Just Above Sunset

There are serious matters, always, as on Tuesday, May 13, fires were burning, cyclones causing unimaginable devastation and massive earthquakes leveling cities – and tornadoes were “on a record pace” across the American South and no one really knew why. You might assume something was up – Mother Nature saying something like PAY ATTENTION! If you were of a fanciful nature you could imagine the planet itself was sort of slapping us all in the face – Snap out of it, forget Barack and Hillary, and old-man McCain, and even the shallow, mean and vindictive George Bush and his Svengali, Dick Cheney! 

But of course there was no “Thanks, I needed that.” Most people watched those news stories with the usual odd mixture of being properly appalled and vaguely bored – save for those in Florida, Myanmar (Burma), central China, or Tulsa. All of that was elsewhere – far away. We live in our own world, with our own concerns.

The same day brought us this news story from the UK:

A man who dressed up as Darth Vader, wearing a garbage bag for a cape, and assaulted the founders of a group calling itself the Jedi church was given a suspended sentence Tuesday.

Arwel Wynne Hughes, 27, attacked Jedi church founder Barney Jones - aka Master Jonba Hehol - with a metal crutch, hitting him on the head, prosecutors told Holyhead Magistrates’ Court.

He also whacked Jones’ 18-year-old cousin, Michael Jones - known as Master Mormi Hehol - bruising his thigh in the March 25 incident, prosecutors said.

But it seems this was all a matter of competing obsessions, intense enthusiasm, and a lack of restraint:

Hughes claimed he couldn’t remember the incident, having drunk the better part of a 2 1/2-gallon (10-liter) box of wine beforehand.

“He knows his behavior was wrong and didn’t want it to happen but he has no recollection of it,” said Hughes’ lawyer, Frances Jones.

District Judge Andrew Shaw sentenced Hughes to two months in jail but suspended the sentence for one year. He also ordered Hughes to pay $195 to each of his victims and $117 in court costs.

In the 2001 United Kingdom census, 390,000 - 0.7 percent of the population - listed Jedi as their religion.

Almost four hundred thousand people list Jedi as their religion? George Lucas has much to answer for. But one is reminded of the Hillary Clinton supporters – as this was the day she won the West Virginia primary, not that it mattered much. Obama leads in pledged delegates, superdelegates, the popular vote and all the rest. But she did win the state, somewhere around 66-27, but the percentages. She picked up perhaps fifteen pledged delegates, just after Obama had picked up fourteen more superdelegates. It was a win of sorts.

Reuters reported it this way – Hillary Shellacs Obama in West Virginia Primary – “As was widely predicted in polls, Clinton takes the state. Obama conceded West Virginia, but Hillary’s campaign argues that he shouldn’t be able to write off the loss given her decisive margin.”

The Associated Press offered Determined Clinton Wins W.Va., Says Race Not Over:

Hillary Rodham Clinton coasted to a large but largely symbolic victory in working-class West Virginia on Tuesday, handing Barack Obama one of his worst defeats of the campaign yet scarcely slowing his march toward the Democratic presidential nomination.

“The White House is won in the swing states. And I am winning the swing states,” Clinton told cheering supporters at a victory rally.

She coupled praise for Obama with a pledge to persevere in a campaign in which she has become the decided underdog. “This race isn’t over yet,” she said. “Neither of us has the total delegates it takes to win.”

As least she didn’t swoop in as Darth Vader, wearing a garbage bag for a cape, and slap Obama around, even if the Force is With Him. CNN has a video of her victory speech – part madness (the numbers don’t mean a thing) and part graciousness (Obama is a fine fellow and someone does have to defeat Grandpa McCain, who is really George Bush, and one of us must).

So her campaign was rescued from the dead, as CNN put it. And the Clinton campaign had already pointed out that this one really did matter, as “no Democrat has won the White House without winning West Virginia since 1916″ – so you see, Obama’s devastating primary loss in this case shows that, in spite of his large lead in the polls over John McCain, he cannot possible win the general election – no way, no how. Those polls lie.

Matthew Yglesias has a few things to say about that:

What’s even more interesting is that no Democrat has won the White House without carrying Minnesota since 1912 (it went for Teddy Roosevelt’s Bull Moose party) so given that Obama won Minnesota and Clinton won West Virginia, McCain is guaranteed to win the general election - unless the eventual nominee can somehow completely replicate the social and political conditions prevailing in pre-WWI America. The outlook, in short, is very grim.

Yes, it is all quite mad – but then Matthew Yglesias lives in another world, and he writes books. The good people of West Virginia don’t mess with those –

According to the exit polls, about two-thirds - 65% - of all Democratic primary voters today are whites with less than a four-year college degree. That’s by far the highest percentage for any primary state so far. … The age distribution of the West Virginia Democratic primary electorate is older than most states. A quarter (26%) of those voting today are seniors, 65 and older. Just 12% of the voters are under 30.

It’s an interesting place. It’s no place for a Jedi knight.

As for ever sorting out the madness, over what had happened and what it meant, Josh Marshall at Talking Point Memo said don’t watch television:

This is fascinating. I spent most of the evening writing a sprawling post about the historical and demographic roots of Sen. Clinton’s strength in Appalachia (which accounts for almost all of her purported strength with rural and working class white voters). But now I’m listening to the MSNBCoids discussing the finer points of objective fact versus epistemological relativism, or, in this specific case, whether Sen. Clinton simply has a different, equally valid, opinion on the closeness of the race, or whether she’s living in her own separate reality. So I’m not really sure there’s any point.

Yep, everyone has their own separate reality, and some run for president. The trick is to get the pundits on television to say, yeah, we see the actual facts, and she does seems crazy as a loon, but to be fair, we obviously must consider whether everyone else in the world is crazy, including all of us, and only she sees the truth, and thus the facts really don’t matter – it’s only fair.

But there are basic facts, and Andrew Sullivan offers them up:

The exit polls reveal what the demographics have long foretold, and what the polls last February predicted, with just a few wrinkles. The race factor seems to have tipped very heavily toward Clinton in West Virginia. In Indiana, 16 percent said race was an important factor for them; in Pennsylvania, 19 percent; in West Virginia, 22 percent. The racial skew to Clinton does soar in West Virginia: 81 percent of race-based voters went for Clinton; in Pennsylvania, it was 55; in Indiana, it was 53 percent.

Oddly, Obama did better among white Catholics in West Virginia than he has in the past. No idea if that means anything.

Was this racial? See this:

Josh Fry, a 24-year-old ambulance driver from Williamson, insisted he was not racist but said he would feel more comfortable with Mr McCain, the 71-year-old Vietnam war hero, in the White House. “I want someone who is a full-blooded American as president,” he said.

There’s much more here –

Yet another was told of Obama by a Clinton supporter: “He’s a half-breed and he’s a Muslim. How can you trust that?”

Yeah, well – there is the matter of competing obsessions, intense enthusiasm, and a lack of restraint.

And then the is Camille Paglia, the “feminist that other feminists love to hate,” offering this in Salon:

“She Came to Stay.” That was the American title of Simone de Beauvoir’s first book, a 1943 roman à clef about a manipulative and self-absorbed young woman who saps the energy and willpower of her admirers and plunges them into the existential abyss.

Bulletin to all nations: help! Tornadoes, typhoons and earthquakes batter the globe, while the U.S. is teetering into recession and paralyzed by a stupid war it can neither win nor quit. But somehow we are locked at the hip to Hillary Clinton, who won’t stop her manic tarantella until her party whirls into ruins, like the run-amuck carousel in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Strangers on a Train.”

That’s just not nice, no matter how packed with amusing allusions. But it comes down to this:

As a candidate running a close second, Hillary would normally have every right to complete the primary process, which runs into early June. Calls for her to drop out of the race began months ago and were certainly premature. But at this point, even with strong wins in Appalachia, Hillary has no true rationale for her candidacy, other than her inflamed gender and her putative Washington “experience” - which has yet to produce a tangible legislative achievement. Her persistence is now keyed to her hope (chillingly close to a curse) that her rival will make a major gaffe or be besmirched by some unknown past scandal. And her message maliciously undermines the presumptive nominee by targeting his presumed weakness in the general election. But the gifted Obama is just getting started on the national stage, while his opponent, John McCain, is a clumsy, fusty, narcissistic waffler whose party is in disarray and revolt against him.

And Paglia knows Hillary is not quitting:

I’m puzzled by the optimism of so many commentators and Democratic functionaries who are prophesying Hillary’s graceful withdrawal by mid-June. Is there anything in the Clintons’ tawdry history to support such a thesis? Why wouldn’t they play smiley-face rope-a-dope now and smash-mouth alley-and-ambush fisticuffs right to the bitter end - meaning the convention in August? It’s now or never for Ms. Hill. Even if Obama loses this fall, there’s no guarantee whatever that she would win the Democratic nomination in 2012. That hoss will have been around the rodeo way too many times. The infusion of fresh new blood into the party - especially women governors - has already started. Who will want to resurrect all those 1990s mummies?

And should she somehow win the nomination, there would be trouble:

Republican operatives have been salivating for Hillary to be the nominee. Her vainglorious claim to have been fully “vetted” is ludicrous. She and her husband left a mountain of manure in Little Rock and Washington that hasn’t even begun to be thrown. The mainstream media, despite its tilt toward Obama, has been amazingly protective of the Clintons during this campaign. Where were the chronologies of the voluminous Clinton scandals that voters (especially young ones) needed to evaluate Hillary’s professional judgment and character? That the conservative Washington Times has now begun to make document drops about Hillary’s stonewalling and duplicity (such as over the Rose Law Firm billing records) suggests that Republicans have concluded her candidacy is kaput.

Surely, given Hillary’s claim of expertise on the basis of her service as first lady, every major or ambiguous episode in her husband’s two presidencies should have been systematically reexamined by the media. …

Not to worry – see The Portland Tribune with Poll: Obama trouncing Clinton in Oregon (Illinois senator leading former first lady 55-35) – “A bit more than a week away from Oregon’s May 20 primary, Barack Obama has amassed a nearly insurmountable lead in the Democratic presidential race, according to statewide polling …”

But does that matter? See Christopher Beam in Slate with this review of the Clinton reality, after West Virginia. Here’s the alternative truth:

1) Obama’s coalition is splintering. Clinton’s major argument has been that Obama can’t win working-class white voters, and that he relies on too narrow a coalition. Well, tonight helps her case. Clinton won almost every single demographic normally loyal to Obama. She won all income slices, although less decisively among wealthier voters. She won 54 percent of independents, as well as 59 percent of conservatives. She took college graduates by 57 percent. (She even won voters with postgraduate work, 51-47. Hey now!) And, most surprisingly, she won young voters (age 17-29) with 57 percent. Everyone expected Clinton to win West Virginia because of its demographics - they didn’t expect Obama to slip quite so much among his usual fans.

2) He’s too vulnerable. It looked like Obama’s campaign disasters - the Rev. Wright, “bitter,” the flag pin - didn’t hurt him much in Indiana and North Carolina. In West Virginia, though, they clearly did. Fifty-one percent of voters told pollsters they thought Obama shares Wright’s views. Only 47 percent of voters said Obama shares their values - a pretty clear stand-in for questions of patriotism. Clinton could argue that these voters are the tip of a big, judgmental iceberg of general election voters. If you think Obama’s having trouble now, wait till all the racists come out of the woodwork in November.

3) Economy blues. Consider this: Sixty-four percent of voters named the economy as their top issue. At the same time, a whopping 63 percent said her gas tax holiday proposal was a good idea. That despite almost unanimous opposition to the idea by experts. Clinton can now say she’s got the people on her side. She can also argue that if the economy crashes between now and November, she stands to benefit much more than Obama.

4) It’s not over! According to Fox News, 78 percent of voters think Clinton should stay in the race. That includes a good chunk of Obama supporters. If Clinton needs to persuade superdelegates to hold their tongues until June 3, this is the stat she’ll cite. And right now, buying time is the best thing Clinton can do.

All this may work, or it may not.

But there’s more, like Robert Novak’s column from May 12, with this:

Some U.S. Christians are not reconciled to McCain’s candidacy but instead regard the prospective presidency of Barack Obama in the nature of a biblical plague visited upon a sinful people. These militants look at former Baptist preacher Huckabee as “God’s candidate” for president in 2012. Whether they can be written off as merely a troublesome fringe group depends on Huckabee’s course.

Yglesias comments:

Now there appears to be no actual evidence that Huckabee, working in tandem with God Himself, is actually fighting to deliver the presidency to Black Nationalist Muslim devil-man Barack Obama, but Novak’s got plenty of idle speculation.

But Obama could be the Antichrist, ruling in wickedness until the True Christ is triumphant (and the world ends) – you never know. But people say lots of things. Chris Matthews in this video clip says that Hillary Clinton is “the Al Sharpton of white people” – whatever that means. And there are four hundred thousand Brits who list Jedi as their religion. We live in our own worlds, with our own concerns.

And it’s not like the guy now is charge is any more grounded than anyone else:

For the first time, Bush revealed a personal way in which he has tried to acknowledge the sacrifice of soldiers and their families: He has given up golf.

And via Duncan Black, from October, 2003:

Mansfield also reports: “Aides found him face down on the floor in prayer in the Oval Office. It became known that he refused to eat sweets while American troops were in Iraq, a partial fast seldom reported of an American president. And he framed America’s challenges in nearly biblical language. Saddam Hussein is an evildoer. He has to go.” The author concludes: “… the Bush administration does deeply reflect its leader, and this means that policy, even in military matters, will be processed in terms of the personal, in terms of the moral, and in terms of a sense of divine purpose that propels the present to meet the challenges of its time.”

And also from October, 2003:

Bush was in an expansive mood on the flight from Indonesia to Australia, wearing an Air Force One flight jacket, snacking noisily on a butterscotch sweet and chopping the air for emphasis.

And so it goes. It’s all madness.

Out here in Hollywood we call it jumping the shark, and we know the reference – the September 20, 1977 episode of Happy Days in which “Fonzie” Fonzarelli actually jumps over a shark while water skiing. The show’s ratings were in the dumps and they were trying anything that might help. Let’s put the Fonz on water skis!  

It didn’t help. The Cunningham’s of Milwaukee, and the Fonz, were increasingly disregarded – no one wanted to watch desperate pandering – and the show eventually disappeared. That 1977 episode was when things turned irredeemably bad, the turning point. One assumes that all television producers now have this image enlarged and framed on the office wall – a reminder. The black leather jacket says it all. The whole show had jumped the shark.

Now everyone uses the term – jumping the shark:

“Given the ongoing sex offender mania and its premise of permanent recidivism as the basis for lifetime registries and prohibitions on residence and occupation and such, one wonders whether some activist legislature will now jump the shark and propose extending Samson to a lifetime forfeiture of Fourth Amendment protection for convicted sex offenders, even after the terms of the parole has ended.” 2007 supplement to Modern Criminal Procedure, 11th ed. (noted here)

It is a useful term. Yeah, you throw everything you can at something – the kitchen sink, as they say – and hope something works. But things just get worse.

It’s now used in political commentary. In a New York Times op-ed back on August 27, 2005, Maureen Dowd said that George Bush “jumped the shark by landing on that ‘Mission Accomplished’ carrier.” Two months ago Josh Marshall said this about where Hillary Clinton found herself then:

There are clearly a number of forces in play here, not least of which is the clock and the math. But also playing a clear role are the initial signs that Obama has weathered the Wright controversy relatively unscathed. And perhaps more than anything the fact that in the last week or so the Clinton campaign has just descended into something like an all-night shark hop.

So we’re talking about desperate pandering that just makes things worse. After that September 1977 episode, the Fonz was no longer the cool, snide and funny, but lovable, rebel. He became a parody of himself. It happens. It’s always pathetic.

Most recently the Clinton call for a summer Gas Tax Holiday, which every single economist in the world said was pointless and would not drop the price of gasoline at all, didn’t do her much good – as much as she carefully posed as the hero of the downtrodden common man. Everyone saw the Fonz on water skis - desperate pandering.

But the day before the West Virginia Primary, Clinton’s situation became more desperate:

Barack Obama’s wave of superdelegate endorsements puts him within reach of the Democratic presidential nomination by the end of the primary season on June 3 - even if he loses half of the remaining six contests. The Illinois senator has picked up 26 superdelegates in the past week. At that pace, he will reach the number of delegates needed to clinch the nomination - 2,025 - in the next three weeks, when delegates from the remaining primaries are included.

For Clinton to have a shot, she needs several things to fall her way, including the remaining superdelegates. Obama has claimed more than 80 percent of the superdelegates since Super Tuesday on Feb. 5. He now leads in states won, pledged delegates won in primaries and caucuses and superdelegate endorsements. He erased her longtime advantage in superdelegates this weekend …

But even with her campaign twenty million dollars in debt, the show must go on:

Once Hillary Rodham Clinton jumped into the presidential race with an “in it to win it” flourish. Now Democrats speculate endlessly about an exit strategy that she ponders privately, if at all. To hear them tell it, steely determination, delegate math, mounting debt, party unity, personal legacy and more could factor. “I’m staying in this race until there’s a nominee,” the former front-runner told reporters not long ago, and on the rope lines at her campaign events, women supporters implore her not to give up her pioneering candidacy despite the lengthening odds.

That Associated Press item goes on to discuss possible exit strategies, all of them hypothetical, as she is still out there skimming the waves, waving to the cameras, and seemingly unconcerned about any sharks in the water. Like the Fonz, she seems unaware that she is fast becoming a parody of herself.

The day before the West Virginia Primary, in Slate, Christopher Beam in his daily item, The Hillary Deathwatch, put her chances of winning the nomination at 1.6 percent:

We’ve believed for some time that the day Obama overtakes Clinton in the pledged delegate count is the day Clinton throws in the towel. But Friday was that day, and the towel is still there, mopping up the Clinton campaign’s blood, sweat, and tears by the bucketful. According to the Associated Press’ count, Obama now has 277 supers to Clinton’s 271. It was the last metric in which Clinton was leading, and Obama’s momentum isn’t slowing any: Over the weekend, he got seven supers to Clinton’s one. Clinton campaign Chairman Terry McAuliffe still claims she’s within “striking distance” of the popular vote. But that’s only if you count Florida, Michigan, and now Puerto Rico, which doesn’t vote in the general election.

On the other hand, Clinton’s chances in West Virginia look good, or as Beam notes, “insanely good.” He notes a Lexington Herald-Leader poll puts her at 51-31 percent over Obama, and comments that “a landslide victory there will remind people of Obama’s weakness with working-class whites and remind the doomsayers that Clinton is still kicking.”

But that does not change the basics. See this, a Boston Globe survey of things said by many of her prominent supporters. They’re worried. As Beam puts it:

Right now, the question is no longer who has won the Democratic nomination. It’s how the loser chooses to exit. As cops like to say, we can do this the easy way or the hard way. Depending on which way Clinton wants to go, West Virginia, which votes tomorrow, could mean one of two things. Either Clinton seizes on it as an excuse to stay in the race and compete with Obama in Kentucky and Oregon and Montana and Puerto Rico until she has to be euthanized on the track. Or she goes out on a high note. The latter option is looking more and more attractive as it becomes clear that the longer she bruises Obama, the more she’ll have to atone for it in the general.

The latter option – get off the damned water skis – seems to have been rejected. See Jim Oliphant at “The Swamp” – As Pressure Builds, Clinton Pulls Out Stops. It’s not pretty:

Speaking to a crowd of close to 1,000 people in this mountainous West Virginia coal town, Clinton delivered a kitchen sink of a speech, conflating all of the various themes she has employed during this extended Democratic presidential competition.

Was there the newest incarnation, Hillary Clinton Mellencamp, the small-town populist who never stops fighting?

Check, complete with soundtrack (”Small Town,” “Check It Out,” “Our Country”). She talked tough about oil producers and the high price of gas, saying “When I’m president, you aren’t gonna see me holdin’ hands with the Saudis, you’re gonna see me holdin’ them accountable.”)

How about First Lady Hillary, spouse to a president who governed when the economy was booming?

Yep. Several references to Bill, the former president, and the Glory Days of the 1990s.

How about Senator Clinton, the wonk, the master of details?

Uh huh. Try talking to a gym full of West Virginia schoolkids and their parents about dragging China in front of the World Trade Organization. Oh, you’re yawning too?

Remember her “job interview” phase? When she likened choosing a president to a “hiring decision.” That was back on Tuesday.

The commander-in-chief test? She was again talking about the 35 generals who had endorsed her.

Ready to govern on Day One? That returned too. (The 3 a.m. phone call, however, remains in mothballs.)

There’s much more at the link. It was what Marshall calls “a real shark hop.”

And he’s a hard data kind of guy. Monday, May 12, there was a new Washington Post, ABC News poll – Obama beats McCain 51-44 and Clinton beats him 49-44, so either is electable, either wins the general. But Marshall digs deeper: 

Statistically speaking, those are basically the same margins. But I strongly suspect we will see Obama’s numbers moving ahead of Clinton’s in the coming days.

This is one factor that’s been too little remarked on - I’ve never plotted the numbers out on a graph but who does better against McCain has tracked consistently with who’s getting the winner and loser headlines in the primary battle. So, consistent headlines that communicate Clinton’s or Obama’s power, effectiveness, winner-hood for lack of a better word, push up his or her numbers vis a vis McCain. That’s not particularly surprising when you think about it. But it does put the softness and mutability of those general election horse race numbers into perspective.

And when one candidate has become a parody of herself, well, that’s deadly.

And then there’s age – it seems that thirty-nine percent Americans said they’d be uncomfortable with president who enters office at age seventy-two, and that would be McCain, but only sixteen percent think the same about a female president, and only twelve percent say that about a black president.

But Marshall has a warning:

I don’t think there’s any question that questions like this yield a substantial amount of self-censoring among respondents. Social Scientists have a reassuringly unwieldy term for this - which escapes me at the moment. But basically, many people won’t say they’d be uncomfortable with a black president because they know they’re not supposed to think like that, even if they do. On the contrary, there’s no comparable social stigma associated with thinking that about someone past retirement age.

Still, even with that factored in, that’s a very big gap - and a big slice of the electorate for whom McCain’s age is a big issue. No doubt that’s why we’re hearing a lot of references from Dems about honoring McCain’s many decades of service to America.

And then he notes this in the poll:

While overall discomfort with an African-American president is much lower, it rises among less-educated whites - the same group that’s been a challenge for Obama in the Democratic primaries. Among whites who haven’t gone through college, 17 percent say they’d be at least somewhat uncomfortable with a black president; that compares with just 4 percent of white college graduates. Clinton may face a similar problem, however; less-educated whites also are more apt to be uncomfortable with a woman president (21 percent, vs. 7 percent of white college graduates).

Clinton may win the Hatfield-McCoy primaries in West Virginia and Kentucky, by a landslide, but what it all means is tricky. Some television producer back in 1977 must have said something like, “Man, folks are going to LOVE seeing the Fonz jump that shark – the ratings will soar, our audience will triple, advertisers with fistfuls of money will be begging us to sell them thirty-second spots!”

No. It doesn’t work that way. People liked the Fonz as he was – not a parody of the guy.

And parody is the problem. On the May 10 episode of Saturday Night Live it started – Clinton had become a joke. The show opened with their Hillary impersonator offering this – vote for me because 1) I’m a sore loser, and 2) my supporters are racists, and 3) unlike Senator Obama, I have no ethical standards at all. And it was delivered with sincerity, and a smile. Everyone knows.

In the feature at Slate, the daily best new videos on the internet, there’s something even more devastating – even if it’s far more esoteric. But it’s something everyone in the movie industry out here understands. In Hollywood, everyone knows the ultimate mad scene, the final scene from Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard – the delusional faded movie star descends the stairs, as if her glory days had not faded decades ago, and it’s horrifying, and pathetic, and deeply disturbing. It says a lot about us all. And now there’s a frame-by-frame parody remake – with Hillary Clinton as Norma Desmond. It’s spooky.

One can now never look at that 1950 film again in the same way. The whole thing becomes a parallel to the Clinton campaign. And tomorrow, driving through Billy Wilder Square (Sunset Boulevard and La Brea), it will be hard to untangle Hillary Clinton and Norma Desmond. But it is over.