McCain: tragic figure

Tragic in the classical sense: a figure who is undone by himself.

McCain is now trying to walk back the Krystalnacht-style turn that his campaign has taken. But his Republican supporters are having none of it:

Said McCain, "I want to be president of the United States and I obviously I do not want Senator Obama to be. But I have to tell you, I have to tell you, he is a decent person. And a person that you do not have to be scared as president of the United States."

The crowd booed.

Bits and pieces of bad behaviour continue to leak out from McCain's campaign rallies. Here we have a McCain supporter who'd brought in a monkey with an Obama bumper sticker stuck on it. Here we have the official clergyman for the event give the following invocation at the start:

"I would also pray, Lord, that your reputation is involved in all that happens between now and November, because there are millions of people around this world praying to their god - whether it’s Hindu, Buddha, Allah - that his opponent wins, for a variety of reasons,” Conrad said.

“And Lord, I pray that you would guard your own reputation, because they’re going to think that their god is bigger than you, if that happens. So I pray that you will step forward and honor your own name with all that happens between now and Election Day"

"Buddah"? Praying to "their god?"

Sometimes the McCain campaign gives a lukewarm indication that McCain doesn't like this sort of thing, as with their official statement about that invocation:

While we understand the important role that faith plays in informing the votes of Iowans, questions about the religious background of the candidates only serve to distract from the real questions in this race about Barack Obama’s judgment, policies and readiness to lead as commander in chief.

But sometimes the campaign comes out with the claim that pointing out this bad behaviour is an unfair attack on Mccain's supporters:

Barack Obama’s attacks on Americans who support John McCain reveal far more about him than they do about John McCain. It is clear that Barack Obama just doesn’t understand regular people and the issues they care about. He dismisses hardworking middle class Americans as clinging to guns and religion, while at the same time attacking average Americans at McCain rallies who are angry at Washington, Wall Street and the status quo.

By the by, this post contains a poll comparing Independent voters' opinion about if they think Obama or McCain "understands your needs and problems". Obama blows McCain out of the water.

The difficulty McCain faces now is that the destructive social forces he unleashed are beyond his control, and are threatening to destroy not only him, but the social fabric of the country as well. Can you imagine what these people are going to do if Obama wins? Some commentors on American blogs I read are already discussing the best small arms to get for self-defense purposes should the Reichstag Right turn violent after "Barack Hussein Osama" becomes President.

Worse for Mccain, the Reichstag Right appears to exist within his own campaign apparatus, and even appears to include his own Vice Presidential nominee. That's my interpretation of this recent article from the Sunday Times, anyway: McCain tussles with Palin over whipping up a mob mentality. Read the whole thing, and be very afraid.

In classical tragedy, the tragic hero must sacrifice himself in order to right the larger wrong he helped create. It's certainly not necessary to go that far in this day and age of course, but I will say this: John McCain, the only way you can win is by feeding this mob. If you don't, they'll turn on you and demand you be replaced by someone who will, like your own running mate. If you do, you'll be responsible for everything that this mob does in the future to all the people that they merely demonise and threaten now.

You can either try to become president of the United States of America on the backs of those who do not believe that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are the right of anyone who is not exactly like them, or you can show that you truly believe in American values, ensure that the next President is not faced with a large segment of his own population wanting to kill him just for being who he is, and oppose this mob and everything it stands for, even though politically it will cost you everything.

It's either you or the country. Make your choice.

"He's got the bloodlines"

My opinion has been that the question of who wins the US presidential election is important for the world and for liberal democracy, but just as important is how they are perceived to have won it. That will tell us what values America really stands for - whether the American people genuinely want to stand up for their liberal democracy and what it has given them, or whether they're just going through the motions in a slow descent to...something else.

On that basis, here is a 4 and half minute Youtube of some McCain-Palin supporters from one of Palin's campaign events.


I'll transcribe what I think is by far the worst part, starting at about 1:00, when the cameraman asks two women about Obama:
Cameraman: He's a terrorist?
Woman #1: Definitely.
Woman #2: He's got the bloodlines.
Cameraman: What does that mean?
Woman #2: Well, just think about it. The name.
Cameraman: So you do think he's a terrorist.
Woman #2: I didn't say that, but, ah...
Woman #1: I think he is.
Cameran: You do? Why?
Woman #1: He's got the connections. Have a look at his name!

Democracy can tell you so much about a people. Oh yes, I'll know how John McCain won the election if he does.

Election year in October in the US; ugly time

And the Republican Party has discovered new lows amongst the party faithful. I think one commenter from here had the best response to any attempt to absolve Palin from responsibility for the near-violent rhetoric of the crowds at her gatherings:

she is not lynching him, but she's a hell of a rope salesman.

I've becoming addicted to watching Pollster's poll of polls from day to day. Near as I can tell, Obama's popularity hasn't taken much of a hit over the past few days after the McCain campaign went full negative. But the start of the Republican incitement to hatred seems to roughly coincide with McCain's popularity slowly but steadily going up after a long period of decline.

I'll see if the trend continues before I speculate on what it means. But I think people need to keep in mind that even though Obama's currently ahead, he has not secured more than 50% of the vote: there are enough undecided voters that it's still statistically possible for McCain to win the popular vote even if Obama doesn't lose any support from now until election day. It seems unlikely, but I find that worrying nevertheless.

Sarah Palin and the Bush Doctr...the what now?

Sarah Palin flubbed a foreign policy question about the Bush Doctrine in her one and only interview to date, and conservative commentators, including Australian ones on the Sunday morning TV I was watching yesterday, have scrambled to defend her, saying how incredibly complex and arcane the whole definition of the "Bush Doctrine" is, and she can't possibly be expected to effectively answer such an obvious "gotcha" question like that.

I'm not going to waste even a second with the irrelevant charade of the Bush Doctrine's "complex definition". The fact is that Palin would have to demonstrate that she'd even heard of the Bush Doctrine before it's possible to get into the question of whether she understands it. She failed to do so:

GIBSON: Do you agree with the Bush doctrine?

PALIN: In what respect, Charlie?

GIBSON: The Bush -- well, what do you -- what do you interpret it to be?

PALIN: His world view.

Um, no. Besides the obvious initial stall for time and attempt to pump for more information to obscure the fact that she has no idea what was just asked of her ("In what respect, Charlie?"), the fact that she guesses that it has something to do with Bush's "worldview" tells me that she had no concept that the "Bush Doctrine" even existed, let alone what it was. In fact, the confusion demonstrates that she is unaware of the concept of foreign policy "doctrine" at all.

Bottom line: when Charlie Gibson asked Sarah Palin what she thought of the Bush Doctrine, she didn't even know it was a question about foreign policy until Charlie Gibson told her it was.

Edit: oh, and to pre-empt (heh) what I expect to be the most likely line of defense, please don't waste your time and mine if all you're going to do is "use enhanced interrogation tactics" on the definition of "worldview".

Wanted: artistry of lipstick on a Republican pig

Obama, from what I've seen of him, wants the American Presidential election to be about the issues that are important to America. Republicans, from what I can see, currently want it to be about lipstick. I should be outraged at the phoniness of the Republican outrage about this so-called "personal attack on Sarah Palin", but if Republicans want this campaign to be about lipstick, then I think it's possible to oblige them, without sacrificing the any emphasis on the issues that are of importance to America and to the world.

If I was any good at this kind of creativity I'd do it myself, but since I'm not: I ask anyone who cares about the issues facing America to create this imagery by any method they can: a pig, identifiably associated with the Republican party, which has at least one of the Republican failures of the last 8 years clearly written or identifiable on it: failing economy, sub-prime mortgage crisis, ruined international reputation, record levels of debt, The Iraq war and so forth (I was originally going to say put all the failures on one pig, but I realised that they may not actually fit on just one, given the sheer number of them). Then put very obvious lipstick on the pig. The tube of lipstick used should be readily identifiable with the McCain campaign.

I would trust that any attempt to portray any actual Republican person as a pig would be denounced as a personal attack, in keeping with Obama's desire to focus on real issues rather than the phony distractions of personality politics. I realise of course that Republicans see a "personal attack" in everything these days, and may see one in something as stupid as the remote possibility that the lipstick on the pig may be roughly the same colour as some lipstick that Sarah Palin may or may not have once worn, so use your best judgement as to what genuinely is unpalatably personal and what is just the frothings of "movement" conservatives engaging in their Two Minutes of Hate.

I'm sick of American elections being won or lost by bullshit. If Republicans want America to obsess about lipstick on a pig, I say give Americans the McCain lipstick on the Republican pig of failure good and hard. And let's bring the focus back on actual issues in the process.

Obama and Sarah someone

On Friday, I watched online as Barack Obama laid out his ideals and addressed the issues that he believed were most important to America. I had hoped that the ensuing political discussion would be about the issues and ideals he'd laid out rather than the petty sniping and personality politics that so turns me off the whole political process.

By Saturday, and pretty much every day since then, the talk from political observers, both Republican and Democratic, has been about the personality, gender and life experiences of someone named Sarah Palin. Issues? Ideals? What are they?

I am not a Democrat (well, obviously, since I'm not an American, but even if I was American, I'd still value my political independence). I do not care to support any political party blindly. I'm interested in this US political campaign because I want to see some repairs done to the political system of the world's oldest existing liberal democracy; I think it's fundamentally broken. I want to see America once again have a political system that promotes the ideals that make a liberal democracy work - accountability, involvement by the people in the task of government, ability of multiple different polities to work together, if not always well, then without any actual bloodletting - above phony considerations of a candidate's "character" that is, in reality a media-constructed fantasy about the person, so carefully crafted by their campaigns. I don't care if the effort to restore the overarching importance of core liberal democratic ideals, and end all the bullshit about fictional "character" issues, comes from a Republican, Democrat or other candidate, so long as it comes from somewhere.

I have been deeply impressed by the commitment that the Obama candidacy has had to those liberal democratic principles. I am anxious to see both Republicans and Democrats stop obsessing about the minutiae of Sarah wotsername's life story, and return to working towards promoting those overarching liberal democratic ideals over the phony politics of personality.

You know, some part of me can't help wondering if part of the point to this pick was to get people on both sides focused away from the big issues and back onto the petty, election-winning but ultimately country-destroying, stuff again.