Veeps: Profiles In Insignificance

I didn’t drink that much on Election Night, but I think I got a contact high from the hoopla. I’ve had a lot of shit cleanup jobs in my life, but I’ve never had a mess that kept me busy for more than a few weeks. Even if he didn’t have the job yet, I figured he’d have all the Glad bags filled and be hosing off the mop by now, and that he’d get to the basement later.

But I guess, like the rest of the country, I greeted the New Year with my first massive hangover of 2009 after the last delirious drunk of 2o08. I got out of bed on January 1…and my country was a fucking mess. Who the hell did I invite over last night? And the last eight years?

It’s not a happy time to be a President-elect of the United States, unless you’re coming to the job with pixie dust and a magic wand (which, even if they don’t work, is still a refreshing change from our last President-elect, who came to the job with Rohypnol and 282 million ball-gags). Every foreclosure that a realtor finds with its fixtures stripped and rotten with garbage, gang graffiti, and human feces is a timely and topical metaphor for the mess that Barack Obama is discovering now that he’s taken possession of his new house.

I can’t speak for the rest of tenuously-employed America (and except for process servers and collections employees, everyone in 2009 is tenuously-employed), but I miss the good old days when I used to be able to drive into work and decide if I wanted to skip my exit and head to the beach or some tavern near the docks that opens at 7:30 AM to serve the graveyard crowd.

Because, whoop-de-doo. It was 1999, and there was so much fat in the land that we couldn’t eat it all. I had a warm body with a pulse and I’d never committed sexual battery in the company break room. I could get hired somewhere else tomorrow. The only people who couldn’t get a job were the ones who would cop to a nail gun assault on their application and inquire about the company’s workplace open-container policy. I still knew four convenience stores in my neighborhood that would have hired me with that jacket. And even if everything else washed out, there was still Wal-Mart.

Of course, I never wanted to lose my job and still kept up my Cal Ripken attendance record, but it was nice to know that if I did want to put an ice pick in the back of the head of my work ethic, I could, and I probably wouldn’t be let go. Besides, the company I was with did have a liberal open-container policy, so if I really wanted to get my swerve on during the day, I could just wait until 2:00 PM when we were permitted to tap the keg of IPA in the refrigerator in the employee kitchen.

In any case, it’s a very different world ten years hence. My commute is five times as far as it was then–you can even discern a change in dialect between my neighborhood and where my office is. If there are free Tootsie Rolls in the break room, I’ll pass them by lest I dislodge a filling and have to put myself further in the hole with uninsured dental work. Sick days? That’s a dangerous roll of the dice for a contractor like myself. Unless I happen to have caught a fire axe through my sternum, I’ll be at work.

There were hoozahs across the land Thursday when President-elect Obama gave his morning speech on the economy at George Mason University. But it was equal parts encouraging and unsettling when he dropped the phrase “fear itself” into his address. It’s music to the ears of hopeful progressives to hear a leader invoke the memory of FDR in these turbulent times, but when President Roosevelt uttered those two words, much of the country was still years away from being able to afford to keep its electricity turned on for consecutive months.

And just to make sure we understood what we’re facing, he added, “it is altogether likely that things may get worse before they get better.” That’s not good news for any urban and suburban Americans who have already started pondering the logistics of shooting their food from their front porches.

The downside of this can-do nation is that we have a tendency towards irrational assurance. As much as we want to be pie-eyed and calling for Mimosas, celebrating that the election results of nine weeks ago heralded breakfast in bed for a nation awakening from a nightmare, God has since slung a few reminders–in the form of Bernie Madoff, Rod Blagejovich, and the mess in Gaza that we can’t ignore–that we’re still sleeping in a bed with soiled sheets. And the washer’s broken and the maid can’t make it into work because of the clobbering, holiday-crippling weather in nearly every county in the nation.

We did buy Hope on November 4th, but in this new credit-strapped America, it’s clear that we may have bought it on layaway.

So, we’re deep in the rough. There might not be any miracles forthcoming, but we can say a prayer for our new President that he can return us to a day when we could do what modern Americans do best: Photocopy our genitals, look at pornography when we’re supposed to be responding to a client RFP, call in sick so we can stay home and watch Law And Order reruns, have our co-workers cover for us while we go and nap in our car; take for granted our livelihoods, and treat with disdain our indispensable roles in what makes this country work.

Speaking as just one hopeful American, I really miss those days of not feeling we have to give a shit. And who knows? After this mess, maybe next time around we wlll.

It was November 5, just fourteen hours after America had elected its first African-American President. There were a few morons cutting eyeholes in their pillow cases and lamenting the certain befouling of what was left of the last few megaliters of pure white blood left in this great country after the man in the Black House ordered the conscription of their Prussian Blue daughters to make babies for the HNIC. But by and large, the country was trying to catch its breath, having a post-coital smoke, or running out of scratch paper trying to write down all the new Democrats who had won office the night before.

So, just for the hell of it, I posted my status on one of my Internet pages that “Bill is…fed up with the do-nothing Obama Administration.” You could presume, if I were a smarter man, that I was making a comment, Jonathan Swift-style, on the perils of irrational expectations. Yes, we’d elected the new President on his promises of hope and change, but…where the hell was it anyway? Huh? We’re waiting!

I made no pretense that I might be articulating a grander statement. I was just having fun.

But Jesus. I got a handful of comments along the lines of, “Yeah! Big fucking talk!!! I just HOPE I don’t get ass-raped, but I’m not counting on it. Fucked by The Man again!” That flurry was amusing and passed soon enough. But…

We’re not even a month off of the most historic election and still another 50 days before Barack Obama even takes office. He’s done more in four weeks than his soon-to-be-predecessor has done since the last mid-term elections. Unlike the last Democratic president-elect, he’s actually using the runup to his inauguration to recruit his staff rather than cashing in his electoral goodwill on donor’s wives and discrete stewardesses and legislative aides who don’t mind finding their way to his hotel via the backseat floor of an anonymous Crown Victoria and the Marriott’s laundry room entrance.

As much as I respect Rachel Maddow, though, it’s all I can do not to flip the station over to Hannity or Boortz when she starts her good-natured lament that Barack Obama is already handing the New United States he just won back to the American Right because he has been handing the plum assignments of his Administration over to the less-reprehensible members of Team Bush and the triangulate foot-soldiers of the Clinton era.

Rachel Maddow, for all her liberal bonafides, was one of four people who weren’t Steve Schmidt, Tucker Bounds, or Fred Barnes who weren’t predicting a Barack Obama victory. I’m not sure if that and her current railing against Obama’s isn’t part of some superstitious reverse-psychology hoping that Obama, Biden, Bush, Cheney, Nancy Pelosi, Robert Byrd, Condoleeza Rice, Henry Paulson, Hillary Clinton, and Eric Holder, all get assassinated this month and the government is left to a power struggle that’s going to roil for months in the U.S. courts while Michael Mukasey and Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne go hammer-and-tong over the rights to the White House.

I don’t know that I didn’t see this coming. The left-wing grumpiness, I mean. And most of them will concede that in not packing the Administration with the left-wing he isn’t exactly loading his team up on the right and betraying his campaign promises. But the corpse of John McCain’s candidacy isn’t even cold yet–hell, Sarah Palin is still getting press daily and Joe The Plumber just released a book he allegedly oversaw the writing of (even if the only writing he oversaw was his ghostwriter signing his name to the Joe Wurtzelbacher book he would take care of himself without any interference from the plumber-in-Carhartts-only grabbing far-too-large-a-share for lending his name to the book and sitting around drinking beers and bitching about Big Government (they left out the parts that came out when he got drunker the more he railed against the Palestinian and Iranian Jew-killers and paraphrasing Grover Norquist’s analogy about murdering Big Government in the bathroom, but in Joe’s example he’s bludgeoning it to death himself with an 18″ Stillson wrench instead of drowning it in the bathtub).

Anyway, everyone wringing their hands and digging the torches out of the garage that they put away at 8:01 PM November 4th needs copious and repeated doses of oxygen. If our President-in-waiting had nominated Phil Gramm as his Treasury Secretary, then I’d be digging out my pitchfork and joining you, but he didn’t. If you’re looking to fill your cherry baskets on January 20, bear in mind that all of those cherry trees have been hacked down with impunity over the last several years. We’ve got a lot of greenskeeping and landscaping ahead of us before there’s any fat of the land to live off of again. If you don’t believe me, head down to the bank tomorrow with your 796 credit score and try and get a used futon financed and tell me how that works out for you.

Relax, inasmuch as that’s possible with the axe of our economic reality ready to come down on our collective necks. We’re going to have to spend money that our unborn grandchildren don’t have to get out of this mess, and every indication is that the new tenant at that rickety old barn on Pennsylvania Avenue apprehends that reality only all too well. We’re not anywhere near “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”

Remember everyone pledging suicide or pan-galactic emigration just five weeks ago when there was even the tiniest shred of a possibility that Sarah Palin would be darkening Washington’s doorstep come third Tuesday in January. A little perspective is a healthy thing: The Governor hasn’t gone away, but she won’t be a fading heartbeat away from the highest office in the land either, and the grumpy Batman to her rogue Robin is slinking back to the Senate he ignored for most of 2008 and accepting his future as a senior member of the minority party.

I never thought that the most pie-eyed among us were expecting an instant liberal utopia. Those solar panels may well, and probably will, return to the White House, but even though we may not be a center-right nation as John Meacham suggested in a recent Newsweek cover story, Barack Obama appears to know his history well enough that he isn’t going to let himself get beaten with the cudgel of the wide-eyed idealism of Jimmy Carter or the victory-drunk caprice of Bill Clinton. God knows they meant very well, and neither of them had to jump into the White House with a government on life support, but even without economic Armageddon, it’s already apparent the incoming President has studied his history well enough to know why and how he intends to not remind the American people why a Democrat has in recent history had a better chance at winning the White House than the Buffalo Bills winning a Super Bowl.

“Pragmatism” isn’t a word that the outgoing Chief Executive would utter in front of his children, but it’s not going to earn anyone an FCC fine either. Given our current circumstances, there’s a measure of sobriety and practicality that are going to have to carry the day before happy days are here again.

Put another way, I’m all for the day when we can look over the pastel paint chips and have a spirited debate over what color we’re going to paint our new country, but it might be prudent to at least give the new landlord the chance to put out the house fire first.

There’s no way anyone can do anything about Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Alberto Gonzalez, John Bolton, et. al. pulling a paycheck somewhere over the next few years–this is America, after all; everyone deserves the right to work. But rest assured they probably won’t be drawing their dime from the U.S. government.

Draw a breath, give your new man at least a shred of the benefit of the doubt, and let him try and do his job when it’s officially his, and there’s a better chance than not that you won’t be inviting your friends to celebrate your daughter’s wedding under a freeway overpass somewhere.

When people were getting a bit ahead of themselves and becoming understandably exercised about this annoying collapse-of-the-world-economy thing, President-elect Obama felt it necessary to remind the American people that “we only have one President at a time.”

I suppose you could argue that he was correct on the technical merits. But every other analysis would suggest that we’ve run into one of those vagaries they didn’t provide for in the 25th Amendment. We really don’t have a President at the moment.

Well, we do–certainly more than we have in the last few years–but Barack Obama hasn’t been inaugurated yet, and the Constitution is demanding the moving van keep circling the block for another eight weeks. George Bush is letting the hired help do the packing and sneaking out after Laura goes to bed to do shots with the White House greenskeepers. Morning comes, he’ll get up when he gets up, and if any papers come in that need signing, toss it in a box for the new kid. I’m off the clock, folks! Unless the country asplodes, I ain’t interested, and if it does, make sure they forward my pension checks to our place in Paraguay (heh, heh!).

Everyone except John Hinderaker realizes that if George Bush weren’t term-limited, the country would have had to fire him. I suppose if John Zogby and the Gallup Organization monitored the real world, there would be no shortage of Kinko’s employees with 20% approval ratings, and they still get to come back to work day after day. But there’s a certain point where sympathy and charity come into the picture, and in any case, the laws of free market selection limit these people to the realm of photocopies and away from nation-building and hurricane relief.

But even at Kinko’s, every now and then you get one imbecile who puts his junk on the copier after hours or inserts Asian rough trade 8 x 10s into a difficult customer’s proposal for investors in his South Korean apparel brokerage, and you just have to draw the line.

In the average workplace, though, when it’s been decided that an employee has queered the patch good, he’s usually not kept around as a curiosity to see what a clockpuncher does once his future employment has been voided and what kind of damage he can do when he simply doesn’t give a shit anymore. But that’s one of the perks that our system of government guarantees its lame-duck Presidents.

By nearly every objective measure, the George Bush Presidency couldn’t have been a bigger disaster if Bush were teaching eight-year-olds Home Ec drunk with a machete.

For months, the netroots on the left have been nearly apoplectic about the kind of havoc George Bush would wreak as the sand ran from the hour glass of his empire. Given the track record of this Administration, it wasn’t entirely implausible.

Time passes differently in politics. It’s easy to forget that just four years ago, fresh from their drubbing of John Kerry, Karl Rove was leading Team Bush in a call for a “permanent Republican majority.”

Well, if you were hanging your hat on that, you can thank Bill Frist and Mother Nature for knocking that train off the rails.

The Congressional intervention with Terri Schiavo was embarrassing enough (that it gave Bo Gritz a reason to come back on the public radar was only part of it), but the moment that Senator Frist diagnosed Schiavo from a piece of video that he watched from the floor of the Senate, it was game over for the GOP. They’d officially overreached and were stunned when they drew back a bloody, quivering stump. Within eighteen months, Frist, Rick Santorum, and George Allen–all much-ballyhooed Presidential timber just months earlier–were out of work, taking righteous wing blowhards Mike DeWine, Jim Talent, and Conrad Burns with them. Over in the House, Arizona’s loudmouth buffoon J.D. Hayworth led the pink-slip brigade, followed by California’s Richard Pombo (who made Rolling Stone’s October 2006 list of America’s 10 Worst Congressmen), and future guest of the Federal Penal System, Bob Ney of Ohio, and 28 other vanquished souls.

Similary, when George Bush flew back from John McCain’s birthday party in September 2005 and lamely gazed out the plane window as New Orleans drowned in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, that was the beginning of the end of any thoughts of a Bush Republican Dynasty.

A train-wreck of a war that many would argue shouldn’t have been waged in the first place, ignored subpoenas, industry lobbyists charged with overseeing the departments they’ve made a career of opposing, corruption pervading his Cabinet like an STD in an island prison, and a torrent of signing statements declaring, “Awright, I hereby acknowledge you passed this here law, but, by the empowerment invested in me, fuck all y’all.” There are tens of millions of doormats in mudrooms across America that are treated with more respect than the George W. Bush Administration has afforded the Constitution.

But we’re far past the point that this man cares, and Karl Rove has moved onto FOXNews. No one really cares how many office supplies he steals as long as they don’t involve environmental or banking regulations. He’s at least done the decent thing and ordered that none of his employees pry the “O” keys off their keyboards (BTW, that was a myth: Clinton’s lame-ducks never popped the “W” keys off).

Our current President isn’t engaged in the privileges of his office in any way, aside from the aforementioned pardons and diddling with regulatory authority here and there–the latter that the incoming President can and certainly will undo with a quick stroke of his pen.

True to his much-cited initial, the second Bush Administration is going to end with a loud, sad whimper.