Saturday, October 11, 2008

Goodbye Old Principles

Three debates—two presidential and one vice-presidential—so far, and one presidential one to go.

There’s not much to be said for the vice-presidential debate, really. Biden had a very tough tightrope to walk—essentially, it came down to “Don’t be sexist, but treat her gently”—but he did well enough by reserving his barbs for McCain and continuing to refer to “Governor Palin,” not taking her bait of “Can I call you Joe?” (which turned out to be the precursor of such pathetic memorized lines as “Say it ain’t so, Joe.”)

Palin’s performance was absolutely cringe-inducing. Between the lies about her own record, her misrepresentations about the GOP platform, her refusal to answer direct questions with her “I’m just gonna talk straight to the American people” schtick, and her winking at the camera, she has managed to become so infuriatingly annoying and idiotic that I now have the same reaction to seeing her chirpy mug on television that I do to seeing GWB’s squinty visage: I immediately want to change the channel.

Over the last few weeks, fact-checking has brought to light Palin’s true record in Alaska, and I am embarrassed that I ever bought into the “fiscal conservative” falsehood. Sarah Palin is, at best, a weasel. The whole Bridge to Nowhere? She was a big fan of it until it became unpopular, and then never bothered to refuse the money. (In fact, the Road to the Bridge to Nowhere was recently completed well after the cancellation of the bridge itself, and that cost quite a bit as well.) She lobbied hard for pork, especially for pet projects in Wasilla.

What’s worse is that there’s been an ongoing bipartisan investigation of her activities as governor, and here again, she’s been utterly weaselly. The investigation started back in June, long before she was tapped as McCain’s running mate. She pressured people to be uncooperative with legal subpoenas, her husband refused to cooperate with investigators, while she was saying that she wanted to get the investigation over as quickly as possible and had every intention of cooperating. And as more and more details came out, it became clear how amateurish and idiotic her administration had been: loaded with unqualified cronies, participating in questionable activities, firing people not for incompetence or insubordination, but simply because they didn’t immediately capitulate to her demands. It was her record in Wasilla, and it was quickly becoming her record in Juneau. Skirting the law, she took blatant advantage of the taxpayers, billing them for lodging while she stayed at home, charging for incidental expenses that the taxpayers shouldn’t have had to shoulder—never quite breaking the law, but certainly stomping on it pretty hard.

What bothers me the most, though, is her RNC speech and her debate performance.

One of the things that Palin said in her RNC speech was this line:

Long ago, a young farmer and haberdasher from Missouri followed an unlikely path to the vice presidency. A writer observed: “We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty, sincerity, and dignity.” I know just the kind of people that writer had in mind when he praised Harry Truman.

Certainly it was strange to invoke Truman here, who would have been embarrassed to be lauded by this small-minded self-righteous busybody. But the quote was what bugged me. I knew I’d heard it before, but couldn’t remember where—and it wasn’t a good thing.

It wasn’t until today, when I ran into an opinion column in The Wall Street Journal by Thomas Frank, that it hit me:

It tells us something about Sarah Palin's homage to small-town America, delivered to an enthusiastic GOP convention last week, that she chose to fire it up with an unsourced quotation from the all-time champion of fake populism, the belligerent right-wing columnist Westbrook Pegler.

Westbrook Pegler. I’d done a report on him in high school. He was a Hearst columnist—and started off pretty respectably—who gradually became one of the most viciously racist (in general, but notably anti-Semetic) columnists in mainstream newspapers, demonizing Democratic politicians and passively calling for violence against them. Pegler eventually became so fanatically extreme that he was kicked out of the John Birch Society.

Now, I doubt Palin is well-read enough to have researched that line herself—after all, this is a woman who thinks “What magazines or newspapers do you read?” is “a gotcha question”—but certainly her handlers fed her the line. Handlers like Tucker Eskew, the Bush consultant who slandered McCain so badly in South Carolina (claiming that McCain was a traitor, that his adopted Bangladeshi daughter was actually his illegitmate child, and other such stellar rumors). These are the people spoon-feeding Palin her rhetoric, and it shows.

In between the debates, her campaign rhetoric relies relentlessly on misrepresentation, ranging from subtle associations to breathtakingly outright lies, and more and more, it’s sparking the sort of violent verbal outbursts that are inappropriate in any forum, much less a presidential campaign.

I’ll have more to say about this later, but I am very unhappy with the fact that McCain has chosen this stance. Unable to sway people on the strength of his argument, he has shed every attribute that he ever had that made him in any way admirable, abandoned any sense of honor and forthrightness, and has embraced the worst elements of the GOP in order to . . . what? It’s not really helping his campaign much.

Oh, and one other thing, those of you who seem to want to make a big deal of Senator Obama’s middle name: Give it a rest. Honestly, do you realize how desperate and stupid you sound? Yeah, his middle name is Hussein. Yes, it’s an Arabic name; it means “small handsome one.” Do you somehow think he chose his middle name? Or that it has any bearing on his character?

Good grief, of the two candidates, it’s McCain with the problem name. John Wilkes Booth—the assassin of one of our most beloved presidents. John Wayne Gacy—the part-time clown who turned out to be a serial killer. Do you idiots seriously think that makes McCain more likely to be a murderer himself?

Please, please, please: drop it. You look unbelievably stupid harping on it. Drop it.

As this election nears, I can’t help but think of something Winston Churchill once said:

The Americans will always do the right thing—after they’ve exhausted all the alternatives.

There are still alternatives available, though, and that worries me. More about that tomorrow, I hope.

(By the way, the work project’s deadline is this week. Hopefully that will allow me to write here more often than I have been.)