Clothesgate, a bizarre finale

COULD YOU  have ever imagined last August, when the McCain camp rocketed Sarah Palin into the politicosphere, that it would have had such a bizarre ending as the current Clothesgate scandal?   I mean,  to paraphrase T.S. Eliot, not with an intended bang on election day but rather with a whimper?  While she was jetting back to friendlier turf in Alaska, her GOP detractors, obviously fussy about how some of their money was spent,  were said to be jetting a lawyer to Wasilla or wherever to retrieve the fashionable  wardrobe that Palin  laid out for herself and family for more than $15o,00o.  My guess is that they won't find  the kind of goods that would end up in a neighborhood rummage sale.  So far, Palin doesn't appear to be all that repentant about the buying spree.  Besides, she may need every last stitch if she runs for president in 2012.  Meantime, I await the photo ops of an eagle-eyed  Washington lawyer poking around in Sarah's closets with receipts from Saks amid her complaints that her privacy was being invaded by disgruntled McCain males.   On the day she was  assigned to the ticket with McCain, I  wrote that it was political insanity. ( Every now and then I get it right.)  And now Clothesgate.  Weird.  Folks, you can't make this stuff up.  

Morning in America

THE MORNING AFTER:  Despite the rush of polls in the final days, nobody was more surprised by the size of Barack Obama's victory as I was. With vivid memories of the 2000 and 2004 elections, I winced when MSNBC political analyst Chuck Todd in mid-evening examined some voting figures and said,  "It's beginning to look like 2000 and 2004."  Shortly thereafter a funny thing happened to the equation:  Ohio turned over its 20 electoral votes to Obama and the 7 million vote rout of McCain was on in an election that was  widely viewed around the world.  The influential Italian newspaper, La Repubblica,   rushed into print with a  big quirky headline  that declared, "Obama presidente, l'America cambia pelle". (President Obama, America changes skin)   The editors probably  thought better of it and soon replaced it with "Obama presidente, E un altra America". (President Obama, it is another America." )

The point is, Europeans care deeply about what happens in our politics, which is a kind of flattery that we do not extend to them. I can't imagine any American newspaper running a big headline on front page recording a victory by Silvio Berlusconi.  

So, some bleary-eyed random thoughts:

As the New York Times noted this morning, the hard work now begins.  Considering the profoundly ingrained mess at home and around the world, it is fair to ask why anybody would work a couple years for a job that is fraught  with so many obstacles.  In Obama's case, it may be a major test of the irresistible force vs. the immovable object.  Let's hope not. 

For the Republican Party, when will it wise up to the fact that its "base" represents no more than 25 pct. of the electorate;  I thought it might have learned that much in 2006 when Ken Blackwell, a social conservative who claimed the support of a sea of ministers, was pummeled in Ohio's gubernatorial contest by Ted Strickland, who kept his own ministerial background out of view.  

More bad news for the aging GOP:  two-thirds of the voters under 30 years old cast ballots for Obama.  The Republicans' farm system is still mostly tied to senior citizens and rurals. Where, one might ask, would Obama have ended up in the party primaries if he had been a Republican? 

As for McCain, his finest moment came in the somber half-light of his concession speech; for once he seemed to be dictating his own conscience rather than the orchestrated cliches that misfired time and again.  His endless insistence during the campaign that he would curb lobbyists and veto earmarks was intellectually dishonest, to say the least, inasmuch as his campaign manager, Rick Davis, has been paid $2 million  as a lobbyist  to build a firewall around Fannie  Mae and Freddie Mac against regulation.    And what of Charlie Black, his senior advisor, who served well as a lobbyist for Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi exile  who led us into Iraq with his misinformation camapaign?  So now McCain will return to the Senate and his advisors will return for their big loaves of daily bread on K Street.  

As for Sarah Palin, one of McCain's horrendous campaign decisions (with plenty of nudging from his advisors) she can go back to Alaska to prepare for her 2012 presidential campaign.  No one up there will blame her for McCain's defeat.  Alaska is a numb  politically isolated state that even sent a convicted felon back to the U.S. Senate yesterday.     

Oh, George Bush and Dick Cheney?   I'm sure there are some back doors at the White House where both could slip out in the middle of the night with all of their cronies and not be seen again.  I never thought Bush's two terms would ever end. But we're getting close.  As of today, 76 more days, and as Gerald Ford declared upon succeeding Richard Nixon:  "Our national nightmare is over."    

Organizationally, there might have been a strong hint of the outcome when McCain called to Joe the Plumber in the crowd and Joe wasn't there.   I have a hunch that would not have happened with Obama's ground troops.

As for me, I'm going for a long walk.  My Steelers have a tough game on Sunday with Indianapolis and I want to figure out a game plan.  Maybe I can call on Obama''s textbook-perfect organization to offer me some hints.   On the other hand, we may all be too weary to do anything for... oh...three or four hours.    

The shame of McCain's refrain

SHAMELESS. How else can you describe the torrent of political pornography gushing from the McCain-Palin camp in the final days of the campaign?  John "Country First" McCain, desperate to put himself first, has left no rumor, whisper or slander unturned in leading his mob of Republican lemmings to the living rooms of American voters.  

Unable to clearly articulate his plan for America other than resorting to  such cliches as  being "pro growth and pro jobs" - whatever the hell those rhetorical placebos mean - McCain's only other non-radioactive bid to stroke the voters is that he is, um... tested.  Surely no one would discredit his POW experience, but he is in fact saying that any POW- and there were many -  is prepared to be president.  I think not. No more so than Sarah Palin is prepared to be president.  Since she was summarily added to the ticket she has proved to be no more than an anatomical expression for leering guys and a vacant substitute for Hillary Clinton as a not so subliminal walk-on role for the benefit of the ladies in her audience. 

In the final days, the McCain camp's rap sheet on Obama has included outrageous charges that he threatens to bring on a Holocaust (courtesy of a rightwing Republican Jewish organization), that he would be a threat to the peace and tranquillity - with maybe even bodily harm - to your family and mine  (you must know the origins of those fears with an African-American challenging McCain);  that Obama favored criminals over cops; that he was not an American citizen (don't kid yourself, folks; this is as racist as it gets without mentioning the n-word. )

The GOP has fallen so low into the muck that the Rep. John Boehner, the Republican minority leader from Hamilton, Oh.,  didn't hesitate to refer to Obama as "chicken shit".  Boehner? Wasn't he the guy who was seen passing out lobbyists' money on the House floor? 

However Tuesday's election turns out, neither McCain nor his party deserve to win.  The antagonists in this race would need more than $150,000 for clothes to freshen up their images after giving their brand of moral values a bad name, not only in America but to a watchful world whose support the U.S. will desperately need in the months and years ahead. The only   good news landing in the Democratic camp from their adversaries is that some guy named Cheney heartily endorsed his friend, John McCain.  With friends like that, you don't need many  enemies. 

Hemingway once described courage as "grace under pressure."  I didn't see any of that in McCain's frantic appeals to our worst instincts as we headed  to the polls. No honor.  No decency.  Even for the hysteria of ugly politics, it was despicably out of bounds.

Palin's home-front downer

IT USED to be a clever talking point for the partisans on both sides to note that even the hometown newspaper - the folks who knew the most about one's opponent - found reason not to endorse that opponent.  Well, now.  The largest paper in Alaska has endorsed Barack Obama!  Although the Anchorage Daily News insisted that both McCain and Sarah Palin were too "risky" to endorse in a troubled nation and world, here is the paper's conclusion about Alaska's governor:

        "Yet despite her formidable gifts, few who  have worked closely with the governor would argue she is truly ready to assume command of the most important, powerful nation on earth.  To step in and juggle the demands of an economic meltdown, two deadly wars and a deteriorating climate crises would stretch the governor  beyond her  range." 

          You betcha.  As Palin has become more of McCain's  chattering nuisance in the final days of the campaign, she has quickly reminded me of the disruptive student in a grade school class  who was constantly waving an  arm for permission to go to the bathroom.  

She qualified for the role!

Some debate, huh?  What  restraint Joe Biden must have called upon to remain a perfect gentleman against an opponent who appeared to be auditioning for a high school class play! Sarah Palin would have won the role easily.   She repeated her lines perfectly as they skidded from one Republican talking point to another.  As scripted for her, she went after Obama/Biden like the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse:  Win the war without surrender...cut taxes for Joe Sixpack ... reform the government (without mentioning  George Bush's central role in the meltdown)... deliver all of us from evil.  Tax-cutting has been a GOP staple  in the GOP playbook as far back as I can remember.  And guess what?  Read-my-lips Bush  (the present incumbent's father) campaigned fiercely against taxes and then went on to support new taxes.  Of course he did. So have others. 

Paul Krugman pointed out that Palin's closing testament to freedom was lifted from Ronald Reagan's appeal to the the wives of physicians in the early 1960s (not yet president) to resist, um...  socialistic Medicare.  Is that what she really wants to tell Joe Sixpack?

She also told Fox News (where else?) that she was annoyed by some of Katie Couric's questions and that she wants to talk to Americans "without the filter."  Bush, the current one, used to refer to filters, too.  He preferred to read the unfiltered morning briefings from his staff rather than  newspapers.  My hunch is that he was peeking at other printed words, too, but it's always comforting  to attack the left-wing media,  which is largely owned by Republican businessmen.

I've been thinking about filters and decided there is no higher calling than to filter the filters, the latter being those politicians and others who command public attention.  So journalistic filters must figure out how to discard the nonsense and find the stuff that is often purposely left out by the newsmakers.   That may be confusing, I know,  but I can live with it.