Not worth a fart...

“Where’s Margaret?”

“Indiana. Flown back to the campaign like a, how you say, a slot-addict with a fresh roll of quarters,” I told Frank Belloc, combat psychologist as we hot tubbed in the North Carolina hotel with my old producer, Robbie Jackson. “I will be honest with you, I am glad for the quietude.

“She’s taking over HRC’s Microtargeting Efforts in Indiana,” I told the boys wearily, nibbling Fig Newtons from a tray on the side of the tub.

“Microtargeting?” asked Robbie, shaking the dwindling cubes in his iced tea glass for the pool girl to attend to.

“Narrowcasting,” said Frank, “is another term for it. Minute slicing of the electorate based on ancillary polling. Basically, it’s finding out what McCain people like, what Obama people are prone to spend money on; how Clinton people act as consumers. Then when it’s discovered that Obamaniacs show a predilection for granola and lattes, direct mailing campaigns can be effectuated directly at those markets.”

“What the fuck you talking about, cracker?”

“It’s the commodification of the voter,” I said, reaching for my glass of chardonnay, a good Chassagne Montrachet, “aligning the consumer’s tastes with her political leanings. The more we can know about the voter, the more the candidate appears to identify.”

“Goddamn, I have never heard anything so motherfucking ignorant in all my motherfucking life,” said Robbie, flinging his unfilled tea glass into a stack of towels. “Where in name of Shaft does it end? We don’t need to know all that to get through an election! Hell no. Man, that’s the problem with everything else that’s gone fucked up in this world. Too much goddamn knowledge and too little wisdom! That ain’t worth shit. Remember your Milton:

Knowledge is as food, and needs no less

Her temperance over appetite, to know

In measure what the mind may well contain;

Oppresses else with surfeit, and soon turns

Wisdom to folly, as nourishment to wind.

That’s my boy, Milton. Book VII, Paradise Motherfucking Lost.”

We all nodded in reverie. The wine had a good, yeasty nose; notes of apple and pear.

Tuesday, Sheraton Society Hill Hotel...

Margaret was quiet and still in the hotel room rattling her fingernails over the writing table; a tap-tapping of polish on shellac. The lights were dim, though it was sunny outside and the weather quite pleasant, and the curtains pulled shut. I could see her eyes pendulate from the blank screen of the television to the locked mini-bar.

“I want to see it,” she said flatly.

“Ma puce,” I told her from where I stood at the wardrobe, ironing shirts, “There is nothing to see. Not yet. The returns, they don’t begin until six. It is hardly past noon.”

“I want a drink.”

“We said ‘nothing’ until at least ten precincts reporting, ma cherie,” I sighed. I had called Frank Belloc, combat pyschologist, and retained his private audience this evening, in case of the worst. Only he could talk poor Margaret down, in the case the junior senator lost by less than five percent.

“Tell me again,” she said, the words like tired coal cars creaking from the mouth, “What do we need to win?”

“Oh, now I don’t know,” I said, spritzing my white dress shirt with sizing, which sizzled under the hot metal. “I think eight percent is more than just a mandate to move on, no? Ten percent margin or better and the delegate leader will have to make serious considerations for a joint ticket; certainly the superdelegates will see the inevitability of it.”

There was a sigh and the continued rapping of fingernails over the wood of the table.

Speaking of bitter...

“The problem with the brother is he thinks he can talk to anybody,” said my old producer and friend, Robbie Jackson, who now runs his own record label out of Philadelphia, “You got him in Texas, talking ‘bout the Popeye’s chicken in a nigga’s fridge and he can do that, ain’t nobody in the black community going to do nothing but laugh and say, ‘that’s right.’ But this brother, Obama, he’s the kind who thinks he can turn it around, head up to San Francisco, whiffing chardonnay with the Zuni set and make an insightful, off hand comment about crackers out the steel mills in W. PA. Now, I can say that cause I ain’t running for shit, but that here is the crux of the matter.”

It is a little cool to be sitting poolside here at Robbie’s home in Wynnewood, an affluent suburb, but the sun was out, you know, and my man, he has got a thing about his pineal glands after the wintertime. “Got to work out the melatonin,” he says to me, offering iced tea which I longed to doctor.

“That’s why everybody was right with the Ferraro business,” he said, his right hand over his passion fruit tea in its highball glass, a thick finger bisecting the circumference. “She’s right for one; ain’t no way some white dude name Barry Smith, a one term Senator outta no Experienceville going to get ninety percent of the black vote just for ringing the doorbell. That’s just a fact, P-fitty [his affectionate name for me; an artifact of my days in Canadian Hip Hop]. But this craggy old honky broad, she don’t get to say it on the national goddamn TV and not expect to get her chips cashed. That’s just the way it is.

“Now, I hear the brother is confused, he don’t understand that shit like that can’t fall into the hands of the public, especially not with a general motherfucking election in front of you,” Bernie says with his left hand splayed wide and rising and falling in spasmodic chops. “That is just the kind of shit that is going to sink him if he ain’t ten motherfucking points ahead come 11/4! I’ll tell you right now, PBL, if that creaky old McCain is still standing in this fight come November, none of this has been anything but an exercise in noble futility. History has shown, you just look at the last two election cycles that, left to the undecided voter in this country, and you know who I’m talking bout; these 'bitter' comments, the stuff with his wackadoo pastor is, whatever color fear is being coded in, are just what it takes to put the Republicans back in the White House.”

“You speak of the Moms of Soccer, no?”

“And now he’s just waiting on Philadelphia, you see?” Robbie tossed his iced tea into the pool behind him in order to gesture with both hands. “He’s dipped below ten points and it might get worse than that. He was hoping for something close so he wouldn’t have to do what it is that he’s gonna have to do after Hillary whips him.”

“Ahhhhh, you are not the first to suggest this…”

“What’s he going to do? Brother has never faced the general. That shit ain’t simple; sure as hell he won’t get so lucky as he did in the state senate back in the Ill. Do you see Mac getting caught running his wife through swinger clubs? What the brother is going to need to get through the Republican Swift Boat machine is an instant impact player. He’s not going to help himself by bringing out somebody he’s got to reintroduce to the country, maybe Wes Clark, but can you see that lil white dude standing next to Obama? Anyway, I digress… Obama’s going to get the nom, but without PA; that means unless he can get Al Gore on the back end of the ticket, he’s got little in the way of choice. Dean? I think motherfucking not. He’s got to go Hillary. Watch it happen.”

Nom du Christ! So… I hate to admit it, you know, I somehow had lost my press pass; maybe Margaret had stolen it from my suit coat that morning, whatever, I don’t know, but I was forced to get in line last week in Bloomington to hear the former president speak at the University of Indiana. It was good at first, out there with the youth, you know? The nascent, tumescent minds awash with the promise of democratic possibility, engaged in the process, getting involved. And then came the shout.

“Yo brah, they’re giving away free Dave Matthews tickets down at the Obama HQ in town!”

The skinny, dreadlocked white kid had called out to his brethren. The line blew away from the Assembly Hall like a sneeze, kids near racing down the hill for the nineties top concert draw, while I was left to slip into hear the nineties top president speak to a far less than capacity crowd.

What connerie! I mean, the cheap political tactic… what John Stewart called “kind of a dick move”, that is, whatever, immaterial. That America’s youth are chugging down hillsides for the music for the frat boy and the dental hygienist… Sacre’Poutine! What is the world coming to?

Dave Matthews? What happened to the music with balls? Where is Dylan, Hendrix, Joplin, and Young? That is the music for the change, no? Reagan, Thatcher, Apartied, and Bush One gave us U2, and Rage, and Public Enemy, Ani goddamn DiFranco! Has the MTV brain been so cooked down to a sickly sweet gastrique? Don’t even get me started on that Black Eyed Peas ‘Yes We Can’ disaster! The ghost of Arlo Guthrie spins in the grave to see the New Century Hootie and the Blowfish trotting out America’s Top ‘B’ List Entertainers (and yes, ma cherie, Scarlett, you make one more The Island and that’s just what you’ll be) to self-importantly preen and croon over Obama’s speech in grainy black and white. Where is Kanye West? Zack De La Rocha?

Oh, Sacre’Merde! That was a mistake! I have just watched the new Will.I.am Obama video and feel like I have to wash my ears! Je suis désolé, but the group that bestowed the world with ‘My Humps’ has a lot to answer for before a nation ought to start listening to its political advice, no?!

Will this campaign ever rock?

Torch, Interrupted...

Nom Dieu! Je suis désolé, you know? It could not be helped. I have been away. My headstrong half brother, Bernie Ernesto, had bolted from the Nader campaign and was arrested in Paris trying to micturate on the Olympic torch from a rooftop along the Seine and I was forced to fly from the Clinton campaign in Oregon last week to see to his release, a difficult proposition considering that when he saw me he began to howl about the two party system in United States; the candidates’ milquetoast stand on human rights.

It did not end well in Harrisburg, either, I am afraid to say. It turns out that in these smaller metropolitan enclaves the hiring of professional bar staff is prohibitive and the grad student bartender, apparently pursuing a Masters in Social Work at Temple, took great umbrage at Margaret’s comments w/r/t Senator Obama. Both were removed from the bar by local police, each still howling at the either for the definition of ‘change.’

I have rejoined the campaigns. Et vous prêt?

The Only Thing We Have to Believe is Belief Itself...

Frank Belloc, combat psychologist; he counsels reporters and pundits, cameramen and crew covering Barack Obama; he brings them down from the dizzying highs and swoons in the post speech moments so their coverage looks and feels more fair and balanced.

“I don’t get a lot of work from Fox,” he tells me over bottles of Belgian beer at the Abbey Bar in Harrisburg, “Sometimes I gotta come in and calm down the hue/sat mixer; but that’s something completely different.

“Same goes for MSNBC; except I do get more crew work from them, so the cameras aren’t shaking, but the talking heads there don’t care what they sound like. Olbermann is openly hostile to the suggestion he could use help moderating his commentary.

“But CNN is good work. The news heads are concerned that they don’t get too worked up. Tony Harris is a handful, believe me; but he’s just like that.”

“But, Frank,” I said, “What can you say of the candidates? Their psychological states? Have you had any insights?”

I sip deeply of my Brasserie des Rocs Grand Cru. I can feel Margaret Safire, sitting with us, constitutional law professor at Cornell and former member of the Clinton campaign, drinking whisky for she will have non of the beer that is the spécialité of the place, stiffen noticeably. She is like to have been shell-shocked herself by the imagined Tuzla sniper fire, it is a shame to say.

“Obama, for all intents and purposes, is an only child and decidedly a child of divorce,” Frank said, wiping the sweat from his fluted tripel glass. “And therein comes a sense of entitlement; a feeling of individual empowerment. This is reinforced by the break-up of the parent’s marriage; mother’s and father’s often feel a need to overcompensate for the feelings of loss and the child of divorce, especially one as bright as Obama, grows up with a strong conviction that they are going to fix things; make it all right. This candidate has that in spades; he truly believes he is the answer; he has the answers.”

“He just does not have the policies,” grunted Margaret, “or his zombie’s are completely unable to articulate them.”

“Ma cherie,” I gently pat her skirted lap.

“No, Ms. Safire has a point,” Frank said. “This climate of charisma, the Obama phenomenon, is real. People are able to suspend their ordinary disbelief by the way this candidate is able to speak to them. Whether they consider it the greater good, a higher purpose; somebody like Obama is able to transcend policy specifics. In fact, a great deal of his supporters can’t fathom what it is you mean when you say he’s not transparent about exactly what it is he intends to do. They’ve projected their hopes and dreams in their place. They could no more question his platform than they could their own, and in their opinion, better nature.”

“Next stop, Halle-Bopp,” Margaret sneered.

To be continued…