Video Meliora, proboque; Deteriora sequor

The Dems Last Night

A rabid (as a child I confused that word up with "rapid", as in "he is a rapid baseball card collector") Republican approached me today and asked if I'd seen the Democrat debate last night. I said I watched some of it and he said he thought it was disgraceful how it all got watered down in distractions like the Bosnia gaffe and the Rev. Wright controversy.

Well knock me over with a feather. Au contraire!

Listening to Hill & Obama on the issues seems an exercise in predictability: utter pander-ation. On Iraq: get out, honkey cat! On the home front? Treat citizens like college kids: "hold on son, we'll send money soon!". I may be wrong, but I sense there's precious little creativity in Hillary & Obama's domestic agenda. Just find new ways to redistribute wealth, less the 30% gov't take. So any talk about "the issues" goes a long way for me at least.

That's not to say the Republicans aren't similarly out of ideas. Most of the "solutions" seem to consist of cries of "cut taxes and batten down the hatches, for a Nor'easter is comin'," meaning that Teddy Kennedy saw his shadow and that means sixteen more years of a Democratic Congress.

Last night was superb entertainment if disturbingly schadenfreudic. Normally Obama's too cool to show emotion amid the falling arrows, but the unexpected ones aimed by George and Charlie wrought visible pain. I almost felt sorry for the guy. Concerning Wright and Obama's recent gaffe "it is what it is" and if his explanations fell short, the arrows didn't. It'll be very interesting to see how much weight Americans will put on these things come November. This is an election very hard to predict because while America's in a left-of-center mood, Obama's very left-of-center.

One interesting moment last night came when Hillary admitted her misstatement about Bosnia sniper fire given what she'd said in her own book. Forget Sinbad or the other eyewitnesses (they could've been part of a vast right-wing conspiracy after all): when she saw that her present account didn't jive with her past account she admitted fudging the truth. A very human thing - we trust ourselves first and foremost. I tend to feel warmth towards Hillary, probably because she's the underdog and because there's a part of me that admires their chutzpah and shamelessness. Shamelessness seems to wear better on those for whom it is a perpetual kind, like Mr. Skimpole in Dickens' Bleak House.

So I can't get too exercised about the Bosnia exaggeration. Notice how the stock market sometimes doesn't go down despite a devastatingly bad jobs report? That's because the market has "already discounted that". Already digested the fact that things are going south. So here I thought all of us had already discounted Clintonian lying and that by now the Clinton stock wouldn't fall in reaction to a new revelation.

Obama, on the other hand, is full of surprises. One surprise I experienced this campaign cycle is how differently whites and blacks view the prospect of a black president. Whites think that it would be a boon to race relations if a black man was elected president, while I think most blacks would consider it a boon to race relations only if an "authentically black" was elected president, where "authentic" is a liberal Democrat friendly with the Rev. Wrights of the world. In other words, no Bill Cosbys or Colin Powells or Condi Rices need apply.... But then whites see electing an "authentically" black candidate as rewarding bad behavior, offering legitimacy to racists like Rev. Wright and Louis Farrakhan.

Experience has shown, however, that rewarding or punishing bad behavior is an exercise in futility. Fidel Castro will (has?) die(d) in his bed, absolutely unaffected by decades of El Norte's ostracization. The U.N. attempted to "punish" Saddam Hussein through economic sanctions and there's little evidence that he felt punished. We have rewarded China with favored nation status and China shrugs and goes on doing what China does. We are more impervious to external stimuli than meets the eye, and our natural desire to see "the good guy win" is frequently thwarted, notwithstanding that none of us are good. I think I'm becoming more pacifistic in the sense of finally realizing how overrated force is.