Evening Songs

++I got an e-mail from the Democratic Campaign Committee saying that 11 Senate races are divided by its.

++I get another that says Nate "the Great" Silver at FiveThirtyEight says the control of the Senate rests with Georgia. Actually go read this column because Nate explains his probabilities and what they mean if it was baseball. Without Georgia,the Democrats would only have a 25% chance of retaining the Senate. He cites Michelle Nunn leading in the last several polls and that she has the momentum.

++Andrew Sullivan pays attention to the South Dakota race where Governor Rounds is mired in scandal that has surfaced with gale wind force in the last few days. Andrew is of the opinion that Pressler is the most likely to knock Rounds off, not Weiland. He argues the state has gone almost completely Democratic and that Pressler, a former Senator and Republican,is more likely to siphon off Rounds support. Read the article. Then he has a link to his previous musings on South Dakota. 

++As anyone who reads this blog knows,I caught on to South Dakota early on with Weiland's campaign of stopping in each town. But step back,the state has the lowest unemployment rate in the country. Doesn't Rounds reap the benefit of that?

++I have been musing on whether corruption isn't a political attribute. Consider the present candidates--Rick Scott is even with Charlie Christ and everyone knows he built his fortune on Medicare fraud and should be in prison;Scott Walker has faced the John Doe investigation and will have another one after the election as well as been blatantly involved in giving mining rights for contributions and he is even with Mary Burke,Michigan's Rick Snyder has seized cities and put management teams in place without a democratic process but is either tied, according to PPP, with Mark Schauer. Is there truly no accountability? Chris Christie's Bridgegate pales in comparison to his sweetheart contracts and the pipeline across southern Jersey. 

++Maybe voters think since politicians are corrupt, then it's better to elect people who know how corruption works. None of the contenders this year have charismatic personalities. None are articulate. And none pay any attention to the media. Maybe that's the new recipe for success. Chris Hayes quipped that Rick Scott is the worst candidate of all time--but here we are less than two weeks out and he is tied with an articulate,smart candidate who has already been governor and has a winning personality.
Somewhere lurking in the voters' subconscious is the awareness that corruption makes government work.
Governor Brownback faces another issue--ideology doesn't make government work and Kansas' financial picture is so bleak because of his ultra right ideology that economists say the state can't come back.

++I have read James Ellroy's Perfidia about Los Angeles around the time of Pearl Harbor. All our favorite characters show up like Dudley Smith. Besides the joy of reading Ellroy's prose,isn't the honest reaction to the corruption and sleaze in the story is that is preferable to a reformist tradition. It seems more real and human than the Good Government types. Isn't that the American dark side? And isn't that why so blatantly corrupt politicians win? They seem to have more of the juices that make humans interesting.

Has Obama Killed Stephen Hawkings Yet?

The title is taken from the Investor Business Daily's assertion that the National Health Care System in Britain would terminate the life of someone as disabled as physicist Stephen Hawkings because he would not be considered valuable to society. The lesson was that Obama's Health Care reform would create the same situation in the United States. A problem--the great scientist is still alive as of this writing and continues to live in the United Kingdom where he has been all his life unmolested by the health police.

Stephen Moore's Club of Growth has been placing ads that say that the same British health care system terminates life when the medical bill hits $22,500. Maybe the British embassy should refute some of these little tales out of school. Much to my disappointment President Obama said he had no such plan to create the vaunted death panels so the bureaucrats would sit behind desks and judge disabled and crippled patients wheeled to defend their right to life.

For a political person such as myself, how is one to grabble with the lunacy pouring forth not only on this issue but every issue since the fall elections? The late, great Bayard Rustin, a friend and one of our greatest civil rights leaders, used to say whenever there was some black foolishness "When the brothers go, they really go." Maybe I should channel the smidgin of Cherokee blood and just say,"Those white people are just CRAAZZZYY." Because I can find no entry into the so-called political discourse. My son asked me to explain a comment by one of the frothing screamers at a health townhall meeting. I told him there was none--there was no discernible reason behind their statement.

Here we have the first President in my son's life that he can look up to--a young, classy guy with a touch of the nerd and articulate as hell--surrounded by a country I don't recognize. It's almost like President Obama is the only adult in a room that is peopled by whiners and complainers who all have more privilege and wealth than 90% of the country and now believe they are victims. Should my son be taught that America has gone insane?

Or maybe my attitude should be as a foreign correspondent or anthropologist watching a fascinating human society that on the surface defies our understanding of community. In this way, the current rhetoric would lack the emotive force to enrage. Instead from the observer's vantage point, we would watch with detachment some modern ritual of sacrificing the leader. These detached moments have traditionally failed. One only has to read V.S. Naipul's accounts of the South to know the outsider often fails to comprehend the magnitude of our derangement.

Perhaps imagining a writer's style will do it. Hunter Thompson would have loved today with the strange peoples dotting the terrain. What would he do with a conservative movement that takes its directives from an Australian paperbaron married to a Chinese woman and a woman who claims the President isn't an American, who is herself from Moldova and regularly gives interviews to Pravda? The whole term astro-turfing would probably end up to be one of his ESPN columns. But Hunter isn't appropriate. He amped up the quirks and visuals of the established figures of the 1970s and 1980s so we could see how truly depraved and bizarre they were, even while most people thought they were straight. Everyone today is over the top,you can't hype their style to make them any more real or understandable. And, poor Marshall McCluhan, television is no longer the cool medium--it's hot now. That's why I believe Obama appears a classic figure--he's cool and comfortable, while everyone else on the tube is amped.

Hunter won't do. James Ellroy might be appropriate for the hinky doings within the powerdrome but he too would fall short. A surprise candidate for capturing the full panorama of American madness might be Carl Hiassen. Carl's journalism has covered in microcosm some of the demented as it affects Florida, a state that almost becomes cutting-edge in the realm of mundo bizarro. Pythons freed into the Everglades; pension funds invested by the Governor in Lehman Brothers, which just vanish along the firm itself, 32-story condo buildings with a sole occupant because the real estate market has gone bust. Ghost towns of developments left by owners who would rather just give up the second home than pay the mortgage. His style, particularly his humor, might be the best antidote to the current madness.

It would be nice to say--It's all America. It's all good. But it isn't.