Lose the Debate, Win the Election

As I left at friend's apartment at 5am on Saturday morning Berlin time after watching the first presidential debate, I admit was not a happy Christopher. My chosen, cherished candidate had disappointed me. The opposition, I felt, gave an unusually strong and coherent performance. I decided to just go to bed and spare myself what I was sure would be dispiriting post-debate analysis.

When I woke up later that afternoon and crawled to my computer, though, I was greeted by something rather surprising. Obama had won the debate--so said the snap polls--and most commentators were busying themselves trying to explain why Obama had been deemed the more appealing contender.

Had I seen the same debate as everyone else? Am I living on another planet? I struggled for an explanation. Was this evidence of media bias? Or did Obama's campaign simply outmaneuver the McCain camp in post-debate spin? Or am I simply hopelessly out of touch?

Whatever the explanation, I now feel more confident about Obama's chances for winning the presidency than I have at perhaps any other point this year. What his victorious failure in Friday night's debate proves is that Obama is so firmly in command of the election narrative that no intercession of real events will able to halt his progress.

McCain could hardly have hoped for a better performance. He is almost certain to do worse in later debates. Obama could still falter, but it is far liklier that he'll put on a better, more energetic and personable show in the debates to come.

The point is not that McCain failed to acheive his "game-changer": the point is rather that game can no longer be changed. Obama's lead, I now believe, is becoming entrenched. Gallup actually has his number increasing by three points since the debate.

If Obama can do this well while doing this badly, then the election is over.

Living with an Asterix

Is it all a dream? At some point the question must be confronted, the body must be pinched. Is this real life, or a Zwischenspiel? Are Americans who live abroad really just “on leave”, living with an asterix—for years or decades perhaps—like so many university professors whose starred departmental profiles provide annual disappointment to scores of over-eager pupils?

I am not an expatriate. I have neither married a European nor given up my American citizenship. I jealously—bitterly—cling to my right to vote, among other New World privileges. Despite soon beginning work for a European magazine, my mind still inhabits a media community whose main organs are centered in New York. I am considering opening a Roth IRA. My return to the United States may be perpetually deferred in an earthly, temporal sense, but it is always imminent as a mental proposition. My waking mind might be uncertain about its future plans, but my unconscious has no doubt that it will soon find itself back on the other side of the Atlantic.

So what does it mean, in the year 2008, for Americans in their early twenties to pack up and move to Europe? Everyone draws on traditions, whether they like to or not, and “losing” oneself in European exile in an especially venerable one. And yet, as I open the Literatur section of this week’s Die Zeit and read about Truman Capote’s romp around Venice with Donald Windham, I feel more distance than resonance. Capote’s own gay grand tour, his Italian muse-mongering, was untraditional in its own way, and cannot really be compared to the kind of American exile-experiences chronicled and/or imagined by earlier writers like Henry James.

But Capote seems much closer to James and the nineteenth century ‘Grand Tour’ model than he does to any Americans I know today. What’s so different about 2008?

Well, for one thing, the dollar is a lot weaker. In a way this is the crucial thing. Americans living in Europe can no longer correctly style themselves as the emissaries of American empire, feasting upon the cultural left-overs of a ruined and bankrupt continent. Neither are we burdened with the same sense of cultural inferiority that Americans once inevitably were. In matters both cultural and economic, the scales have tipped back towards parity. Does this make the European-American relationship in some way “purer”, an encounter between equals?

The other thing that must be said—loath as I am to over-extrapolate from my inevitably narrow experience—is that moving to Europe feels entirely normalized. It has carries with it no special romance or cachet. In a way, deciding to move to Berlin is not so unlike deciding to move to New York, or Chicago, or San Francisco, particularly if you speak German. Part of this is a cyber-effect, no doubt, an illusion of closeness.

And yet I still wonder if this a detour from life as I will one day live it. Whether this were so would be much clearer if I were living in, say, Bangkok. There would be no question in my mind that living in Thailand would carry a very big asterix indeed. Berlin is fuzzier, because it is less exotic. Maybe this really is real life. Maybe my expectations of myself shouldn’t be any different than they would be back in the states. Maybe I should be looking for a long-term career, a long-term mate, a mortgage-loan, etc.

Surely one of the chief reasons young Americans go abroad in the first place is because they don’t want to look for these things. Maybe it’s a mistake to qualify jobs and marriages and mortgages as “real” and everything else as “vacation”. Maybe life really is a beach. Or should be.

Bringing up Bridget

With the all the hub-bub surrounding candidate children and photo-op exploitation (or sexploitation, in the cases of poor young Bristol and Levy--when do you think they were informed they had to get married?), one candidate child has been notably missing on the various convention stages and magazine spreads. This is a shame because Bridget McCain, John and Cindy's infamous 'Black' (actually adopted Bangladeshi) baby, the one who arguably cost him the South Carolina primary and perhaps the entire presidency back in 2000, is almost certainly the most interesting candidate-child around, notwithstanding the fierce competition from special-needs Trig and promise-ring Bristol (and bizarrely-named Track, so dubbed, if we are to believe press releases, in order to pay tribute to 'high school track meets').

To see a regrettably unflattering picture of Bridget look here. http://bigheaddc.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/mccain-sisters.jpg

Everyone always whines about how awful it must be for candidate children to have to endure the withering media spotlight, but how do you think it feels to be the only kid around barely getting any attention at all? Is it because Bridget isn't white? or not pretty enough? or not pregnant enough? I know virtually nothing about Bridget McCain, but I demand to know more. It's time the folks at the National Enquirer gave me a Bridget scandal, because everyone knows it isn't any fun to be left out.

Will the GOP have another Harriet Miers moment? The answer is no, it's all about Roe

Democrats have rightly been complaining that GOP rank-and-file support for Sarah Palin demonstrates how hypocritical and/or disingenuous their attacks on Barack Obama's 'inexperience' have been.

I'd like to draw attention, however, to the fact that the army of conservative writers who have leapt to Sarah Palin's defense (notably William Kristol at the Weekly Standard and almost the entire staff of the National Review) include many of the same voices who brought down Harriet Mier's supreme court nomination with bitter accusations that Bush's favorite lawyer was light-weight and unqualified.

Why the 180 degree shift from Miers to Palin? It is now clear (as it was to some even at the time), that conservatives mounted their vigorous assault on Miers not because they thought she was unqualified, but because they were worried she wasn't conservative enough, and, especially, that she did not offer a reliable vote against Roe vs. Wade. With Palin, on the other hand, there is no question about her opposition to abortion rights, which is as extreme as can be. That the conservative commentariat's reactions to Palin and Miers have diverged so dramatically offers an instructive lesson: in the Republican party, ideology always trumps talent.

Which isn't necessarily such a bad thing, were republican ideology not so frightening. During the Miers controversy, a lot of liberals leapt on the dump Miers bandwagon, heaping praise on her impeccably credentialed--but intractably hard-line--replacement, Samuel Alito. We should all be asking ourselves whether we wouldn't be better off with a dummy like Miers than a villain like Alito.

Juno in Juneau

How does the revelation that Alaska's first daughter, seventeen-year-old Bristol Palin, is five months pregnant affect our view of her newly ennobled mother, Alaska governor and McCain VP pick Sarah Palin? The media, which in its reactionary, post-PC mode has taught itself to genuflect before any manifestation of the lives and values of the white working class, has been busy convincing itself that little Bristol's teen pregnancy contributes to the 'authenticity' of her mother's backwoods, moose-hunting image. The Palin family, say the McCain cmap and its media plants, is just working through the kind of issues and curveballs that life throws at all ordinary Americans.

Excuse my ingorance: since when is teen pregnancy a core American value, or indeed, the kind of issue that confronts 'all american families'? It may be the kind of issue that confronts ordinary families in Iran, but teen pregnancy rates in the United States are pretty near the all-time lows achieved during the Clinton administration.

Rates inched upwards, of course, during the Bush years and the imposition of Abstinence-only policies, but becoming pregnant at 17 (or was she sixteen when it began?) is still hardly the norm.

Where danger lurks for Sarah Palin is that Bristol's pregnancy will alter the way voters think about her evangelical pentacostalism. For teen pregnancy can be thought of not only as the result, but, in a sense, the secret agenda of evangelical 'family values'. The trouble with Palin on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday was that it was difficult to criticize her hard-line evangelical conservatism without sounding like she should have aborted Trig, her baby who suffers from down-syndrome. But now with Bristol's pregnancy, it's all getting a bit out of control. There are all together too many children in the Palin orbit. Becoming a grandmother at 44 is simply not the American dream. Although the media tends to present the white working-class as a cultural monolith, there's a world of difference in the cultural attitudes of (largely Catholic) working class whites who live in the suburbs of major Midwestern cities and the kind of evangelical millennarians who pack up and move to Wasilla, Alaska. Palin's endlessly proliferating progeny might play well in Salt Lake City, but how about among union members in Akron, Ohio? Whereas at first it seemed that the existence of Trig put Palin's pentacostalism off-limits, or somehow beyond reproach, Bristol's pregnancy once again invites to consider whether we really want a religious extremist with her finger on the nuclear trigger.

Quick notes on Palin

Sorry to my readers, if there are indeed still readers, for being so remiss about updates. Just got back from traveling in Croatia, and will resume daily updates.

Just wanted to highlight a couple points about Palin, some of which ratify the core contentions of BerlinerBlog:

- she is a marathon runner

- she is rabidly pro-life but somewhat gay-friendly, giving the lie to the phony notion of "culture wars". Republican hostility to gays will continue to recede with the next generation of conservatives (young evangelicals are far more homophilic than their parents), but the abortion issue isn't going anywhere

- she isn't really that much of a surpise: she's been on the shortlist all along, and I've been saying for weeks that she was arguably the strongest choice on the list. Miles ahead of the radically unpleasant Carly Fiorina.

- her children are named Track, Willow, Bristol, Piper, and Trig Paxson Van.

- there are real dangers for the Obama campaign in criticizing her inexperience. It's tempting to use Palin to neutralize McCain's argument about Obama's inexperience, but it will take a lot of political art to make this line work without inviting unflattering comparisons to Obama.

- Palin is sexy, and this is a liability for her. Like Obama, she is not simply young, she carries with her a whiff of sexuality. It will look awkward for McCain--a man who left his first wife for a much younger woman--to be on the trail, arm in arm, with a MILF.

- the "pre-packaged scandal" that comes with Palin won't hurt her. Palin seems to have gotten her sister's ex-husband fired from some government job. Nobody will care, particularly since the guy sounds like an asshole.

- in the end--it really is true--no one votes for VP. Palin is a strong pick for McCain, I think, but not one that really 'changes the game' in any significant way.

Backlash: the Abuse of a Concept

Of all the rich and various ways to make a surprising, counter-intuitive argument, few are as popular, as cheap, or as intellectually impoverished as the concept of 'backlash'. For media types, the beauty--or should we say the crude utility--of penning a 'backlash' story is that it provides the template for the simplest, indeed, the most intuitive kind of contrarian reasoning.

Backlash stories abound in the daily press, the most notable recent example being the coverage of the alleged backlash against Barack Obama's trip to Europe, during which 'presidential' photo-ops supposedly became 'presumptuous' in the popular imagination. Backlash--the journalistic notion that every event that seems moves politics or taste in one direction inevitably triggers a countervailing force in the opposite direction--has an elegant, Newtonian predictability to it. It allows journalists to believe they are being clever and unconventional without actually having to craft a complex thought.

But in addition to its everyday role as a ready-made template for media 'analysis', the notion of backlash also shapes the popular understanding, the 'collective memory' we might say, of the history of post-war liberalism. Although there are many variants on the story, practically every explanation for the flagging fortunes of the Democratic party since 1968 relies on the notion that Democrats started to lose their New Deal white working-class majority when they began to push a liberal social agenda (in succession: civil rights, women's rights, gay rights) at the expense of their left-wing economic agenda. Because there are few commentators who, on the merits, can really bring themselves to speak ill of the civil rights movement and its offspring--is it really possible anymore to oppose desegregation or sexual harassment legislation?--mainstream critics of social liberalism have relied on arguments related to political strategy to explain why, for instance, the democrats need to stop advocating gay rights.

This is where the notion of 'backlash' comes in: liberal elites, especially those on the Supreme Court, have imposed progressive values from their imperial pedestal onto a conservative populace that has responded with anger and resentment. At their most extreme, proponents of the conservative backlash theory actually argue that court decisions like Brown vs. Board of Education or the recent California ruling on gay marriage actually harm liberal causes by provoking a backlash whose negative ramifications exceed whatever good is done by the legal decision.

There is virtually no compelling evidence, though, of a 'backlash' effect against most progressive Supreme Court decisions. Some people are racist, and some people are sexist. Most people, perhaps, hate gays. But did people become more racist after Brown? Are they becoming more homophobic as a result of the gay marriage decisions? The evidence of the last fifty years suggests the opposite--that supreme court decisions have tended to be leading indicators, substantially moving public discourse in a progressive direction. Anecdotally, of course, there may be instances of negative feedback, of minibacklashes where things actually get worse for persecuted minorities as a result of elite-authoritarian policy shifts. The overall effect, though, is clearly one of positive feedback, of front-lash. Not two steps forward, three steps back, but rather three steps forward, and a slight pivot back while the body politic stabilizes itself in its new position.

There is an exception, though, to this general story of the Supreme Court leading and the masses slowly following. The exception is Roe vs. Wade, which arguably really has produced a sustained political backlash among large segments of the American populace. Whereas popular attitudes towards race, gender, and sexuality have changed dramatically in the last fifty years, in an almost seamlessly progressive direction, attitudes toward abortion have been much less predictable, swinging back and forth. The country is not significantly more pro-choice today than it was in 1980.

I support abortion rights. The freedom to choose is one of the most important prerequisites to Women's liberation. Still, Roe vs. Wade is fundamentally different from Brown vs. Board of Education or Lawrence vs. Texas, and the attempt to smuggle the abortion debate--an issue which, on the merits, is unavoidably contentious--into the broader debate about civil rights is one of the political sleights-of-hand that has helped conservatives to dominate American politics for the last thirty years. This lie is best summed up with the bogus term 'culture wars', which seeks above all else to leverage popular opposition to abortion into opposition to every other feature of the liberal social agenda.

These days, when people talk about the 'culture wars' or invoke 'values voters' they are trying mostly to link abortion to the gay rights struggle. It won't work, though. At the end of the day, the California Supreme Court's gay marriage decision is much more like Brown vs. Board than it is like Roe vs. Wade. Thirty years from now, same-sex marriage will be the norm and no one will remember why everyone kicked up such a big fuss (just as it seems incredible today that African-Americans in the south were largely prevented from voting until the 1960s). But abortion will still be argued about, likely with the same amount of vigor as today or as in 1973. In a country as religious as the United States, abortion will never go away--the substance of the issue is too divisive.