It's a Class War, Stupid

The Obama camp, playing with a big halftime lead as the cliché goes, is going to play this one close to the vest, sticking to a strategy of using larger and larger fonts every week for their "CHANGE" placards, and getting the candidates' various aides and spokesgoons to use the term "McCain-Bush policies" as many times as possible on political talk shows. Obama will also use this pre-convention period to do what every general election candidate does after a tough primary-season fight, i.e. ditch all the positions he took en route to securing the nomination and replace them with opinions subtly (or sometimes not-so-subtly) reconfigured to fit the latest polling information coming out of certain key swing states. Both sides as well as the pundit class will describe this early positioning for combat over swing-state electoral votes as a "race for the center" (AP, July 3: "Candidates Courting the Center"), as if the "political center" in America were a place where huge chunks of the population tirelessly obsessed over semi-relevant media-driven wedge issues like stem-cell research and gay marriage, even as they lacked money to buy food and make rent every month.

The press, meanwhile, is clearly flailing around for a sensational hook to use in selling the election, as the once-brightly-burning star of blue-red hatred seems unfortunately to have dimmed a little — just in time, perhaps, to torpedo the general election season cable ratings. They are working hard to come up with the WWF-style shorthand labels they always use to sell electoral contests: if 2000 was the "wooden" and ?condescending? Al Gore versus the "dummy" Bush, and 2004 featured that same ?regular guy? Bush against the "patrician" and "bookish" John Kerry (who also "looked French"), in 2008 we?re going to be sold the "maverick" McCain against the "smooth" Obama, or some dumb thing along those lines. Time has even experimented with a "poker versus craps" storyline, feeding off the incidental fact that Obama is a regular poker player while McCain reportedly favors craps, which apparently has some electorally relevant meaning — and if you know what that something is, please let me know.

We're also going to be fed truckloads of onerous horseshit about the candidate wives. The Michelle Obama content is going to go something like this: the Fox/Limbaugh crowd will first plaster her with Buckwheatesque caricatures (the National Review cover was hilariously over-the-top in that respect) and racially loaded epithets like "baby Mama" (that via Fox News spokeswhore Michelle Malkin, God bless her) and "angry black woman" (via self-aggrandizing, cop-mustached Chicago-based prune Cal Thomas). Next, the so-called "mainstream" press, the "respectable" press, which of course is above such behavior, will amplify those attacks 10 million-fold via endless waves of secondary features soberly pondering the question of whether or not Michelle Obama is a "political liability" — because of stuff like the Thomas column, and Malkin's quip and the endless rumors about a mysterious "whitey" video. Cindy McCain, meanwhile, will generally be described as a political asset, as the pundit class tends to applaud, mute, stoned-looking candidate wives who have soldiered on bravely while being martyred by rumors of their mostly absent husband's infidelities. It will help on the martyrdom front that McCain launched his political career with her family money and drove her into an actual, confirmable chemical dependency. As long as she keeps gamely wobbling onstage and trying to smile into the camera, she's going to get straight As from the political press, guaranteed.

Some combination of all of these things is going to comprise the so-called "national debate" this fall. Now, we live in an age where our media deceptions are so far-reaching and comprehensive that they almost smother reality, at times seeming actually to replace reality — but even in the context of the inane TV-driven fantasyland we've grown used to inhabiting, this year's crude cobbling together of a phony "national conversation" by our political press is an outrageous, monstrously offensive deception. For if, as now seems likely, this fall's election is ultimately turned into a Swan-esque reality show where America is asked to decide if it can tolerate Michelle Obama's face longer than John McCain's diapers, it will be at the expense of an urgent dialogue about a serious nationwide emergency that any sane country would have started having some time ago. And unless you run a TV network or live in Washington, you probably already know what that emergency is.

A few weeks back, I got a call from someone in the office of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. Sanders wanted to tell me about an effort his office had recently made to solicit information about his constituents? economic problems. He sent out a notice on his e-mail list asking Vermont residents to "tell me what was going on in their lives economically." He expected a few dozen letters at best — but got, instead, more than 700 in the first week alone. Some, like the excerpt posted above, sounded like typical tales of life for struggling single-parent families below the poverty line. More unnerving, however, were the stories Sanders received from people who held one or two or even three jobs, from families in which both spouses held at least one regular job — in other words, from people one would normally describe as middle-class. For example, this letter came from the owner of his own commercial cleaning service:

My 90-year-old father in Connecticut has recently become ill and asked me to visit him. I want to drop everything I am doing and go visit him, however, I am finding it hard to save enough money to add to the extra gas I'll need to get there. I make more than I did a year ago and I don't have enough to pay my property taxes this quarter for the first time in many years. They are due tomorrow.