Welterweight

The notion that Joe the Plumber who Owns a Small Business and Makes $250,000/year and Goes to Political Rallies to Question the Candiates--that this dude somehow represents the average American is patently absurd. It's wonderful. McCain, who increasingly appears to be the hate child of Danny Devito's Penguin and Howard Beale, the Mad Prophet of the Airwaves, had this crazy houdou direct address to Joe thing going on, and then Barack got in on the act, swiveling toward the camera and chopping his hand and shouting out to "Joe." The "average American" makes more like foedy, fiddy, sisty grand, works in an office, and exists only to amuse the world-spanning, multi-nodal, transpersonal superconsciousness of The Internet on company time. He doesn't fix things or conjure jobs and wealth out of the ether. The Politicians' endlessly reiterated genuflection to The Genius and Innovation and Productivity of the American Worker is the most cynical ploy in all of politics. Do any of you folks buy it? What the fuck are you doing reading blogs at 11:30 on a Thursday morning?

Whatever creature is gnawing away at the part of McCain's brain overseeing fine muscle control is doing an excellent and thorough job, giving him a frightful testudine appearance, all head and shoulders, beak snapping this way and that. When his flippers rose to put air quotes around "women's health," I almost made uh-oh in my underoos. Give Gee-dub this much credit: he maintained enough active synapses to slickly signal fellowship with the natalist far right while blending code phrases and cultural tropes into a stage-managed aw-shucks demeanor. McCain's efforts to do the same turn his every utterance into a probability cloud of hazy non sequiturs and Kulturkampf strophes ripped straight out of 1992. I honestly feel for the monster, self-immolating on the burning political faction whose approval he so long sought and finally, if briefly, received.

Barack's occasional smiles seemed genuine: pwnd, b1chz, it said. His insane claims have the benefit of sounding like standard boilerplate politics. They wash over and around you, and though you know them to be false, they don't rankle. Smooth delivery helps when you're claining that "clean energy . . . will create 5 million jobs in the heartland." What the fuck? Why not 4 million, or 50? A job for every solar cell? Ending subsidies for companies that ship jobs oversees? Companies do not actually load container ships with cubicles and send them to Bangalore. The king who went to the water's edge and commanded the tide to stop ended up looking like quite the fool. If you can pay some Bangladeshi loser twelve grand a year to read blogs, then you're not going to pay an American five times that.

But, it's all blood under the bridge, and the Obaman mien again takes the day as far as Homo voticus goes. McCain smells of desperation and mothballs. He represents another era. Obama is made for teevee. He's going to be fun to watch as he grinds Progressive dreams to dust beneath the heavy boot of regal reasonableness.