At first, I was pissed at the media for taking a few nutcases and blowing their joke of a movement way out of proportion for the sake of one of their Campaign Narratives. But I apologize for this. I was totally wrong. These are the most fascinating people in America.
(Larry King just finished interviewing a PUMA right now who, in addition to all the normal PUMA craziness, has this weird facial tic thing whereby she makes her point, looks indignant as these PUMAs are wont to do (she's kind of got a lazy eye, too) with her serious face, stops speaking, pauses for like four or five seconds, I think she suddenly thinks to herself "oh shit I'm not smiling what do I look like" and gives the camera the absolute phoniest smile I have ever seen. Terrifying. Also, she keeps saying she isn't supporting Obama because he hasn't asked for her vote. A more self-centered and entitled person I have not heard since the last PUMA interview I watched. Apparently unless a candidate chats this woman up and asks how her kids are, they haven't earned her vote. I wish I caught her name so I could print it here and maybe just MAYBE she would do a Google search for her name and she how fucking self-centered and brainless she is, but I missed it, so the best I can do is LARRY KING GOOGLY-EYED PUMA.)
(UPDATE: Video here. God, that "smile." She must've been a disappointing pageant girl before she got hollowed out when her looks faded. I bet her husband drinks.)
It seems to me the PUMAs are the logical conclusion to our current sound byte political atmosphere. Again, I do think the PUMAs are being blown out of proportion by a media who looks for the interesting story first and the truth second (or at least this is what I am telling myself; I also think--and the polls bear this out--that it started out as more of a fringe-crazy thing and the media's legitimizing a few bitter wacky old Jews/Manhattanites (mostly) by giving their airtime helped the movement gain steam, which is fucking depressing), and though most people (hopefully) vote on the issues, there are still a not insignificant number of Americans who vote for whichever abstraction the candidates can latch themselves onto. In the primary, of course, it was CHANGE vs. EXPERIENCE. A lot of people could care less about Obama's specific policies, but saw the Clinton psychodrama coming down the highway and practically salivated at the thought of CHANGE. Clintonites may have originally been attracted to Hillary's health care, or maybe they had loved her for years and she was a known quantity to them, but she affixed EXPERIENCE to herself and--here's the important part--attached INEXPERIENCE to Obama in ways Obama didn't do to Clinton (there was, no doubt, a bit of SAME OLD attached to Clinton by the Obama folks, but I would argue it wasn't done as explicitly), and suddenly EXPERIENCE became less of an abstraction or shorthand for a candidate and more of a rallying cry--a reason to vote.
So in the course of all this EXPERIENCE/INEXPERIENCE stuff, there was a core of superdevoted Hillary supporters who--to rationalize their own insane devotion to this woman and the absolute despair they felt when she lost what they had just assumed would be hers by birthright or something--convinced themselves that the reason they felt so passionately in the first place was that Hillary was EXPERIENCED. After all, that is what she was telling them. Hillary and Obama didn't talk much about Iraq. They certainly didn't talk about things like abortion rights, because they didn't need to. And so EXPERIENCE/CHANGE became even more strained a narrative than it would have been. And then Hillary lost and McCain (I want to say brilliantly, even if it was only stumbling into a brilliant coincidence since no matter who walked out of Denver he was still going to be so very old) said "well shucks, I'm EXPERIENCED, after all" and suddenly you have Hillary supporters acting against all their political self-interest because, in their strain to make the Hillary/Obama divide something worth investing so heavily in, they've made EXPERIENCE the most important issue of the campaign. Even though it's not an issue--it's an abstraction, a buzzword, a talking point. It's nothing. But now, when the thing to do after a primary (if you're a member of a political party, anyway) is to hit the reset button and say "well experience is important, but all the things I believe in are pretty important too" and set your differences aside and fall in line, the EXPERIENCE thing has been drilled so deeply into their brains by the nature of the primary (long, tough, unplesant) that it's there to stay and they've forgotten all about the things that are really important that should make this election an absolute laffer for Obama.
I love watching these PUMAs, because as these anchors rip into them (and it is so easy), you can see their brains laboring to make the connections necessary to justify their support for a man with whom they have absolutely nothing in common politically. They don't have an easy answer. They say they feel they've been mistreated during the primary, but when they're pressed to explain why that justifies their unbearable pouting and their inexplicable conviction to VOTE FOR THE OTHER CANDIDATE (not just abstaining, which would be misguided but at least I can respect that, but VOTING FOR THE OTHER CANDIDATE), they struggle. Some say that's enough--that the DNC fucked them over so much it's a matter of principle. Others say they have serious concerns about Obama's inexperience, but tellingly, they never go past this (and frustratingly, anchors don't press them further). What do they believe will happen? That Obama will bungle into a war with Iran because he presses the wrong button? That he is fooled by a Republican Senator into amending the Constitution to ban gay marriage? That he panics and overturns Roe v. Wade somehow? He freaks out and does some more of the things McCain openly admits to wanting to do? PLEASE, anchors, ask this question--if you are, in fact, a Democrat/liberal, what could an inexperienced Democrat do to the country that would be worse than what an old, hardened, kind-of-crazy Republican would do?
They will have no answer for this. They are not Democrats anymore--they are not motivated by liberal politics or anything like that. Call them Experiants--at this point, they'll follow it off a cliff.
There was one woman CNN interviewed shortly after Hillary's speech (which, I must admit, was nice. The "were you voting for my sake or for the sake of the soldier/woman without health care" sentiment hit the nail on the head re: these selfish, self-aggrandizing PUMA hogs, who are pretending this is about Clinton so they don't have to admit they're selfish children concerned only with their own feelings. And also, now that I've thought about it, I would argue Hillary couldnt've all of a sudden said "just kidding Obama is ready to lead after all" because that would have come off as totally insincere and would have cast a pall of insincerity over the whole rest of the remarks) who really hit the humanity of this thing. She wasn't a PUMA, but she was a Hillary delegate, all decked out in Hillary garb. She was incredibly earnest, and through the interview, she was on the edge of tears. She said she would absolutely not vote for McCain, but she still wasn't ready to vote for Obama yet. She could win him over, but she had to know more about him, she said. Which sounds fucking obnoxious and ignorant in print, but came across at least a little better on screen, because you could see the anguish she was going through, that this woman she had devoted so much energy to supporting wasn't going to be President anytime soon and that it was really over. She was smart enough and had enough integrity to know that, politically, she could never vote for McCain and should almost certainly vote against him. For this woman, at least, it wasn't a self-aggrandizing ME ME ME thing, like with so many of these Clinton supporters, it was a real internal conflict. She was tearing up and I could feel her struggling with her convictions vs. the easy Clintonian buzzword politics that told her that Obama was still all wrong. The stars really aligned, this campaign, which is why this is all so strange and powerful--a difficult primary campaign that saddled the eventual winner with exactly the kinds of weaknesses his Republican opponent could best exploit. There are a lot of morons out there who are lost causes, and good riddance to them. But there are still voters like that one woman CNN managed to find who are sincerely trying to break free from the hypnotic easy answers our debased political discourse offers, and to those people, I wish the best.
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
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1 comment:
Saw your post last night after I saw the PUMA on Larry King. I should have the video up on my blog shortly. Still waiting for YouTube to process it.
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