The Pelosi problem

So now there’s the issue of Nancy Pelosi. Before I write another word, I have to confess that she makes my skin crawl. What really bothers me, though, is that I have no idea why. Without giving it much thought, I’d say my main problem with her is that whenever she opens her mouth I begin trying to determine what percentage of what she says is completely false compared to what’s not, and then how much, from the “what’s not” category, is partially true compared to what’s almost entirely factually correct.

More succinctly, Nancy Pelosi makes my skin crawl because she’s just as bad as any other politician. It’s embarrassing and humiliating for me to admit this, but evidently I am every bit as susceptible to Republican-generated bullshit as anyone else. Nancy Pelosi is every PR person's dream come true: the messaging document has transcended bullet points and words and is now political scripture, and it goes something like this: Nancy Pelosi is an unapologetically liberal politician. She’s a rich bitch. Since she represents San Francisco, she’s an elitist, she’s out of touch with real America and the people who live there, and she should be disposed of immediately.

I woke up, sort of, one night not long before the elections when I happened to tune into her being interviewed by Charlie Rose. Speaking of crawling skin, Charlie Rose, along with Oprah, is one of the worst interviewers I’m aware of. He does more talking than the guests – that alone should get you fired, I think, but that’s just me – and most of his talking is beneath banal. And Nancy Pelosi was having none of it. If there is a man who has man-handled Charlie Rose more effectively than Nancy Pelosi, it’s a spectacle I’ve yet to witness. The next day I looked up her legislative record, which I realize is sort of an elitist thing to do during election season, and my reaction is hard to describe. Blown away, perhaps. Stunned. Guilty. Maybe all three. It seems to me she is one of the last remaining politicians who didn’t succumb to Pappy Bush’s degradation of liberalism by referring to it as “the L word” during the 1988 and 1992 presidential campaigns. Pappy was a man’s man, a national father figure and a direct link to the most revered president of our time, and his smears were interpreted by the majority of Democrats, including the Clintons, as guidance from the invisible hand of God to shift from the left to the center, which they’ve been doing dutifully now for 20 years.

For the next several days I listened to many, many people on the radio and television and internets reiterate over and over again how forward they were looking to voting against Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi. All of the bellowing was done with zero regard for the fact that there was not a national election last week. Also absent was any acknowledgement of how far from or close to San Francisco the orator or his or her audience lived. No matter: according to Mama Grizzly and many others we fired Nancy Pelosi and put Barack Obama on a performance plan last week (we did neither, in my opinion, but this is hardly the time for technicalities). As I listened I was overtaken with the same sense of quiet dread that usually accompanies the dreams I have where I’m in houses I’ve known for decades, only the rooms are completely and irrationally rearranged, and no one but me seems bothered or even surprised.

Are we really that retarded? I wondered through it all. Am I really that gullible? Yes, and yes. And I suppose I should show some gratitude to Charlie Rose.

Those are scary thoughts and questions for me, but, as always, there’s more: as Nancy Pelosi was being demonized with a measure of misogyny so vehement it made the Salem witch trials seem like a mismanaged but harmless badminton tournament, where were the Democrats? They were hiding, as usual, caving. It’s a very bad thing to be associated with Nancy Pelosi, so the script said, and so they bailed. Until, of course, it was too late. Once the Republicans had reclaimed control of the U.S. House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, nervy woman that she is, decided she wanted to retain some sort of leadership position even though her party had been dethroned. And since the commercials had run their course, her fellow Democrats decided, with ringing clarity, at long last, to stand by their leader. For this reason and thousands more, it’s not at all surprising to me that the Democrats lost the majority in the house, but that they ever managed to attain it in the first place.

A prediction

Now that the countdown to 2012 is officially underway, I have a prediction: I believe the Republican candidate for president in 2012 will be Marco Rubio, who was elected to the U.S. Senate on Tuesday by the people of Florida.

I heard him on the radio on Wednesday evening, and he’s perfect.

He’s young – he’ll turn 40 in May – and reasonably attractive (by suburban heterosexual standards anyhow). For college he won a football scholarship, so he’s no pussy. He’s married to a former Miami Dolphins cheerleader, which is awesome, and together they have four children, meaning he can legitimately get misty eyed when regurgitating the sermon about how wrong it is to pass Obama's debt down to our children, our grandchildren and beyond because, having shown zero regard for reproductive responsibility, he will, theoretically anyhow, be represented in greater numbers in future generations of citizens who will, also theoretically, pay taxes

After going to law school, he served in the Florida legislature (for two years as its speaker) so he understands people. He used to go around the state holding what he called “idearaisers,” and based on those events he wrote a book called 100 Innovative Ideas for Florida’s Future. He’s conservative and he’s a Republican, so he’s really good at simplifying things and, in the process, really connecting with people just like you and me.

When he speaks, he does so in that flat yet sing-songy Republican cadence. In a way that’s probably similar to what a deer experiences when the rifle is silently aimed at his head or his heart on what started out as an ordinary Saturday morning, I recognize this vocal shift instantly. Describing it is more challenging, but here’s my attempt: It’s condescending, but in a circuitous way. It's a way of speaking that reaches out to the ear and then, drawing on the full aresenal of horsepower behind tone and inflection, invites the ear to join the voice in speaking to anyone who happens to fall into the category of “other” with one side or another of the lower lip slightly upturned.

Thanks to NBC’s insertion of itself into a state election, he already has national name recognition, and in 23 months and three weeks Marco Rubio will have served in the U.S. Senate for close to two years, and you know as well as I do how his supporters will respond to any suggestion that he doesn’t have enough experience.

But, speaking of comparisons to Obama, here’s the best part: Marco Rubio is not white. He’s Cuban American. That makes him a Latino!

Marco Rubio will certainly face some obstacles, but I believe he’ll overcome them all, and beautifully. As a Tea Party candidate, he is beholden, of course, to Mama Grizzly, but by the time 2012 rolls around, she will have realized that it’s time for her to do what real women do, which is to shut up, offer cream and sugar with the coffee and let the menfolk do what they were put on this earth to do. Otherwise, she’d be veering into feminist territory, and that’s an expressway to Lezzy Land. The second big challenge for Marco Rubio is his religion. He’s a Roman Catholic by birth and breeding, but he and his family now do their magical thinking at an Evangelical church, so, in terms of fundraising and the inherent rightness of bringing more babies into the world, I think that could easily be turned into an advantage for him. Plus, it’s clear as crystal that he is not a Muslim, so we can all rest a bit easier, a bit more peacefully.

Here, though, is the best part of Marco Rubio: his parents are from Cuba. This concerned me initially, with the Tea Party’s hard line on immigration and all, but I’m probably over thinking it. I look to the Marco Rubio people to trot the issue out full throttle with a brass band and lots of fireworks. Marco Rubio truly understands the love of country, the power of patriotism, because he was raised by two people who endured an amazing conflict. They loved Cuba, but with equal fervor they hated Communism, and they hated Communists. Naturally, when Castro took over their hearts were so broken that they came to Miami and, like many of their fellow travelers, became Republicans. I was on the edge of my seat, fearing that those painful labels might ruin an otherwise beautiful scenario: immigrants, illegal immigrants or, the worst, illegals. But my worries were for naught, because Marco Rubio is not the son of immigrants, he is the son of exiles. And that one word alone makes his story one from which we can all draw inspiration.

I want a better show

I have to hand it to the people who call the shots on the television, the radio and the Internets, for conducting themselves in a way that is indeed fair and balanced. If you thought the fact that they started crowing about the midterms before Obama even walked onto the stage in Chicago to give his acceptance speech in 2008 was unfair to Democrats, think again. Because here, word for word, is a bit of story seeding from Wednesday morning’s headlines:

Hold the celebration. Most voters expected Republicans to win control of the House of Representatives on Election Day, but nearly as many expect to be disappointed with how they perform by the time the 2012 elections roll around.

And a few hours later, this headline, on MSN:

With elections down, all eyes on 2012.

Down? Was it a hunting adventure? And in terms of eyes, who exactly constitutes ‘all’? Speaking only for myself, my eyes, and my ears, were on Multnomah County, Oregon where they were counting ballots to see if the keys to the governor’s mansion were going to be handed over to a guy who, as best I can tell, never so much as ran for student government. (The answer, for now, appears to be no.)

You might expect me to be critical of this, but there’s one piece of information that’s changed my mind. The cost for the game show that ended for the most part on Tuesday evening was $3 billion, which I believe makes elections, officially, an industry. And with the media publishing polls about the next election before the current election is finalized, coupled with the high court’s wisdom about the spending rights of corporations, it’s only going to get better with time.

And another thing that might surprise you is that I am looking forward to seeing how far this goes, and given the fact that we worship the almighty dollar – and why not? – I predict it will go all the way. I picture a more user friendly future for our elections, where people cast their votes via text or cell phones or e-mail, or all three perhaps, plus Facebook and Twitter and some red state/blue state iPad app and whatever new moronic thing comes along between now and 2012, and at the rate we are innovating there will surely be many. I can see shapely women in sparkly gowns gliding to and fro in the rotunda at the U.S. Capitol, walking people in and out depending, of course, on the results, and allowing them to comment briefly from time to time about how it was either the best time of their life or how much they’re looking forward to serving the people of our great country, especially the men and women in uniform and the men and women – but mostly men – who once wore a uniform but now reside, tax free, in graveyards. It gives me chills, just thinking about it. And I picture, or hear, a soundtrack of some sort, maybe an orchestra, or a pre-recorded theme song since the acoustics at the Capitol are terrible.

But what I really want in my elections is some personality, and the perfect way to achieve that, I think, is to have some judges. Not the black-robed sorts, but some real rabble rousers, some real personalities, who could give hand signals or put ping-pong paddles with numbers up to cast their vote. The former governors of Illinois, for example, could do a season with their parole officers in tow, just slightly beyond the camera’s reach, but very slightly. Or maybe a panel of jilted political wives. The possibilities for putting some lipstick on the old pig are truly endless, and with only 24 months to go before the next season finale I think we better get moving.

Do you believe in magic?

John Boehner, the future speaker of the house, didn’t waste a nanosecond last night in reminding everyone that his party’s wave of victories does not constitute “a revolution,” but I think he’s being admirably modest. I am quite confident that by this time next year we will be living in a very different place, one where there is little if any unemployment, where spending is under control, where there is not much of a deficit, where quality healthcare is available to any and all and where, most importantly, questionable deal making and compromising one thing for the sake of another are as obsolete as a handwritten thank you. John Boehner’s modesty aside, The American Dream was revived yesterday after its two-year stint on life support, and even though Rick Fox, the hot black guy, got voted off Dancing with the Stars last night while Bristol Palin was spared, I for one am really looking forward to the good times.

Talking

The short-term question for today seems to be this. Is your life any different than it was two years ago, when Obama was elected and Democrats became the majority in Congress? In one way mine is radically different. In early November 2008, I still clung to my belief, stridently, some would say, that you cannot blame the media – the media simply serves its audience. The media is not to blame for the message. I was wrong, and for the past 24 months I’ve been eating crow. The media – all of it, the radio, the television, the incessant Internet commentary and chatter and rambling – began priming the pump for the midterm elections not on the day that Obama was sworn in but on the day he was elected. It’s a show, and since they’re hosting it they want to make sure as many people as possible attend. Therefore, Obama takes a dump on a Thursday afternoon, out of synch for various reasons with his regular rhythm, and it is tied directly, somehow, in a way that defies your wildest dreams, to the midterms. A road is paved on a hot summer afternoon; by the next morning the analysts are reporting on it “in the context of” the midterms. While surveying the destruction in the Gulf of Mexico, Obama, who is the president of the United States, refuses to behave like he’s a guest on Oprah and that, ladies and gentlemen, will have an impact on the midterms.

In PR this behavior is called “seeding the story.” It’s toxic enough when it concerns the launching of a new computer program that shouldn’t be newsworthy in the first place; when the “seeding” intentionally distorts and perverts politics for the sake of ratings, I think we’ve taken the concept of sinister to an entirely new level.

So today I’d like to seed a story of my own, one whose primary character is a little boy called Ian. I cringe when people attempt to explain the world with toddler quotes – so simple yet so true, and so gosh darn cute! – but today that’s exactly what I’m going to do. On the morning of the inauguration, Ian and his father, who happens to be my brother, came to my house to watch the festivities. It was a beautiful sunny morning in Portland, cold and wintry, January. Inside we had coffee and bagels and brownies. “The steam coming up out of the mugs, it’s so pretty,” my brother said. Though wasteful, I’d boiled water to heat up our mugs before pouring the coffee. That had been one of our father’s signature moves: warming cups and teapots and such with boiling water. Since our father had died shortly after casting his vote for Obama from a hospital bed via absentee ballot, I’d wanted, in some way, to recall him. It was touching, for a very brief moment, that my brother bothered to notice. Ian, who was about to turn two, trashed his face with cream cheese but managed to get most of the bagel in his mouth. Using both hands, he drank fruit juice from a steamed coffee mug of his own.

There was all sorts of commotion on the television. My brother thought the wheels on the helicopter waiting to carry W. off the national stage looked like they belonged on a toy. I thought Mrs. Obama’s dress was wonderful. We sat on the couch, the three of us, watching. Ian looked up first at his father, and then at me, with a curious but resigned expression on his face, then pointed at the television and said, “Talking.” We laughed, we agreed, we all pointed at the television, and Ian said once again, with more conviction, “Talking.” And for the past 24, hype-fueled months of stories that are at best distorted and at worst completely made up, it’s been mostly just that: talking.

Basic math from Florida

I’ve been doing a pretty good job of curtailing television time around here. There are two reasons for this. First, the campaign ads and, far worse, the accompanying, nonstop nonsense about ‘the midterms’ from some of the more odious celebrity anchors is sickening. Secondly, and more importantly, I have really been enjoying reading first thing in the morning. I make the coffee, make the bed, turn on the lamp on my table, and sit down. It’s been dark here lately until well past 7:00, and starting the day with well-crafted sentences printed on paper rather than the television or radio is a little bit of heaven for me.

But this morning I relapsed and turned on Today, which never fails to provide endless examples of the transformation of what was once the news into cheap entertainment. My current favorite is Matt Lauer, who hosts Today, and David Gregory, who moderates, supposedly, Meet the Press. Matt Lauer went to California to moderate a debate between the two candidates for governor of that state, and David Gregory went to Florida to do the same with the three candidates vying to represent that state in the U.S. Senate. As much as they would like for it to be, this is not a presidential election. These elections are about people voting on candidates and issues specific to their cities, counties, municipalities and states. So why, I’ve wondered, are these figureheads from national media outlets even involved in these races?

Because, I learned this morning, they’re doing what they do best: manufacturing stories. This morning, Today opened with the “controversy” from Florida. Three people are running for one seat: a Democrat, who is black, a Republican darling of the Tea Party, who is Cuban, and the governor, who is running as an independent, who is white and widely rumored to be a homo. According to many polls, the Democrat is so far behind it’s hopeless, and therein lies our paint-by-numbers controversy for the day: Bill Clinton, who hasn’t been president for nearly a decade, is campaigning for his fellow Democrat, and there are rumors that he advised that candidate to drop out of the race, which would bolster the independent candidate and defeat the Republican. Is that true? Did he really say that? Meredith Vierra had the Democrat on and really showed us her stuff. But, but, she said, there are rumors, and where do you suppose they came from? I’m not dropping out of the race, the candidate managed to say at least four times. The people of Florida will decide with their ballots.

If you have three candidates and one withdraws, there are two options. Either the people who supported the withdrawn candidate do not vote, or they vote for one of the two remaining candidates. Regardless of what Bill Clinton said or did not say, that’s a simple mathematical fact. If Bill Clinton reminded the candidate that his withdrawal from the race would increase the chances of one of the two remaining candidates, so what?

Here’s what. Not five minutes later, Ann Curry sat down with two of the network’s Cub Scouts, David Gregory, just back from his celebrity appearance in Florida, and Chuck Todd, NBC’s blandly snide White House correspondent. Ann Curry wanted to know how things are looking for the Democrats. How badly are they going to lose next week? Then – and this is perhaps one of the reasons that someone who greets people on national television by saying “Hey” earns millions – she brought the chat back to the interview with the Florida candidate. Only by that point the story had morphed a bit and the reference about advice given – or not – in Florida was no longer to Bill Clinton but to The White House. My oh my, I thought, how things evolve in less than five minutes, because had you tuned in at that moment, or had you not been paying attention, I would not blame you for believing that The White House was interfering in state races. And that, of course, makes it a story not about elementary mathematics as broken down – or not – by an elder statesman who clearly knows a thing or two about winning elections but one of national relevance.

Dangerous people, dangerous movies

I love picking out movies on Netflix and then watching them at home, but there’s still nothing quite like seeing a movie at a theater with a big screen and a sound system to match. So this weekend I walked to my neighborhood theater, paid $4.00 for a ticket, and bought a bag of popcorn from a young woman who, as it turns out, lives two houses down the street from me. I love a late-afternoon movie, especially if it’s a dreary day, so Saturday was perfect. I decided to see Eat, Pray, Love, which I did not expect to like. I wanted, badly, to be wrong. Before the lights even went down my problem with the movie wasn’t the movie itself but the author of the book, who, post eating, praying and loving, believes her plight of not being able to marry someone because he is not a citizen of the U.S. is worth a lot of ink (the publishers and the book-buying public agree, unfortunately). Personally, given the hostility toward many couples in this country when it comes to marriage, I find that sort of tone deafness offensive. Still, I didn’t want to dismiss the movie before it even started. I am trying not to typecast. I wanted a good surprise, and I got one. The movie started badly, and then – here’s the surprise – it got worse. Way worse. If I had to write a succinct overview of the movie for the newspaper, here goes: A celebration of middle class self-indulgence. Great scenery.

Which made for an interesting contrast with the other two movies I watched over the weekend: The Most Dangerous Man in America and Sometimes in April. My blurb copy for each of them would read as follows: Freedom of speech: Yes? No? Maybe?

I didn’t fully experience the 1970s, but I still get nostalgic for the era. From what I’ve read and heard and seen, it seems to me that the 1970s is the last time people, en masse, actually rejected convention. In 1971 Daniel Ellsberg, a former Pentagon employee and the Wiki leaker of his day, earned the most dangerous designation by sharing massive volumes of classified documents with The New York Times. He was driven to this act because, as someone who had contributed to the “intelligence” used to justify the war in what Nixon called, on tape, “that little shit-ass country,” his conscience would no longer permit him not to. The most compelling part of the film, I thought, occurred after the leak. Nixon imposed an injunction, so other papers across the country, one by one, in solidarity, took up publishing the documents where the New York Times left off. In fairly quick order, the supreme court also answered to its conscience and dismissed Nixon’s injunction, but not before what for me was the movie’s most memorable scene. As Tricky Dick was doing his best to nationalize the print and broadcast media, Daniel Ellsberg gave a copy of the documents to a congressman from Alaska, who read from them at the U.S. Capitol during a filibuster, which, technically, transferred the official ownership of the papers from the Pentagon to the U.S. Congress. I love dangerous people.

Finally, on Sunday afternoon, Rwanda. The 1994 genocide in that country in which nearly 1 million people (more by some estimates) were killed intrigues me. April 1994 for me is not confined to grainy black and white photographs in history books. I remember it, and I remember it well. Sometimes in April follows two brothers throughout the killing spree and its aftermath. One is married to a Tutsi woman; the other is an announcer on the Rwandan radio station that beat the death drums via the airwaves throughout the genocide, branding Tutsis as, among other things, “cockroaches.” The story is a complex one, and the questions it left with me are even more so. What exactly does freedom of speech mean? Is it okay for people like Michael Savage to take to dehumanize Muslims and liberals and anyone else he doesn’t like by calling them “vermin”? Does the right to free speech cover Portland’s own right-wing, talking hyena, who claims, repeatedly, that well over half of all Latinos in the city are “illegals”? Should her station be required to have documentation on file to back up that claim? I don’t know.

Throughout Sometimes in April, newsreels from a particular day of the genocide were shown along with the number of people killed by that date at the bottom of the screen, a morbid ticker, if you will. One day that month – and I remember this very clearly – as people were hacked to bits with machetes, the lead story on the national news in the U.S. was the mournful youngsters gathered in Seattle to comfort one another through a devastating blow: Kurt Cobain had killed himself, silencing forever “the voice of a generation.” What on earth were they going to do without him? In spite of the message that Courtney Love had recorded for the weeping wounded, they were lost, as was Julia Roberts on Saturday afternoon as she gazed down at her wedding photos and tearfully realized she couldn’t picture herself in her own marriage. It was a crisis, to be sure, as was the number accompanying the images of the mourners. I believe 30,000 people had been murdered in Rwanda at that point in the film, but it may have been up to 60,000 by then. Sorry – I’m not so good with numbers.