AUDASE

The Good, the Bad, and Joe Lieberman
The Obama tide lifted some clear winners, including polling savant Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com, gun-shop owners, Black Eyed Peas front man will.i.am, MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow, and, of course, Oprah. As for the losers, Joe Lieberman tops the list.
by James Wolcott (Vanity Fair)
Here on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, the liberal capital of frizzy hair and encyclopedic grudges trailing back to the Spanish Civil War, many of my fellow comrades are still walking around with Obama buttons stuck to their fulsome bosoms. The election is over, victory was achieved, and yet they can’t bring themselves to take off their buttons. They may never take them off. Obama buttons and yes we can actionwear may become classic staples of Manhattan street fashion, like Ramones and CBGB T-shirts. That so many steel-wool cynics have developed a sentimental attachment to Obama buttons is testimony that everybody loves to identify with a winner, especially when they’ve been stigmatized as losers for so long, pelted with peanuts by Rush Limbaugh and every other caroler on the right. Noble failure is fine, until you make a habit of it, then you become a pathetic figure of fun. George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Al Gore’s loss in 2000, John Kerry’s loss in 2004, the eviction of Dan Rather from CBS, the financial hemorrhaging at The New York Times—each has been draped like an albatross around liberalism’s neck, the musty aroma becoming the signature scent of Nation subscribers, PBS viewers, and Wally Shawn fans. But then Obama won—won big and wide—and the cling of failure dissolved like the vines in The Sleeping Beauty, liberating the sun. Even the Clinton victories didn’t carry such exultation. It was almost scary, seeing so many New Yorkers smiling in the post-election afterglow, using facial muscles long buried under habitual scowling. That’s what winning does—it promotes cellular rejuvenation. Losing, however, results in a leakage of life force, shrinkage under the spotlight. That’s why the Republicans keep trying to tap into the legend of Ronald Reagan, hoping to extract one last vital drop of sap.
It doesn’t take a quantum mechanic to figure out who the conspicuous winners were in the election. Where the Hillary Clinton brain trust tried to roll each other down the bowling alley (with Clinton’s hapless chief strategist, Mark Penn, serving as the designated patsy), Obama’s campaign manager, David Plouffe, and chief strategist, David Axelrod, conceived and executed the Obama electoral strategy with a supersonic hum and a minimum of bared ego. The first to grasp the portent of what was taking shape was the prophet of the Obama paradigm shift, the journalist/activist/online editor/blogger Al Giordano, who, as a student of the teachings and tactics of community organizer Saul Alinsky (whose Rules for Radicals is the guerrilla guide for domestic insurgents), divined the advantage that Obama’s small-donor base gave him against old-school juggernauts. In a prescient article for The Boston Phoenix in September 2007, a full year before the Democratic convention, Giordano saw a distant dot heading down the railroad tracks and perceived that the Hillary Is Inevitable story line was Old Hollywood, about to be overthrown by an emerging social grid. He foresaw “a different narrative than has ever occurred before—especially because most of Obama’s record-breaking campaign war chest comes from small donors.… Obama is raising campaign money faster than even the Clinton machine is. So the real surprise of the 2008 Democratic nomination contest is that, for the first time since Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 campaign, the upstart rival will be able to outspend the anointed Democratic front-runner.” Outspend and outmaneuver. “It is Obama’s history as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago—and the application of that experience to organizing his campaign—that is making the 2008 cycle distinct from previous ones. Where [Howard] Dean failed to convert his donor-activist base into effective organization, Obama is apparently writing the book on how to do it.” And although Dean’s 2004 campaign may have prematurely ruptured, Dean’s tenure as chairman of the Democratic National Committee was a triumph, the party’s nationwide victories a vindication of his 50-state strategy. He was able to bury “the Dean Scream,” for which he is hoarsely remembered, under a high note.

No shiny arrow shot swifter and loftier from obscurity to quotable authority than Nate Silver, whose FiveThirtyEight.com site became the expert sensation of the election season. (Five hundred thirty-eight is the sum of electoral-college votes up for contention.) Crunching poll numbers until they sang with clarity, Silver, a managing partner and sabermetrician at Baseball Prospectus and a former Daily Kos diarist, made many of the old pros look as if they were stuck in the previous century, milking cows. Not only did his disciplined models and microfine data mining command respect, his prognostications hit the Zen mark on Election Day. “This uncanny accuracy is the equivalent of dropping a penny from the top of a 50 story building and landing it in a shot glass,” John Cole wrote at Balloon Juice. “This is sick accurate.” Silver also became an instant cable-news savant, his geek-genius glasses and owlish mien worthy of a Starfleet sub-adjutant whose quadratic equations coolly foil an attack from a Romulan vessel while the senior officers are frantically poking at their touch screens. Combine blog cred and TV-niche stardom, and a fat book contract is the next-best thing to inevitable, and, sure enough, Silver scored a two-book contract said to be “in the neighborhood of $700,000,” which is a pretty nice neighborhood, especially these days when people are stockpiling spam. Able to move into an even nicer neighborhood is comedian Sarah Silverman, whose “Great Schlep” viral video campaign to noodge Jews to migrate to Florida to persuade their cranky grandparents to vote for Obama helped catapult her into a multi-million-dollar book deal. Some of Obama’s victory dust rubbed off on her, too. Contrast this with the sorry plight of Shelby Steele’s A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win, a book destined for the remainder bin of infamy as a case study in authorial hubris (Steele still won’t acknowledge he blew it) and the cost of becoming Super Glued to a losing argument.
The Sabrina story of the season was Rachel Maddow’s captivating rise from minor-league hottie to prom-queen media darling. After regular guest appearances on Race for the White House with David Gregory and Countdown with Keith Olbermann, Maddow—a host on the liberal Air America talk-radio network, whose collegial humor and buoyant crusading defied the stereotype of the ranting lefty driven bonkers by Bush-Cheney—was awarded her own prime-time show on MSNBC, a time slot that had been a cemetery plot, claiming the souls of Deborah Norville, Dan Abrams, and others whose names are writ in mist. The ratings rocketed far beyond expectations. Maddow’s sparky enthusiasm at being the new kid on the block stood in marked contrast with the granitic monotone of Fox News hosts such as Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, who tried to gin up scary-Obama controversy with their customary one-two of jabbing fingers and gritted dentures, relying on a right-wing playbook from the Clinton-bashing era that’s as stale as one of Roger Ailes’s old stogies.
Oprah Winfrey, whose world you and I inhabit, added yet another crown jewel to her empress tiara with her early benediction of Obama. Opinion was divided at first as to the wisdom of her infallible decision. The marriage of those two magic circles, those twin halos, would constitute a new power ring, many proclaimed; others wrinkled their beaks. To question Oprah’s wisdom is to doubt the cosmos, to accuse the Wheel of Life of having a loose axle, yet a few agnostic members of the Beltway punditry ventured skepticism, despite the obvious risk to their immortal souls. One of the most prominent shuffleboard players on the political-analyst scene, the hacktacular Mark Halperin, began the debunking with a Time-magazine piece confidently titled “Why Oprah Won’t Help Obama.” He conceded that Obama and Oprah together would be a photo-op orgasmatron. “So yes, expect loud, rousing rallies in all three early voting states when Oprah Winfrey comes to town with her friend Barack Obama in early December [2007], with gobs of media attention, raucous crowds, emotion and great pictures. But don’t expect those events to do anything productive to allow Obama to get over the biggest hurdle standing between him and the White House. American voters are not looking for a celebrity or talk show sidekick to lead them.” Undecided voters, Halperin speculated, might be turned off by such hullabaloo. “In that respect, Winfrey’s events might even be—dare it be said—counterproductive.”
John McCain, slouching loser, fallen maverick, and his fellow failures: from left, Karl Rove, architectural disaster; Sarah Palin, Margaret Thatcher with moose antlers; Mark Penn, Hillary’s minister of misfortune; Christopher Shays, Republican snail darter; and Joe Lieberman, the defective defector. Photo illustration by Chris Mueller.
Halperin, dare it be said, made a doody, as did Lisa Schiffren, a former speechwriter for Vice President Dan Quayle, who argued at National Review Online that basking in Oprah’s reflected glory only served to make Obama look Mickey Mouse. “Just watching Obama standing next to this very successful, very sophisticated older middle-aged woman who has been around the block a couple of times, highlights his youth and inexperience. What does he know about life?” Not as much as a former speechwriter for Dan Quayle, that’s for dang sure! Other observers had a healthier respect for Oprah’s powers of levitation, such as David Bositis, senior policy analyst at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, who told The Washington Post’s “The Trail,” “If she can get Tolstoy back on the bestseller list in an era of shortened attention spans, then there’s not much she can’t do.” But it would take a pair of economists from the University of Maryland to quantify “the Oprah effect” at the polls, to verify and certify that what she was able to do for that old fusspot Tolstoy was politically transferable. In a paper titled “The Role of Celebrity Endorsements in Politics: Oprah, Obama, and the 2008 Democratic Primary,” Craig Garthwaite and Timothy J. Moore reached the heart- pounding conclusion: “The results of this study suggest that Oprah Winfrey’s endorsement of Barack Obama during the 2008 Democratic Presidential Primary had statistically and politically significant effects on Obama’s political outcomes.” Sounds a little vague, care to specify? “In total, we estimate that Winfrey’s endorsement was responsible for 1,015,559 votes for Obama.” Oprah earned every close-up she received as one of the rejoicers at Obama’s victory address in Grant Park, and every invitation to the Lincoln Bedroom the Obamas care to extend.
Another winner was will.i.am, the musician and front man for Black Eyed Peas, whose song “Yes We Can” was alchemized into an anthemic, iconic YouTube classic by director Jesse Dylan, evocatively weaving passages from Obama’s speech with testimonial cameos from Scarlett Johansson, Herbie Hancock, John Legend, Amber Valletta, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (not wearing his pilot’s uniform from Airplane!, alas). “Yes We Can” inspired a couple of hilarious spoofs, one of them titled “john.he.is,” where John McCain’s offhand hawkish comments about bombing Iran and staying in Iraq for 1,000 years induce panic attacks in the sensitive songbirds taking part (one of them breathing into a paper bag). And what did the McCain camp lob back in musical response? Every four years Republicans pretend to love country music down to its dyed roots to show how much they have in common with “real Americans,” and this year country repaid the favor with a rusty-assed ditty by Hank Williams Jr., giving doggerel a bad name with his rousing theme song “McCain-Palin Tradition,” whose lyrics probably took the better part of an afternoon to Scrabble: “John N Sarah tell ya just what they think / And they’re not gonna blink / And they’re gonna fix this country / Cause they’re just like you N ole Hank.” Fixing the country would have been easier than fixing ole Hank’s rhyme schemes, but the electorate intervened, sparing Republicans both awesome tasks.
“I could sell a hundred ARs an hour, if I had them.”
That was the word from the man behind the counter at my local gun shop yesterday afternoon when I stopped in. As if to put an exclamation point on his claim, two men added their names to an ever-growing waiting list to purchase AR-15 carbines within minutes of my entering the store. —Confederate Yankee blog, November 20, 2008.
No group of winners enjoyed a more perverse windfall than gun-shop owners, whose showrooms were besieged by militiamen, survivalists, deerstalkers, rifle-range groupies, fans of the cult film Red Dawn, and other Second Amendment bitter-enders loading up on guns, scopes, and ammo as if ready to refight the Battle of the Alamo in the Home Depot parking lot. Based on my diagnostic survey of gun blogs, numerous strains of psychic contagion prompted this biped stampede. Some hunter-gatherers feared that, were Obama to win, black people would go crazy in rampant celebration, burning city blocks to express their joy. Others feared that, were Obama to lose, black people would go wilding with outrage, igniting a nationwide Rodney King rampage. Either way, they wanted to be ready. Even after the election, when America’s urban citadels stood unsmoking and intact, gun showrooms saw a rise in boot traffic as the heavily armed became even more heavily armed, stocking up on high-caliber staples before an anticipated crackdown by the Obama administration on home arsenals. “Bernie Conatser has never seen business this good,” began a CNN story of November 11, 2008. “ ‘I have been in business for 12 years, and I was here for Y2K, September 11, Katrina,’ Conatser said, as a steady stream of customers browsed what remained of his stock. ‘And all of those were big events, and we did notice a spike in business, but nothing on the order of what we are seeing right now.’ ” America being the unhappy hunting ground of multiple homicides, a volatile combination of stockpiled weapons, political resentment, psychological rage, and economic distress could generate many a tragic headline going forward as some of that surplus ammo gets used up.
Such a grim note for this inaugural season. Let’s jolly it up a bit to find succor and inspiration in the unfatal misfortune of others, those divinely ordained flops intended to teach humility to the unteachable. Poetic justice doesn’t get more perfectly crafted than the spectacle of Fox News political analyst Karl Rove—Bush’s “brain,” the intellectual architect of the permanent Republican majority, the reigning dean of the Lee Atwater school of cutthroat division, the hissable villain who busted hip-hop moves with NBC’s David Gregory—watching his dream castle wash out to sea as Pennsylvania and Ohio went for Obama, and with it his hope of spending the rest of history gloating with both baby cheeks. An unrepentant Communist watching the Berlin Wall crumble must have felt something akin to Rove’s emotions as repudiation rolled across the scoreboard. Moreover, the McCain team was riddled with Rovians, McCain’s defeat thereby denying Rove the paternal pride of seeing his protégés—the Devil’s disciples—carry on his works and secure his legacy. When Rove was a power source inside the White House, rivals and foes alike could magnify his dark intentions, imagining the evil directives winging from his brow. But upon leaving the service of President Bush in 2007 (rat, ship, flee), Rove was divested of his wizard mystique, deprived of his base; he hopped on the merry-go-round of Beltway punditry, quickly establishing himself as the thinking man’s Dick Morris, which is something of a comedown after being Satan. Instead of picking up the phone and making people’s lives hell, he’s now peddling standard op-ed mush with an extra dab of gall. Without any apparent sense of self-irony he took to his Wall Street Journal pulpit to intone, “Now Obama Has to Govern.” Given Rove’s profound involvement with the Bush White House, which wrecked the country’s image abroad and plunged the nation into an economic abyss (Great Depression II: Jurassic Edition), he’s the last person to be lecturing anybody about governance. It’s like putting Sarah Palin in charge of sentence construction.
But at least Rove didn’t personally embarrass himself during the election and post-election contest, which is more than can be said for Michael Barone, a once stolid and reliable fixture (co-author of the authoritative Almanac of American Politics and senior writer at U.S. News and World Report) who has slanted so far right in recent years that the straw has come out of his head. A week after the election, in a speech in Chicago, he gave voice to quite a faux pas. “A roomful of academics erupted in angry boos Tuesday morning,” wrote Mike Allen and Andy Barr at Politico in one of the year’s cheeriest ledes, “after political analyst Michael Barone said journalists trashed Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the Republicans’ vice presidential nominee, because ‘she did not abort her Down syndrome baby.’ ” Beneath the jovial masks of his fellow journalists lurked a ghoulish zealotry, Barone claimed. “They wanted her to kill that child.… I’m talking about my media colleagues with whom I’ve worked for 35 years.” The boos and angry walkouts provoked by Barone’s aspersions were the first clues that his speech wasn’t going over very well. In an apologetic e-mail explaining how his big mouth had strayed into foul territory, Barone wrote that he “was attempting to be humorous and … went over the line.” Abortion humor in a roomful of academics—gee, what could possibly go wrong? Barone’s self-inflicted injury was clinching evidence of how Ann Coulter’s callow brand of group slander—liberal-trashing one-liners delivered with a hiccup—has rancidly seeped into the Republican mainstream. It’s a very dated style now, as tired and ineffectual as the stomach growls to which CNN’s William Bennett gives voice to render his headmasterish disapproval of whatever it was Paul Begala just said.
Conspicuous as a two-time loser in 2008 was Hugh Hewitt, a blogger, radio host, and Promethean twit possessed of an infallible gift for getting it pompously, egregiously wrong. First he became the supreme laser swordsman for Republican hopeful and hair lord Mitt Romney, advocating his candidacy with a book-length mash note titled A Mormon in the White House?, then fawning over every move Romney made on the campaign trail, reaching a crescendo with a post-pubescent swoon over Romney’s speech addressing concerns about his Mormon religion. Hewitt’s Townhall column began, “Mitt Romney’s ‘Faith in America’ speech was simply magnificent, and anyone who denies it is not to be trusted as an analyst. On every level it was a masterpiece.” Once Romney left the primary stage, taking his multi-level masterpiece with him, Hewitt pressed his fingers to his mystic temples and projected another vision on the side of the barn. On October 3, a month before the election, H.H. pronounced, as if it were a mortal lock, “Why McCain Will Close and Win.” His reasoning was somewhat windy—“We do not desire to become Europe.… Large portions of Obama’s most dedicated supporters do”—but his certitude was as solid as Gary Busey’s sobriety on Celebrity Rehab. “America is a great and good nation, and it will not turn itself over to a party in the grip of its hardest left cadres, its most corrupt machine and its least experienced nominee ever.” Oh, yeah? Guess again, buddy boy! Up against the wall! Free Huey!

Its habitat destroyed, picked off one by one, the Republican Moderate is going the way of the auk and the dodo, fading into extinction. It may have taken its last hard hit in 2008. Chris Shays’s loss in the election deprived the Republicans of their remaining House seat in New England. To those who pine for a cooperative spirit of partisanship, who bathe in the healing bubbles of Washington sages David Broder and David Gergen, the demise of the Republican Moderate is an occasion for elegy. But to bugle-blowing conservatives such as Rush Limbaugh, the appropriate send-off to Chris Shays and his ilk is good-bye and “good riddance.” The Republican Moderate, a political animal that goes by the disparaging acronym of rino (Republican in name only), is a useless excrescence, sapping the vital essence of conservatism. Moderation is emasculation in the minds of militant conservatives, and pruning the party of wishy-washies will produce a lean, mean fighting machine for 2008 dream girl Sarah Palin, whose flash stardom was a boon to Tina Fey and a Viagra boost to conservative gawkers, whose pants ballooned like Jiffy Pop bags whenever she appeared on TV in glorious array. (Rich Lowry, editor of National Review, may never live down rhapsodizing about Palin’s vice-presidential-debate performance as if he had just been honored with a lap dance. “I’m sure I’m not the only male in America who, when Palin dropped her first wink, sat up a little straighter on the couch and said, ‘Hey, I think she just winked at me.’ ” Down, tiger.)
So let the purge commence of crybabies such as Chris Shays and Christie Todd Whitman and backstabbers such as—well, the conservative Web site RedState is putting together a list. Furious over the leaks about Palin coming from fellow Republicans, RedState announced a campaign called “Operation Leper” to compile the names of these traitorous finks hiding behind anonymous leaks to the hated mainstream media. RedState urged its readers to sign a petition pledging “to publicly expose and actively oppose all of John McCain’s staffers smearing Sarah Palin and … oppose any candidate who hires these people for a 2012 race. These smear artists must become political lepers for the good of the country and the Republican Party.” This stirring call is reminiscent of the Captain Video Ranger pledge Norton swore in The Honeymooners, minus the space helmet. It’s unlikely that any Republican of moderate inclination will wish to wade into the shark waters of suspicion and recrimination that will roil while the party is out of power, ensuring that the future rank and file will become largely the refuge of white people animated by fear, spite, and a hunger for simple answers. But, hey, at least they’re animated! That’s why they gravitate to Sarah Palin—they’re drawn to her frontier spunk, that coonskin cap of hair she has. She makes the past come alive, which appeals to those feeling left behind, for whom the past is a beautiful Sunday idyll that liberals went and ruined. She’s America’s first and probably last prelapsarian drama queen, a brassy object of fascination whose unsheathing of presidential ambitions and personal entitlement will be breathtaking to behold in the years ahead, akin to watching Godzilla eat breakfast. Well, it beats listening to Joe Lieberman ooze. Aligning himself with the wrong team, having the effrontery to show up grinning on the stage at the Republican convention, Lieberman was the loser’s loser of the 2008 election—in the immortal words of Groucho Marx, Go, and never darken our towels again!
James Wolcott is a Vanity Fair contributing editor.