As Sarah Palin spoke cheerily into the camera, in plain view, behind her, Tom-the-turkey met the last measure of Alaskan “frontier justice” as he was loaded head first into the abattoir chute. We watched in amazement at the scene behind her, and could not hear what she was really saying. On the one hand, Tom-the-turkey’s head was wrenched off in front of us, and his blood drained into the gutter. On the other hand, she was oblivious of the carnage she enabled us to witness (shades of déjà vu?). She was so dismissive of the audience’s likely reaction or feelings, it was scary. My guess is, a multitude of ‘true-believer’ vegetarians were born on this day.
So, is she one of us? Hello, I don’t think so! Or, as Rachel Maddow would say, “Not so much.” Therefore, in remembrance of this episode would you say that she has, once again, exposed herself, and “the Empress has no clothes?” Is that why she is said to have “raided Nieman Marcus from coast to coast?” Tom-the-turkey lost his head; did Sarah lose hers too?
She keeps reminding us of what might have been our future. Let’s hope she keeps reminding us, for we are a forgetful people. Right on, Sarah, keep those camera opportunities clicking! In the last image I remember, she was smiling and her lips were moving behind that famous lipstick, but did I hear her say, “Vote Democratic?”
I'm standing outside the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul, Minnesota. Sarah Palin has just finished her speech to the Republican National Convention, accepting the party's nomination for vice president. If I hadn't quit my two-packs-a-day habit earlier this year, I'd be chain-smoking now. So the only thing left is to stand mute against th fit-for-a-cheap-dog-kennel crowd-control fencing you see everywhere at these idiotic conventions and gnaw on weird new feelings of shock and anarchist rage as one would a rawhide chew toy.
All around me, a million cops in their absurd post-9/11 space-combat get-ups stand guard as assholes in papier-mâché puppet heads scramble around for one last moment of network face time before the coverage goes dark. Four-chinned delegates from places like Arkansas and Georgia are pouring joyously out the gates in search of bars where they can load up on Zombies and Scorpion Bowls and other "wild" drinks and extramaritally grope their turkey-necked female companions in bathroom stalls as part of the "unbelievable time" they will inevitably report to their pals back home. Only 21st-century Americans can pass through a metal detector six times in an hour and still think they're at a party.
The defining moment for me came shortly after Palin and her family stepped down from the stage to uproarious applause, looking happy enough to throw a whole library full of books into a sewer. In the crush to exit the stadium, a middle-aged woman wearing a cowboy hat, a red-white-and-blue shirt and an obvious eye job gushed to a male colleague — they were both wearing badges identifying them as members of the Colorado delegation — at the Xcel gates.
"She totally reminds me of my cousin!" the delegate screeched. "She's a real woman! The real thing!"
I stared at her open-mouthed. In that moment, the rank cynicism of the whole sorry deal was laid bare. Here's the thing about Americans. You can send their kids off by the thousands to get their balls blown off in foreign lands for no reason at all, saddle them with billions in debt year after congressional year while they spend their winters cheerfully watching game shows and football, pull the rug out from under their mortgages, and leave them living off their credit cards and their Wal-Mart salaries while you move their jobs to China and Bangalore.
And none of it matters, so long as you remember a few months before Election Day to offer them a two-bit caricature culled from some cutting-room-floor episode of Roseanne as part of your presidential ticket. And if she's a good enough likeness of a loudmouthed Middle American archetype, as Sarah Palin is, John Q. Public will drop his giant-size bag of Doritos in gratitude, wipe the Sizzlin' Picante dust from his lips and rush to the booth to vote for her. Not because it makes sense, or because it has a chance of improving his life or anyone else's, but simply because it appeals to the low-humming narcissism that substitutes for his personality, because the image on TV reminds him of the mean, brainless slob he sees in the mirror every morning.
Sarah Palin is a symbol of everything that is wrong with the modern United States. As a representative of our political system, she's a new low in reptilian villainy, the ultimate cynical masterwork of puppeteers like Karl Rove. But more than that, she is a horrifying symbol of how little we ask for in return for the total surrender of our political power. Not only is Sarah Palin a fraud, she's the tawdriest, most half-assed fraud imaginable, 20 floors below the lowest common denominator, a character too dumb even for daytime TV — and this country is going to eat her up, cheering her every step of the way. All because most Americans no longer have the energy to do anything but lie back and allow ourselves to be jacked off by the calculating thieves who run this grasping consumer paradise we call a nation.
The Palin speech was a political masterpiece, one of the most ingenious pieces of electoral theater this country has ever seen. Never before has a single televised image turned a party's fortunes around faster.
Until the Alaska governor actually ascended to the podium that night, I was convinced that John McCain had made one of the all-time campaign-season blunders, that he had acted impulsively and out of utter desperation in choosing a cross-eyed political neophyte just two years removed from running a town smaller than the bleacher section at Fenway Park. It even crossed my mind that there was an element of weirdly self-destructive pique in McCain's decision to cave in to his party's right-wing base in this fashion, that perhaps he was responding to being ordered by party elders away from a tepid, ideologically promiscuous hack like Joe Lieberman — reportedly his real preference — by picking the most obviously unqualified, doomed-to-fail joke of a Bible-thumping buffoon. As in: You want me to rally the base? Fine, I'll rally the base. Here, I'll choose this rifle-toting, serially pregnant moose killer who thinks God lobbies for oil pipelines. Happy now?
But watching Palin's speech, I had no doubt that I was witnessing a historic, iconic performance. The candidate sauntered to the lectern with the assurance of a sleepwalker — and immediately launched into a symphony of snorting and sneering remarks, taking time out in between the superior invective to present herself as just a humble gal with a beefcake husband and a brood of healthy, combat-ready spawn who just happened to be the innocent targets of a communist and probably also homosexual media conspiracy. She appeared to be completely without shame and utterly full of shit, awing a room full of hardened reporters with her sickly-sweet line about the high-school-flame-turned-hubby who, "five children later," is "still my guy." It was like watching Gidget address the Reichstag.
Within minutes, Palin had given TV audiences a character infinitely recognizable to virtually every American: the small-town girl with just enough looks and a defiantly incurious mind who thinks the PTA minutes are Holy Writ, and to whom injustice means the woman next door owning a slightly nicer set of drapes or flatware. Or the governorship, as it were.
Right-wingers of the Bush-Rove ilk have had a tough time finding a human face to put on their failed, inhuman, mean-as-hell policies. But it was hard not to recognize the genius of wedding that faltering brand of institutionalized greed to the image of the suburban-American supermom. It's the perfect cover, for there is almost nothing in the world meaner than this species of provincial tyrant.
Palin herself burned this political symbiosis into the pages of history with her seminal crack about the "difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull: lipstick," blurring once and for all the lines between meanness on the grand political scale as understood by the Roves and Bushes of the world, and meanness of the small-town variety as understood by pretty much anyone who has ever sat around in his ranch-house den dreaming of a fourth plasma-screen TV or an extra set of KC HiLites for his truck, while some ghetto family a few miles away shares a husk of government cheese.
In her speech, Palin presented herself as a raging baby-making furnace of middle-class ambition next to whom the yuppies of the Obama set — who never want anything all that badly except maybe a few afternoons with someone else's wife, or a few kind words in The New York Times Book Review — seem like weak, self-doubting celibates, the kind of people who certainly cannot be trusted to believe in the right God or to defend a nation. We're used to seeing such blatant cultural caricaturing in our politicians. But Sarah Palin is something new. She's all caricature. As the candidate of a party whose positions on individual issues are poll losers almost across the board, her shtick is not even designed to sell a line of policies. It's just designed to sell her. The thing was as much as admitted in the on-air gaffe by former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan, who was inadvertently caught saying on MSNBC that Palin wasn't the most qualified candidate, that the party "went for this, excuse me, political bullshit about narratives."
The great insight of the Palin VP choice is that huge chunks of American voters no longer even demand that their candidates actually have policy positions; they simply consume them as media entertainment, rooting for or against them according to the reflexive prejudices of their demographic, as they would for reality-show contestants or sitcom characters. Hicks root for hicks, moms for moms, born-agains for born-agains. Sure, there was politics in the Palin speech, but it was all either silly lies or merely incidental fluffery buttressing the theatrical performance. A classic example of what was at work here came when Palin proudly introduced her Down-syndrome baby, Trig, then stared into the camera and somberly promised parents of special-needs kids that they would "have a friend and advocate in the White House." This was about a half-hour before she raised her hands in triumph with McCain, a man who voted against increasing funding for special-needs education.
Palin's charge that "government is too big" and that Obama "wants to grow it" was similarly preposterous. Not only did her party just preside over the largest government expansion since LBJ, but Palin herself has been a typical Bush-era Republican, borrowing and spending beyond her means. Her great legacy as mayor of Wasilla was the construction of a $15 million hockey arena in a city with an annual budget of $20 million; Palin OK'd a bond issue for the project before the land had been secured, leading to a protracted legal mess that ultimately forced taxpayers to pay more than six times the original market price for property the city ended up having to seize from a private citizen using eminent domain. Better yet, Palin ended up paying for the fucking thing with a 25 percent increase in the city sales tax. But in her speech, of course, Palin presented herself as the enemy of tax increases, righteously bemoaning that "taxes are too high" and Obama "wants to raise them."
Palin hasn't been too worried about federal taxes as governor of a state that ranks number one in the nation in federal spending per resident ($13,950), even as it sits just 18th in federal taxes paid per resident ($5,434). That means all us taxpaying non-Alaskans spend $8,500 a year on each and every resident of Palin's paradise of rugged self-sufficiency. Not that this sworn enemy of taxes doesn't collect from her own: Alaska currently collects the most taxes per resident of any state in the nation.
The rest of Palin's speech was the same dog-whistle crap Republicans have been railing about for decades. Palin's crack about a mayor being "like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities" testified to the Republicans' apparent belief that they can win elections till the end of time running against the Sixties. (They're probably right.) The incessant grousing about the media was likewise par for the course, red meat for those tens of millions of patriotic flag-waving Americans whose first instinct when things get rough is to whine like bitches and blame other people — reporters, the French, those ungrateful blacks soaking up tax money eating big prison meals, whomever — for their failures.
Add to this the usual lies about Democrats wanting to "forfeit" to our enemies abroad and coddle terrorists, and you had a very run-of-the-mill, almost boring Republican speech from a substance standpoint. What made it exceptional was its utter hypocrisy, its total disregard for reality, its absolute unrelation to the facts of our current political situation. After eight years of unprecedented corruption, incompetence, waste and greed, the party of Karl Rove understood that 50 million Americans would not demand solutions to any of these problems so long as they were given a new, new thing to beat their meat over.
Sarah Palin is that new, new thing, and in the end it won't matter that she's got an unmarried teenage kid with a bun in the oven. Of course, if the daughter of a black candidate like Barack Obama showed up at his convention with a five-month bump and some sideways-cap-wearing, junior-grade Curtis Jackson holding her hand, the defenders of Traditional Morality would be up in arms. But the thing about being in the reality-making business is that you don't need to worry much about vetting; there are no facts in your candidate's bio that cannot be ignored or overcome.
One of the most amusing things about the Palin nomination has been the reaction of horrified progressives. The Internet has been buzzing at full volume as would-be defenders of sanity and reason pore over the governor's record in search of the Damning Facts. My own telephone began ringing off the hook with calls from ex-Alaskans and friends of Alaskans determined to help get the "truth" about Sarah Palin into the major media. Pretty much anyone with an Internet connection knows by now that Palin was originally for the "Bridge to Nowhere" before she opposed it (she actually endorsed the plan in her 2006 gubernatorial campaign), that even after the project was defeated she kept the money, that she didn't actually sell the Alaska governor's state luxury jet on eBay but instead sold it at a $600,000 loss to a campaign contributor (who is reportedly now seeking $50,000 in taxpayer money to pay maintenance costs).
Then there are the salacious tales of Palin's swinging-meat-cleaver management style, many of which seem to have a common thread: In addition to being ensconced in a messy ethics investigation over her firing of the chief of the Alaska state troopers (dismissed after refusing to sack her sister's ex-husband), Palin also fired a key campaign aide who had an affair with a friend's wife. More ominously, as mayor of Wasilla, Palin tried to fire the town librarian, Mary Ellen Emmons, who had resisted pressure to censor books Palin found objectionable.
Then there's the God stuff: Palin belongs to a church whose pastor, Ed Kalnins, believes that all criticisms of George Bush "come from hell," and wondered aloud if people who voted for John Kerry could be saved. Kalnins, looming as the answer to Obama's Jeremiah Wright, claims that Alaska is going to be a "refuge state" for Christians in the last days, last days which he sometimes speaks of in the present tense. Palin herself has been captured on video mouthing the inevitable born-again idiocies, such as the idea that a recent oil-pipeline deal was "God's will." She also described the Iraq War as a "task that is from God" and part of a heavenly "plan." She supports teaching creationism and "abstinence only" in public schools, opposes abortion even for victims of rape, has denied the science behind global warming and attends a church that seeks to convert Jews and cure homosexuals.
All of which tells you about what you'd expect from a raise-the-base choice like Palin: She's a puffed-up dimwit with primitive religious beliefs who had to be educated as to the fact that the Constitution did not exactly envision government executives firing librarians. Judging from the importance progressive critics seem to attach to these revelations, you'd think that these were actually negatives in modern American politics. But Americans like politicians who hate books and see the face of Jesus in every tree stump. They like them stupid and mean and ignorant of the rules. Which is why Palin has only seemed to grow in popularity as more and more of these revelations have come out.
The same goes for the most damning aspect of her biography, her total lack of big-game experience. As governor of Alaska, Palin presides over a state whose entire population is barely the size of Memphis. This kind of thing might matter in a country that actually worried about whether its leader was prepared for his job — but not in America. In America, it takes about two weeks in the limelight for the whole country to think you've been around for years. To a certain extent, this is why Obama is getting a pass on the same issue. He's been on TV every day for two years, and according to the standards of our instant-ramen culture, that's a lifetime of hands-on experience.
It is worth noting that the same criticisms of Palin also hold true for two other candidates in this race, John McCain and Barack Obama. As politicians, both men are more narrative than substance, with McCain rising to prominence on the back of his bio as a suffering war hero and Obama mostly playing the part of the long-lost, future-embracing liberal dreamboat not seen on the national stage since Bobby Kennedy died. If your stomach turns to read how Palin's Kawasaki 704 glasses are flying off the shelves in Middle America, you have to accept that Middle America probably feels the same way when it hears that Donatella Versace dedicated her collection to Obama during Milan Fashion Week. Or sees the throwing-panties-onstage-"I love you, Obama!" ritual at the Democratic nominee's town-hall appearances.
So, sure, Barack Obama might be every bit as much a slick piece of imageering as Sarah Palin. The difference is in what the image represents. The Obama image represents tolerance, intelligence, education, patience with the notion of compromise and negotiation, and a willingness to stare ugly facts right in the face, all qualities we're actually going to need in government if we're going to get out of this huge mess we're in.
Here's what Sarah Palin represents: being a fat fucking pig who pins "Country First" buttons on his man titties and chants "U-S-A! U-S-A!" at the top of his lungs while his kids live off credit cards and Saudis buy up all the mortgages in Kansas.
The truly disgusting thing about Sarah Palin isn't that she's totally unqualified, or a religious zealot, or married to a secessionist, or unable to educate her own daughter about sex, or a fake conservative who raised taxes and horked up earmark millions every chance she got. No, the most disgusting thing about her is what she says about us: that you can ram us in the ass for eight solid years, and we'll not only thank you for your trouble, we'll sign you up for eight more years, if only you promise to stroke us in the right spot for a few hours around election time.
Democracy doesn't require a whole lot of work of its citizens, but it requires some: It requires taking a good look outside once in a while, and considering the bad news and what it might mean, and making the occasional tough choice, and soberly taking stock of what your real interests are.
This is a very different thing from shopping, which involves passively letting sitcoms melt your brain all day long and then jumping straight into the TV screen to buy a Southern Style Chicken Sandwich because the slob singing "I'm Lovin' It!" during the commercial break looks just like you. The joy of being a consumer is that it doesn't require thought, responsibility, self-awareness or shame: All you have to do is obey the first urge that gurgles up from your stomach. And then obey the next. And the next. And the next.
And when it comes time to vote, all you have to do is put your Country First — just like that lady on TV who reminds you of your cousin. U-S-A, baby. U-S-A! U-S-A!
Each day that passes, Sarah Palin reveals herself as a paleoconservative hatchman in pumps.
In this time of economic turndown, a moment when the search for scapegoats may be just around the corner, it might be wise to remember the words of author Sinclair Lewis, which hopefully will not turn out to be prophetic:
“When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross.”
Turn a deaf ear to this Pat Buchanan in lipstick?
You betcha!
Several of my friends have been e-mailing haikus about the election back and forth. The following are my contributions.
Obama doesn'tunderstand. That's why I can'tlook him in the eyes.
You've got a bracelet?You must be really happy.Hey, I've got one, too.
Does McCain's make-up artist use the same... lipstick on him as the country's oldest president, Reagan, used? If not, then maybe you can't put lipstick on a pig!
But seriously, the right is coopting the American language, which makes it easier for them to communicate with contituents either intentionally or neglectfully under-educated. "Lipstick" is now a word that can only be used by ReDubyaKins!
The extremely intelligent and knowledgeable inside-the-beltway daughter of a very good friend of mine thought that the "W" on the camo floppy-hat that she saw on my shelf stood for George "W" Bush! It was actually from a Washington National's promotion supporting vets. Apparently the initial W is now only for B'Stuff!
If we don't win in November, will John M ruin my last initial?
Henry M (proud, but nervous!)
10. He doesn't know how to post a job opening on Monster.com
9. Republicans would consider him an "elitist"
8. His high dosage of Metamucil already flushes all toxins from his body
7. Sarah Palin would fire them and replace them with Wasilla High School grads
6. He’s not sure where they would sit in the mess hall
5. The deaths of Socrates, Napoleon and Lenin were covered in courses he failed at Annapolis
4. He loves to gamble with dice, VP selections and, of course, with his health
3. You don't eat barracuda – it eats you
2. Lipstick (just had to mention that, because it seems to be on everyone’s lips lately)
And finally, the number one reason McCain will not hire food tasters:
1. He doesn’t need to because on November 4 Barack Obama will eat his lunch
How nice to be talking about real issues that affect the American people, with lots less "lipstick on pigs" and Kindergarten Sex-Ed!
Of course, it required a near total meltdown of the Financial sector to get McCain's attention, and even then, he was all over the map.
This is what happens when you don't have any policies except the retreads from the Bush administration and the record of the last twenty-six years of McCain's pro-deregulation stance. So now, the issues message is somewhat overshadowed by the main stream media stories on flip-flops. Oh well, better than lipstick, I guess.
One other huge story should be the seemingly successful stonewalling of the Alaska Legislatures investigation of 'Trooper-Gate'. It pretty much says to me that Palin is Bush, and Rove is calling the shots.
Since when do we allow anyone to 'ignore' a subpoena? You or I couldn't do it without some good jail-time in our future...
Also, absent any policy initiatives beyond "Hey, Bushes policies are working well, so more of the same!", McCain has nothing to add beyond telling whoppers, and getting caught doing it.
By Thursday, McCain reverts to showing what an aging idiot looks like, from threatening to fire the SEC chairman to implying that he would not speak to our NATO ally Spain, even if he knew where it was. Oy vey!
One week until the first debate! That should be good. Look for wireless receivers under John McCain's suit jacket, 'cause he's obviously gonna need some real-time coaching from Lieberman, et al.
http://www.motleymoose.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=145
"Alaska Women Reject Palin" Rally - 150% the Size of Pro-Palin Rally by: chrisblaskSun Sep 14, 2008 at 19:52:31 PM EDT Mudflats, a blog by Alaskan AKMuckraker has an article today about a rally - organized by eight women over coffee - held to counter the event welcoming Gov. Palin home from her ordeal answering questions for the first time since being nominated by the GOP for President (er: *Vice* President). The turnout dwarfed the Pro-Palin rally yesterday.
Alaskan Women Reject Palin was, by this account, the *"biggest political rally ever, in the history of the state"*. At least 1,400 people showed up, and to put that in perspective that would be akin to 100,000 New Yorker women showing up to a political rally in New York City (we can be fairly certain no-one took the train from New Jersey to Anchorage or drove up from Philadelphia for the event). This compares to perhaps 1,000 Palin fans who showed up for her event that same day.
So John McCain and Sarah Palin are out there touting change. From what I have seen, there's no change to be had here. Judging by the last week, it's more of the same from the Republicans.
Some of the "Change" we should all expect to see:
A change from the politics of deceit and lies. Lies about personal accomplishments. Lies about opponents. Sarah Palin never sold the state jet for a profit on Ebay, but that didn't keep John McCain from saying she did. Sarah Palin went fishing for over $200 million in earmarks last year, but John McCain says she didn't.
A change from the politics of Dirty Tricks. Phone calls are pouring into progressive talk shows from Democrats that received absentee ballots that they never requested, with the return address being RNC or McCain headquarters. This reeks of Karl Rove.
A change from the pettiness and personal attacks. "Lipstick on a pig". Come on John, this is the best you can do? It used to be the "Straight Talk Express". Perhaps you should be calling it the "Distort and feign disgust Express" Eight years ago I thought of voting for this guy. But the 2008 John McCain is not the same guy as the 2000 John McCain.
A change from the secrecy of the last eight years. Honestly, can Dick Cheney account for half the time he was in office? Or is it too secret for us to know? Likewise Sarah Palin. It took two weeks to get a interview, and they had to show "deference"?? This sounds a lot like the time Dick Cheney shot a guy in the face while quail hunting, not announced until Dick had time to sober up. Sarah's delay was undoubtedly to get her up to speed so she could semi-intelligently answer some questions.
John's already running into some snags now that he's campaigning on his own. And the bright lights of the media should help the inexperience of Sarah Palin shine through.
Sarah Palin says she's got foreign policy experience because you can see Russia from an island in Alaska??? Is she freakin' kidding??? Then I'm a Korea, China, Japan, Mexico, Arabic, Persia, and France societal expert because of the individuals I've worked with. Maybe I should be the V.P. nominee of the Republican party.
The sad thing is, unless people get involved and cry 'foul', we will probably get another election tainted by Republican election fraud and petty personal attacks.
Thanks for reading
They have been much talk about pigs in lipstick and the more I hear about it the more upset I become. Surely Americans are not so easily taken in. I know that we want to be sure that we understand the people we are voting for but what exactly does it say when people on hearing these false allegations and misrepresentations of the truth, would come out publicly and put a stop to it. I would have had greater respect for Palin had she come out and say, he never meant me, he was referring to…, I thought so.
The Pig in Lipstick
The people for eight years got the same
Hogwash and mud baths and a senseless war game
Electorate trusted them year after year
Putting faith in a Government that professed to care
Instead they got a big disappointment
Got bamboozle by a misguided Government
It all became obvious, “no way, no how”, not again
Now many were crying out “not McCain”
Lots of his policies were facsimiles, and when
Investigated, his voting records were with Bush 9 in 10
Politics is a devious game when played the old way
Some promises, and dressing up, while they lead us astray
They put on façades then vow it’s all new
It would never be like the old ways we knew
Covering up the pig with sparking lipsticks
Keeps us curious but with scrutiny, it’s the same politricks
The full article
This campaign season is historical not only in its candidates but in its ability to inspire and mobilize younger generations to involve themselves in politics. But it is no different than any other in its multitude of potential distractions.
The international and domestic policies that have plagued our country throughout the Bush Administration have left the American people dissatisfied with the way government works. Our growing dependence on foreign oil, our unwanted presence in Iraq, our growing national deficit, our floundering economy – these are just some of the major issues that the next president will tackle. Not to mention the rising cost of tuition, the millions of Americans without access to healthcare, and the increasing number of families that can no longer afford to keep their homes. These are very real issues.
Unfortunately, the dishonest tactics displayed by the McCain campaign work to draw our attention away from the real issues of this election and direct it towards obscure half-truths. The McCain campaign claims that Obama wants to teach sex education to kindergarten students. (Such an outrageous accusation doesn’t actually deserve a rebuttal, but for those who are interested, the New York Times kindly explains where the confusion lies. READ MORE) Their continued mockery of Obama’s experience, the tenacity with which they latched onto Obama’s “lipstick” comment, and their blatant distortion of their own political records (and by “they” I mean Senator McCain and Governor Palin), serve as evidence to one thing: the Republicans having nothing to run on. So when a politician has nothing to run on, they create distractions.
I should state at the top that I don't believe the recent polls—numbers in themselves are inherently deceptive and are used to deceived. Who was polled, what questions were asked, how the answers were tabulated following what methodology. To my mind they are pointless.
All of which leads me to believe that Obama et al, should stay on message. I would go so far as to say that it is unnecessary to answer any of McCain's or Palin's or their advocates' statements or charges. We should just move forward, move forward addressing the issues as we would address them and ignore McCain completely.
As a brand strategist I recommend we speak as if the outcome of the election is already known and the political theater is just that, an entertainment. We should focus on priorities and how we will deal with them. Obama et al should not even mention McCain by name—treat the man and his constituency as irrelevant. Nor should McCain's name be linked to the present administration—these tactics merely preach to choir—we have that vote. We have everyone damaged economically, emotionally and intellectually by the Bush & Co. The independents, the working class, deal with substance and with solid evidence. Let's provide it.
The issues, "reality," will earn us the election. I am annoyed by the tit-for-tat not because it is juvenile but because it is poor strategy. It makes us look defensive and uncertain. Rather than attack, let's define ourselves and rather than brawl, let's box. McCain could win with a wild roundhouse punch, but if we're smart we'll win on points.
That's what Obama was talking about when he said McCain wasn't computer literate.
If he were, he'd know what everyone else already does, and he'd be clued in to the fact that everyone knows he's lying and that he is making a butt of himself. McCain is hiding under the old rules of 'smile' and 'deceive' and 'use people's ignorance against them' -- that old tactic from back when people were mainly illiterate, ill-informed, and would go for the drama BS rather than investigating for themselves what the real truth is and using the facts at hand.
That method is no longer working for McCain, and he is so computer-illiterate that he doesn't even know it's not working. He keeps lying and people keep checking him and finding out he's lying.
Obama wasn't calling McCain a computer-illiterate idiot because he can't use the keys or a mouse or even hook up a YouTube video--only a real ignoramus would think that. He was saying that McCain doesn't realize--because he is not 'internet savvy'-that everything he's saying is being researched, clocked, investigated, and fact-checked by average everyday Joe Blow laymen who now KNOW he's lying about everything he says.
No one has to guess any more whether or not he's lying, it's all over the World Wide Web for the Whole Wide World to see. If McCain knew that, either he would stop lying, or at least try to explain his lies to himself and the people he keeps telling them to.
I hope Sen Obama wins as he is the better candidate. But his unfortunate selection of the pig further increases the suspicion that he is Muslim as they use the word in a derogatory sense.
Secondly to compare an indisputably attractive woman to a pig shows poor judgement.
May I wish you luck.Watch out for your own safety.
A Los Angeles Times piece today criticizes Obama’s recent attack ad mocking Mr. McCain’s inability to send an email by invoking Mr. McCain’s injuries sustained while a POW.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2008/09/obama-ad-email.html
This article is dishonest, and the L.A.Times author must know it. The issue raised in Mr. Obama's ad is that Mr. McCain has not learned how to send an email. IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH FRACTURED FINGERS. Attempting to warp the truth is insulting and unethical. However, I HATE THIS NEW AD from Mr. Obama. I do not hate it because it is dishonest, it seems to be accurate, and I do not hate it because it disrespects McCain's suffering and sacrifice as a POW, it does not. I do HATE IT for one simple reason. IT. IS. PETTY.
