A Doomed Strategy

John McCain screwed himself. At this point the games is pretty lost due in no small part to his poor positioning within the electorate.

If you're John McCain, you're facing a Republican base that's not particularly jazzed about your rather centrist track record. The base slaps you with the RINO moniker and claim they'd rather sit out an election than cast a vote for you. Curiously enough that centrist attitude puts you in good stead with independents; the same people who probably would have voted you into office had George W. Bush not pulled nasty, racist stunts in North Carolina back in 2000. But that's all water under the bridge now. Your solution: pick Sarah Palin. She's a dicey pick but she stands a good chance of winning over all those women, and you just might get a crack at making history with your presidency, trumping the half-breed in the process.

But it didn't turn out that way. Sarah Palin wound up revving up the base and only the base. Injecting an air of creepiness into the campaign, the woman you picked to excite the female vote has instead become a masturbation fantasy for die-hard Republican men. The women you sought to bring into your camp with the pick are just kind of grossed out. And you can't really blame them. Meanwhile you're forced to go along for the ride, feeding the racist sentiments of a base that represents and ever shrinking percentage of the American demographic. By the time you become aware of the monster you've created it's too late to back out.

On one side McCain is forced to distance himself from the naked hatred and racism boiling over from his ostensible base, while on the other side he's forced to push back against Obama in order to secure the independent vote. Caught in a vise, McCain is getting squeezed and the poll numbers reveal it.

We've got just over a week to go and much can change between now and then. Just wait for the White House to release a judiciously timed Bin Laden video. But this is not 2004 and the zeitgeist has mostly moved on. It's hard to see how McCain can release himself from the situation he's created.

It Burns Me Up

Politics is my baseball. I don't much care for most American sports aside from the perennial squabbles between the Democrats and the Republicans. My only wish is that a third party were more viable, thereby making the spats more interesting. Getting to the point, right now we're in the middle of the American political World Series. I'd say we're getting to around the seventh or eighth inning, the Republicans are down by about four or five runs and they're looking pretty tired.

Anyway, the last debate spat forth a particular remark that didn't get picked up in any of the many media channels; in most instances it slides right past those paid to care about such things. Perhaps they were too distracted by all the other memes and catch phrases that emanated forth from the mouths of the aspirational. But I caught this one and it really burns me up...

Why do some anti-abortion types refer to their opponents as being "pro-abortion"? I think John McCain mentioned it his previous nationally televised chin-wag with That One. I skew pretty left of center when it comes to my political beliefs and I know a lot of people who would prefer not hunker down and get greasy with the anti-abortion/pro-life faction. The thing is that not one of the friends I keep would consider his or herself "pro-abortion". I can't think of a single woman who's so pro-abortion that she deliberately gets knocked up just because it's fun to drop a fetus or two on the floor every once in a while. That's pro-abortion. She's most likely pro-choice, meaning that if a woman really feels the need to do something with her body then she's free to do it, even something as unpleasant as an abortion. That doesn't mean she's really into it. It just means free to choose for herself. Nowhere implicit in that concept is any notion of being pro-abortion. To use that term is to conflate the issue at hand. In fact most people waging war over abortion are really arguing about two very different concepts that just happen to intersect on some pretty dangerous ground.

All this abortion garbage is, as George Lakoff has gone over, just a surrogate for control over women and enforcing a strict social order. At the core of it is a desire to ensure that women stay in their gender roles and remain largely subservient to male masters. When a woman is free to choose she's free to choose in the absence of any male oversight, and I think that makes a lot of people really, really scared. The rationale goes something like, "Shit, if women start making decisions for themselves what might happen next? And why stop there? Women making decisions for themselves is about as crazy as a black man becoming president of the USA!"