Category Archives: Politics

Crazy Old Wizard

Saddam KenobiThere’s something pathetic and familiar about the way Saddam Hussein looked when he was captured this weekend by coalition troops. It took me all day to figure it out, but I finally realized that, in that gray beard, nappy hairdo and especially those disheveled robes, he reminds me of ‘old Ben Kenobi,’ living like a hermit somewhere in the treacherous, dry hills of Tatooine. There’s nothing nearly as benign about this murderous former dictator, though, and for the fact that his capture will provide a more definitive kind of closure to Iraqis, this turn of events strikes me as significant, and in a storybook fashion, a real triumph of justice. On the other hand, I am bracing myself for the political ramifications, the trickery that the Bush administration will undoubtedly employ in order to reap the benefits of this big win, and the confused, panicked scurrying among Democratic contenders for the Presidential nomination as they try to make sense of their diminishing chances in 2004.

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The Man Who Would Be Kingmaker

Al GoreBefore I learned to like baseball, the race for the Presidency of the United States was all the baseball I needed: an intensive, protracted race that changed daily, full of odd twists and turns and intricate, obscure statistical bellwethers. The news that former Vice President Al Gore will endorse Howard Dean tomorrow is exactly the kind of grand, highly dramatic turn of events that makes this race so compelling, at least to me.

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Posters for President

PostersIt was a charming idea for The New York Times Magazine to commission nine prominent graphic designers to design posters for one of the nine Democratic candidates vying for the presidential nomination, but charming is exactly the problem. Each designer drew a candidate’s name from a hat, so there was no deliberate synergy in politics or artistic temperament, which may explain why most all of these posters are so flat and lifeless, but it doesn’t explain why, first of all, almost none of these designers really bothered to address the central challenge of the exercise, and second, why a disproportionately high number are all drawn from the same source.

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People Powered

There’s nothing particularly sexy about tomorrow’s elections, which will almost certainly guarantee that only a tiny fraction of the electorate will show up at the polls. This may explain, at least in part, why it was so hard to dig up an overview of the referendums on the New York City ballot. After some digging around, I came up with the Gotham Gazette’s overview. The hotbutton issue, of course, is Mayor Bloomberg’s quest to obsolesce partisan primaries — the Democrats are against it, and so is The New York Times.

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Hast la Vista, Democracy

SchwarzeneggerWatching the recall process in California has been like watching an insane neighbor dig up his backyard in some crazy treasure hunt. Every day, as first the grass and then the soil and then the pipes running beneath the neighborhood get torn up and piled in a destructive heap, the yard becomes a worse and worse disaster, and yet it still seems hopeless that the neighbor would ever listen to a reasonable argument against calling the whole thing off.

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Anger Management

Third Democratic Presidential DebateAt last night’s third Democratic presidential debate, held at Pace University in lower Manhattan, Senator John Kerry and Rep. Dick Gephardt both took swipes at Governor Howard Dean with the obvious intention of provoking him to anger. Dean, who has been nagged by a reputation for irascibility, took the bait.

Responding to an allegation by Gephardt that he had sided with former House Speaker and notorious Republican Newt Gingrich on health care issues (including some negative comments on Medicare), Dean shot back that the claim was “a flat-out falsehood,” that he had, “frankly done more than [Rep. Gephardt]” to deliver health care, that “nobody here deserves to be compared to Newt Gingrich,“ that the allegations were “not helpful” and distracted from “the real enemy: George W. Bush.”

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A General Election

Wes ClarkA friend of mine has been talking up the long-awaited entry of General Wesley Clark into the race for the Democratic nomination for so long now, it seemed almost anti-climactic to me when it happened yesterday. Notwithstanding Clark’s impressive résumé, I’ve been a bit skeptical of the concept of an ideal candidate that the politically flirtatious Clark has been cultivating for the past few months. My take on it is that, before a candidate jumps into the race, it really doesn’t matter what they’ve done before, for better or worse. Once the hat is in the ring, as it is now, that’s when we really find out if there’s a credible case to be made for him. And besides, one has to wonder why the hell he waited so long to join the fray.

Clark has enjoyed no shortage of enthusiastic press coverage, but I predict that won’t last very long. The field of Democratic contenders is crowded and, except for Howard Dean, mostly unremarkable from the perspective of newsworthiness. Clark opens up the story considerably, at least for the short term — he represents a new wellspring of potentially juicy headlines, and the press corps is going to tear him apart.

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Brought to You by the Letter K

K StreetPolitics is one thing I can’t seem to get enough of these days, so I was happy to see the debut of Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney’s “K Street” earlier this week. Conceptually, this new ongoing series is something like a verité mockumentary, a kind of cross between the work of D.A. Pennebaker and Christopher Guest — I realize that putting it like that would seemingly confound distinction, but there’s not an easy way to describe the tone of a series that pits a small handful of fictional characters mingling and interacting with real-life politicians and Washington power brokers, and that is designed to be conceived, written, shot, edited and aired all within the span of a week. It’s a bold concept, and the result is generally worthwhile; “K Street” is by turns revealing and lightly comedic, but it also bears the creakiness of an improvised enterprise.

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