morehouse College alone. Her sense of decency compelled her years ago to buy a couple of adjoining high rise condos in Buckhead, Atlanta’s high rent district, combine them into one unit, and make it available to Coretta Scott King, where King lived until she died.

Most of the women who will rage on the internet for the next few days about how unfair Oprah is, about how betrayed they feel, will take her back, because there is no where else to go to get the kind of upscale, no nonsense empathy that her show provides for this particular kind of middle aged woman. There will be some in the media, who have never really contemplated before the kind of power a billion dollar net worth can give a black woman, who will be become obsessed with the notion that Oprah has gotten "too big for her britches". Or as they like to say down here, "uppity".

These are the same people who will automatically smile for the cameras when you say the word "diversity". The same people who will tell you that "color doesn't matter". That we are on the brink of a "post-racial" society.

Until we do something they don't want us to do.

"Diversity", it seems, stops just short of allowing access to the locus of power. The kind of diversity we rave about today is a purely social act - the large sums of money in this country are still guarded fiercely, the levers of power still wielded by hands that are almost exclusively white.

The act of asking Oprah Winfrey to put Sarah Palin on her show meant there were at least two possible outcomes to the the request. If the response McCain's strategists allegedly wanted was one they were unwilling to accept - i.e., the "wrong answer" - then they weren't really asking a question to begin with.

They were telling her what to do.

The time for real diversity, for real equality, the kind that can accept the decisions that are made when brown-skinned hands hold the levers of power, is right now.

Palindromic Free Verse - "I Love Me, vol.1"

Since Sarah Palin appears to be allergic to any microphone not affixed to a podium, I guess we will have to start speaking for her. With the help of Jim Kalb's Palindrome Connection and Thinks.com, I was able to select some prewritten palindromic phrases and organize a simple stump speech for her to deliver when she finds herself out in the hinterlands without John McCain at her side.

I Love Me, vol. I
[in palindromic pentameter]

Top spot.
Guns 'n' robes, a base born snug.
We freer few.
Red now on level - no wonder.

Draw, O Caesar, erase a coward.

Stratagem: megatarts.
Tug at a gut.
Kayak salad, Alaska yak.
Elk cackle.


I saw I was I.
Reviver.
Deified.


Aha!
Is sensuousness I?
Beware era web!
Harass sensuousness, Sarah?
No, it is opposition.
Oh, cameras are macho.
Live on, Time; emit no evil.


I did, did I?


Dammit, I'm mad.
May a moody baby doom a yam?
Oh who was it I saw, oh who?
Name now one man
Star comedy by Democrats.

O tarts! A castrato!

Yo! Bozo boy!
Draw, O coward!
Ten animals I slam in a net.


I saw I was I.
Reviver.
Deified.
A mama.


Live on evasions? No, I save no evil.
Harass selfless Sarah!
Dump mud!
Sex-aware era waxes.
Draw a slot, sir, Bristol's a ward.
Tug at a gut.
Oh, cameras are macho.
I've let a name emanate: Levi.


I saw I was I.
Deified.
Reviver.


Was it felt? I had a hit left, I saw
Dr. Awkward.
Title fit--I felt it!
Resume so pacific a pose, muser.
He lived as a devil, eh?
Puff in, sniff up!
A six is a six is a six is a six is a...
Ergo — ogre!


I saw I was I.
Deified.
Redivider.


Did I do, O God, did I as I said I'd do? Good, I did!
Harass selfless Sarah!
Revered now I live on. O did I do no evil, I wonder ever?


I saw I was I.
Redivider.
Reviver.


Top spot.
Guns 'n' robes, a base born snug.
Kayak salad, Alaska yak.
I did, did I?
Harass selfless Sarah!



I saw I was I.
Reviver.
Deified.
Redivider.

As much fun as this was for this old English major to put together, there is still much work to be done - MILLIONS of eligible voters in this country are not registered to vote. So the only palindrome that really counts today when it is all said and done is the one below, which is the goal we need to be working towards in every state:

"Rise to vote, sir."

GUEST BLOGGER: I Loved Palin's Speech - Too Bad It Was a Disaster

[Sometimes I run across original research or information that is exactly the kind of stuff I live for - well thought out, well written, well researched commentary, the kind that your media experts get by the pound but think is too much for you to understand. The author, like many bloggers, has a need to keep his avocation under the radar for professional reasons. As he explains below, he goes by the name thereisnospoon at the progressive political website DailyKos, where we are both active members of the community. He has given me permission to publish his comments in their entirety. Enjoy]


I loved Sarah Palin's speech last night. No, really, I did. As a student of rhetoric, I couldn't help but admire the poise, the confident delivery of cutting lines read with a smile, the deft moves from pulling the heartstrings with family stories to clever jokes about hockey moms and pitbulls to biting invective at political opponents.

It was a speech in the best Ciceronian tradition, delivered not with stentorian bombast but with the charm of your small-town neighbor and the visual appeal of a celebrity actress.

And it was an utter, unqualified failure. As with so much else in her life, Palin may have gained greatly from her performance, leaving her a force to be reckoned with for years to come (assuming her myriad personal and political scandals don't sink her first), but she probably just hurt McCain's chances in 2008 as surely as she hurts everything else she touches.

Already the results of two focus group projects in different places (Nevada and Michigan) already strongly suggest that Palin did not sway the independents or the Clinton supporters that she needed to in order to overcome their concerns about her experience. Thing is, that shouldn't have come as any surprise to anyone who has ever done a political focus group this election season.

You see, I moderate focus groups for a living--mostly on the corporate side, but with some political work thrown in. I've done a couple of projects for non-partisan 527s and NGOs who are nonetheless on the progressive side, talking about what matters this election season. I was a precinct captain for the Obama campaign, talking to conservative Dems and independents. I also live in a Republican district, and don't miss an opportunity to talk to regular voters about what's on their minds. And anybody with half a brain who does this for a living could have told you that Palin's speech wouldn't work to persuade the independents and Clinton supporters McCain needs.

Without revealing too much (my clients' research results are proprietary), what I can tell you without hesitation are four universal factors:

1. Most importantly, times are too tough and the public too worried about their economic security to sweat the small stuff.

2. Issues trump personality this year. I know we say this every election cycle, but it really is true this year. People are apprehensive about the issues, and they're paying more attention than ever. Allow me to give you a quote from a Republican I talked to in a focus group setting:

"I like McCain personally. He's a war hero. I would have voted for him eight years ago, four years ago. But the issues are way too important now. People are in trouble."

3. Voters have very low tolerance for partisan red meat this year. This cuts both ways: voters no more want to hear about the reasons we got into Iraq (though many acknowledge it was for oil) than they want to hear about God, guns or gays. They want solutions.

4. Economics trumps all. Only in the Midwest Mountain West does Iraq play even a close second fiddle to economic concerns. Voters want solutions to stagnant wages, massive debts, gas prices, healthcare and a host of other economic concerns. They're sinking, and they want the government to do something.

By all four of those measures, Sarah Palin's speech was an absolute disaster.


1. In an election where the voters find "small" unappealing and want big, bold solutions to weighty problems, Palin's speech did little but extol the virtues of small: small towns, small government, small-scale issues and small-ball politics. She gave voters nothing profound, no inventive solutions or even inventive perspectives. At the end of the day, voters still had no idea what she would do to solve their problems.

In fact, she did spend an inordinate amount of time criticizing Democrats for wanting to increase the size of government. In an environment where voters are worried that politicians are selling out government infrastructure and not paying attention to job losses, and where "high taxes" don't even break the top five issues, selling the governor's plane on eBay and firing the governor's cook aren't exactly selling points.

2. As a personality on stage, she was terrific. Too bad voters aren't really that interested in personality this year. They want problems solved, they want change and they want answers. Sarah Palin talked a lot about her family and her values, but she provided no answers and talked very little about the issues that matter most to Americans.

3. It was a great piece of Ciceronian oratory--but like most Ciceronian oratory, it was nasty, cutting, vicious and full of divisive red meat. It was exactly the sort of grating partisan rhetoric that voters have said repeatedly they are turned off by.

4. Outside of oil drilling, there was almost nothing about core economic issues in her speech. In fact, they were so assiduously avoided that I can't help but wonder if independent voters felt almost insulted by the nonchalance of it all. Coupled with Rudy 9/11's rhetoric about "giving workers the right to work", Republicans clearly have no understanding what the problem is. It's not that workers can't necessarily find jobs (though that can be a problem depending on the community): it's that the jobs they can find don't pay enough to cover the bills.

What she did manage to do without a doubt is motivate and mobilize to a certain degree the evangelical base. But Republicans must take that for granted, else Obama will win in a devastating landslide. What the Palin pick was designed to do was appeal to independents and to Hillary's voters. By that measure, I'm almost certain that she flopped terribly. I could be horribly wrong, of course, but already the data are appearing to bear me out.

Of course, insofar as the speech was written for her she may escape much of the blame for this debacle. But that doesn't matter now: she gave the speech. She owns it.

And now the GOP will get to pay the price.

They Can't Kill All The Indians This Time

"We have, in fact, two kinds of morality side by side; one which we preach but do not practice, and another which we practice but seldom preach."

Bertrand Russell

I watched Rudy Giuliani and Sarah Palin come on stage Wednesday night like a couple of cowpokes from the Wild Wild West with their six shooters drawn. After listening to the two of them, it appears that the easiest way for us to "circle our wagons" to save America from the bad guys would be to evacuate the nation from top to bottom - then allow only right thinking, completely certifiable Anglo-Saxons back in.

When "us" versus "them" is your theme song - the righteous versus the damned, the right to lifers versus the baby killers, the evolutionists versus the creationists, "pure hearted" America against the "evil doers" - you should not surprised when your supporters boil these images down to their most simplistic form, the way you've taught them to do in every other situation.

I guess that makes the rest of us as relevant as the Indians used to be when the America decided to tame the West. We're just a bunch of peace pipe smokers who don't have any guns, taking up space on valuable land that should be developed, speaking a language that is incomprehensible to those whose native tongue is Gasolinia - "drill baby drill!"

Take Christianity, for instance. Who was that guy back in Galilee, way back when, who went from house to house, from corner to corner, ready to help those in need? Jesus Christ himself, it seems, was one of those lousy"community organizer" types.

A self designated American patriot who only sees the world in red, white and white while driving an Expedition, a Suburban, an Excursion, a Hummer, or any other big ass SUV slash school bus is as patriotic as the reverend who spends money from his parishioners at the strip club is religious.

Now if you're reading this, and your politics leans to the left, before you go getting on your high horse about the minuscule size of your carbon footprint, you need to remember that righteousness, that good old salve for the prickled consciences on both the left and the right, has never won an election, even when married to the best of intentions.

For those of you who have been thinking critically, you can see beyond the rhetoric that Palin has been pushing the last...well, the last thirty six hours...and think about where the locus of power really resides in political arenas. Is it the person who can write a check to a campaign for $4600? Is it the person who can write a check for $4600 to a campaign AND $28,500 to the party?

Or is it the person who is a center of influence in his community, whose judgment and advice is trusted because his or her community sees it in action everyday? Community organizers are one of the cornerstones of the Obama campaign, helping to keep costs down and enthusiasm up as they attempt to pull off the most massive voter registration drive in the history of this country.

There are not enough big donors out there to fund this kind of gargantuan registration effort if you had to do it with paid staff, which is why people who believe, the same armies of people in every single state in the union who are working for the Obama campaign for little or nothing, are so powerful.

With the help of their tireless efforts, the expanded electorate McCain/Palin will face in November pose an extremely tough challenge to the Republican ticket in states like Missouri, Florida, New Mexico and Colorado. It could even make it a horse race for our electoral votes here in good ole Georgia, as well as North Carolina and Virginia.

At some point this October, the campaign ads will reach a point of saturation. The colorful mailers will get thrown out before the mail hits the counter. And even though there is nothing so sweet as the sound of a robo call to bond a voter with his candidate, voters will inexplicably stop listening to them.

The “code of the west” was romantic, but John Wayne is dead, there is no more cavalry, and they can't kill all the Indians this time.

Elephant In The Room Last Night Not GOP Mascot

Rudy Giuliani spoke so long I dozed off before he finished his speech. By the time I woke up, Sarah Palin’s family was on stage. Luckily, I had my trusty “REWIND” button, but since I didn’t record the action at Wednesday night’s Republican National Convention, it only went back about two thirds of the way into Sarah Palin’s address.

The camera had stopped at Bristol Palin, the unmarried pregnant teenage daughter of the woman speaking on stage. Was that an elephant in the Xcel Center that I heard rustling around? Or was it the awkward, stilted cone of moral exemption that had descended around the teenaged Palin’s pregnancy?

Sarah Palin looked good, with the kind of well defined cheekbones and clear skin that were made for high definition television. Her delivery wasn’t as energetic as the Sarah Palin I’d seen on clips from past engagements, but it was more than adequate when contrasted with the rest of the speaking slate last night. Most of all, she looked more comfortable the longer she talked, her eyes beginning to flash as she started tearing away at Barack Obama.

The thing that lingered on my mind, though, wasn’t Palin’s voice, but a picture I’d seen earlier on another website. Two teenaged looking girls, one white, one black, were shown side by side, both of them in despair as their at-home pregnancy tests shoed them positive results. The adjectives that were superimposed over the white girl’s image were some of the same ones used this week to describe Bristol Palin, the pregnant 17 year old daughter of vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin. I saw this picture every time the camera swung to Bristol’s face during the speech, wondering how morality had now become a "situational" premise.


I pushed the “LIVE” button and S. and I watched the recap by the old faithful at CNN. I flipped to Leno on NBC when the roll call voted – the only real reason we were up this late was to see Larry King Live.

Leno's observation, repeated several times, that the audience was practically all white, was something the mainstream news media was studiously trying to avoid mentioning. “The reason why Governor Palin looked so comfortable on stage was, when she stood behind the podium and looked out where the audience was supposed to be was because it was all white - she thought she was back in the snow in Alaska.”

Leno deftly used another comedy bit to illustrate why this image looked so yesteryear when he flashed the picture of GOP entertainment from the old days. But that didn’t have my attention as much as the elephant in the room did. I could hear her rustling around, could feel her ponderous bulk as she kneeled down.

When Leno’s jokes petered out, I flipped back to CNN, where they were just getting Larry King’s show on the air. As we sat there, watching the people on the Larry King panel make comments, I turned to S. "I just put my finger on what Palin’s speech reminded me of. It was the student council conventions I used to go too. We knew the text, we sounded enthusiastic, but the speeches themselves sounded like we were saying someone else's words." The women on the Larry King panel – all white, all middle-aged, all Democratic Party supporters – had quite a bit of fire in their eyes. But to a woman, they all stayed well clear of Bristol Palin, circling their wagons around the stance Sarah Palin took on the issues instead.

Sarah Palin, it appears, doesn’t seem like she's going to be a real problem for Obama. Until McCain picked Palin, a lot of his party faithful were on the fence about him. So far, she is basically shoring up his support among the people he was supposed to already have, with limited avenues to appeal to anyone who does not share her views. For all the hoopla over Palin, both parties are still wrestling over who will get a bigger percentage of the sliver of undecided voters and those voters who are apt to change their minds. Registering new voters may be more labor intensive and and sound less exciting than the latest soundbite, but in November, its the number of fingers pushing those buttons that will count the most

All this time I was thinking this, though, that damn elephant was still bothering me. Maybe, I said to myself, this is a trained elephant. Maybe trained elephants know how to take up less room. Maybe they have mastered the art of being light on their feet. And maybe they have a special place on their trunk that you rub to make them kneel down behind you before you give your mother’s new boss a hug.

Maybe that’s what young, black, unmarried teenaged mothers need, I mused to myself – their own elephant trainers.

Deal Or No Deal, John McCain

Survivor.

The Nanny.

Intervention.

The Flavor Of Love.

Cheaters.

And now, to join them, we have a brand new reality show, The Nominee’s Dilemma, starring that bad boy of the Republican Party, John McCain, as he struggles with the biggest decision of his political life – to either dump his running mate for someone who looks better, like he did to his first wife, or hang in there, like a good soldier, the way he did in Vietnam, to be tortured day and night for the next sixteen hundred hours, every hour on the hour, by Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.

This unbelievable, over the top, “couldn’t have written anything this good if you tried” drama behind the selection of little known Alaska Governor Sarah Palin has mesmerized the nation for the last few days.

If McCain were Donald Trump, the know-it-all billionaire real estate guru (unless Trump is filing for bankruptcy protection again this week) host of The Apprentice, he would have fired Sarah Palin by now, after having his blunt spoken, blonde haired assistant, Cindy McCain, break down how Palin's weaknesses and her liabilities are a detriment to the organization.

This urge that compels us to watch the Palin family’s lives unravel before our eyes is the same thing that motivates us to watch these reality shows, programs with central conflicts that are exaggerated and manipulated in order to appeal to our baser instincts.

Like it or not, John McCain, The Ultimate Fighter, has found himself in the middle of The Surreal Life, wishing his newly named running mate had received a visit from Supernanny. We now know one thing for certain - McCain had no Fear Factor , was not scared by the unknown facts or unvetted scandals when he chose The Weakest Link to be on the Republican ticket.

Do we enjoy seeing other people being humiliated that much? Do I really have to even answer that as I turn off my – damn, they were doing WHAT?

By this time next week, Sarah Palin may be wishing she had The Simple Life. I truly believe her husband and her future son-in-law will be ready to tear off those blue suits they look so uncomfortable in and build themselves an American Chopper.

Deal Or No Deal, John McCain.

Deal Or No Deal.

Critical Thinking Is The New Black

Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is the probable reason why so few engage in it.
--- Henry Ford

The firestorm that has erupted on the airwaves since John McCain chose Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate has members of the punditocracy spitting fire. I've never been a big fan of television commentators, especially political ones, but this latest wave of hysteria that is currently filling practically every news channel has pushed my distaste to full blown disgust.

Critical thinking seems to be in short supply these days.

Have we become so fragmented in our thinking that we have forgotten that we can only put new information into the proper context if we are constantly reevaluating the big picture we are trying to fit it into at the same time?

In spite of all the titillating new information that has hit the internet about Sarah Palin the last few days, in spite of all the adulation that Barack Obama's acceptance speech garnered, in spite of all the importance put on signals from Hillary Clinton to her die hard supporters , or pronouncements from Bill Clinton about the nominees "readiness", there is only one thing that will determine who the next president of the United States is - voter turnout.

The reactionary style of thinking practiced by today's punditocracy is as outdated as the rayon shirts we wore back in the 70's, as funny sounding as the shirts were funny looking.

One of the things that some people have had a hard time accepting about Obama is the way he seems to have risen almost effortlessly from community organizer to presidential nominee. His ability to achieve a certain clarity - that is, his ability to look through the exteriors, the camouflage, and the smokescreens allows him to focus on the actionable juncture in a given situation. Combine this with an affinity for thinking both globally and locally simultaneously, and a lot of the distractions we as Americans tend to agonize over don't seem to clutter his mind, or the minds of his key staffers.

For all the talk about issues, even from those who are students of the science of politics, there still remains an awful lot of Americans who make their political decisions based on how they feel about the candidate. And they often gauge their candidate's chances of winning on how many ads they run, or how photogenic they are. But in the end, it all comes down to the numbers - how many voters turn out in each state, and how many of these states each candidate garners.

Registering more voters, according to the Obama campaign strategists, enlarges this electorate, increasing Obama's ability to run a competitive race despite the challenges his candidacy presents. So what was the Obama campaign doing this Labor Day weekend, insted of slamming John McCain's selection of Sarah Palin, or stoking the fire underneath the Palin family's domestic drama? They were conducting the biggest voter registration drive in the history of modern politics.

Critical thinking, it seems, will be the new black this fall.