Obama Campaign Rally, Marriott Hotel & Convention Center, Coralville,
Iowa. October 7, 2007. Photo by Jon Winet

David Levi Strauss, Aperture magazine contributing editor, noted writer, and current Chair of MFA Art Criticism and Writing Department, School of Visual Arts, shares his unique perspective on the current political landscape.

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I Put This Floor in This House

The political campaign ad for television is certainly one of the most degraded forms of public communication we have. It was base to begin with, built on a tissue of half-truths, innuendoes, and outright lies, and designed to appeal to our worst tendencies: fear, greed, insecurity, and selfishness. Most of the ads aired by both sides in this presidential campaign have been negative hits on one’s opponent.

Until last night, when, six days before the election and flush with more donated money than any candidate in history has had at his disposal, Barack Obama bought thirty minutes on prime-time TV, right before what turned out to be the final game of the World Series, to make a final pitch to American voters.

It begins with an image of American beauty and bounty: a field of Kansas wheat blowing in the wind. Then a traveling shot of the prairie as the voice-over begins, “With each passing month, our country’s faced increasingly difficult times . . . .” The candidate then appears, already at home in a less austere version of the Oval Office, and sits on the edge of his desk to speak to us. He’ll tell us the stories of four working families and their struggles, and what an Obama presidency will do to help them. “Everybody here has got a story.”

The structure of the ad is consistent and sound. Each family’s story is followed by Obama’s policy proposals to address their issues. These are the problems, and these are the solutions. There are moments of great subtlety and effect, as when Larry Stewart, retired after working thirty years on the railroad, sits in his house in Sardinia, Ohio, and says, “I put this floor in this house.” When he retired ten years ago, he lost his health insurance and had to take a job at Wal-Mart at age 72, as an “associate salesman.” “In other words,” he says, “I just sell stuff, that’s all.” That is, I don’t make things anymore, like I built this house. I just sell stuff, cheap, that other people now make elsewhere in the world, to other Americans like me who can’t afford to buy stuff we make ourselves anymore. And we are told that this is now our work, to consume, to buy and sell stuff we don’t make to each other. This is what we’ve been reduced to, far away from “an economy that honors the dignity of work.”

Each family story, from Kansas City, Missouri, Sardinia, Ohio, Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Louisville, Kentucky, tells a part of the catastrophe we’ve been led into: forty-seven million people without health insurance, $10 billion a month in Iraq, and an economy built on easy money, debt, and consumption.

John McCain and Sarah Palin are never mentioned in this ad. George W. Bush is never mentioned. It’s not about them. It’s not even about Barack Obama. It’s about us. The entire ad, from amber waves of grain to God bless America, is about the idea of us, and what would happen if we decided to take back our country.

One of the marks of a world-class practitioner is that he can take a degraded form and breathe new life into it. Political analysts will be talking about this ad for a very long time, because it transcends the form.

But it doesn’t transcend reality. All of these stories of people who are hurting now are haunted by the realization that more pain is on the way. The current financial crisis will certainly lead to terrible economic effects over the first term of the Obama presidency. The real pain hasn’t even started yet. It’s going to be bad, and it’s going to be worst for poor and working-class families. To get through it at all, people are going to have to come together to enter a “new era of responsibility,” and abandon the politics of resentment and fear that have reigned over the last eight years.

“In six days, we can choose hope over fear and unity over division. . . . In six days we can come together as one nation and one people, and once more choose our better history. That’s what’s at stake.”

Filed on Thursday, October 30 , 2008.

McCain Nation Presidential Debate Watch Party, Walnut Creek, California.
October 15, 2008. Photo by Jon Winet

David Levi Strauss, Aperture magazine contributing editor, noted writer, and current Chair of MFA Art Criticism and Writing Department, School of Visual Arts, shares his unique perspective on the current political landscape.

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Autism on the Rise

John McCain has the worst timing of any politician in recent memory. Eight years ago, he was the most popular political figure in America. Shot down by the Bush/Rove team’s dirty tricks in 2000, he was later forced, Stockholm Syndrome-style, to embrace them. Now, after eight years of a Republican administration that will be remembered as among the worst in American history, McCain and his ideas are irrevocably yoked to that catastrophic cart. His statement Wednesday night that “I am not President Bush,” echoed Nixon’s “I am not a crook,” in its bitterness and irony.

Rather than moving toward the center to convince independent and undecided voters (who used to be part of his natural constituency) to vote for him, McCain instead swerved to the right, choosing a polarizing vice-presidential candidate that can only help him on the lunatic fringe, and mounting a negative campaign that attempts to revive the cultural battles of the 1960s at a time when a collapsing economy has voters focused only on the immediate present and future, not the past.

To rely exclusively on the old Republican rhetoric of cutting taxes and shrinking government at this point, when government is the only protection against collapsing markets, indicates a dangerous misreading of political realities. McCain is fighting the wrong war at the wrong time. More and more, he exhibits an abnormal subjectivity, marching to his own maverick drummer as it leads him and his supporters over a cliff.

Watching McCain in the final debate, I was reminded of Bob Dole in 1996, another highly skilled and successful senator who was drastically out of step with the changing times, and made bitter by the knowledge that he’d repeatedly missed his presidential moment. When John McCain looks at Barack Obama, he sees the future, and it galls him. You can see it in his eyes. Bob Schieffer was trying to help McCain by setting him up for his litany of attacks against Obama, but all it did was display the older man’s desperation and impotence. McCain looked better than he has in months in the first forty minutes of the debate, but if this had been a prize fight, Schieffer would have stepped in and thrown up his hands to protect McCain an hour into it.

Filed on Friday, October 16 , 2008, after the third and final presidential debate.

Obama Debate Watch party, Jack’s Valley, Douglas County, Nevada.
October 7, 2008. Photo by Jon Winet

David Levi Strauss, Aperture magazine contributing editor, noted writer, and current Chair of MFA Art Criticism and Writing Department, School of Visual Arts, shares his unique perspective on the current political landscape.

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Overhead Projector

Acting partly out of desperation and partly out of hubris, John McCain chose to walk into a fair, refereed fight tonight in Nashville and try to go head-to-head on the issues with Barack Obama. This was a reckless, arrogant, possibly fatal mistake.

Granted, this was supposed to be McCain’s format. He’s done hundreds, maybe thousands of these “town meeting” style appearances, and he feels comfortable in this setting. But from the opening coin toss, Obama had the edge in this one, speaking clearly and convincingly about his new policies and about McCain’s failed ones: “He believes in deregulation in every circumstance. That’s what we’ve been going through for the last eight years. It hasn’t worked and we need fundamental change.” McCain revealed his one new proposal (to stabilize home values by buying up bad home loans) in his first minute, and his timing was shot from then on. His jokes fell flat and he couldn’t connect with the questioners in the audience, Tom Brokaw, or Barack Obama. To conceal his reluctance to face his opponent and look him in the eye, McCain retreated to his stool after each speech and pretended to write furiously in a notebook. When Obama wasn’t speaking, he sat confidently, looking directly at McCain. Obama was more aggressive here than in the first debate, but he never hit McCain when he was down. And McCain was down a lot.

This debate made it clear that John McCain and the Republicans are in the same position that John Kerry and the Democrats were in 2004. By accepting the basic terms of Obama’s original message of change, all McCain has to offer now is a watered-down version of what his opponent is proposing. If voters can get the real thing with Obama, why should they choose a less vigorous form of it with McCain?

Outside the debate, McCain and Palin have gone negative with a vengeance, recycling the old Reverend Wright and Bill Ayres guilt-by-association smears against Obama. This race- and radical-baiting is an attempt to resuscitate the old Vietnam War era animosities, to energize the base. The trouble for the Republicans is that the people who are going to put Obama over the top if they come out in force next month weren’t even born in 1968. The time has run out on this tactic, and it is rapidly running out on John McCain.

Filed on Tuesday, October 7, 2008, after the second presidential debate, in Nashville, TN.