What is true for mortal man is also true for ideas, for concepts, for myths and values, for political theses.
That’s what we’re dealing with in events like the supposed "bitter" contretemps and Barack Obama.
Forget for a moment whether Barack Obama is a black man or white. He is, first of all, a Hawaiian.
Hawaiians surf. They stand on a board above the waves and they ride the water the way Texans ride horses. Obama surfs history the way painters like Picasso surf artistic trends or the way a Tom Brady surfs through defenses seeking a receiver.
As do we all, once we realize it. But journalists are stuck in the eternal now, and have no concept of this idea of surfing.
Thus they see scandal where there is, in fact, the death rattle of their own assumptions of political myth, value, and power, and the alchemy in which both are created.
What Barack Obama said last week in Pennsylvania was the simple truth. It should surprise no one that people turn bitter when their jobs disappear, when politicians in both parties use that to gain power and then do nothing about it.
The Clintons promised to help, but instead took that power and endorsed free trade agreements which guaranteed the jobs would never come back. The Bushes blamed the blacks, the browns, all the "others," then continued the march away from production, towards consumption.
There is no lie there. There is no scandal.
There is nothing but simple truth, obvious truth, truth which reporters do report, in their own way, on their own terms. Poor, poor steel town, they say. Allentown, say the songwriters.
But the candidate said it, not the press, which under the Nixon Thesis believes it has the power to decide what is true and what is false (as the Nixon people have always told them, while buying out their owners and then demanding they tell it their way as the Soviets and the Nazis did).
And so a scandal is created from whole cloth. Watch it start on Free Republic, move to the Chicago Sun-Times, then get onto ABC News. Simple truth is turned into a lie, into a scandal, and the polls will move, oh yes they will, in the short run.
Because most people aren’t paying attention.
But this is where everyone makes their mistake. This nomination is won. Barack Obama will be the Democratic nominee — make no mistake. And the fact that John McCain seems close is not a sign of strength, but weakness.
What writers like Digby realize, and few others do, is that the press itself is on trial this year. The establishment press, with its spin and its daily quota of pundits with face time, is very much on trial. And they’re guilty.
The media has decided who wins and who loses, it thinks, for years. While in fact it has been deliberately manipulated, first by people like James Carville, then by people like Karl Rove, cynics who understood that through the simple manipulation of now they could get the dog to chase its own tail, and no one would notice.
Because people are stupid, they will say between martinis.
Well, people are not stupid. Mostly, we’re unobservant. Most of the time we don’t really care about today, or the trends. We care about ourselves. And we can’t see any difference between Gush and Bore, most of the time. Because most of the time it doesn’t matter.
It’s so easy, most of the time, to go with our prejudices, and to let ourselves be led. Because an election only seems to matter to people in Washington City, and our assumptions about the past and future, the myths and values which define our life, are fixed.
But sometimes, once every generation, this is not the case. The press does its spinning, the pollsters assume the spin is working, but deep under the numbers the chant rises — not this time.
Not This Time.
Sometimes, elections really are about us, and about our troubles, about our concerns, and the differences among us. Sometimes elections really matter. They really are a choice between wildly different myths, between completely different sets of values.
The last such election was in 1968. At that time, the media thought of Nixon’s win as narrow, as an upset. Now they obsess over that year, and its meaning, as having great historical significance.
Only it’s a significance which is the opposite of what they reported at the time, and for several years afterward.
But the press never notices this. Except in deep retrospect. In all their memoirs reporters working now will claim they knew where 2008 was headed all along.
They will be lying. But we will let them lie, because at that point it won’t matter any more. Ordinary people don’t judge the truth of the elite’s memoirs. Political earthquakes shake once, hard, and then we go back to how we were. We assume that the new configuration of the land is how it has always been. The political river goes calmly into the new channel. These are our myths, these are our values, this is how it has always been, we’ll say.
Yet there will have been an earthquake. There will have been an enormous change. By a margin of 3-2, or thereabouts, we will have chosen differently, and we will continue to choose differently, as long as we live. And we will teach our children that these truths which were thought lies just months before the earthquake are self-evident.
That’s what happened in the 1960s, as the Roosevelt Thesis of Unity gave way to the Nixon Thesis of Conflict. It’s what happened in the 1930s, as the Hoover Progressive Thesis gave way to the Roosevelt Thesis of Unity. And in the 1890s, as the Civil War Thesis gave way to the Progressive Thesis. And in the 1860s, as the Civil War Thesis was born in blood, and Jacksonian Democracy died.
Most people aren’t historians. Most people are trying to get by as best they can. They change their minds because of terrible events. Iraq. Katrina. Global Warming. Foreclosure. Recession. Depression? $4/gallon gas? Unemployment.
That’s what people care about. We care about ourselves. We don’t care about politicians, or the media. We don’t care about "issues". God knows we don’t care what reporters and pundits natter-on about. Even in the blogosphere.
Nothing will change because of what I just wrote and what you’re reading. Yet everything is changing, has changed, will change. Because we will it to change.
People ask, what about my kids? What about my cost of living? What about my street? My home town?
Sometimes we make choices. And this is one of those times.
