Back in the 1970s there was a commercial for a brand of audiotape that asked the consumer, "Is It Live, Or Is It Memorex?"
I usually steer clear of politics on this blog, outside of occasionally mentioning a political figure in the context of a cultural discussion, e.g. "I suspect that the current vogue in academia for atheism has something to do with President Bush. He's an evangelical Christian, and he's widely hated among the leather-elbow crowd. Therefore it is just possible that there's a connection between Bush-hatred and the current vogue for atheism."
This stepping-around political issues is probably the main reason that my excellent, thought-provoking and in general wonderfully-written blog has practically no readers. These days if you're not screaming "racist!" "homophobe!" "fascist!" "misogynist!" " or "poo-poo head!" at somebody, you don't get much attention.
And I'm not about to start doing that now. But at long last I think I have finally found a political question that it's worth my time to ask:
Just who the heck is Barack Obama, anyway? (And is he LIVE? Or is he Memorex? Somehow that question from the dark days of the 1970s is echoing through the hallways of media coverage these days.)
Because more and more people, including media people, are asking the first of those questions, and maybe the second as well. A year ago there were only two political questions on the table in the United States: how soon would She have the nomination locked up and who could the Republicans possibly come up with who might challenge Her Inevitableness?
Okay, I'm putting it on the table. I was a Giuliani man, primarily because I was convinced more than a year ago that only Rudy G. could save us from a fate worse than disco: eight more years of looking at....(insert picture here of myself smelling cauliflower cooking) Her, which, if anyone still doubts it, meant THEM.
Well, now Giuliani's out of the race, but surprise, it looks like this junior upstart from Illinois might do it for us instead. He's now leading slightly in delegate count, and although that doesn't necessarily make him into her as regards the quality of Inevitableness, it does throw things into a new shade of afternoon light, doesn't it? Even James Carville, the Clintons' pet attack hound, whose teeth it required the Jaws of Life to remove from the rear end of more than one Clinton critic during the 1990s, is now saying that if she doesn't win both Texas and Ohio on March 4, well, she can go home and start learning how to bake those cookies she was always so proud of not knowing how to bake. (I bake great cookies, by the way.)
Incidentally, apropos of Hillary and that cheeky whippersnapper who seeks to deny her what she clearly thinks is her rightful entitlement, "the ultimate alimony," as one pundit called it, I have a sports metaphor to invoke, and I'm surprised no one else has.
Don't these two, all of a sudden, remind you a bit of Muhammad Ali and Sonny Liston? That is, if you're old enough to remember Muhammad Ali and Sonny Liston.
For those of you who aren't...It was 1964, and Ali, still named Cassius Clay at that juncture, was getting his first shot at the world heavyweight boxing title against Liston, who in turn had won it by dethroning Floyd Patterson in 1962. Liston was a much-feared hard-puncher, heavily favored to win when he climbed into the ring with the brash young loudmouth (who later evolved into a brash, somewhat older loudmouth) who had won the Olympic gold medal for boxing in Rome four years earlier.
What followed was the beginning of a new era in boxing. Ali vanquished Liston, then did it a second time a few months later, and that was the end of Liston. But what astonished everyone was how he did it. Liston could punch like a Sherman tank. Ali couldn't. What he did instead was live up to his motto, "Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee." Ali danced and jabbed, danced and jabbed, as we would get so used to seeing him do in years to come, and in short order Liston was on the mat with Clay-Ali standing over him yelling (for the cameras) "Get up!" That was the touch of genius that augmented Ali's talent in the ring: he was the first prizefighter in history with a sense of the theater. Putting on a show came naturally to him, as anyone who rolled their eyeballs through the 1960s will remember.
Ali never punched hard; he couldn't. Ali wasn't a power-puncher of the Sonny Liston-Rocky Marciano-Joe Frazier type. What he did instead was drive his opponents crazy, wear them down and get them tired, dancing around just of out their reach, flicking jabs at their heads with arms that seemed to be about eight feet long. Usually it worked. Sometimes it didn't. On two occasions Ali met men tough enough to "get inside," and they both beat him because they could hit harder. Joe Frazier knocked him on his butt in 1971. My fellow San Diegan Ken Norton broke his jaw two years later.
Well, this winter it seems to me that Barack Obama is playing Muhammad Ali to Hillary Clinton's Sonny Liston. She clearly has hard-hitting power behind her; until recently she had the ability to raise a football stadium full of cash by snapping her fingers, for one thing. And until the strategy backfired, she was keeping her hands clean by sending her husband out to do the attack-dog work on those in her way. And let's face it, she's Hillary. Inside the Beltway that's like saying, well, like saying "Sonny Liston" in the boxing circles of 1963.
So who is she up against? A light puncher who charms audiences with his good looks and audacity. Sound familiar? This has to be making her bonkers. As another talking head put it recently, what was supposed to be a stately march to the coronation has turned into a high-school election between the hardest-working girl and the coolest guy. There aren't enough policy differences between them to make a good fight: they're both basically old-fashioned tax-hiking liberals more interested in expanding the welfare state than in protecting our borders or our bodies from whoever might be out there shopping for C-4 and bazooka parts on the Internet.
And Obama, like a smart boxer toying with a dangerous opponent whose weakness he has managed to find, is taking full advantage of that. All he has to do is AVOID substance, and what can Hillary do? They're both lawyers, but she's much more of a policy wonk (I always hated that term) than he is. He knows that. So he's conducting a campaign, at least so far, that's the equivalent of Ali's dance-and-jab style, by which I mean it's a whole lot of flash and not much substance, and I'm certainly not the first to notice this. Pundits on the right and even on the left are pointing it out every day lately.
Obama's shtick thus far has been more rock and roll tour than presidential campaign. He shows up, the crowd goes wild, he performs his general-term spiel about hope and change and the future, the crowd goes wild again and he's on his way to the next venue. It's like he put together his campaign playbook watching old films of Up With People. (They actually came to my high school once. I ran and hid.) Even far-left bloviators like the New York Times' Paul Krugman are beginning to feel a little ooky about this. Krugman recently commented that the Obama campaign was "dangerously close to becoming a cult of personality."
Well, maybe. But at this point we're still talking more Hannah Montana than Kim Il Sung.
Still, the questions lead to other questions. Like, underneath all of that hope for the future and the engaging smile and the books he's written about his struggles and so forth, who are we dealing with here? I'm sure Hillary would like to know.
Once, after seeing Wagner's Lohengrin at the San Francisco Opera, I remarked to my companion that evening that the piece could have been subtitled What Do We Really Know About This Guy?
In Lohengrin, a young German maiden, Elsa von Brabant, has been accused of murdering her younger brother, the evidence against her being simply that he has vanished. Actually, he's been turned into a bird. (Don't ask.) And by the way the story takes place in 10th-century Germany, pre-habeus corpus. This being the Middle Ages, such questions could be settled by combat, and a hero promptly appears from nowhere to fight for Elsa's innocence. His name is Lohengrin, and he arrives in a rowboat towed by a swan. (Again, don't ask. It's opera.)
Cut to the chase. Lohengrin engages in some swordplay with Elsa's chief accuser and beats him, thus establishing Elsa's innocence according to the level of evidence required by 10th century German justice. (A similar level would be applied years later to O.J. Simpson.) There's great rejoicing and, this being an opera, Elsa and Lohengrin immediately fall in love and get married. He admonishes her of only one thing: she must never ask anything about his past or where he comes from.
The rest of the plot involves the bad guys (Elsa's chief accuser Telramund and his equally slimy wife Ortrud) scheming to get Elsa to break her vow and ask Lohengrin the fateful question about who he really is.
To switch from boxing metaphors to opera metaphors, (just to dazzle one and all with the breadth of my erudition -- come on, you're impressed, admit it) Hillary, if she wants to stay alive, (and believe me, no one ever wanted that more, probably in all of history) has to quit playing Sonny Liston to Obama's Muhammad Ali and start playing Ortrud to his Lohengrin. I know she's perfectly capable of playing this role. Indeed, if there's one role in all of opera, outside of the female lead in Verdi's Macbeth, that I would consider tailor-made for Her No-Longer-Quite-So-Inevitableness, it would be that of Ortrud in Lohengrin.
A helpful hint for Hillary: Ortrud started out by working on Elsa. Maybe you should invite Michelle Obama over for a friendly game of...oh, I don't know. Maybe you could show her a few tricks, you know, like how to make a poisoned apple, or how to turn kids into aardvarks. Well, I'm sure you'll think of something. In fact I'm sure you already have.
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