Category Archives: United States of America

Have a Gay New Year

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Anderson Cooper and Cathy Griffith's 2008-9 New Year's coverage on CNN

S. and I are watching Anderson Cooper and Cathy Griffith’s New Year’s show on CNN. Anderson Cooper catches a lot of flack for being high-profile and still in the closet, but he has pulled off something totally post-gay culture: he’s come out of the closet without having to have a press conference or a cover page interview with People. He’s got Cathy Griffith as his fag hag and he keeps on cutting to interviews with on-scene drag queens (Su-She in New Orleans is going to be lowered in rhinestone covered shoe in lieu of a ball or somesuch). CNN is having a totally edgy, gay New Year’s special, nothing like that middle-America friendly, stated, whitebread bullshit going on with Ryan Seacrest and Dick Clark on ABC.

The default assumption hitherto, absent active countervailing action, is heterosexuality. By having engineered a salami-slice coming-out, absent the appropriate ceremony of homosexuality, Anderson Cooper is thwarting this cultural system. I mean, we live in an era when drag queens are a regular feature of CNN’s New Year’s coverage, thanks to Anderson Cooper.

Cathy Griffith is fucking hilarious. She blurted out that they should cut away from a call with Wolf Blitzer because he was boring her, called out CNN’s on-scene reporter Richard Quest for being loaded and has admonished Anderson a number of times, “Wake up, grandpa,” for not getting one of her pop culture references. Anderson Cooper is trying as hard as he can to play along with her antics — which he obviously enjoys — but he has no emotional range.

So here’s to 2009 and the continuance of the revolution in morality.

Update, 12:57 AM, 1 January 2009: Kathy just objected to Anderson that “I don’t come to your job and knock the dicks out of your mouth.” That’s one of my favorite insults.

The Pink Pentagon

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Has Foggy Bottom become the pink Pentagon? It now seems that it will be a routine part of every presidential administration — or at least of their supporters — for the next couple of cycles to tout its advanced thinking on gender issues by pointing to its high-level appointment of a woman to the position of Secretary of State.

Two out of the last three Secretaries of State have been women (Madeleine Albright, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice). Candidate Obama seemed to have Samantha Power on the Secretary of State shortlist and now it seems as if Senator Clinton is on the way there, purportedly to mollify her female supporters by providing the Senator with some role.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon remains an impenetrable bastion of masculinity. And not just men, but manly men. Donald Rumsfeld practically snorted puffs of superheated testosterone out his nose. Not only are women inconceivable, but apparently even so effeminate as Democrats at large are no longer allowed at the Department of Defense. President Clinton selected a Republican to head the Pentagon (William Cohen) and President-elect Obama has rumors emanating that he will retain Secretary Gates for a period, or of Senator Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense.

Nominating a woman to run the Pentagon would cause a political firestorm of retrograde gender imaginings, still lurking just below the surface. It will be the true, last hold out against female equality.

The two institutions have both obviously become overloaded with psychological meaning. The State Department, with its constant bias toward diplomacy, is the redoubt of verbal skills, much denigrated now that it turns out that women possess them in spades over men. And the State Department has only become an acceptable appointment for a woman as the department has declined in stature. It’s budget has been allowed to deteriorate away over the years, ambassadorships have become powerless rewards for campaign contributors and responsibility for real foreign policy making has all moved over to the Pentagon. Now that it’s the department of international social work, it’s safe to leave the place to a woman. The State Department has even got a double entendre in its unofficial name — Foggy Bottom — to suggest that it’s the proper place to send the skirts, especially the bulging middle-aged ones. They may as well run a knitting circle out of the Secretary’s office suite, whereas the Pentagon is a bastion of manly action.

If what is required is someone who can talk our enemies to death, why not go with one of the original rumors, and make Senator John Kerry the Secretary of State? If Senator Clinton is going to get a role other than leading the charge for healthcare reform in Congress, then let’s retire this gender-reifying myth and send her to the Pentagon.

The Transition from Idealism to Power

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For all the idealism and slogans of the campaign trail, what I see in the moves of the last few days — in the selection of Rahm Emanuel as his chief of staff, in his politicianly reticence at Friday’s press conference, in his meeting with Senator McCain — is a man making preparations for the actuality of governance, of the exercise of power, of making the necessary compromises between idealism and the hard reality of the achievable.

Along similar lines, here’s Ezra Klein (“Legislator-in-Chief,” TAPPED, 16 November 2008):

… the success of Obama’s presidency is dependent on his ability to navigate an increasingly dysfunctional Congress, and that the ability to pass bills through the institution requires pretty fair knowledge of how it works and pretty good relationships with the key players. Clinton didn’t have that. He entered office and showed very little respect for congressional expertise, surrounding himself with trusted associates from Arkansas and young hotshots from his campaign. Obama is not making the same mistake.

I’m essentially pro-establishment. All that hoary stuff of Sarah Palin on the campaign trail about shaking up Washington and the evils of Washington insiders is just junk pander to an ignorant public. Washington, D.C. — any center of power — is a complex place. Knowledge of the workings of Congress, of the bureaucracy, of all the hangers-on, especially the unofficial, undocumented byways, counts.

A point that S. made this weekend is that there is a difference between being an advocate and being a policy maker in a position of power. Al Gore has said that he feels he can best advance his agenda from outside of government and that may sound like something that someone in his position just says. But Mr. Gore can adopt an uncompromising position that the United States should be completely off of fossil fuels within ten years. And President-elect Obama has embraced that position on the campaign trail. But here is the contrast of actual governance. President Obama will probably pursue a more mixed agenda on energy and climate change because he has to make policy of principle and that will involve grabbing at what can be had in the current political environment, bringing in fence-sitters and even some opponents to a comprehensive, compromise package.

I would say that so far President-elect Obama is looking pretty shrewd and his choices are already giving me confidence.

The Current Climate

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The Onion’s post-election analysis (“Nation Finally Shitty Enough To Make Social Progress,” Issue 44-45, 5 November 2008):

Carrying a majority of the popular vote, Obama did especially well among women and young voters, who polls showed were particularly sensitive to the current climate of everything being fucked. Another contributing factor to Obama’s victory, political experts said, may have been the growing number of Americans who, faced with the complete collapse of their country, were at last able to abandon their preconceptions and cast their vote for a progressive African-American.

Citizens with eyes, ears, and the ability to wake up and realize what truly matters in the end are also believed to have played a crucial role in Tuesday’s election.

No Sleep for George W. Bush

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Celebrating the Obama victory, Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House, 3:35 AM, 5 November 2008

After results and President Elect Barack Obama’s victory speech, at about two in the morning, I got on my bike and rode down to the White House where a huge crowd had assembled along Pennsylvania Avenue to taunt the lame duck. President Bush probably didn’t sleep well last night. Hundreds of people were there screaming and carrying on. People brought improvised percussion instruments. People chanted, “Move your shit, move your shit” in the direction of the White House.

People were blaring their car horns all throughout the city, but I Street, the street just north of Lafayette Park, was the unrelenting car horn epicenter. Nearly everyone who drove past stood on their horn the whole way. People shouted out their car windows as they passed. Pedestrians took over streets, drivers too caught up to care. Over at Franklin Park someone with a built out car stereo opened the doors and cranked it. Another guy stripped down to his boxer-briefs and danced on top of his car. It was a true spontaneous street party.

DCist has pictures and stories at “Washington, D.C. Celebrates Obama Victory Well Into the Morning” and “More D.C. Election Night Dispatches.” Flickr has more from around D.C. SLOG has great pictures of the same from Seattle at “Where is the party right now?,” “More of Your Photos From Last Night” and “It’s 2:30 in the Morning….” Neighbors hauled the stereo up to the roof to blare a dance remix of “Don’t Stop Believing” to street revelers.

Over

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9:40 PM. Ohio has been projected to go for Senator Obama. CNN isn’t about to call the election officially, but John King just hypothetically went through the map of the outstanding states and even under the wildest bias in favor of Senator McCain, he still loses. Mr. King said “I can’t see any plausible way for McCain to win.” As far as I’m concerned, CNN has called it.

District of Columbia, Precinct 39, Ward 1

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Election day, Precinct 39, Ward 1, Bell Multicultural High School, District of Columbia, 4 November 2008

I’ve only voted one time in my life, when at the age of 18 or 19 my mother requested an absentee ballot for me, sat me down at the dining room table and showed me how to fill it in. It was an off year and it was some issues and offices entirely forgettable. I consider voting to be mostly irrational behavior since the chance of my swaying my state’s slate of electors is somewhere on the order of < 0.5*10-7. Being permanently ensconced in the liberal archipelago, my vote matters even less. But this election is historic and I figure some children might ask me about it some day. Having to answer that I didn’t vote would be quite the wet blanket.

So for the first time in my life I drug my ass out of bed at some hour where birds and worms lock in mortal combat, hauled on last night’s clothes and walked a few blocks over to precinct 39, ward 1 voting center, namely the Bell Multicultural High School theatre and voted. I got there twenty minutes after polls opened. Nonetheless, the line stretched out the door, down the block, into the D.C. Parks Department parking lot, where it snaked around the perimeter, then back out onto the sidewalk, to the end of the block, across the street and part way down the next block. It was cold enough this morning that people were wearing gloves and hats and performing little mini-callisthenic foot shuffle dances while they waited.

We had an option of voting paper or electronic. Since I was unsure that I could properly navigate a grid of arrows, bubbles and names with my eyes, and since being victimized by Diebold seemed exciting, I opted for electronic.

Of course I voted for Senators Barack Obama and Joe Biden. For fun I also voted for House of Representatives Observer Elinore Holmes Norton, a friend of the Colbert Report, and as a cantankerous and cranky old lady, one of the few figures in public life with which this pessimist can identify somewhat.

After two hours and twenty minutes I was on my way back home. There wasn’t much by way of excitement. Some people took pictures. Some high school students shouted pro-Obama slogans from the upper-floor windows. Many cars honked as they drove past our long line. Everyone seemed a little excited when a Navy official of some sort came out and ran the flag up the pole in front of the school. It was pretty bureaucratic. The flag wasn’t folded into one of those neat little triangles like boy scouts and marine drill squads are taught. He just came out with it wadded under his left arm, like it were the laundry. It was a nice autumn morning. The sky was grey. The most beautiful tree on my block had covered the sidewalk with a layer of variegated, crunchy orange leaves. The hot shower between my civic duty and work felt wonderful after that long standing in the cold.

And now the waiting.

An Early Night

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Like I was saying, make sure you’ve got a line on a glass of champagne early (Steinberg, Jacques, “Networks May Call Race Before Voting Is Complete,” The New York Times, 4 November 2008, p. A24):

A senior vice president of CBS News, Paul Friedman, said the prospects for Barack Obama or John McCain meeting the minimum threshold of electoral votes could be clear as soon as 8 p.m. — before polls in even New York and Rhode Island close, let alone those in Texas and California. At such a moment, determined from a combination of polling data and samples of actual votes, the network could share its preliminary projection with viewers, Mr. Friedman said.

“We could know Virginia at 7,” he said. “We could know Indiana before 8. We could know Florida at 8. We could know Pennsylvania at 8. We could know the whole story of the election with those results. We can’t be in this position of hiding our heads in the sand when the story is obvious.”

Similarly, the editor of the Web site Slate, David Plotz, said in an e-mail message that “if Obama is winning heavily,” he could see calling the race “sometime between 8 and 9.”

“Our readers are not stupid, and we shouldn’t engage in a weird Kabuki drama that pretends McCain could win California and thus the presidency,” Mr. Plotz wrote.

There’s no need to mention Barack Obama or John McCain meeting the minimum threshold of electoral votes by as soon as 8:00 PM. Either Senator Obama is going to be declared the President Elect early, or it’s going to drag on all night.

Tomorrow!

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It’s hard to know what to think about tomorrow. I’ve been a subscriber to the school of “big factors count most,” so incumbent approval, the economy, right direction-wrong direction, party identification. It probably didn’t matter who the Democrats put up this year. That person was going to win owing to the structural factors. In fact, I turn to racism — or if not overt racism, at least race-related conservatism — on the part of white voters on the Democratic side and selection by the Republicans of the maverick with the maximum crossover appeal among the Republican slate for things being as narrow as they are. However much spleen is being pumped up by the far-right in anticipation of the blood-letting to come after their defeat, Johm McCain was the Republican capable of losing by the least in 2008.

But I’m jumping into the details way too fast. The big picture is that I am making sure that I am getting together with my people tomorrow night early. If we wait too long to meet up, we could miss it. I am anticipating that Senator Obama is not just going to win, but win in a landslide. If he wins Virginia and Pennsylvania, they could call the whole election on that basis. With polls closing in those two states at 7:00, they could have a statistically significant portion of votes counted by 9:00 and it could all be over. This is, of course, barring total electoral chaos.

A dash of confidence off the top, I am still significantly worried and tomorrow evening is going to be a nail-biter all the way until it’s called. I think that polling is essentially sound and the big numbers are the ones that count. The lesson of 2004 seems to be that frittering around the margin is misguided. That being said, I can’t help the frittering. There are still seven percent of voters undecided and presumably anyone still undecided is going to break for Senator McCain. The race is tightening somewhat. And I am completely freaked out over a potential Bradley effect, though it hasn’t appeared in this cycle to date. On the other hand, I am also counting on that segment of people only owning cell phones who don’t show up at all in the polls causing an Obama win larger than expected. And opposite a Bradley effect might be the fact that people want to bet on a winning horse. Maybe the heard mentality will kick in with the undecided votes and they will do what’s cool.

All the rational calculation aside, I am trying to contain an overwhelming amount of positive excitement for tomorrow. I have my rational, pessimistic expectations for an Obama administration. That being said, we will get to witness one of the great bugaboos of U.S. history slain: the idea that only a white man can be entrusted with the fate of the country. I feel like there have been two outstanding political events in my lifetime: the end of the Cold War and September 11th. Tomorrow we will be adding a third event of similar magnitude to the list. President elect Obama should lead the inaugural parade down the Capital Mall instead of Pennsylvania Avenue and take the oath of office not from the Capital, but from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

Barack Obama is a phenomenon of his own and deserves the enthusiasm he gets, but part of the determination and anticipation of tomorrow is that after eight seemingly interminable years we will finally be closing the door on a dark period of U.S. history, namely the administration of George W. Bush, Jr.

I find the whole media invented “hundred days” narrative tiresome and I wish that an Obama administration would do something to counter it. But I wholly anticipate a frenetic burst of energy from an Obama administration. There is so much in need of fixing, so much done wrong or neglected, or in need of undoing. And in every instance the right thing so damn plain. There is so much pent up energy at this point. We’re not just going to close the door on the Bush years, we’re going to slam it shut.

Delivery

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I think that this last debate was actually acceptable. There was a lot more contention and contrast. I mean, they’re both horrible bores. If I hear one more “independent voter” say that they’re not going to make up their mind until the candidates level with them about details I’m going to scream. I’m a wonkish type and I at a number of points Senator Obama was so thick in the numbers and turns of one policy or another that I was glazing over.

It was amazing the degree to which John McCain has failed to absorb the lesson of the Bush-Gore debate of 2000: being a sore debater doesn’t score any points. He’s like the snorting minotaur, lost in the labyrinth. Smoldering and scoffing isn’t winning over any undecided Athenians.

Maybe it was all just my mood, but for once I loved the punditocracy in all of their sprawling, self-referential drama, entirely divorced from the fate of the nation. It’s the most preposterous, grandiloquent reality show on television. David Gergan is our frog prince statesman. Jeffry Tobin is the ringmaster, comical and macabre, the Harold Zidler of CNN’s Moulin Rouge. Anderson Cooper was flashing blue steel, letting Wolf Blitzer know that this was AC360, not the Situation Room. Carl Bernstein and Candy Crowley, conspicuous in their absence, must have snuck off to make out under the bleachers. I love Andrea Mitchell but in these troubles times she doth protest too much for her beleaguered husband. I’ve always thought that there was something about the Monica Lewinski / Chandra Levy archetype, but to see Maria Bartiromo, cigar-chomper of CNBC, MILF statistician Cambel Brown and Soledad O’Brien, the Marisa Tomei of television journalism, one after another was an undeniable demonstration of the place of prominence of the Brooklyn-Jersey-Long Island brunet in the D.C. psychodrama of blow-dried grey-haired power-mongers.

The most characteristic thing anyone has ever said of D.C. was when Kissinger said in his realpolitik German accent that “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” The D.C. media establishment is Pepe Le Pew floating in misdirected amore along the scent trail of a painted cat. The contrast between the dithering fuddy-duddies of the Senate and the fiddling Neros of burning Rome was beautiful. It was a pyroclastic flow of superheated bullshit. The planetary nebula of the waning days of the new Rome. Like the skeleton at the feast, I can’t help myself.

Update, 16 October 2008: Wow. In the person of Jessi Klein, frog prince David Gergen has found his princess (“I’m in Love With David Gergen,” The Daily Beast, 15 October 2008):

I love his low, quiet voice. That unmodulated buttery whisper that sounds like it’s elbowing its way past a cough drop that’s permanently lodged at the back of his throat. You know how Bed Bath & Beyond sells those white noise machines that help you sleep? And they usually make ocean noises? I want one that’s just David Gergen gently muttering about the economy.

I love the way Gergen makes me feel calm, even when he’s making dire predictions about the future of our country. I love the way he knows everything and then formulates an opinion about everything that’s always right. I love that his eyebrows only move when he gets mad, and I love that he almost never gets mad. I love that he looks like a handsome baked potato.

I love David Gergen too. He’s the sort of old school commentator — polite, level headed, calm — that has been replaced over the years by interrupting, screaming, unhinged children of commentators. David Gergen is like watching old reels of Meet the Press from 1961.