Friday, October 10. 2008The View from the Couch: Town Hall PlusJohn McCain wanted many "Town Hall" style debates. Look out when you get what you wish for. One was more than enough. McCain must have liked them in the past, since he can, for the most part, vet the audience, fill it with friendly Republicans, and talk in a more relaxed manner. There was nothing relaxed about Tuesday night, unless it was The One leaning/sitting cooly on his chair, waiting for McCain to finish his latest attack. Obama was turned into That One, instead of just The One, by a frustrated McCain. In his happy campaign stop Town Hall meetings, McCain would only be shown giving an answer or two, in a close shot, on local and occasional national news. Little bits where he would look folksy and sincere. But Tuesday the scene looked like the set of Equus, currently remounted on Broadway. Tiers of seats surrounding an arena equipped with a hot red carpet, a space that McCain paced around like the damaged Richard III. There were few tight shots, many long shots. McCain's physical presence and body language did not play well in such a setting, especially in contrast to the lithe one, Barack Obama. So, along with the cratering Dow Jones, a lot of talkers are writing off McCain, describing his downward death spiral in the polls. Democrats shouldn't be so confident. Given the so-called Bradley effect (polls exaggerating a black man's actual potential vote), Obama will need about a ten percent lead to squeak by November 4. One man who only squeaks these days is our current president, the completely superfluous George W. Bush. It may have been his destiny. When I use to write columns for the Chicago Sun-Times at the beginning of the Bush II administration, I was often criticized for pointing out how stupid Bush was. How he was so often turned out Dan Quayle style to appear at saccharin photo ops with kindergarten kids (as he was the morning of 9/11). Because of 9/11, Bush went from stupid to lethal, but now he's going back to stupid. Every business young Bush ran, he ran into ruin and left others to clean up the mess, though he usually made off with a profit. Lethal was the best period of the Bush presidency; commanding and wielding the largest and most powerful military in the world gives a person plenty of gravitas. But now as the Iraq war devolves, killing fewer Americans, and Afghanistan heats up, showing the limits of our power and military might, Bush just seems stupid again. OK, he's smarter than Sarah Palin, but he shares her lack of intellectual curiosity, her zero interest in serious learning. As a number of commentators have pointed out, the "Surge" has worked because we let the civil war in Iraq play out enough, kill enough Iraqis, segregate villages back into mono communities, create millions of refugees who fled the country, to show "improvement." What is less mentioned is John Negroponte's role. Once he got there in 2004, death squads and sectarian killings followed, which mirrored his record in Central America in the early 1980s. Negroponte's terms of service specialized in letting opposing sects kill each other off. That history has repeated itself in Iraq. Negroponte is now Deputy Secretary of State. Everyone seems to have forgotten about the current administration's flunkies and what they do and have done. The Wall Street mess and the campaign and Sarah Palin has given the Bushies the most effective smoke screen to hide behind as they exit and leave behind for Obama the disaster he is likely to inherit. Trackbacks
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