What Will Suffice

Last night I had two Canadian friends to dinner.  Along with pasta and cold cucumber soup, we had the typical sort of behind-closed-doors political discussion that foreigners living in the States excel in.  In this mode of conversation, every statement is punctuated by an expression of incredulity at “America,” “Americans,” and their crazy ways.  The subject almost always ends in the same place – disbelief at the completely polarized way Americans talk about public affairs.  In a political discourse where the word “independent” more often than not means “equal parts Democrat and Republican,” the with-us-or-against-us mentality is more prevalent than anyone seems willing to admit.

This has been brought home to me in the last week listening to – and reading – various people whose opinions I respect argue about the perky moosehunter from Alaska whose nasal vigour has so captivated the nation.  Jessica Grose at Jezebel noted that for a certain sort of woman, in which class she includes herself, Sarah Palin can cause “violent, nay, murderous, rage.”  On Shakesville, while simultaneously decrying sexism in certain attacks on Palin, Misty says she is a “conservative fuckneck.”  I could list more examples, but you get the drift.

Now, of course, both of these remarks are taken out of context.  They are the icing on relatively coherent critiques of Palin’s political positions and her sugarcoating of her own record.  And of course they are irreverent, in the way blog writers like to be irreverent because their writing is impulse-driven and off-the-cuff.  But they’re still of that “irrational American” variety of political criticism that worries me.

And, to get up on an internet soapbox for a moment, it worries me that blog writers – the ostensible critics of mainstream media discourse, particularly when writing under a Gawker-sponsored masthead – jump into this fray.  It’s always worrisome when the “outside” talks exclusively in the dominant terms of the discourse.  It’s not that there’s no native American outside to be had, of course – Jon Stewart has taken liberal pundits to task for their extremist, asinine, partisan one-upmanship.  But I’m not hearing people pay so much attention to that particular problem.  If anything, people are internalizing the hyperbole of punditry as the election gets closer and each side gets more and more nervous that they just might lost.

Don’t get me wrong – Palin is playing this game herself, beginning with her snide and race-baiting (and hopefully strategically misguided) talking point on the alleged irresponsibility of “community organizers.”  She’s not playing nice, and neither is McCain for all his talk about bipartisanship and changing Washington and self-effacing chuckles.

But all this eye-for-an-eye stuff their critics might want to cite as justification for throwing third-grade insults isn’t any more productive as a political tool than it would be as punishment for a murderer.  It might be viscerally satisfying, of course, to throw an epithet at these people, but at the end of the day, your c-words and f-words and ass-words are going to prematurely end your conversation with a voter who could maybe be persuaded to vote the right way.  Even worse, it’ll likely destroy your credibility in starting the next one.

The truth, which is almost never located at the extreme anyway, is that people who are still investigating how they’ll vote in November don’t care particularly to hear your anger or rage, however justified it might be.  They want to hear your reasons, and “McCain is a motherfucker” is not a reason, it’s a dagger.  And nobody wants get stabbed, so your audience is going to get out of the way of that type of talk right quick.

Now, the good news is that Republicans have handed the Democrats a gift in this election, which is that they are displaying a remarkable lack of interest in seeming like the voice of reason in this particular cultural conversation.  They’re happier to yell louder and throw more balloons and substitute “POW” for every third word in their average sentence.  This makes for excellent television, I’ll admit.  Even as I began to froth a little at the mouth in the privacy of my living room, watching the RNC was much like watching The Hills; it is utterly banal and stupid, but its monumentally offensive display of white privilege is somehow impossible to turn away from.  But I don’t think the undecideds are suffering from a thirst for a Presidency with a reality tv approach to the issues, as it were.

I know that this penchant for over-the-top behaviour was cited by disgruntled Democrats as the reason the GOP handed them their ass in the last election cycle.  But in general the Democratic base tends to overestimate the talent of their candidate pool in his regard.  That was certainly true of Kerry, a candidate whose only universal appeal was the profound feeling of sleepiness he elicited in everyone, himself included.

But in Obama, the confidence one can put in his talent is pretty deep.  I’m not an unqualified fan, or an Obamabot as Megan Carpentier at Jezebel likes to say.  I haven’t even sipped at the glass of his Kool-Aid.  But I think even his critics admit that dude can give a speech like few in American politics today – witness the stunned silence of the punditry post-Convention speech.  All this talk about inexperience and celebrity and slickness does frequently seem just that – just talk – when he actually gets going.

And why is that?  Because even when on the attack, he (and his running mate) wields sarcasm with a purpose – for example, they are only interested in the number of McCain’s houses to the extent that it belies McCain’s claim to be more of an “ordinary guy” than Obama.  There’s something ultimately respectable about that – about choosing to conduct oneself publicly with dignity and class, about keeping a campaign from getting distracted with idiotic sidetracks like questioning McCain’s patriotism – that I think will ultimately help him win over that sliver of people who decide all elections, the undecided.

This doesn’t mean you have to pull punches.  It does mean, however, that you have to make your blows with purpose and with intelligence and always pay lip service to why you sound the way you do.  You want to change Washington?  Then you have to be willing to talk in a different way than they do.  You have to quit sounding like you’d be a welcome foil for O’Reilly on his show, because anyone who thinks of O’Reilly mode of talking as trenchant criticism is a lost cause for you.  All you do when you hyperbolize is risk tarring Obama’s campaign with a brush it hasn’t, as of yet, taken up.

If only his supporters understood as well what his campaign does implicitly: it’s the discourse, stupid. Talk to people like they aren’t mindless morons, and they aren’t likely to identify you as one so quickly.  They’ll at least keep listening, and as long as you’re saying something worth hearing, you’ll keep well ahead of the GOP.

P.S. I’ve been neglecting this blog while I moved from Brooklyn to Manhattan, but I expect to be posting daily for the next little while; this is the first in a series.  Next time: How Sarah Palin Can Unwittingly Revive American Feminism.