Huge turnout forecasts a Democratic blowout. Obama owns the hope and change message, and having a wave of new voters suggests that his message caught on.
McCain’s blather about a late-campaign surge only brings more Obama people out in the hopes of staving McCain off from stealing the campaign at the last minute.
What it might do is run cover for GOP vote stealing. All McCain needs is a narrative, and an argument abut the liberal media bias, and he has a way to tamp down protest of the take. All it takes is the story – enough to encourage people to go back to the polls and fight again for a candidate, rather than an independent movement for social change.
The last thing keeping Obama from the Presidency is vodka (and not in the “George Bush history of alcoholism” way). Here’s what I mean:
If you sit and stare at a potato long enough, it stops being a potato, and starts becoming vodka.
Obama has been the front runner for a couple weeks now, and as election day approaches, each poll that puts him substantially ahead of McCain increases voter and media scrutiny on him. He receives more and more coverage as a nearly president-elect, people begin to speculate on cabinet choices, governance style, and divided government under an Obama Presidency. Through all of this, the sense of Obama as a fresh face with endless promise begins to morph a little, and maybe wear at the edges.
At the same time, McCain begins flinging anything and everything he can at Obama, hoping that any one of them could become an excuse for a voter to change their genuine interest in Obama into an excuse not to vote for him. “I like Obama but…” will be the shape of a McCain upset, and until Tuesday, expect everything including the kitchen sink to fly in the hope of hooking more and more “Obama, but…” voters.
McCain and the GOP have been rolling hard with their TV spots lately – the last few have been very effective, and if they started with this stuff earlier in the campaign, they had a chance. The last 3 or 4 have been focused on single messages, to the point, and way good
First: “I am Joe the Plumber” – nice everyman type ad, does a good job of subtly otherizing Obama
Second: ‘Storm’ – a good mobile metaphor for experience that gives off a lot of associated meanings, but remains focused clean and simple on the experience issue
Third – “Ladies and Gentleman” – Takes Joe Biden’s words and flips them against Obama – a good move when Biden was selected to bolster Obama’s foreign policy credentials. Also makes a pretty good visual argument about an externally dangerous world.
There’s nothing left to say. McCain tried to co-opt Obama’s frame with the Palin pick, and it ended up sinking him. I think people will look back and say he had a fighting chance as the voice of reason and experience next to the up-and-comer with no real background (think Celeb ad), but as soon as he tried to change tack and go for the mantle of change, he lost momentum on both fronts. It seems like McCain never fully grappled with the fact that Obama’s narrative worked because of who he is, what he looks like, and his story. It wasn’t about reform policies – how many campaign reform bills you backed, times you took on your party – Obama doesn’t look like old politics, McCain does.
Which doesn’t mean he was doomed – or slated to be in a spot as bad as the one he’s in now. The tried and true, steady hand message like the one in McCain’s Storm ad, had a shot at effectiveness – even in 2004, in the middle of the worst part of the War in Iraq, after fucking Abu Ghraib, and people went for the fear and dread over a new face, and McCain had it. But he tried to have it both ways, and Obama out classed him – in all senses of the word.
It seems like the McCain campaign is burning through a book of epithets working backwards from now (Celeb ads) to the 80s/90s (Big Government), to the 60s (Bill Ayers) all the way back to the good ol’ Red Scare 50s (this bullshit). I’m kinda digging the old school flavor.
Anyways – the argument against Obama from the right apparently peaked when they went after Bill Ayers. Now, folks are going after a radio interview from 2001 of Obama talking about how to interpret the Constitution. (Srsly, as if the Constitution still mattered) This is really the end of the line – picking through old radio clips about Constitutional Law in the hopes that it proves something about Obama’s un-Americanness.
It seems petty, but I guess the only really appeal of the clip is the tone, with Obama sounding like the elitist college professor type that folks pigeonhole him for – it might be dangerous to his campaign because it keeps him from sounding like the ‘common man’. I suspect his is an ‘above the fray’ moment for the campaign and you’ll hear nothing more of it from Obama.
McCain/Obama have done lots of talking, and lots of campaigning, but somehow they forgot to talk about:
1. Torture – I’m not talking about McCain war stories, I mean waterboarding, ‘advanced interrogation’ techniques and extraordinary rendition. The total silence surrounding this issue means that the ‘08 election effectively establishes torture as a centerpiece of American foreign policy for the long-haul. (The time to really end this was ‘04, right after Abu Ghraib, but Kerry refused to challenge Bush on the issue)
2. Wiretapping/Executive Authority – the real problem with the FISA bill was that it retroactively sanctioned the President’s overreaching in setting up the taps in the first place. It’s not like spying is even popular, but I think Obama and McCain both want to have a strong Executive Branch with themselves in charge.
3. The Gulf Coast - Hurricanes. Wiping out whole cities. New Orleans remains a mess, Galveston was annihilated, other parts of the coast were devastated in ways that remain invisible to most of the country. Rebuilding the coast requires a huge investment from the Federal Government that should be the centerpiece of a bigger infrastructure rebuilding process, but both candidates were silent.
4. Immigration – McCain even authored legislation on the issue. I guess Obama avoided it to not be seen as any more foreign than people believe him to be already, but this one isn’t going away.
5. Incarceration – Not that I expected anything out of either candidate, but holy shit 2 million people is a lot of people to have in jail. US prison policy hurts everyone it touches, and needs to be addressed in a way that reduces the number of people put in jail.
David Frum. This man hates you. From Urban Mixer's flickr photostream
When David motherfucking Frum is able to write a Washington Post editorial on the good old days of Republican campaigning, something is up. This man spearheaded the Bush campaign message during his first Presidency, and embodies the most effective use of divide, scare and surveil GOP electoral politics.
Yet, somehow he manages to chide his way out of responsibility for the McCain campaign message (run by fellow Bushie Steve Schmidt) that takes the last 8 years to their logical extreme. Frum forecasts the way the Republicans will frame the first 2 years of an Obama Presidency:
1. The Good and the Bad GOP – folks will try to divide the party into radicals and moderates, and endorse a shift back to the party’s “middle ground” of deregulation and old school culture wars issues like gay marriage and creeping restrictions on a woman’s right to choose.
2. Victimhood – people on the right will once again paint Washington as the stomping grounds of the loony-left big-government eggheads, imposing a radical agenda on the Real People of America. The Republican Party will become the party of victimhood, turning every policy into an abuse of power by the ascendant Democratic party.
The backpeddling and second guessing has already begun, and I think Democrats need to avoid self-congratulation if they want to avoid a big GOP pushback in 2010, 1994 style.
When the Sarah Palin nomination was announced, Pat Buchanan called her selection “the biggest political gamble, just about in American history”
I think we can now conclude what the payout from that gamble will be: Palin is hurting McCain big time, and she has started to out-Maverick McCain.
Palin was an unknown to America, and apparently also to the McCain campaign. Obama should hold on to that 130 million and invest in housing or something, it looks like it might be a waste to spend it in other ways.
Oh shit – I just caught up with this story about the alleged beating of a McCain supporter in Pennsylvania – not only does it follow the form of the key Joe the Plumber and Palin/Wolves narratives of the McCain campaign, it reveals what makes this campaign season so different from the others that have gone before.
Obama proved that Lakoff was right – he’s followed many of George’s recommendations to a T, to great effect. The most interesting part about Lakoff’s strategy is how much he talks about it – he has injected discourse about discourse into the campaign and helped make McCain’s incompetence running his race a key issue.
And that’s why Ashley Todd’s fake story about being assaulted matters. Because it links McCain with the rhetorical tactics of the Willie Horton ad, and sinks him for playing dirty. Progressive folks and politics in general now talks about strategic communications more than communications itself – and the beating story links McCain with a type of Attwater hardball that this discussion about communication roundly rejects.
Like this, but better. from Vincent J. Brown's flickr
When McCain decided to roll out his Bill Ayers strategy, Obama was waiting with Keating Economics. Now that it looks like the election might take a turn for the national-security nitty-gritty, I’m interested to see what Obama has in store.
The most devastating argument against McCain is the Swiftboat: attacking him where he’s strongest. This Village Voice article is where I think the national security/’support our troops’ argument is headed – McCain votes against vets. There was already a disruption at the RNC about this, and I bet there’s a hoard of vets with good stories to tell about how McCain left them high and dry.
Continued insanity: ‘al Qaeda’ endorsed John McCain for President, because he’s “impetuous” and will continue the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan indefinitely. Expect endless dissection of comments and a return by McCain to the national security theme that seems to be rising again ever since Joe Biden said that stupid shit about an international crisis testing Obama. The Democrats are rolling hard with the “erratic” story line vs. McCain, but I expect that the real upshot of the national security discussion will be in reminding people that OH THERE ARE STILL TERRORISTS AND JOHN MCCAIN IS A REPUBLICAN SO TRUST HIM. Also, the terrorist vote is split: Hamas really likes Obama, which means that any attempt to spin the endorsement back on McCain will backfire and continue to remind people that Obama doesn’t look like a real American, while John McCain used to defend our country with his bare hands in Vietnam.
Images of images. from christhedunn's flickr photostream.
McCain’s last hope for the Presidency lies in keeping the meta-physics of his campaign in order. People have begun to see him as erratic based on how he led his campaign for the Presidency, and so he’s trying to get back on track by rationalizing how his decisions have been made. The last ditch efforts for covering up his negative attacks are trying to articulate a bizarre tit-for-tat process whereby Obama somehow incited McCain to talk about Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright. He’s also pursuing an argument about the need to keep government divided between Democrats and Republicans on the assumption that the House and the Senate will be majority Democrat come January.
We’ve reached a point in the media environment where the actual meaning of a campaign is in how it describes the actions it takes. McCain constantly talks about Obama’s decision to attack Joe the Plumber – not the facts of the attack itself; just as Obama talks about the negativity and cynicism of the McCain campaign on his stump. McCain lost debate 3 not because of what he said, but because his non-verbals showed that he was ‘out of control’ and unprepared for the debate. Obama has run a slick, well paced campaign that won him as many points as the actual things he said during it.
McCain’s attempt to brand Obama doesn’t need to make sense, it just needs to be repeated. Check out this video via Andrew Sullivan:
there’s a point at about 2:30, when a woman talks about Obama and Bill Ayers. She clearly knows nothing about it, and reverts to simple telegraphic speech to make her point “Obama. Ayers. Connection. What else do you need to know?”
This is the type of simple-associative connections at the core of Republican campaign strategy, as explained by George Lakoff. They’ll set up a frame where ‘Obama’ ‘Ayers’ and ‘Terrorist’ are powerfully linked, along with several other word-images (probably something about ‘bin Laden’ and ‘evil’) that activate each other in a network of ideas. Once the frame is set up, even attempts to refute the claim using the same words will reinforce the associations. That’s why folks will believe some of this crap, without being able to tell you anything about what it means, or why it’s true.
The coffee of Barack Obama. from Barrybar's flickr photostream
I’m glad to see the McCain/Palin campaign pushing dangerous and absurd talking points to their full ‘logical’ conclusion, at which point they simply fall apart under the weight of their own stupidity.
For instance, I would be glad to take another week or two of the election just to get John McCain and Sarah Palin on TV to explain things like “pro-American America” then watch their words turn to ash in their mouths. I want to see these arguments tumble down the slippery slope to their wretched death.
…brilliant distraction, and he made it a character issue about Obama. He made Obama seem callous, and indifferent to the needs of Joe (stand in for everyone).
Also means McCain can give speeches like this one: “The response from Senator Obama and his campaign yesterday was to attack Joe,” Mr. McCain said. “People are digging through his personal life, and he has TV crews camped out in front of his house. He didn’t ask for Senator Obama to come to his house. He wasn’t recruited or prompted by our campaign. He just asked a question. And Americans ought to be able to ask Senator Obama tough questions without being smeared and targeted with political attacks.”
Remember when McCain went on the offense because ‘the left’ attacked Palin? Yeah, same thing. He’s moving the narrative from ‘on the defensive’ to ‘victimized,’ which is a much more rhetorically powerful position.
I thought McCain bungled his “Joe” move because he made it a talking point, rather than a real story. Now, he’s picked up a new story – that the ‘left’ will tear apart a regular American for their own political ends – as allegory for his argument about ‘big government liberals’ and taxation. And that’s almost a winning position – polls have McCain picking up steam a little bit, and the media outlook doesn’t look quite so bleak. Fortunately for Obama, “Joe the Plumber” is a flash in the pan type of story that will probably be gone as soon as the new fundraising numbers come out and the news cycle turns over.
Second reaction: toss-up, maybe a little bit of Obama lean. McCain came out of the gates strong with the Joe story, but it lost its impact when he kept riding the point – it stopped being a compassionate story and started looking more and more like a talking point as the debate wore on. Reagan told stories like this but switched them up and kept moving on as in casual speech; McCain is no Reagan.
Obama fell behind in verbal talking points, but kept still. By that I mean that McCain was a blinking, figidity, interrupting mess while Obama spoke, which hurts McCain on the new key Obama talking point -that McCain is ‘erratic’ and out of control of his campaign (himself).
Third reaction: Obama made a coherent and cogent defense of a women’s right to choose in a Presidential debate. That is very nice. I think that’s the biggest impact his campaign has made – that he articulates intelligent defenses of progressive ideals, like he did on healthcare in the second debate (“I believe healthcare is a right”) and in his acceptance speech.
However, the danger is that he undermines many of those values elsewhere: I don’t believe coal power is good, tort reform is downright evil, and Obama NEVER ONCE TALKED ABOUT WIRETAPPING TORTURE OR PRESIDENTIAL POWERS. Seriously folks. This campaign cements the fact that torture, wiretapping and an imperial presidency will be part of American politics for years to come. And that is terrifying.
I’ve decided to keep up my criticism of Obama even as I campaign against McCain because I don’t think people should be caught unprepared for the sweet talkin’ back stabbing President Obama might become. And this debate only made me more wary.
That being said, Obama is one of the most interesting and compelling symbols in the history of American politics, and I don’t want to lose track of the important things he’s doing for our political discourse. He is advocating progressive ideals, he is talking on the grossness of the way Bush ran the last 8 years (rhetorically at least), and doing it all in a way that makes people feel empowered.
A little visual analysis, old school. Been reading the BAG again.
Here’s the first piece of compelling visual media the Obama campaign has created in a while:
This spot works because it pushes the focus onto McCain almost exclusively – it doesn’t mention Barack Obama once, and that’s fine. It tries to define McCain at a point when Mac needs an image overhaul – particularly on the issue of financial regulation
Terribly cinematic, it opens with a darkened an obscured clip of Charles Keating in a prison jumpsuit, behind a chain-linked fence, cut to Washington DC and a congressional hearing with John McCain looking younger and uncomfortably guilty, of something. He shifts awkwardly in his seat, holds his hands, then we see him taking an oath – and with the establishing shots previously, there’s a suspicion that it’s not an oath of office.
Those shots lead to our current economic downturn, represented by nervous stockbrokers, folks losing their jobs at Lehman. Another clip of nervous, shifty McCain followed by a Phil Gramm shot (Texas is the center of everything good in politics), some testimonial from economist-man, and then the ’screen’ shatters and ‘Keating economics’ appears.
I like it because it makes a clear association between McCain and criminality, much like the association McCain is trying to make with Obama-Ayers. However, this has the visual goods: McCain on trial, performing the body language of the guilty (in his stiff, bizarre fashion of course), and the associated imagery of someone in prison fatigues. The visual tone is on point: dark, with the lined-filter that suggests we’re watching re-mediated clips of the established public record, a televised event that itself suggests scandal.
McCain’s demeanor in the spot takes him on his core quality of certainty and poise. He looks unconfortable throughout, the clips in the spot show him looking around, making jerky , quick movements with his hands, manifesting him as shifty and uncertain – quite the opposite of the straight shooting maverick he wants us to see.
This week in Pinocchio Politics: Doubt! A sudden materialization! Games!
Last week began with a smattering of chaos, what with the ongoing saga of the downfall of industrial civilization as we know it – thought it at least produced interesting web content from Pinocchio Politics partners, as you can see here.
The point being that trying ot keep up with the latest news-cycle was running us in circles – the brand and its offshoots would do much better with longer-range planning that probably honestly needed to be done months ago. As appealing as it seems to build instant campaigns out of shifting coalitions and proprietary press lists, effective organizing requires face to face, long term strategic thinking from the get-go.
The best breaks this campaign has received came from people who we knew, not from any kind of web-focused outreach. Many of the best creative ideas, the most interesting developments in terms of the message, and the funding came from people we met in other contexts, and collaborated with to build the campaign.
The upshot from these thoughts is that I think this campaign needs to shift back into the mode of creating news, rather than spinning it. The reason working with people you know in a long-term framework makes sense is that it allows you to buck the news cycle by focusing on your strengths and not reacting at every turn. Look: we know that campaigns try to ‘win’ news cycles by generating heaps of distracting bullshit – and that’s a trap for their opponents, but also for the activists caught up in working on the election. I always thought that working on the election matters because it helps define the symbols/frames that shape the country for (roughly) 4 years, and if that’s true, then we can’t get spun by the news cycle, but rather need to keep the bigger (non-electoral) goal always in sight.
All that being said, we made a sweet game of bingo. Play it at your next debate – or over the next weeks, when McCain will continue to spew really nasty stuff.
This year I’m in the target demographic for get out the vote and voter registration drives. Lots of people want me to vote. At first glance, these ‘drives’ are visibly indistinguishable from blood ‘drives’ – friendly middle aged folks going soft around the edges staffing with clipboards and mountains of paper touting your ability to save a life (of our republic, or of someone you don’t know). The comparison is apt: blood drives and voter reg, next to ‘raising money for cancer’ is about the only totally uncontroversial political discourse left in America.
I however, would like to come out in support of so-called ‘voter apathy.’ I believe that the demonization of non-voting in our society is based on the totally false belief that our government can or should continue to operate without the contributions of the people governed. Piles of money gets pumped into the airwaves for the express purpose of devaluing the decision millions of voters make to avoid the polls. At the behest of this propaganda, a great deal of the voting class (and it is, by most measures, a class) refuses to take their Fellow Americans seriously come election day.
Not voting does not mean voter apathy. Voter apathy does not exist, apathy towards voting yes, but we are not ‘voters’ first. Not voting is an express recognition that the fools and liars running for office don’t serve your interests. Not voting means that you don’t believe that the election can solve your problems; it actively recognizes that our lives are defined by issues that Our President won’t help or change. If you don’t think the president can change your life for the better, you shouldn’t vote.
