Meltdown

Anticipating the Vice-Presidential Debate

Gwen Ifill, moderator of the Vice Presidential debate, welcomes the two candidates, and begins the questioning with Senator Joe Biden of Delaware.

Ifill: Senator Biden, you said during the primary campaign that Senator Obama was "the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. . ." Would you like to explain what you meant by that?

Biden: Sure, Gwen. Look, you're a good example of what I'm talking about, so you can understand. You're articulate, and you're African American. And that's storybook, man.

Ifill: You also said that the presidency is not something that lends itself to on-the-job training. Can you also explain that?

Biden: Sure, Gwen. I was saying that someone who only has been mayor of a small town and governor for just a couple of years of a sparsely populated state really isn't ready to be a heartbeat away from the presidency.

Ifill: But she hadn't been chosen yet.

Biden: Oh.

Ifill: Let's turn to Governor Palin of Alaska. Governor, you've been criticized for saying that you said, "Thanks, but no thanks" to the Bridge to Nowhere, when the record shows that you actually supported the project first, and then changed your mind. Could you explain that?

Palin: Sure. You know, the Alaska infrastructure is pretty important, and we needed to be shoring that up. But when those pork-barrellers in Washington got ahold of it, it just got to be out of control.

Ifill: But didn't you accept the money anyway, once the project was killed?

Palin: We accepted the money but not for a bridge.

Ifill: You've spoken out against pork-barrel spending. Isn't that accepting it?

Palin: I'm governor of the great state of Alaska. Not a Washington insider.

Ifill: Senator Biden, do you have anything to say to that?

Biden: Yeah, I supported that bridge. Didn't they build it?

(pause)

Ifill: Back to you, Senator Biden. You've been saying that you thought the recent ad put out by your campaign showing Senator McCain as computer illiterate was "terrible." Is it a problem for your campaign that you're criticizing it?

Biden: I'm sure you've misunderstood, Gwen. When I said it was "terrible," I meant that it's terrible that John is so out of touch with the American people. He hasn't joined the 21st Century. Heck, he hasn't even done anything the last 26 years he's been in Washington. I don't know where he's been. He's nowhere, man. John's just out of touch. He's lost his soul. He's a friend, but he's no friend to America. He didn't even mention the middle class the other night in that debate. Did you see it? Ninety minutes, and do you know how many times John mentioned the word "middle class?" Zero. Zero. That's John. So when I said it was terrible, I meant John is terrible. Terrible. That's what we Catholics like to call "an epiphany."

(pause)

Ifill: Governor Palin, do you have anything to say to that?

Palin: John McCain is the only person who's ever truly fought for you, and a true American hero. And a maverick. That time your wife was dancing on a tabletop in Greece he was there for her. And he'll hunt down Obama.

Ifill: Thanks, Governor Palin. Governor, here's another question for you. You fought making the polar bear a protected endangered species. Can you explain that?

Palin: Sure. There's a healthy population of polar bears now, and they're not really endangered. They're seven-hundred miles from where we want to drill, but protecting them would reduce our nation's ability to be energy independent.

Ifill: Isn't it true that your running mate, Senator McCain, doesn't agree with you on drilling in ANWAR?

Palin: I'm working on him, Gwen. (*wink*)

Ifill: Senator Biden, do you have anything to say to that?

Biden: I hope you have better luck with John than I did. I mean, the guy's been a friend for years. A friend. But John has lost his soul. His soul. He's out of touch with the American people. Not like Barack America, I mean Barack Obama. From main street to Wall Street, Barack is your man.

Ifill: Governor Palin, do you have anything to say to that?

Palin: Well, actually Senator, Todd, our "first dude," has always been my guy. But Senator McCain is a man of the people. And the only man who has truly fought for you. He'll end radical Islamic extremism. Make us energy independent.

Ifill: Senator Biden, one last question for this segment: Do you believe Governor Palin is ready to be "a heartbeat away from the Presidency?"

Biden: She's clean, bright, and articulate. Well, clean and bright, anyway. That's storybook, man.

View from a Heartland Swing State

The typical Wisconsin voter isn't some rabid right-wing lugnut or a babykilling liberal.

The state is filled with working class people whose ancestors came from Germany, or Poland, or Ireland, who mostly go to church on Sunday, probably Lutheran or Catholic, because their ancestors did, but still have beer and wine at their church potlucks. They like polka masses and county fairs, cheese curds and elephant ears. They mostly take the "love your neighbor" stuff out of church and take the rest with a grain of salt. Their world grinds to a halt when the Packers are playing, and they've worshipped for years at the altar of Brett Favre, but will still be diehard cheeseheads regardless. They'll brave winter's cold in Lambeau Field just to cheer on the Pack to victory, and they remember the days of Vince Lombardi. They go to fish fries on Friday night, love to tailgate, fish walleye and bass in the northern lakes, go waterskiing, and participate in the local office pool. They have their favorite neighborhood bar where they know everyone, greet people by name in the grocery store, and love garage sales. They know what it's like to work hard, whether it's to save the family farm, or at the papermill or factory. They know that dairy and lumber are their lifeblood. They like seeing the leaves turn gold and crimson in autumn and the tulips and daffodils peeking out in the spring. They love their beers. And brats. And fishboils. They want brandy in front of a fire in the wintertime, and still go into dark restaurants to order chablis by the carafe. They like progressive ideas, but want someone to talk straight to them.

In Madison, you'll find the university crowd, people who shop mostly in the health food stores, have art fairs, and very active GLBT communities, coffeehouses, and lots of live-and-let-live. Milwaukee has the tough urban landscape like a far northern suburb of Chicago, poverty next to old money on the lake, beer manufacturing as a lifeblood, plenty of German food and European heritage.

This is a state that has no problem electing a popular Republican governor alongside two extremely progressive Democratic senators, and would take equal pride in having Tommy Thompson on a national ticket as it would Russ Feingold.

That's why Wisconsin is in play.

The Person, Not the Party

I remember well watching my first presidential convention during the 1960 campaign, sitting in front of a black-and-white television eager to know what was happening. Like any other inquisitive child, I asked my father who he was supporting.

Kennedy.

"I generally support the underdog," he said.

That carried a lot of influence at an early age and many years following. Though my father was a registered Democrat, and generally voted Democratic, he was quick to point out that he voted the person, not the party, that he felt was best for the country or the community at the time.

Most election years, my father came back from voting with my mother, and we'd learn that they'd cancelled each other out in the polling booth. My mother, the product of a family that produced many local politicians who'd originally run as Democrats, had been swept away in a post-50's movement in the LDS Church that had run more to the Republican Party, where people felt that in order to be faithful members they had to vote to the right.

A state away, we watched a number of election controversies take place in Utah, including periodic votes on liquor-by-the-drink, and Democratic candidates running for Governor or Senator in the State of Utah. In the cattle and oil county we inhabited in southwestern Wyoming, dynastic cattle families could be generally assured to be voting Republican.

Four years later, we'd lost a president to an assassin's bullet. That took on special significance to the daughter of a Kennedy supporter, and rose the man to mythic stature among much of the American landscape. My best friend's father was supporting Barry Goldwater, and I got my first taste of the nature of political campaigns. They were blood sport, putting teams out onto a field and cheering for the favorite, or putting two contenders into the ring and hoping "our guy" would win. I couldn't understand how someone who was my friend could come from such a different point of view.

The sixties brought people clamoring for change, figureheads who went to untimely deaths, struggles against an unpopular war, and discrimination, and inhibition. They also brought us Richard Nixon.

I was in college when he resigned in shame in the wake of the Watergate scandal. The candidate the LDS Church had allowed to speak from the pulpit at the Salt Lake Tabernacle had gone down in flames, and I was campaigning as a Young Democrat at BYU for Utah Congressman Wayne Owens in his unsuccessful bid for a Senate seat against Republican Jake Garn. When he lost, he was suddenly given a position as Mission President in Montreal, Canada.

It wasn't easy being a Young Democrat at BYU. At the time, it was akin to being a member of the Black Panther Party or SDS there. Lone gentile at a bar mitzvah. Suddenly, it was 1976, and the incumbent unexpectedly elevated Vice President Gerald Ford was running against an upstart from the south, Jimmy Carter, who represented change, and hope. He seemed to be one of the people. Again, I learned what it was like to have a best friend have everything else in common with me, and argue for the opposition. It was clear a dairy farmer's daughter from Idaho had brought with her her own set of family prejudices and predispositions, just as I had, daughter of a working class father of six, daughter of a father who said, "I vote for the person, not the party, but we generally champion the underdog."

The person, not the party.

But in all those years, the person had always been Democrat. It was Democratic ideals that most nearly reflected our worldview, our aspirations. We went to bed at night listening to "Abraham, Martin and John" sung mournfully over the radiowaves beamed from Oklahoma City.

Carter blew it, there was no doubt, but my anger towards a former B-movie star who'd elevated himself to Governor of California reached a peak when he got manipulated the release of American hostages to influence an election. We then entered what I perceived to be eight of the bleakest years of American life. But I noticed something happening, all around me. There was a change in the wind. Young people who ordinarily wouldn't be championing conservative causes were suddenly becoming Young Republicans, because of this tidal wave of change. Freshmen were entering the university not intent on getting a general liberal arts education, but specializing in business, and computers, and management. Something definitely had shifted under our feet.

And the Gipper had done it.

I put my head down low for eight years, hoping we'd all survive it. When it was revealed following his White House exit that he had Alzheimer's, I joined those who were not the least surprised.

Meanwhile, election after election, the Democratic Party paraded out a seemingly endless stream of Minnesota milquetoast, Humphries and Mondales. When both Gary Hart and Michael Dukakis arrived on the stage, I was encouraged. Maybe the Democrats could actually win. Gary Hart threw his away on a boat, and Dukakis on a tank. Things weren't looking good for the Dems. We were resigned to live the rest of our lives under the rule of hawkish Republicans who'd march us off to war while their wives sported big eagle broaches with diamonds while hosting teas. Oliver North, and the Iran-Contra affair, seemed to typify what was wrong with America.

The year I married my husband, we both voted in the election the morning we drove to Milwaukee to pick out my wedding dress. We went first to my polling place, then to his, then off to the Pfister Hotel that night where I had a business meeting for the weekend to watch returns.

It occurred to me, we hadn't discussed how we voted. We'd been so busy in the previous weeks leading up to our engagement, the election really hadn't been a topic. We sat there at the Pfister that night, watching the returns come in, and for the first time, discussed politics. Who did you vote for? I asked.

Fortunately, we'd voted for the same person, and both breathed a sigh of relief.

That discussion about politics was illuminating. My husband's story interwove the same campaigns from my past into the present. 1960, he'd been asked to be the person who escorted JFK and Jackie Kennedy around the local county. He had his oldest son pulling a little red wagon through the neighborhood with Kennedy flyers, knocking on doors. Later, he and his first wife were invited to the inauguration.

But my husband also told a story, and a worldview, that reflected my own. "We vote the person, not the party," he said. Like me, he'd rarely voted a straight ticket, although he'd generally self-identified as a Democrat. We laughed at how there were those who thought he was a Republican, and those who swore he was Democrat, all based on superficial judgments. He was a successful businessman--wouldn't it stand to reason he was Republican? He was an Irish Catholic from Chicago--wouldn't it stand to reason he was a Kennedy Democrat? He went through much of his adult life friends with governors, senators and congressmen of both parties.

Both of us have had life experiences that have made us convinced that the greater good of a nation, and a community, was best served in voting the person, and not the party, and not feeling the blindsighted allegiance to party over all.

As we have with most elections since we married, we've looked at the available choices for Commander in Chief and made our own judgments about who would be best for the country at any given time. Fortunately, those judgments have always lined up.

Four years ago, the first determinative act my husband did after entering the hospital in early August was to vote absentee ballot in the Kerry-Bush election. We'd spent several days discussing the issues, and the candidates, and I wanted to be sure he understood both clearly before casting a vote, when he'd been unconscious in a hospital bed for weeks beforehand. It was clear he had a grasp of the issues, and the candidates. And he cast his vote.

That same little boy who toted the red wagon for Kennedy in 1960 went on to be a Kennedy devotee, a champion of the party, and by 2004 was on Kerry's steering committee.

In the same family, however, his brother, ten years his junior, is a diehard conservative who has a completely different worldview, separated primarily by, it seems, the Reagan years. That younger brother typifies what I observed in my later years at BYU--a tide had turned, and there was a generation of conservatives coming forward. The two brothers could not be more different. One would expect both to be fiscally conservative and socially liberal, but they're not.

The night the Bush-Gore election hung by a thread in Florida, that youngest called me late into the night at our Florida home desperate for information. It was as though his entire future hung in the balance of the outcome of Florida.

Many in the country felt the same way. Not all agreed on the desired outcome, but the sense that it was a pivotal election was palpable.

Gore's gone on his way and on to Nobel greatness and Hollywood awards. Edwards, my boy from four years ago, has gone on to general limbo of those who commit political suicide.

I apologize to those who feel I should be championing party loyalty over any desire for having the best person run our country. My mindset and worldview has been shaped by my own unique life experiences. At this point in my life, despite sympathies to certain ideals over others that more closely align with one party than another, I resist the notion that I need to vote a straight ticket, or vote for a certain candidate, because of party affiliation. At the beginning of this election season, I took a good look at the entire field, and felt strongly that one candidate was superior to the others, and supported that candidate to the best of my ability. But it was not a judgment I took likely. I do not believe that automatically meant I had to vote for my party's nominee, even if it was not that person.

I am unapologetically moderate at this point in my life, very liberal in some ways and equally conservative in others. My country is important to me; I do not regarding voting as an act of frivolity. I want to know about the person who's going to have the nuclear codes. It's less important to me that they are perfect, worship the same God (or none at all), or have more or fewer homes than I do. I care less than I did in the anti-Vietnam sixties if that person has served in the military; I care less that I did when Walter Mondale tapped Geraldine Ferraro for issues relating to token race and gender. I dream, as I've frequently noted, of a colorblind and genderblind society, where candidates and campaigns aren't focused on a single community, a single target voting bloc, a single set of sympathies and sensibilities.

I fully respect those who choose to align their allegiances without question to a particular political party and campaign, volunteer, contribute and vote accordingly. I won't be branded a traitor for making my own best judgments about candidates seeking the highest office in the land, and will make them clean of conscience. And I do that in honor and tribute to a wonderful father, long gone, and with a nod to a supportive husband, still here, both of whom emphasized a philosophy that is also my own, "The person, not the party."

Burn After Reading

Not the Coen brothers' best film.

The cast itself is a promising six-degrees-of-separation. George Clooney, from O Brother, Where Art Thou. George Clooney and Brad Pitt, from Ocean's Eleven/Twelve/Thirteen. George Clooney and Tilda Swinton, from Michael Clayton. Frances McDormand, a Coen spouse, from Fargo.

And John Malkovich, from, well, everything.

All of the above mentioned films are better than Burn After Reading. George Clooney is far better as the Dapper Dan Man in O Brother than here. Frances McDormand is far better as the pregnant Marge in Fargo than here.

Oddly enough, the best performances are from those who are novices to the Coen entourage--Brad Pitt, Tilda Swinton, and John Malkovich. The funniest lines, and moments, are all Pitt's, as he plays counter to suave. Tilda Swinton is brilliant as a cold redhead bitch pediatrician with absolutely no bedside manner, unless she's under the sheets with Clooney. And John Malkovich is, well, John Malkovich. He's like Kleenex; he's his own brand.

The film opens with a wide shot of Google Earth, panning down over North America until it drops on CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia, where we find Malkovich's character, Osborne Cox, a veteran CIA agent, losing his job because "he drinks too much." He then delivers one of the best lines of the entire movie: "F*** it, you're a Mormon--next to you everyone drinks too much!"

Having lost his job, he heads home to Georgetown to tell his uptight pediatrician wife, Katie, who's so wrapped up in preparations for a cocktail party she's hosting that evening that she can't manage to find the time to hear him deliver the news, news she was never destined to take well, even though he alters it somewhat by telling her that he quit voluntarily, and yes, without severance, without benefits, without anything. She's unimpressed by his plan to write his memoirs in his post-CIA ennui.

Guests at the cocktail party include George Clooney's character, Harry Pfarrer, another government suit who used to work for State but now works for Treasury, and in twenty-two years of carrying one has "never had to fire his gun," and his children's book author wife, Sandy.

Unbenownst to Osborne, his wife and Harry have been doing the horizontal mambo.

Katie Cox, concerned about the recent reversal of her husband's fortunes, privately consults with a divorce attorney about the prospect of ending her marriage, and is advised that she should research the family finances prior to serving him with papers. When Osborne is out of the house attending a Princeton alumni dinner, she goes into his computer in the basement and starts copying files.

Across town, in the Hardbodies Gym, we find Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand), a forty-something single female who cruises internet dating sites and yearns to "reinvent herself" through cosmetic surgery, and Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt), a charming dullard of a personal trainer whose reach exceeds his grasp. When someone finds a computer disc on the floor of the ladies' locker room, which appears to have highly sensitive classified information on it, Linda and Chad see a ticket to a brighter future. The gym manager, Ted, a former Greek Orthodox priest endearingly played by Richard Jenkins, wants nothing to do with it.

Once Chad uncovers the source of the classified information, one "Osborne Cox," he hatches a plan to return the disc to Cox, for a small finder's fee ("Good Samaritan Tax"), aided by Linda.

Meanwhile Linda's dating misadventures lead her to an internet dating connection with Harry, whose wife is out of town on a several-city book tour.

Katie Cox has divorce papers served on Osborne, changes the locks and puts his bags on the street. Telling Harry that all he needs now is to free himself of his own marriage in order for them to be together only sends him further the other direction, yearning for his wife's return, only to learn she is also planning to divorce him.

There's enough cloak-and-dagger misadventure here to keep people guessing who's following in the black car in the rear view mirror.

Best moments are Pitt's comic turns, but the movie tends to be more dark than comic. It doesn't take dark to its brilliant and well written extreme, like No Country for Old Men, nor mix the dark with the comic perfectly, like Fargo. It doesn't have the witty repartee of Raising Arizona or O Brother, Where Art Thou.

The key to understanding Burn After Reading is really found in a climactic scene between Osborne Cox and another important character in the film, when he lets the audience know, if they didn't already, that's he really fed up with dealing with morons and imbeciles. It's that frustration with the dribs and drabs of life that spins the entire misadventure of a film from firing to infidelity to insecurity to mistrust to what the CIA superior, played especially well by Juno's dad J. K. Simmons, accurately calls a "G-D clusterf***." (Cue Marge's line from the end of Fargo, "And for what? For a little bit of money.")

I won't spoil the ending for you except to assure you that Linda does finally get her cosmetic surgery, if not her heart's desire.

I was reminded of Barbra Streisand and Ryan O'Neal's misadventures with the multiple plaid suitcases in "What's Up Doc?"

Eunice Burns is a better Linda Litzke. And What's Up Doc? is a better film.