Campaign Ad: 'Maverick Maverick Maverick!'

The ad agency Goodby, Silverstein and Partners has created some inventive fake campaign ads for the presidential campaign. This one's good enough to be a real ad for Obama.

Two more over-the-top ads from the agency can be found on Stunningly Bad.Com.

I've thought for a while that the world needs an ad agency that specializes in creating attack ads for subjects outside of politics. Our most sarcastic voiceover actors shouldn't be put on a shelf for three out of every four years. If Madison Avenue can sell the most powerful job in the free world by employing sneering contempt for rivals, there's no reason the same technique can't be an effective way to sell things like erectile dysfunction medicine, soft drinks and public-service campaigns.

Politics · 2008/10/07 · 6 COMMENTS · Link

Review: 'Indignation' by Philip Roth

Philip Roth's Indignation describes the short unhappy life of Marcus Messner, a college student in the early '50s who is paranoid about getting kicked out of school and drafted to serve in the Korean War, in spite of the fact that his grades are so strong he could become valedictorian. Messner, the dutiful son of a kosher butcher in Newark, transfers from a local school to Winesburg College in Ohio, trying to escape an overprotective father who has become overwhelmed by fear that his son will die.

Messner's a mess, a bundle of unexpressed antisocial rage who can't get along with his roommates, rejects numerous invitations to socialize with classmates and can't seem to take joy from anything -- not even his first sexual relationship, which falls into his lap in a classmate's 1940 LaSalle Touring Sedan.

I've never read Roth before, but the way he writes sex in Indignation reminded me of the 40-Year-Old Virgin bluffing his way through a discussion of sexual conquest among male friends by talking about "bags of sand."

Sex figures heavily into Messner's story -- excruciatingly bad sex, both in execution and description. Anyone suffering from "prolonged excitation" can cure the problem by reading the sex scenes in this book.

Indignation picks up when it covers the rest of Messner's life, where his Bertrand Russell-inspired atheism causes him to rebel against the requirement that all Winesburg students attend chapel. A prolonged argument between Messner and the Dean of Men -- where Messner schools the dean on Russell's famous 1927 lecture "Why I Am Not a Christian" -- drives the remainder of the book towards a conclusion you know will be tragic for the student. I found the setting of Winesburg, which Roth copped from Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, a pleasant reminder of the way a college can be a world unto itself.

Unfortunately, just when you think the story's going somewhere, the small-page, big-font, 233-page book abruptly ends. Roth constructs a plot device in which he can stop Messner's story at any time, and he does, cutting it off before the crisis that leads Messner to leave school. He never justifies how the young man, who believes that leaving college means certain doom in Korea, throws away his academic career. He never shows you how Messner's father reacts to the thing he most feared, the notion that in life, "the tiniest misstep can have tragic consequences."

Instead, you get a seven-page wrap up zooming through all the events you missed because the book ended too soon. Talk about indignation.

Books · 2008/10/06 · Comment · Link

Rich Lowry: 'I Think She Just Winked at Me'

Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review for the past 11 years, posted this comment on The Corner about Sarah Palin's performance in the vice presidential debate:

I'm sure I'm not the only male in America who, when Palin dropped her first wink, sat up a little straighter on the couch and said, "Hey, I think she just winked at me." And her smile. By the end, when she clearly knew she was doing well, it was so sparkling it was almost mesmerizing. It sent little starbursts through the screen and ricocheting around the living rooms of America.

It isn't every day you see a 40-year-old man react to a political candidate like a tween at a Jonas Brothers concert. Lowry's other comment on the debate was to declare that Piper Palin was the night's "other big winner" because she's adorable.

Does anyone else find it disturbing that one of the conservative opinion leaders in this country believes that people on TV are communicating directly with him?

Politics · Television · 2008/10/04 · 10 COMMENTS · Link

Scoring the Biden/Palin Debate

The summer before third grade, I became the oldest kid on my block to ride my bike with training wheels, a subject of increasing ridicule among my peers in Garland, Texas. My dad, attempting to solve the problem as dads are prone to do, decided the best solution was to take off the training wheels and push me down our steep driveway on my bike. Instinct would kick in. I would navigate the incline with increasing confidence, execute a deft 90 degree turn down the alley and ride through the neighborhood, removing the stain from my reputation.

Instinct did not kick in. Arms locked in terror, I was propelled straight down the driveway, across the alley and into a field, where I was separated from my bike by a utility pole's guy wire.

Sarah Palin was pushed down the driveway without training wheels Thursday night, and she did not hit a guy wire. Her performance sufficiently proved that she is not the slack-jawed bumpkin she seemed to be in the Katie Couric interview, frozen in fear at such simple questions as "What newspapers do you read?" and "What Supreme Court cases do you disagree with?" If the goal was to avoid cringe-inducing blunders and reduce calls for her removal from the ticket by right-wing critics, mission accomplished.

But if the goal of the vice presidential debate was to help your running mate win the presidency, Joe Biden did considerably more to meet that objective. All night long, as Palin kept steering questions back to her talking points and laying on the corn pone charm, Biden was engaged in a substantive debate at a crisis point in our history. As Palin ran down a checklist of objectives on her note cards -- ask to call him Joe, check! use "say it ain't so, Joe" attack line, check! -- Biden smiled past her dumber remarks to avoid the trap of looking like a bully and launched into a serious critique of the voting record and policy goals of John McCain, both of which are sharply out of sync with public opinion. Biden didn't even point out that Palin botched the name of the U.S. military officer in charge of Afghanistan, twice calling Army Gen. David McKiernan "McLellan." It was as if they were speaking at two different events airing in split-screen.

I think this was clearly the right approach for Biden, who can speak convincingly to the "kitchen table" concerns of the American public as a senator from a working-class background who never enriched himself in public office, unlike many other Democrats and Republicans of his generation. Palin didn't have a good answer on the economy aside from saying over and over that Democrats will raise your taxes and kill your jobs, a warning that probably works better on the Americans who still have jobs. She amusingly said at one point that "it's a toxic mess, really, on Main Street that's affecting Wall Street," a malaprop that accurately describes the Republican concern for protecting Wall Street with decades of deregulation.

There are times when charisma and pluck are enough to propel a politician into national office, and Palin has both in abundance, but I do not believe this is one of those times. Biden's a reassuring presence in this election, the quintessential steady hand who bolsters Barack Obama's claim to be ready to lead the nation. Biden conveys as strong a command of foreign policy as any Democratic politician in my lifetime.

I think one of the key points of the debate was the exchange on how to deal with the presence of Al Qaeda in Pakistan's border region with Afghanistan, an issue in which Obama's willingness to hit them with air strikes has been long ridiculed by McCain as a sign of his inexperience. McCain and Palin both continue to pursue this line of attack, even as the U.S. conducts air strikes in Pakistan.

Last night, Biden said this about the threat:

John continues to tell us that the central war in the front on terror is in Iraq. I promise you, if an attack comes in the homeland, it's going to come as our security services have said, it is going to come from Al Qaeda planning in the hills of Afghanistan and Pakistan. That's where they live. That's where they are. That's where it will come from. ... that's where bin Laden lives and we will go at him if we have actionable intelligence.

Palin, echoing McCain in the first debate, ignored the threat in Afghanistan and Pakistan and went back to justifying the Iraq War, our $10 billion-a-month boondoggle that overstretches our military, drains our budget and will never end in a McCain administration:

... as for who coined that central war on terror being in Iraq, it was the General Petraeus and al Qaeda, both leaders there and it's probably the only thing that they're ever going to agree on, but that it was a central war on terror is in Iraq. You don't have to believe me or John McCain on that. I would believe Petraeus and the leader of Al Qaeda.

In the first two debates, McCain and Palin have both vouched for Osama Bin Laden's judgment on where the U.S. should be directing its military response to the war on terror, giving the architect of 9/11 his props. If Bin Laden had a debate watching party at his cave, you have to think that this shout-out prompted culturally appropriate high-fives and "you the mans!"

As folksy as she is, Sarah Palin should be familiar with the expression "Br'er Fox, please don't throw me into the briar patch."

Credit: The photo of a winning Palin Bingo card was taken by Dan Perry and is available under a Creative Commons license.

Politics · 2008/10/03 · 63 COMMENTS · Link

Debate Moderator Writing 'Age of Obama' Book

A lot's being made today of the fact that Gwen Ifill, the moderator of Thursday night's vice presidential debate, has a new book coming out on Inauguration Day titled The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama. The story's drawn hundreds of comments on the Drudge Retort.

Ifill has made no secret of the book, which has been mentioned for months in media reports. On Aug. 21, she wrote an essay for Time magazine that describes her motivation for writing it:

... Obama is just one member of a generation of political leaders faced with a new task: honoring the contributions of their forebears without alienating the broader, multiracial audiences they need to win. I've spent part of the past year tracking dozens of these rising stars and have concluded that anyone who thinks Obama is unique is not paying attention.

The essay identifies her as a TV host and the "author of the forthcoming The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama."

Although Michelle Malkin uses the existence of the book to claim that Ifill's "in the tank" for Barack Obama, the book's premise doesn't require him to win in November. As the daughter of a minister who marched in civil rights demonstrations, Ifill's writing about a generation of leaders and using Obama, the most high profile of those black politicians, as the embodiment of a larger trend.

Ifill's a well-respected PBS journalist who moderated the debate between Dick Cheney and John Edwards four years ago. Though I expect she'll do a fair job in her role as moderator on Thursday, the book raises undeniable questions about her objectivity because of the timing of its release. Ifill will sell considerably more copies if Obama wins the election, particularly when it hits stores on the same day he takes the oath of office. For this reason, she has a commercial stake in his success that makes it harder to trust her judgment in the debate.

The McCain campaign is complaining that it didn't know about Ifill's book, according to Greta van Susteren. That's hard to believe, given the fact that it was mentioned in an AP story on July 23, two weeks before Ifill was chosen as moderator.

But then again, figuring out what the McCain campaign doesn't know has been difficult since the selection of Sarah Palin.

Politics · Books · 2008/10/01 · 14 COMMENTS · Link

See You Later, Alligator

I got a flier in the mail informing me that the St. Augustine Alligator Farm is now offering a "parents night out" service:

Let us entertain your kids in a safe and educational environment while you and yours have a night out on the town. Have a nice dinner, take in a movie, or just relax at home; whatever you want, we've got the kids. ...

Includes: 2 slices of pizza per person, drinks, hands-on animal presentation, twilight zoo tour, a craft, nocturnal games and lots of fun!

When I'm looking for a relaxing night out with the missus, nothing puts me more at ease than letting my children roam around after dark in a place where they're not at the top of the food chain.

Jacksonville · Florida · 2008/09/30 · 5 COMMENTS · Link

George Orwell's Road to Morocco

People sleep in the streets by hundreds and thousands, and beggars, especially children, swarm everywhere. It is noticeable that this is so not only in quarters normally frequented by tourists, but also in purely native quarters, where any European is promptly followed by a retinue of children. Most beggars are quite satisfied with a sou (twenty sous equal a penny halfpenny). Two illustrative incidents: I asked a boy of about 10 to call a cab for me, and when he returned with the cab I gave him 50 centimes (three farthings, but by local standards an overpayment.) Meanwhile about a dozen other boys had collected, and when they saw me take a handful of small change out of my pocket they flung themselves on it with such violence as to draw blood from my hand. When I had managed to extricate myself and give the boy his 50 centimes a number of others flung themselves on him, forced his hand open and robbed him of the money.

Orwell mentions in this diary giving bread to a Moroccan city worker who saw him feeding some to gazelles. He refers to this incident again in "Marrakech," an essay he wrote that was published a year later.

Books · 2008/09/29 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

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