Vote — for revenge... or love?

This clip neatly embodies a reason why I believe Romney will win. He feels like optimism, and Obama — who once owned the word "hope" — seems petulant, divisive, and ungrateful.

ADDED: On love and revenge, read Martin Luther King Jr.'s speech on Accepting the Nobel Peace Prize:

Sooner or later all the people of the world will have to discover a way to live together in peace, and thereby transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. If this is to be achieved, man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.

AND: Here, for comparison, is Barack Obama's speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, over which we will puzzle forever. What was it for? He didn't mention revenge, but he did mention King and he did mention love:

The non-violence practiced by men like Gandhi and King may not have been practical or possible in every circumstance, but the love that they preached – their fundamental faith in human progress – that must always be the North Star that guides us on our journey.

Live-blogging Day 3 of the Democratic convention.

5:41 Central Time: I'm starting now, because it's Tammy Baldwin, my congressperson. She's running to take the seat Herb Kohl has been sitting in for oh, so long. She tells us of Wisconsin's motto, "Forward" (which Obama is using as his motto), and she finds a few opportunities to repeat "Forward." She's talking about "the Wisconsin I know" and "the America I love."

5:51: It's LBGT time. A video, with Obama saying we need to see a man with a man or a woman with a woman as equally worthy as a man and a woman. Then a young man named Zack Wahls — from Iowa — says he was raised by 2 moms, and: "I'm awesome at putting the seat down."

5:55: A really sweet and charming video about the woman who started the "Fired up/Ready to go" chant in Greenwood, South Carolina, some 4 years ago, Edith S. Childs. Ah, it's on line: here. Watch it. I liked that.

5:58: "They really got through the gay stuff quick," I observe.

6:01: Jim Messina, the Obama campaign manager is begging us for money. There's a sob in his voice. He sounds genuinely desperate.

6:28: Foo Fighters emote. [ADDED: Meade says: "This is kind of depressing music, and it goes along with the whole convention.]

6:32: The Foo Fighters are singing "I never wanna die" over and over. It's this song, "Walk":

I never wanna die
I'm on my knees
I never wanna die
I'm dancing on my grave
I'm running through the fire
Forever, whatever
I never wanna die
I never wanna leave

No, no... that's not an argument for a politician's reelection.

6:34: Now, there's this really gloomy video. Faces on a dark background. Woebegone people agonizing about how they "did everything right," and yet they are "one mistake away from losing the little that we have."

6: 47: An. act.tress. Kerry. Wash.ing.ton. I'd never heard of her before, but she's emoting big time, like she's talking to a bunch of idiots who never think about politics. But politics is thinking about us, she says ominously. Uh, we're the people watching the convention. We're not your Hollywood friends. "The other side" — "side," pronounced as a series of trembling, upscaling notes — "wants. to. take. our. voi.ces. a.way. and render us. invisible" — big wagging finger — "but we" — "we," rendered in the trembling, upward 4-syllables for a 1-syllable word, like she's really trying to scare us — "are not. invisible." Her doe eyes scan the crowd. Did they understand? Did they com.pre.hend? Did they fath.om the depths of. my. words? [ADDED FROM THE COMMENTS: Fiftyville said: "I loved Kerry Washington's statement... 'You may not be thinking about politics, but politics is thinking about you.' If you have to steal, Dems, why steal from Yakov Smirnoff?"]

6:57: Scarlett Johansson. So the beautiful actresses are all getting dumped in an early hour. Unlike Kerry Washington, the actress Johansson is able to act like a normal person. "We are the generation who feel our voices haven't been heard," she says, repeating something Chelsea Clinton said earlier in the convention. Johansson enthuses about voting. It's a speech that seems more appropriate to a bunch of young kids. And, sorry, I don't understand the basis for this whole generation believing that their "voices haven't been heard." You get to vote. Like everyone else. Why do you feel there's more of an entitlement than that? If you have something to say, say it. You kids have the whole internet. Twitter. YouTube. My generation didn't have that. What's this "no voice" business?

7:04: Debbie Wasserman Schultz aids a woman who is struggling to walk onto the stage. With great effort, she struggles to blurt out the words of the Pledge of Allegiance. My God, it's Gabby Giffords. Many tears run down many faces.

7:09: "As a Catholic woman, I take reproductive health seriously," says Caroline Kennedy, reading the script robotically. She complains about states putting restrictions on "access to reproductive health care."

7:13: Jennifer Granholm, "from the great state of Michigan, where the trees are just the right height." (She lifts Mitt Romney's gentle joke about home, and Meade and I disagree about whether she's showing some affection for her fellow Michigander.)

7:17: Granholm has a good (if unfair) line — referencing Romney's supposed lack of concern for auto-industry workers — "The cars get the elevator, and the workers get the shaft." You have to know that Romney had a car elevator installed in one of his homes.

7:21: It's "actress Eva Longoria." Not sure why Caroline Kennedy and Jennifer Granholm broke up the parade of actresses. Longoria sounds like an intelligent person who actually has followed politics in the normal way that people who like politics follow politics.

7:43: John Kerry. American exceptionalism demands an exceptional President, and that President is Barack Obama, he says.

8:05: As a tribute to servicemen and women goes on at the convention, email from Obama comes in, saying, "Ann -- Before I go on stage to accept the nomination, there's one thing I need to say... Can you pitch in $25 or more right now?"

8:44: Jill Biden warmed us up to think of Joe Biden as the embodiment of human caring, and now Joe Biden is doing the same for Barack Obama. He tells us he "loves" Obama. Obama was "gutsy."

9:40: Obama is giving his speech. Here's the whole text.  His inflections are polished, but nothing is jumping out at me as different from what I've heard him say many times.

9:55: "We, the People, recognize that we have responsibilities as well as rights; that our destinies are bound together; that a freedom which only asks what’s in it for me, a freedom without a commitment to others, a freedom without love or charity or duty or patriotism, is unworthy of our founding ideals, and those who died in their defense." Is that controversial?

10:03: The word "hope" appears 15 times in his speech. The last 3 come near the end:  "And I think about the young sailor I met at Walter Reed hospital, still recovering from a grenade attack that would cause him to have his leg amputated above the knee... He gives me hope. I don’t know what party [various heretofore mentioned] men and women belong to. I don’t know if they’ll vote for me. But I know that their spirit defines us. They remind me, in the words of Scripture, that ours is a 'future filled with hope.' And if you share that faith with me – if you share that hope with me – I ask you tonight for your vote." Other people give him hope, the Bible refers to hope, and if you hope like he hopes, you should vote for him. Because... hope!

10:17: The speech ends, and there's a flurry of confetti. No balloons, because an indoor presentation hadn't been planned. Obama steps forward and waves. There's a closeup of his face and I think I see his lip curl with a bit of disgust, and I rewind and ask Meade to interpret the face and he says: resignation. Subjectively, we think we see in his face that he knows he's going to lose. Michelle and Malia and Sasha come out, looking perfectly glossy and pretty, and then there's Biden and Jill and Mrs. Robinson and various other relatives, milling around, waving a bit, and then the long view of the stage shows they've clumped toward the rear wall. Why are they huddling there? The shots of the crowd show some ecstatic delegates — all women — and many stolid/dispirited faces — male and female. At one point there's a hitch in the Bruce Springsteen music — a silent gap — but then it plays again. And now they're gone.

10:26: The Cardinal wanders out to the lectern. He's got his benediction written out on folded sheets of paper. "Help us to see that a society's greatness is found, above all, in the respect it shows for the weakest and neediest among us." He thanks God for giving us those "inalienable rights — life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." He thanks God for "the gift of life" and asks that we be given "the courage to defend it." In subtle defiance of the convention's abortion-rights theme, he says: "We ask your benediction on those waiting to be born, that they may be welcomed and protected."

11:03: The Democrats didn't have anything oddball, like Clint Eastwood. Nothing surprising. Nothing to talk about. Speaking of nothing, on Intrade, Obama re-election shares today experienced a 0.0% change. Oh! I checked back, now he's down 0.2%. (Romney is up 0.7% on the day.)

11:12: I just realized I fast-forwarded through Charlie Crist. Looked like another white male governor.  I forgot about the whole former-Republican thing. Does anyone really care?

"Doctors’ waiting rooms are absolutely brimming these days with women suffering from low libidos."

"I have talked to a lot of young women about this, and they just don’t seem to do it any more.... Honestly, I suppose it’s because we all have so many other demands on our time now."

Many young women also feel guilty or distressed over their low libido....

So... you're so stressed about work that you don't have sex, and then you're stressed about not having sex. Stress! Stress! Stress! What do you think about all this stress as the cause and the effect of not having sex? It strikes me as a shallow and lame explanation for things.

I tend to think that the reason people are doing whatever they are doing is because it's what they want to do. There's something irrational about saying I don't want to do what I don't want to do. Or, to turn it around, I want to want something. If you want it, you want it. If you don't, you don't. Start there. Too busy? Hopeless!

Why did the NYT publish a very long article on the white people in Michelle Obama's ancestry?

There's the funny (Star-Trek-evoking) name Tribble, and they could forefront some old lady in Georgia who acknowledges that it's hard "to face this kind of thing." And there are those others who "have declined to discuss the matter beyond the closed doors of their homes, fearful that they might be vilified as racists or forced to publicly atone for their forebears."

Said forebears were slaveholders, though the common ancestor was the child of an interracial union that occurred after the Civil War, the former slave who was impregnated lived until 1938 and never said it was rape, the father was probably not the owner but his son (a man "of modest means" who had grown up with her), and some of the descendants say things like "To me, it’s an obvious love story that was hard for the South to accept back then."

The NYT reminds us that former slaves tended to avoid talking about slavery, and: "This willful forgetting pervaded several branches of the first lady’s family tree, passed along like an inheritance from one generation to the next." That is, Michelle Obama herself has nothing to say about her white ancestry.

Why bring this up now? One answer is that there's a book coming out this week — "American Tapestry: The Story of the Black, White and Multiracial Ancestors of Michelle Obama" — and this article is adapted from it. But that doesn't explain why the NYT would publish a long article and feature it, with a slide-show, in the middle top of its front webpage.

I can't stop myself from presuming that the editors believe this is a story that will help Barack Obama get reelected. But why would this work? Why delve into racial bloodlines? We've been talking about racial bloodlines with respect to Elizabeth Warren (the Senate candidate with a dubious claim to a small percentage of Cherokee ancestry). But that issue isn't helpful to Warren.

I'm going to theorize that the NYT — like some people on Obama's campaign — would like voters to occupy their minds with the subject of race and, especially, to inhabit the emotional narrative of America's trajectory out of a shameful past. This subject is, at the very least, a distraction from the present-day economic woes that plague Obama's second-term ambitions. But it also has the potential to restimulate the 2008-style "hope," which, for many voters, seemed to imbue Obama with the power to heal America's lost-festering racial wounds.

We're not healed yet. And it's not too late to give up the hope that Obama was the answer... even if the dream of racial healing seems to have deteriorated into hackneyed partisan electioneering.

"The Zimmerman family is in hiding because of the threats that have been made against us..."

"... yet the DOJ has maintained an eerie silence on this matter. These threats are very public. If you haven’t been paying attention just do a Google search and you will find plenty. Since when can a group of people in the United States put a bounty on someone’s head, circulate Wanted posters publicly, and still be walking the streets?"

A letter from some unnamed relative of George Zimmerman to Attorney General Eric Holder.

Good lord, what an ugly place we are in right now. Who would have thought that in the last year of Obama's presidential term, the public mind would obsess over race at this level? I'm recalling the media coverage of election night, 2008, and the inauguration, when there was a rhapsody of closure and a feeling — some called it "hope" — that we had entered a new era of harmony. How did we get sucked into some nightmare parody of the past? If it's not Obama's fault, can he at least do something to yank us up out of this awful place? In 2009 or even 2011, he would have given a speech. He would have believed he could rescue us with a speech, perhaps because we kind of thought he could. Maybe no one believes anymore. There's a hope vacuum, and look what's moving in.

"Our passports may say that we are French, but we don’t feel French because we are never accepted here."

"No one can excuse what he did, but he is a product of French society, of the feeling that he had no hope, and nothing to lose."

"Peter Goodwin, a family physician who wrote and campaigned for Oregon's right-to-die law in the 1990s, died Sunday..."

"... after taking a cocktail of lethal drugs prescribed by his doctor, as allowed under the legislation he championed."

Dr. Goodwin said... that his health was deteriorating and he would soon end his life....

"The situation needs thought, it doesn't need hope," he said. "Hope is too ephemeral at that time."

The potential for a Barack Obama nostalgia movement in the next 13 months.

Remember how you felt in '08? Maybe not you, specifically, but remember the hope? The inspiration? Don't you want to feel like that again? Etc. etc.

Picture it. I think it's possible that the Obama 2012 campaign could touch many people — people who are suffering, out of work, occupying Wall Street (or wherever) — by prompting them to get in touch with the great old feeling of the good old days... in 2008... when we were young... when we had dreams...

I know you may scoff and say that every single reference to the abstractions and fuzzy feelings of 3 years ago will only draw derision and intensify the pain. But there's so much pain... At some point, won't people want to take the drug that worked so well that other time. What intense pleasure! What brilliant hallucinations! It calls to you.

Well, not necessarily you. But you see my point?

This notion crossed my mind while I was watching this February 2008 video of Michelle Obama. I'd been searching for that old quote of hers, something like Barack will never allow you to go back to your old lives.



The actual quote is: "Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed."

My initial reaction to that today was that it was weird how much she's insulting people... and they love it. They wanted transformed lives, but look how bad things are today. We really were deprived of our "lives as usual," but not in a good way.

The larger context of the quote is:

Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.

See? You have the problem of being cynical and isolated. You're too comfortable. You need to do a whole lot better. Barack Obama will require you to work. I know: ridiculous. Now. Lines like that stoke the very cynicism he demanded that we shed!

That was my initial reaction. But then I saw the potential. The cynicism may seem much more justified now, but it also hurts, and people remember when words like this made them feel as good as they've ever felt about politics in their whole lives.

Don't you see the potential for hordes of people to embrace the simple pleasures of nostalgia? When I drive my car, I turn on the satellite radio and put on the 60s channel, where I'm always young and carefree. It's 2011, but I can push the button for the 60s, musically. There's a political button marked 2008, and I think there's a decent chance there are a whole lot of people who would love to push it.

"For people of a secular age, Steve Jobs's gospel may seem like all the good news we need."

"But people of another age would have considered it a set of beautifully polished empty promises, notwithstanding all its magical results. Indeed, they would have been suspicious of it precisely because of its magical results."

From "Steve Jobs: The Secular Prophet," by Andy Crouch in the Wall Street Journal.

[T]he genius of Steve Jobs was to persuade us, at least for a little while, that cold comfort [death is "life's change agent"] is enough. The world—at least the part of the world in our laptop bags and our pockets, the devices that display our unique lives to others and reflect them to ourselves—will get better. This is the sense in which the tired old cliché of "the Apple faithful" and the "cult of the Mac" is true. It is a religion of hope in a hopeless world, hope that your ordinary and mortal life can be elegant and meaningful, even if it will soon be dated, dusty and discarded like a 2001 iPod.

Speaking of "hope"... wait... that's a topic shift I'll make into a separate post.

See, this is what happens when you get people's hopes up.

Link.

"Too Many Barnacles Sink the Ship/Is this the New Civility?"

Pro-Walker I think. It's surprising how much interpretation the signs demand!

And here's another visually distinctive female sign-holder-up.


(Enlarge.)

You many say she's a dreamer, but she'll have you know that she is not the only one. The other side of the sign said "This is The Hour/We are the ones we've been waiting for/Hopi Elders." Hopey changey elders... I have heard of you. And I know you're not the only ones. But seriously, enough dreaming. There's a time for dreaming, and a time for waking up. And I'm saying that. Me, the Althouse-y elder.

The Obama-Hope-End-War sign is already tattered...

... and yet still the wars go on.

Obama, what have you done to the hope of the hopeful folk who sewed banners with your face inside a heart? I am not one of them. In fact, I'm making a list of Things I Like About Obama:

1. By continuing to fight the wars that George Bush started, he has crushed the hope of the people who bought into the campaign abstraction "hope."

2. By putting his name on many of the policies that George Bush was condemned for adopting, he has rehabilitated the reputation of George Bush .

3. ...

Strange old tree and, underneath it, the grave of hope.

(Just something I saw yesterday.)

"'Our system is about to collapse'? Define 'collapse.' Back to a barter system? Hunting squirrels in Central Park? Possible, but I doubt it."

Silicon Alley Insider Henry Blodget is, some readers think, "smoking the hopium."

"Gaza is where dreams of reconciliation go to die."

Why Jeffrey Goldberg doesn't want to talk about Gaza:

I have friends in Gaza about whom I worry a great deal; I've seen many people killed in Gaza; I've served in the Israeli Army in Gaza; I've been kidnapped in Gaza; I've reported for years from Gaza; I hope my former army doesn't kill the wrong people in Gaza; I hope Israeli soldiers all leave Gaza alive; I know they'll be back in Gaza; I think this operation will work; and I have no actual hope that it will work for very long, because nothing works for very long in the Middle East. Gaza is where dreams of reconciliation go to die. Gaza is where the dream of Palestinian statehood goes to die; Gaza is where the Zionist dream might yet die. Or, more to the point, might be murdered. I'm not a J Street moral-equivalence sort of guy. Yes, Israel makes constant mistakes, which I note rather frequently, but this conflict reminds me once again that Israel is up against an implacable force, namely, an interpretation of Islam that disallows the idea of Jewish national equality.

.

But what about all that snow?

Flight alert just received via airport WiFi:

NW 247 February 25 ON TIME departs DTW at 7:26 pm arrives MSN 7:41 pm Gate 4

Okay. I'm taking your word for it! Departing Ithaca at 4 pm and hoping not to spend the night in Detroit.

I could have stayed another day in Ithaca. Northwest has some kind of "winter waiver" that lets you change your flight without a penalty. But I have class on Monday, and you don't wuss out about snow when the flights are listed as on time. But there is so much snow!

No snow yet here in Ithaca, where we had fun last night at "cabaret" -- the law school show. Today, we brunched at Mahogony Grill and had some laughs talking about any number of things including the topic "Is America ready for a Satanist President?"

I contemplate whether that's a good topic for my Tuesday NYT column:



We talk about writing, and I go on at some length about that David Foster Wallace essay about Tracy Austin in "Consider the Lobster." John points this out, right above my head:



I say if I was crazy, I'd freak out right now. I'd think I was doomed... or at least destined for a serious encounter with alcohol.

Afterwards, we take a stroll in Ithaca, and someone makes fun of me for half-remembering things. You called Madeline's Marguerite's, and you called the Mahogony Grill the Magnolia Grill, and now you're calling the Commons the Concourse.

We stop to look at a lot of old album covers:



I surreptitiously do some YouTubing... but I'm having some mystifying "file format" problems, so I'll have to add that later.

ADDED:



[Click here if you have trouble playing it in that window.]

UPDATE: I'm now in Detroit and the flight is scheduled to leave on time. I hope to get home soon. Perhaps my car is buried under two feet of snow, but I'm feeling optimistic.

AND: You have the picture above that John took of me. Here's one that I took from the other side of the table:



And John's father Richard Lawrence Cohen was there too. Here's RLC's blog. It's his voice that you mainly hear along with mine on the video clip above, talking about, among other things, the song "Little Boxes."

IN THE COMMENTS: "Of course, it's Badfinger," says Sippican Cottage, who notes a recent comment on a February 7th post that brought up Badfinger and linked to the very picture we're talking about in the video clip. I don't remember clicking on that, and I'm surprised I had a mental image of Badfinger, but rather pleased with myself for having exactly the nugget of information requested on a particular occasion.