Monday, November 03, 2008 - Posts
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I was saddened this evening to read about the death of Obama's grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, or as anyone who has read Dreams From My Father might remember her, "Toot." Toot was an ordinary woman who raised an extraordinary family and who increasingly lived race in America in a way few have. Living in Texas after the war, Toot shooed her daughter and a black playmate inside the house when children screamed "nigger lover" outside her picket fence; in Hawaii, she opened her heart to an African son-in-law, when intermarriage was still illegal in more than half the country. As we all know, she went on to raise an African-American grandson who was to become the first black nominee for president of the United States. Toot became a symbol of race's emotional complexities—and a literal embodiment, some thought, of selling one's own grandmother for political gain—when, in his speech on race, Obama discussed her discomfort with black people who were not her grandson. She died on the eve of what may well be his election. Regardless of its outcome, I, for one, feel bereft that she will not get to see tomorrow.
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Update: Well, now I know what to think of the blog claiming Joe Wurzelbacher was life of the Saturday Night Live after-party this weekend. The poster is a hoaxster, and I got punk'd.
The blogger, called Marty Eisenstadt, claims he and the iconic plumber were "downing shots of Makers Mark" at the party following John and Cindy McCain's guest appearance this weekend and that Joe "got some ‘quality' alone time with a certain female cast member." An SNL press manager wrote to say that Eisenstadt's post was "completely untrue." Although Eisenstadt blogged that John and Cindy McCain were at the after-party, "they most certainly were not," according to the NBC e-mail, and "more importantly -- neither of my female cast members ‘hooked up' with Mr. Wurzelbacher."
As further proof of my own gullibility, I submit this alert I subsequently found on Sourcewatch.org advising that Eisenstadt doesn't exist. I'm beginning to think Wurzelbacher doesn't either.
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My beloved Liz Lemon—er, I mean Tina Fey—isn't the only one suggesting that Sarah Palin's focus has shifted from 2008 to 2012. Today, trying get a jump on the post-election story before the polls even open, much less close, a host of politicos are placing their bets over who will emerge from the broken GOP as the next to be (unofficially) crowned party leader.
When John McCain chose his running mate, he was rightfully lambasted as cynical for passing over experienced insider men for an accessible outsider woman. In the end, he was right on one count: that a swath of the American public—though one which perhaps may not be wide enough to elect him tomorrow—felt so disenfranchised by the people who hold power in this country that they would line up behind someone who reflected and could articulate their own proud feelings of ordinariness. (This profound cultural conflict—rooted deep in issues of education and economics—will require far more systemic thinking than the fuzzy feeling of "unity" Obama hopes to usher in tomorrow and beyond.) Where McCain may have been wrong—and this is big—was in his perception of this election as a game of identity politics.
People have talked plenty about whether Obama is a post-race candidate for a post-race America. I've generally taken issue with that notion—and should he be elected, my heart positively swells with the notion of the descendant of slaves raising her children inside the White House. But by the same flawed token, did Sarah Palin become a post-gender candidate for a post-gender America? Of course, Palin has certainly worked her gender in this race: from that flirty wink and sky-high Manolos to her uber-mom positioning. But like Obama's race hasn't been the totalizing meta-narrative of his candidacy, neither has Palin's gender, and just as this hasn't been an election year for single issue voters, it hasn't been one for single-identity ones either, despite what pundits may have predicted from the outset. We entered this race all aflutter about our first female presidential candidate. We're ending it considering the next one with hardly a shrug about her gender.
While I am hardly a Palin fan, and for myriad reasons shudder to imagine how she might develop with the next four years to study up, the fact that neither her supporters nor her detractors seemed to make a big deal about a female commander in chief (remember those days?) suggests that in unexpected ways, we've come a long way during this long march to Election Day.
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This weekend, I ran partway through Brooklyn along the marathon route with my brother (who was actually running all 26-plus miles, unlike me). Much of the route is crowded with cheering spectators. But I've run this section a few years and every time I'm struck by the relative emptiness of the streets in Bed-Stuy (a lower-income neighborhood that's mostly African American) and the section heading into Williamsburg where a lot of Hasidic Jews live. The sudden emptiness of the streets is one of those profound reminders of class divisions -- how different a few miles can make in the social geography a city. This year, though, something different took place. There was a group of spectators in Bed-Stuy who avidly cheered on a subsection ofmarathon runners: Those wearing Obama stickers and buttons. "OBAMA!" rung out over and over. I've lived in Brooklyn a long time but I've never seen such a sense of connection across class and race in this area as I did yesterday, for those few moments.
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Jumping in on Rachael's and Melinda's discussion about negative campaigning, the example of Pennsylvania Jewish voters being told Obama will bring on a Holocaust and Sen. Elizabeth Dole's swipe at opponent Kay Hagen's Christianity remind me of the 1990 Minnesota Senate race between GOP Sen. Rudy Boschwitz and college professor Paul Wellstone. Both candidates happened to be Jewish, but the Saturday before the election Sen. Boschwitz sent out a direct-mail letter to "Friends in the Minnesota Jewish Community," accusing Wellstone of having "no connection whatsoever with the Jewish community." While Boschwitz was proudly "known as 'the Rabbi of the Senate,' " the letter said, Wellstone was married to a shiksa (Wellstone's wife Sheila was a Southern Baptist), and their "children were brought up as non-Jews."
Wellstone held a press conference decrying Boschwitz's apparent problem with Christians and "the way my wife and I have decided to raise our children." Three days later, Boschwitz was the only Republican incumbent senator defeated in that election.
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This weekend it came to light that in January Barack Obama, during an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, said that in order to combat global warming he favored a cap and trade system that would be so punitive to industries releasing carbon dioxide that it would "bankrupt" anyone attemping to build a new coal-powered plant. Can't he leave the pushing of a San Francisco-style national agenda to Nancy Pelosi? Obama needs to stay so far away from anything San Franciscan that he refuses even to eat Rice-a-Roni. It was at a San Francisco fundraiser that he gave his infamous, almost campaign-sinking sociological insights that the losers of small-town Pennsylvania "cling to guns or religion." Surely when in San Francisco it sounds perfectly reasonable to say that in an Obama administration there will be no future for nasty, dirty coal. But such a promise probably doesn't sound so good to "cling" voters in the coal-mining swing states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana. Nor does it sound good to anyone interested in this country's need to reduce our reliance on imported oil. It doesn't help that running mate Joe Biden recently remarked that he wants, "No coal plants here in America." At least you've got to give Joe credit for blurting this out in Ohio.
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I don't know what to make of this McCain strategist's report of witnessing "canoodling" between Joe (who has apparently joined the McCain entourage) and a Saturday Night Live cast member at the after-party this weekend.
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