Obama's Trickle-Down Equanimity

By Leslie Savan

The other day I noticed that my husband had for the tenth time ruined the slick seasoned surface of my cast-iron skillet by scrubbing it with Brillo. I started to get ticked off, building up a tiny tornado of fury; boy, am I ever going to tell him. Again.

But then I thought, Would Obama let this get to him? That tall cool drink o' distilled water would never blast Michelle for a domestic faux-pas like this, but here I am going ballistic because my spouse tried to clean a pot? Then poof! (or plouffe!): my anger was gone.

Not to get all hagiographic about it, much less to liken the President-elect to "The One" (the name the McCainiac right sarcastically used to paint him as the false Messiah), but Barack Obama's calm, nonreactionary response to the worst that politics and economics can throw at him has begun to establish a new emotional policy: trickle-down equanimity.

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November 28, 2008

GOP Plays a Mean Saxby

By Leslie Savan

Most of us outside of Georgia think of Saxby Chambliss as the guy who ran the most disgusting senate ad ever (at least until Liddy Dole's "You're an atheist!" spot this year). In 2002, Republican Chambliss attacked Democratic senator Max Cleland, who left three limbs on the battlefield in Vietnam, for lacking "the courage to lead" against the likes of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, whose images play John the Baptist in the ad to a series of photos of Senator Cleland, carefully cropped to hide his heroic injuries.

Because of that spot, most of us view the hungover Georgia election on Dec. 2 through a lens of justice and revenge, just as Bill Clinton did Wednesday, at an Atlanta rally for Jim Martin, Cleland's would-be vindicator. "When I saw someone wanting a Senate seat so bad that he accused Max of endangering the national security of this country..." Clinton said, shaking his head and trailing off, as if there simply were no words to describe Chambliss's perfidy.

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November 20, 2008

Sarah's Faked Alaska

By Leslie Savan

While Sarah Palin talks and talks and talks in media appearances this week, the press is still letting her get away with (at least) one big, easy-to-spot lie.

For weeks, she has been asked, What went wrong with that Katie Couric interview? And Palin has repeatedly excused her disastrous performance by saying she was "annoyed" with Couric, because Katie had condescendingly asked, What do you read up there in Alaska? That's proof, Palin insists, that Couric and the liberal elite media look down on her--and by extension, all people out there in the "real America"--and she, for one, is not going to take it anymore.

Here's Matt Lauer, on Wednesday, letting Palin babble on, not bothering to question her premise:

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November 12, 2008

McCain Goes Hot-Tubbing on Saturday Night Live

By Leslie Savan

When I heard that John McCain would appear on Saturday Night Live last weekend, I fretted: Will the likable "old McCain" charm votes back from Barack Obama? (And will he get a last-minute boost Monday night from SNL's election-eve special?) Just because Sarah Palin's SNL spot did nothing to dent Tina Fey's caribou-in-the-headlights impression, there was no guarantee that the cast would not fawn over the frequent guest and one-time host of the show.

But McCain was never pitted against his SNL doppelganger (Darrell Hammond) as Palin was. McCain was pitted against himself. And you gotta say, once he was back on the Rockefeller Center stage, he came off not only game and self-deprecating, but...happy. It really wasn't the performance you'd expect from a race- and red-baiting politician mired in the closing days of a losing campaign.

Still, McCain probably didn't win or lose votes Saturday night so much as he took his first steps towards reclaiming his damaged legacy. Like Al Gore's famous hot tub appearance on SNL, which tipped us off to his decision not to run in 2004, McCain's que cera performance (evident elsewhere on the trail in these last few days) was almost an admission that he knew he was about to lose, padded out with every imaginable electoral excuse. Standing next to Fey's Palin, he presented a cheerier, more ironic version of the victimhood he's been pulsing with for months. "Barack Obama purchased airtime on three major networks," he said. "We, however, can only afford QVC." He went on to hawk kitsch like Joe the Plumber action figures, pork-cutting knives, and the "10 commemorative plates that celebrate the 10 townhall debates between Senator Obama and myself. They're blank, he wouldn't agree to those debates."

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November 3, 2008

Obama Ad Hits McCain's Winky-Dink Veep Pick

By Leslie Savan

A wink is as good as a nod: An Obama ad finally takes on Palin and the unbearable frightfulness of her cutesiness, though not by itemizing her lies, sneers, and Joe McCarthy ways. It doesn't need to do that--just showing her face, at the right moment, casts her as the summation of John McCain's recklessness.

It's not unheard-of for a presidential nominee to run ads against the other guy's running mate. Dukakis hit Quayle, and Humphrey skewered Agnew (both to no avail). But beyond a few digs on the stump, Obama has largely tip-toed around Palin. And here, of course, Obama is only using Palin to make the point she seems to have been born to convey: That you can't trust McCain's judgment on the biggest issue of the day, the economy, because you can't trust his judgment on the biggest decision of his campaign, his veep. Simple, true, and wordlessly tied together with a pop-perfect punchline, her wink.

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October 29, 2008

Must-See Campaign Vids

By Leslie Savan

In a field of great new independent political videos, these two stand out. They were both released in the last few days.

"The Vet Who Did Not Vet" explains McCain's pick of Palin in the way Spongebob might explain it to Patrick.

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October 27, 2008

Boo! Another Halloween Ad from John McCain

By Leslie Savan

Predictably enough, John McCain made an ad based on Joe Biden's stupid, stupid comment that, mark his words, the world will test Barack Obama with a "generated crisis" within six months of taking office. The spot takes us on an all-fear, all-boogeymen trip around the world, with Hugo Chavez, Ahmadinejad, and ski-masked jihadis riding shotgun.

I would've been more scared if that second image didn't look so much like a fetal sonogram and make me think this was a terrorist-cum-antiabortion ad, a straddle too far even for the McCain campaign. On further viewing, however, I could make out that those were battleships. And that the fist-shaking mob toward the end there probably formed overseas, and not at a Palin rally.

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October 25, 2008

We're All John the Candidate

By Leslie Savan

One thing you've got to say about John McCain and his campaign gimmicks: He will blithely hold onto them like a pinless grenade until they blow up in his face--as he did with the Palin pick for veep, the "suspension" of his campaign for the bailout, and now, of course, Joe the Plumber.

McCain might yet get the real Joe Wurzelbacher to cut an ad for him, but in the meantime, the candidate has found a bunch of other oppressed "just folks" to swear that they are all Spartacus, too:

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October 22, 2008

Sarah Palin Has a Tina Bit of a Problem

By Leslie Savan

Sarah Palin's appearance on Saturday Night Live was weird in many ways, but the strangest moment came as the would-be veep passed Tina Fey on her way to give her muted "Live from New York" shout-out. Tina, who'd just been told by Alec Baldwin that "the real one" was there, flickered like a shadow over Palin's political grave at that moment, and if Sarah didn't feel the chill, I suspect a lot of viewers did.

The striking thing about that TV instant when the two women crossed paths is that they're both fake, the Sarah Palin and the Tina Palin. When the only vice-presidential nominee in modern history to refuse to give a press conference "jokes" that an actor's fake presser was "not a realistic depiction of the way my press conference would've gone," we begin to realize what a dizzying game of make-believe the McCain campaign has become.

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October 20, 2008

Free-basing McPalin

By Leslie Savan

We've all seen the signs in those we love--the abandonment of hope, the furtive worry about skin tone, the sleeplessness and sudden loss of teeth. But it took MoveOn to step forward and attempt an intervention:

Simplistic anti-drug public service announcements, notably those from the corporate-sponsored, Bush 41-spawned Partnership for a Drug-free America, have been setting up spoof-ready targets for a couple decades now. But this MoveOn spot up-ends the usual worried parent/at-risk child equation with such precision that the cameos by Gossip Girl stars Penn Badgley and Blake Lively are just icing on the cake.

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October 15, 2008