Lessons from the 2012 Presidential campaign

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It has taken me a little while to compose myself after Election Night 2012.  Now that I’ve stopped screaming with joy, however, I’ve jotted down a few things I’ve learned over the past few weeks and months.

 

 

As follows:

 

 

Probably you shouldn’t try to redefine the word “rape.” It doesn’t make you many friends. (Todd Akin, Richard Mourdock: hear me?)

 

 

Money doesn’t necessarily win elections.  When it’s quite evident that you’re trying to buy a House/Senate seat (McMahon in Connecticut, Hinckley in Rhode Island), you will probably lose. And Donald Trump publicly mocked Karl Rove for wasting millions of dollars of PAC money on candidates who lost. (As a Tumblr commentator said: Who knows more than Donald Trump about wasting money?)

 

 

Lying is very traditional in American presidential elections, but it’s getting easier and easier to disprove a lie. Probably people should try to lie less (or at least more cleverly). And they should not openly flout the fact-checkers.

 

 

In a state where people traditionally hate and fear state troopers (like Rhode Island, for example), the opposition party shouldn’t nominate a state trooper as their candidate. (Bye-bye, Brendan Doherty.)

 

 

Don’t make fun of your opponent. It makes you look small. (This one goes out to former Senator Scott Brown of Massachusetts, who insisted on belittling his opponent Elizabeth Warren as a liar, as ugly, as untrustworthy, as a “college professor.” It didn’t work, did it, Scotty?)

 

 

Do not, in your concession speech, imply that God made your opponent win in order to make the Apocalypse happen sooner. (Okay, Mr. God-be-the-glory Todd Akin?)

 

 

Don’t assume that gay marriage is a passing fad. Before Tuesday, every popular referendum on gay marriage had failed, and the Republicans / social conservatives were convinced they had a failsafe way to defeat gay marriage: bring it to a popular vote. Well, on Tuesday, four states voted, and three (Washington, Maine, and Maryland) upheld gay marriage. You can be sure the GOP will be less confident in future about this particular strategy. (So Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee can take their Chick-fil-A sandwiches and jam them up one another’s asses. And they can make sure those sandwiches are up there real tight, too.)

 

 

And finally:

 

 

The country is changing. We are more diverse, and more tolerant, as a whole. (A commentator in 2008, shortly after Obama’s first election, said that bigotry and intolerance in the USA would decrease over time, but (like seawater evaporating) they would become more concentrated and intense. I remember thinking this was a very wise thing to say. Now, after four years of concentrated intense vicious hatred of Obama and the liberal agenda, I see how prescient he was.) But we are not Sarah Palin’s America, and we are not Mitt Romney’s America (whatever the hell that was supposed to be about). We are a multicolored America. We do not care to be ruled by Christian law, or Sharia law, or any kind of religious law for that matter. We like our marijuana. We like being married to our common-law partners. We like Planned Parenthood. We like knowing that, if we become ill, we will not go into bankruptcy if we go to the doctor. We have no problem with electing women, and gays, and differently-abled people; in fact, we’re proud to be represented by them.

 

 

Let the right-wing nuts shriek about socialism and the Death of America, kids. They’ll tucker themselves out in a while, and we can have some peace, maybe even through Inauguration Day.

 

 

And I’m sure the 2016 campaign won’t begin before June or July of 2013.

 

 

(I plan to vote for Hillary. How about you?)

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Adorably unsafe at any speed

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I was walking to the health club the other day, and I paused at the corner of Wayland and Pitman. It’s a bad corner: Wayland Avenue drivers are timid and hesitant, and Pitman Street drivers are aggressive and nasty.

 

 

I waited for all the cars to go through before I crossed. But the last car caught my attention. It was driven by a woman with something like a fox terrier in her lap. She was actually driving while resting her chin on the dog’s head. The dog was avidly looking out the side window, while the driver was looking straight ahead.

 

 

It was adorable, and terrifying.

 

 

I’m just thankful that the driver wasn’t on her phone, or texting, at the same time. Who drives with an animal in her/his lap? An idiot, that’s who.

 

 

In Flannery O’Connor’s short story “A Good Man Is Hard To Find,” all the trouble is initiated by a cat named Pitty Sing, who’s been smuggled into a car by Grandma. Disaster ensues.

 

 

Listen to Flannery O’Connor, kids. No matter how much you love your pets, don’t let them ride in your lap while you’re in the car, no matter how adorable they are, no matter how adorable you think you look while doing so.

 

 

All kinds of non-adorable things can happen.

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Rhode Island politics: Cicilline versus Doherty

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Rhode Island politics are always very strange. We’re a blue state, and Democrats are mostly in charge, but we have a strange habit of electing Republicans from time to time, especially as Governor. (Rhode Island Republicans are very different from, let’s say, Oklahoma Republicans; they’re much more middle-of-the-road than the national norm. That being said, they’re still Republicans.)

 

 

 

We have an interesting Congressional race going on in RI District One. The incumbent, David Cicilline, a cute little gay Jewish Italian from a family known to consort with the old Rhode Island Mafia, was formerly Mayor of Providence. I voted for him twice as Mayor and once as Congressman, and we all thought he’d run Providence pretty efficiently.

 

 

 

Until he left office, and it was found that the city’s funds had been horribly mismanaged, and Providence was perilously close to bankruptcy.

 

 

 

He’s running for reelection. His Republican opponent is a tough Irish ex-cop named Brendan Doherty. Doherty is breathtakingly unqualified for the position, by the way.

 

 

 

But he has integrity!

 

 

 

We are continually reminded that he has integrity!

 

 

 

(I’m reminded, somehow, of the old “Peanuts” comic strip, and Linus waiting for the Great Pumpkin, who would rise only out of the “most sincere pumpkin patch.”)

 

 

 

In one of Doherty’s ads, he’s walking through a dirty alleyway, talking about how he took on criminals, and he’s not afraid to take on “those politicians in Washington.” Does he think, as a freshman congressman, he’s gonna be able to beat people up until they see reason? I think not. They’ll eat him on toast.

 

 

 

So here’s our choice: a suave rascal (Cicilline) who votes consistently with the Democrats and the Obama agenda, or a crewcutted blockhead (Doherty) who fairly oozes integrity, and would almost certainly vote alongside the Republican House majority, once they work him over a few times.

 

 

 

Whom do you choose: the knave or the fool?

 

 

 

I choose the knave. I don’t care if Cicilline roasts and eats puppies for dinner, so long as he votes the right way in Congress.

 

 

 

(This, by the way, is the same kind of reasoning that kept Teddy Kennedy in the Senate, next door in Massachusetts. Horrible human being, but a great politician, and he always voted for the right stuff.)

 

 

 

I wish I could vote for someone I could feel really good about, though; someone like Barney Frank or Paul Wellstone; someone I respected, and who also voted the right way.

 

 

 

But we ain’t got nobody like that on the ballot at the moment.

 

 

 

So we votes the way we gotta vote.

 

 

 

(Sigh.)

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Bad poll

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I don’t mind participating in telephone polls. I like telling them how I feel, especially in an election year.

 

 

However . . .

 

 

The phone rang around 8:30pm last Sunday evening. It was a young woman calling from somewhere else in the USA (she had a vaguely Southern accent, and had no idea how to pronounce names like “Cicilline” and “Doherty,” so she certainly wasn’t local).

 

 

The first few questions were okay. Have you heard of the following, and how do you feel about them? Paul Ryan: yes, and strongly negative. Barack Obama? Yes, I think I’ve heard of the President of the United States, for whom I seem to remember I voted four years ago, and yes, I think he’s done well. Mitt Romney? Yes, and blech.

 

 

Then my pollster (who, poor thing, was only reading a script from her monitor) began subtly changing the script.

 

 

Here’s some background: our congressman, David Cicilline, used to be the mayor of Providence (I voted for him every time). He did a pretty good job, we thought, and we sent him on to Congress.

 

 

Then the city crashed. Turns out that David was using up rainy-day money to run the city, and now the city is a mess. The new mayor, Angel Taveras, has done a nice job of trying to pull the city out of its financial morass. But – and I hate to admit this – David, bless his gay / Italian / Jewish heart, had a lot to do with causing this.

 

 

But he has been an impeccable congressman for Rhode Island District One. He has upheld the Democratic agenda and helped the President, which is Job #1 as far as I’m concerned, especially when the House is dominated by the GOP.

 

 

Is he a saint? Not at all. Is he the perfect candidate? By no means. Is he doing the right thing in Congress? But assuredly.

 

 

Then, kids, I am for him. I don’t much care about what came before. All I care about is how he votes in Congress right this second.

 

 

David’s current opponent for the Congressional seat, Brendan Doherty, is a former Rhode Island cop who’s never held political office. He (with the assistance of lots of outside-of-Rhode-Island money) has made lots of awful commercials, in which he appears with his sleeves rolled up, ready to beat up rowdy Democrats and Communists (both of which he apparently anticipates meeting in the House of Representatives), telling us how his experience as a Rhode Island state trooper uniquely qualifies him to root out corruption in Washington.

 

 

O-kay.

 

 

Leaving aside the irony of someone claiming that, as a freshman congressman, he’d be able to do anything (does he think he’ll be patrolling the aisles of Congress in a policeman’s uniform, bopping people on the head with a nightstick if they don’t do the right thing?) –

 

 

Anyway.

 

 

So back to this telephone poll. “How do you feel about Bran Dan Doggery?” she asked me languidly. (As I said, she had no idea how to pronounce any of the Rhode Island candidates’ names.)

 

 

“Strongly negative,” I said.

 

 

“Did you know,” she said, “that Barack Obama’s health care plan will gut Medicare?”

 

 

“No,” I said, “and by the way, that’s a lie.”

 

 

“Did you know,” she continued, “that the enormous debt that Barack Obama has piled up – “

 

 

“Enough,” I said. “These aren’t statement of fact. I’m hanging up now.”

 

 

And I did.

 

 

I feel bad for the woman on the other side of the line. She sounded African-American, and if so, I can only imagine how uncomfortable she was asking these questions. (I know, I’m making assumptions. So sue me.)

 

 

That was a bad poll. It was a Fox News broadcast masquerading as a poll. It presented “facts” that were nothing of the sort, and then innocently asked: “Does this make you more or less likely to vote for David Cicilline?”

 

 

I don’t care if David Cicilline runs down the avenue naked. He votes the way I want him to, and that’s all that matters.

 

 

I’m not voting for a single solitary Republican in this election.

 

 

Got it?

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