Just how important is Obama's race, anyway?

John Heilemann has an article in New York on how race is an unspoken factor in the opposition to Barack Obama. Fair enough, but I'm almost positive he's worried far too much and coming from a skewed perspective. Take the following quote:

In a number of key swing states, the percentage of voters who backed Clinton and who said that “the race of the candidates” was “important” in their decision was alarmingly high: in New Jersey, 9; in Ohio and Pennsylvania, more than 11.

9% is alarmingly high? Tell that to any American in 1962. That number seems quite low, considering how controversial race still is today. And how many that 9-11% would be voting for a Democrat under any circumstances?

I don't understand how pundits worried about Obama not having a 20-percentage point lead see this as proof he can't win. (For the record, Heilemann has never believed Obama could win).

Why Barack Obama Isn't Doing Better In The Polls [New York]

Book Review: The Way We'll Be - The Zogby Report on the Transformation of the American Dream by John Zogby

(This review was originally published on Blogcritics)

The only mark against John Zogby’s career as a pollster has been his tendency to let his mouth get the best of him. He’s yet to have a poll prove blatantly incorrect, but in 2004, Zogby would tell anyone who would listen on Election Day that Kerry would win by a comfortable margin. His final poll showed Bush winning by a percentage point. The Way We’ll Be: The Zogby Report on the Transformation of the American Dream, Zogby’s first book for a popular audience, gives him a vehicle to explain his line of work, his views on the nature of polling, and, somewhat more spuriously, where his polls show America to be going. It’s clear that he’s had 20 years of opinions stored up that he can’t wait to let out. For better or worse, The Way We’ll Be lets Zogby’s mouth run wild.

The Way We’ll Be is a relentlessly optimistic book. He sees a future that’s shaped by an adult population with no memory of World War II, the Cold War, or increasingly, the turbulence of the 1960s. Today’s 18-29 year olds are the backbone of a rising wave of tolerance, global consciousness, and environmental friendliness. While Zogby declares from the start that he’s “no Pollyanna,” he treads dangerously close to apologist territory with his positive outlook. It may be true that that today’s youth are more tolerant than older generations, and that the opinions of 18-29 year olds are the key to measuring future attitudes of the American public. But as the Bush presidency winds down, optimism is a bitter pill to swallow.

Backing Zogby’s case is a plethora of tables, percentages, majorities and plurarities to dissect. At some points, the numbers become so overwhelming that it seems your best bet is to trust the conclusions of the expert. Of course, this is not a statistical report, but a work of popular nonfiction. Zogby clearly has some ideas in place that are more normative than descriptive. Just witness his section on “champs and chumps” of recent advertising campaigns in the book’s penultimate chapter. Instead of focusing on which ads were the most effective at selling a product and which failed, he focuses on which ads “get it,” “it” being his argument that advertisers should be more honest. This leads to passages as painfully sophomoric as his description of the “What Happens in Vegas” ad campaign:

So it’s okay to lie, cheat, steal, carouse; get stinking drunk; marry a total stranger one night and divorce the same stranger the next night; and gamble away the kids’ college money because in good old tight-lipped Las Vegas no one ever whispers a word? Give me a break. What planet are these people living on?

This is not exactly a careful analysis of empirical data, nor is his listing of “just about every political campaign" as a “chump” despite admitting they can often be effective. This passage taints an entire chapter of data that very tenuously shows a generational development of a “bullshit detector.”

It would be easy to take passages like the preceding and dismiss The Way We’ll Be outright. Many of Zogby’s theses depend on percentage-points differences that are barely above the margin of error. But to dismiss Zogby’s entire book would ignore some of the more compelling points that he makes. One of the more fascinating is his argument that the best ways to measure voting tendencies are by consumption habits. It seems that many of our commonly held stereotypes are actually crucial statistical predictors: Wal-Mart shoppers and NASCAR lovers primarily vote Republican, while Target shoppers and fans of Richard Pryor vote Democrat. This use of statistical examination to address commonly held assumptions is exactly what a pollster should be doing, and Zogby has admittedly used unconventional methodology to come up with some particularly striking results.

After the mess of his chapter on authenticity, we get a concluding chapter that utilizes some of his strongest and most convincing data. Rather than divide American generations into the standard Greatest Generation, Baby Boomers, and Generations X and Y, he divides America into “Privates,” “Woodstockers,” “Nikes,” and “First Globals.” This division overcomes some commonly held misconceptions. Generation X, for instance, may be more cynical and apathetic towards politics, but they also represent a sea change of devotion of the individual to one’s own family and personal convictions. The Baby Boomers did make a breakthrough with radical politics, but they’ve also become decadent whiners who are primed for a political reinvention.

It’s unclear how much of the differences of opinions between these generations are due to the natural process of maturing or the product of something specific to this particular period in American history. What’s more compelling than Zogby’s analysis of general beliefs, however, is his data on specific issues. Across the board, adults under the age of 40 are consistently on the more progressive side of a controversial issue. They’re more likely to be tolerant of stem cell research, more in favor of net neutrality, more concerned with carbon emissions, and more open to multinational negotiations in the Middle East. More so than any larger intellectual change in American values (or what Zogby calls the rise of “Secular Spiritualism”), these specific results are the most telling signs of what the future holds in America’s political landscape. Zogby has his numbers right, but in The Way We’ll Be, once more, he lets his mouth get the best of him.

They've probably never heard of Richard Hofstadter in Vegas

Geoff Schumacher at the Las Vegas Review Journal suddenly realizes that Americans are anti-intellectual. Welcome to Andrew Jackson's America, Geoff.

Bush is not Batman!

If he was, he would be the Batman and Robin version of Batman (though seeing Bush's nipples in a rubber suit may make me vomit). Apologies to Fire Joe Morgan, but I must use their style to call out Andrew Klavan of the Wall Street Journal for his Republican wet dream. Trying to milk The Dark Knight for his own political purposes, Klavan has drawn a comparison (for which there could be "no question") between Chris Nolan's Batman and Dick Cheney's President Bush.

A cry for help goes out from a city beleaguered by violence and fear: A beam of light flashed into the night sky, the dark symbol of a bat projected onto the surface of the racing clouds . . .

Oh, wait a minute. That's not a bat, actually. In fact, when you trace the outline with your finger, it looks kind of like . . . a "W."

Yes, because when Bob Kane and Billy Finger created Batman in 1939, they actually had superhuman future predicting powers, and could predict the middle name of their President/superhero 69 years later. Additionally, God must have been a Bush supporter50 million years ago when he designed the bone structure of bats to coincide with the development of the Roman alphabet around Jesus time and the middle name of the President today. God is on Bush's side after all.

There seems to me no question that the Batman film "The Dark Knight," currently breaking every box office record in history, is at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war.

Yes, there's no question that everyone loves Batman because of they also love Bush. The 27% of the population that approves of Bush, and the part of the world population that doesn't want him imprisoned for war crimes (or dead), accounted for all $200 million+ the film has made worldwide. Also, Chris Nolan, an Englishman, is secretly a right wing American stooge. Just like Obama is a secret Muslim Manchurian Candidate.

Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past.

Um, in case you have forgotten, Klavan, Batman doesn't kill anyone. And since 9/11, there hasn't been an active threat in America on the same level of bombing hospitals, blowing up ferries, and murdering mayors, cops, judges, and police commissioners. The civil liberties violations have occurred well after the emergency has past. I'm also pretty sure Batman is against waterboarding, which is probably worse than breaking people's ankles by throwing them off two stories of a building. Furthermore Bush hasn't only sometimes pushed boundaries; he's violated fundamental human rights and human dignity at all times whether or not it's been helpful to fighting terrorism. Batman's actually accountable for his actions, and also takes the blame for crimes he hasn't committed for the good of Gotham. Compare that to "we don't torture people."

And like W, Batman understands that there is no moral equivalence between a free society -- in which people sometimes make the wrong choices -- and a criminal sect bent on destruction. The former must be cherished even in its moments of folly; the latter must be hounded to the gates of Hell.

Except Batman doesn't kill people. The Joker does. And if there's no moral equivalence, how come Batman is seriously disturbed and insane? Did you even see Batman Begin? I guess that would kill the mood of the wet dream.

"The Dark Knight," then, is a conservative movie about the war on terror. And like another such film, last year's "300," "The Dark Knight" is making a fortune depicting the values and necessities that the Bush administration cannot seem to articulate for beans.

Therefore, you are full of shit. You're saying that 300, a nearly panel-by-panel adaptation of a comic book published in 1998, and The Dark Knight, a move directed by and starring Brits, are both Bush propaganda pieces. Really? Maybe Bush can't articulate it because he isn't as hot as Gerard Butler or Christian Bale.

Conversely, time after time, left-wing films about the war on terror -- films like "In The Valley of Elah," "Rendition" and "Redacted" -- which preach moral equivalence and advocate surrender, that disrespect the military and their mission, that seem unable to distinguish the difference between America and Islamo-fascism, have bombed more spectacularly than Operation Shock and Awe.

Why is it then that left-wingers feel free to make their films direct and realistic, whereas Hollywood conservatives have to put on a mask in order to speak what they know to be the truth? Why is it, indeed, that the conservative values that power our defense -- values like morality, faith, self-sacrifice and the nobility of fighting for the right -- only appear in fantasy or comic-inspired films like "300," "Lord of the Rings," "Narnia," "Spiderman 3" and now "The Dark Knight"?

Yes, because liberal Hollywood—wheat grass-drinking, hybrid-driving Hollywood, requires you to be a Bush propagandist in order to get a movie financed. Never mind that 27% approval rating, or the fact that just about everyone wants us out of Iraq immediately. We all know that Bush is right, but can only realize it in an allegorical form. So basically, the only way Bush would be right is if Batman, Spider-Man, and Narnia were real.

The moment filmmakers take on the problem of Islamic terrorism in realistic films, suddenly those values vanish. The good guys become indistinguishable from the bad guys, and we end up denigrating the very heroes who defend us. Why should this be?

The answers to these questions seem to me to be embedded in the story of "The Dark Knight" itself: Doing what's right is hard, and speaking the truth is dangerous. Many have been abhorred for it, some killed, one crucified.

Or, you know, that real life is not a comic book. If soldiers could get killed in Iraq and then hit restart again like it was Halo, then yes, maybe the war wouldn't be so bad. If we could die as many times as Superman or Captain America, then it wouldn't be that bad. But then again, Jesus came back to life, so why can't we all? I guess it's liberals fault we can't all be Jesus.

Leftists frequently complain that right-wing morality is simplistic. Morality is relative, they say; nuanced, complex. They're wrong, of course, even on their own terms.

Left and right, all Americans know that freedom is better than slavery, that love is better than hate, kindness better than cruelty, tolerance better than bigotry. We don't always know how we know these things, and yet mysteriously we know them nonetheless.

Yes, and Christians are better than Muslims (and Jews), liberals are worse than conservatives, and Bush is a better president than a sack of doorknobs. 27% of Americans can't be wrong! Wait, what does this have to do with Batman again?

The true complexity arises when we must defend these values in a world that does not universally embrace them -- when we reach the place where we must be intolerant in order to defend tolerance, or unkind in order to defend kindness, or hateful in order to defend what we love.

So basically, as Tom Lehrer said, there are some people who don't embrace tolerance, and we should hate people like that. Or else Batman will kick their asses?

When heroes arise who take those difficult duties on themselves, it is tempting for the rest of us to turn our backs on them, to vilify them in order to protect our own appearance of righteousness. We prosecute and execrate the violent soldier or the cruel interrogator in order to parade ourselves as paragons of the peaceful values they preserve. As Gary Oldman's Commissioner Gordon says of the hated and hunted Batman, "He has to run away -- because we have to chase him."

Doesn't this sound like it should be read by Don LaFontaine? So I guess the soldier who kills civilians and the waterboarder is basically the equivalent of the loose cannon cop called out by the chief of police. But dammit, he gets the job done. Except when he doesn't. As in real life.

That's real moral complexity.

Lethal Weapon is morally complex?

And when our artistic community is ready to show that sometimes men must kill in order to preserve life; that sometimes they must violate their values in order to maintain those values; and that while movie stars may strut in the bright light of our adulation for pretending to be heroes, true heroes often must slink in the shadows, slump-shouldered and despised -- then and only then will we be able to pay President Bush his due and make good and true films about the war on terror.

Yes, Bush is in the shadows. That's why his torturing, wiretapping, and War are still firmly imprinted in America's mind. And keep in mind that Batman confessed to a crime as a cover up for Harvey Dent. He didn't actually do anything wrong. Does that make Dick Cheney Two-Face? That would assume Cheney was ever once a crusader for good. So I guess what he's saying is that we'll be sorry when Bush is gone. Maybe, but with a country more likely to have another building blown up after Al Quaeda has gone unchecked, with a country more likely to go underwater because of global warming (or just another hurricane Bush would ignore), a country that has innocent people tortured and guilty people giving false testimonies under torture, we'll be sorry alright. But for a different reason.

This makes me never want to watch 24 ever again.

Theater Review (NYC): Stain by Tony Glazer

(This review was originally featured on Blogcritics.)

Stain feels like what would happen if Vincent Gallo wrote a play and didn’t have a disciplined editor at his disposal. It takes a lot to politically offend me, and Stain is the first play that has done so in quite a long time. The play has not-too-obvious right-wing leanings, a racist dad who would be comical if he weren’t so repulsive, and misogyny that rivals Strindberg's. I’m fine with offensive politics and dialogue if there’s an interesting story, as well as believable, if not sympathetic characters, and true human struggle. But rather than inject some creativity and careful thought into Stain, playwright Tony Glazer has instead given the play a hopeless string of cliché’s and confused character motivations. The result is a play where the harshness cannot be justified.

Allow me to list the number of supposedly controversial themes addressed in Stain: abuse, racism, rape, molestation, teen parenthood and confusion over biological parents, incest, divorce, drugs, unprotected sex, and legal manipulation. Glazer left murder out of an otherwise complete set, but his casual assumption that abortion is murder has it there by proxy.

Playing with a glut of themes along these lines is not necessarily doomed to failure—in fact, this year Pulitzer winner, August: Osage County, also featured a seemingly endless string of similar catastrophes. But where August offered real human struggle, black humor, and broken human lives, Stain instead offers stunning plot twists for the sake of stunning plot twists. Glazer mentioned in a recent interview that he wanted to address the repercussions of not being honest with your family, and that point is certainly jammed down our throats repeatedly. But with such confused character motivations and dubious melodrama, there’s not enough else going for the play to overcome the clichés, other than a handful of witty lines.

The play centers around how a bunch of adults have been wholly unfair to one extremely unlucky fifteen-year-old named Thomas (Tobias Segal). In addition to Arthur, the said racist, borderline-alcoholic dad (Jim O’Connor), Thomas has a repressive, manipulative mother, Julia (Summer Crockett Moore), a botox-using, saintly (if Republican) grandma Theresa (Joanna Bayless), and a pot-smoking, insult-trading buddy George (Peter Brensinger). There’s obviously a secret everyone is keeping from Thomas about his parents’ divorce, and he spends most of the first act asking for it. We also learn that he’s knocked up a 32-year-old Puerto Rican lawyer, Carla (Karina Arroyave), who, rather than facing statutory rape charges, plans to raise the baby on her own and ignore Thomas altogether while still demanding child support once Thomas turns eighteen.

The play struggles with consistency and believability throughout. How can Thomas, so wiry and awkward, have convinced an educated women that he was of the age of consent, much less be smooth enough to convince her to sleep with him? How could Theresa, at once batty and immensely grounded, have been so oblivious to the true history of Thomas’ birth? How could anyone not think of calling the cops on Carla, despite her legalese?

Perhaps most offensive, however, is Glazer’s brazen sweep over the question of abortion. Thomas’s situation seems like the kind of case Roe v. Wade was made for, but rather than at least seriously considering all possibilities, the issue is shot down by both Carla and, less believably, Thomas’ family. When Carla mentions she’s not having an abortion, Theresa casually declares, “We’re Republicans.” When your fifteen-year-old son’s future is on the line, you simply cannot shoot down the possibility so easily because of a political conviction, even by a family that believes “liberal” and “welfare” are appropriate crossword puzzle solutions to the description “destructive.” At the very least, you could consult a lawyer much more quickly.

Segal’s performance as Thomas may be the most redeeming element of Stain. A recent Drama Desk nominee, Segal is ironically the most mature and professional actor in the cast, effortlessly gliding through Thomas’ range of emotions while never dropping his overwhelmingly adolescent glaze. Hopelessly clumsy, he looks to have outgrown his body. Through pure charm, he almost allows you to forgive Glazer’s poorly thought-out decision to make Thomas a drug user and lawyer-seducer. Bayless’ Theresa would have given the other noteworthy performance as the capricious grandmother, who seems to be on more drugs than botox. Unfortunately, Bayless struggles with her lines too often for her performance to really shine.

Stain is a willfully obnoxious play, one that doesn’t try to make its audience happy or play to viewers' political sympathies. In a way, we should be seeing a lot more of this kind of attitude in the New York theater scene. But without a proper play to back up that attitude, the obnoxiousness translates to something more sophomoric than productive.

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Through August 23. Stain, written by Tony Glazer. Directed by Scott D. Embler. Scenic Design by Eddy Trotter. Costume Design by Cully Long. Lighting Design by Nick Kolin. Sound Design/Original Music by Andrew Eisiele. Photos by Orlando Behar.

Starring Tobias Segal (Thomas), Jim O'Conner (Arthur), Peter Brensinger (George), Summer Crockett Moore (Julia), Joanna Bayless (Theresa), and Karina Arroyave (Carla).

It's Obama's election to lose

Zogby has posted an electoral college map using their state-by-state poll predictions, and even with 105 electoral college votes too close to call, Obama has over 270 electoral college votes. The more conservative map at 270towin.com has Obama up 185-174, but this is still a clear indication that Obama is the prohibitive favorite at this point. He'd have to try really hard to fuck this up, or have Michelle say "whitey" sans rickroll.

Senator (VP?) Jim Webb on TMZ

The fact that he doesn't tee off against the paparazzi should help alleviate the bad temper rumors.

Pandas More Popular Than Politics (and non-heteronormative Adam Sandler)

This was by no means a bad opening weekend for You Don't Mess With The Zohan (Adam Sandler is like the Cal Ripken of the box office). Kung Fu Panda just did even better (and also had better reviews). Still, I fully expect someone to pen a column about how no one wants to see politics in movies out of this weekend's box office results, because, you know, columnists will take any excuse they can to write that column. If I don't find it, please email it to me. You can definitely expect some Fire Joe Morgan-esque mockery.

How important is David Mamet anyway?

I suppose I should address David Mamet's diatribe in The Village Voice on his newfound aversion to the left wing. He is, after all, arguably the most influential American playwright of the last 25 years, and I'd argue that an introduction to his work is bound to fuck up the styling of most young playwrights for at least a few years (Oleanna pretty much permanently castigated me to critical aspirations). Still, I feel immensely unqualified to write about it, as I did not see Boston Marriage, Romance, or November. I would feel worse about this, if I didn't hear such nearly universally terrible things about the former two. The latter play had all the indications of closing the store on Mamet's career, but I think I was not the only one surprised when it got a glowing review from John Lahr and did exceptionally well at the box office (perhaps the result, as Ben Brantley put it, of being a "David Mamet play for people who don't like David Mamet.") But because I haven't seen these plays, I'll focus more on the politics and past cases of lefty playwrights gone right.

Mamet's long had indications of his right-wing leanings, even in his earliest work, which had a frank honesty towards the brutality of dog-eat-dog capitalism, be it real estate (Glengarry Glen Ross) or Hollywood (Speed-the-Plow). He also fiercely criticized political correctness in my personal favorite of his, the aforementioned Oleanna. Even when his plays were scathing critiques of the culture of capitalism, there was a sort of acceptance of capitalism's logic behind it all. The biggest indication of late, of course, has been his right-wing Israel book The Wicked Son and his rant on Hollywood in Bambi vs. Godzila. He hasn't just been a contrarian, he's been an outright reactionary. It's arguably what we've loved most about him. Now we just have direct evidence of the fact.

Michael Billington raises the absolutely worthy consideration that his dogmatic conservatism may be making him a worse playwright, as he loses the moral nuance that characterized his earlier work. He cites Kingsley Amis and John Osborne as playwrights who suffered after there newfound conservatism. As an Osborne devotee, I must raise a red flag here, because as John Heilpern pointed out in his recent biography, Osborne was always more contrarian than conservative, and he certainly never had a political mantra as direct as what Mamet has provided here. So, I guess to sum up, I'm dissappointed by Mamet, though not particularly surprised, and I don't particularly expect all that much from his later career. It was nice while it lasted.