Words to Live By

Funny - I'm sitting right now in a "Professional PR 101" session, an urban/hip-hop-oriented seminar/educational event put on by a PR agency (don't have the name in front of me - a PR mistake, I'd say). The panel has spent much of the last half hour emphasizing professionalism, which is good. Oddly, the agency that put the event together called and mispronounced the names of two invited members of our editorial staff - referring to "Jan" as "Jane." The email press release was similarly full of vague connections, but it didn't have basic information like a schedule. The information coming from the panel all sounds right, but the shaky effort by the PR agency might be the reason there are only 25 people here.

Is It Just Me ...?

... or did John McCain often seem like an old man? At some points during the "debate," it was merely awkward - his weird attempts at jokes - but never worse than when he said yet again that Obama won't admit that he was wrong about the surge. Every time he hits that "he won't admit he was wrong" riff, he sounds like half of a spatting couple that chews on decades-old petty beefs.

Ugly in the Echo Chamber

The video of McCain and Palin appearances and the hostility and suspicion toward Obama is appalling, but it's hard to imagine that playing well outside of the party faithful. This campaign started absurdly early, so people have spent more than a year seeing and hearing Obama. Are the moderates and undecided going to really decide that this calm, seemingly measured guy is really a terrorist? An enemy of the state? Similarly, it's hard to imagine that Ayers and Wright will have any traction outside of the faithful because the stories themselves are old news having first come up months ago during the primary season. McCain and Palin don't have fresh news, or even fresh spin on them; all they have is greater volume and urgency, brought on by the nearness of the election.

Who are moderates and undecideds going to go to - the guy who has seemed on message and engaged in issues for the last year-plus, or the guy who has skittered erratically from crisis-oriented decision to crisis-oriented decision in radical steps? And will they really believe that the guy who thought Palin was a good idea, who gambled and tied himself to an economic crisis that's likely to get worse before it gets better, and who runs as an outsider despite a quarter-century in Washington when he tries to tell voters they don't know the real Obama? I think the polls are telling us the answers. Desperation is sad stench, and it's strong on him.

Word of the Week

Thankfully, the "Main Street/Wall Street" variations have worn that hackneyed phrase out already, but "pivot" seems to have become the political verb du jour, used to describe what politicians do when asked questions they don't want to answer. It seems like I heard it two or three times last week, and the Huffington Post quotes Sarah Palin using it to criticize Katie Couric's interview:

"The Sarah Palin in those interviews was a little bit annoyed," [Palin] said. "It's like, man, no matter what you say, you are going to get clobbered. If you choose to answer a question, you are going to get clobbered on the answer. If you choose to try to pivot and go to another subject that you believe that Americans want to hear about, you get clobbered for that too."

What should Couric have asked her? In an interview with Fox News, she said:

"In those Katie Couric interviews, I did feel that there were lot of things that she was missing in terms of an opportunity to ask what a VP candidate stands for, what the values are represented in our ticket. I wanted to talk about Barack Obama increasing taxes, which would lead to killing jobs. I wanted to talk about his proposal to increase government spending by another trillion dollars. Some of his comments that he's made about the war, that I think may, in my world, disqualify someone from consideration as the next commander in chief. Some of the comments that he has made about Afghanistan -- what we are doing there, supposedly just air raiding villages and killing civilians. That's reckless. I want to talk about things like that. So I guess I have to apologize for being a bit annoyed, but that's also an indication of being outside the Washington elite, outside of the media elite also. I just wanted to talk to Americans without the filter and let them know what we stand for."

Evidently in Alaska, "interview" means "opportunity to say whatever shit you want to say without question."

The Truth as Comedy

It's a bad sign for Sarah Palin that Tina Fey's impression of her has become so popular. Gerald Ford admitted after he left office that Chevy Chase's sketches showing him to be a bumbler changed the way people thought of him, and George H.W. Bush says he never said, "Naat gonna do't," but the phrase and Dana Carvey's almost absurdly consonant-deficient Bush pronunciation became the starting point for anyone who wanted to mock him. In their cases, Chase and Carvey presented extreme versions of their subjects; this weekend, fuly half of Tina Fey's lines as Palin came directly from the debate. Palin at her best was the butt of a joke, and it's not a reach to expect that something radical will have to happen to keep her from being seen as anything but a version of Fey.

Getting it Right

DJ Z-Trip has posted his "Party for Change Obama Mix" and while there's a lot smart in it, there's no more perfect moment in it than when he backs a clip of John McCain speaking with "Yakkety Sax." After his frantic activity last week surrounding Wall Street and the will he/won't he debate, the image of McCain as Benny Hill seems spot on.

The Breaking Point

There are any number of basic problems with the McCain candidacy starting with someone with 26 years of experience in Washington - most of it in the party in power - running as the outsider. But the moment last night when I had to stop my TV and yell (thanks to the miracle of DVR) came when Fargo Palin told Joe Biden that sometimes the government can't solve a problem; sometimes it is the problem. How can McCain and Palin seriously run for office when they view the office and the government as a bad, intrusive thing? The current financial crisis and the post-Katrina Gulf South illustrate the product of a government driven by a self-hating ideology.

One last thing - today the press is giving her credit for having better answers and a better command of the details than she did with Katie Couric. That was easy, but would she have done as well without her notes, which you could often see her refer to? Even with them, she got the name of the commander in Afghanistan wrong twice, and her vice presidential answer was one of a few that still had some Miss South Carolina in it.