As the election season winds down...

[missroserose]

It's been quite a ride, this past year and a half or so, hasn't it?

I must admit, I tend to follow politics as entertainment more than anything else. Sure, it's good to be informed about the potential future leaders of the country and their policies, but seriously - Bill Clinton's passive-aggressive almost-sabotaging Obama? Hilary Clinton tearing up in a New Hampshire diner? The Jeremiah Wright controversy and Obama's speech on race? Ads accusing McCain of lying about (of all things) the type of car he buys? McCain pegging the yearly salary line for "wealthy" at $2 million a year? The entire Sarah Palin debacle? You can't make this shit up - no one would believe it! Far better than reality television - because not only is it actually real, this circus is going to determine the future of one of the most powerful countries on the planet.

You kind of have to sit back and laugh, don't you?

Anyway, as things wrap up, I had a couple of last thoughts I wanted to get down.

First was just an amusing observation. We live out a ways along a highway, and while it's a fairly low-traffic area, it's still the major thoroughfare for the area, and people rip along at fifty or sixty miles an hour on a fairly regular basis. To cut down on the noise and lights, therefore, most folk who live out here build their houses set back a ways, with a driveway connecting them to the main road.

Just down the way from us is a driveway that leads down to two houses; for a couple of weeks, there was a single "McCain-Palin" sign on one side of it. A little surprising (our area is pretty strongly Dem-leaning), but hey, whatever. However, one day we were driving home and noticed that the other side of the driveway had an Obama-Biden sign up. We laughed over that a bit, but were surprised to come home the next day and find that the sign had proliferated - they also had Berkowitz and Begich (our Democratic candidates for House and Senate, respectively) keeping it company. Not to be outdone, the next day their neighbors had Young and Stevens sign up - it's starting to look like quite the garden. Color-coordinated, too!

On the campaign trail itself, word has it that Obama's returning to his uplifting rhetoric about the importance of unity and transcending partisanship as his closing argument. A good plan, certainly, if a bit of a luxury, thanks to his poll numbers. Interestingly, "McCain will make no such shift and will continue to pound away at Obama as a tax-happy liberal intent on wealth spreading", according to Slate's roundup of the day's news.

What strikes me as odd about this is that I don't think he quite understands his audience. Certainly, wealthy people will be unhappy to hear about Obama's "wealth spreading" tendencies, but wealthy people - especially of McCain's caliber - are such a tiny percentage of the US population (especially after the last eight years' worth of policies designed to help them get wealthier at the expense of pushing more and more middle-class people out of the "middle-class" bracket). You can make that argument to a somewhat more limited extent to middle- and lower-income people, true, but as you go down the ladder, not only do you end up with proportionally more people - more and more of those people are likely to be the ones to benefit from wealth spreading. For a long time, the Republicans have simply not promoted policies that were in the best interest of the majority of the population (i.e. lower-income people); however, they've managed to countermand that handicap by emphasizing values-politics. Hence the stoking of paranoia over terrorism, patriotism, gay marriage, abortion, you name it - if they could convince their constituency that the other guy was going to threaten their fundamental values, they could easily convince them to vote for candidates whose policies that were not in their economic best interest. (One of the most well-known proponents here in Alaska of exactly that strategy is a pastor named Jerry Prevo, who has built a giant church (known locally as The Prevo Palace) on the strength of donations from his mostly lower-income constituency, and who regularly preaches politics from the pulpit.)

Unfortunately for McCain, that particular weapon has been rendered far less effective, thanks to the economic meltdown. Sure, Palin has energized the evangelicals thanks to her social policies, but despite their volume, they're a relatively small group. And many of the "regular folks" who might otherwise be swayed by "Obama's not like you and me" rhetoric are instead busy looking at the candidates' policies - according to that same article, Virginia voters (a state that Bush won last election by eight points) trust Obama over McCain on tax policy by fifteen points.

And McCain seems so befuddled over the fact that his "wealth-spreading" argument isn't working. I find myself wondering, especially given the aforementioned quote of his on where the salary line is for the definition of "wealthy", if perhaps he's spent so much time around rich folk that his perceptions are skewed. I mean, if he honestly believes that middle-class Americans make (say) half a million a year, it's no wonder he keeps pounding away at the "Obama's going to tax you to death" point. In a way, it's a far more effective demonstration of how out-of-touch he is than any campaign ad Obama's team could put together.

Comments

[roseneko.livejournal.com]

I saw the clip too. I didn't mean the remark in a derogatory manner - it was obvious that this was an important issue for her, and the fact that she cared so much only increased my respect for her. (For all that I supported Obama, I respect Hilary and I really disliked the cattiness and infighting that the Democratic primary seemed to inspire.) All I meant was that it was the sort of moment that, were it in a movie, you'd have a hard time not going "Awww, Lifetime Original Movie melodrama." Seeing it in real life was pretty gut-wrenching. Like I said, you can't make this stuff up. :)