For those of you who have OD’d on political commentary and yet crave more—my Google Reader is dry as a bone!!—The New York Review of Books has assembled its “usual cast of smarties”:http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22017 to weigh in on Indecision ’08.
Seems a good a place as any to mention the best book on politics I have ever read, _Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man,_ by Garry Wills. For those of you preemptively weary of Watergate and the twitchy Nixon of the second term, fear not: the book was written in 1969, before all of that.
I particularly recommend chapter 6, “The Hero,” which is a defense of Nixon’s old boss, Dwight Eisenhower. The chapter is a compelling brief for the political virtues of charisma, shrewdness, and moderation; much to my astonishment, it (the chapter) is available in full at “Google Books”:http://books.google.com/books?id=5cVKKLSC788C&printsec=frontcover&dq=nixon+agonistes&ei=aaULSd-8HZbMzQTvxvTsAw#PPA115,M1. (Actually, looking at it again, it’s probably necessary to read the previous chapter, “Checkers,” too; it’s also very good.)
This recommendation does not arise purely by chance. You see, I see a lot of Barack Obama in Wills’s description of Eisenhower, which could be a very good sign indeed. Wills emphasized Ike’s uncanny ability to win political battles deftly, with a minimum of overt conflict. What the pundits and the pols sometimes forget about politics is that winning isn’t the only thing; one must win _well,_ win and leave the other players involved devoid of rancor. I think Obama has this quality.
I was reminded of this trait of Obama’s during that brief interlude about a week after the Republican convention, when McCain, riding a wave of Palin-mania, managed to eke his way into the lead. Ever the optimist, I made two bets that week, one with a McCain supporter and another with a nervous Obama supporter, on the premise that Obama’s good times were far from over. There were many such bets to be made at that moment.
We forget it now, but there was ample discussion to the effect that McCain’s momentum had definitively established that Obama was too recessive, was not sufficiently capable of attack, and—naturally—should have chosen Hillary Clinton to be his VP. In one of his two-handers with John McWhorter that made 2008 such a delight, perpetual Obama skeptic Glenn Loury “expressed this view”:http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/14432 (start at about 29 minutes in) on a bloggingheads.tv “diavlog” recorded on September 14.
Loury made reference to the “knife fight” Obama had suddenly found himself in and observed that the Clintons would surely be mighty helpful in such a context. A few moments later, Loury used the words “elegant, articulate, intelligent” to describe Obama and generally left behind the impression that Obama might be too much of a Nancy boy for big-time politics.
Allow me expand on that: the person Loury was describing in such terms had very recently waged a six-month battle with the accepted heir apparent to the Democratic nomination—a battle that ended, of course, in his own triumph. It was this person that Loury could profess to describe as somehow weak or lacking steel or nerve.
It is useful in politics to win knife fights; it is even more useful in politics to emerge from tense confrontations with one’s adversaries and not leave all of the other players feeling as if a knife fight has just occurred. To describe a political … _warrior_ like Obama in such terms is ridiculous; it’s like saying that Greg Maddux displayed too much finesse to be a “really” effective pitcher. Yes, the Clintons often win knife fights—do they engage in anything else? How about someone who can play the Jedi mind trick on an adversary and leave nobody thirsting for blood?
My view of Obama’s deftness with regard to avoiding traditional political battles—that’s straight _Nixon Agonistes,_ chapter 6. If you read it, you might even recognize a shrewd Hawaiian-born pol between the lines.

Jason Kottke called the recent _Rolling Stone_ “profile”:http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/23638511/the_lost_years__last_days_of_david_foster_wallace/print of David Foster Wallace “as close to a biography of David Foster Wallace as you’ll get,” and I think that’s exactly right.
Since that post nearly two weeks ago, I had a transatlantic flight and the article was not online in full, so I bought the issue of _Rolling Stone_ at the airport. Not only is the article, by David Lipsky, the closest thing to a biography we will get (until we get one), but it’s so thorough that it’s difficult to imagine what additional substance a book-length version of same would provide.
According to “Jason,”:http://www.kottke.org/08/10/the-lost-years-and-last-days-of-david-foster-wallace _RS_ just made the full version available online; do yourself a favor and check it out.

Don’t look now, but James Wolcott’s been on fire lately. This “meditation”:http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott/2008/10/over-at-tpm-david-kurtz.html on hellish gridlock under a President McCain is brilliant, right up to the last deliciously _weltschmerz_-soaked line. And this “reminiscence”:http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott/2008/10/sheila-omalley-at-the-sheila.html of Pauline Kael’s connection to Barry Levinson’s _Diner_ really gets me where I live. I spent my college years inhaling as many of Kael’s words as I could get my hands on, and _Diner,_ which came out when I was 12, was the sort of quirky “how can this be a classic when TBS plays it every weekend?” gem that impressed me a lot during the same period. I didn’t know that she rescued the movie; more people should.

Ever since Barack Obama failed to win the New Hampshire primary (for reasons probably having little to do with people lying to pollsters), the media just cannot get enough of the Bradley effect. (For a cogent explanation of why the Bradley effect has been on the endangered species list since about 1991, and why it probably didn’t even happen to Tom Bradley himself, in the mayoral race of Los Angeles for 1982, see “here”:http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2008/10/24/04.)
The Bradley effect is an attempt to measure the existence of hidden racism among the electorate. People are racists but cloak their views before a judgmental pollster, goes the theory. It’s worth pointing out that the phenomenon itself requires a special combination of circumstances. If you make a line chart of “racism in society over time,” where it starts out at 100% (everyone is always racist) and it slopes diagonally downward to 0% (nobody knows what racism is), the Bradley effect would only obtain when you have a bunch of racists but the racists aren’t really in charge of the discourse. In other words, too much racism in the society and nobody’s embarrassed about expressing it; too little racism and it doesn’t get expressed. You have to have a whole bunch of racists who are feeling a bit sheepish. In a way, it’s not surprising that the window for the Bradley effect is always a fleeting one.
My opinion is that for a subject of a poll misrepresent what candidate he or she supports to an anonymous pollster who possesses no power to alter the subject’s life … well, you have got to be talking about some serious shame/embarrassment. In other words, not wanting to vote for the black guy isn’t a potent enough cocktail of shame and embarrassment to induce the lie. You have to be supporting … pretty much a Klansman or a Nazi to elicit it.
At this point, I’d like to bring in two men, “David Duke”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Duke and “Jörg Haider”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%B6rg_Haider.
I hear a lot about the Bradley effect, but I rarely hear anyone mention David Duke. David Duke was a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan who participated in a runoff election in the Republican primary for the gubernatorial race in Louisiana in 1991. A man named Edwin Edwards beat Duke pretty solidly, it turned out, but there were a few weeks there in which that outcome did not seem ensured, and in that period you heard a lot about white racists lying to pollsters. To be frank, it’s the last time (barring the possible exception of Harold Ford’s 2006 Senate run) that people talked about this subject at all in the United States. Here’s _The New York Times,_ after Duke “got beat”:http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D0CEFD91F3AF93BA25752C1A967958260:

Although the prospect of a large “hidden vote” for David Duke received a lot of speculation from poll takers and commentators in the weeks before Louisiana’s runoff election for governor, a hidden vote did not materialize in Edwin W. Edwards’s victory over Mr. Duke.

A hidden vote could have occurred if some voters were not willing to disclose their preferences to poll takers. In Mr. Duke’s past attempts at public office, his support was stronger than some polls had predicted, making some poll takers wary about simply using their standard methods in the runoff.

They seemed to take the effect pretty darn seriously, even if it didn’t manifest.
Between 1991 and 2008, you didn’t hear much about the Bradley effect in the United States. But you did hear about it (albeit not by that name) quite a bit in Austria, a country that featured the most successful radical right-wing politician in Europe: Jörg Haider.
By chance, Haider died in car crash a couple of weeks ago. In the 1990s, he led the Freedom Party of Austria to a series of very successful showings, finally entering a coalition government in 2000. Before Haider, the FPÖ was kind of a forgotten little right-wing party where the former Nazis would hang out; not a big deal. Haider changed all that, gradually building it up to nearly 30% of the vote and generally freaking a lot of liberals out, both inside and outside of Austria. Also, Haider would occasionally say flattering things about the Third Reich, which would get him into trouble.
And in Austria, you heard constantly about how polls were underrepresenting his support. I’m not an expert, but well-informed Austrians assure me that the electoral tallies tended to outstrip his support in polls.
In Austria, support for the Nazis is a crime punishable by “incarceration”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Irving; it’s a serious business, and the social sanctions against it are high—maybe not as high as here, but still very high. As with the KKK, perhaps, you don’t just casually admit to any anonymous caller that you are into supporting crypto-Nazis in Austria. Haider was deft enough a politician to blur his own Nazi ties (I myself think they were somewhat overstated)—but the whiff of social sanction was never far from him.
So that’s my thesis. if it’s just mild distaste for the black candidate, you’re not going to go and _change the candidate you support_ to a pollster—that’s the threshold we’re discussing here. You might not admit the racism on the phone, but you’ll say you support the other guy because of his tax policies. Only for a candidate who is synonymous with evil are you going to cloak your views.
Personally, I think that the Duke and Haider cases constitute almost a death blow to the Bradley effect if you think through their implications; in one of the two cases, it didn’t even exist! The media want to keep interest in the race high, so they have incentives to dismiss countervailing examples like David Duke. But that doesn’t mean we should believe them.

On the heels of the stupendous “success”:http://twemes.com/nyfest of our New Yorker Festival Twitter “experiment”:http://emdashes.com/2008/09/twitter-your-way-through-the-f.php, I still found myself wondering what the point of the service really is—the similar function on “Facebook”:http://www.gravity7.com/blog/media/uploaded_images/fbook_feed-707592.jpg has the virtue of being integrated into pages that people will consult in the course of other activities.
But then in the course of just a few days, Twitter popped up in probably the two most attention-getting presidential campaign stories of the moment. It turns out that Michele Bachmann (the Minnesota representative who announced a desire to investigate “anti-American” members of Congress) and Ashley Todd (the McCain worker who faked the politically motivated attack by an Obama supporter) used their Twitter accounts just before they became notorious. In both cases their tweets actually bear on the reasons for their eventual fame.
In retrospect, Bachmann’s optimistic “tweet”:http://twitter.com/MicheleBachmann a few days ago that she would soon be appearing on _Hardball_, where she made her unfortunate remarks, is almost touching: she had no way of knowing that appearing on the show would undo her career. And Todd intentionally used Twitter to lay the “groundwork”:http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2008/1023083twitter1.html for her hoax, indicating that she was hunting for a Bank America “on the wrong side of Pittsburgh,” complete with helpfully racist conception of what constitutes the right side of that fine town. How odd. Does William Ayers have a Twitter feed? (“Watching Bears game w/ BHO, planning violent overthrow of TPTB, LOL.”) Does Levi Johnston?

1. On September 23, Kevin Drum at the _Mother Jones_ website wrote a “post”:http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2008/09/obama_and_ayers.html about conservative efforts to find evidence of deep ties between Barack Obama and William Ayers, the former Weatherman who committed several serious terrorist acts in the early 1970s. The point of Drum’s post was that those efforts had turned up virtually nothing. As most potential voters know, John McCain has since attempted to make the relationship between Ayers and Obama a central theme of the election campaign.
When I first read Drum’s post, I had a revelation, which is that _the underlying truth always matters._ It seems to be true that Obama is not close to William Ayers, which, if it is important to you to prove that the two men have a close relationship, is a serious problem.
But more to the point, it also seems clear that, whatever one thinks of Obama, he is not an especially “radical” thinker, apparently has never shown the slightest interest in using violence to further his goals, and doesn’t subscribe to the antiestablishment antipathy of Ayers or his former pastor Jeremiah Wright.
Again, the underlying reality matters: In much the same way that Obama is not a 1960s-era radical who has shown any interest in blowing up buildings for political reasons, Obama is also not a box turtle. Ads that set out to prove that Obama is such a radical or box turtle are equally likely to fail—because the underlying premise is moot.
Speaking of Barry Blitt’s now notorious “fist jab” cover, Art Spiegelman said something related to this at the New Yorker Festival; I mentioned it in my “writeup”:http://emdashes.com/2008/10/new-yorker-festival-art-spiege.php of the event. He said that it took the whole country two news cycles to realize that … Obama is not a radical. This fact lies at the core of the sneaky brilliance of the cover.
The underlying truth matters. The cover, and the decision to run the cover, both stem from an understanding of Obama’s nature as patently not very radical, and that may be why the slow, slow fuse of the cover was so effective, and (in the end) so much less worthy of contempt.
2. Yesterday Daniel Radosh put up a very insightful “post”:http://www.radosh.net/archive/002512.html about the potential misuse of satire once it is “liberated” from its original context.
To back up a moment, most of us are familiar with the occasional phenomenon of satirical news stories from _The Onion_ or some other source popping up in the press as “legitimate news stories”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Onion#The_Onion_taken_seriously. Also at the Festival, Stephen Colbert alluded to a similar incident in which a website dedicated to defending Tom Delay incorporated a clip from _The Colbert Report_ in which Colbert “defended” Delay. (Thanks to Rachel Sklar’s comprehensive “account”:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/10/05/stephen-colbert-at-the-em_n_132019.html of that event, which helped me pin down my memory.)
One of the premises of the original debate around the Blitt cover was that _New Yorker_ readers or really anyone seeing the cover with the familiar “New Yorker” lettering would be very unlikely to regard the drawing as a smear against Obama; others, presumably fearful of future Republican attacks, contended that the image was so loaded that its power might well exceed the borders of that _New Yorker_ frame.
True to his fellow satirists, Radosh disclaims any responsibility on the part of the satirist for the unintended uses of his or her work and simultaneously takes the position that such uses are unlikely anyway. (I stress I’m not slamming him for this; this stuff is tricky.) In the post yesterday, Radosh brought to our notice a fascinating counterpoint to the Blitt cover.
You see, it turns out that those horribly “racist” “Obama Bucks”:http://thinkprogress.org/2008/10/16/obama-bucks/ (scare quotes are necessary, I’m afraid) started out as a liberal satire of Republican excesses—a distant shadow of the Blitt cover, one might say—and then got widely reported as an _example_ of those excesses. Remarkably, Diane Fedele, a Republican Party official in California who found the image and decided to use it in a newsletter, has been obliged to “resign”:http://www.salon.com/wires/ap/2008/10/23/D940B6OO0_obama_illustration/index.html her post.
I’m not sure that Fedele’s credulity or ill intent, however defined, really makes the original satire any better or worse; from where I sit, it still looks pretty crude to me, if undeniably potent. Maybe it all reflects poorly on Republicans, that a satire of their excesses could be regarded by friend and foe alike as legitimate examples of same; I don’t know.
But as for Blitt’s cover, it is a reminder that the existence of the frame matters, and quality matters too. I’m guessing that Blitt is a more experienced practitioner of visual satire than the creator of those Obama Bucks, and that experience may be the element that prevented the image from actually harming people, instead sparking a discussion about whether it might harm people.

I’ve been moving some my books around this week, some of which are by David Foster Wallace and others of which are by recent Nobelists, among them Doris Lessing, Naguib Mahfouz, Orhan Pamuk, J.M. Coetzee. Every time I handled one, I would think about the Nobel, and I would think about Horace Engdahl, who is the top member of the award jury. And I realized that something about Engdahl’s “rebuke to American writers”:http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D93H89QO0&show_article=1 last month was still nagging at me (even though I have already “weighed in”:http://emdashes.com/2008/10/score-it-literary-magazine-1-s.php), and I think I finally recognized what it was.
What bothers me, I realized, was the timing, indeed the appalling lack of sensitivity implied by the timing. Wallace committed suicide on September 12; Engdahl made his comments on September 30. His take on American letters may or may not have merit; less ambiguous is the fact that American letters had lost a particularly bright light just 18 days earlier.
The astonishing thing is that (as far as I saw) there was little connection made between Wallace’s suicide and Engdahl’s comment in the media. Did anyone even notice that these two events sit fairly uncomfortably aside one another? I’m not saying Wallace was headed for Nobel status; far from it, he wasn’t that kind of writer. But Engdahl even went so far as to say that American writers are “too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture,” an observation that could easily be taken as a veiled reference to Wallace—and yet the sentiment that perhaps Wallace’s death made this an awkward moment to point fingers at America’s literary deficiencies went relatively unexpressed.
As sometimes happens, the United States gets treated differently. A hypothetical: if one of Indonesia’s top young writers were to perish in a plane crash, say, and two weeks later the head of the Nobel committee were to single out Indonesia for having an immature literary culture, the ensuing embarrassment might well be substantial enough that the self-appointed critic would be obliged to step down from the position. Less dramatically, people would make that connection very quickly and consider the speaker insensitive. But Americans are not accorded that kind of tact these days.