Volume One, Chapter Two: Letters from the Campaign Backlines

May 22, 2008
Los Angeles

cjh
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JOHN MCCAIN & JOE LIEBERMAN ARE NOT FULL-SIZE PEOPLE

Up at 4:04am with a toothache and thinking about a few things:

1) Beer and cigarettes are a helpful guide at this early hour.

2) Robert Altman made really good movies, and he imbued his last - A Prairie Home Companion - with a touching and pleasantly haunting awareness of his own coming death.

And perhaps most relevant to the title...

3) John McCain and his press conference sidekick Joe Lieberman are small men with crooked mouths, inauthentic ideas and dark souls who will say and do anything in their losing struggle to maintain the veil of political relevancy. I could throw the rest of the GOP in there, along with Hillary, but I'll save those for future posts.

The perception that John McCain and Joe Lieberman are not full-size people, for me, is fueled by some plain realities. First, they are, in fact, not very tall. Their age has left them with compressed spines, which must bear added stress considering a lifetime in politics has left them without backbone. For McCain, the effect is amplified by the unfortunate fact that his broken arms have left him looking a bit like a marionette with invisible strings whose master hasn't quite got the illusion of realistic human locomotion down yet.

Second, they speak with small ideas and that essential political inauthenticity that reminds real thinking humans (of whom there are a sad few) of why we don't follow politics. They represent what I hope is becoming the old way to campaign for the hearts and minds of the desperate American "mainstream" - manufactured, taglined deception. For McCain, the effect is amplified by the fact that his age has left him too slow to keep consistent with his own lies (a crucial political talent), and too stupid to have bothered to put together a clean team that is capable of doing so. In short, just as age leaves the elderly oblivious to their own public gas passings and bowel movements, it has so left John McCain oblivious to - or worse, unconcerned by - the putrescent embarrassment that his own political life has become.

Like with many, for me, there was maybe one minute when he was running for President in 2000 where I thought I caught a glimpse of a real person in there. But that was before he realized that he couldn't win that way. It was before the election of 2000, and it was before the infamous September day that launched him into misguided, misbegotten battle. Since then he turned Baptist (a common age-70 conversion), distilled his talk to strictly Islamofascist rhetoric, and heavily courted the endorsement of the first evangelist he could identify, who just happened to be the over-the-top, entertainingly evil Pastor John Hagee.

I'm now basking in that one minute where I think I see a glimpse of a real person in Barack Obama. He is trying to win in what looks like a new way, and it seems like he's got a good shot, though I don't underestimate the power of the GOP or the Clintons to squash their foes through deception and distraction. Their's is a time-tested approach, and time selects for that which works, so it will return to fashion. But I'm enjoying this minute.

cjh
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