Just Above Sunset

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.