Camp-Pain

THE ABSURD TIMES

http://www.whatnowtoons.com

I never did get around to commenting on the cartoon cover for the New Yorker magazine, but Keith did. In case you missed it, this is what the New York magazine published:

I didn't think much of it because, after all, it did come from New York.

The Campain has become so absurd that I'm just about ready to pack this whole thing in.

For example, last week McCain made the old GOP promise not to raise taxes. He then appeared on one of the Sunday talk shows and said that payroll taxes should be increased to help out Social Security. His campaign then snapped into action, saying that McCain does not speak for his campaign Comittee. Say what?

A recent ad by McCain shows Obama in Germany talking to the 200,000, and then Brittany Spears and Paris Hilton. See the connection? In defending this ad, one of his campaign advisors said that "Obama spoke to a lot of leftist Europeans." Hunh? In Germany? The country that gave us such leftists as Hitler and Merkel? Are Republicans really that afraid of the Left? Obama is left-handed, maybe that's what they meant?

Anyway, here is a nice article with gook links from TOMGRAM:

Tom Dispatch

posted 2008-07-29 16:22:07

Tomgram: Ira Chernus, Will Culture War Overshadow Real War in 2008?

All agree that this is (or should be) the year of the Democrats. But
with candidate Barack Obama still leading, on average, in national polls
by only about <http://www.pollster.com/polls/us/08-us-pres-ge-mvo.php>
two to five percentage points, depending on the day, and the media
proclaiming
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2008/07/26/ST2008072602046.html>
"oil" now a "Republican" issue, there's certainly a long way to go to
that prospective Democratic victory on November 4th. Still, in
retrospect, this last week may be seen as the one in which Senator
McCain's campaign concluded that this might not only be the year of the
Democrat, but of the Obamacrat as well, and went for the jugular.

Gallup polling, for instance, shows Obama making small but significant
<http://www.gallup.com/poll/109036/Obama-Gains-Over-McCain-Swing-States-Since-June.aspx>
gains in every kind of state (red, purple, and blue) over the last two
months. At the same time, Obama's world tour -- the one McCain and the
neocons practically egged him into taking, with all those online tickers
showing
<http://blogsforjohnmccain.com/days-barack-obama-visited-iraq-widget>
just how many days since he had last been to Iraq -- left the McCain
camp in full and bitter gripe mode. In the imagery of advisor and former
Senator Phil Gramm, they had become a campaign of "whiners."
<http://www.newsweek.com/id/145421> Meanwhile, the /Berlin bounce/
finally showed up
<http://www.gallup.com/poll/109102/Gallup-Daily-Obama-49-McCain-40.aspx>
in the polls.

While Obama was wowing the Europeans, McCain managed to get an
offshore-oil photo-op in the Gulf of Mexico wiped out by a somehow
overlooked advancing hurricane. Instead, he ventured into a grocery
store aisle in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, prepped on rising food prices,
where he met <http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/07/27/10633/> a
"shopper planted by the local Republican Party" and experienced an
unfortunate "applesauce avalanche."
<http://blog.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2008/07/25/john_mccain_and_the_applesauce.html>
(/The Daily Show/ version
<http://www.thedailyshow.com/full-episodes/index.jhtml?episodeId=177446>
of this is not to be missed.) Not surprisingly, by week's end he was
decisively skipping the "issues" and heading for "values" -- that is,
directly for the throat in the style which Republicans have, in recent
years, made their own.

Earlier in the week, he had practically declared his opponent treasonous
for supposedly putting his political campaign ahead of victory in Iraq
-- "It seems to me that Obama would rather lose a war in order to win a
political campaign?" -- and launched a classic Republican campaign
attack on Obama's "character." His latest ad, which attacks Obama for
supposedly going to the gym rather than visiting wounded American
soldiers in Germany, typically ends
<http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=679D4D79-3048-5C12-008AD444C373AA15>:
"McCain, country first." (Versus? uh? Obama, country last?)

It's not exactly surprising that candidate McCain headed for what he
hoped was potential "values" and "character" pay dirt (emphasis on
"dirt") in tough times. As Ira Chernus -- canny TomDispatch regular and
author of Monsters to Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/1594512760/ref=nosim/?tag=nationbooks08-20> --
points out, it may be his only chance. The question is: Will it work?

Will "character," the culture wars, and security fears help elect the
most woeful Republican candidate since Bob Dole -- and in a country that
not only increasingly doesn't think much of Republicans, but has never
cared to vote old? (Ronald Reagan was the exception to this rule, always
running young and vigorous, whatever his age.) McCain, in a golf cart
<http://blogs.chron.com/txpotomac/2008/07/caption_contest_mccain_in_a_go.html>
being piloted by 84-year-old George H.W. Bush, actually looked older
than the former president. And, gee, you might go for the jugular early,
too, in a year in which the Republicans don't even control the political
machinery of the state of Ohio.

Now, let Ira Chernus take you on a magical mystery tour of the strange
world of American "values," American "values voters," and a mainstream
media that values the value-voter story above all else. /Tom/

War Meets Values on Campaign Trail

*Will the Big Winner of 2008 Once Again Be a Conservative
Culture-Wars Narrative?*
By Ira Chernus

While the Iraq war has largely faded from our TV screens, some 85%
of all voters still call it an important issue. Most of them want
U.S. troops home from Iraq within a couple of years, many of them
far sooner. They support Barack Obama's position, not John McCain's.
Yet when the polls ask which candidate voters trust more on the war,
McCain wins almost every time.

Maybe that's because, according to the Pew Center for the People and
the Press, nearly 40% of the public doesn't know McCain's position
on troop withdrawal. In a June Washington Post/ABC poll
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/24/AR2008072401330.html>,
the same percentage weren't sure he had a clear position. When that
poll told voters that McCain opposed a timetable for withdrawal,
support for his view actually shot up dramatically. It looks like a
significant chunk of the electorate cares more about the man than
the issue. Newer polls
<http://blogs.wsj.com/politicalperceptions/category/peter-brown/>
suggest that McCain's arguments against a timetable may, in fact, be
shifting public opinion
<http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/07/16/10393/> his way.

*McCain's Only Chance: Values-plus Voters*

Pundits and activists who oppose the war in Iraq generally assume
that the issue has to work against McCain because they treat
American politics as if it were a college classroom full of rational
truth-seekers. The reality is much more like a theatrical spectacle.
Symbolism and the emotion it evokes -- not facts and logic -- rule
the day.

In fact, the Pew Center survey found that only about a quarter of
those who say they'll vote for McCain base their choice on issues at
all. What appeals to them above all, his supporters say
<http://www.gallup.com/poll/107671/General-Election-Shaping-Change-vs-Experience.aspx>,
is his "experience," a word that can conveniently mean many things
to many people.

The McCain campaign constantly highlights its man's most emotionally
gripping experience: his years of captivity in North Vietnam. Take a
look at the McCain TV commercial
<http://blog.washingtonpost.com/channel-08/2008/07/_while_this_message_delivers.html>
entitled "Love." It opens with footage of laughing, kissing hippies
enjoying the "summer of love," then cuts to the young Navy flier
spending that summer of 1967 dropping bombs on North Vietnam and
soon to end up a tortured prisoner of those he was bombing.

McCain believed in "another kind of love," the narrator explains, a
love that puts the "country and her people before self." Oh, those
selfish hippies, still winning votes for Republicans -- or so
McCain's strategists hope.

Obama agrees that the symbolic meanings of Vietnam and the "love
generation" still hang heavy over American politics. The debate
about patriotism, he observed
<http://www.barackobama.com/2008/06/30/remarks_of_senator_barack_obam_83.php>,
"remains rooted in the culture wars of the 1960s? a fact most
evident during our recent debates about the war in Iraq."

Obama is right -- sort of. The so-called culture wars have shifted
away from social issues to war, terrorism, and national security.
The number of potential voters who rate abortion or gay rights as
their top priority now rarely exceeds 5%; in some polls it falls
close to zero. Meanwhile, Republicans are nine times as likely
<http://www.quinnipiac.edu/x1295.xml?ReleaseID=1192> as Democrats,
and far more likely than independents, to put terrorism at or near
the top of their most-important list. And Republican voters are much
more likely to agree with McCain that Iraq is, indeed, the "the
central front in the war on terrorism."

Sociologists tell us, however, that the "culture wars" so
assiduously promoted by conservatives are mostly smoke and mirrors.
Despite what media pundits may say, the public is /not/ divided into
two monolithic values camps. Voters are much less predictable than
that. And few let values issues trump their more immediate problems
-- especially economic ones -- when they step into the voting booth.
The almighty power of the monolithic "values voters" is largely a
myth invented by the media.

Yet, the "culture war" story does impact not only debates about the
war in Iraq, as Obama said, but all debates about national security.
Beyond the small minority who are strict "values voters," there are
certainly millions of "values plus" voters. Though they can be
swayed by lots of issues, they hold essentially conservative social
values and would like a president who does the same. This time
around, it's a reasonable guess that they, too, are letting war and
security issues symbolize their "values" concerns. Put in the
simplest terms: They are the McCain campaign's only chance.

So just how much of a chance does he really have? At this point,
only two-thirds of those who say they trust him most on Iraq plan to
vote for him. That means less than 30% of all voters are solidly
prowar and pro-McCain. But another 12% or so who do not trust McCain
on Iraq say they'll vote for him anyway, keeping him competitive
<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/28/us/politics/28web-nagourney.html>
in polling on the overall race. Most of them are surely part of the
huge majority who, whatever they think of his Iraq specifics, trust
McCain most to protect us from terrorism and see him as the person
most desirable as commander-in-chief. (There's that "experience"
again.)

The crucial voters are the 10% to 20% who want troops out of Iraq
soon, won't yet commit to McCain, but "trust him" most to do the
right thing on Iraq and terrorism. They are choosing the man, not
the policy position, on the war. A lot of them fall among the 5% to
20% -- depending on the poll you pick -- who won't yet commit to
either candidate.

McCain can swing the election if his campaign can only convince
enough of them to vote with their hearts, or their guts, for the
"experienced" Vietnam war hero, the symbol of the never-ending
crusade against "Sixties values." So he and his handlers naturally
want to turn the campaign into a simple moral drama: Sixties values
-- or the nation's security and your own? Take your pick.

*Obama's American Values*

Could that "values" script get a Republican elected, despite the
terrible damage the Republicans have done -- and for which voters
blame them -- in the last eight years? Many Democrats apparently
think it might. They're afraid, says Senator Russ Feingold
<http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/continued/3691/why_democrats_wont_stop_the_war/>,
that "the Republicans will tear you apart" if you look too weak and
soft. That's why the Democratic Congress, weakly and softly,
continues to give the Bush administration nearly everything it wants
when it comes to funding the war in Iraq, as well as eavesdropping
on citizens at home. And the Democratic presidential candidate now
goes along, with little apology.

The Obama campaign recognizes the larger "values" frame at work
here. Look at the commercial
<http://blog.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2008/06/19/obama_launches_nationwide_ad_c.html>
its operatives made to kick off the general election campaign. In
it, Obama says not a word about issues. He starts off by announcing:
"America is a country of strong families and strong values." From
then on, it's all values all the time.

And the "strong values" the commercial touts are not the ones that
won him the nomination either. Not by a long shot. You'll find
nothing about "change" or "hope" there. It's all about holding fast
to the past. Nor is there a thing about communities uniting to help
the neediest. America's "strong values" -- "straight from the Kansas
heartland" -- are "accountability and self-reliance? Working hard
without making excuses." You're on your own. It's all individualism
all the time.

Sandwiched between self-reliance and hard work is the only community
value that apparently does count: "love of country."

Obama's second ad
<http://blog.washingtonpost.com/channel-08/2008/07/obamas_working_class_pitch.html>
(which /Newsweek/ described as "largely a 30-second version" of the
first) features images of the candidate warmly engaging hard-hatted
and hair-netted workers, all of them with middle-aged wrinkles, blue
collars, and white skins. Both commercials ran in seven
traditionally Republican states as well as 11 swing states. As they
were released, Obama gave major speeches supporting patriotism and
faith-based initiatives.

As Republican consultant Alex Castellanos put it
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/22/AR2008062201964.html>,
the Obama campaign made "an aggressive leap across the 50-yard line
to play on Republican turf." Before they sent their man around the
world to focus on war and foreign policy, to meet the troops in
Afghanistan and General Petraeus in Baghdad, they felt they had to
assure the "Kansas heartland" that he shares true American values.

And Obama's message-makers know where that mythical "heartland"
really lies: not in Kansas, Dorothy, but on a yellow brick road to
an imagined past. The America conjured up in his commercials is a
Norman Rockwell fiction that millions still wish they could live in
because they feel embittered (as Obama so infamously said) by a
world that seems out of control. They prefer a fantasy version of a
past America where so many, who now feel powerless, imagine they
might actually have been able to shape their own destinies.

Perhaps the frustrated do cling to "guns or religion or antipathy to
people who are not like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or
anti-trade sentiment," as Obama suggested
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mayhill-fowler/obama-exclusive-audio-on_b_96333.html>.
But his ad-smiths know that they cling far more to illusions of a
secure past, when (they imagine) everyone could count on clear,
inviolable boundary lines -- between races and genders, between
competitive individuals in the marketplace, between the virtuous
self and the temptations of the flesh, between the U.S. and other
nations, between civilization and the enemies who would destroy it.

All of these boundaries point to the most basic one of all: the
moral boundary between good and evil. McCain and Obama are both
wooing the millions who imagine an absolute chasm between good and
evil, know just where the good is (always "made in America"), and
want a president who will stand
<http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/80822/how_mccain_stays_popular_despite_supporting_disastrous_wars/>
against evil no matter what the cost. They want, in short, a world
where everyone knows their place and keeps to it, and where wars, if
they must be fought, can still be "good" and Americans can still win
every time.

The Republicans have a code word for that illusory past:
"experience." Their "Sixties versus security" script offers a stark
choice: The candidate who clearly symbolizes the crossing of
boundaries, most notably the American racial line, versus the
candidate whose "experience" and mythic life story are built on the
same mantra as his Iraq policy: "No surrender."

The McCain campaign is not about policies that can ensure national
security by reaching out and making new friends. It's about a man
who can offer a feeling of psychological security by standing firm
against old and new enemies
<http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1826064,00.html>.

*The Media's "Ordinary American"*

Who would choose psychological security over real security? The
mainstream media have an answer: "the ordinary American." Now that
the "values voter" of the 2004 election has largely disappeared, the
media have come up with this new character as the mythic hero for
their election-year story.

It began, of course, with Hillary Clinton's primary campaign
comeback -- portrayed as a revolt of those "ordinary people," who
might once have been Reagan Democrats (and might soon become McCain
Democrats), against the "elitists" -- or so the media story went.
Her famous "phone call at 3 AM" ad
<http://blog.washingtonpost.com/channel-08/2008/02/clinton_invokes_your_kids_in_n.html>
suggested that "ordinary people" value a president tough enough to
protect their children. As her husband once put it
<http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1004926,00.html>:
"When people feel uncertain, they'd rather have somebody who is
strong and wrong than someone who's weak and right."

Now the "elitist" Obama still has a "potentially critical
vulnerability," according to the /Washington Post's/ veteran
political reporter Dan Balz
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/22/AR2008062201964.html>:
"Voters do not know whether he shares the values and beliefs of
ordinary Americans."

Balz's colleague, /Post/ media critic Howard Kurtz
<http://blog.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2008/06/30/obamas_working_class_pitch.html>,
called the second Obama commercial a "White Working-Class Pitch"
designed to show that Obama is "on the side of average workers." The
/New York Times's/ Jeff Zeleny
<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/10/us/politics/10obama.html> echoed
that view: "One of his most pressing challenges is to assure voters
that he is one of them."

The centrist and even liberal media are as busy as conservatives
propagating the idea that, to be one of the average, ordinary
Americans, you have to prize (white) working-class values considered
"Republican turf" since the late 1960s: individualism,
self-reliance, hard work for "modest" (which means stagnant or
falling) wages, faith, and a patriotism so strong that it will never
surrender.

The American Everyman, the hero of this year's media story, is an
underpaid worker who may very well vote Republican against his or
her own economic interests, and all too often against the interests
of loved ones who hope to come home alive from Iraq or Afghanistan.

What about all those Democrats who voted for Obama because he
offered a vision of a new politics, a way out of Iraq, and a new
path for the United States? What about all those who earn too much
or too little, or have too much or too little education, or the
wrong skin color, to be part of the white working class? Evidently,
they are all extra-ordinary Americans; "outside the mainstream," as
media analysts sometimes put it. They may represent a majority of
the voters, but they just don't count the same way. They don't fit
this year's plot line.

Of course it may turn out that the old melodrama of an "experienced"
Vietnam hero against the "summer of love" no longer draws much of an
audience, even with both campaigns and the mainstream media so
focused on it. No matter how things turn out on Election Day,
however, it's beginning to look like the big winner will -- yet
again -- be the conservative "culture war" narrative that has
dominated our political discourse, in one form or another, for four
decades now. With Obama and both Clintons endorsing it, who will
stand against it?

For the foreseeable future, debates about cultural values are going
to be played out fiercely on the symbolic terrain of war and
national security issues. The all-too-real battlefields abroad will
remain obscured by the cultural battlefields at home and by the
those timeless "ordinary American values" embedded in the public's
imagination. It's all too powerful a myth -- and too good an
election story -- to go away anytime soon.

*Creating New Stories*

Yet there is no law of nature that says the "ordinary American,"
white working class or otherwise, /must/ value individualism,
self-reliance, patriotism, and war heroics while treating any value
ever associated with the 1960s as part of the primrose path to
social chaos. In reality, of course, the "ordinary American" is a
creature of shifting historical-cultural currents, constantly being
re-invented.

But the 1960s does indeed remain a pivotal era -- not least because
that is when liberal, antiwar America largely did stop caring much
about the concerns and values of working-class whites. Those workers
were treated as an inscrutable oddity at best, an enemy at worst.
Liberals didn't think about alternative narratives of America that
could be meaningful across the political board. Now, they reap the
harvest of their neglect.

It does no good to complain about "spineless Democrats" who won't
risk their political careers by casting courageous votes against
war. Their job is to win elections. And you go to political war with
the voters you have. If too many of the voters are still trapped in
simplistic caricatures of patriotism and national security created
40 years ago -- or if you fear they are -- that's because no one has
offered them an appealing alternative narrative that meets their
cultural needs.

It does no good to complain that such working-class views are
illogical or stupid or self-destructive. As long as progressives
continue to treat "ordinary Americans" as stupid and irrelevant,
progressives will find themselves largely irrelevant in U.S.
politics. And that's stupid, because it doesn't have to be that way.

What can be done to change this picture? Facts and logic are rarely
enough, in themselves, to persuade people to give up the values
narratives that have framed their lives. They'll abandon one
narrative only when another comes along that is more satisfying.

Democrats started looking for a new narrative after the 2004
election, when the media told them that "values voters" ruled the
roost and cared most about religious faith. The result? Democrats,
some of them quite progressive, are creating effective
faith-oriented frames for their political messages.

No matter who wins this year's election, the prevalence of the
"ordinary American" voter story should be a useful wakeup call: It's
time to do something similar on a much broader scale. This election
year offers an invaluable opportunity to begin to grasp some of the
complexities of culturally conservative Americans. Equipped with a
deeper understanding, progressives can frame their programs of
economic justice and cultural diversity within new narratives about
security, patriotism
<http://www.alternet.org/election08/86816/?ses=5d88b64ec3d34318b2f62f2b0d581a73>,
heroism, and other traditionally American values.

That will take some effort. But it will take a lot more effort to
stave off the next Republican victory -- or the next war -- if the
project of creating new, more broadly appealing narratives continues
to be ignored.

/Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of
Colorado at Boulder and author of Monsters to Destroy: The
Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/1594512760/ref=nosim/?tag=nationbooks08-20>.
His email address is: chernus@colorado.edu./

Copyright 2008 Ira Chernus