Chill Cobra: Haven't You Heard Of Big Sky Sportsmen For Obama?

There is an Obama campaign organization in Montana. The Geezer has no such presence in the Treasure State. There is something for the late-night jokesters here. The Cobra needs to take a trip out West. If this is (fair & balanced) political realism, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
They Get It
By Timothy Egan

A big red-headed guy in a pickup pulling a fishing boat stopped in front of Barack Obama headquarters here — loaded for bear, as they say.

Land Tawney, a fifth-generation Montanan with a gap-toothed smile, was wearing a plaid shirt and a camouflage cap atop his head. He belongs to Sportsmen for Obama, which sounds like Facebook Users for McCain, or Linguists for Bush.

I asked him whether fellow members of the hook-and-bullet community are concerned about Obama’s race, or the depictions of him as un-American. Montana, after all, has a black population of less than one-half of one percent.

“For 95 percent of the people, it doesn’t matter or even come up,” said Tawney, whose name suggests that he was predestined never to spend his days under fluorescent lights. “For the other 5 percent, yeah, there’s some talk.”

The furor over this week’s New Yorker cover — the satirical cartoon of Barack and Michelle Obama in Muslim and black-militant poses — boils down to this: We get it, but what will those folks in fly-over country think?

The answer is that they get it as well. Irony, it turns out, does cross the Hudson River. And if they don’t get it, if they see the cover as affirmation of the sludge they’ve heard on talk radio or certain cable outlets, they’re never going to vote for Barack Hussein Obama anyway.

People forget that part of the inspiration for the magazine cover is this year’s best media-division political laugher: the suggestion by Fox News that a triumphant knuckle bump between the Obamas, a gesture familiar to any third grader in Little League, could actually be “a terrorist fist jab.”

More importantly: Why are there sportsmen for Obama? Or for that matter, nearly a dozen paid Obama staffers in Montana, a state that Democrats have won only twice in the last 50 years? Surely, its three electoral votes are not the draw.

Recent polls show Obama ahead or nearly tied in Montana, North Dakota and South Dakota, the northern tier of the Democratic presidential desert. Talking to people under the Big Sky, you get the sense that three things are in play in the landscape of altered political expectations.

One is that people who live in states with few blacks seem more open to the idea of a president who is not white. Perhaps race is more of an abstract, an ideal. The raw, sometimes tribal clashes of ethnic groups, where a long-ago slight can harden into a political attitude, seems less pronounced.

Thus, Obama is ahead in Oregon, which has a black population of 1.9 percent, but is having trouble in Michigan, where 14.3 percent of the population is black and the white suburban diaspora has complicated views about race informed by black-majority Detroit.

The second factor is the Democratic Party’s decision to field operations in all 50 states, a plan that was scorned when Howard Dean, the party chairman, first proposed it in 2006. Following that lead, Obama has fully staffed offices in five cities in Montana. He’s visited the state three times, and he’s on the air with television ads. Senator John McCain has no paid staff and has yet to set foot here.

“It’s not a head fake,” said Caleb Weaver, a spokesman for Obama in Montana. “We think we can win it.”

The final thing is that the more time Obama or his people spend in states thought to be out of reach, it’s less likely that there will be another mistake like the one he made at that California fund-raiser when he referred to small-town voters as bitterly clinging to guns and religion. As they get to know him, he gets to know them.

The National Rifle Association expects to spend $40 million during the campaign, partly to persuade gun owners to vote against Obama — a full blast of “I’m a bitter gun owner and I vote,” as the N.R.A. button proclaims.

“There’s a lot of talk about Obama and guns, and — I’ll be honest with you — a lot of fear,” said Tawney. “But at least he’s not trying to fake it. Not like John Kerry with a dead goose over his shoulder and new hunting outfit one month before the election.”

The biggest misperception of people in Montana, he said, is that everyone is a rube just off the hay truck. That’s not to say there aren’t militia wackos hiding in the hills, trading toxic nonsense about Obama’s secret Muslim past.

But for every nut, there’s a New Yorker reader — and then some.

[Timothy Egan, a contributing columnist for The Times, writes the weekly "Outposts" column on the American West. Egan — winner of both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award — graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in journalism, and was awarded an honorary doctorate of humane letters by Whitman College in 2000 for his writings on the land.]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

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The Cobra Bites The Hopester: Doesn't Like The Taste

We need a president we can mock: Vaughn Meader on JFK, David Frye on The Trickster, Dan Akroyd on Mr. Peanut (Jimmy Carter), Chevy Chase on The Bumbler (Jerry Ford), Phil Hartman on Dutch, Dana Carvey on Poppy Bush, Darrell Hammond on The Slickster, and Will Farrell on The Dubster. The Cobra, in today's op-Ed piece, bemoans The Hopester's rectitude. She must secretly love The Dubster: the dumbest sumbitch ever to reside at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Ha ha. If this is (fair & balanced) venomous whining, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
May We Mock, Barack?
By Maureen Dowd

When I interviewed Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert for Rolling Stone a couple years ago, I wondered what Barack Obama would mean for them.

“It seems like a President Obama would be harder to make fun of than these guys,” I said.

“Are you kidding me?” Stewart scoffed.

Then he and Colbert both said at the same time: “His dad was a goat-herder!”

When I noted that Obama, in his memoir, had revealed that he had done some pot, booze and “maybe a little blow,” the two comedians began riffing about the dapper senator’s familiarity with drug slang.

Colbert: Wow, that’s a very street way of putting it. "A little blow."

Stewart: A little bit of the white rabbit.

Colbert: "Yeah, I packed a cocktail straw of cocaine and had a prostitute blow it in my ear, but that is all I did. High-fivin."

Flash forward to the kerfuffle — and Obama’s icy reaction — over this week’s New Yorker cover parodying fears about the Obamas.

“We’ve already scratched thrift, candor and brevity off the list of virtues in this presidential cycle, so why not eliminate humor, too?” wrote James Rainey in The Los Angeles Times, suggesting “an irony deficiency” in Obama and his fans.

Many of the late-night comics and their writers — nearly all white — now admit to The New York Times’s Bill Carter that because of race and because there is nothing “buffoonish” about Obama — and because many in their audiences are intoxicated by him and resistant to seeing him skewered — he has not been flayed by the sort of ridicule that diminished Dukakis, Gore and Kerry.

“There’s a weird reverse racism going on,” Jimmy Kimmel said.

Carter also observed that there’s no easy comedic “take” on Obama, “like allegations of Bill Clinton’s womanizing, or President Bush’s goofy bumbling or Al Gore’s robotic personality.”

At first blush, it would seem to be a positive for Obama that he is hard to mock. But on second thought, is it another sign that he’s trying so hard to be perfect that it’s stultifying? Or that eight years of W. and Cheney have robbed Democratic voters of their sense of humor?

Certainly, as the potential first black president, and as a contender with tender experience, Obama must feel under strain to be serious.

But he does not want the “take” on him to become that he’s so tightly wrapped, overcalculated and circumspect that he can’t even allow anyone to make jokes about him, and that his supporters are so evangelical and eager for a champion to rescue America that their response to any razzing is a sanctimonious: Don’t mess with our messiah!

If Obama keeps being stingy with his quips and smiles, and if the dominant perception of him is that you can’t make jokes about him, it might infect his campaign with an airless quality. His humorlessness could spark humor.

On Tuesday, Andy Borowitz satirized on that subject. He said that Obama, sympathetic to comics’ attempts to find jokes to make about him, had put out a list of official ones, including this:

"A traveling salesman knocks on the door of a farmhouse, and much to his surprise, Barack Obama answers the door. The salesman says, ‘I was expecting the farmer’s daughter.’ Barack Obama replies, ‘She’s not here. The farm was foreclosed on because of subprime loans that are making a mockery of the American dream.’"

John McCain’s Don Rickles routines — “Thanks for the question, you little jerk” — can fall flat. But he seems like a guy who can be teased harmlessly. If Obama offers only eat-your-arugula chiding and chilly earnestness, he becomes an otherworldly type, not the regular guy he needs to be.

He’s already in danger of seeming too prissy about food — a perception heightened when The Wall Street Journal reported that the planners for Obama’s convention have hired the first-ever Director of Greening, the environmental activist Andrea Robinson. She in turn hired an Official Carbon Adviser to “measure the greenhouse-gas emissions of every placard, every plane trip, every appetizer prepared and every coffee cup tossed.”

The “lean ‘n’ green” catering guidelines, The Journal said, bar fried food and instruct that, “on the theory that nutritious food is more vibrant, each meal should include ‘at least three of the following colors: red, green, yellow, blue/purple, and white.’ (Garnishes don’t count.) At least 70% of the ingredients should be organic or grown locally, to minimize emissions from fuel during transportation.”

Bring it on, Ozone Democrats! Because if Obama gets elected and there is nothing funny about him, it won’t be the economy that’s depressed. It will be the rest of us.

[Maureen Dowd, winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary, became a columnist on The New York Times Op-Ed page in 1995.]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

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Beware: There's A Fang In This Snow Cone

Our best story-teller hums George Gershwin's "Summertime" as he reviews recent events in this poor, poor country. Keillor doesn't whine. Keillor tells truth to power to presidential candidates (Both of them, even though Keillor is an Obamaniac.), the current idiot occupying the White House, the corrupt agents of the mortgage/financial crisis, the international corporations plundering Central America, and finally — the Big (and I mean BIG) Dittohead. Thanks to that fat sumbitch's egomania, the NY Fishwrap puff piece about the BIG DIttohead told us (and Keillor) that the obese bastard has a life-size (make that wall-size) self portrait in his Palm Beach compound. I know why the BIG Dittohead was abusing prescription meds: to suppress nausea when looking at that damn painting. If this is a (fair & balanced) jazz aria, so be it.

[x Salon]
The Livin' Is Easy
By Garrison Keillor

(Summary: In the sweetness of July, nothing seems to matter — not high gas prices, the dumb New Yorker cover, nor the Fannie and Freddie bailout.)

Summer nights! The fragrant dark descends, the night creatures chitter and chirrup, and we linger on the porch, a little wine in the glass, children coming and going, and we inhale the sweetness of life. In Pasadena, people are lined up outside a bank, hoping to get their money out before it goes belly-up, and Mr. McCain's friend Mr. Gramm says we are a nation of whiners complaining about a recession that is only mental, but we are engulfed in summer and don't notice. We're sitting on the porch, inhaling the breeze from the trees, and we are American optimists.

We grew up with cheapo gasoline and our children won't and anything you hear about rolling back prices at the pump is just election-year blather. Supply is not rising to meet demand, what with China and India booming, and that drives the price up: You learned about this in the seventh grade. So our kids will have to deal with new realities, which they can manage better than we can, and when gas goes to $7 and $8 and $10 a gallon, they'll roll with it.

A fellow father on the porch says he's taking his girls to Guatemala in July on a church mission though it isn't the Guatemalans he wants to minister to -- he wants his children to spend a week in a village whose inhabitants live on a fraction of what we do and aren't messing around with Facebook and YouTube so much because they have gardens to tend and chickens to butcher. He simply wants his girls to see this and know how privileged we Americans are. We got cheap bananas and coffee out of Guatemala by supporting a vicious regime that suppressed dissent, and for Chiquita Banana, brave people were tortured and shot, which is something that Adams and Jefferson didn't foresee, and yet a band of Lutherans is welcome to visit a rural village and sleep on mats for a week and eat what the locals eat. What a beautiful world!

In the sweetness of July, the dumb cover of the New Yorker showing Barack in Muslim garb doesn't matter, nor does Mr. McCain's sweet moment when he was asked if it is fair that insurance will pay for Viagra and not for birth control pills and he stammered like a schoolboy. Politicians have powerful response reflexes that pick up on a key word in the question and play back a practiced response, but Mr. McCain blushed and winced, a lovely vulnerable moment that in the languors of July went unappreciated.

On a lovely summer morning you read about the secretary of the Treasury's plan to rescue Fannie and Freddie to the tune of $300 billion in federal loans. A classic Republican story — lax regulation, lavish salaries to executives, financial bungling, and rescue by the taxpayers. (Note to myself: If McCain is elected, buy gold ingots and install bars on the windows.) A whiner might wonder where was the Current Occupant? Does the gentleman still come to the office on a regular basis? Does anybody tell him what's going on or is he still looking at picture books? Don't matter. It's July.

Same with the growling and grumbling on the left about Barack tacking to the center, adjusting positions, giving tough-love speeches to African-American audiences — what some people decry as cynical politics, some of us welcome as a sign of seriousness. Barack making overtures to evangelicals? It's about time! Barack expressing his support of the Second Amendment? Bravo. I want to see my man excited by the prospect of victory and not shrink from it as so many Democrats do. They've read too many books about heroic dissenters and it makes them nervous about being in too big a crowd.

The huge crowds that Barack draws are stunned by the fact that someone like him, with that interesting name, is — hang on now — a mainstream candidate for president of the United States and that he is, on close examination, One of Us. An earnest striver with a sense of humor. He is so much more One of Us than the privileged ne'er-do-well son in the White House or poor Rush Limbaugh living alone with his cat in his Palm Beach compound with the cherubs on the ceiling just like at Versailles and the life-size oil portrait of himself. Imagine having to look at that as you come down to breakfast.

[Garrison Keillor's "A Prairie Home Companion" can be heard Saturday nights on public radio stations across the country. Keillor graduated from the University of Minneosta in 1966. His signature sign-off on "The Writer's Almanac" (weekdays on public radio stations) is "Be well, do good work, and keep in touch."]

Copyright © 2008 Salon Media Group, Inc.

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