State of Play

From a forensic standpoint, Joe Biden won the debate. He seems to have triumphed in popular perception as well, with pluralities in post-debate polls finding him to be the clear winner. Palin reassured American punditry, however--what a fickle gang they are, really! I suppose that makes it a wash, all things considered.

I watched most of the thing on PBS and was struck afterward by how pudgy the otherwise insubstantial David Brooks has become in the last eight years, which seems like some sort of metaphor, but I'm not certain what for. This is no new observation, but the attempts of wealthy television personalities to intuit their way into the middling mind of middle America are exceptionally vapid and remarkably wrong. In my professed cultural attitudes, obviously, I'm a viciously disdainful elitist; a smug, pompous snob. And yet I did grow up in a small Pennsylvania town (actually, this one), and the elaborate metastructure of expectation and image that pundits construct around candidates and candidates around themselves in order to explicate the behavior of the portion of the population that still votes becomes clear for what it is (this should shock exactly no one)--justification for the continued existence of their jobs. "Regular people," such as they exist, remain motivated by fairly straightforward prejudices and affinities, not questions of whether or not so-and-so "beat expectations," or whatever.

That's a digression. Look. To me the most despairing moment of the whole debate was the discussion of when it is appropriate to use military force, and Joe Biden laid out two points, the first of which was is it feasible, which sounds reasonable after the last eight years until you pause and consider just how monstrous it is. It is, in fact, one of the most explicit rejections I've heard of the quaint and never-practiced doctrine of war as an instrument of the utmost last resort, a point at which feasibility becomes a meaningless rubric because the only other choices are death and subjugation. It affirms violence as a basic tool of statecraft--of course, we all know this to be historically and almost universally the case, but it still rankles to hear it spoken without even the Cold-War-current nods to "the peace-loving American people." In the question just prior, asked if Americans had "the stomach" for Biden's expansive view of acceptable foreign military intervention, Biden was even plainer: "The American people have a stomach for success." This too is a basic truth--that people love peace only until promised triumph--rarely publicly expressed. In a sense, I suppose we owe Senator Joe thanks for his honesty.

Palin coasted through the whole thing on winks and smiles, enunciating a series of pious non sequiturs tangentially related to John McCain's promise to transubstantiate America with the touch of his quaking hands. Even as they hew to know-nothing informality as a signifier of their own authenticity, the McCain/Palin ticket has moved in an increasingly lofty and abstract direction, promising an end to greed and a win for victory and a triumph of the, uh, will. Wrapping such glittering golden turds in heckuvas and dontchaknows makes them no more palatable to people who want someone to blame for their troubles. McCain tried to give them Obama but got wrapped up in his own goofball mythology. Obama meanwhile shed his myth and plated up some fat-cat CEOs. The latter, I suspect, is the better as far as electioneering goes.