A Pilgrim’s Digression

This diatribe from Rush Limbaugh caught my attention.  I won’t bother with a link because his material disappears into the abyss of his pay site after one day.  Emphasis mine.

The depth of experience [in the debate] was on display.  As soon as we got to foreign policy, the depth of experience, life experiences, Obama was clearly, yeah, you know, One L.  Obama came across as professorial, elitist, smooth.  Charles Krauthammer, who I love, I just have so much respect for Charles Krauthammer, I can’t tell you.  For every aspect of his life, he had a huge accident, he’s in a wheelchair, he’s just overcome it, just brilliant, he’s just brilliant, but I felt so strange disagreeing with him in his analysis.  He said that Obama came off as elegant.  Obama’s a Chicago street thug. Obama’s running ads lying about everybody — me, McCain.  There’s nothing elegant about Obama.  Karl Rove described him accurately.  He says, (paraphrasing) “You’ve never met this guy but you’ve seen him.  He’s the guy at the country club standing up against the wall in the corner with a cocktail and a cigarette and his gorgeous little woman with him, passing judgment on everybody that walks by, thinking he’s high above ‘em.”  Elegant is just not how I would describe Obama.  But everybody wants to comment on his intellectual prowess that they’ve bought into and his mannerisms and so forth.  But who is Obama?  He’s not elegant.  He gets to play elegant while all the thugs are out destroying everybody that’s in his way, or trying to.  Anyway, I had to get that off my chest.

I don’t know whether it’s racist for a white man to call a black man a “thug.”  I’m not the kind of person who tries to police the language.  What’s interesting, though, is the contempt for Obama both because he is “elegant” and elitist, and because he is a thug.  Which is it, Limbaugh?

The contradiction is striking because I think it reveals what really hits conservatives in the gut about Obama: he’s a black man who came from nothing (a thug) who has risen above his roots, to use an Appalachian phrase.  He’s gotten too uppity.  Rove’s “country club” metaphor reveals much the same prejudice.  It’s irritating to conservatives that Obama can get away with acting white when we all really know he’s nothing more than an angry, resentful street thug.

Anyway, not to belabor the point (as Katie Couric famously remarked to Sara Palin) my impression of the debate was much more in line with Krauthammer.  Obama was elegant, statesmanlike, calm.  McCain was irascible, condescending, and on edge.  After hearing McCain say for the umpteenth time “Senator Obama doesn’t understand…” I felt Obama would have been justified in at least one eye-roll or a sigh.  No one deserves to be talked down to like that.

What I found most interesting is how under the lights of the debate hall, McCain threw out his recent argument that he represents change and fell back on the old “Experience” argument.  That’s where the arrogance came from–McCain quite simply felt that he was more knowledgeable, more experienced, better than Obama.  It was like McCain could barely tolerate being on the same stage as this presumptuous young man.

Obama knows how to deal with condescension, however.  It all rolls off his shoulders.  What liberals miss when they complain about Obama not being angry enough is that an angry Obama is not what has attracted people to him.  Calm, steady, assured, and yes even elegant and elite (in the sense that he is among the best young men this country can produce)…these are the words to describe Obama.  He’s not erratic.  He doesn’t need Hail Mary passes, such as the Palin selection, to move his campaign forward and generate momentary excitement.

It’s the smile and the coolness.  That’s what got Obama this far.  And I believe in the end, people are going to choose him because he is calm, not because he is angry and excitable (“passionate” is the word liberals use, but what they really mean is “mean”).  If there’s a thug behind his smile, he has betrayed no hint of it as far as most of us are concerned.  The fact that some people see him as a thug probably says more about their own fears than Obama himself.

I always begin my lunch break with the best intentions.  Today, I thought to myself, “I’m hungry for something fresh and light.  I think I’ll just get some pasta salad and that’s all.”

As I’ve written somewhere in this thicket of words called a blog, there is a restaurant near where I work on Capitol Hill that serves a lunch buffet.  The offerings on one of the buffets are healthy–vegetable, fruit, and pasta salads.  The offerings on the other are, let’s just say, “traditional.”  There is General Tso’s and white rice, the sauce so thick and spicy-sweet it must be made with pure honey.  Roast beef, mashed potatoes, and gravy.  Spaghetti and meatballs.  Fried cod.  Cajun-style catfish.  There is also a deli bar where the cooks will make you a sandwich to your specifications.

I almost left the restaurant with my good intentions intact.  I took a small container and filled it with a bowtie pasta salad, mixed veggies, and fresh mozarella.  It looked so clean and fresh, the cherry tomatoes like bright, red vitamins on top of the white pasta and cheese.  Then I had the thought, “Gee, is that going to be enough for my lunch?”

I wandered over to the traditional bar, the rich, steamy smell of burbling fat tempting me to add something a little more filling to my container.

In the end, I split the difference and ordered a BLT with mayo from the deli.  Still, when I got to the cash register it was clear this meal was a bad choice for other reasons.  The sandwich by itself was 4.50.  With a diet Coke and the pasta salad, my lunch came to 10.45.

I’m going to make myself feel better by only eating the pasta salad for lunch, saving the sandwich for my long commute home this evening.  Or perhaps I’ll eat only half the sandwich now and save the other half for later.  That’s my intention, anyway.

The Fix at the Washington Post has a catalog of Joe Biden’s Greatest Hits.  The only problem for Barack Obama is that these hits are more reminiscent of the best of America’s Funniest Home Videos, rather than the Led Zeppelin box set.

To say Biden occasionally puts his foot in his mouth is an understatement.  The man must be a contortionist to put his foot in his mouth and keep it there, day in, day out.  Cilliza, author of The Fix blog, doesn’t even list all of Biden’s gaffes.

Yesterday, for example, in speaking of the economic crisis, Biden said that “when the Stock Market crashed” (in 1929), Franklin Roosevelt went on television to explain the situation to the American people.  I know I was not a History major in college, but presuming someone had an early TV in 1929, they might have wondered what the former Secretary of the Navy was doing commenting on the stock market crash.  Herbert Hoover was President in 1929.

Another favorite Joe moment was the time recently when Biden insisted a man in a wheelchair stand and be acknowledged by the crowd.  “Stand up, Chuck!  Let ‘em see ya.  Oh, God love ya, what am I talkin’ about.”

These incidents certainly are funny, even to Obama/Biden supporters.  Whether or not they are harmful to Obama is a matter for debate.  I tend to think they are not harmful, especially looking at the polls.  Obama’s numbers seem unaffected by his running mate, either negatively or positively.

In fact, I’d venture to say that Biden’s gaffes add a bit of color to a campaign that has overall been lacking in humor.  The wheelchair incident was actually kind of endearing, in my opinion, the kind of human mistake any of us might have made.  I laughed, but I also felt embarrassed for Biden.  The way in which he tried to recover by laughing at himself–”You can tell I’m new at this”–was a proper and mature response.

The question I have is whether Biden undermines the central rationale for Obama choosing him in the first place: that he brought a degree of seriousness and experience to the ticket that Obama needed.  Are Biden’s gaffes so ridiculous that he looks completely foolish?  Does the choice of Biden look like such a poor decision that Obama’s judgement can be called into question?

I don’t think so.  I actually find myself liking the guy more now than I did before, when he seemed a very bland, but solid choice.  At the very least, we’ll never lack for comedy in an Obama administration.

On the radio this morning, while laughing uproariously, Fred Grandy commented that Biden makes Dan Quayle look like a genius.  But I think that comparison is fundamentally wrong.  The thing about Quayle was that he couldn’t laugh at himself.  Quayle was so serious, and he never admitted a mistake.  He even blamed the cheat sheet supplied by the elementary school for his misspelling of potato.  Biden, at least, can have a laugh at his own expense.

Will he be booted from the ticket, as Internet rumors insist?  I don’t think so.  Unless there is a legitimate reason for him to drop out–say, a serious illness or a terrible scandal–it would be a much worse condemnation of Obama’s judgement (and his loyalty) for him to switch running mates at this late stage.

Also, I don’t think Biden’s credibility has been so tarnished that he drags down the ticket.  His mistakes are honest and he owns up to them.  If only the same could be said about every politician.

Sitting in the dentist chair this morning, I picked up a Reader’s Digest and flipped to an interview with Tina Fey. I have no pretensions towards intellectual curiosity here. The hook for the article promised to reveal her favorite stooge (she likes Larry, the middle man).

However, what really stuck with me about this interview was a comment she made when asked if she sees her humor as a gift. She replied, “Every kid has something they’re good at, that you hope they find and gravitate toward. This is my thing. I don’t think I was supposed to be a gymnast and accidentally landed on this.”

People say things like that all the time. It’s a concession to fate or destiny which, ironically, most people deny plays much of a role in their life. Ask them straight up, do you believe in fate or free will, and they will say “free will.” Rational people want to believe they have control over their lives. Plus, to advocate for the self-made life is as purly American as a flag lapel pin.

To delve a little deeper, does every kid really have one thing they are good at and “gravitate toward” it? Fey says we “hope” kids do. In the end, hope may be all there is.

There are plenty of people who never achieve their potential; maybe they never even realize they had any potential. Whatever a kid may hope for or wish to be in life, there are any number of factors that determine whether the child finds the thing they are good at and gravitate towards it. On this question, I often think of one of my mom’s sisters, who has a certain amount of artistic ability. But she grew up in the same impoverished, uneducated household as my mother, and instead of ever fulfilling her potential, she is now a middle-aged woman working in a sweltering factory. As for her artistic talent, she paints country landscapes on pieces of slate to sell at flea markets.

I don’t come down strictly on one side or other of the free will versus fate, or nature versus nurture argument. But I tend to come down more on the side of fate/nature. There are too many factors beyond the control of individuals which determine the outcome of a life. Luck is a big part of it. Being in the right place at the right time. Knowing the right people. Being born into the right family, or the right socio-economic stratum.

Much of a child’s future is determined by whether his/her parents have money. Can they send the child to the best schools? Can they provide a variety of experiences, maybe through travel or enrollment in sports or other extra-curricular activities? Do the parents themselves value education, reading, intellectual achievement?

Thinking back on my own experience, what if my parents had been more encouraging about going to college? Or even if they had just been able to give me advice? My parents actually wanted me to join the military, which of course is not a bad option. It might even have helped me, if it provided a better opportunity for a college education than I actually received.

I’ll never forget the enormous disappointment of not being able to go to the college of my choice. I’ve told this story many times (my wife is probably rolling her eyes right now, if she’s reading this). My first two years of college were spent in a community college, because I essentially wasted my senior year. I really had no clue what I was supposed to do in order to get into a good school.

I let application deadlines slip past and drifted, clueless but with growing concern about my future, through the entire year. Finally, in the summer of ‘91, community college was the only thing left to me. However, by the time I had to move on to a regular four year school for the winter/spring semester in 1993, I had English professors who were interested in me and advising me as best they could. Some of the advice I got was simply in the form of pointers to good schools. Today, looking back, it seems like these teachers were as clueless as I was, in terms of what was possible for me.

I applied to Emory and even Princeton, for example, as well the University of the South in Tennessee. The University of the South is where I decided I really wanted to go, after reading about it. Of all the schools where I applied, it was also the only good school that showed any interest in me. Princeton rejected me so fast I don’t even think they looked beyond my SAT scores.

I received an invitation to visit the University of the South, however, and after much cajoling my parents agreed to drive to Sewanee, Tennessee with me to visit. The more I saw of the campus, the more I fell in love with that school. I loved the gothic architecture, the quiet, English feel of the campus, with Seniors attending classes in gowns as if they were Oxford undergrads. It also has a great English program and is the home of the literary journal, The Sewanee Review, so I think it would have been a good fit for me.

Then came the sit-down with the financial aid officer. In retrospect, I think my parents always knew it was going to be impossible for me to go there, unless I received scholarships and loans to cover everything. My parents were always overly cautious about debt, though, so I don’t think they would even have allowed me to consider school loans. Anyway, the subject never came up. At that time, tuition and fees at Sewanee were over $19,000.00 a semester.

Although I wouldn’t receive the official rejection letter for a week or two (it said my grades in Math and my score on the Math portion of the SAT were not good enough), I nonetheless had a long, dejected car trip back to West Virginia. I knew the dream had died that day. And in the end, I went to West Virginia University to finish my education.

Of course, good things came from that circumstance, not the least of which is I met my wife at WVU. I still ended up with a Masters Degree and a good job.

And of course I made choices along the way that determined my future. My senior year of high school, I made a choice to procrastinate and never properly find out what the best course would be for myself, over the next four years. Maybe I could have worked harder in school, made more of an effort to improve my math skills, sought advice and guidance from teachers instead of waiting for them to give it.

Also, my life has been characterized by a reluctance to take risks. When I applied to graduate schools, I was accepted at the University of Virginia as well as West Virginia University. UVA would have been the better choice. But i chose the less risky option. I was already settled in Morgantown, West Virginia, and it would require little risk on my part. Moving to Charlottesville was a risky proposition–would I like it there, would I thrive in UVA’s English program, or would it prove too difficult for me?– and in the end I didn’t take it.

My decision was helped along by the fact that WVU was willing to give me a teaching assistant position, with tuition and fees fully covered, while UVA gives its students no financial assistance during their first year.

So, for better or worse, I’ve made my choices. Or looked at another way, maybe my risk-averse personality made these choices for me.

Or maybe it was all meant to work out this way in the first place, in which case nothing I could have done would have resulted in me going to the University of the South instead of West Virginia University. And maybe even if I had went to the University of the South, I still would be in the exact same place I am today, or a comparable position.

Free will versus fate. A psychologist I studied as an undergraduate, Carl Rogers, wrote of how the idea of human potential, or of an “ideal self” as he called it, can be challenging but also destructive. If we can never achieve our potential because of a mixture of environmental and psychological strictures, this can lead to neurosis.

Sometimes I think the happiest people are those with no sense of their own potential at all. Someone whose only goal is to make a little more money is probably happier in the long run than the person who feels they “ought” to have been a doctor…or an artist, or an actor, or a writer.

In one respect, my parents knew better than me. I had an exaggerated idea of the kind of college I could attend. My parents knew it would be impossible. They just never had the heart to tell me, with all due respect to the American dream, you can’t always achieve something just because you want it badly enough.

This is either a fascinating, or a disturbing article, depending on one’s point of view.  Survey: Nearly Every Kid a Video Gamer.

I can’t say I am surprised, though.  I’ve been playing video games since roughly 1980, and since I still play them as an adult, it was inevitable that my son would also start playing.  We bought a Wii for his birthday in April, ostensibly for him, but it has been only recently that he has really begun to enjoy playing.

Since my game is World of Warcraft, I don’t play the Wii much on my own, but my son and I play together.  This confirms something else mentioned in that survey: parents under 40 typically play video games with their kids.

That has to be an unambiguously good thing.  I have good memories of playing Atari with my Dad when I was a kid, so even that isn’t necessarily a recent trend.  However, I can see the counter-argument: kids should be outside, playing ball or exercising, or just running around the neighborhood with friends.  Video games are too sedentary.

My parents only let me play Atari and, later, Nintendo after dark or on rainy days.  They were constantly pushing me outside.  I’m not even sure my son thinks about playing outside.  Is that a fault of mine?   I don’t know.  The thing is, I don’t do sports.  I’m not the kind of dad who is going to throw a ball around with him, or kick a soccer ball.  He is enrolled in soccer, and he goes to soccer camp in the summer; he also takes swimming lessons pretty much all year long, since we have an enclosed pool in our community.

But do we take a ball outside on a whim and kick it around? No.  I guess that means he’s inheriting my own sedentary habits.

I remember the one time this summer when I encouraged him to come outside with me while I worked in the yard, within ten minutes he was complaining of the gnats and heat and went back in the house.

Honestly, that’s where I’d rather be, too.

So what kind of society are we creating with our video games?  Ironically, in terms of this discussion, I saw a kid about eight or nine years old taking a tour here at work just the other day…and he was literally walking around this beautiful building, not even listening to the docent.  Instead, he was playing his PSP.

That’s a bit much even for me.  If I were his parent, I’d tell him to put it away.

But in a way, how atypical is he?  I see people playing games on their portables while riding bus and metro.  The tendency is to see this as creating a society of weakling introverts, but I think as the article correctly points out, what is happening is that there is a new society forming online.  One has only to play an MMORPG like World of Warcraft to see that.  There are people I consider my friends who I have never met, and who I will probably never meet outside my video game.

People are playing together on their consoles as well, either online or face to face.  Gamers are not necessarily the lonely basement dwellers they are caricatured as being.  In fact, that caricature is used as an insult in the gaming world.  “You probably live in your mom’s basement,” someone will say to someone who offends them.

Still, there is a part of me that wonders if my son would be better off with a little more outdoor activity.  I grew up in West Virginia, and my Dad took me hunting and fishing from an early age.  He bought me my first gun, a .410 shotgun, when I was about seven or eight, my own son’s age.  I cannot imagine putting a loaded gun in my son’s hands!

We went camping on weekends, and when I say “camping” I mean really roughing it.  We didn’t pull our truck or camper into a park somewhere and build a fire in a fire pit.  We got in a boat on the Little Kanawha river and floated down it for miles, so deep into the hills there was no trace of human life.  We’d camp in a tent on a sandbar, or along the shore.  Somewhere down the river, Dad would have arranged for Grandpa or someone to meet us at a point where the road re-connected with the river, and we’d haul our boat and go home after a couple days of that kind of living.

I will never do that with my son.  I look back on hunting and camping nostalgically, but it’s not something I want to do now, as an adult.  Maybe I’ve grown plain lazy, I don’t know.  I just don’t think that it would be fun.

Certainly I don’t think hunting is fun.  In fact I never enjoyed it.  I hunted partly because my Dad forced me to go hunting, and partly because I wanted to please him.  My memories of deer hunting involve standing under a tree at 7 AM in freezing, snowy November weather, waiting for a deer to walk by so I could try to shoot it.  That is something I will never do again of my own free will.

Now, if there is a world apocalypse and I am forced to live off the land, perhaps my hunting skills will have to be honed for the sake of survival.  But until that day, I’ll always prefer my nice warm bed at 7 AM on a cold November morning.  If that makes me a video game playing wuss, then so be it.

I guess what bothers me is that my son won’t even have any outdoors skills to be honed.  My grandpa passed this tradition on to my Dad, and my Dad passed it on to me, but because I am “different” I will never pass it on to my son.  It’s funny how things work.  I hate hunting.  My son would probably hate hunting.  But hate it or love it, there is a part of me that feels like I need to teach him to handle a gun and kill animals, whether he likes it or not.

I don’t know whether to write about the change of seasons, or the economic crisis.  Instability seems to be the buzz word of the day: hurricanes in the west and mid-west, and the collapse of banks in the east.  With relief operations in full force in Texas, it seems like our government has a better grip on how to respond to that storm than it does our economic troubles.

I have to admit, the fall of Lehman Brothers seems pretty far removed from my own life, and with the price of gas falling back somewhat after a weekend, pre-Ike surge, the economic woe seems even more distant.  Besides gas prices, however, the one reminder I see every day that indicates trouble on the horizon are the number of For Sale signs in front of homes.  Many of those signs have been in the yard for months, if not a year or more.  A newly-built house at the end of our street has been up for sale for nearly a year.  I’m sure the owners never imagined it would sit empty this long.

A pleasant, brick family home across the street from where I catch the bus in Silver Spring has been up for sale for over a year.  I’ve watched for two summers as the grass in the yard grew into a hayfield and then was trimmed back after several weeks.

I take in these sights, and then I listen to the radio and TV and can’t decide whether to be worried or to just sit back and wait.  Most economists say if you aren’t a wealthy person (defined as having over $100,000.00 in a savings or investment account), you have no need to worry.  The housing situation, however, affects everyone.

The scenario that runs through my head concerns a change of jobs.  What if a person wants to change jobs, but the change requires moving to another city?  How is that economically feasible if the person’s home can’t be sold at a profit?  What if it can’t be sold at all?

Job loss, not changing jobs, is the big fear of most people, however.  Debt, mortgages..all seem like a millstone around the neck if you don’t have a job.  People are just holding on to what they’ve got, not making any big decisions, hoping the four horsemen pass them by.

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You know you are getting old when your son starts asking you questions about “when you were a kid” and your answers prompt facial expressions that indicate disbelief.

You know you are getting really old when you start contributing these “when I was a kid” stories without even being asked.  My only consolation is that I have not yet used the expression “Back in my day.”

Brendan is seven, and he is at an age where he is starting to get a grip on the timeline of history, but he isn’t quite there yet.  It’s all still a bit confusing to him, and this confusion prompts some interesting exchanges like this one.

“Dad, was Benjamin Franklin alive when you were a kid?”

“Oh no, ” I tell him.

“So you didn’t have electricity when you were a kid?”

“Oh, we had electricity,” I say, “But Benjamin Franklin was born almost exactly 300 years ago.”

“Did Benjamin Franklin and Abraham Lincoln know each other?”

“No, no, they are from two different centuries,” I answer.

“So did you ever see Abraham Lincoln on TV?”

At this point, what can I do?  I try to change the subject.

“No, but let me tell you a story.  When I was your age…”

What I often don’t realize before beginning these trips down memory lane is that sometimes it can be hard to put into words what I am really trying to say.  How do I explain to a kid what television was like before cable, when we got one fuzzy channel on our black and white TV–and the clarity of that channel was totally dependent on how the antenna was positioned (“What’s an antenna, Dad?”).  If someone walked across the room too heavily, the picture would go out.

How do I explain the early eighties equivalent of the iPod, the portable tape player/recorder?  This was before even the Walkman.  At night when I was supposed to be sleeping, I would lie in bed with my tape player and an earphone (yes, that’s right, earphone; there was only one!) listening to Bon Jovi cassettes, or sometimes mix tapes I made myself by trying to record songs from the radio.

I was kind of an obsessive about capturing a song from radio without the lead-in by an announcer.  I remember many frustrating afternoons sitting by my parents’ AM/FM tape deck waiting for a song to come on that I wanted to record, then either hitting the play and record buttons too late, or too soon.

Back to the earphone story, though.  Back then, I think we just called it an earphone, but today it more properly resembels the earbud.  It was a rather bulbous, hard plastic earbud that you had to plug into one of your ears.  It didn’t fit properly, since I was a kid, and after a short time my ear would feel like someone had punched me in the side of the head.  There were stereo headphones back then, but if I recall they were expensive until the Walkman made them more accessible.  Me, I just had the cheapo white earphone.

Back in my day, every once in awhile the tape player would eat your tape.  Why, you might lose ten or twenty songs you spent a whole weekend collecting off the radio!  Just think of that, son, the next time you download some new songs for your iPod.

Back in my day, we only had 13 channels, even with cable.  And the only reality show we watched was when we had happened to walk in on mom and dad in the bedroom.  And you think “Celebrity Rehab” is scary?

Why, back in my day, McDonalds served chinese food, and we ate it and we liked it.  Chicken McNuggets…bah!  I ate my first chicken McNugget with a chopstick and Sweet and Sour sauce.  So don’t give me any of this McRib crap.

And you know what?  Back in my day, the pizza wasn’t delivered to your door.  We had to go pick it up.  Then Domino’s came along and made us all lazy.  Domino’s had that Noid mascot, too, so don’t talk to me about annoying TV commercials.  I know all about them!

Back in my day, we had to get our porn from our father’s dresser drawer, just like he did when he was a kid.  You kids today don’t know how easy you have it.

Back in my day, our video games gave us blisters on our thumbs, yessir they did.   I once had a blister that lasted a week, but did I let that stop me from playing Pac-Man?  Hell no.  I learned to move the joystick with my left hand, until my right hand healed.

Those were tough times…back in my day.

It’s getting crazy out there, folks.  This little tidbit is courtesy Howard Kurtz’s Media Notes in the WashPo.

Forget Iraq and health care. Forget the polls and focus groups. There’s a new explanation why Sarah Palin is the surprise hit of the season.

“She’s sexy. Men want a sexy woman,” says CNBC’s Donny Deutsch. “Woman want to idealize about a sexy woman . . . She’s a lioness . . . Women want to be her. Men want to mate with her.”

What men are really saying, Deutsch adds, is, “I want her laying next to me in bed.”

First point I would make: any record of similar statements made about Obama?  Do women want to “mate” with him?  Men may want to be him; I don’t know and I don’t presume to speak for other men.

Second point: beauty is completely relative.  I may be the only man in existence who can’t find a woman attractive unless her intellect, beliefs, and personality are also attractive, but that’s just how I am.  For me, her intellect, beliefs, and personality (as displayed at the Republican convention) are a turnoff that surpasses whatever physical beauty she may hold.  Her religiosity suggests a frigidity, or at least a rigidity, that at least for me, do not provoke excited fantasies about what she’s like in the bedroom.

Also, there is the voice.  No one has mentioned the voice.  It really isn’t relevant, but since irrelevancies are rapidly overtaking substance in this campaign, what the heck.  Does anyone else find her voice, particularly that accent, annoying?  I’ve heard it referred to as a “western twang.”  I’d say it more approximates the annoying whinging of a prepubescent boy from North Dakota.

Maybe it’s just me, but every time I hear a Palin soundbite, I grit my teeth not only at the substance of what she says, but at the sound.  I don’t think I can bear listening to her for four or eight or more years.

“I love those Hockey Mawms…”

Please God, no more.

But to return to the original topic–it is so very important after all–is Sarah Palin sexy?

Glen Beck called the fake bikini photos “conservative porn” and said Palin was “smokin’ hot.”  I think he needs to get out of the studio more.  Perhaps she is hot, if one can get past everything else about her.  For me at least, I can’t do it.

It’s like trying to get me to acknowledge that Ann Coulter is hot.  There is no way in hell.  If I saw a picture of Anne Coulter or Sarah Palin nude, I’d laugh.  It just woudn’t do a damned thing for me.

Incidentally, again on the subject of her looks, on the WMAL morning show this morning Andy parks went off the Palin reservation and commented that he saw a picture of her recently in which she had the “crazy eye” of Jennifer Wilbanks, the runaway bride of a couple years ago.

I’ve always thought she looked a bit wild-eyed, myself.  These are things people only say on radical, left-wing blogs like mine, though.  Parks was immediately chastised by his co-host, Fred Grandy, and he retracted his statement.

Supposedly Palin was a beauty contestant at one time, but it’s no surprise to me that she was only a runner up.  Let’s hope that trend continues in the current contest.

David Frum, a blogger at the National Review Online, had an interesting article in the New York Times Magazine this weekend, titled The Vanishing Republican Voter.  There is also an addendum to the article over at NRO.

Distilled into a sentence, Frum’s thesis is that cities and suburbs where there is a mixture of poor and wealthy–where income is unevenly distributed with a small middle class–tend to vote Democrat, whereas areas in which income is more equal than not tend to vote Republican.  That sounds like common sense, except that when you get down to the details, what he is saying is that Republicans may “own” middle income voters, but they are losing voters on the high and bottom ends of the economic ladder.

Frum defines “high end” as being those with incomes above $100,000.00.  To me, that is upper middle class, and that comprises a whole lot of voters.

A couple things fascinate me about this story.  For one, Frum is a Republican, but he is making a Democrat-sounding argument that growing economic inequality in the country threatens Republican dominance of the political machine in this country.  Middle income families have not seen their incomes rise during the Bush years, and in fact the rising cost of health care may have actually injured their income growth.  These people, stupidly (in my opinion, not Frum’s), are Republicans.

Frum’s argument for why these voters are Republican could be interpreted as condescending, since he implies that their lack of education results in them voting based on issues such as gay marriage, gun control, and other issues that have no bearing on their standard of living (these are the “bitter” Americans Obama has been so much derided for mentioning).

My interest was further piqued when Frum points out that despite the perception that the wealthy tend to be Republicans, in fact those with incomes above $100,000.00 a year tend to vote Democrat.

Republicans still claim the support of the upper-middle, but by dwindling margins. Democrats increased their share of the vote among those earning more than $100,000 by 9 percentage points between 1994 and 1998. Between 1998 and 2006, Democrats increased their share of this upper-middle-class vote by 3 more points.

Frum’s explanation for this is that Democrat centrist economic policy allows wealthier voters to vote according to their more liberal social values, rather than their pocket book.

This is fascinating stuff, really, especially when one considers the politics of class warfare in the present campaign.  One of the most fiery portions of Bill O’Reilly’s interview with Obama, the second segment of which aired last night, concerned O’Reilly’s charge that Obama is using class warfare against McCain.  Obama vehemently denied it.

However, he may well have countered that it is Republicans who used class warfare most successfully against Democrats.  For two decades or more, Republicans have successfully defined Democrat politicians and voters as elitist and condescending, not to mention anti-Christian and unpatriotic.  “Hollywood liberals” as the conservative talkers sneeringly call them are defined as much by their wealth as their intellectual vacuity, in the minds of Republican voters.

Frum is no friend to Democrats.  He is writing to a Republican audience, warning them that they are marginalizing themselves.  Frum calls it a “slow-motion withering” of the GOP, and attributes it to economic stagnation on the lower and middle ends of the ladder, and a vast inequality between the lower, middle, and upper-middle class.

Conservatives need to stop denying reality. The stagnation of the incomes of middle-class Americans is a fact. And only by acknowledging facts can we respond effectively to the genuine difficulties of voters in the middle.

The implication for the current Presidential race is that when it comes down to November 2nd, a shift in  demographics may count more than anything in a Republican defeat.  Better yet, Republicans seem to be whistling past the graveyard with the nomination of Palin and the appeal to social values conservatives, rather than pocket book Independents.

Listening to the speeches during the GOP convention, particularly those of Thompson, Guiliani, and Palin, I was struck by how they could have been speaking before the 1992 and 1996 conventions.  The rhetoric was old and stale–the vitriolic attacks on opponents, the appeal to middle class Americans with the whole moose-hunting, hockey mom schtick…I would not have been surprised if Pat Robertson or Pat Buchanan had rose to speak.

Where was the acknowledgement that we live in uncertain economic times?  Where was the acknowledgement that many people are out of workor struggling?  And those who are working, as Frum points out, aren’t seeing their income rise.

The tide is in Democrats favor.  However, I can’t help but feel this portent of disaster.  Maybe that’s natural, after eight years of disappointments.  It often seems like Obama is simply submitting himself to the fates, floating with the tide, rather than building a boat and becoming master of the tide.  What has always given me hope is that this campaign has been different so far.  The intent to compete in states like Virginia, which have always been bastions of conservatism, implies that Obama understands the shift away from conservatism in our polity.

Obama is not just trying to win all of Kerry’s blue states plus one.  Just as in the primaries, he is competing across the nation, in states Democrats never considered in play before.  Whether it is a strategy that will pay off, it’s hard to say.  It’s new.  There is no tried and true template for success here.

I’m nervous, but not yet pessimistic.  McCain’s seven or nine point advantage in Ohio is troubling, but if Obama can win Virginia and some other unexpected states, maybe Ohio won’t matter.  Or maybe in the end, it will all come down to Sarah Palin’s moose-gutting skills or how she looks in a bikini.  I won’t be surprised, whatever happens.

Elitist jerk that I am, I’m just hoping some intrepid investigator turns up a video of Palin speaking in tongues.  Demographics aside, there is still nothing so effective as a nice October surprise.

As I’ve listened to news coverage of the election campaign following last week’s Republican National Convention, it has been tough to maintain even the semblance of objectivity in the wake of what looks in hindsight like nothing more than a dog and pony show.

This morning on Fox–several days after the convention came to a close–I still found myself subjected to inane stories about how the model of eyeglasses Sarah Palin wore are now sold out. However, the female host of the morning show just happened to have obtained a pair on loan from a store, and she assured us that they fit marvelously.

By the way, her eyeglasses were created by a Japanese designer, Kawasaki, and cost around $375.00. Somehow I don’t think she’ll wear them when gutting a moose.

So, I flipped over to CNN and found little changed. People have lost their mind, or at least their sense of perspective. This must be how conservatives felt in the early days of the Obama campaign, when women were fainting.

Honestly, I don’t know how much longer I can take it. There is a sense of doom that clings to the election now, like the whiff of a corpse in the trunk of a murderer’s car. I find myself wondering, “Are people really going to be stupid enough to fall for this crap?”

I really don’t know. What I do know is that from my perspective, the choice of Palin was the most cynical, the most calculatedly condescending political move I’ve witnessed in all the years I’ve been watching politics. It’s to be expected that a candidate for the Presidency will choose a running mate who either applies some brick and mortar to the weak points at the top of the ticket, or else enhances the strength of the Presidential nominee. Palin does neither.

She was chosen solely for the shock and awe value of putting an unknown political neophyte second in command to the President. She’s a mother, she’s a “hockey mom” (that term still makes me want to puke), she’s a hunter, she’s a fisherman. No one in the McCain camp proposes that she’s Henry Kissinger, or even Henry Fonda (at least he could act the part of a political wise man); what she is to the McCain camp is the tail of the dog, and we’re the dog being wagged.

She’s a distraction–a distraction from the economy and all the serious issues we ought to be debating, and a distraction from the emptiness of the Republican platform. Obama is correct in pointing out that the Republicans launched a lot of vicious attacks against him during their convention, but offered no proposals for the challenges facing America. Furthermore, what specifics Palin and McCain offer even about her record aren’t necessarily true. Her relationship with lobbyists and earmarks is not as squeaky clean as she would have people believe. These inaccuracies are going to come out as Palin gains exposure. Yet however true that may be, is anyone listening?

The roar of publicity around this woman is deafening, and with so little time until the election there is little opportunity for the shine to rub off her expensive eyeglass frames. By the time people figure out what a boondoggle they are being sold by the Republicans, McCain and Palin may have won.

In the midst of the storm over whether Ophra should give in and do an interview with her, or whether a mother with a special needs child should run for such a high level office, one thing gives me hope that the media and voters will become serious about this election once again. One thing: time.

There isn’t a lot of time, but there is enough, and Palin’s exposure is going to morph into over-exposure rapidly. I don’t think she will hold up as well as Obama, who has had time to adapt to the shifting realities of the election. She’s like a small business owner plucked from obscurity to be co-CEO of Microsoft. And she only has around eight weeks to make herself presentable to the Board of Directors.

There is a certain degree of cheering for the underdog that is bound to happen, as Palin is exposed by the media over the coming weeks, but in the end I think the majority of Americans will recognize the cynicism of McCain that led him to choose her in the first place. It is, after all, McCain we are voting for, not Palin.