Monday is universally considered the worst day of the week – you have to go back to work and the kids have to go back to school. No one is happy. It’s a bad day. It puts you in a bad mood. And there are the historical precedents for hating the day.
There was the first Black Monday, 14 April 1360 – the army of Edward III during the Hundred Years’ War was struck by hailstorms, lightning and panic. Many died on that Easter Monday. And there was Black Monday, 28 October 1929 – just one day in the Wall Street Crash of 1929, but usually given of as the day everything fell apart. Hey, it was a Monday – it had to be Monday. See this list of Black Mondays. It’ll make you dread Mondays – not that you need any extra help.
This year, Monday, May 5, gave us this:
Dueling over gas prices, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama strained for every last vote on Monday, the eve of the Indiana and North Carolina primaries that are the biggest prizes left in their epic Democratic nomination fight.
Yes, the Associated Press used the word Epic – as in the Iliad and the Odyssey, and Virgil’s Aeneid, and the Song of Roland, and Orlando Furioso (Ludovico Ariosto, sixteenth century, the war between Charlemagne and his Christian paladins, and the Saracen army which is attempting to invade Europe). No one reads such things these days. The AP was probably trying to invoke some idea of a complex and protracted battle that determines the fate of the world, like in an MGM extravaganza from the fifties. But the word also evokes being bored out of your mind in a dusty classroom on a spring day when you’d rather be outside in the sun, shooting the breeze with your friends.
People have had enough of the Obama-Clinton epic. In Slate you can see Anne Applebaum has had quite enough of it:
A question for all of you: At what point does it become socially acceptable to admit that one is no longer interested in the Democratic primary? And at what point will newspapers stop treating the subject as if it should still be the focus of national attention?
Applebaum points to Nora Ephron, the month before, saying that the never-ending Democratic primary was like an “unending last episode of Survivor.” Ephron put it this way – “They’re eating rats and they’re frying bugs and they’re frying rats and they’re eating buts; no one is ever going to get off the island and I can’t take it anymore.”
Applebaum seems amazed it’s still going on:
We’ve now had the Rev. Wright scandal not once, but twice. We’ve now had major newspaper and political blog coverage of the Guam primary, where the Hillary campaign declared that their candidate had “historic ties” to the island, Obama won by seven votes, and an apparently astonishing 4,500 people turned out for the election. The same observations about both candidates get recycled in different ways, to the point at which it’s not worth reading the newspaper anymore.
And she points out the obvious:
The truth is that there wasn’t - let’s face it - that much new that we were ever going to learn about Hillary Clinton during this campaign: We already know more intimate details about her life than most of us know about most of our best friends. The excitement of the early part of the primary was learning about Obama and watching him draw even with Hillary. But that moment has passed, and we aren’t going to learn anything else about him until we see him debate John McCain.
Nevertheless, I have the feeling that one still isn’t quite allowed to say any of this in public, as a degree of earnest political involvement is expected….
Melinda Henneberger then agrees with her:
Not only is it okay to admit being so over this endless campaign, it’s all but required. …
I’ve started viewing it like any long-term relationship, in which just when you think you will never laugh at that stupid joke ever again - well, you do. And just when you’re sure that if one more person says superdelegate you will run screaming into the traffic, you suddenly find that embarrassing as it is, you do care about Guam. Or so I can imagine.
But she offers this odd observation:
You know who else seems sick of this Democratic primary? Barack Obama. Not that he’s phoning it in or anything, but a certain weariness seems to have set in. Which I take as yet another sign that not only is he not too elite, he might be too normal: He still thinks he can go off script sometimes, and he lets it show when he’s had it with trying to insist on a new kind of politics if all we really want to carry on about is flag pins. When Hillary Clinton says she would never have chosen Jeremiah Wright as her pastor, she isn’t kidding; you wouldn’t stick with that guy for five minutes if your every human impulse was run through the purifying filter of, “but how would that play in Scioto County?”
In case you were wondering, Scioto County is rural Ohio, way outside of Cleveland.
Oh heck – we’ve been here before. See the American Conservative, where Clark Stooksbury is quoting from Bill Kauffman’s Ain’t My America:
American flag lapel pins had been distributed to members before the president spoke to Congress on April 2, 1917, requesting a declaration of war. It took a certain obdurate courage to refuse to wear the colors; Senator La Follette was among the refusers, as was the Mississippi senator Vardaman. (Wilson had called for “stern repression” of disloyalty in his speech of April 2 - a Prussian formulation that ought to have set American throats to gagging.)
Been there, done that – as they say.
And the Hillary-as-Epic-Hero stuff is getting old. See the North Carolina science writer James Hrynyshyn at Island of Doubt, who made the mistake of attending a local Clinton rally:
[The gas tax holiday] idea is, as an educated friend of mine who very much wants to support Clinton told me as we waited for Clinton to arrive, an insult to her intelligence. But then, there was Clinton, insulting the intelligence of her audience every chance she got. The only common theme to emerge from the 30-minute ramble was an attack on our enemies. China is the enemy for selling us lead-contaminated toys and poison pet food. The Saudis are the enemy for exploiting our addition to oil. The rest of OPEC, too. And worst of all are those evil, parasitic “middlemen” who pop up in every corner of the economy, ready to take a cut and give back nothing.
Only ordinary Americans, and, because this Clinton campaign stop was in a rural corner of the state, only small-town Americans, can be trusted to do what’s right.
It’s sad, really. Not only is everyone else the enemy, but intelligence itself is suspect. What we need, she seemed to be saying between the lines, is someone at the top who’s just a simple yokel - more of the last eight years, in other words.
In Homer it was “the wily Odysseus” watched over by Athena, the Goddess of Wisdom, sometimes in the guise of Mentor, the wise old counselor – but times have changed. In The New Yorker, Ryan Lizza quoted an adviser talking about Bill Clinton, as close to the character Mentor as Hillary will ever have:
When I asked what he was doing on Election Day, a Clinton campaign adviser said, “I think he’s leading a caravan of Wal-Mart greeters to the polls.”
Maybe that was a joke. Maybe it wasn’t.
Also in Slate see Timothy Noah with the Clinton-Wallace Mix ‘n’ Match (Match the quotation with the angry white male!).
Former President Bill Clinton in 2008 here:
The great divide in this country is not by race or even income, it’s by those who think they are better than everyone else and think they should play by a different set of rules. In [southern state] and [southern state] we know that when we see it.
Alabama Governor George Wallace in 1968 here:
They’ve looked down their noses at the average man on the street too long. They’ve looked at the bus driver, the truck driver, the beautician, the fireman, the policeman, and the steelworker, the plumber, and the communication worker, and the oil worker and the little businessman. … [t]he average man on the street in [southern state] and [southern state]. …
Some epics never end – but elsewhere Noah is more generous:
What would it take for Clinton to start a stampede? A massive, catastrophic drop in the polls for Obama. But the only way for that to happen is for Clinton to tear into Obama so viciously, Lee Atwater-style, that she destroys her own reputation, causing her to lose the general election and very likely her Senate seat, too. Not going to happen. Clinton is determined, but she isn’t insane.
That may be in dispute. Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo wonders about her sanity:
What is Hillary talking about? She’s going to break up the OPEC oil cartel?
That’s what Ben Smith at Politico carefully reports:
Clinton’s attacks on oil prices as artificially inflated, Enron-style, keep escalating, and today she appeared to threaten to break up the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.
“We’re going to go right at OPEC,” she said. “They can no longer be a cartel, a monopoly that get together once every couple of months in some conference room in some plush place in the world, they decide how much oil they’re going to produce and what price they’re going to put it at,” she told a crowd at a firehouse in Merrillville, IN.
“That’s not a market. That’s a monopoly,” she said, saying she’d use anti-trust law and the World Trade Organization to take on OPEC.
Smith provides the context:
Clinton has cast herself as a warrior for working people against the oil industry and malicious “speculators,” and made that - along with her push for a gas tax holiday - central to her closing message in Indiana.
It’s a potent message, like the attack on “Wall Street money brokers,” with deep roots in American politics. It’ It’s also very hard to figure out what exactly she means by the threat to break OPEC.
Smith also notes that the Obama campaign is pointing out that Clinton has not signed on to cosponsor this bill, an attempt “to make oil-producing and exporting cartels illegal” – but the Clinton campaign countered, saying she voted for a version of the bill in 2007 and “has long favored filing a WTO complaint against OPEC.”
Marshall is having none of it:
Because we have such a strong hand to play now with the OPEC member states? And isn’t the main issue here a matter of rising demand, principally for rapidly expanding economies in Asia, not monopoly pricing?
Hillary is certainly not the first candidate to bash the oil producing states or oil companies around election time. And the polls seem to show it’s working for her. But I’m concerned about the widening gap between reality and her campaign trail statements. First with the pledge to obliterate Iran if they attack Israel, then the rebellion against economists and now this.
Where are we going here?
We’re going into epic battle, it seems. It’s kind of like Orlando Furioso – “The Frenzy of Orlando,” or more literally “Orlando unhinged and detached from reality” (one must beware for false cognates, as you probably thought Orlando was furious with the Saracen army attempting to invade Europe, when he was actually quite crazy).
Oh, forget the epic. There are other things going on. See Fred Kaplan in Slate with The Army’s Math Problem – “We don’t have any more soldiers to send to Afghanistan unless we take some out of Iraq.”
See Avram Goldstein reporting in Bloomberg with Post-War Suicides May Exceed Combat Deaths, US Says – “The number of suicides among veterans of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan may exceed the combat death toll because of inadequate mental health care, the US government’s top psychiatric researcher said.”
Epics are boring. Real problems need attention.
