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.

Tone Deaf Campaigning

Hillary has the same problem our governor here in Georgia had last year - relying on advice and counsel from staffers who are probably ill equipped to understand the vagaries of the kind of black people who make up the majority of South Carolina's electorate.

I am watching this next primary closely because SC is my home state - I grew up with some of the Lowcountry pols who will be getting out the vote, and my father went to South Carolina State College around the same time as Jim Clyburn, the congressman who was "disheartened" by Hilary's supposedly disrespectful commentary about MLK.

Given the risk/reward ratio, the Clinton camp needs to leave the "what I think is important to you people" stuff at home - her camp runs a very, very high risk of hitting the wrong chord. One imagined slight, one catch phrase, one Tommy Hilfiger type rumor, one naked growl at the black man who is running for president - that's all it takes and she's back to being Miss Ann, the same Miss Ann whose thumb these folks just got from under LAST WEEK.

With almost two weeks to go, I think she is going to the typical Type A white guy thing - when all else fails, just charge right ahead - and miss the boat entirely.

The Deep South, even today, is not exactly what it appears to be at first glance.

Hillary, that white guy with two degrees and and American Express card in his pocket that you pay 20K a month to give you advice has no way to connect with the vibe in the hoods that ring Charleston, in the barracks that populate Columbia, in the swamps that cover the Pee Dee, in the foothills that push into the Piedmont from North Carolina and Tennessee.

These are the little guys, who have been hornswoggled and finagled out of their fair share of opportunity and their hard earned wages all their lives. It doesn't take much to rile them.