Whole Deck of Race Cards

The Issue That Dared Not Speak Its Name is now on everybody's lips, including John McCain's and Barack Obama's own. Is this good or bad? Maybe both.

On the positive side, it's healthy to drag prejudice into the open (fresh air as a disinfectant and all that). Those who vote against Obama because of race should at the very least be made to squirm for it, if they have the capacity for being embarrassed, instead of hiding behind euphemisms.

But we are now involved in a more convoluted debate that threatens to diminish all sides. Let's review the bidding:

After the Jeremiah Wright YouTube rants, Obama made his Philadelphia speech about race, was almost universally applauded for it and prepared to move on.

But Hillary Clinton's sudden enormous popularity with "working-class voters" in the late primaries showed that millions had a wee problem seeing a black person in the White House, and it was inevitable that Republican swiftboaters would notice and act accordingly.

Obama, in effect, challenged them to try. “We know what kind of campaign they’re going to run,” he told Americans in June. “They’re going to try to make you afraid of me. He’s young and inexperienced and he’s got a funny name. And did I mention he’s black?”

For the past month, the McCain campaign has been doing just that, using "different" and "flashy" as its locutions of choice.

Responding to the Britney Spears-Paris Hilton ad, Bob Herbert in today's New York Times muses:

"Gee, I wonder why, if you have a black man running for high public office--say, Barack Obama or Harold Ford--the opposition feels compelled to run low-life political ads featuring tacky, sexually provocative white women who have no connection whatsoever to the black male candidates."

When Obama himself hit back, he was accused of playing the race card. “I did not bring up the issue," John McCain says in his best I'm-shocked,shocked style. “Senator Obama...brought up the issue of race, I responded to it...I’m disappointed, and I don’t want that issue to be part of this campaign."

So what we have now is a whole deck of race cards, with double edges, on the table. Once the August silly season is over and the Conventions start, politicians on both sides will be talking about the economy, wars and threats other than Obama's skin tone. But the issue will be there, under the radar, all the way to November.

Clergy Cuckooland

We are in new territory this year when politicians renounce men of God for their wildly divisive rhetoric, as Barack Obama did yesterday in resigning from Trinity United Church of Christ after the bombast of Rev. Rev. Jeremiah Wright and the bad taste of Michael Pfleger, a visiting Catholic priest.

Earlier in the month, John McCain cut loose his dynamic duo of Pastor John Hagee and the Reverend Rod Parsley for their hate-mongering.

In earlier times, it was the clergy who denounced such behavior by candidates for public office, but in the era of televangelism and mega-churches, the competition for worshippers has become as intense as the scramble for votes.

The YouTubing that has punished candidates for breaching political correctness (pace George Allen of Macaca fame) is just now catching up with preachers, many of whom have been uninhibited in their expression by the certainty that they are doing God's work.

But that's all changing. Even the sainted Billy Graham, adviser to Presidents since Eisenhower, was embarrassed by the recent release of audiotapes of his agreeing with Nixon about the "stranglehold" of Jews on American media and encouraging him by saying, "If you get elected a second time, then we might be able to do something."

In politics as well as religion, God works in mysterious ways. You never know who's listening.

Obama's Preening Pastor

What emerges from watching the endless YouTubing of Jeremiah Wright is not the picture of a religious or political fanatic but a world-class attention-seeker. In those operatic video clips, there is a dashiki-dressed performer playing to the crowd, a soulmate, not of Louis Farrakhan, but of Bill Maher, whose imprudent comments on 9/11 cost him his network gig.

Now Obama's pastor is back on stage, coming out of his recent retirement, with Bill Moyers on PBS tonight and at the National Press Club in Washington next Monday, flamboyantly defending himself to the possible political detriment of his former congregant:

"I think they wanted to communicate that I am unpatriotic, that I am un-American, that I am filled with hate speech, that I have a cult at Trinity United Church of Christ. And by the way, guess who goes to his church, hint, hint, hint?"

If Hillary Clinton's campaign were paying him, the Rev. Wright couldn't being doing more for them than to keep Obama's embarrassment front and center in the days leading up to the final critical primaries.

But we may be underestimating him. By continuing to call attention to himself, Wright may be deviously trying to show that Obama is not under the Svengali-like influence of a dangerous man, just bedeviled by the antics of a showoff.

If so, that would be too subtle for most voters. All that may register with them is Obama's unfortunate choice in a spiritual adviser.

New Kind of Presidential Debate

Would you rather see the candidates grilled by Tim Russert and Wolf Blitzer or a snowman and a gun nut cradling his "baby," a semi-automatic weapon?

Close call, but isn't there an alternative? The question is prompted by Paul Krugman's column after this week's Democratic debate, claiming Barack Obama was "a sucker" for signing on to fears that Social Security is a "Ponzi scheme" that will go bankrupt before Baby Boomers can collect what's due them.

Most voters, it's fair to say, would like to know who's blowing smoke here--politicians or dueling economists--but we're not likely to find out from sound-bite answers to ignorant questions.

In our treasured but messy democracy, there is room for college girls to ask Hillary Clinton about diamonds and pearls but so far not for informed political scientists, historians and economists to ask knowledgeable questions that could show us who really understands the issues.

At the end of this month, CNN will give us Republican hopefuls being discomfited by cutesy YouTubers, a spectacle that will undoubtedly produce entertaining insights into how well the candidates handle social embarrassment.

But if we want to know what they know about issues that will affect our lives when one of them takes the oath, couldn't there be at least one debate in which they face those talking heads the networks trot out only on election night to give us perspective on what's been going on or at other times we only hear on PBS?

A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, but total ignorance, as we know only too well from recent experience, can be disastrous. Along with the snowman and Chris Matthews, can't we have at least one debate with questions from Krugman and his academic peers of various political persuasions?

We should be willing to take the risk of being bored to death to try to avoid being governed by morons.

A Digital Dying

Randy Pausch is a man of his time, a popular computer-science professor who lectures about time management and has done pioneer research in robotics and virtual reality. He is 46 years old, happily married and has three young children. A year ago, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and now has only months to live.

For almost everybody else, dying is the most private experience of a lifetime. Aldous Huxley once wrote about terminal illness: “We live in one universe and die in another.”

Not Randy Pausch. He is sharing his final days as a joyous celebration of life, on his web site, in a lecture for his students and a YouTube encounter for the rest of us.

Knowing him is an unforgettable experience.

Health Care Slum: Tear It Down!

If Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon were deciding who dies and who gets maimed in Iraq, there would be a public outcry. Why, then, is it acceptable for HMOs and insurance companies to make those decisions for Americans at home?

In all the talk about health care, none of the ’08 White House aspirants has been willing so far to take a wrecking ball to the termite-infested structure that has been deteriorating for half a century.

The slum lords, who take one out of every three dollars collected from the victims, are interested only in profits, some of which they use to lobby against any attempt to provide decent public housing instead,

As Clinton, Obama and Edwards duel over their palliative remedies and the Republicans snarl about “socialized medicine,” there is no serious debate about extending the Medicare model, which works well for older Americans, into a single-payer system that would provide better care at far less cost.

If all the moviegoers who are enjoying their righteous outrage after seeing “Sicko” would demand it, we could have a serious discussion instead of sound bites.

Will any network will step up and offer the time for it? From the sampling of YouTube videos so far, there would be no shortage of good questions.

"American Idol" Debate

The YouTube questioners tonight were more inventive and at times funnier than the usual MSM suspects, but the candidates, egged on by an applauding audience, were even more preening and self-congratulating than usual.

Book-ended by Mike Gravel’s scolding and Denis Kucinich’s certainty about everything, Joe Biden and Chris Dodd were selling their hundred years of experience as Senators, Bill Richardson was pushing his claim that Governors were better bets, John Edwards was fervently sincere and uxorious, Barack Obama kept reminding everybody he was against the war in Iraq before it started and Hillary Clinton was oozing leadership by being firm while patronizingly patting the also-rans on the head for being good little Democrats instead of bad old Republicans.

With Anderson Cooper as the amiable M.C. of the variety show, detailed answers to substantive questions would have spoiled the fun. Next: The candidates trade one-liners with a panel of Leno, Letterman, Bill Maher and Jon Stewart.

Salad Dressing Secrets and Our Own

Sometimes American culture looks like one of those circus riders straddling two horses pulling in different directions.

Today’s equestrianism is about individuality. Under one foot is the report that a New York restaurateur is suing a former employee for theft of intellectual property by copying elements of her establishment from the décor to the menu.

Going in another direction is Thomas Friedman’s New York Times column titled “The Whole World Is Watching,” which says:

“When everyone has a blog, a MySpace page or Facebook entry, everyone is a publisher. When everyone has a cellphone with a camera in it, everyone is a paparazzo. When everyone can upload video on YouTube, everyone is filmmaker. When everyone is a publisher, paparazzo or filmmaker, everyone else is a public figure. We’re all public figures now. The blogosphere has made the global discussion so much richer--and each of us so much more transparent.”

There are echoes here of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World where “everybody belongs to everybody else,” and you don’t have to be Ayn Rand to find some of the implications troubling, even while cheering on the kind of open society that people like Dick Cheney hate.

Chef Rebecca Charles will likely not have much luck with legal remedies for claims about appropriation of her recipe for Caesar Salad dressing and touches like little packets of oyster crackers at each place setting, but her sense of feeling violated is understandable.

We may not live in a Brave New World--yet--but it makes sense to be thinking about where all this transparency is taking us while we can still rein in the horses.

YouTubing to the White House

In 1992, Bill Clinton made history as the first Presidential candidate to appear on MTV, play the sax and answer questions about his underwear. Some political observers think it’s been downhill ever since.

But that will seem like ancient history next month when the Democrats have the first YouTube debate ever on CNN, with viewer videos replacing reporters to ask questions and, more than likely, offer visual montages for candidates’ responses.

What we can expect may be foreshadowed by some of the YouTube golden oldies--the “1984” portrayal of Hillary Clinton as Big Sister, the “I Feel Pretty” accompaniment to John Edwards’ hair styling and, just this week, the “I Got a Crush on Obama” music video.

Forgive an old killjoy for asking: We may get a lot of youthful self-expression, but what the hell will any of it have to do with picking someone to run the country?