A few colleagues of mine got together to launch a new web publication, The New Ledger. I encourage you to check it out - it’s got a neat combination of hand-picked aggregated content, sorted Daily Reads each morning, and longer form opinion pieces from smart folks and good writers.

I have the feature today, on The Right and the Challenge of the Environment. I hope you’ll check it out - I’ll be editing the Conservation section of the site going forward.

It’s true that the free market is, oftentimes, the enemy of the environment. It’s one of the greatest forces for freedom in the world, yes – but when it comes to many of the issues, I believe the marketplace espouses a view that is focused on the short term, not the long. It often makes perfect financial sense to operate at the narrow edge of irresponsibility, to stamp your feet about government ignoring property rights and bureaucracy passing ridiculous regulations, because it’s true that such things are often fundamentally unjust. Yet the actors in the market don’t usually evaluate land or sea in terms of stewardship – they evaluate it in terms of the immediate bottom line.

But that’s only half the story. The other half is the fact that overwhelmingly, the vast number of nations that can afford to make the decisions to protect and conserve land and sea, and be good stewards of the resources and creatures within them, are those that are thriving members of the global marketplace.

I have been asked by many who knew that I went up to New York City for the events to share an account of Father Neuhaus’s wake and funeral, and so here it is.  Excuse the rambling nature of it - there was too much shared over these two days to recall it all, and my memory isn’t as good as it used to be.

On Monday night at Father Neuhaus’s wake at Immaculate Conception in New York City, there were (by my estimate) roughly 1,200 people in a church that could hold about 800. I arrived far too early and not wanting to conflict with the evening service, went across the street to wait in one of the thousand dirty basement Irish bars there seem to be in that city, listening to the Brooklyn vowels of some angry Jets fans discussing personnel moves made and unmade.  New York is such an odd place.

After it got really packed I let an old woman have my seat and stood in the back.  The church was packed to the brim and every New York Catholic of note was there, it seemed like, interspersed with people who just knew him as “Father Richard, who baptized my son or my daughter,” and had no knowledge of his other work.  They seemed amazed to learn what he had achieved.

There were three eulogies after the homily. George Weigel’s was good, Jody Bottum’s was powerfully personal, and Robert Louis Wilken’s was inspired.  Of the three, Jody’s was the most political – at one point noting that, when the regime of abortion in America is finally ended, Father Neuhaus will be hailed rightly as a mighty champion for the cause of life, without whom it could never be achieved.  There were letters from the President, and not just of this country, and hundreds from around the world, filled with sorrow and prayer.

There were stories of his time at the church he described as “St. John the Mundane.”  There were stories of his conversion from Lutheran to Catholic, from liberal to conservative, but in both cases, it seemed more that the world turned around him than that he changed.  There were recitations of his favorite quotations – perhaps one of his favorite being one of Alexander Hamilton’s remarks, that “I will not amuse you with an appearance of deliberation when I have decided.” There were notations on his favorite words – “Winsome.” “Egregious.” And favorite of all, “Convivium.”

When invited to “Convivium” at Fr. Neuhaus’s house, one was expected to arrive promptly by seven PM, in order to stand together and sing the evening prayer.  The discussions over his dinner table, usually surrounded by young Catholic men and women, were the stuff of legend.  His house was always a mess, but a mess with unique stories hidden in it, and some excellent wine.  Perhaps the oddest furnishing was his bathroom wall that was papered with photographs of all these young people, so that he could see them while he shaved, and be reminded to pray for them as he walked – or jaywalked, which he was famous for, with a Calvinists’ sense that those cars would do what they would do – during the day.

There were many, many tales of his addiction to cheap liquor (Jack Daniels at its finest) and good cigars (two a day on average), and more tales of his long friendship with Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who would always stay with him once a year. Rabbi Heschel always said that he would bring the liquor if Father Neuhaus brought the opinions, but in truth, he brought both.  Neuhaus called him “Father Heschel” – and Heschel called him “Rabbi Neuhaus.”

He made terrible coffee, but it motivated him to stay up later and talk more, so everyone always encouraged him to make it.  He wrote 12,000 words a month for print, on average, and near the end, confided from his deathbed that he only wished he had the time to write more. He was motivated always by a longing for “prudence, justice, courage, wisdom, holiness,” and his mantra of “fidelity, fidelity, fidelity.”

Father Neuhaus once confided that the secret to his prodigious ability was to make sure he said his morning prayer every day before he read the newspaper.  Putting God first, he could get to the work God asked of him with a mind set to the right purpose.

The next morning, the day of the funeral mass, the church was even more packed – I would estimate as many as 1,600.  I stood in the back behind what seemed like the entire editorial board of National Review, First Things, and the bevy of priests who were there.  I missed a small amount of the mass, as there was an elderly woman who had come out with a cane who I ended up helping around quite a bit.  But I heard the whole of the homily first, by Father Raymond de Souza.  Fr. de Souza began by saying “Cardinal Ratzinger once said…” and had a quote that seemed relatively minor.  He then explained that he thought Fr. Neuhaus would have approved of any funeral homily that began, “Cardinal Ratzinger said,” because it was one of his favorite things to begin any conversation with in life.

Fr. de Souza’s remarks focused on this verse from Isaiah, one of my personal favorites which apparently was one of Fr. Neuhaus’s favorites as well, and its description of what he called “the eternal Convivium” of believers.  It is the Convivium that begins at the Altar, and ends in the Kingdom of God.

We recited the RSV translation instead of the NAB (to avoid, they said, setting the Father to spinning before he was in the grave):

The loss of Fr. Neuhaus, Hadley Arkes said, “For his friends this is the kind of loss that tilts the world on its axis; for so many things marking the world around just cannot be the same.”  But having been to this vigil and this mass, I feel like this is not true.  It may seem the case to us – it may seem wrong, unjust, unfair.  But I think now that it is right, and good, and the way things ought to be.

He once wrote of the cross: “This is the axis mundi, the center upon which the cosmos turns.”  He liked that phrase.  And now he knows it in full.  I have no doubt of that.

For this is the way the story should end: a sinner becomes a man of God, a man of God becomes a great warrior for God, and a warrior for God, triumphant in his work, goes now to be with God - welcomed as a champion.

In an election cycle that saw the explosion of “Fact Check” articles written from thinly-disguised partisan bias, there is one fact that the overwhelming majority of voters going to the polls on Tuesday cannot deny: The 2008 election will finally end.

Regardless of the outcome, we all should be thankful for this fact, if only for the sake of the battered American psyche.

Some academics over the years have intoned that the voting process itself can be considered a legal act of peaceful revolution, in keeping with Thomas Jefferson’s oft-cited musing that “A little rebellion now and then…is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government.” If this comparison is accurate, then the only logical conclusion in the aftermath of this contest is that, in the modern age, a little democracy now and then is bad medicine indeed for the mental health of America.

America is so very tired of it all – tired of the hacks, the flacks, and the attacks. Ah, for the older, simpler days of politics, when dirty-fingered men would hand out pamphlets on the street corner with more veracity than the accusations of the 24-hour networks.

Closing the book on the 2008 election would take the strength of a full grown elephant and donkey, yoked in tandem, if the volume held a full accounting of the twists and travails of this never-ending contest, with full appendices of fiends and follies.

What a range of surprises the bizarre tome would contain. How could even the wisest minds of Washington have predicted these two candidates, even a year ago, would emerge from the primary season as the party nominees? How could they have predicted that their stances on the war in Iraq, the largest contributing factor to each man’s victory, would barely be a topic of mention in the final weeks of the campaign, pushed aside by the controversy of an Alaska Governor’s fashion choices and the economic viewpoints of a Toledo plumber?

How could they have predicted that John McCain, for years the Republican most popular with the press, would become a jilted lover? How could they predict that Barack Obama, based on fewer than 200 days experience in the U.S. Senate, could predict with a messianic aplomb unseen since the days of William Jennings Bryan, that his election would be retold to children in decades hence as “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal” with a straight face?

Perhaps most shocking of all: who could have predicted that this cycle, featuring two men who repeatedly declared their ability to unite the country in bipartisan spirit in the wake of eight divisive years, would put the charge of “Socialism” back in common usage?

Speaking to one of his glorious rallies on Wednesday, Sen. Obama claimed that “By the end of the week, [Sen. McCain] will be accusing me of being a secret communist because I shared my toys in kindergarten. I shared my peanut butter and jelly sandwich.”

There’s only one problem with that line, of course: Sen. Obama isn’t talking about sharing his sandwich as President. He’s talking about sharing yours.

As the overwhelming favorite on Tuesday, Sen. Obama stands to emerge from this race with the most ethereal presidential mandate of the modern era. How can one give a mandate to a party headed by a politician who insists his election alone will accomplish his policy goals? As the old song goes, he doesn’t want to set the world on fire – he just wants to spark a flame in your heart. And spark it he has - but if the polls are to be believed, it’s very unlikely this spark will transfer to Senate Democrats, who may gain as few as 4 net seats in an election cycle where a 60-vote filibuster proof majority had once seemed a foregone conclusion.

Sen. Obama’s model for success, in other words, is a model dependent entirely on the person of Barack Obama. It is not exactly a model for a new Democratic majority.

Consider former Gov. Mark Warner, poised to win Virginia by a significant margin, as the contrast. In him, you see the model for a pro-capitalist Democratic majority that recognizes the center-right nature of the electorate. Where Warner once denounced social conservatives and gun rights voters as “threatening to what it means to be an American,” he went on to earn “A” ratings from the National Rifle Association, and proved to be a centrist on fiscal issues. Gov. Warner has no buoyant cult of personality around him – his keynote speech to the Democratic Convention earlier this year was widely viewed as a flop – but rather a practical resume of solid government work.

In Gov. Warner, we see the kind of pragmatic politician who represents the policy viewpoints of a permanent Democrat majority. But in Sen. Obama, we see the kind of hubristic politician who could very well squander an electoral victory – attained not so much thanks to his policies or celebrity charisma as fatigue over President George W. Bush – by overreaching.

A regrouped conservative movement, likely to have an even firmer hold on the GOP, will be ready if he does. The successful politicians on the right in 2008 almost all share one attribute: a populist streak that is very strong and vibrant. There’s no question that, as we saw in ‘92-93, the next 2-4 years will find this third of the GOP increase the strength of this variety of politics.

Today, the American people are sending a mandate for change. But getting them to agree on what the word “change” means, and what government results from it, is a very difficult thing. If Sen. Obama makes the mistake of believing that his election represents a mandate for redistribution of wealth, for socialized medicine, for a reintroduction of the welfare state through tax credits to those who pay nothing…he may soon find that his electoral coalition is more delicate than he imagined. Matt Yglesias is already urging him on toward this course, suggesting that this election will grant an unrestrained mandate to American progressives.

The right can only hope the new overlords believe the hype.

We shall see. For now, be thankful the election that would not die is finally, at long last, proving to be mortal. Come Tuesday, put the yard signs away for a bit, and say farewell to our most modern folly. Americans now should take their cue from T.S. Eliot, and saying “Well now that’s done, and I’m glad it’s over,” put a record on the gramophone.

Video by Mary Katherine Ham.

I n every Presidential election, it’s my experience that reports of fraud tend to be a bit exaggerated. Yes, there will always be a degree of problems - but most of those are of the human error variety, not purposeful lawbreaking. With so many millions voting, and so many election officials who are really just volunteer librarians, mistakes are bound to happen. The Electoral system helps guard against these things mattering, and I am fairly confident that outside some isolated incidents in big cities, voter fraud won’t change who wins the Presidency tomorrow. Corrupt as they are, I doubt very much that ACORN will provide the margin of victory.

Now, when it comes to local elections, I think the story is the reverse. Voter fraud can have a huge impact on a local level, and yet it’s almost always underreported. ACORN can’t make a difference in the presidential stakes, but they can make a difference in who becomes the next mayor, commissioner, or Congressman. And it’s surprisingly easy for that to happen in an environment where election laws and regulations are shockingly lax.

Consider where I live - Loudoun County, Virginia, arguably the swing county in a swing state, and one Obama is absolutely certain to win if you’re keeping score. Here in Virginia, you can go in and vote absentee early - a slightly different arrangement than other states, but quite straightforward in practice. An enormous number of people, more than 450,000, have taken advantage of this so far. All you have to do is go to your local office, stand in line for about 30-45 minutes, fill out a form, and vote.

At the Loudoun location on Saturday, they weren’t requiring picture ID - not even a Federal one, just any ID. Turns out you don’t need one. How convenient.

But if, in theory, Virginia decided to require that you present an ID as opposed to just sign a piece of paper (which will only matter if there’s a lawsuit, of course, which costs money and time and is politically dangerous), it’s awfully easy to get ahold of a Virginia voter card with someone else’s name on it (perhaps one of these fun creations). Especially if you rent rather than own.

You see, in a state with more than 400,000 newly registered voters since the last election, polling places have changed a lot. The Volunteer Firehouse location where I’ve voted all but once in the past 8 years can’t contain the polling place this year, so it’s moved. So have the polling places for much of Loudoun. The local Election Board was kind enough to send out a mass mailing informing every voter effected by this change a few months back.

And they were also kind enough to include a new voter card, with your name, address, and local polling place printed on it.

Personally, I received five voter cards in the mail. One was mine - four others were for people who have not lived in the house I rent for more than three years. Five different names. Same address. They sure do make it easy.

Useful, that. If you were interested in helping your guy, whoever it is, win.

It’s really quite easy to do a bit of DIY Election Fraud in an age where they send the Voter Card, info and all, direct to you. But hell, you won’t even need it in the Old Dominion - there’s no ID required. Just sign the paper promising you’re cool, and your vote matters just as much as everyone’s.

It’s like leaving the front door wide open for days, and being surprised that the TV is gone when you come back.

Democracy: you’re doing it wrong.

Update: More here and here.

I am rapidly becoming a total addict to the Nielsen Wire blog, which today posted perhaps their most useful and practical survey information of all time: charting how Republicans and Democrats watch TV. While some of the differences are exaggerated, there were some notable differences - particularly on one show that’s near and dear to my heart.

As might be expected, however, several programs had clear partisan bents.  On Comedy Central, for example, Democratic viewers paid the most attention to “The Colbert Report,” while “South Park” was the network’s most engaging show among Republicans.

Mediaweek has more. I don’t need more prompting, though, to repost something from last season about South Park at Redstate 2.0. You can read the original post here, with comments.

I know not all of you are South Park fans. I’m a huge fan of their work, and as RS editors know, I try to force them all to watch the episodes and marvel at the phenomenal social commentary hidden behind a layer of the absurd and/or the obscene.

The South Park guys aren’t conservatives - they’re libertarians. But they’re awesome libertarians. They hate the global warming preachers, NAMBLA, Jesse Jackson, Hillary Clinton, and save some of their strongest bile for the celebrity political activists - George Clooney, Rob Reiner, Rosie O’Donnell and Barbara Streisand. They can’t stand politically correct authoritarians and they authored the definitive anti-9/11-truthers response (which actually ends up being kinda pro-W, believe it or not). They’ve made Al Gore into a walking joke among Comedy Central viewers. Yes, they bash the Catholic Church a lot and they have some cutting remarks about redneck Americans and country music…but their episodes bashing Richard Dawkins and atheism are far more vicious, and amazingly composed.

And they really, really loathe hippies. Really. Like, even more than me. Can’t blame them. Their native Colorado has about the worst hippie infestation I’ve ever seen. There’s really no hope for that place.

Anyway, that brings us to Cartman’s brief commentary about abortion in the other night’s episode - don’t worry, nothing horribly NSFW in this clip (though there is plenty in the whole episode, which you can find here if the clip isn’t working):

Surprisingly, well, good. Hmm. This isn’t a pro-life clip, but it obviously ridicules the idea that abortion is anything but a cop-out that sacrifices another human life to an individual’s whim.

There’s no reason to think that Parker and Stone meant anything by this other than the context of the joke…but still. It’s something. And it’s good.

Thanks to South Park Studios awesome redesign, you can now watch a whole collection of clips with the Abortion tag. Most of them are either mocking the selfishness of the people involved, the ulterior motives of those seeking the destruction of human life (particularly the stem cell episodes), or in some cases, using brutally accurate descriptions of abortion to make a gag joke.

I seriously doubt the South Park guys are pro-life. I just think they have a low tolerance for B.S. from either side. And in this case, most of the B.S. isn’t on our side.

Since I live in the newly swing state of Virginia and specifically in very swinging Loudoun County, and have voted here in every election since I could vote, allow me to point out what would be obvious to anyone who lived here: the amount of enthusiasm for John McCain among the people who get voters to the polls and determine whether this county is red or not is almost nonexistent.

Part of it’s ideological, in the sense that many of the conservative activists in Virginia are more Lou Dobbsian than you might expect (there’s a reason Huckabee beat McCain by a 2-1 margin in Roanoke), but it says something that I can’t even find as many volunteers in this county as George Allen had in the final days after Macaca - the volunteer base was one of the reasons Allen made a late surge, making up a good deal of ground, and still almost won here running against a self-styled centrist Democrat in a year that was terrible for Republicans. Allen only lost the county in 2006 by 7,000 votes, less than 3 tenths of a percent. His total margin of loss statewide was 10,000 votes, less than .5 tenths of a percent. In other words: Loudoun alone determined Webb’s victory.

The Obama campaign has deluged us with smiling volunteers, most bussed in from other places. I got a notebook-sized book, with a hand-written message, left at my door while I was at church the other day. It is the finest piece of political literature I’ve ever seen. It’s gorgeous. It’s beautiful. All flowing Gotham font and perfect image selection. It makes Kitten look like the most moderate, experienced Democrat you’ve ever seen. You want to put it on your coffee table.

McCain’s people left a torn door hanger shoved against my door with a picture of him looking like he was constipated. Knocking on doors on a Sunday morning - well, that’s fine for the Democrats, but for the Republicans? Please.

This year, the Republican Party selected the most ideologically moderate, media-friendly nominee of my lifetime. They picked him because, like Dole in 96, he was the guy who deserved his shot. They picked him because they thought the fact that he’d made a career out of stabbing his party in the back would befriend him to the horde or make him difficult for the New York Times to attack.

They thought wrong. As Mark Salter expresses it in what should be held as THE classic rant of this cycle to Jeffrey Goldberg - and it’s all true! - it’s not McCain who’s changed, it’s the media that’s covering him.

JG: What do you think of the assertion that McCain is exploiting his P.O.W. experiences?

MS: I find that very offensive. Barack Obama gets to tell his story why? Because it’s more potent?

JG: How are you feeling about the press these days?

MS: Look, I think, starting with the Democratic primary, there has been a different standard for Obama than there has been for any candidate running against Barack Obama. And maybe this should have set off more warning bells with me. I think much of the media has a thumb on the scale for Obama. I think the thumb has been there the entire time. There are many honorable exceptions, I don’t mean to tar everybody, but I think there’s one standard for us, and one standard for Obama. He has run more negative ads than McCain has run ads. They run from the quite misleading to the blatantly untrue.

Once he stopped jabbing GOPers in the eye with a sharp stick and started running as the nominee of a party, the media reacted:

JG: Looking back, do you think there was something false about your salad days with the press?

MS: No, I’m trying not to draw general lessons about the press or us or the meaning of life out of all of this. Otherwise I’d despair. I think the media is driven by a need to see this history happen. And I think they’ve rationalized it, they think they’re on the level with McCain, that he’s not the old McCain. But he is the old McCain. He just doesn’t know what happened to the old press corps. They rationalize a reason to go get him. Every Obama attack they carry. Every McCain criticism of Obama they rush to blunt even before Obama does.

JG: Putting aside Palin, is one of the problems you’re facing the fact that there’s no foreign policy discussion right now?

MS: Iraq was supposed to be the issue of the campaign. We assumed it was our biggest challenge. Funny how things work.

The Republicans ignored the fact that with the exception of the surge, John McCain has been out of step with the base about just about every policy he’s chosen to stick his neck out to support. He’s just burned too many bridges along the way to this moment. If you don’t get the people who can deliver 2,000 home schoolers on 24 hours notice to support you, you can’t win this state.

Nowhere is McCain’s wrongness about one of his key issues, the public financing of elections, going to hurt him more than in the Virginia TV market - Sunday afternoon, over the course of multiple football games, I saw what felt like 75 Obama ads - three separate ones, alternating, repeating every commercial break - messages of fix your health care, cut your taxes, McCain is a fraud. I did not see a single McCain ad. Not one.

The public financing gambit from McCain was always based on the proposition that, with the right candidates in either party, an agreement of restrictions on the weapons at hand would be good for democracy. It would enable both candidates to engage in a dozen town hall meetings, which McCain loves, and spread their message in limited and less negative form. But when you count “1, 2, 3″ and drop all your weapons but a Bowie knife, and the other guy is standing there with a Surface to Air Missile on his shoulder, saying “Eh, I changed my mind,”, well, you’re pretty much screwed.

Winning Northern Virginia exurb voters, like winning most elections outside of an urban environment, is done by having volunteers, activists, and targeted GOTV efforts. It is done through massive mobilization and organization and, on a few key policy points, running well-designed and well-targeted ads (Obama has the luxury of not having to target at all - he’s doing the sledgehammer method, running ads on every channel I watch, every sporting event, every comedy show, even late night cartoons). I was stunned at the number of mobilizers, organizers, and longtime volunteers who were sitting this McCain ride out completely before the Palin pick (which energized the volunteer base like nothing else - her rallies are easily twice the size of his). And this isn’t just true in Virginia. But those are the stories for the morning after.

This morning, this showed up in my inbox. I walk to this park every week, sometimes twice. And on Wednesday, Barack will be coming to town.

This Wednesday, October 22nd, please join Barack Obama in Leesburg, where he will talk about his vision for creating the kind of change we need.

Change We Need Rally
with Barack Obama

Ida Lee Park
Festival Field
50 Ida Lee Drive, NW
Leesburg, VA

Wednesday, October 22nd
Gates open: 3:00 p.m.
Program Begins: 5:30 p.m.

RSVP

http://va.barackobama.com/LeesburgChange

This event is free and open to the public. Tickets are not required; however, an RSVP is strongly encouraged. Space is available on a first-come, first-served basis.

For security reasons, do not bring bags and please limit personal items. No signs or banners permitted.

Obama’s about to head to Hawaii to see his ailing grandmother - poor gal, the one he called a “typical white person” - but a rally in Leesburg, VA, a place that elects a solidly moderate GOPer in Representative Frank Wolf like clockwork every two years, is more important.

The Lesson: The Media is a fickle creature. Grudging respect is not a basis for a successful electoral campaign. And running Old and Busted against the New Hotness is a whole mess of Fail.

My latest op-ed over at the Washington Times concerns the dueling perspectives of John McCain and Barack Obama on our economic woes - and how both fail the test:

So, here’s a story to tell the grandkids around some future autumn kitchen table. Once upon a time, the American people, facing the greatest global economic crisis in a generation, headed to the polls to choose the next leader of the free world and custodian of the formerly free market. Their options were limited to the dashing young lawyer and the battle-tested combat pilot, two men who for all their appeal had never run a state, a town or a business - large or small.

It’s shocking to consider how Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama come to the challenges of the day with such little economic knowledge of their own. If both won their respective primaries thanks in the largest part to their positions on security issues - Mr. McCain elevated by his undeniable vindication on the Iraq troop surge, Mr. Obama fueled by a vibrant antiwar upsurge that now seems like little more than postwar bitterness and should change little about the outcome of the conflict - neither comes to the fray knowing more about the economy than what others tell them. And for advice, one has the banking lobby whispering in his ear while the other has the corrupt handmaidens of Fannie and Freddie holding his purse strings.

Read it all over at the WT website.

There’s no question that I really should like Mad Men. I don’t watch a lot of television that falls outside the categories of “sporting event” or “cartoon”, but if they put it down on paper, I feel like I’d be the ideal target market for this one. Along with any under-thirty guy who damns John Kennedy for ending the life of the Fedora (actually, that’s an urban myth - the truth is much dorkier, and not at all fitting with JFK’s tousled appeal), and thinks the world would be a much better place if men behaved like Cary Grant and talked like C.C. Baxter, and the uniform of choice was still the the gray flannel suit. Hell, there’s a bottle of rye sitting on my desk as I type this, next to a retro Colibri lighter in an ashtray. I should love this show.

But I don’t. And it’s damn disappointing, because I wanted to like it.

There’s no question the design is fantastic, evoking with gusto the old New York of the golden age of advertising, as one might imagine it. It’s the stuff of the old magazines on the bottom shelf in your grandparent’s living room (or your parent’s basement if you’re a bit older). The whole thing reminds me of that famed advertising memo - I can’t remember who wrote it, someone email it to me - where the head of a firm requested that the men of the firm drink whiskey at lunch instead of vodka, because he’d prefer that their clients thought they were drunk, instead of stupid.

Sadly, the retro style is where the good stops. One of the reasons I never liked Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner’s work on The Sopranos was that my introduction to it came in the later phases, when I am told the show had a surplus of characters who were either powerfully unlikeable or completely incomprehensible as anything but the tool of a lazy writer.

In the case of Mad Men, I feel like it’s a different problem: this is Ally McBeal with guys. The situations swing between the obvious, the predictable, and the absurdly cliched. Oh, so now you’re going to play the normal 1960s show game of let’s cover gaps in our plot and make it seem like we’re being epic and ingenious by invoking a pop cultural event everybody knows about. Yes, that’s oh so new and creative. People were so uptight back then! And they had the social family drama of the upper crust as related via off-Broadway theatre! And the man feared emasculation! And there was sexual and racial tension! And they hated adoption! You learn something new every day.

No matter how talented the actors - Jon Hamm always reminds me of Mitt Romney, but he’s perfectly cast, and John Slattery is nearly as good - or the actresses (Lileks’ affection for Christina Hendrick’s Joan is totally understandable) are, they just can’t carry this drek. It’s either the stuff of bad Lifetime movies (there’s another kind?) or bad oversexed FX drama, not the kind of tautly written dramatic material any show depicting such an explosively creative period rightly deserves. Instead, the Sixties agency world is just another period for people to apply the same combination of broad strokes that make up typical TV storylines to a new canvas … and that’s not telling a story, it’s just playing games. Or as Raymond Chandler once said: “This is what is vulgarly known as having God sit in your lap.”

A small hypothetical for you all to entertain as you watch tonight’s debate:

When Joe Biden first ran for the Senate, he ran as a Democrat in a Democratic year. In Washington, he’s been a fairly moderate Democrat - a servant of MBNA and the credit card companies in Delaware, he’s been a frequent friend of the corporation and the businessman. He’s played the Washington game a bit - sending his son to a high-class lobbying job, playing both sides of Clarence Thomas during that nomination debacle, putting his foot in his mouth on more than one occasion - but on the whole, he’s never been a radical.

Is it that hard to imagine Biden as a Republican, instead of a Democrat?

His voting pattern is not all that dissimilar from Senator Arlen Specter in Pennsylvania, or Biden’s former colleague, moderate GOPer Bill Roth. Highly educated and ambitious from his youth, he has the brash ego of a career politician and a penchant for outrageous remarks that far exceed any Macaca moments. He likes the military and Amtrak and corporations. He likes America. He dislikes hippies. He’s fairly moderate in ideology and testy in temperament.

On the other side, you have Sarah Palin - a rural feminist, with a strong religious undercurrent, a blue collar background, a PTA member, a Union member, pro-gun, pro-life, and pro-military but a bit isolationist and rather libertarian on gay rights issues. A son in the military - a recruit, not an officer - and a Huckabee-esque penchant for bashing authority. She can’t be painted into any particular corner ideologically, but she is hated by government bureaucrats as much as she is loved by the citizens of her state.

Is it that hard to imagine Palin as a Democrat, instead of a Republican?

She’s the member of no old guard, no political establishment, has no family wealth to fall back on. Her astounding political win in a relatively minor state comes hard fought against the male-dominated Republican leadership. She does so by taking a populist anti-corporate and anti-establishment position, talking in very blue-collar terms about climate change and the need to install immediate reforms. If there’s a comparison on the D side, she’s the female Jim Webb: brash and inspiring, the people who like her adore her, and the people who dislike her hate her intensely.

Imagine this debate, for one moment, with Sarah Palin - the socially traditionalist (need those evangelical swing voters!), blue collar union member, telegenic Democratic Veep nominee - and Joe Biden - the old white guy who’s been in Washington forever, wedded to the credit card companies, who’s never done anything but be a lawyer-politician, who’s gotten money from every interest group and traded favors with everyone under the sun - as the Republican Veep nominee?

I could see it. And I wonder how the media would treat it differently.

Update: Victor Davis Hanson has the right idea.

I watched very little of it, but I think Ezra Klein’s assessment sums up the opinions of the blogosphere rather tidily:

This is a pretty traditional debate performance for Obama. Strong on substance. Few mistakes. Little in the way of killer instinct or decapitating lines. McCain, by contrast, is offering an uncommonly strong performance powered, as far as I can tell, by his raging contempt for Obama. He won’t look at him. He’s using “what Senator Obama doesn’t understand” the way Joe Biden uses “ladies and gentlemen.” His constant refrain is the places he’s visited, leaders he’s befriended, aging advisers and presidents he’s known. Obama is conveying the fact that he thinks McCain wrong. But McCain is conveying the fact that he thinks Obama an unprepared lightweight. One of these is a stronger claim than the other.

Obama is without question the more appealing fellow on a stage: he has a commanding presence, an engaging smile, a great voice for the thing. He makes things seem more substantive just by talking about them (where the same lines repeated by, say, John Kerry would seem limp and trite). He’s also fantastic when it comes to changing the subject - he can easily glide from a tough topical question to a series of vague and nice sounding policies (hence Lehrer’s frustration at points tonight). But he also has the smart professor’s disease of talking long and being a poor self-editor, thinking that using a string of numbers is an argument, and generally sounding like he loves the way he talks. This makes him ideal for a campus debate, or excellent in a venue where his opponent is restrained (see: Clinton, Hillary), but poor in a situation where the other debater comes to the forum carrying a lead pipe in his craggy old hands.

McCain is used to the dueling of the Senate floor - he’s a poor speaker generally, not an inspirational vocalist, and a reader and a narrator as opposed to an elucidator of things. Where Obama can make any muddle seem appealing, McCain is oftentimes forced to either skip the muddle or get bogged down in it and lose the audience. McCain won very few of the debates during the GOP primary, and when he did win, he often seemed like a mean old man berating students for being idiots. But he does have his moments, and when he gets a good clip going, McCain ceases to seem mean, and instead comes across as a supporting character in a David Mamet screenplay, smiling jubilantly as he brings that pipe down.

In this situation, with this opponent in the arena, McCain seems rejuvenated. Where Obama is young and smart, McCain is old and forceful. Even his smile is wartorn and uneven next to Obama’s gleam and Denzel Washington-like symmetry, but the unevenness gives him a certain grace. McCain is the known quantity on stage, and he has nothing to prove; most of Obama’s slights about him being Bush 3.0 just don’t sell, because his brand is so well-defined already. This gives him a slight advantage, as Klein notes - Obama has to come to these debates to close the deal, to sell himself as the next President, to convince the last waverers not to jump over to the other side in a time of uncertainty. McCain, on the other hand, just needs to convince people that Obama is unready to lead, a gamble in a dangerous time, a guy who’s better suited for the celebrity circuit than the Oval Office.

There’s something oddly amusing about these seeing these two very odd characters go at it. Neither of them really know anything about the biggest issue in this election, the economy - one’s a soldier, one’s a lawyer. McCain is the more emotional of the two, more inclined to act on gut instinct and passion, while under Obama’s soft exterior is a more calculating and capable politician. Four years ago, one never would’ve predicted that either of these men would end up on this stage.

Now we’re stuck with them, and there’s nothing else for it. So let’s hope they’ll still take paper money for popcorn at the next one.