Taibbi, Matt | Whose Media | Edited by Saswat Pattanayak

Hillary's Flimsy Case for the Nomination :: Matt Taibbi

Sat, 05 Apr 2008 08:35:38 -0400

In the space of three short months, I've contrived to write two lengthy, gloating political obituaries for Hillary Clinton, only to see both of them blow up in my face after fantastic eleventh-hour comebacks that ended with scenes of the Hillmeister doing the dual flabby-arm raise on CNN while gusts of confetti whooshed across the room, obscuring almost everything except the shocking results blaring out from the crawl on the bottom of the screen. There was a time when this race looked like it might become the most uplifting in a generation. It's now threatening to become the most divisive and disturbing. It is a good time to ponder how that happened — and to address a few of the other Frequently Asked Questions about this depraved circus that is now poised to continue well past Pennsylvania.

Isn't Hillary Clinton better qualified than Barack Obama to be president, given that she is the more experienced candidate?

The idea that Clinton is somehow more qualified to deal with international crises because she has more "experience" is one of the strangest things I've seen the media swallow whole in a long time, dating back to the "tiny, sand-covered, yet-to-master-the-art-of-plumbing nation of Iraq is an imminent military threat to the United States" fiasco. According to my calculations —worked out over many hours, using long division out to eighteen places —Clinton is a second-term senator, while Barack Obama, conversely, is a first-term senator. By any reasonable standard, both are political neophytes.

Clinton talks a lot about having visited "over eighty countries" —but then, Chelsea was with her on a lot of those trips, and I doubt folks are rushing to hand her the red phone. In case anyone has forgotten what exactly first lady Hillary Clinton really did all those years, here is a press account of a 1997 trip that she made to Senegal with her daughter: "Her first stop in Senegal was at Goree Island, where she peered through the 'Door of No Return,' through which slaves passed on their way to the dreaded Middle Passage of the Slave Trade. When she arrived in Dakar, the first lady was greeted by Senegalese who danced and serenaded her with lyrics written especially for the occasion." Shit, I feel better about that 3 a.m. phone call already!

It is worth noting that Hillary was being packed off on these trips into the heart of Africa at precisely the time when her husband was getting his knob polished by an intern in the Oval Office. That's not a reflection on her personally —but for the Hillary camp to tout her advantage in foreign affairs based on these trips into the marital wilderness, as compared to a candidate who has actually lived overseas and has actual relatives living in villages like the ones Hillary passed over in her glass-bottomed boat, is beyond absurd.

When it comes time for delegates to vote at the convention, shouldn't they take into account that Clinton has performed better than Obama in the so-called battleground states? Doesn't she stand a better chance against John McCain in the national election?

In reality, the exact opposite is true. Everything about the results so far suggests that Obama is the more electable candidate according to the "battleground" voter the Clinton camp is claiming for their own.

The Clinton strategy for winning the presidency is so simple, even a chimpanzee could grasp it. You win the blue states, the Massachusettses and the New Jerseys, almost automatically, just by being pro-choice and saying nice things about trees and gay people. You concede the really red states, the places like Tennessee and Kentucky where you're fucked anyway, places where huge pluralities believe the devil really exists and has thick red skin and a bull's horns. That leaves you free to compete hard in the mixed-bag states by drifting to the right as far as you can without losing your in-pocket blue territories, which is really hard to do unless you start wobbling on abortion or selling out the spotted owl. It is through the prism of this new Clintonian strategy that presidential politics has basically been reduced to winning Florida and Ohio.

But saying that Hillary is better qualified to take on John McCain because of her performance in those states only makes sense if (a) you believe that the people who voted for Clinton in the primaries will not vote for Obama in the general election, and (b) you believe that no Democrat can win the traditionally red states. In fact, Hillary has mostly been winning the traditionally blue states —places like New York, California, Massachusetts and New Jersey —that are going to go blue in November anyway, no matter who is running on the Republican ticket. And even in the states Hillary has won, it has been registered Democrats, not swing voters, who have carried her to victory, while Obama has dominated her in virtually every contest among registered independents. Even in her home state of New York, Obama whipped Hillary among independents by fifteen percent. In Missouri, that margin was twenty-eight percent. In California? Thirty percent.

Obama, meanwhile, has performed extraordinarily well in traditionally red states like Louisiana, Georgia and South Carolina. And sure, some of that is due to the black vote. But all of his victories have been marked by two things: larger-than-usual turnout and routs among independents, leading to the large number of blowout wins that are basically responsible for his delegate lead at the moment. On Super Tuesday, Hillary won sixty percent of the vote in only one contest, Bill's home state of Arkansas. Obama won seven states by that margin or more.

In other words, Hillary is winning the Democratic voters who are going to vote Democratic anyway. Obama is bringing in new voters, and he's winning large numbers of swing voters in red states.

What happens if Hillary ends up taking the nomination despite trailing in both the popular vote and the delegate count?

Put it this way: If this race ends up getting decided by a bunch of political insiders, in defiance of the popular vote, it's going to render all self-righteousness about the 2000 debacle meaningless. And if Hillary ends up winning it by claiming Florida delegates from an uncontested election, in the process once again disenfranchising thousands of minority voters in Miami and other urban areas (who would have voted for Obama, just as they voted for Gore in 2000), then it'll end up being a double fuck-you to the public, a signal that the Democrats are no different from the Bush Republicans.

What if the nomination gets decided by the superdelegates?

In the old days, we had a different name for superdelegates. We called them party bosses. If either Clinton or Obama wins by virtue of a superdelegate revolt against the popular will —particularly when both candidates have given hundreds of thousands of dollars to the superdelegates through their leadership PACs —then we're looking at an election that huge pluralities of the country will view as illegitimate. One more experience like this and we'll end up with Swedish election observers stepping in to run the 2012 race.

Are the Clinton camp's attacks against Obama racist?

Not really. What they are is opportunistic. The Clintonian campaign philosophy is basically an inverse of the Nixonian Southern Strategy: It accepts as gospel the notion that the old coalition of white labor and blacks that kept the South Democratic for generations has been severed forever by the rise of evangelical Christianity and social conservatism. Therefore the Clintons don't try to win back those white workers in the lost Southern states through, say, a more staunch advocacy of unions; instead, they try to pry away Nixon's old "silent majority" voters by courting the same fears about safety and national security that Tricky Dick used to take the South away from Democrats in the first place.

It's no accident that Hillary ran her "3 a.m." commercial in Texas but not Ohio; this was a cunning ploy to win back those scared white voters whom the Clinton strategy insists are needed to win. And it worked: After the ad, her support among white Texans jumped from forty-four to fifty-six percent. Does it help that her opponent is a black dude with a Muslim middle name? Sure. But the fearmongering by the Clintons is more about winning blue-collar votes without alienating their big-business buddies than it is about exploiting fears of a black planet. With the Clintons, ideology is always whatever gets them through the night. They haven't been reduced to balls-out, Willie Horton racism yet. That's not to say that they won't get there —they're just not there yet.

Won't the Republicans go after Obama with even nastier stuff?

Not long ago, I was talking to former Bush speechwriter David Frum, and he told me he thinks that Obama's Achilles' heel is patriotism. Put Obama in the general election, he said, and the Republicans are going to hammer him relentlessly. They're going to bring up everything they can find that bolsters the argument that Obama isn't slobberingly, priapistically patriotic: the famed decision to stop wearing his American flag pin because it was being used as a substitute for "true patriotism"; the now-infamous photo of him holding his hands at his waist while Hillary patriotically clasped her heart during the national anthem; the comments by his wife, Michelle, about being really proud of America "for the first time in my adult life"; the associations with Sixties radicals. Along with his middle name and the unkillable rumors of Muslim leanings, it's obvious where the Republicans are going to be aiming if they have to run against this guy all summer. If and when that happens, Obama is going to find out pretty quick that there's no explanation you can possibly give to Middle America for taking off your flag lapel pin that is going to make sense to them.

So Obama is weakest on the issue of patriotism?

No -- Obama's real weakness is that nobody really knows yet what he's all about. He is running as a symbol of a new politics, a politics somehow less disgusting and full of shit than the old politics. But if it were to get out that he's not that —that all he is is the same old deal dressed up in black skin and a natty suit —then he quickly morphs into a different kind of symbol, a symbol of how an essentially bankrupt political system can seamlessly repackage itself to a fed-up marketplace by making cosmetic changes, without altering its basic nature. There have been disturbing signs along that front, from the accusations that Obama aides called his anti-NAFTA stance "just politics," to his angry stumpery against a Maytag plant closing even as he pals around with Lester Crown, a Maytag board member who raised huge sums for his campaign. Right now, Obama has millions of voters thinking Santa Claus really does exist; but if he keeps getting caught turning the usual tricks with campaign donors, attention is going to shift away from his heroic image and toward the prosaic reality, which in politics is always grubby and depressing. And with that, his value as a symbol will evaporate, and Christmas turns into just another holiday with those same relatives you hated every other day of the year.

Should Obama go negative against Hillary, as the press is urging him to?

It doesn't matter what Obama does at this point. He's fucked either way. If he gets into a catfight with Hillary, the peanut gallery will slam him for being just another typical politician. If he sits there and just lets her plunge knife after knife into his abdomen, he'll have every hack at Time and Newsweek saying he doesn't have "what it takes" to compete in the "blood sport" that is politics (as if any of those news-mag yuppie turds know anything about actual "blood sports"). I'll say one thing: This endless he-said/she-said piss-fighting between the two camps, with its attendant daily purging of loose-lipped campaign staffers of the Samantha Power/Geraldine Ferraro genus, is a bad place for Barack Obama to be. Nobody in American history has ever been better than the Clintons at calculating the electoral math of resentment, paranoia, media aggression and just flat-out, back-alley nastiness. Every day, the Clintons come up with some new and brilliantly devious way to color the subliminal background of the electoral canvas, from using comparisons to Jesse Jackson to buttonhole Obama as a "black candidate," to floating rumors of an "unstoppable" Hillary-Obama ticket —despite the fact that Hillary would rather eat a KFC bucket full of her own shit than run with Obama —in order to con on-the-fence voters into thinking that a vote for Hillary might also be a vote for Obama. That's why it seemed so weirdly appropriate that Samantha "she's a monster" Power was forced to resign from the Obama campaign, while Gerry Ferraro could all but call Obama a nigger and then claim that she was the victim of discrimination. We expect the Clintons to play dirty, and don't demand that they apologize for doing so. But we'd be disappointed in Obama if he went there.

So with all this Democratic infighting, is John McCain going to be the next president?

McCain may be an asshole, but he's not an idiot. He's doing exactly the right thing right now by going overseas for a fact-finding tour in Europe and the Middle East —basically exiling himself from the public eye —while Obama and Hillary claw each other's eyes out every five minutes on MSNBC. He's smart enough to know that whichever candidate emerges from the Democratic scrum is going to have a face like an uncooked side of beef come general-election season; he doesn't need to say a word to raise both of their negatives. Hillary is doing half of McCain's dirty work for him by repeatedly assailing Obama's supposed lack of experience and questionable patriotism, while Obama is inadvertently helping McCain's cause by forcing Hillary to go all craven psycho-bitch on him to stay alive in the race. We saw this effect on display most overtly after the Cleveland debate, when the angry back-and-forth banter by both Obama and Hillary left McCain, for the first time, leading in the polls against either candidate.

Democrats had all the momentum going into this race because of seven years of uninterrupted press scrutiny of the Bush administration; by the time November rolls around, however, most voters are going to feel like the Democrats have been in charge for over a year. And McCain will be able to swoop in and ride a "throw the bums out" uprising straight to the White House —just in time to actually keep the same old bums in charge. In American politics, always look for the worst possible scenario to emerge triumphant. And right now, that's it.

The Wright Controversy Revealed America's Deeply Insecure Side :: Matt Taibbi

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 08:49:41 -0400

A society at peace with itself wouldn't have reacted in the way it did to the partly true/partly crazy remarks of Obama's former pastor.

The word "squeeb" is a crude mix of squid and dweeb, and by inventing it I mean no disrespect to the squid, which in most respects is an excellent and admirable animal. In the ocean there's almost nothing you'd rather be than a squid, one of nature's most perfect predators -- fast, resilient, ruthless, more intelligent by leaps and bounds than your average fish, and able to squeeze into impossibly tiny cracks. In the ocean, there is no hiding from a squid, I tell you.

But on land, a squid is about as useless as it gets. It's a spineless, squishy little hunk of seafood that wouldn't stand a chance in a cage match with a baby squirrel. It has no heart, and its first instinct when trouble comes is to hide in a cloud of its own excretions. This is why a squiddy word like squeeb seems to me to be a good way to describe the American voter during a presidential election season.

That's especially true now, during a "controversy" like this latest flap over Barack Obama pastor Jeremiah Wright. This Wright business is a perfect example of the American electorate at its squeeby worst -- panicky, gutless, acting more on reflex than thought, incapable of retaining information for more than a few minutes at a time. It's also a great example of how the presidential election process has become more about enforcing the attitudes of a cultural orthodoxy than a system for choosing leaders.

Through scandal after idiotic scandal, the election process has become a painfully prolonged, deeply irritating exercise in policing conventional wisdom, through a variety of means keeping the public in a state of heightened, dumb animal panic, and ultimately turning the election itself into a Darwinian contest -- survival of the Squeebiest.

As by now the entire country has heard, Barack Obama was forced to run the media gauntlet this week after a series of videos shot across the internet, showing his pastor doing his best Minister Farrakhan impersonation. Pastor Wright's comments ranged from the idiotic (suggestions that AIDS in Africa was spread by the U.S. government) to the even more idiotic (urging black parishioners to sing "God Damn America" instead of "God Bless America") to the not-entirely-without-validity (suggestions that 9/11 in some sense represented a form of blowback for America's violent foreign policies, its role as the world's chief purveyor of weapons, and so on) to the absolutely-true-but-taboo (observations that the U.S. supported terrorism against Palestinians and senselessly bombed Cambodia and Iraq).

Anyone who's ever listened to Farrakhan or any other angry black nationalist is familiar with a lot of these ideas, which have been around forever and aren't exactly controversial in certain circles. The same white America that enjoys saccharine Ice Cube movies like Are We There Yet? and Barbershop probably would puke in its minivan if it listened closely to Farrakhan-inspired Cube tunes like "When Will They Shoot?," which talk about Uncle Sam being "Hitler without an oven," with white America guilty of "Burning up black skin," and bombing neighborhoods to "push the crack in."

A lot of this stuff is stupid as hell and totally paranoid -- the much-regarded theory that white scientists cooked up AIDS in order to keep Africa poor (as if it needed help) rivals only the 9/11 Truth movement for sheer stone-headed dumbness -- but a lot of it is just angry America-sucks ranting grounded in the unfortunately utterly factual record of American iniquity, not much different from the kind of thing you'd read coming from Howard Zinn or Noam Chomsky.

But whether or not any of Wright's "controversial" statements have any validity at all is beside the point. The point is that a country that had any balls at all -- that was secure enough in its patriotic self-image to stare vicious criticism right in the face and collectively decide for itself, in a state of sober reflection, what part of it was bullshit and what wasn't -- such a country wouldn't do what it did in the case of the Wright flap, which is to panic instantly, collectively leap off the ground in terror like a bunch of silly bitches, and chase the criticism away in a torch-bearing mob with its eyes averted without even bothering to talk about what was actually said.

Yet naturally this is what was done in this case; the very first response of the entire national media apparatus was to denounce Wright as a kind of living disease and shriekingly demand that Obama do the same.

These controversial occasions, it should be said, are favorites of the national punditry. They offer an opportunity for slothlike, couchbound columnists everywhere to dress themselves up in white-hot outrage and to pen long accusatory columns in a tone suggesting that all contentment and happiness in their lives will henceforth be impossible until the offending agent is fully and completely shunned by society.

You get articles like the one written by Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe ("It's still a question of Wright and Wrong," March 19) in which Jacoby noted that if his rabbi had said such hateful things, his congregation would have risen as one and ridden him out of town on a rail; expressing disappointment that this had not happened at Obama's church full of appallingly approving black folk, Jacoby then expressed sorrow that Obama, who delivered a racial-reconciliation-themed speech this week echoing Martin Luther King (40 years after his death, mainstream America's current symbol of acceptable protest), would not reject a pastor who drew his inspiration not from King but seemingly from Malcolm X, James Cone and Louis Farrakhan (symbols of unacceptable protest).

This "clanging double standard," Jacoby wrote, "raises questions" (these milquetoast pundits never just say they think a guy sucks; they always say his behavior "raises questions") about Obama's character and judgment, and about his "fitness for the role of race-transcending healer." Now, me personally, as a white guy, I have to admire Jacoby -- I'm not sure I'd have the balls to tell black America that it is permitted to criticize whitey in the style of Martin Luther King but not in the style of Malcolm X. I mean, no one sent my grandfather to be injected with syphillis at Tuskegee, or strung up my great-uncle for smiling at a white girl, so no matter what I actually think here, I'm keeping my mouth shut. But not Jacoby, and not the bulk of the media apparatus. They have no problem telling anyone, at any time, where the boundary lines of acceptable opinion are, and what the penalties are for straying beyond them.

Of course, this is not the first time that this kind of thing took place in this campaign; it's actually happened over and over again, with Farrakhan himself (when an exasperated Obama was forced to "reject" and "denounce" Farrakhan's rhetoric, as if mere "rejection" were not enough), with Geraldine Ferraro (when Obama aides demanded that Hillary denounce the ex-Veep hopeful for suggesting Obama was lucky to be a black candidate), and with End-Times enthusiast/right-wing pastor John Hagee in San Antonio, from whom John McCain was forced to make distancing statements. These sorts of denunciations also continue involving figures not connected to the candidates -- the campaign by various women's groups to censure Chris Matthews for his supposed sexist remarks is a good example, as is the much-ballyhooed incident involving Don Imus, a landmark event in the history of herd-panic and rank hypocrisy.

Now, no one is suggesting that there shouldn't be some reaction to genuinely toxic ideas, or that all criticism of racist or unpatriotic comments is unfounded. But what we're getting with all of these scandals isn't a sober exchange of ideas but more of an ongoing attempt to instill in the public a sort of permanent fear of uncomfortable ideas, and to reduce public discourse to a kind of primitive biological mechanism, like the nervous system of a squid or a shellfish, one that recoils reflexively from any stimuli. And the campaign is where you really see this process at work full-time. It's something I noticed while spending so much of the last year (and, before, so much of the years 2003 and 2004) on the campaign trail talking to prospective voters, listening to their complaints and their fears and their (often fleeting) enthusiasms. During this time, I started to notice a pattern, comprised of several elements.

The first is a truly remarkable tendency of seemingly intelligent people to work themselves into genuine outrage over information they didn't even know about twenty minutes ago, until they heard it on television, or coming out of the mouths of a candidate.

A laid-off worker in Ohio will go to a Hillary Clinton speech, hear Hillary talk about the dangers of electing a president without "experience," and then five minutes after the speech he'll be shaking his fist at the ceiling at the very idea of someone without "experience" even trying to run for president. A teacher in New York will go to an Obama event looking curious and happy, then come out furious at the politics of "the past," rambling like it's been on his mind for years about how we need to "look to the future" instead of staying stuck "where we are." A Republican turns on the TV, hears some asshole like Michelle Malkin say the surge is working, then turns around and with his arm draped around his wife gives you a long spiel about how the surge is working and how those damned liberals don't want to admit it.

Crucially, however, those same people never tell you the same story for more than a few weeks. A few weeks later, their brains are a clean slate again, and the next story they tell you is the one they heard even more recently on TV. Now the outrage might be Barack Obama getting a free ride in the media (your squeeb-citizen here might cite the SNL skit about Barack getting offered a pillow by debate moderators), or John McCain not knowing al-Qaeda is Sunni and therefore not an ally of Iran, or Hillary misspending campaign money on luxury suites in Vegas. "That just shows she's not fit to manage money," he'll say, solemnly.

The net effect of all of this is to make the electorate exquisitely sensitive to constant prodding and poking by media stimuli, and what people don't notice is that that prodding and poking is tirelessly moving them in the same direction, toward a safe, inoffensive middle, away from anything that smells controversial. The endless onslaught of tiny scandals trains the electorate to be hyper-responsive to temporary, superficial outrages while simultaneously chipping away at their long-term memories, their inclination to look at the big picture, their ability to grasp subtleties of opinion and policy.

So instead of talking about the fact that Barack Obama once introduced a bill to give a tax break to a Japanese company whose lawyers donated fifty grand to his Senate campaign, we're freaking out for five minutes about the fact that Obama's pastor thinks America spread AIDS on purpose in Zambia.

And instead of talking about the fact that Hillary Clinton took $110,000 from a New York food company she later helped by introducing a bill to remove import duties on tomatoes, we're ranting and raving about Gerry Ferraro's paranoid ramblings about Obama's blackness. We can't keep our eyes on the ball and really think about the serious endemic problems of our system of government because we're too busy freaking out like a bunch of cartoon characters over silly, meaningless bullshit. And then forgetting about that same bullshit ten minutes later, so that we can freak out all over again about something else later on.

That's just the way we are, and maybe it's time to wonder why that is. In Russia they have a word, sovok, which described the craven, chickenshit mindset that over the course of decades became hard-wired into the increasingly silly brains of Soviet subjects. It's a hard word to define, but once you get it -- and all Russians get it -- it's like riding a bicycle, you've got it. Sovok is the word that described a society where for decades silence and a thoughtful demeanor might be construed as evidence of a dangerous dissidence lurking underneath; the sovok therefore protected himself from suspicion by babbling meaningless nonsense at all times, so that no one would accuse him of harboring smart ideas.

A sovok talked tough, and cheered Khruschev for banging a shoe at America, but at the same time a sovok would have sold his own children for a pair of American jeans. The sovok talked like a romantic and lavished women with compliments, but preferred long fishing trips and nights spent in the garage tinkering with his shitty car to actual sex. It's hard to explain, but over there, they know what the word means. More than anything, sovok described a society that spent seventy years in mortal terror of new ideas, and tended to drape itself in a paper-thin patriotism whenever it felt threatened, and worshipped mediocrities as a matter of course, elevating to positions of responsibility only those who showed an utter absence not only of objectionable qualities, but any qualities at all.

We're getting to be the same kind of people. We can't focus for more than ten seconds on anything at all and we're constantly exercised about stupid media-generated non-scandals, guilt-by-association raps, accidental dumb utterances of various campaign aides and other nonsense -- while at the same time we have no energy at all left to wonder about the mass burgling of the national budget for phony military contracts, the war, the billion dollars or so in campaign contributions to be spent this year that will be buying a small mountain of favors for the next four years. And we... shit, I don't even know what I'm saying anymore.

I'm just tired of this tone that's always out there when these scandals break, like we can't fucking stand the existence of this Wright fellow for even a minute longer, not a minute longer! -- when we all know that come Monday, or Tuesday at the latest, Jeremiah Wright will be forgotten and we'll be jumping en masse in a panic away from the next media-offered shadow to fall across our bow. What a bunch of turds we all are, seriously. God help us if we ever had to deal with a real problem.

The Return of Evil Campaign Journalism :: Matt Taibbi

Thu, 19 Apr 2007 09:36:46 -0400

God help us, the 2008 presidential election is already here; they are already murdering huge forests in South America so that Jonathan Alter and Karen Tumulty can tell us what the latest Scripps/Howard poll says "voters believe the next president's haircut should look like." Hell is much too good for all of us...

Mainly in an attempt to preserve my own tenuous grip on sanity, I made it through this past weekend without reading much coverage of the campaign. The election, after all, is nearly a full Martian year away, with a Super Bowl and two World Series still to play out in between -- which means that the "urgency" of breaking campaign news is now and will remain for at least a year an almost 100 percent media concoction.

Like Seinfeld, the presidential campaign is essentially a "show about nothing," a prolonged prime-time character-driven drama crafted around a series of fake conflicts that always get resolved by the end of the program, in this case November 2008. Marcia and Greg make driving-test bet in segment one; Marcia imagines instructor in underwear in middle segments; Marcia and Greg's bet ends in a tie, family loves each other again. In the old days the presidential show's writers tended to use actual political issues (Georgie and Hube argue about Vietnam!) as the starting points for their dramatic conflicts -- a natural artistic strategy, given that the subject matter was a real election in a giant country teeming with ugly social and economic problems -- but in the last few cycles the networks seem to have figured out that you can shoot even a whole season of a presidential race without including any of the boring political shit.

Instead, you can cover the whole race using the time-tested Aaron Spelling method of creating TV dramas: You pack a rich and magical dream-landscape with a group of easily-recognizable psychological archetypes and spend a dozen episodes or so letting them smash into each other in bikinis and sports cars (if the show is set in California) or spurs and hoop-dresses (if it's a Western).

The campaign is the same deal. Instead of making a Malibu beach soap out of a prude, a slut, a 98-pound weakling and a leading man, you do a political drama with a hothead (McCain), an Eddie Haskell (Romney), an underdog (Obama) and a wicked witch (Hillary), all doing turns manning tractors and cow-milking chairs on a digitally-enhanced farm set that looks so much like Iowa, you'd swear it was the real thing. (For the second straight season, incidentally, Dennis Kucinich will play the Harry Bently-Dwayne Schneider-Kramer "nutty neighbor" character, getting a wolf whistle and three seconds of pre-recorded "enthusiastic applause" every time he walks through the apartment door. I've been on Dennis to wear a handyman costume next year to make his character really fly.)

I bring all of this up because I've started to see the first examples of what I call the "Sweet n' Blow" campaign article hit the front pages in recent weeks. The Sweet n' Blow, as the name suggests, is a no-calorie substitute for real journalism, a gossip column masquerading as political reportage. It's one of the key techniques for use in turning the election into a politics-free character drama. A true Sweet n' Blow piece makes it from the lede all the way to the last line without saying one fucking thing about what the candidate actually stands for. Instead, it will tell you a lot about the candidate's strategy for improving his "image," which incidentally had originally been created, at least in part, by the very reporter writing this new article.

In other words, in July, X reporter says Y candidate "lacks the warmth and charm that voters respond to"; in August, that same X reporter says Y candidate is now "going on the charm offensive." During the same period, Z candidate maybe struggles to overcome a reputation for "flip-flops," and reporter X will spend those months detailing and ultimately arbitrating on the success of those efforts.

All of this bullshit obscures the fact that Democrats Y and Z are essentially the same candidate, backed by the same people and espousing the same positions. But it makes for good theater, and that's the important thing.

There was a classic example of this stuff this past weekend in The New York Times, in a piece by Adam Nagourney called "2 Years After Big Speech, A Lower Key for Obama." The Times, incidentally, is one of the chief producers of this brand of campaign journalism. In every presidential election, the paper manufactures its own story lines around fictional candidate struggles to conquer certain adjectives. They will show candidates fighting for the title of the most "nuanced," wriggling away from tags like "prickly," and racing to great final showdowns of adjectives in the general election -- "brainy" versus "folksy," "emotional" versus "plodding," and so on.

And make no mistake about it, they invent these controversies out of thin air. One of the most conspicuous instances I can recall was December of 2003, when reporter Rick Lyman ran a piece called "From Patrician Roots, Dean Set Path of Prickly Independence" and then ran a piece just a few weeks later in which Dean had to defend himself against Lyman's charges that he was prickly ("I can be prickly with the press corps... I'm not usually prickly with other people."). Reporter calls candidate "prickly," then asks candidate to answer charges of prickliness. Now that's journalism! The campaign press will follow the same formula over and over again, just changing the word -- a candidate will be accused of being too liberal (Kerry), too cold (Hillary), too "lightweight" (Edwards), too "unserious" (Sharpton), etc., until he either cries uncle or drops out. Using this technique the press can basically bludgeon any candidate into whatever shape it likes. When a candidate fails to comply -- when, say, a Kerry fails to demonstrate that he's not too "patrician" for middle America -- he is summarily punished and usually ends up a loser.

In the Nagourney piece, we're getting some glimpses of where the adjectival battleground might be in the upcoming race:

[Obama] is cerebral and easy-going, often talking over any applause that might rise up from his audience, and perhaps consciously trying to present a political style that contrasts with the more charged presences of John Edwards, the former trial lawyer and senator from North Carolina, and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.

Nagourney then went on to make a prolonged case for Obama's "easygoingness," quoting a from-central-casting Iowan farmer ("He's low key, he speaks like a professor") and that similarly ubiquitous figure of campaign coverage, the earnest schoolteacher-voter ("Dazzle is not what he's about at all. He's peaceful").

In paragraph 12, Nagourney asks Obama about his easygoing persona theory. Obama confirms it, saying "I want to give them a sense of my thought process."

So by paragraph 13 -- the next paragraph -- we officially have an "emerging style of Mr. Obama as a candidate for president," one that stands in stark contrast to his fiery speech at the '04 convention. Nagourney is officially pronouncing Obama "easygoing" here, and he appears to do so approvingly, implying distantly that the "charged" emotionalism of Obama's '04 speech might be unsettling or unappealing to voters.

You will see this a lot in campaign journalism, where a candidate who gives journalists reason to paint him with emotional adjectives like "heated" or "angry" or "passionate" will be subtly fragged in places like the Times -- as though his "emotion" was evidence of a subterranean streak of dangerous Trotskyism (for Dems) or Hitlerism (for Republicans). Expect John McCain to have a lot of trouble in that area next summer.

Obama's "easygoing" is okay -- theoretically. But it's not the whole story, says Nagourney. He goes on to add that Obama also shows "strains of the populist call of Ross Perot" -- this is seemingly in negative contrast to Obama's easygoingness. (Absurdly, Nagourney's example of a "populist call" is the line "[let's] take our country back," which has been used by every hack/corporate-sponsored presidential candidate for the last thirty years). But then, even worse than the "populist strain" comes this passage:

But there is also, in a historical comparison that his supporters have tended to resist, the cool intellectualism of Adlai Stevenson who, for all the loyalty he inspired among many Democrats in the 1950s...lost two presidential elections. If Mr. Obama enters the room to the sounds of "Think" by Aretha Franklin and the roar of people coming to their feet, clapping and jostling for photographs, it is only moments before the atmosphere turns from campaign rally to college seminar...

You could almost smell this one coming. As surely as there is a nutty neighbor in every sitcom, there is an "Adlai Stevenson" in every Democratic primary race. Sometimes the comparison is made overtly, as in the case of the 2000 race, when Newsweek baldly resurrected the famous "worn-out shoe" photo of a campaigning Stevenson, using Bill Bradley, the most Stevensonesque of the new Stevensons, as the stand-in. Ironically, the man Bradley lost to in that primary season, Al Gore, would himself be Stevensoned in the general election, haunted in his neck-and-neck race with George Bush by accusations of braininess, collegiate diction and defiant, loserish idealism.

Generally speaking, the "Adlai Stevenson" tag -- which also sometimes appears in the guise of phrases like "speaks like a college professor" and "has a bookish, intellectual demeanor" -- is 100 percent fatal in a presidential season. It is the AIDS virus of presidential campaign adjectives, even deadlier than "moribund" or "prickly." The only politician to survive it beyond the normal diagnostic time-frame is Jimmy Carter, who was killed by it four years later than usual, but even he would have been felled earlier had it not been for Watergate.

The rest of the Nagourney piece was full of inane descriptions of the Obama "style": he is described as being a "tactile campaigner, his bony hand grabbing elbows and hands," he "speaks in a language of community and shared sacrifice...evocative of Mario Cuomo," he "talks in even, measured tones," and his audiences are "rapt, if sometimes a tad restless; long periods can go by when there is not a rustle in the crowd."

If you're thinking Um, okay, that's all great, but what the fuck does the candidate stand for?, you're not the only one. For all the tireless descriptions of Obama's "style" that there were in the piece, there was absolutely nothing in it about Obama's platform, not one thing. Which is kind of an amazing accomplishment, considering that this was a front-page political profile in the Sunday edition of The New York Times.

But this is the way campaign journalism goes. You'll hear quite a lot in the next 20 months about who has bony hands, who has lines on his or her face, who looks good in a parka, who can play the saxophone underwater, who is "measured" and who is "fiery" -- but you won't hear anything about who voted for the bankruptcy bill and who didn't (Obama was a nay, incidentally; Hillary abstained).

This technique isn't confined to the Times, not by any stretch of the imagination. A huge chunk of the rest of the campaign coverage we've seen to date has been of the same ilk, with mostly all of the coverage involving either poll numbers, money-raising stats, scandals or "style." In the New York Post's recent campaign against Hillary -- the newspaper is humorously running an openly poisonous series of articles lauding Democratic voters who have switched from Hill to Obama -- almost all of the info has been about Hill's money troubles and pleasingly vague testimonials from voters like the following, from a black doorman named Gregory Smith:

"Hillary, in my eyes, is a professional politician...that's why I like Barack. He's more believable than Hillary. Barack chose politics to better people."

Again, this issue of who is or who isn't a "professional politician," who's more "believable" -- this is all right up the alley of campaign journalism. If you're not rolling on the ground laughing at the idea of the New York Post arbitrating, with a straight face, the issue of someone's "believability," you should probably be institutionalized. But this kind of stuff is there for a reason. Spend enough time on "believability" and you don't have to worry about who took money from the maker of the "Plan B" morning-after pill and then held up the nomination of the FDA commissioner until he cleared over-the-counter status for the drug (that'd be Hillary Clinton, carrying water for Barr laboratories), or which two putatively antagonistic Democratic candidates are having their economic platform crafted by the same Wall Street-friendly roundtable (that'd be Hillary and Obama, both turning their platforms over to the Hamilton Project, a free-trade group associated with the Brookings Institution). I mean, senators are pretty busy people, they make a lot of heavy decisions. It would take more time than most of us have to even skim through their top 1,000 most important in-office moves. But instead of any of that, the headline stories in the country's leading paper are that one senator is "low key" and another lacks "realness."

No joke, that was Judith Warner's offering in the Times on March 14. "The Really Real Hillary" was the name of the piece and the man-on-the-street quote went like this: "I'm not feeling the realness from her." Warner chimed in: "She's got a voice that is metallic and somewhat atonal...she clearly isn't wired to project 'realness' on the national stage. And frankly, for political figures, projection is what matters most."

How much of this bullshit can we take? When will it end?