Real and Mitt Rmoney in the same sentence!

Where were you last night?

Sewing up the asshole vote

Scott Brown (R-smallpox blankets) has always been arrogant in the way that good-looking people of both sexes can be. They're ornamental - and in his case athletic - so not much more is expected of them. Intelligence? Who needs it? He looks nice, so he doesn't have to be nice. That came through loud and clear in last week's debate.

And I thought the Republicans already had the asshole vote almost completely locked up.

Four words, ideological edition

The handful of you who are still tuning in to the endless purgatory of Republican (non) Presidential debates no doubt noticed when John King vacuously asked the four horse's-ass-men of democracy's apocalypse for a single word to sum themselves up. King of course gave enough forewarning that they were able to come up with self-flattering, thematically aligned, bullshit marketing.

That is not what I do, so...

• Newt Gingrich - megalomaniac
• Ron Paul - mammon-worshipping
• Mitt Romney - wealthy
• Rick Santorum - theocratic

Strong partisan

Yeah, I admit it. I'm a strong partisan. Duh. So this applies to me:

The only voters who like to hear the jabs, [Merle] Black said, are "the strong partisans. They like to see the other candidate, the other side, criticized."

The fundamental problem in the CNN story - and probably in the swing voters themselves - is that no one makes even a theoretical distinction between drawing a strong contrast with your opponent and attacking your opponent. It's all "negative campaigning." So, calling your opponent a sleazy, cow-tipping, alcoholic pederast is the same as showing how he'll implement his health care plan in an unpopular or expensive way.

I find it credible that the so-called persuadables don't make this vital distinction either. They don't want politicians saying bad things about each other even if they're both fair and true. Frankly, I just don't understand how adults can possibly be so timorous. What we're deciding is important. It would be weird and unnatural if we strong partisans didn't get passionate about the issues and the candidates.

Once again, our political discourse is pitched to those who have the least interest in it and who are least equipped to deal with both the pros and the cons, both of which need to be heard.

Rescued

Great thing about a dog is she'll get you out of the house and away from the TV, in tonight's case the Presidential "town meeting." I put "town meeting" into quotes because I've been to town meetings, and they're nothing like this format, although some moderators are as mumble-prone as Tom Brokaw.

So I missed most of the debate, and the part I saw didn't really hold my interest. Obama gave a pretty lackluster performance in the few minutes I did see. McCain was a little better relative to expectations.

Reading is a better way to get real information than sound bite manufactured for the still indecisive middling, muddled, mediocre voter who only turns out every four years. McCNN reports this:

"We will kill bin Laden, we will crush al Qaeda," [Obama] said.

McCain responded in equally strong terms: "I'll get him. I know how to get him. But I am not going to telegraph my punches as Sen. Obama did."

Now that's comedy! No difference in content or intent, except for the chip on McCain's shoulder. Yep, that silly Obama - he revealed the intelligence assets he'd use to find Osama. Not.

Avoidance behavior

It's important to have debates, but it would be better to have revealing debates. No, I'm not talking about the pundit-fueled faux revelation we've seen so often in the past.

Still, I have to confess that the only part of the VP debate I've seen so far was an image of Sarah Palin shining off a widescreen TV through the window of a house I used to live in, as I drove by at 10:20 on the way home from tennis.

Well, I thought, she didn't collapse and need to be wheeled off the set, so she must have exceeded expectations.

Yes, I have it on the DVR - I think. That didn't go well for the first Presidential debate, so I can't be sure. I promise to watch it someday. I'm guessing that she completely met my expectations - since I didn't have any positive ones.

(Note: I got a helpful email that C-SPAN has a mash-up site for the debates, and the VP debate is there, too.)

Anything to avoid learning

Big media personality Gwen Ifill is now in the sights of the right. Big deal.

Ifill is hardly a reliable liberal. In fact, she's only reliable at playing that vital Beltway game of speaking troth to power.

Ifill moderated the 2004 debate between Darth and John Edwards, and she once appropriately enforced the rules against Darth using tones that the vaporous wingnut punditry found insufficiently respectful.

But these are facts, and facts don't matter. This new, trumped-up bullshit controversy is about giving weak-minded people excuses to discount the obvious inadequacy of Sarah Palin. It's an attempt to lower expectations by the tried-and-true Republican means of patronizing the voting public.

How low are expectations?

They are sooo low.

Sarah Palin can't name a newspaper she reads. She can't name a Supreme Court decision other than Roe v. Wade that she disagrees with. (Hmm, you think those two things might be connected?) On her behalf, smarmy Tucky Bounds can't name a single decision she made about the Alaska National Guard.

The thing is, these omissions are all easily remedied. What's not easily crammed for is the habit of a lifetime of taking in information in your field that someday might be useful to have at your fingertips. Palin, like Duhbya, is a proud ignoramus. She's like that high school cheerleader no one has ever said no to, who wants to run the yearbook because ... no reason, she just wants to run it.

Palin can walk out on stage tonight and not fall off her heels, though, and the captive media will intone with all seriousness that she exceeded expectations in her first (!) chance for America to get to know her.

C-SPAN blues

My DVR recording of the debate carried the helpful crawl to tell me now that C-SPAN's coverage had been moved to C-SPAN2, so I guess I'm SOL. No, I didn't feel like listening to throwaway speeches from the House of Representatives. There's only so much praise across the aisle for retiring long-time Republicans that I can stand, and that's measured in nanoseconds.

Ah, hell, probably all the insight into the performance has already been said somewhere. But I've been holding off reading from the great soup of punditry so that I could write something fresh for me and uncolored by all the other commentary.

So, on this rainy Sunday when the Pats have a bye and the Red Sox are locked in a scoreless and meaningless duel with the Yankees, when my tennis club is booked solid, when the dog didn't even want a walk, I'm listening to a little John Mayall. (Yeah, the laws must change one day, but not that CD.)

I'm not a big fan of debates anyway. They're not aimed at me; they're aimed at the muddled and unanalytical middle, at people who don't know enough or think hard enough to need anything approaching information or argument that would be useful to a political junkie like me.

Usually a general election Presidential debate has me cringing at both contestants. The Republican spews a fog of atomized bullshit in a spray so fine you'd think it came out of a snow-making machine, and I guess that's not far off the truth. The Democrat tries to reduce his positions to the sort of Splenda-sweetened sound bites that appeal to the lowest common denominator. Since I fancy 75% cacao dark chocolate, treacly sweetness makes me say, "Yuck!"

Much of the trouble in our politics stems from the need of both sides to appeal to the worst, dumbest voters of all, the ones who start as clean slates for the debates. The bases on both ends are locked up, and the left and right are fighting over voters who are marginal in several senses. They only vote in Presidential elections, they get their news if any from the most pandering TV outlets, they can't remember who did what last year, much less ten years ago (unless it involved a soap opera), and they believe all sorts of myths that would be demonstrably untrue if you could actually demonstrate anything to them that differed from the opinions they have been filled with by rote repetition, starting with their parents but culminating in their becoming perfect foils for advertising of every kind.

This marginal middle won't notice if their decision process, such as it is, results yet again in the choice of yet another image-driven establishment bullshitter. Rational actors would re-examine how they decided and think about changing. These people are more likely to "remember" that they voted for the guy they actually voted against.

So, debates often devolve into pandering contests. I don't mean that the politicians can pander to small audiences. What they can to, though, is pander to the short attention span and lack of depth of citizens who meet the very minimum standard of social engagement and vote once every four years.

But you go to the election with the citizens you have, not the ones you wish you had.

And, hey, I'm actually guardedly optimistic about November 2008. Given the McCain-Palin ticket's dismal and transparently manipulative performance over the past two weeks, even voters who choose based on tie color are noticing that the Republicans are full of bullshit. Still, while that's better, it's not even up to half a loaf.

Obama and Biden really should be twenty points ahead.

Lowering expectations

Any two-year-old who has learned to poop in a toilet can tell that McCain's suspension is not only bullshit but is pure political calculation.

McCain will show up to the debate, but his spinners will plead that the dog ate his homework if he's not ready for anything but the typical stock bumpersticker phrases. He'll say he's been spending all his time on the economy.

Barack should be ready to retort that he knows this debate was meant to be about foreign policy but that he's willing to talk about the economy off the cuff and without preparation (heh heh). And then he should smoke McCain's ignoramus ass about the credit meltdown and everything else.

That could close the deal.

I also found this pretty funny in a laugh or cry kind of way.

But Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House, called McCain's decision to suspend his campaign the "greatest single act of responsibility ever taken by a [Republican] presidential candidate."

There. Fixed. Trust Newtie to be clueless and over the top about responsibility.

Desperate times

McCain's suspension of his campaign is insincere bullshit. Its sole intent is to benefit him politically by:

• Freezing the status quo to stop Obama's rise in the polls
• Seizing the news cycle for photo ops (and they're all free!)
• Giving him the chance to pretend to ride to the rescue as if a Wall St. bailout were San Juan Hill
• Evading a debate for which he could never be sufficiently prepared (though in the mean time he'll try)

I'm sure as I can be that the last is what provoked him to do something. If the fumbling, bumbling, stumbling McCain is seen on a platform next to the brilliant, knowledgeable, and often eloquent Obama, the stark contrast will be undeniable. Since even Fox "News" has Obama up six points (warning: link blows up Firefox 2), another five-point shift would be the death of McCain's campaign anyway.

Obama should say, "McCain is welcome to suspend his campaign if he can't manage to advance more than one effort concurrently, but is that really what we need in a President?"

Or maybe Harry Reid has already done better:

"If there were ever a time for both candidates to hold a debate before the American people about this serious challenge, it is now," he added.

Update: Obama takes the best of both (at the same CNN link)!

"It's my belief that this is exactly the time when the American people need to hear from the person [who] will be the next president," Obama said. "It is going to be part of the president's job to deal with more than one thing at once. It's more important than ever to present ourselves to the American people."

Update: I really should have been much snarkier about this, now that I think about it. Here are some possibilities:

• McCain: I haven't finished my homework, so I'd better pull the fire alarm.
• Granddad needs his nap.

Please feel free to compete in comments for best McCain no-debate snark.

Downside of Joe Klein

Of course, there's a downside to match the rare upside of Joe Klein, but for a change he seems merely mistaken, rather than captured by the narrative of the media herd. And that in itself is a silver lining.

The sheer, slimy audacity of the McCain ads has given him a nice midsummer run. The polling numbers haven't changed all that much, but Obama has been on the defensive since he returned from his overseas trip.

Here, Joe misses the timing and the complicity of the media in printing every stinking McCain press release while Obama was overseas. Obama was already on the defensive long before returning home. Minor, of course, but I wish pundits who get paid for watching paid as much attention to the big picture as a part-time blogger reading and writing from his study or office.

The best way to do that is through a major, narrative-changing event.

Here's another head-scratcher: Klein is asking for political theater, not reality. And he completely fails to notice the obvious fact that the Obama trip overseas was exactly "a major, narrative-changing event" that didn't work because the press corps was so obsessed with McCain's slimy audacity (good phrase, Joe!).

Last, Klein's thesis is that Obama should sign up for more debates in the late summer. Here's the obvious reason he won't: He prefers to play a few big hands and win the killer pots instead of penny ante town halls that slide into boring frequency. Who remembers anything from the zillion Democratic primary debates?

Yes, a dozen debates would give Klein and his cohorts more to write gaffe-watch pieces about - and snark about even if there are no gaffes - but they are unlikely to give the voters more useful information about what the two candidates believe and what each would do as President.

Duhbya takes questions

The Democrats took questions from real human beings who don't need access - see the Boston Globe.

Duhbya's going to do the same thing. Yeah, right.

How long before the Republicans are willing to take blunt questions? I wouldn't bet on it.