April 2008

Purple

After the strange elections of 2000 and 2004, I didn’t think politics could get any weirder. Although the division of the United States into Red and Blue states was vaguely repellent, at least it made some sense, given the wide range of, for lack of a better word, styles that exist in this country, whose citizenry’s tastes are said to range from Budweiser to Chardonnay, from Ford to Volvo, from Billy Ray Cyrus to Beyonce to Bach to Birdman. Americans seem to be dispersed into various marketing categories based on income, education level, and something that can only be called “class,” though we always insist that doesn’t apply to us.

So it seemed reasonable that given this vast spectrum of tastes, there might be some dividing line in our midst, a median strip that slices us quite neatly in half, as the 2000 and 2004 election results would suggest.

But now, we are being sliced and diced anew by the latest schism: in this primary season, Blue voters appear to be neatly divided, too, with half going for Obama and the other half for Clinton. This divide has introduced new shades of blue into American political discourse, as if we have all spent so much time watching Project Runway (I know I have) that the term “Blue” seems too vague, and we yearn for more particular hues, e.g., turquoise and cerulean.

But isn’t it odd that the Blue Team’s divisions seem to exactly replicate the national percentages of the past two presidential elections? As I monitored the primary results in Texas and Mississippi a few weeks ago, I had a horrible sense of déjà vu—it was 2000 all over again, as well as 2004, as I watched my candidate, Barack Obama, go up, then down, then up, then down, then end up at what I suppose was statistically a draw.

As of today, Obama is ahead by slightly more than one hundred delegates. Given that Michigan and Florida are still up in the air as of now (that damn Florida again!), it’s impossible to predict how it will all turn out. At one time, most Democrats, at least the ones I talked to, felt that for better or worse, Clinton had the nomination in the bag; now, her cakewalk to victory has turned into a photo-finish (a horrible mixed metaphor: cakes in a bag, dashing toward a finish line...). It’s like a nailbiting Superbowl, with sudden upsets—touchdowns and turnovers (more pastry!), with flags, or flag lapel-pins, flying on every play.

How can it be, I wondered as I noted the latest delegate count, that just like the entirety of the American electorate, the Blue Team is divided perfectly neatly down the middle?

As usual, I have a theory. You can call it a conspiracy theory if you like—I’m full of them (and I think I’ve pretty much been vindicated about the JFK assassination). It looks to me like whenever someone pulls ahead—for example, in 2000, a sitting Vice-President up against a moron with basically no experience in governance—the media decides it would be fun to pile on the presumed winner just to make the contest more interesting. After all, if Gore was a shoo-in, what on earth would everyone talk about in those tedious months before the election—policy? Nooooo, policy is for wonks.

You may recall that in 2000, the Washington Post produced a series of articles about Al Gore that made him seem plodding, grandiose, even mendacious, smug, and worst of all, boring. As Eric Alterman put it in The Nation last July, “That Al Gore’s 2000 presidential candidacy was treated unconscionably by most members of the mainstream media is not really arguable by sentient beings.” I remember at the time wondering why on earth the Post had it in for Al Gore and had conjured up a foul stew of innuendo instead of simply, oh I don’t know, reporting the news.

Later, I discovered that this series was part of a larger pattern of the media going after Gore, a pattern that included such things as declaring that he had lost a debate through which I had cheered as Gore dropkicked the obviously clueless Bush (who appeared to be fed information through an earpiece) into what I thought would be political oblivion. Gore’s patronizing sighing may have reminded people of the smart kid who always raises his hand in class, but that doesn’t mean one should elect the bumbling idiot in the back row who’s sticking a tack on someone’s seat just to teach Smart Boy a lesson.

But because of the media’s depiction of Gore, and then Kerry, as I have complained before in these pages, Bumbling Idiot has been president for the past eight years, and just look what he’s done to us.

Now, not content with having engineered what will probably turn out to be the decline of western civilization if not the ruin of the entire world, the media has focused on the Democratic primaries with the same mischievous zeal it once devoted to making Gore, who has since won the Nobel Prize, look like a lying smarty-pants. The media doesn’t like it when one person is winning—there’s no story there. The media likes a contest, a sporting event. So whenever anyone seems to be pulling ahead, they pile on until the numbers are even again.

So when Hillary Clinton complained that the Saturday Night Live parody of the media’s preferential treatment of Obama was accurate, she was probably correct. At that point, though, stung by her accusations, the media swung the other way and started thumping Obama. When Obama’s numbers started to dip, they pulled back, and today’s headlines on CNN seem slightly anti-Clinton again. (Whatever the news story actually says, the headlines are all anyone reads, so they’re probably the most important barometer of which way the zeitgeist is blowing.)

Meanwhile, in a Zogby poll yesterday, McCain was beating both Clinton and Obama in the general election. But don’t worry—by the time the Democrats finally decide on a candidate, splitting that last Superdelegate down the middle, Solomon-like, the media will no doubt shake things up for McCain, if only for their own amusement. We’ll go back to being Red, Blue, Red, Blue, Red, Blue.

And out on the campaign trail, Barack Obama says, “We have to come together….That’s how we’re going to change the country.”

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