The Political Romantic

Sarah Palin

So McCain has appointed a former Buchananite who favored teaching creationism in public schools as little as two years ago? And she has no foreign policy experience! This pick looks like a disaster.

Props to Chris Matthews

His first bit of commentary on MSNBC after Obama's speech tonight was really genius. I think it might be quoted by world historians a hundred years hence. As Ross Douthat has suggested, they probably won't mention that Clinton left office with a 65% approval rating. 

Out on a limb...

...I shall go, and say that I find it hard to imagine John McCain being the forty-fourth President of the United States. More directly: Obama will be the next president, and bless him. He's about to be the most powerful leader we have had since at least Kennedy, more likely FDR. 

Excellence

I think, quite basically, Barack Obama is for people being excellent. I, too, favor excellency. 

Missing the Clintons

Joking! Or rather, it's something of a double entendre. They're replaying Obama's speech on MSNBC right now, and he gave a particular thank you to Hillary Clinton. Having watched the post-speech coverage, it's clear Obama's speech was so powerful that it made reporters, who really liked this easy story, forget all about the Clinton controversy that was the story of the first two days of the convention. Whatever else he did (and this "else" is really what matters), Obama bested the Clintons tonight. I, for one, appreciate anyone who makes them negligible, and so appreciate Obama. 

IL Magnifico, or simply a test of human nature?

Andrew Sullivan:

"What he didn't do was give an airy, abstract, dreamy confection of rhetoric. The McCain campaign set Obama up as a celebrity airhead, a Paris Hilton of wealth and elitism. And he let them portray him that way, and let them over-reach, and let them punch him again and again ... and then he turned around and destroyed them. If the Rove Republicans thought they were playing with a patsy, they just got a reality check."

[Italics mine] If that's true, and Obama let the over-reach, knowing full well that he would be able to parry their assaults with such convincing facility, he is either mad and lucky or a politician of unfathomable genius, a politician with an understanding of human interrelations that rivals Lorenzo Il Magnifico. And damn, we need a Renaissance now. 

Of course, the more likely explanation is that Obama failed to prevent Sen. McCain gaining traction these last few weeks, and he is also a good enough thinker and speech giver that he was able to respond effectively tonight. In itself, this accomplishment is hugely impressive--Obama may very well be an historical figure on the scale of Napoleon, a real epoch maker. But still I think Mr. Sullivan is probably wrong--I suppose Obama simply have lost those news cycles over the past few weeks, and was not losing on purpose. Either way, Obama might easily become the most powerful politician in a long time. He is certainly trying to be a more powerful president than Clinton ever attempted; Bill Clinton's political aims were limited by certain political means, necessary at that good and bad time (good for what had happened and bad for whom had claimed credit), which were fundamentally defensive. The power that Obama goes for is very great, and therein lies both the excitement surrounding and the possible danger of Barack Obama. He is a man of doubt, of great intelligence, trying very hard to do right. I'm fairly sure of all these things. His success or failure will reflect upon the relative goodness of human nature. He is now a truly heroic figure, like the pagans' mythic figures, there on Olympus. Tonight was his apotheosis. 

The 44th President

I'm only slowly realizing how good this speech was. McCain was just refuted and made to look silly. Of course people have disproved him before, but not in so monumental and definitive a matter. Frank Luntz is giving him a great review, saying he was crystal clear. This is on Fox News, mind you: even they, who are fundamentally propagandists, unconcerned with the truth. But he just predicted Obama will have a ten point lead 72 hours from now. Expectations game? Well, he sounded sincere tonight. McCain can not match him in a set piece of rhetoric like this. George Bush will cause McCain horrible press in the coming days, if the Democrats are conscious. 

Ahh, now Luntz is saying John McCain should steal into the audience, disowning speech writers and the like, and engage the skeptical public at the Republican National Convention in a town-hall meeting. Me thinks it fixed by the parti pris. Also, Luntz says that McCain, with his age and his POW-ness, has a wisdom that McCain could not. Here I strongly object. Obama, with his brilliant ability to essaier himself, a la Montaigne, is a very wise man. That was Toni Morrison's reason to endorse Obama. McCain, by comparison, seems taken with righteousness, and the good, and concepts such as honour, and nation, and courage. Of course, these things are real in a certain respect, but McCain builds narratives of reality in a way that requires an enemy, since fighting the enemy is the "surest" way to do good. This leads to very real problems, like the way McCain talks about foreign policy so belligerently. Putin responded today, and I don't think anyone should be pleased with how he did. He treated McCain like the spokesperson for America, and the result was tension. If you want more of this, vote for Luntz's wise-guy. 

"Enough"

More than any moment in my as yet short life, when Barack Obama yelled out "enough", it felt as though history turned on a hinge. Just sayin'.

Grassroots

"This election has never been about me; it's about you," Barack Obama just claimed on the TV. The conventional wisdom is that this election is a referendum on Barack Obama. This is not true. It's a referendum on the American people. Unless we're more ignorant than I think, we will realize that McCain represents, to whatever degree, a continuation of the ideological proclivities of the last eight years, particularly the first four of those eight. That realized, the only question is whether the American people will tolerate that. I really hope not. 

Respecting People

Note that Obama did not say he wasn't a celebrity. He said McCain may think all sorts of things about celebrities, but my life story is as I just described it: rather prosaic. The culture of celebrity is vicious and vulgar, but individual celebrities should not be despised, but rather allowed their privacy. With their oeuvre, they have given the public enough. They are people; we don't own them. McCain uses them as a punchline. Obama's rejoinder manages to avoid even using them as a foil. 

Obama and Introspection

Wow, Obama's profile video seems incredibly well done. They are rolling this guy out as well as I could have imagined. Actually, might it be a bit tedious? It's more a character driven story than one carried by the plot, which is what people mean when they say he lacks experience? But I was struck by how they told the story of his search for self as the major point in explicating his thought--which is in essence, his life. Who is Barack Obama? Someone imperfectly but honestly searching for the truth about things, and particularly his own nature, as this can be examined most intimately and without regard for the feelings and jealousies of others. 

He's on now, and I for one am excited.

Of Colonnades

Chuck Todd says Republicans are attacking the colonnade behind the speech at Mile High Stadium as presumptuous and "regal." Regal? Plainly not! The capitals are of the soldierly doric order, not the elegant Ionic or luxe Corinthian orders. If it were John McCain, I'd be worried the columns were indicative of an insight of Kenneth Clark: the art and architecture of militant politicians will always be classical, due to that style's ability to express order on a grand scale.

Prognosticatin' (I've been told apostrophes are cool)

Obama will accept the Democratic Nomination tonight, which seems like a fairly big deal. Only 45 years ago--not so very long, although we can pretend--Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech, in which he called for a country would be judged by their abilities and goodness rather than anything people are unable to determine themselves. If a man be good and great, what a waste to care that his skin is black!

In recent months, Barack Obama has lost his luster. Tonight he must shine. Fashion know longer finds him so exciting, and the "celebrity" trope has certainly been a mind-fuck for weary Democrats, forever afraid the Republicans have some dastardly trump card of baseness up their sleaves. Their trump-card, precisely, is this: causing Democrats to worry so much that they emasculate themselves. I feel as though Democrats are beginning to doubt that their party would win an election if the public knew all their secrets. Why have any? Do Democrats actually doubt that the Republicans are now proposing to intensify the Bush model? After the last eight years, don't Democrats fully understand the urgency of repudiating the Bush Doctrine of empty moral posturing and hegemonic projection around the world? Obama need only be forthright and confident and, as smart as he is, he will win. The Republicans have not only made a losing argument; because of their policies and the people who vote for them, America has lived it.

Be like John Kerry was last night. Be unafraid, be terse, be witty, be tough and even savage--but never lose sight that this game is a chore. Although at times it appears to have a logic of its own, politics do not exist for their own sake. They exist because they prevent humanity from destroying itself in an orgy of anarchic chaos. Of course, government itself can be disruptive, particularly when it rapes a foreign culture by invading that culture's land. George Bush started a war. It wouldn't have happened without him and the ideological coterie of neo-imperialists that have aggresively suggested America exert and assert itself abroad since almost the end of the Cold War: first with NATO expansion into Russia's near abroad, then in China, then in the Middle East after the China intrigues were put on hold by 9/11, and now once again in the Caucuses. Putin's responses today--blaming the US for manipulating the entire conflict in Georgia--is infuriating, but it is instructive to note that he seems to be replying to the voice of American foreign policy the week of the invasion, John McCain. Relations between the major powers would likely become increasingly contentious if McCain were to win.

Tonight, we will find out how much Barack Obama trusts his own judgment. If he does sufficiently, the Republicans are toast. If he has lost his own self-confidence, and has lost direction in the darkness of the tirelessly shameless conservative movement, John McCain will likely pummel his way into the White House.

The Pathos of Salvation

    One thing that seems to me rather odd: pictures of the crucified Christ rarely depict it as the great event of spiritual liberation, which the basic logic of Christianity suggests it is.
    After the fall and before the atoning act of Christ, every and all were damned for the mere sin of being born to a fallen world. The son was punished for the sins of the father. The men of the Middle Ages did not consider this just, simply true; it was just another aspect of reality that one takes in passively, not asking why and wherefore.   
    The death of Christ marked the end of the world without heaven, and freed men’s souls from the torment of previously inescapable damnation. But when these serious medieval men set down to record their thoughts of the crucifixion, the lamentation, the pieta, etc. in pictures, the dominant note is unfailingly that of pathos. As best I can tell, the new spiritual freedom is never even hinted at.
    I suppose this contradiction owes something to the odd masochism of a religion that has humanity “redeemed” by the death of the greatest man who ever lived.
    (I tend to trust what I hear in pop songs, at least that they are an honest expression, and so I come to the curious case of Rivers Cuomo, singer of Weezer. The self-declared greatest man that ever lived, Cuomo's songs are oftentimes ironical explorations of the pathos of self-obsession. Blasphemous? Perhaps. Christly?  Of course. Thomas a Kempis has gone camp.)

Getting Back Up

Joe Biden's father has inspired me to start blogging here again. I've mostly confined my writing lately to the comments sections of both Matthew Yglesias's blog, where I write as Robert, and two of TNR's blogs, where I comment under the alias skipper2379. I'm thinking blog content will be somewhat different--hopefully more digestible and less dogmatic--in the future.