A Pilgrim’s Digression

It didn’t last long. A week maybe? I can’t keep up this pretense of supporting Hillary Clinton for President. It’s just too difficult to root for the person one hopes will be a loser.

So today, for better or worse, I officially withdraw my (tongue in cheek) support for Clinton and return to the Obama fold. It’s a depressing place to be right now, not so much because of the negativity that seems to surround news report about the candidate, but because the candidate himself seems to have succumbed to the negativity.

“What happened to Barack Obama?” Hillary Clinton’s latest advertisement in North Carolina asks. What happened, indeed. The more I listen to Fox News, the more I feel like I am witnessing something akin to Clarence Thomas’s infamous “high-tech lynching.” Given, I’ve only been paying attention to elections since roughly 1988, but I cannot recall a candidate destroyed almost entirely by the media. One can say that Obama’s own gaffes and personal associations are what has destroyed him, but that’s not how it appears to me, when I tune in to Fox and hear story after story after story beating on the man not even for his policies or his beliefs and values, but because of the “friends” he keeps (and I use the word “friends” with caution there).

Take last night, on Hannity and Colmes, almost the entire hour was taken up with assailing Obama for not being candid about his relationship with Wright. Never mind that he has had two major speeches in which he has addressed the issue, to exhaustion in my opinion. Now Hannity and the chorus of Republican surrogates Hannity brings on the show say that Obama wasn’t forceful enough. He should have “ripped the microphone off” in his zeal to denounce Wright.

Not only that, but at every commercial break, Hannity promised a “shocking” new photo of “unrepentant terrorist” Bill Ayers that “may spell trouble for Barack Obama.” So, I wait through the entire programming, dreading to see a photo of Obama with his arm around Ayers.

Instead, this “new” photo is an old photo of Ayers taken for the promotion of a book in 2002, in which Ayers “stomps” on an American flag. So I am left thinking, “What the hell does any of this have to do with Obama?”

The last straw for me was the fake story about the Ayers photo, which Hannity by some wild stretch of logic tried to turn into a new “scandal.” I changed the channel to Larry King, where the host and his guests were also talking about the election, but at least the host did not have any obvious axe to grind. I have to say, I have never particularly liked Larry King; he is too much in the celebrity gossip style of news reporting for my taste. But he was a soothing anodyne to Sean Hannity, last night.

All that said, I have felt better about the tone of the campaign itself this past week, if not the tide that seems to be turning in Clinton’s favor. It is quite a relief to hear the candidates arguing about the suspension of the gas tax during the summer months, rather than listening to them go back and forth at each other over who is elitist. I am sure they are doing some of the back and forth, too, but most reports about what they are saying on the trail concern this gas tax debate.

Again, though, even on the issue of the gas tax I wonder if Obama has not shot himself in the foot. Don’t get me wrong, I think the gas tax suspension is nothing more than naked, ugly political pandering on the part of Clinton and McCain. No economist supports the idea, and Clinton is out there arguing that because of that lack of support, economists are “elitist” and don’t understand how ordinary people are being crushed by the weight of rising fuel costs.

On its face, Clinton seems to have the stronger hand. She is making an emotional appeal, not an intellectual appeal, and most of the time voters respond to that kind of message. Obama is making an intellectual appeal, which usually gets a cold response, especially where matters of the wallet are concerned. But there is no way to refute Obama’s argument against the lifting of the tax: saving thirty cents every time one fuels up will hardly make a difference in people’s lives. Even if one takes Clinton’s optimistic estimate, $70.00 over the course of the summer is hardly a windfall for ordinary people. The conclusion to be reached is that McCain and Clinton are pandering, plain and simple.

I’d much rather have another stimulus check in the Fall, which is Obama’s idea. At the end of the summer, if the gas tax is temporarily lifted, I might have saved the equivalent cost of half a tank of gas using the most accepted estimate. However, another stimulus check would give me several hundred dollars to pay bills.

I don’t know if that message is getting through, however. Obama has faith that the American people are smart enough to tell when they are being condescended to by a politician who does not even pump her own gas, let alone pay for it directly (not to mention she apparently has trouble getting a cup of coffee from a gas station coffee machine). I don’t have so much faith in ordinary folks. Sorry, I guess I am elitist. I just think Americans are by and large easily fooled.

I confess it doesn’t take much to get me down. I am not an optimistic person. It doesn’t help that I listened to Rush Limbaugh yesterday, as he mobilized his “troops” for Operation Chaos today.  It only makes me more depressed.  He and Hillary are practically sending each other love letters through the media.

We are a nation ruled not by law and representative government, but a nation ruled by a media that thrives on sensationalism and crisis, and which encourages the savage, almost cannibalistic devouring of anyone under their watchful eye who allows a glimpse of human weakness.  I cannot imagine running for President in the modern world of 24/7 media coverage; it must be a little like swimming in the Amazon.  The water looks welcoming enough, but by god you’d better not have a cut or wound on you anywhere.  The flesh will be picked from your bones; and if the piranhas don’t get you, you will die a slow, agonizing death from  infection and disease.  Obama is getting a little bit of both, right now: the piranhas have been swarming around him for weeks, but in the end it may be the slow-burning infection that finally kills him.

I am fully prepared for Obama to lose both Indiana and North Carolina today. He’s a deeply wounded candidate; the momentum is all with Clinton; Republicans are turning out in a Democrat primary to vote against him…it’s hard to see how he overcomes all of that opposition, especially when he doesn’t seem like his old optimistic, hopeful self anymore.

When I hear him speak, he seems to have lost confidence, even joy in the work he is doing. He speaks slowly now, as if afraid that a slip of the tongue will end up costing him thousands of votes–and he is probably right to be afraid. I agree with him on almost everything I hear him say, but how he says it does not inspire passion the way it once did. He can probably reverse things with two wins tomorrow, but it seems highly unlikely that he will win both states.

If he did, though, it would be a major breakthrough moment. At the very least, Limbaugh would no longer be able to say that he “hasn’t won squat since February 22.” And Clinton will have to justify her continued campaign anew. It all depends on if he wins Indiana. It will take a surprise victory to get this campaign back on track. The predictable victory in North Carolina won’t be good enough to put the bloom back on the rose.