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BE STILTED, MY BEATING HEARTNovember 2 2008

HAPPY WARRIOR
from National Review

It’s a bit late in the day to say what I’m looking for in a candidate. So let me say what I’m looking for in a voter. It was nicely summed up by Marc Ambinder in The Atlantic Monthly, contrasting McCain and Obama back at the end of primary season as they clinched their respective nominations:

The enormous crowd in the Xcel center seems ready to lift Obama on its shoulders; the much smaller audience for McCain’s speech interrupted his remarks with stilted cheers.

And God bless ‘em: Three stilted cheers for the stilted cheerers. There, surely, is the republican ideal: a land whose citizenry declines to offer anything more generous than stilted cheers for whichever of their fellows presumes to lead them. Alas, we stingy stilted cheerers are a dying breed, and, if present polls are any indication, on November 4th Americans will be looking for a leader they can exalt with more full-throated hosannas. Two and a third centuries after the Declaration of Independence, the monarchical strain in American politics is stronger than ever: Not for us a citizen-executive promising a chicken in every pot; we seek a benign sovereign promising hope in every pot – presumably a specialty item hand-crafted by some Vermonty artisan type.

The old kings – the ones got rid of bac

POINT OF NO RETURNNovember 1 2008

Across the electric wires, the hum is ceaseless: Give it up, loser. Don’t go down with the ship when it’s swept away by the Obama tsunami. According to newspaper reports, polls show that most people believe newspaper reports claiming that most people believe polls showing that most people have read newspaper reports agreeing that polls show he’s going to win.

In the words of Publishers’ Clearing House, he may already have won! The battleground states have all turned blue, the reddest of red states are rapidly purpling. Don’t you know, little fool? You never can win. Use your mentality, wake up to reality. Why be the last right-wing pundit to sign up with Small-Government Conservatives For The Liberal Supermajority? We still need pages for the coronation, and there’s a pair of velvet knickerbockers with your name on it.
Yes, technically, this is still a two-party state, but one of the parties is like Elton John’s post-Oscar bash and the other is a church social in Wasilla. As David Sedaris put it in The New Yorker:

“I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. ‘Can I interest you in the chicken?’ she asks. ‘Or would you prefer the platter of s—t with bits of broken glass in it?’

“To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.”

THE BARACK OBAMA LACK-OF-VARIETY SHOWNovember 1 2008

For what it's worth, I don't think the night worked for him. The last time anyone did this — Ross Perot — it was so weird a world unto itself (strange-looking guy with pie charts) that, beached between Cybill and Murphy Brown (or whatever it was back then), it had a kind of integrity and distinctiveness. This time round, The O Show followed by the Phillies followed by Jon Stewart cumulatively undermined the candidate.

For a start, the show itself was slick only in a drearily generic way. The waving wheat and music made it seem like a standard campaign commercial, only longer — "It's Morning, Noon And Night In America," which is a big enough problem thanks to the media's Obama cultists without the candidate himself piling on. As for the King Barack Meets [Insert Name Of Downtrodden Subject Here] stuff, aside from the fact that I don't recognize the hellhole this country apparently is, there's something faintly ridiculous in doing it in the middle of the Phillies winning the World Series. Maybe on Super Bowl Sunday, instead of Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunctioning, Obama could come out and interview people about how our entire rotten society is malfunctioning. And then The Daily Show kibbitzing stepped all over the infomercial even more.

This is an amazing race. The incumbent president has approval ratings somewhere between Robert Mugabe and the ebola virus. The economy is supposedly on the brink of global Armageddon. Mc