NUVO Newsweekly Blogs

The New Yorker cover is a triumph of marketing over meaning. Magazine covers, as most everyone during the last week seems to have forgotten, are there to sell magazines. The swells at The New Yorker wanted to join the national political conversation big time (even bloggers want to join the conversation) and sell product. It's been a while since we have had a New Yorker cover that generated much buzz. Bears wearing iPods don't help magazine copiesrush off the newsstands. So, when we hear endless debates about "parody," "satire," and other English Lit 101 topics on both cable and network news this past week, we can only say, well done New Yorker, your aim has been accomplished. Get the folk talking about your slick mag. The boys at the New Yorker have done it before, with the black on black 9/11 cover, the orthodox Jew and hot mama cover, and now with the Obamas in the Oval office, fist bumping (I have heard a number of racist riffs on that gesture), while the Old Glory burns in the fireplace and Osama stares down from the wall. Michelle looks more Assata Shakur than Angela Davis and Barack is in some generic pass-for-Muslim outfit. That'll get them talking! But the pious palaver about irony, etc., has been a real pain. As usual, it's about money, all you smart people out there.

Things continue to come apart at the seams. The economy, John McCain's campaign, Barack Obama's happy campers, what's left of the Bush II administration. Is it just the wild fires of the summer, or a continuing trend? In McCain's case, it well might be scorched earth forever. Phil Gramm, the former Senator from the great state of Texas and McCain's national co-chair, said we have become a "nation of whiners" and what's going on out there is only a "mental-recession." Gramm is one of the more unpleasant people still functioning as a public figure, even though he's a vice chairman of a Swiss bank, UBS. To Gramm and his friends it certainly is a mental-recession, since whatever happens won't leave them gas-less. Gramm has expended too much gas in his time in the Senate, pushing laws through that set the stage for the subprime mortgage collapse. That is, when he wasn't getting laws through as he left the senate to ease the way for his wife's trips to corporate board heaven. Having him around continues to make McCain look like a stooge for all things Republican at its worst. McCain does a passable job at connecting with average folk, since he doesn't always come off as the elite scion he actually is. Gramm is a buffoon on wheels, though a successful one. McCain has attempted to put "distance" between himelf and Gramm, but it's the distance between A and B. And then there's Jesse Jackson, an equivocal champion of Barack Obama, caught on film once again. Jackson has a long history of being embrassed by an open microphone ("Hymietown" comes to mind), but the latest is a dozy. The "cut his nuts out," Barack's that is, remark is a bit much, given the history of blacks in America. But Jackson and Bill Clinton are nursing the same hurt (not, decidedly, the nuts problem): both feel mightily displaced and had Hillary been the nominee to be, both Jesse and Bill would be rolling in clover. And that's a hard nut to crack.

This will be one odd Fourth of July. President-to-be-most-likely Barack Obama gave speeches this week on patriotism, on values, on religious groups playing a bigger role (delivered to "Faith in America"! ) in the nation, corralling the center (he hopes), while the stock market tanks, people get loans to fill up their gas tanks, California is burning, fireworks being outlawed, Fox News losing viewers, but old Rush gets a rush from his new many millions contract. John McCain might have trouble keeping the base happy, but not Limbaugh. I listened to him for a year, wrote about it in my '96 campaign book, and am impressed he's managed to triumph over his troubles (drug habit, subsequent hearing loss, fatness, etc.) Rush can't make it on TV, but radio, his audience, at least, loves him. Speaking of seeing, rather than just hearing, most Americans can visualize Barack Obama as President, but they are still trying to focus picturing Michele as First Lady. But, it's equally hard to focus on Cindy McCain as First Lady, too. So all that might end up a wash.

Well, it's unity everywhere, or at least in Unity, New Hampshire, Senators Obama and Clinton smiling wildly at each other. More wild is Bill Clinton, unaccounted for, sulking, his hopes dashed, the boy from Hope hopeless, till he figures how to be the Come Back Kid once again. Meanwhile, Barack Obama already appears to be president, if the press conference he held in Chicago yesterday is any indicator. It seemed like a presidential press conference; Obama exuded a bit of impatience, mentioning that he had answered such questions before, talked in the measured tones of someone with his hands on the levers of power. Reporters differed to him as if he was already elected. Perhaps Obama's performance seemed presidential, since Bush's appearances recently seem slightly surreal, more Bush jokes than substance, Bush kidding around as if he can't wait for his term to be over. Though coincidental, it isn't difficult to watch the disputed election fiasco in Zimbabwe to be an Africanized version of the 2000 presidential election, Florida style, Robert Mugabe taking on the W. role. It's a cartoon version, of course, except for the Zimbabweans, especially those who have been assaulted or killed. Where is Donald Rumsfeld to give his political analysis of this young democracy and say stuff happens, ala Iraq?

Summer's slowing down most everything political, so much so that we're lost in town hall mania, John McCain style. He wants one held most every week, with Barack Obama in attendance, so the old war hero can poke fun at mister smarty pants. And Ronald Reagan's widow has just announced that her husband's library out in a lovely part of California is available as a setting anytime it's needed. Obama's people are a little reluctant to get involved is this love fest of highly managed citizen participation. Way back when, when Joe McGinniss wrote The Selling of the President 1968, these staged formats were Richard Nixon's favorite. But everyone wants a break, a vacation, from campaigning; indeed, exhaustion is being given as a reason that Obama chose Jim Johnson for his veep screening team, now that Johnson has bailed out, given the bad publicity he generated just for being who he is. (My mention of him last week was doubtless the last straw.) McCain has been losing people for months after their biographies are made public; usually it's the long list of lobbying efforts trailing them being the cause to jump. In Obama's case, one commentator on Diane Rehm's Friday news roundup show expressed disbelief that Obama, being a Harvard Law School graduate, didn't have a trusted brilliant lawyer friend to name to his veep committee. She didn't seem to recollect that Bill Clinton and his wife, Hillary, Yale Law School graduates, had the same problem when they hit town and moved into the White House. It's hard to gain trusted friends when you're accelerating through space so quickly. And some of Obama's Chicago friends were only showing up at the local political operator Tony Rezko's trial, including defendant Rezko himself. It's a problem with hitting the big time so soon. There's likely to be more betrayed friends than trusted friends.

The primaries are finally over and the buyer's remorse seems right around the corner. Even Barack Obama has been sporting "How did this happen?" expressions in photographs various newspaper editors have chosen to run. Hillary Clinton's concession speech today, though, apparently was the hottest ticket in town, almost any town, though the event was held in Washington, D.C.. Though Sen. Clinton said she would throw her "full support" behind nominee to be Obama, she's not throwing her delegates his way yet, since she merely "suspended" her campaign, a fund raising ploy and her ticket to mischief in the convention to come at summer's end. And, speaking of mischief, when Bill Clinton called the author of a Vanity Fair article, which insinuates a lot of both smoke and fire on the Bubba behavior front, "slimy," it was a veracity endorsement of sort. The former president claimed there were "five or six blatant lies in there," in the article, though that sort of non-denial denial leaves all the rest of the innuendo certified. The timing of the article and Clinton's tirade, coming as it has on the heels of Obama's elevation, seems to have put another nail into the coffin of an Obama/Clinton ticket. The notoriety of a barely published magazine article screams "Here's What to Expect!" if Hillary is put on the ticket. But, with all of Barack Obama's "Change" theme, one thing he did not change was the makeup of his veep selection team. There is Caroline Kennedy (the next Cheney, the one to pick herself?), Eric Holder, a former deputy attorney general under Bill Clinton (and there was so much good luck in picking an actual attorney general in Bill's administration), and, the coup de grace, Jim Johnson, the former head of Fannie Mae (subprime city now), who was instrumental in picking the wonderful veep choices of both Geraldine Ferraro and John Edwards. Now those were some picks!