Election Day, November 4, 2008. Jack’s Valley, Douglas County, Nevada. 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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Image & Reality

I felt early on, from age 10 or so, that a big part of politics was emotional, and had everything to do with the collective imagination and memory. President John F. Kennedy was assassinated when I was 10, and those images remain indelible. My first electoral politics excitement came from the insurgent candidacy of Bobby Kennedy, and those images too have never faded. When Martin Luther King was assassinated, and then Bobby, in 1968, I was 15, and I never stopped mourning those losses, until November 4, 2008. Forty years later, I feel that excitement again. Electoral politics seems possible again. That’s a long time to wait, a long time to be outside, and I’ll admit it feels very strange to be back after all this time.

If Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy were still alive, they would be 79 and 83 years old, respectively. Think about how much different the intervening years would have been if they hadn’t been killed. As a political tactic to influence democratic process, terrorism doesn’t work—but assassination does.

The politics of fear and resentment that has largely determined electoral politics in America for the last forty years just lost. Nixon and Reagan lost. Lee Atwater and his protégé Karl Rove lost, decisively. “Triangulators” like the Democratic Leadership Council lost. The change—and in American democracy, change is still a choice—is palpable. People are moving differently on the street, and sounding different when they speak.

A few days after Obama won, some people began to publicly wonder whether this was “only a symbolic victory,” or constituted real change. This question seems to me to reveal a singular misreading of the present moment. Yes, this is a symbolic victory, but it is one in an environment where symbols matter more than ever. Symbolic change is real change.

It was necessary, in this campaign, to change the way people thought about electoral politics, to create a new image of it. In the recent past, right-wing Republicans had gotten themselves into position to govern by seizing the public imaginary and by controlling images. They turned out to be extremely good at this.

To defeat them, it was necessary to reclaim the public imaginary, to change the symbolic order. Now Obama and his team are in position to govern, to change policy, and they must do so swiftly and decisively, but they must continue to pay attention to the image. In their second term, Bush & Co. neglected the image, gave up on the public imaginary, and ruled with brute force and fiat. Obama can never do that. There are hard times ahead, and we are going to need images to unite us.

In the campaign, Obama had a particular problem that few politicians ever face: he became too popular. At one point, the level of public adulation rose so precipitously that it threatened to get out of control. The opposition (first Clinton, then McCain) took note, and their image of Obama as a callow celebrity—all style and no substance—briefly took hold.

Then, in Denver, in a stadium filled to bursting with 84,000 of his most ardent supporters, high on their own rightness and growing strength, I saw Obama dial back the charisma and cool the image, to make it more convincing for the 40 million people watching the speech on small screens in living rooms, many of whom did not know him well and had not yet made up their minds. He controlled the image, in order to get into position. When this kind of understanding and self-control comes together with great intelligence and a genuine will to change things for the better, many seemingly impossible things become possible again.

If Obama continues to honor this confluence, he will become not just the most unlikely candidate ever to win an American presidential campaign, but one of the greatest presidents we have ever had.

Filed on Monday, November 17, 2008, after the 60 Minutes interview.

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.

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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Special Needs: Style & Substance

Two extraordinary things happened last night in St. Louis. First, Sarah Palin showed up for the debate with her A game. She was well prepared and poised, and turned in a sterling performance. After disastrous TV interviews with Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric, in which she looked like a clueless student in a high school current events class, Palin appeared last night as the formidable politician that so excites John McCain. From her very first words to Joe Biden, “Hey, can I call you Joe?” she was on-message and relentlessly appealing. Deflecting Gwen Ifill’s insightful questions like a goalie at the net, she delivered her prepared remarks like a seasoned professional, peppering her speech with trademark folksy Fargoisms that made it seem like your gutsy, sexy mom had gotten fed up, put on her best black skirt and heels, and come to Washington to kick some ass.

The second and, in light of expectations, even more extraordinary thing that happened last night was that Joe Biden observed this miraculous make-over and brilliant performance, read Palin’s tone and body language, and carefully calibrated his own delivery to perfectly counter it. He treated her with the respect due a dangerous adversary. He listened closely to what she said and responded forcefully, letting the greater substance of what he was saying speak for itself. He did not overreact or become impatient. This was the most disciplined, magnanimous, and moving performance of Biden’s long and storied career.

I think operatives on both sides expected and prepared for a quite different debate, so there were a number of odd juxtapositions, with each candidate responding to something the other hadn’t said. But the Biden team’s strategy was essentially more generous, and was, in the end, able to absorb and subdue Palin’s style, which would have worked much better against, say, Hillary Clinton.

When the Roviacs discovered and deployed Palin, they were returning to the old Reagan playbook, to appeal to the psychopolitical narcissism of some American voters, who want “someone just like them” to lead the most powerful nation on earth. This weird perversion of populism (Pop populism?) helped to get George Bush and Dick Cheney elected. Going back to it now, after eight years of failure and devastation, is a desperate move, and last night, Joe Biden shut it down.
Filed on Friday, October 3, 2008, after the vice-presidential debate in St. Louis.

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.

Everett and Jones Barbeque, Oakland, California. Site of a large
presidential debate party. 09/26/08. Photo by Jon Winet

No one got hurt in this first debate, and under the circumstances, I think that’s bad for Obama. John McCain limped into this thing after two days of wildly erratic behavior, suspending his campaign and announcing that he wouldn’t show up in Mississippi for the debate, because he had to rush to Washington to solve the financial crisis. After demanding a meeting at the White House with President Bush, Secretary Paulson, Chairman Bernanke, and the Congressional leadership, McCain was ambushed by House Republicans, who decided to oppose Bush’s bailout. After that, McCain reportedly sat off to the side mumbling while Obama asked tough questions of the Treasury secretary and others. When Obama announced that he was going to appear at Old Miss with or without him, McCain decided he could spare the hour and a half to be there, too, after all.

The debate proceeded as if none of this had happened. Jim Lehrer orchestrated an elegant, measured discussion of the issues, with each candidate politely remaining within his time limits. There were no outbursts, gaffes, or zingers, to speak of. The problem with this, for Obama, is that it made McCain look like a perfectly reasonable, august statesman and executive, rather than the reckless, arrogant grandstander he’d been just hours before. McCain looked great tonight, much better than he ever looks when giving a speech. Obama always looks good, so there’s no relative gain.

Even though Obama will always prevail over McCain in any public, refereed debate on the issues, McCain still managed to get his broad, old-fashioned strokes in, painting Obama as a tax-and-spend liberal who will raise business taxes and drive jobs overseas, as a cut-and-runner who will lose the war in Iraq and dishonor the deaths of over 4000 service men and women, and as an inexperienced, naïve upstart who won’t be able to stand up to America’s enemies. Obama is impatient with such broad strokes and doesn’t reciprocate, preferring to draw more precise and subtler connections to make more specific points.

The only real advantage to Obama last night arose from body language and speech tone. From the beginning, Obama often looked at and spoke directly to McCain, while McCain spoke only to Lehrer, ignoring Obama and refusing to look at him. The effect of this was cumulative and significant. As the debate wore on, McCain seemed more evasive and equivocal, refusing to face his opponent head-on. He always referred to his opponent as “Senator Obama,” while Obama called him “John,” and came right at him, honestly and without guile. On a number of occasions, McCain’s tone veered into the sarcastic and even contemptuous, and attentive viewers glimpsed two very different approaches to political discourse.

Filed on Friday, Sept. 26, 2008, after the first Presidential debate at the University of Mississippi’s Oxford campus.

John McCain and Sarah Palin, September 4, 2008. Republican National Convention. Xcel Center, St. Paul, Minnesota. 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 via daily dispatches from the 2008 Democratic and Republican National Conventions.

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No Country for Old Men

John McCain returned to form last night, snatching defeat from the jaws of a victorious convention. His speech was remarkably tone-deaf and stale. “Everyone has something to contribute”? Don’t worry, we’ll find you “a new job that won’t go away”? “We’re all God’s children and we’re all Americans”? Karl Rove must be tearing out his ear hairs. His minions had decked the hall for two nights with fresh red meat, and McCain poured warm milk all over it. The only hope left for his part of the Party is for the revenge and resentment agenda to leapfrog over Grandpa’s corpse.

McCain’s speech had “Old & In the Way” written all over it. He veered from platitude to bad attitude like a drunken sailor. When Thompson and Huckabee and Giuliani and Palin recounted McCain’s moving story as a P.O.W., it sounded noble and true. When he told it himself, it sounded like Gramps nattering on about his glory days.

When he was finally finished, his image men projected big flowing red and white flag bars behind him, recalling George C. Scott’s last speech in Patton, in decline, having become a caricature of his former self. Signal the balloon drop.

The youngest Palin daughter did her plucky best, appearing briefly onstage in a brown sack, looking like Joan of Arc, but it was too late. Her mother now looked for all the world like McCain’s third wife, elbowing aside his current fake glamorous billionaire CEO second wife. And McCain’s mother looked lost in a hail of red, white, and blue balloons. C-e-l-e-b-r-a-t-e Good Times, Come On!

It was all very sad. McCain retired early, leaving Sarah Palin behind to sign autographs, contemplating a future that will, God willing, never come.

Filed on Friday, Sept. 5, 2008, after the last night of the Republican Convention in St. Paul.

Xcel stage moments following Alaska Governor Sarah Palin’s acceptance speech for her nomination as the GOP”s Vice-Presidential candidate. September 3, 2008. Republican National Convention. Xcel Center, St. Paul, Minnesota. 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 via daily dispatches from the 2008 Democratic and Republican National Conventions.

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How to Field Dress a Donkey

So a hockey mom carrying her special needs child walks into a bar, and says to everyone in and outside the joke, “What are you laughing at, asshole? Here’s what I think of your European Ideas.”

Hillary Clinton must be wondering what she did to deserve this. John McCain has, with one deft stroke, made a mockery of her campaign and everything she stands for. You want a woman tough enough to be Commander-in-Chief? Sarah Palin is so tough she doesn’t need to wear pantsuits to wear the pants. She can stand by her man and stand up to the terrorists, while her lily-livered opponent is standing around “worried that someone won’t read them their rights.” And as she marches into history, Palin has picked up the fallen banner of Hillary to use as her own petard.

Unlike Hillary and Joe Biden, she’s “not a member of the permanent political establishment”. . . yet. She’s just been a small-town mayor, which is “sort of like a ‘community organizer,’ except that you have actual responsibilities,” and a big-state governor. Voters like governors, especially of big states. She sees this as a race between “a man who has authored two memoirs but not a single law or even a reform” and the “only man in this campaign who has ever really fought for you.” The sound of Styrofoam Greek columns falling was deafening.

Even Palin’s youngest daughter is so innately media-savvy that she turned Paul Wolfowitz’s telling rough gesture of licking his hand to smooth out his hair (in Michael Moore’s film Fahrenheit 9/11) into an endearing image, using hers to straighten out her baby brother Trig’s. Bristol and Levi looked independent, unrepentant, and fierce, like they could eat the whole Washington Press Corps for breakfast, even without the help of brother Track, who’s on his way to Iraq.

Barack Obama and Joe Biden suddenly have a tremendous problem on their hands. Sarah Barracuda is the new fresh face of revenge and resentment politics, and if enough white evangelical blue-collar and middle-class voters buy it again, things are going to get very ugly. It will no longer be about ideas, European or otherwise. Making sense, telling the truth, and being right just won’t cut it anymore. John McCain has, at least for now, turned the tables, back to a Karl Rovian image- and symbol-storm, in a skirt.

Filed on Thursday, Sept. 4, 2008, after the third night of the Republican Convention in St. Paul.

Fred Thompson, September 2, 2008. Republican National Convention. Xcel Center, St. Paul, Minnesota. 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 via daily dispatches from the 2008 Democratic and Republican National Conventions.

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The Other Side & Their Friends in the Media

When the Bush/Cheney regime seized power eight years ago, I would not have predicted that they would prove to be so adept at the deployment and control of images to shape public opinion. In fact, they turned out to be better at it than any previous American administration.

Watching the first (delayed) night of the Republican National Convention on TV tonight, I was struck by how different the image rhetoric in St. Paul is from what I saw first-hand in Denver last week. The images projected behind speakers tonight were more subtle and yet more iconic than anything I saw in Denver. Joe Lieberman stood before a clear blue sky broken only by a flag waving from a single pole. The film narrated by Gary Sinise was less mawkish and more moving than any of the Democrats’ films. Only George W. Bush’s visual broadcast from the Oval Office was substandard, and that may very well have been by design. For McCain to win, he must distance himself from the Bush/Cheney image.

The verbal rhetoric of each party is less distinguished and less distinguishable. Like John Kerry, Fred Thompson gave a great speech, much better than anything he did on his own behalf as a candidate. Did he have access to better speechwriters tonight, or does he just perform better in a supporting role? “John McCain knows about hope. [When he was a POW] that was all he knew.” “This is the kind of character that civilizations from the beginning of our history have sought in their leaders.” “Character you can believe in.” “Not because of a teleprompter’s speech designed to appeal to America’s critics abroad.” “The Democrats present a history-making nominee for President; history-making in that he’s the most liberal, most inexperienced nominee ever to run for President.”

The overall message was clearer in St. Paul because it was less complicated. Fred Thompson painted a compelling portrait of the candidate and threw out partisan red meat, and then Joe Lieberman appealed to disaffected conservative Democrats and Independents by saying partisanship isn’t enough. It is strange to see both campaigns running against their respective parties. Both McCain and Obama realize that they cannot win with only traditional party loyalties, that they must extend their reach. And they’re both reaching toward the same undecided voters, from opposite ends of the spectrum.

Filed on Tuesday, Sept. 2, 2008, after the second night of the Republican Convention in St. Paul.

September 1, 2008. Republican National Convention. Xcel Center, St. Paul, Minnesota
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 via daily dispatches from the 2008 Democratic and Republican National Conventions. _____________________________________________________________________________________________ A Ship in the Harbor

Who says we can’t afford another big election about small things? Isn’t it the little things that matter most? Like Bristol Palin’s teen pregnancy, and her mother’s little gun? Like John McCain’s age and Barack Obama’s secret Muslim heart? After all, the big things—war, environmental catastrophe, the energy crisis, economic ruin—are too immense to contemplate. So let us turn deftly away, as George W. Bush taught us with 9/11, and the Iraq War, and Hurricane Katrina, and Global Warming. Play some golf, dance a jig, cut some brush in Crawford. What we don’t think about can’t hurt us. Leave it to someone else. One day at a time.

Trivialize women’s rights. Make a cute little button-nosed joke out of the Vice Presidency. Turn the tables on those oh-so-serious Dems, with their sober assessments and dire predictions, and all that downer talk about mutual responsibility. Please. What ever happened to the happy-go-lucky, irresponsible Negro, anyway? Those were the days, remember?

When Blacks and women knew their place and were happy to be there? When the U.S. was the sole super-power and could conduct foreign policy from the air, no matter what Moscow or Bejing or anyone else thought about it? When economic policy consisted of deregulation and privatization and spending the government into bankruptcy? When energy policy consisted of removing all barriers for the oil companies? God created Anwar for us, didn’t he, so we could drill there?

The Democrats’ hand-wringing only encourages the worst tendencies of a Nation of Whiners. It’s Morning in America, my friends. Don’t worry, be happy. Let Sarah and Todd and Bristol and Levi and Cindy and John show you the way, Back to the Future.

Filed Labor Day, Sept. 1, 2008. First day of the Republican National Convention in St. Paul.

Joe Biden acceptance speech. August 27, 2008. Democratic National Convention. Pepsi Center, Denver, Colorado. 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 via daily dispatches from the 2008 Democratic and Republican National Conventions.

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The Machine

I’m writing to you from inside a machine for producing words and images. If anything happens here at the Pepsi Center that is not recorded, it is a wasted act, a kind of sin. Everyone here is divided into use-groups, indicated by the colored tags hanging from their necks. Security forces check the tags constantly to insure compliance.

First, there are the Politicians, the stars, the reason we’re all here. Some of them are so important that they don’t even wear tags. Their images are so ubiquitous and recognizable that they transcend the need for secondary identification.

Next comes the Designated Crowd, also called delegates. Their job is to dress extravagantly and react enthusiastically to everything the Politicians do. They must act as if they’re on-camera at all times, even in the most supposedly private of moments, because when you become part of the Designated Crowd, you sacrifice your identity and image to the greater Image.

The Press is here to record and interpret every act and gesture of the Politicians and the Designated Crowd. The Press is divided into Word People and Image People, and in this setting, the Image People have the upper hand. The Press is also divided into the Mainstream Media and the Bloggers. The MSM have whole buildings (called Media Pavilions) dedicated to their every need or want. They have lounges and cafes and bars. And they have degrees of unlimited access. Some of them have such recognizable images that they have themselves become stars: Wolf, Anderson, Katie, Cokie, Matt. One sees them on the Floor, perfect and motionless, until the cameras roll and they spring to life.

The lowest caste of all is the Bloggers. They are image-less drones, crammed into crowded warrens in tents, outbuildings, and basements, plugged into their pitiful terminals, eating scraps falling from above. They exist at the outer edges of the Machine for Producing Words & Images, closest to the Unwashed, the Irrelevant.

Tonight, the Machine moves.

Filed on Thursday, August 28, 2008, after the third night of the DNC.