1. A Duck by Any Other Name

     There are many ways to look at the presidential election just concluded.  But if it is whittled down to its basest element and seen as a simple contest between two people, which of course, is what all the best elections usually become, there is one salient point of difference on which the vote turned.
     In the metaphorical abstract this issue was not unlike two debaters who have a table between them with a duck on it.  Obama merely had to prove his central thesis that the duck was a duck.  McCain had to convince the crowd not only that the duck was not a duck (or perhaps a figment of their imagination) but that, in the bargain, Obama was a werewolf waiting for a full moon.  
    Where Obama’s case was logical and precise, McCain’s dilemma dictated the illogic of his entire campaign.  His argument was circuitous, one step from honesty and reality removed.  It was all sleight of mind and misdirection and in the end by never forcefully separating himself from the ugly duckling policies and lame duck presidency of George W. Bush, he was the one who was a dead duck on election day.
     This was not an eider/or proposition.  There were four things prior to the election that most observers identified as necessary to the success of McCain’s campaign.  1) Divorce himself from Bush and other unpopular policies, particularly those not essential to the core republican message.  2) Move forcefully and deftly to the middle of the political battleground for, clearly, whoever won the middle would win the race.  3) Define a new republican strategic theory which would appeal to the nation’s imagination.  4a) Allay and put to rest all concerns about his age (72).   4b) Underscore Obama’s inexperience as the centerpiece of a larger case against his fitness for office.  
     To the extent he tried, he succeeded at none of these four points.  In a fateful mistake he tacked to the right instead of the middle and did nothing of a policy nature to distinguish himself from Bush.  And when he chose as his running mate an untried governor of Alaska new to the national stage (Sarah Palin) he rather neatly effected a two-fer maneuver.   Her pick tied the last of these two points together and lost them both, bringing the issue of his age to the fore while undercutting the effectiveness of his insinuation about Obama’s inexperience.
     Obviously for any republican nominee to separate himself from the politics of George Bush would be problematic, but the issue had to be ruthlessly attacked, the sooner in the campaign the better.  Very early on, much as Obama did effectively in the primary to negate the race issue, McCain had to sever the umbilical to unpopular Bush era politics.  Undoubtedly this would have cost him support in his base in the short term which he would have had to work hard regain during the course of the rest of the campaign.  Hard as it would be to find the proper formula to separate his run for the White House from the worst of recent republican policies, it was political suicide to try to merely finesse them.  
    After all, Bush was sitting on an historic disapproval rate of over 75% and polls showed that 80% of Americans thought the country was headed in the wrong direction.  To have not done more to differentiate himself from Bush was a losing position.  Once he and his advisors decided to keep their own ducks in line while ignoring the largest duck in the room it placed them even more on the defensive than his campaign needed to be.  From that point on, having abdicated an intelligent strategic position, McCain was left with only bare tactics to lean on, tactics which by their nature became predictably more shallow and negative as the campaign continued.
    The simple math of the campaign was that a vote lost on the right, as it would have nowhere else to go, might be regained by election day; but a vote lost in the middle would be lost for good.  A vote lost on the right might eventuate in a no-show at the polls.  This would be bad but not as bad as a vote lost in the middle which would swing to Obama, doubling its cost to McCain.
     McCain had a difficult task.  He was trying to bridge a fifty foot chasm with a thirty foot bridge.  If he ran to the middle he would loose his base and if he shored up his base he would lose the center.  But his only chance, the only conceivable hope he had was to move to the middle and try to the bring the right along later.  Therefore a carefully conceived, artfully arranged speech, which he has shown he is capable of making – consider his graceful concession speech – appealing more to voters’ ideals and imagination than their prejudices might have done much to hold the center in play.  A better choice of running mate – Romney say – may not have energized the base the way Palin did, but have served him much better over the long haul to bring the right back on board.  
    To be sure no one could say for certain that even with a better and more coherent campaign strategy he would have won.  But to choose the path he did in the name of party unity was a sure loser.  The alternative danger was that by running to the middle he might have split the party and been blamed for it later.  But actually, piercing his party’s worst self-destructive illusions and reforming its failures would have been the most proper and far sighted path to take.  A realistic and cathartic approach would have made the Republican Party stronger sooner rather than as weak as it is today whit no real foundation to build on for the future.  Instead, McCain took the easy and opposite route.  He tried to shore up his base with substance and appeal to the middle orally, with smoke and mirrors, a tactic which has admittedly worked before, but that in this environment was doomed to fail.  
    McCain and his advisors (many of whom – tellingly – were from the Bush camp) decided to pretend that the duck on the table was not a duck at all and duck the duck issue entirely.  From this point on, like a quack doctor he loyally donned his best duck suit, with feathers, bills, webbed feet and all, and then tried to prove the ugliest Aflac ducklings of failed republican dogma were really swans.  Finally, in desperation, as his ultimate distraction, he tried to prove the duck was really a moose.   
    He and his team consciously tried to make the campaign about personalities rather than policies.  This was not only the least honest approach and the one least likely to succeed but the one that set them up for all their later mistakes and ultimate fall.  This decision entirely misjudged the seriousness of the electorate which for a change was more determined than ever before to actually pay attention and not to be so easily duped and seduced as before by Bush type irrelevancies and dishonest campaign rhetoric.  McCain even unwisely embraced bad Bush policies that he had previously properly rejected and in so doing harmed his own identity as a maverick.
    Finally, structurally hamstrung by his inability to effectively distinguish his economic and foreign policy from Bush’s, the housing credit crunch and resultant economic collapse was the predictable denoument to his hopes.  Though waged with impressive vigor, his campaign became a series of disconnected policies, bizarre references and imagery and unfounded allegations.  The poor duck, the central, symbolic gaping flaw at the core of his campaign, was left alone to quack and waddle and poop at will while McCain could only sputter that Obama must be a socialist with terrorist tendencies.
     Running as a great maverick, McCain, in his first decision exhibited none of the characteristics of maverickhood.  His timidly conceived campaign had less chance of survival than a lawyer duck hunting with Dick Cheney, where all the ducks get away and only the shyster gets shot. McCain was banking on the mistakes Obama might make to win.  But he didn’t make any.  Roosevelt was famously characterized as not a first rate intellect but a first rate temperament.  Obama, as it has played out, has both.
     Obama’s campaign, in contradistinction to McCain’s, never lost its focus.  In place of McCain’s infatuation with personality and negative campaign vilification, Obama offered a tired, restless nation hope and unification.  Of course, negative campaigning works on the fearful and the uninformed and there was a point in the campaign where Obama had to adjust his own tactics and become more polemical in defense of himself and in attack of McCain.  This was a calibration he maintained to the end of the campaign, sloughing off McCain and Palin’s scurrilous charges as easily as a man swatting away flies.  All the while the core of Obama’s campaign strategy was religiously maintained.  
     Quite simply this was: a duck is a duck is a duck.  John McCain looks like George W. Bush.  If he looks like a Bush, waddles like a Bush, poops like a Bush, quacks, talks, taxes and governs like a Bush; he is a Bush.  To this simple obvious charge McCain never had an intelligent reply, not at the beginning of the campaign nor through to its end.   The Obama refrain remained as devastatingly simple as it stayed remarkably consistent.  And McCain, because he was afraid of splitting the party, kept it together to no particular winning purpose and drove them all down to defeat together. 
 
2. The Intellectual Terrorists Among Us

Emblematic of this whole sordid, shambling sham of a campaign was Joe the Plumber.  He burst like a badly corroded pipe joint onto the scene by seeking to entrap Obama in a hypothetical.  He said he was thinking about buying a business for $250,000 and asked innocently if he could eventually be liable for taxes under Obama's plan.

First of all, he wasn't about to buy a business for a quarter of a million dollars.  Secondly, to buy a business for a quarter of a million doesn't mean you will see a quarter of a million in profit the first year which could be taxed.  If you think so you aren't fit to think about owning a business to start with.

So Joe loudly professed he was willing to avoid real tax relief now which might actually help him achieve a greater prosperity later, all to avoid paying an imaginary tax on imaginary future profits he will never see from an imaginary business he is never going to be able to afford to buy.

With logic like this, Joe the Plumber may be dumber than the stuff you find clogging your drain at home.  And yet this is the dupe John McCain put forward down the stretch as one of the leading lights of his entire campaign?  Anyone who really was paying attention knew that Joe was really proving Obama’s case more than he was McCain’s.  It makes you think that John may have thought the public were all as dumb and intellectually passive as Joe.

To boot, plumbing was a particularly dangerous metaphor for those clogging up the pipes of government to employ.  They had to know that sooner or later the public would just decide to say, “ah what the hell, let’s just flush 'em all.”

In the same conversation with Joe the Plumber, suspiciously caught on tape, Obama said something about “sharing the wealth”, as opposed obviously to the hoarding of it.  McCain seized on this phrase in a paroxysm of disgust at the thought of equitable distribution of wealth in our society.  His campaign immediately extrapolated this fairly innocuous thought into socialism and Marxism and God could only imagine what. 

That the increasingly unjust distribution of wealth was a losing proposition for republicans to emphasize in this wobbly economy entirely escaped them.  But then republicans assume that all Americans see money as they do.  They believe in a ratchet up economy where money only travels one way, meaning that what is ours is theirs but what is theirs is never ours. 

The current government bailout of Wall Street illustrates this point rather precisely.  Our leaders assume that whatever benefits big financial and corporate institutions benefits the country.  This is not true.  In fact what benefits the people of the country will necessarily benefit the banking and financial institutions but what benefits Wall Street will not necessarily benefit the general public.  Again, what is ours is theirs but what is theirs is not necessarily ours.  They go berserk at the though of a regular American receiving a well deserved dime of relief but hardly flinch at throwing billions at undeserving millionaires.

Their patriotic use of “we” in terms of money then, when fully understood, is always selective.  So “we” in fiscal policy always really just means them when “them” only means the most elite class of the very well to do.  And what’s good for “them” (which they call “we”) must be good for us even when it obviously isn’t.  But in their minds this is not a two way street because what is good for us, in their minds, is not necessarily good for them.  

Hence “we” in their governing jargon becomes an exclusionary concept which denies the majority equal rights with the few.  Until eventually, perversely, what’s good for us and even good for the country somehow becomes bad for them and their goals become enemies of the state.  So when Bush covets a surplus and says that it’s “your” money he really doesn’t mean “our” money, he means it’s his and his buddies, or “their” money and designs a tax cut accordingly.   This means that all “our” money is mysteriously transformed in the back of their minds foreign to what they say with their mouths into “theirs.”   And voila, republican tax cuts and bailouts always only provide “relief” for the wealthy and no one else.  It’s a rule of law.

So when Obama says he will repeal this tax “relief” Bush showered on the very rich, they say that he will raise “our” taxes, when they really mean he will raise “their” (meaning the very wealthy”s) taxes, even though Obama’s plan distinctly calls for tax relief for the vast majority of all other (than them) Americans, which is to say “us.”   In the republican lexicon “we” (meaning the vast majority of the people of the country) never quite seem to ever have a pronoun of our own, unless it is turned into a pejorative of “they” or “them”.  As in “they” or “those” people (meaning us) never work, cheat or inherit like “we” do and so don’t deserve the tax breaks, incentives and benefits that “we” (meaning them, of course) good Americans already have.

These specious cries raised against Obama about his being a closet Commie went hand in hand with other outrageous claims against him.  Since he once sat on a board in Chicago with a sixties era radical McCain inferred that he was infested with radicalism from this tenuous association.  Why he wasn’t similarly affected with the disease of conservatism from the pillars of conservative society who sat on the same board was never explained.  Nope, he apparently could be influenced only leftward and therefore became culpable after the fact for actions supported by this guy when Obama was a child decades prior to his even having met him.  That sixties radical virus must have been some potent stuff to lay dormant for decades just waiting to infect Obama. 

But that’s hardly all.  Obama also chose to attend grade school in Indonesia apparently for no other reason than in order to become indoctrinated in al Qaeda type radicalism decades before al Qaeda existed – perhaps in a Madrassa - though he wasn’t a Muslim and it really was just a grade school.  Part of the time it was a Catholic grade school at that.  Talk about damning.  For a guy they were saying was dangerously inexperienced this was rather precocious, wouldn’t you say, all this suspicious radical revolutionary activity Obama was engaged in before he’d even reached the age of ten?

All denials of his complicity in these activities he didn’t know anything about were like water off a duck’s back to Sarah Palin (so sensitive by nature that she alone among humans could intuit deep foreign policy experience from Russians flying tens of thousands of feet overhead in Alaskan airspace).  She accused Obama of not only being a socialist but of “palling around with terrorists” at the same time she was more or less otherwise patriotically engaged playing soccer mom and sleeping with a secessionist.

But later Obama, this godless Marxist, Weatherman, radical Muslim – pick one - somehow segued back to the Christian religion (no one ever claimed the path to radicalism was ever straight).  His enemies were forced to tacitly admit his Christianity only because they wanted to tie him to the fiery Jeremiah Wright, the pastor of the church he attended in Chicago.  This could have been a problem for Obama if he had expressed any sympathy for the more extreme views that Wright held, but he didn’t.  In the real world to secretly support an opinion and publicly reject it are generally held to be two entirely different things.  In the odd and wonderful world of republican robo calls, however, even the two most extremely opposed positions can be made to seem as one. 

Fortunately the republicans weren’t able to discover Herr O’bama’s teenage years in Belfast with the IRA or his activities with the Red Brigade or his close sympathy with Pol Pot, General Pinochet, Che’ and Ho Chi Min or the phone lines would have really been burning.

The way they were headed, if the election had lasted longer, it was only a matter of time before the McCain Palin campaign came out foursquare against all book learnin’, new fangled idears, whippersnappers in general and insisted not just on book burnin’ but computer confiscatin’ and maybe even a good old fashioned inquisition (perhaps with a waterboarding auto da fe’ at Guantanamo as a central element) before the end days came upon us.

 I recount this stuff not with pleasure but mainly in astonishment that a modern political campaign would seemingly place such stock in such largely self-refuting nonsense.  The shallowness of these bizarre charges is proof positive of the essential emptiness of republican campaign strategy.  The amazing thing is that the extreme right wing of the republican party even today is in lamentation that they didn’t do more of this crap sooner even though the evidence is that what they did of it backfired and sent the McCain camp into a long slow spiral of low farce and high ridicule.

3. The Right's Last Rites

     This shows the extent which extremely unctuous interests have made themselves to home in the republican enclave.  Once McCain gravitated to them they fatally tainted his campaign more than helped it.  Karl Rove and his cynical acolytes who ran the McCain campaign used to be on the extreme right of the Republican Party, now they are its mainstream.  The electorate seeking change came to regard the Republican Party as an anchor tied to McCain’s right foot and Bush policies a mighty weight hung around his neck.  
    Once he came to the conclusion that it was more important to appease the unappeasable right McCain simultaneously gave up all rights to the term maverick and all realistic hopes of winning the election.  A party which becomes dominated by its own extremes deserves the oblivion to which it will be consigned.  After all, these are the same people who voted for the like minded George Bush as their leader, savior and exegesis.  He was their perfect candidate and gave them exactly everything they have always said they wanted.  Ultimately the Republican Party repents nothing about the Bush years.
    Prior to the election, to check the lunacy gauge, always a fertile resource and  barometer for such a measurement, I was listening to Rush Limbaugh.  He was playing selected excerpted Jeremiah Wright jeremiads interspersed with his own random rantings until pretty soon I was unable to distinguish one harangue from the other.  I found myself wondering if it was more harmful for millions to be infected with low level dosages of daily Rush Limbaugh on national radio for hours on end or for a few hundred to hear Rev. Wright speak once a week.
    Clearly a dishonest indoctrinaire like Limbaugh, whose record of harm is not diluted by any of the good deeds, social work and salutary religious theology that Wright is known for in his community, is the far more destructive of the two.  Wright represents freedom of speech, Limbaugh the desecration of it.  His is unadulterated propaganda without objective truth, moral compass or redeeming social consciousness to guide it.  And Limbaugh is more nimble than some other of his ilk as nuance and substance escapes most other right wing talk show loonies like nimbus clouds dissipate on a sunny day.  
     Most people understand that engaging in bombastic denial of any truth and proven fact which does not fit a prewritten script or feed an inbred advantage would seem the least effective form and least admirable betrayal of “journalism”.  This is democracy turned into sheer demagoguery.  So it’s odd, given their our-side-right-or-wrong approach to “news”, that these paragons of propaganda blame the legitimate press for being “biased.”  
    For professional, bought and paid for, right wing bloviators to criticize real journalists actually trying to do their jobs well is a claim hard to take very seriously.  Somehow, to their weirdly distempered minds, to be always on the take, to engage in prejudices by design and avocation, to embrace duplicity as a career move, to always seek to mislead and spin and smear and misconstrue as a way of life and be permanently deformed with biases for personal profit, is somehow preferable to trying to be objective and occasionally let a bias slip, is a bit hard to swallow.
    Radio propaganda, after all, is a term of art that was originally applied to the Nazis and Commies only to be perfected by the modern operators on the right wing today who dominate AM radio.  It takes a rare breed of cat to want to emulate such infamous predecessors and seek to continue their nefarious work.  Because, really isn’t it the lowest form of life known to be a paid political liar and get wealthy doing it.  .  
    A quote I’ve seen attributed to Michelangelo goes: “The greater danger is not that we set our hopes too high and fail to reach them.  It is that they are too low and we do.”  There is no bar or standard lower than the one these people have set for themselves.  Streetwalkers often at least have the justification of economic necessity to explain their actions.  Those who engage in political duplicity as a way of life have no excuse.  Yet still, even given their severe defeat in the last election arch conservatives have been quick to say that the country is still with them!  It is a center right country they say, though the center is not static, and the country has just shifted to the left.
     What they fail to understand is that an ideologue, such as they are, is really just a longer word for idiot. They have value in their way, in their time, and when their time comes they may prove a valuable and necessary tool to swell a progress, start a scene or two.   But more fundamentally an ideologue is like a broken watch, right twice a day.  In the real world, generically speaking, an ideologue may be right once or twice a generation - tops.  What the Limbaughs of the world have not yet grasped is that their hour is up.  In six months time the country will have moved far beyond their minds’ limited capacity to comprehend and left them outstanding in an empty field of their own design long after the parade they were waiting for has passed by and already faded from view.