Here’s an old joke:

There was this old man who had a favorite hunting story that he liked to tell over and over. Even though his friends and family had heard it many times, he was always looking for a suitable opportunity in any gathering to repeat it.

At one function, there was no break in the conversation that gave him the chance, so he took his walking stick and, when no one was looking, struck the ground hard with it, making a loud report.

In the startled silence that followed, he said “What’s that? A gun shot? Well, talking about guns . . .”

Ok, so it’s not a great joke. Not even a good one. I am terrible at telling jokes and don’t even remember them shortly after hearing them.

The point is that that old joke suddenly popped into my head during the Obama-McCain debate, when McCain took whatever opportunity he got to go on about earmarks. It seems like it is his favorite topic, something that he works into every speech and interview, delighting in the details.

He went on about the three million dollar earmark that Obama, as part of the Illinois delegation, had requested for an ‘overhead projector’, implying that this for something you find in any classroom and was a boondoggle. It was actually for a projector for the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, to project the night sky onto the dome. It is the oldest planetarium in the US and whose current projector is forty years old. Those projectors are expensive.

But that was not my point. Sure, earmarks are not good budget practice. But they are not the worst things in the world. In fact, in the grand scheme of things within the US budget, they are rather small potatoes. If you get rid of every earmark, you would still have huge financial problems. McCain’s seems overly obsessed with them even as we are talking of trillion dollar bailouts and while he wants to provide hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts to wealthy people.

At some point, you begin to wonder whether McCain’s focus on earmarks is a way to avoid talking about real budgetary issues. It seems to have become a gimmick, a way to score cheap points.

The debate itself was a rather boring, I thought. The candidates pretty much rehashed the same things they have been saying for a long time. I didn’t think there was a clear winner but the snap polls all indicate that Obama won quite handily. (See here, here, and here.)

The format was awful. So far, only the first debate was a real debate. At times, both candidates seemed to want to break free of the rigid constraints and get more free-wheeling but the smug and self-important moderator Tom Brokaw (easily one of the most annoying people on network news, even worse than Gwen Ifill who moderated the vice presidential debate) kept reining them in, reminding them about the rules that had been agreed upon. His selection of questions was mediocre.

But if the candidates themselves wanted to change the rules in mid-debate, why shouldn’t they be allowed to? (There was a great episode in The West Wing when at the beginning of a presidential debate, just after the moderator had read all the detailed rules about time limits and no cross-talk and the like, the candidates decided to chuck them and simply talk back and forth. Too bad that only happens in fiction.)

One item that irritated me was McCain’s repeated claim that he knows how to get Bin Laden:

He has said this before, and at other times has also said that he knows how to end the war in Iraq. But if he does know how to do all these things, why has he not told President Bush? Surely, if he “puts country first” then he should have told Bush his secret plans a long time ago to get the country out of the current mess, rather than using it as a lure to get people to vote for him. What if he loses? Is he going to take his secret plans and sulk, refusing to share it with anybody, like a spoiled child? Why doesn’t someone question him on the ethics of keeping it secret? It reminded me of Nixon’s ‘secret’ plan to end the Vietnam war.

Meanwhile, last week, NBC news anchor Brian Williams and David Letterman had a surprisingly thoughtful analysis of the campaign so far and the vice-presidential debate (except for some nonsense midway about how great Tom Brokaw and Tim Russert are):

Part 1:

Part 2:

Letterman made a good observation about Sarah Palin taking everyone by surprise with her opening “Can I call you Joe” remark to Biden as they were being introduced. I too thought it a little odd but put it down to a mere affectation. Letterman thinks that she did this in order to set up her planned line “Say it ain’t so, Joe” later in the debate. Since it has become clear that during the debate she was reading much of her responses from cue cards, that kind of set up for a ‘zinger’ would not surprise me.

POST SCRIPT: Train metaphor for candidates

One thing that struck me during the debate was that McCain looked and walked and talked like an old man. His allusions were dated. Some older people have an old-world style is graceful and charming and even reassuring. But McCain just comes across as out of touch and cranky.

(Thanks to a commenter at DailyKos.)

If you liked the train metaphor, then take a look at this one.

Will attempts by the McCain camp to paint Obama as some kind of sinister and dangerous figure work?

Analysts seem to feel that such smear campaigns can be effective at times. Recall the absurd situation in 2004 where John Kerry’s actual service in Vietnam was ridiculed and called into question by the supporters of Bush and Cheney, both of whom were draft dodgers. Recall also the anti-gay marriage sentiment that seemingly played an important role in that same election.

So far, the normal hot-button issues of sexual orientation and abortion and guns have not played prominent roles in the campaign. This leaves race as the emotional issue that can be exploited. And rest assured it will be, along with all kinds of attempts to impugn the character of Obama using guilt by association.

In trying to run a smear campaign, the McCain campaign is hampered by its own baggage. For every attempt to paint Obama as an elitist, we have the McCains’ dozen (?) homes, thirteen cars, and private plane, and the fact that the outfit that Cindy McCain wore at the Republican convention allegedly cost around $300,000.
[Read more…]

Breaking news: Barack Obama is black.

It is quite remarkable how little salience that fact has had in the race so far considering that if he wins, the election of the first non-white president of the United States is an event of major historic significance. While his ethnicity is a complex one, he cannot escape (and has in fact wisely embraced) the shorthand description of being black. For his campaign to have insisted on accuracy would have been to draw attention to trivial questions of race and ethnicity that are at best distractions and at worst would make race too important an issue.

When Obama speaks in a debate or gives speeches or is interviewed, the fact that he is black is not the most prominent impression he makes, at least for me. It is just an incidental item that registers in the background, like that he is tall or slim. Obama is on his way to becoming the Tiger Woods of politics. Just as the latter is no longer ‘the black golfer’, Barack Obama has almost, but not quite, reached the stage of not being ‘the black presidential candidate’. That is quite an achievement.

But the next month will see if he has made the complete transition to Tigerness. We are now entering the last stages of the presidential campaign, something I have been long dreading. With the McCain candidacy declining steadily in the polls and on a direct path to losing despite the Hail Marys thrown by them (selecting Sarah Palin and ‘suspending’ his campaign because of the financial crisis), you can expect them to now do desperate things.

By this I mean going well beyond the standard negative campaigning tactics of distorting your opponent’s record, taking their statements out of context, impugning motives, and focusing on style in order to give misleading impressions. Those things have always been part of politics.

No, I expect them to go nuclear, throwing everything at Obama to make him into the stereotype of the dangerous black man, to seek to change his image from that of a Tiger Woods to more of a Dennis Rodman, to transform him in the eyes of white people from someone whom you would welcome into your home to the kind of person you cross the street to avoid.

The McCain camp has already telegraphed their disgusting strategy and Sarah Palin has started the process:

Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin on Saturday accused Democrat Barack Obama of “palling around with terrorists” because of his association with a former 1960s radical, stepping up the campaign’s effort to portray Obama as unacceptable to American voters.
. . .
Falling behind Obama in polls, the Republican campaign plans to make attacks on Obama’s character a centerpiece of candidate John McCain’s message in the final weeks of the presidential race.
. . .
Palin’s remark about Obama “palling around with terrorists” comes as e-mails circulate on the Internet with suggestions that the Democratic candidate is secretly a radical, foreign-born Muslim with designs against the U.S. — even though Obama is a native of Hawaii, a Christian and has no connections to Muslim extremists.

McCain’s campaign manager Rick Davis (himself now under a cloud because of revelations of his lobbying links to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) spelled out how such character assassinations are done.

The premise of any smear campaign rests on a central truth of politics: Most of us will vote for a candidate we like and respect, even if we don’t agree with him on every issue. But if you can cripple a voter’s basic trust in a candidate, you can probably turn his vote. The idea is to find some piece of personal information that is tawdry enough to raise doubts, repelling a candidate’s natural supporters.
. . .
It’s not necessary, however, for a smear to be true to be effective. The most effective smears are based on a kernel of truth and applied in a way that exploits a candidate’s political weakness.

(Thanks to BarbinMD for the link.)

Ironically, when Davis wrote the above, he was accusing those in favor of George W. Bush of using those very same dirty tactics against McCain in the 2000 Republican primary campaign when Bush was losing to McCain. Bush went on to win. Since McCain has now hired many of those very same Bush operatives to run his 2008 campaign, we should not be surprised to see a reprise of those tactics, now used by McCain against Obama.

One important factor in a successful smear campaign is the ability to create an ‘echo chamber’ for these slurs, to get it widely circulated in the media. The current financial crisis has been getting banner headlines and has been used to scare people into voting for this huge bailout. Given that financial issues are using up so much media airtime, it may be harder to get traction for this strategy. I suspect that people are more likely to be swayed by extraneous things when there are no major issues gripping their attention.

So will the McCain-Palin attempt at raising so-called character issues at such a time work? Or will it be seen as fiddling while Rome burns?

Frankly, I am not a good judge of whether raising extraneous issues will succeed. I don’t have a good feel for the pulse of the people. I really should get out more.

While I am very cynical of the way the government serves mainly the interests of the rich and powerful and influential, I am usually more hopeful about the good nature and good sense of people in general over the long term. Each election time I think that people will not be swayed by trivialities and will vote on the basis of what truly will affect their lives. And while most are like that, unfortunately there do seem to be some people who can be swayed by such appeals to their fears and intolerance.

Whether those numbers will be enough to sway the outcome of this election is something I cannot gauge.

Tomorrow: More on racial politics

POST SCRIPT: And now, live, the vice presidential debate!

Saturday Night Live had its by now obligatory Sarah Palin parody with Tina Fey, with the bonus of Queen Latifah playing moderator Gwen Ifill.

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