Mixed doubles
If nothing else, John McCain's choice of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin to be his running mate is a victory for the modern industry of consultant-driven politics. Choosing a little-known and little-experienced candidate may make it more difficult for McCain to make his claim that Barack Obama is too inexperienced to be commander-in-chief, but choosing a woman from the working-class ranks helps the GOP in its courtship of both blue-collar voters and disgruntled Hillary Clinton loyalists.As always, it's a race to the "mushy middle" of electoral politics in which We the People are regarded as numbers and itemized voting blocks listed on a dry-erase board-- "message" running a distant second to "perception of message." The Democrats did the same thing last week by pairing the relatively unseasoned Obama with Joe Biden, a senator that's been entrenched in Washington for so long he's got bird shit on his shoulders. I'm sure voters will be as mobilized by the tactic as they were 20 years ago when Lloyd Bentsen, a war hero from Texas, was recruited by his party to "butch up" Mike Dukakis.
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Is it all that mindblowing that Palin is a former beauty contestant? What was Reagan?
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The War on Drugs is about to turn a corner: 16 were arrested yesterday on Forest Avenue in Des Moines after an eight-month police investigation.
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Book recommendation: Matt Taibbi's humorous and unfiltered first book (2005) "Spanking the Donkey: Dispatches from the Dumb Season," recalling the author's experience as a correspondent on the 2004 presidential campaign trail. Taibbi travels along in New Hampshire as John Kerry courts the votes of veterans, Howard Dean repeats the same stump speech over and over, and Joe Lieberman publicly celebrates his mother's birthday. He goes undercover at a Bush/Cheney campaign office in Orlando, before arranging a few of his fellow reporters into a single-elimination tournament to determine America's worst campaign journalist. (Summary examples: Newsweek's Howard Fineman- "the patron saint of media hypocrites," Time's Karen Tumulty- "a third-rate sportswriter, a serial poll-humper, an arch-priestess of conventional wisdom, the unrepentant human embodiment of the lowest common denominator, the sworn enemy of all political substance, and incidentally, ugly," and Ann Coulter- "Like her predecessor, Joseph Stalin, she has her funny moments.")
Taibbi's explicit thesis (and complaint) is that political reporters make their living selling the campaigns to the citizenry, not speaking for the people to the campaigns. No one gets left off the hook in Taibbi's book, including us. Our national elections, he writes, "are gladiatorical spectacle in which individual dignity is ritualistically destroyed over the course of more than a year of constant battering and television exposure. Whether this is a trick of the elite to deliver a frightening object lesson to the population, or whether it represents the actual emotional desire of an impressively mean and stupid citizenry, that's hard to say. Either way, it sucks."
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At least this guy places a value on his vote. 99 cents per vote is a bargain for any office-seeker in this day and age.
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Speaking of office-seeking, my profile as an Iowa House candidate in District 66 has gone up at this national site.
posted by CM @ 2:07 PM
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