NUVO Newsweekly Blogs

Well, there's four full days left before Indiana turns back into a pumpkin, loses its glass slipper, returns to the small media market scullery. Flaunt it while you can! I heard Mitch Daniels' grumpy interview on NPR yesterday (May Day!), recorded in his state house office. I was waiting for Michele Norris to ask him why he got the cost of the Iraq war so wrong back when he was in the Bush II administration, or why he hasn't taken more credit for the Bush tax cuts for the very rich, all before he broke away to selflessly serve the people of Indiana. My Man Mitch wanted to brag about his budget surplus, the lack of debt, but not once did he mention the privatizing of the toll road and Ms. Norris had the good sense, or ignorance, not to mention it, either. Not only does Mitch expect to be reelected, he wants the people of Indiana to cheer his reelection, thank him for his wonderful fire sale of Indiana's assets, not just pull his lever, rather than Jill Long Thompson's, or vote for the stolid Indianapolis architect, who has agreed to take one for the good of the state. But it is the Democrats that need focus here. It's hard to believe Indiana will end the presidential aspirations of Sen. Clinton. If anything can end anything, it would be North Carolina giving her a victory that would block Barack Obama's march to the nomination. But the question is, one I have myself, is Why should one vote for Hillary Clinton and not Barack Obama?

It's Indiana all Indiana all the time now. Finally, a place in the electoral sun! Obama says it's up to us. Hillary wants us bad. The national media will be pouring into town, snapping up motel/hotel rooms, the Clinton and Obama campaigns will help TV stations' balance sheets, the Hoosier on the street will be hounded for his/her opinions. Primary fever, ain't it grand? The Robert Kennedy campaign of 1968 is held up as the last time the state mattered, though this time it doesn't feel like 1968. In 1968 everything was darker and one reason for that is much more was mysterious back then. History now has more light shed on it, for whatever good that brings. During Sen. Clinton's victory speech in Pennsylvania, where she gathered twelve, let's hear it, twelve more pledged delegate votes, she said, with some elation, how our country "defies the odds and does the impossible," which only sadly reminded me of 9/11, where 19 jihadists really defied the odds and did the impossible, flying three planes into three targets, two with utterly catastrophic results. That is why this country is still trying to come to terms with 9/11. Our culture usually revers the underdog, the Davids versus the Golaiths, those few who gain victory over the many. One of the worse moments in our collective history mimicked one of our most dearly held popular culture fantasies: See what they got away with!

The last debate lived up to its name. It was last in about every category, other than in the number of critics it has spawned. The Philadelphia debate was a bit surreal, some bad dream of Obama, or, for that matter, of Hillary Clinton. There was George Stephanopoulos grilling his former boss and, in at least Joe Klein's version of the 1992 campaign, George's former inamorata, about her Bosnia fantasies. For a while, it seemed like divorce court. Stephanopoulos is the best emblem of what has happened to journalism over the last two decades: the revolving open door between campaign consultants and high posts in the media world. Our last general president, Dwight Eisenhower, warned everyone of the perils of the military-industrial complex in 1961, but this generation has had to endure the consultant-media complex.

Vice presidential candidates only matter when a presidential contender loses. The conventional wisdom is that they don't matter at all. But that pronouncement is only the ego of the winner swelling up so large it obscures whatever aid the veep brought to the ticket. This time around, like any number of occurrences in this contest, the conventional wisdom will be thwarted. The choice of vice president looms large on both sides. First, a bit of review of why the veep choice matters. One proof of the veep's importance is when an incumbent loses a second term. Take, for instance, the case of George H.W. Bush. He lost his second term for a number of reasons, principally Ross Perot, but Dan Quayle didn't bring daddy Bush one extra vote. I'm sure Quayle lost him a few. Toward the end of Bush's first term he showed a few examples of physical weakness; throwing up on the Japanese prime minister in January of 1992 wasn't helpful. The thought of a possible President Quayle cost Bush votes. And who was Jimmy Carter's vice president? See? Walter Mondale. No help there. And how about Gerald Ford's? None for a few months and then Nelson Rockefeller. And all those folks were actually president, at least for one term. For those who never won, the veep choice becomes even more stark.

This primary season is the culmination, the peak, of the Sixties generation coming home to roost. Not only do we have a war, two, actually, in the middle east, but we have Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama battling for the Democratic nomination, one to face the former POW of that old war, the one that marked the Sixties generation forever, along with civil rights, the feminist movement, gay liberation, etc. The election of Bill Clinton made 1992 seem to be the triumph of the '60s generation, but this election cycle has more of the elements that shaped a generation. Here we have a woman and a black guy running neck and neck. What would Martin Luther King have thought, if he hadn't been killed on this day forty years ago? Is this the Promised Land?

Hillary Clinton has joined a growing fraternity and sorority: The Fellowship of Fantasists. For those in the literary and academic worlds, it is a familiar phenomena. The first requirement is fame. You need to have done well, be noticed. So, it was after James Frey became an Oprah best seller that his "memoir" was exposed as fake. Just as the most recent example, Margaret B. Jones, the bi-racial home girl drug courier gang member was exposed as she was stepping onto the gangplank of the Good Boat Success as Margaret Seltzer, upper-middle class suburbanite. In the academy, the historian Joseph Ellis first had to win the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize before it was revealed that he had been telling his Mount Holyoke students for years of his exploits as a warrior in Vietnam, whereas the ROTC officer didn't rise from behind a desk back in the States, merely teaching at West Point. Ellis, at this point, has had his reputation and job restored by a forgiving and forgetful public. And, though not of the fantasist persuasion, many a journalist celebrity plagiarist continues along happily in his and her public role as talking head. But Sen. Clinton's run across the tarmac head ducking fantasy may well prove to be a bigger chasm to leap over.

The race now seems to be about race. Barack Obama's minister in chief has been on the cable news circuit, via two clips containing speeches reminiscent of the decades-old boogeymen subjects of the way out left Left: The CDC inventing the AIDS virus, 9/11 being "chickens coming home to roost," the God-Damn America rap. So much so, Obama had to give a speech, a la the Mormon vice-presidential hopeful Mitt Romney's oratory months ago on his own controversial faith. Obama's presentation has been generally more praised than Romney's, except in the Fox News precincts--though, the GOP hit squads, largely,have been holding their fire, waiting on the outcome of the Democratic Super Delegates ruminations. But, Barack's talk to its invited audience does show what the Clinton campaign has been complaining about for the last couple of months: Obama's hold on the media discussion. The question is not why Obama commands the airwaves, but why Hillary does not.