Nietzsche Family Circus

What is the seal of liberation? - No longer being ashamed in front of oneself

Inspired

Governors vs Senators

Shuggy doubts that any senator like Clinton or Obama can ever become president given US voters overwhelming preference for ex-governors who can more easily present themselves as populist outsiders.

Hiowever although it is certainly true that none of the last six presidents were senators, four out of the previous five were (Nixon, Johnson, Kennedy, Truman) and in fact between 1944 and 1976 not one ex-governor won the presidency.

In fact so powerful was senators hold on the presidency between 1960 and 1972 that all four of the contests in that era set senator against senator.

And of course if you're talking the popular vote it was Gore (a congressman before he became VP) who won the 2000 election while Governor Bush lost it - which makes the 'real' score 3 ex-congressmen (Ford, Bush I, Gore), vs 4 ex-governors (Carter, Reagan, Clinton, Bush II).

Factor in vice-presidents (only 2 of the last 13 VPs were ex-governors and 5 of whom - 3 senators and 2 congressmen - went on to become President) and you get a more even picture.

Sure, Democrat senators get a rough ride based on their past record - but then so do Democrat ex-governors (remember Dukakis and Willy Horton, the Arkansas state troopers and Whitewater?).

The point is that the Republicans will always dig deeper and smear harder because they have so much more invested in the contest both emotionally and financially, while the US media are so ineffective and shackled by the cult of 'balance' that they rarely challenge even the most outrageous fabrication.

As a matter of fact I also can't see Clinton or Obama winning in 2008 - but I don't think their painfully calculated and careful voting records as senators will be the deciding factor - sex and race and the other great simplicities of the culture wars will make or break them.

Noam Scheiber of the New Republic comes at the same problem from a slightly different angle, taking as his example the career of right-wing actor and Washington lobbyist Fred Thompson who apparently won his 1994 Senate race in Tenessee by hiring a battered old-pickup truck and touring the state in an outrageously bogus display of good old-boyism (article subscription-only so I'll quote it at length):

By the time Fred Thompson decides whether or not to join the presidential fray, you will have heard the story of his red pickup truck at least a dozen times. The truck in question is a 1990 Chevy, which the famed statesman-thespian rented during his maiden Senate campaign in 1994. The idea was that Thompson would dress up in blue jeans and shabby boots and drive himself to campaign events around the state. Upon arriving, he'd mount the bed of the truck and launch into a homespun riff on the virtues of citizen-legislators and the perils of Washington insider-ism. For good measure, he'd refer to himself in the third person as "Ol' Fred" and the Chevy as "this ol' baby."

There was no real reason to think the tack would work. In fact, Thompson's own campaign manager dismissed it as "gimmicky and hokey." Thompson, after all, had spent the previous two decades as a well-paid Washington lobbyist and sometime screen actor. He was about as close to being a salt-of-the-earth Southerner as Truman Capote, and it was a stretch to think average Tennesseans wouldn't pick up on the dissonance. And yet the gambit proved wildly, dismayingly successful. Thompson was down big when he initialed his car-rental agreement. He won the race with more than 60 percent of the vote.

It's tempting to credit Thompson's success at populist play-acting to his numerous tours in Hollywood. If ever there were a millionaire who could persuade voters of his regular-guy bona fides, it would be the man who, in The Hunt for Red October, lectured Alec Baldwin on how "the Russians don't take a dump ... without a plan." But Thompson is hardly the only Republican to have ridden phony-populism to elective office. In 2003, Haley Barbour, perhaps the most accomplished Washington lobbyist of his generation, pig-in-a-poked and dog-won't-hunted his way to the Mississippi governor's mansion. (One of Barbour's signature tricks was to have himself paged at Ole Miss football games.) And, of course, a certain Northeastern Brahmin reinvented himself as a brush-clearing country boy en route to winning the White House in 2000. These days, phonies win with such regularity in American politics that you've got to look beyond any particular candidate to find an explanation.

Liberals, who go positively batty over such acts of political fraud, have no shortage of theories. The author Tom Frank laid out a popular one in What's the Matter with Kansas, arguing that the ersatz populists use hot-button social issues like abortion and gay marriage to divert attention from their plutocratic proclivities. There is clearly something to this, particularly in states like Kansas, where vast concentrations of economically marginal voters routinely elect tax-cutting social conservatives. Barbour, for his part, employed a variant of this diversionary strategy by using coded racial messages to court downscale whites. (Among other things, he frequently cited the Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor, a black state legislator named Barbara Blackmon, in his public comments, even though there's no such thing as a "ticket" in Mississippi politics; candidates for governor and lieutenant governor run in separate elections.) But the explanation only goes so far. Thompson actually ran for Senate as a pro-choicer, and George W. Bush went easy on the fire-and-brimstone in 2000, when compassion was the order of the day.

A rival explanation comes care of my colleague Jonathan Chait, who once proclaimed his hatred for Bush's "pseudo-populist twang" and views Bush (correctly) as a "pampered frat boy masquerading as" a "rough-hewn Texan." Chait mostly blames the press for enabling this scam. Republicans, according to him, realized long ago that political reporters are much more interested in making vague characterological pronouncements than reporting on matters of policy, or even relating concrete biographical details. The GOP exploited this quirk by placing character at the center of its campaign strategy. The party took care to surround its candidates with the right atmospherics and to impugn their opponents whenever possible. By contrast, Democrats believed themselves to be on the right side of most issues and so they never invested much in these efforts.

Again, there is much to be said for this analysis. Had every story written about the 1994 Tennessee Senate race begun, "High-priced Washington bag-man Fred Thompson, speaking from the red pickup truck he rented to shore up his populist credentials, announced yesterday that ..." the outcome might have been different. On the other hand, it's hard to believe the average Tennessee voter didn't know Thompson had long since ditched his back-country lifestyle for the more cosmopolitan climes of Washington and Hollywood. (His opponent certainly didn't hesitate to remind them.) Likewise, it's hard to believe voters didn't make the connection between the ranch-dwelling George Bush who ran for president in 2000 and the preppie establishmentarian George Bush who'd occupied the White House eight years earlier.

The flaw in both Frank and Chait's theories, I think, is the premise that voters want bona fide populists but are somehow ending up with fake ones instead. But what if voters want exactly what they're getting? What if they knowingly vote for fake populists because fake populism is a highly appealing proposition?

Liberals like Frank and Chait assume that what most Americans want from politics is a modest improvement in their lives: Affordable health care, retirement security, good schools for their children. Under this paradigm, voters should prefer a politician whose life experience has taught him how difficult it can be to get by without such staples. The fake populist is maddening because he professes to understand their concerns but has zero life experience (or at least recent life experience) that would make such understanding possible.

But suppose most working-class voters want something entirely different from what liberals assume. Suppose they don't want to be slightly better off than they are today. Suppose they want to be rich. And the way they evaluate candidates, who are frequently rich themselves, is by wondering: Is this the kind of rich person I'd like to be? Now ask yourself: If you were a working-class voter in Middle America, what kind of rich person would you want to be? Would you want to be the kind of rich person who eats at pricey French restaurants, plays classical guitar, and vacations among the cognescenti in Sun Valley, Idaho? Or would you want to be the kind of rich person who noshes on peanut butter and jelly, reads Sports Illustrated, and kicks back at a ranch in the middle of nowhere?

The difference between you and the first kind of rich person is a vast cultural chasm. The only difference between you and the second kind of rich person is a chunk of cash, albeit a hefty one. If you somehow became rich overnight, there's no way you'd be accepted among the first group, but you could easily imagine yourself as part of the second. And that's more or less what Fred Thompson and George W. Bush are suggesting when they throw on the shit-kickers and turn up the drawl. Sure, they're phonies. But if you were rich, you'd want to be the same kind of phony, not a John Kerry kind of phony. (Though, come to think of it, Kerry's actually pretty authentic as a rich guy.) Liberals see richness and hominess as contradictory. But, for many working-class voters, they're complements. They like their rich people homey, and their homey people rich.

Not long after winning his Senate seat in 1994, Thompson got in his rented red pickup and drove all the way to the entrance of the U.S. Capitol. By way of explanation, he told a reporter he'd hoped to unleash the "doggonedest traffic jam that Washington, D.C., has ever seen from all those staff members trying to get out of town." It might have sounded strange to hear this from a rich Washington lobbyist who'd recently owned an apartment only eight blocks from the White House. But that analysis misses the point. The kind of rich person willing to force the Washington establishment to admire the rear of his Chevy is, for many people, exactly their kind of rich person.

Which I suspect may be part of our Cameron problem in 2008 or 2009 (although of course this being England rather than Tenessee Cameron can be much more subtle than Thompson) - we can run that Bullingdon Club photo as often as we like, but what if the public are really rather flattered that an Etonian multi-millionaire would go to the trouble of sending the au pair and maid out of the room so he can pretend at being one of us for the webcam?

Michael Moore

Terry Glavin reviews the film Manufacturing Dissent and books by Jesse Larner and by Joseph Health and Andrew Potter and uses them to give Michael Moore a good kicking:

What you take away from a Michael Moore film is no more and no less than what you came in with. If you're "conservative," you'll be offended and insulted. If you're a "liberal," you'll have your comfortable assumptions confirmed.

There are millions of nominally "left-wing" Americans who actually believe this rubbish, and if Moore was just subjecting a pack of suckers to a cinematic shakedown like some latter-day P.T. Barnum, that would be one thing. But the reduction of left-wing discourse to the level of puerile conspiracy theory has its consequences.

Here's the way Larner puts it: "For those viewers who despised both Bush and Moore it was absolutely maddening that just when Bush was vulnerable to a thousand legitimate attacks, Moore chose to waste the cultural moment and six million Disney dollars on overhyped connections and ahistorical polemics that the right could easily refute."

Right at the moment in American history when the power of the big media corporations was being seriously undermined by new forms of media -- everything from political-commentary blogs to easily-produced film documentaries -- the American left had no compelling narrative to offer.

It was crippled by its retreat into identity politics and the postmodernist acceptance of a world where there is no universal truth, where facts don't matter, everything is relative, and all reality is contingent and constructed. Just like a Michael Moore documentary.

In a world like that, there's little use for proper journalism. In a world like that, documentaries have little value except to entrench pre-ordained narratives and affirm political identities. Advocacy journalism becomes the work of telling your side what it wants to hear instead of what it might actually need to know.

It's all perfectly democratic, of course, and tailor-made for the marketplace. You get to pick the propaganda you want. You'll find demagogues like Anne Coulter, Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly down one aisle, and the equally fatuous and shrill Cindy Sheehan, Michael Moore and Rosie O'Donnell down the other aisle. Take your pick.

This has created what Larner calls "a hole in the heart of American politics." The Democratic Party is not, in the main, of the left. It is not for a steeply graduated income tax, or a single-payer health care system, or full equality for gay people. It doesn't stand firmly with labour unions and working people, and will not rise against the baleful influence of evangelical Christians.

That hole in the American heart has also left the reigning American conservatives dangerously enfeebled: "In the absence of any coherent popular and intellectual challenge," Larner writes, "it has descended into a lazy and bullying triumphalism."

"If Democrats want to regain power, they will have to be serious about truth," Larner concludes. "They will have to start aggressively calling out the grievous distortions of the right-wing propagandists who have gotten away with a duplicitous game for far too long, but also calling out the distortions of those in their own camp who justify means by ends. When Democrats win, it is in spite of Michael Moore, not because of him."

Read the whole thing.

Wherein is contained the Tryal of the Woman for committing that odious sin of Buggery with a Dog; And likewise of the Man for Buggerying of two Mares

Norm directs us to the Proceedings of the Old Bailey 1674-1834 - an invaluable window into history as it was actually lived by the poor and desperate.

Particularly like the advertisements that accompanied these records of widows burned at the stake for clipping coins, teenage pickpockets hanged for stealing a silk purse, pilloryings, whippings and transportations to the antipodes:

W. Elmy, Professor of Physick and Operator, of known Integrity, liveth at the Blue Ball in Whalebone-Court, at the lower End of Bartholomew-lane, by the Royal Exchange,

WHO most safely and expeditiously cures Deafness and Noise is the Ears in any, of what Age soever, (if curable) and at first sight, by Inspection, resolves the Patient if so or not, as most eminent Persons of quality can testify.

I have Remedies ready Prepared for the Preservation of the Hearing, in those who through some great Defects in the Sounding Membrare, and other Impediments in the Auditory Passages are not perfectly Curable; which Remedies preserves them from ever growing worse, and improved their Hearing to Old Age.

I could mention hundreds of Patients that I have cured, but I have omitted 'em, and make no doubt but this Famous City is sufficiently satisfied in the Ability and Care of yours, W. Elmy.

There are some in a Counterfeit was pretend the same.

He hath likewise a Pill which cleanseth the Blood from all Impurities, infallibly curing the Scurvy. It cures the Head-Ach to Admiration, taking away Vapours offensive to the Brain. It creates a good Stomach and Digestion: Takes away sharpness of Urine, and cleanseth the Reins, and being a certain and present Remedy for the Gout. It cures all Joynt-Pains, resists Fevers and Surfeits, and preserves the Body in perfect health. He hath Boxes of several Prices, according as Necessary requires, with Directions from 1 s. 6 d. to 3 s. and from 2 s. to 6 s.

He hath also an Expeditious way in curing all Pains in the Teeth, without drawing them. He hath likewise 4 most excellent Gargarism or Mouth-water, which will make black or yellow Teeth as white as Ivory in a few times using and it will certaines Cure the Scurvy, and all other Diseases incident to the Mouth, Teeth, and Gums.