Another Week with the Candidates

More or less complete list of songs preceding the Obama rally on 3/3/08:

Paul Simon--"The Boy in the Bubble"
Tom Petty--"I Won't Back Down"
Midnight Oil--"Beds are Burning"
Joe Cocker--"With a Little Help From My Friends"
Genesis--"Land of Confusion"
Jackson 5--"ABC"
Stevie Wonder--"Superstition"
Morris Day and the Time--"Jungle Love"
U2--"Walk On"

And then after the speech:

Stevie Wonder--"Signed, Sealed, and Delivered"

It's tempting to say that anybody who plays "Jungle Love" at a rally should automatically get your vote. And notice that U2 always comes up--except at the McCain rally.

Since he was in Texas, McCain's warm-up music was all bad new country. I would be hard pressed to identify a single song. The rally took place at a little barbecue joint, which is packed wall to wall with Texana bullshit. The seats at the bar are saddle shaped, for example.

It was very uncomfortable, not because it was so crowded, but because I felt like an outsider. I made my way to the back of the place and just stood listening to the conversations around me as I waited. One woman said there was no way Hillary could beat McCain and then discussed not being able to bring herself to vote for Hillary in the primary. You see, Rush Limbaugh had instructed his drones to vote for Hillary because he thinks that his party can unite over their hatred of her. That's some positive thinking if I ever heard it.

There was a middle-aged white man who looked like Bum Phillips dressed in University of Texas garb who looked at a woman wearing a white sweater with multiple American flags sewn on it and said, "You look like a young Kay Bailey Hutchison. I mean that in a good way."

There was another middle-aged white man, who was the very embodiment of the strict father. He sweated a lot and thought it was important to talk to everybody around him. Or, rather, he yelled at everybody around him like a drill sergeant. He explained to several people that he was in Vietnam and spent a year in Japan "learning to walk again" after the experience. He has two daughters, who only went on one date each in high school. One went to Harvard, the other went to Yale. They are both Democrats now. At one point, he looked at me and sneered, "Who are you with? Is this your dad?" He motioned toward the guy in the UT outfit. After Bum denied any association with me, he and the drill sergeant talked about how "they love this country, but they feel like it's going in the wrong direction." I'm not sure what direction they would have us go, though, because they didn't go into details. Once he felt like he had everybody on his side, thedrill sergeant handed out business cards and told people to come to his carpet and flooring store just around the corner. They do counter tops too.

There were also several white men in full camouflage military dress.

These are Republicans, so the event started right on time, with Rob Mosbacher apologizing about McCain being late and telling stories about the humble McCain who often likes to tell people that it doesn't take any talent to be shot down. After some stalling, McCain showed up with his wife and daughter and began his routine.

I call this a routine because it seemed so very rehearsed, like a stand up-comedy bit, replete with plenty of jokes. Yes, all candidates have their speeches rehearsed, but McCain's was obviously so. He even told the same story about it not taking much talent to be shot down that Mosbacher told.

There were the implications that the Democrat party (Never "Democratic Party," always "Democrat Party") wants to raise taxes and that their healthcare program would never work. For his part, McCain thinks you should be able to go across state lines to buy insurance. You know, let the market take care of all the problems. McCain said he was a "true conservative," which may or may not imply that the people in power now are not "true." There were some very specific points about the current Colombia/Ecuador dispute. One imagines that this sort of attention to specific issues is how McCain intends to handle Obama, whom he will be calling a lightweight any day now.

After his short speech, McCain opened the floor for questions. One white man stood and said that he liked McCain because unlike Democrats, he won't be wondering where his spouse is when he gets that 3:00 AM call. Get it? Because Hillary's husband is Bill and Bill would be out chasing skirts. Get it? Then the white man who asked this "question" did the "raise the roof" dance, because he figured he'd gotten in a good one. To McCain's credit, he immediately shot the guy down saying that he understood that it was supposed to be a joke, but he wanted the campaign to be respectful.

A white woman started speaking in a bunch of military jargon, claiming that her husband was David Patreus' PSO. McCain stopped her and said he didn't know what a PSO was and one of the military types in the audience yelled out "personal security officer." I'm not sure what her question was.

A white man got the mic and said that he respected McCain, but wanted to know if he would investigate the corruption in Iraq now. He's a Democrat spy! McCain responded with some boilerplate about trusting the justice department, appointing judges that would strictly interpret the constitution, and that he disagreed that there was corruption.

A Vietnamese woman (not white!) got the mic and asked a rambling question about stem cells and brain damage and then handed McCain an audio tape. The whole room was confused about what any of it meant. One white man was more confused than the rest and immediately asked about the border situation because it made him angry that all the food service people where he works have trouble with English: "This is America!"

America indeed.
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I know you've been missing the links, so here are a couple good ones:

A discussion of the evolution of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah"

Kick out the jams, motherfuckers.