Two new polls from Wall Street Journal/NBC provide evidence of an increasing trend among American voters: a newfound ability to call bullshit.
The findings reveal what anyone with even the most basic grasp of electoral process and campaign strategy could have predicted: after the initial B12 shot that Sarah Palin’s sparkling (and highly distracting) arrival on the ticket provided the GOP nearly two months ago, her qualifications to be President now rank as voters’ top concern about John McCain’s candidacy – “ahead of continuing President Bush’s policies, enacting economic policies that only benefit the rich and keeping too high of a troop presence in Iraq.”
Let that sink in for a moment. The carefully crafted winks and “you betcha”s are fizzing out a lot faster than McCain knows how to handle, and it’s costing him dearly. Palin’s currently a much bigger drag on McCain’s poll numbers than George Bush ever was, and that’s saying a mouthful. 55% percent of the WSJ/NBC respondents now say Palin is not qualified to serve as President, a five-point jump from the previous NBC/WSJ survey. Anyone want to volunteer to track down the other 45%? I’d like to ask them for 3 reasons why.
The fact is, when you take the gender, looks, gut-based emotional reaction to cheap average-Americana one-liners and inappropriate winks out of the equation, this is not a contest. It’s not an argument. Hell, it’s not even a conversation. Sarah Palin has absolutely no place on a Presidential ticket. When she was brought on board, McCain’s ratings boost came from voter attraction to her persona, her country girl charm, her style. Stirring the coals of the teetering base. But her power to hypnotize was vastly overrated, and she didn’t distract nearly enough for long enough – something McCain had gambled so heavily on.
Another poll by Pew Research Center for the People & the Press reveals that opinions of Palin have done an about-face in the last month, especially among the ever-important female voters she was expected to draw by default to the McCain ticket. Women, especially women under age 50, have become increasingly critical of Palin: 62% now express an unfavorable view of Palin, up from 36% less than a month ago.
Why could this be? The answer is simple: McCain went all-in way too early. Palin’s addition to the ticket was an appeal to the basic magnetism of what’s supposed to be everyday Americaspeak, which evidently is just brimming with “you betcha”’s and dropped “G”s. Her policies are irrelevant. She was chosen because her symbolic imagery digs way beneath the bedrock of political maturity and job qualification, and into the ever-fertile soil of emotion-triggering familiarity. None of it is meant to assure voters that she’s the most equipped person for the job, or even remotely qualified at all. A gambling man should’ve known better.
On a gut level, Palin strikes me as the type of kid we all knew in grade school – the one who would point out other kids’ wrongdoings to the teacher to get in good favor. The kind of girl who knew that a pretty face, a whole lotta charm, and unconditional confidence in circular rhetoric can have just as much swaying power as a well-researched position with several backing points. The kind of kid who would grow up to get swept into a national election and wholeheartedly believe that those same tricks will work, that the American public won’t be offended when she blows kisses and winks at them during a Vice Presidential debate. Or that they’ll believe her “gotcha journalism” bullshit excuses for staggeringly inept performances in her early campaign interviews.
Emotion sometimes trumps rational thought when we see a familiar face on the battlefield. The GOP is fully aware of the psychology of symbolism in a campaign. That’s why McCain is being hailed as a hero, why we’ll never hear the word “maverick” again without gritting our teeth, and why Palin is being pushed as the epitome of the American everymom goddess/huntress.
However, it sends a mixed message to Joe Economic Crisis when news breaks that your brand-new wardrobe costs more than his house. Or a full college education for one of his kids. Or all the cars he’ll ever own, put together.
We are being asked by the GOP to choose exaggerated caricatures and an uncurious, small-minded “hometown hero” over reality, at a time when we can’t afford to let our attention spans atrophy any further. We can’t afford to sit idly by and giggle over cute distractions, ignoring the lessons the spin-cycle of history, particularly recent history, has been hitting us over the head with for years.
Sarah Palin’s candidacy is not only unjustified – it’s insulting and demeaning to the American public to suggest – no, to bank the entire legitimacy of your campaign on the idea that we would fall so hard for such transparent beauty pageant tricks, and stay enraptured all the way to the fifth of November. Peggy Noonan, Ronald Reagan’s greatest speechwriter and a columnist with the Wall Street Journal, condemned McCain’s running mate as a “symptom and expression of a new vulgarisation of American politics.” Conservative columnist David Brooks labeled her a “fatal cancer to the Republican Party”.
Contrary to Mrs. Palin, the Vice President is not “in charge of the Senate.” Every single time she’s been asked what the Vice President’s job actually is, her responses have been no more than utterances of complete gibberish. The most famous was the first, back on July 31, when she asked what exactly it was that the VP does every day. There was no humor in the response, but rather a clear lack of knowledge and reference of solidarity with her fellow Alaskans, which has absolutely zero to do with the question.
But the fact is, we need to stop worrying about these things. The question isn’t whether or not she knows the job description for that which she’s applying, or what parts of the country she feels aren’t “Pro-American.” The question is why in the hell we’re discussing this nonsense in the first place.
Sarah Palin’s job over the next two weeks is to be McCain’s attack dog. Dirty work is one of the VP nom’s main job requirements in the weeks leading up to the election. But how’s she doing? So far, she’s either strongly implied or flat out declared that Obama’s a terrorist, a socialist, an America-hater, an attacker of Joe the Plumber, Barack the Wealth Spreader and so much more. The flailing attempts to categorize Obama as un-American are falling on desensitized ears.
Palin’s unintentional contradictions of some of her own campaign’s pitch positions (usually done by chance amidst one memorized broadstroke of empty, nonsensical rhetoric or another) are anything but Maverick in nature. They’re campaign-sabotaging displays of exactly how reckless McCain was in choosing her without deeper consideration of the possibility that her “Average American” symbolism could be exposed for the one-trick pony ride/Hail Mary pass that it truly was. If the veep-unveiling party would’ve been held three days before the election, things may have gone in a different direction. But as it stands, it looks like we’ll all be able to forget about Caribou Barbie and her $150,000 in accessories (not included) on Nov. 5. After a long, deep sigh of relief, of course.
With a heaping dose of luck and staying the course, the United States could very well see its first landslide election since Reagan smacked Mondale down by a margin of more than 18% of the vote in 1984. If it happens, however unlikely, there’s a possibility of a tidal shift in the collective consciousness – and tolerance – that our country hasn’t experienced in decades. Hype and veiled corporate perspectives are cancers eating through mainstream media. Our entire culture centers on a staggering batch of goddamned nonsense these days, everyone claiming legitimacy with renewed fervor, given the blogosphere explosion in recent years.
Sarah Palin could be the tipping point, the ten-ton straw that finally breaks the old camel’s back.
Maybe, if McCain loses in a landslide, people will breathe a collective sigh of relief at having escaped such a cartoonishly nightmarish scenario for four solid years. Sure, Obama’s got a lot of walking to do to match the talk, and he’ll sure as hell have his work cut out for him on day one in office. But our frantic obsession with image and consumption, coupled with our inherent herd mentality, is the real problem at the heart of this country. If America can get beyond our self-defeating obsession with instant gratification and snap judgement, there may be hope after all. And we may begin to see leaders emerge from our society that we could truly admire and get behind.
They’re saying that if early voting is any indication, we could see a record voter turnout for this election. That in itself would be cause for celebration, regardless of the winner. But perhaps people already have a tugging feeling inside that the American Dream has nothing to do with what McCain keeps referring to it as. Maybe the real American Dream is to maintain a personal productive awareness in what’s happening in the world, to each contribute in our own way, and to choose leaders that represent us honorably, with even-handed philosophy and dedication to stabilizing the many teetering issues that shape our national crisis. Not the old, familiar hurricane of anti-intellectualism and reduction of complicated issues to dangerously vague and polarizing boil-downs like “evil” and “freedom.”
