Veeps: Profiles In Insignificance

“Hello Governor Palin, this is Kent at U-Haul on Glacier Hwy. I’m calling to confirm your reservation of a 26′ Super Mover. Can you please call me back at this number if you’re still going to be needing that? Thank you, ma’am.”

I don’t imagine there was any possibility that we could have escaped this election cycle without one of these. There’s always a one-dimensional totem, a stupid prop suitably dumbed-down for the sweatpants and threadbare Bon Jovi tee-shirt crowd in the cheap seats watching six minutes of news spread out over every two days. We expect as much from the McCain-Palin campaign, which has proven itself shameless in jettisoning anything that brings with it the unmanageable burden of verisimilitude, but it’s a shame that Barack Obama got into it up to his thighs in this undignified enterprise.

Usually it’s just an anecdote, like Ronald Reagan’s apocryphal “welfare queen” who had “80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards” and drove a phat Cadillac thanks to her surfeit of unlawfully-obtained government dollars. Reagan deployed this phantom woman–who was really an amalgam of a handful of worst cases of welfare abuse–as an example of the typical welfare recipient and his justification for dismantling the social safety net in America.

I TiVo’d this third and last Presidential debate of the 2008 campaign since I knew I had to work late last night. But I was in my car listening to the showdown about twenty minutes in when I started hearing the invocation of “Joe the Plumber.” I thought at first that it was a generic citation, like “Joe Six-Pack.” Then it came up again and again. By the time I’d made the 19 miles from Tigard to the Interstate Bridge heading over to Vancouver, I’d heard “Joe the Plumber” cited no less than a half-dozen times.

By the time I made it out of my car and hauled my groceries into the apartment, it had passed curious and moved onto annoying. I finished a quick beer and a cigarette outside and rewound the TiVo, and came back to at least eight more questions about how Obama and McCain’s economic policies would affect Joe. It had been less than an hour since myself and the rest of America had heard tell of Joe, and it only took about ten minutes more, through the candidates’ closing statements and into the post-debate analysis, before this curiosity had become a craze and we’d officially entered the realm of the absurd.

I fell asleep with the TV on CNN and the entire night was a fever dream of men with crescent wrenches, pipe cutters, and lunch buckets sitting around a table during a Cabinet meeting as President Joe the Plumber urged the invasion of Brazil to claim their water resources and how formally encouraging his “If It’s Yellow, Keep It Mellow; If It’s Brown, Flush It Down” Wastewater Evacuation Policy could save Americans nearly $180 billion on their water bills every year.

The elite were the plumbers, and the rest of the world were worker bees that labored to keep them supplied with PVC tubing. I don’t remember exactly what I was doing in the dream, but I know I was wearing Carhartts.

I awoke to a world more profoundly retarded than the one I’d left behind just six hours earlier. Joe the Plumber had become a full-fledged phenomenon, with Joe the Plumber hoodies, boxers, and women’s spaghetti tanks all over the Web. Joe was on the television opining about Social Security, taxes, and getting government off our backs. He marveled at the attention and hoped aloud that maybe this newfound notoriety could open some doors that had forever been closed to him.

With an alacrity only possible in the Internet age, though, by the time I showered, hopped in the car, and turned on the radio, it was apparent that the Joe the Plumber mania had peaked sometime between when I was packing my lunch and flossing my teeth. Six blocks from my house, through the intersection I’d come from the other direction just twelve hours earlier when I was learning about Joe on the radio for the first time, it was clear that the Joe the Plumber backlash was on.  With a vengeance.

He isn’t properly registered to vote. He has a tax lien filed against him for unpaid property taxes. The business that he wants to buy doesn’t pull anywhere near $250,000 a year–his boss fixes toilets and leaky faucets, and operates his business out of a back room in his house. Joe made about $40,000 in 2006. His name and the name on his voter registration don’t match (just the kind of fraudulently-registered voter that Ohio Republicans are screaming to exclude from voting). And he’s not even a licensed plumber.

It’s Friday now, and Joe the Plumber is a distant memory, another relic of one of the most bizarre elections that most of us can remember, a fleeting distraction from a frenzied moment in time–and we’re still 18 days from the actual election.

This is just a slice of the bizarre time warp that passes for democracy in 2008. We’re going to witness a dozen or two more operas played out in the next two and a half weeks. Whoever is the protagonist onstage when the clock strikes November 4th will probably be the victor. Welcome to 21st century electoral politics, on truck-driver amphetamines.

Jesus, not again. As if we didn’t learn in 2000 and 2004 to do something about this once and for all. The latest Republican clarion call should make us afraid for the continued functioning of our fragile democracy: The Democrats are trying to steal another election.

Wait. What?

Or so the latest cries of Democratic Party-perpetrated “voter fraud” by its shadowy agents in that mysterious cabal they call “ACORN” would have you believe. It’s this week’s right-wing talking point: The Democrats are using ACORN to taint this election and pack the voter rolls with ineligible, serially registered, or out-and-out fraudulent voters. Images abound of scheming dishwater-drab old Jewish hippie women, shifty middle-aged white men with pony tails and Birkenstocks on their gray-wool stockinged feet, and cigar-smoking African-American men who talk like Samuel Jackson’s Ordell Robbie in Jackie Brown and use the office’s petty cash drawer to buy bottles of Hennessy–all of them conspiring together to send an army of criminals to every corner of the country to put the fix in for November 4. If, God help us, they succeed, then on November 5 it’s going to be all abortion-on-demand, the criminal prosecution of Christians, and fruit baskets at the border for every arriving illegal alien.

I suppose you could argue that desperate times require desperate measures. After all, you have to do something if your brother isn’t the Governor, or if you don’t have the Supreme Court in your party’s back pocket, or you don’t have a wealthy contributor who brags at party fundraisers that the upcoming election is a lock–and who also happens to be the nation’s largest producer of electronic voting machines. Or you have a friend in the Ohio Secretary of State who will make sure the wealthy white districts have plenty of voting machines and making the poor and ethnic urban districts fight over the remaining six.

Of course, using any of these circumstances to advocate ACORN misdeeds would require conceding that not only has ACORN as an organization committed misdeeds, but that the fraudulent efforts of some of their less-than-ethical low-level employees have actually put the coming election in the hands of a million-man army of phony and illegible voters. That would also require believing that one Mr. Mickey Mouse will be allowed to cast his vote in Florida, that Dallas Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo will show up to vote in Las Vegas, or that no one will notice if Cuyahoga County teenager Freddie Johnson votes under each of his 73 registrations.

A little background: ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, was founded in 1970 by Wade Rathke and Gary Delgado. ACORN is, as it has been for much of its existence, an advocacy group for low- and middle-income community families and individuals, promoting health care, good wages, safe neighborhoods, and voter registration.

It’s the latter ACORN cause that has the right so exercised. The country is littered with lawsuits and even some criminal legal actions against ACORN for allegedly registering fictitious and dead voters. John McCain accuses them of “perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history and maybe destroying the fabric of democracy in our society.”

That’s a weighty charge against a few dozen people who don’t, at first glance, appear capable of or at least interested in bathing themselves. ACORN has in recent years hired individuals to hit the streets to register voters. It’s grueling work, and they generally do their due diligence to hire individuals who possess some scintilla of social and political conscience and are out there to do the right thing. But, as John McCain and Sarah Palin might say, their reward is in heaven, if it’s there at all. It certainly isn’t in their paycheck.

Democracy is thankless work, unless you’re Ted Stevens. The average salary of a high-powered ACORN manager is something in the neighborhood of $53,000. With that kind of obscene largesse and a credit score of about 680, you could buy a Kia Rio and taunt your peers with the rewards of your obscene ambition. You’re certainly not paying anything close to that to your entry-level underlings.

Have you seen those Maruchan Yakisoba Noodle trays they sell in WinCo for $0.98? Walk through any ACORN office at lunch and that’s what a lot of their organizers are eating. Those $3.50 a pack GPC cigarettes? That’s what at least a handful of their signature gatherers are working for

Often the recruiting for signature gatherers comes down to a simple two-item checklist: 1) Warm skin.  2) A pulse. ACORN has taken to, in years past, the controversial practice of offering their hires a bounty on each gathered voter registration card. With the avalanche of lawsuits in recent years, they look pretty moronic for the misdeeds of their help, who knew they could get two bucks or so for every name they could sign up.

On the other hand, these aren’t positions that are filled by a headhunter. Decry today’s work ethic as much as you want, the jobs that don’t even pay a Hamilton an hour generally don’t attract the highest caliber of workers. Ask anyone who’s had to manage people in the service-based economy of the last two or three decades and they’ll likely tell you that it’s, at best, a numbers game–plow through enough candidates and there will be at least one or two decent ones hearty enough to still be standing–and, at worst, a crap shoot–you can throw those dice again and still wind up with people you wouldn’t trust to preside over drying paint in your living room, much less your professional enterprise. If you can only afford to pay loser wages, you’re by and large going to attract…yes, exactly.

Think about that gas station/convenience store where you pick up your machine-blended cappuccino or 44-ounce Diet Pepsi every morning before you head into work. Did you notice that the young man at the cash register didn’t look like the young man who rang you up last week–and he didn’t look like the one the week before that? Maybe they didn’t like getting up at 5:30 AM and slogging their way across town for $6.55 an hour, or maybe the station owner fired them when he caught them sneaking hits off their pipe while they were supposed to be out back hosing out the mop bucket, or when he replayed the security camera and saw them stuffing nine giant frozen burritos in their backpack.

Do you stop buying your gas and soda there because the station owner hired a few thieves and morons? Probably not. And certainly no one is hauling him into court and charging him with a systemic attempt to justify raising your burrito prices. The truth is, for every two or three idiots or criminals he fires, there are one or two or three like Lou the pump jockey (I’m using an Oregon frame-of-reference–we’re the only state other than New Jersey that doesn’t allow self-serve gasoline) who have been there a year or more who are out there every time you come in for gas cleaning your windshield and giving you a friendly wave when you leave.

The ratio is probably a little better for an organization like ACORN, where, in addition to the layabout cheats that a tedious, low-paying job will often attract, they do get people of genuine ideals who would like to help elevate America’s traditionally-abysmal voter turnout and maybe in the process elevate a candidate or two who might be more interested in investing in jobs, infrastructure, and education than in tax breaks for oil companies and hoodie manufacturers who decide to relocate to Vietnam.

All of that aside, the other red herring that’s swimming through the slimy water is the charge that these fraudulent registrations are somehow putting democracy at risk. Well, for one thing, many states require that organizations like ACORN turn in all of their voter registration cards, even if they contain obviously disqualifying information. It doesn’t matter how many they catch in their own review process, every one of them has to be turned into the state elections authority for review. Second, not only has the 2008 election not happened yet, but “voter fraud”–where a voter deliberately shows up to a polling place to cast a ballot they are not legally eligible to cast–is one of those transgressions that pops up about as often as an Elvis postage stamp they accidentally printed with a mustache. In fact, the only case of voter fraud that comes to my mind is that of Ann Coulter.

What is of greater concern to “the fabric of democracy in our society” are the Republicans across the country pulling bundles of cash out of their war chest to challenge every voter registration that might be a potential Obama or down-ticket Democratic voter, hoping to tie up the process in red tape and leave the matter unresolved come election day If, in fact, their registrations are proven to be valid–when this all gets resolved by, say, December or January–then they can consider themselves legally registered and can vote without challenge when the next county bond levy comes up.

If ACORN is in the business of stealing elections, they really should be out of business, because they suck at it.

In football, everyone loves a great Hail Mary pass. The drama, the audacity, a will to win so strong that a team is going to grab every last chance it has to walk away victorious without leaving a thing on the field. If they pull it off, it’s not only a tribute to their fortitude, but it’s the stuff of highlight reels for years to come.

That’s when it works, of course. When it doesn’t–as is usually the case–it doesn’t. No one gives it another thought. At least they tried.

It’s when a team starts calling it on every play that the eyebrows go up.

It was sometime in September that the McCain-Palin team passed the point where they ran out of bullets and resorted to throwing their guns at the enemy, hoping to force a concussion or put out an eye. But every morning there’s that hardscrabble determination again when someone on the campaign or within the party manages to find something–an old J-316 folding knife covered with ossified cheese and sausage grease, a suspect smoke grenade pulled out of a pond months earlier–a in a field pack that everyone thought was empty weeks ago.

I’ve been remiss in weighing over these last few weeks, but it seems like too high a bar to clear. The McCain-Palin campaign is daily doing my work for me. The candidate comes out on the day that the flaming American financial infrastructure starts dropping like WTC Two and insists, “the fundamentals of our economy are strong.” He “suspends” his campaign–while his campaign staff continues to trample the hustings and spread ad dollars like they’re using a leaf blower–and attempts to fly triumphantly into Washington, D.C. to save the day, where he hasn’t cast a Senate vote in nearly six months, and is first told to please stay out of town and let the working lawmakers fix this mess, and then to see his would-be save-the-day arrival be answered with a scuttled bailout vote.

His running mate claims foreign policy experience because she can see Russia from her state–and the only place in the state where anyone can actually see the erstwhile Evil Empire is a far-flung village that time has largely forgotten and that she’s never visited. Katie Couric catches her dumbstruck like a Mom asking her 13-year-old daughter why she found three bottles of Mike’s Hard Lemonade in her underwear drawer, when she asks her, first, what regulatory decision she can name that her would-be boss supported, what Supreme Court decision she objected to besides Roe v. Wade, and–the one that’s stumped every genius who’s ever had to endure the pressure cooker of facing a MENSA panel–”what newspapers or magazines do you read?”

Granted, as he’s said that the economy “is not something I’ve understood as well as I should,” it’s not surprising he’d rather ask the country to pass him the salt and turn the dinner conversation to something else than discuss the worst collapse in the American economy since the days when a disproportionate amount of Americans were warming themselves over burning barrels. Still, he’s standing in the middle of a burning living room insisting that it needs a different color of drapes.

As the campaign continues to collapse in upon itself, they’ve taken another dive into the bag to see if there’s anything left that they can pull out. All they’ve been able to find are the tired, dusty remains of Reverend Wright and William Ayers. In the absence of any real policy or facts, they’re limping into crunch time with the last-gasp desperation of a reunited Molly Hatchett firing up “Flirting With Disaster” to keep most of their bored 126 fans from walking out of the Esther Dundas Memorial Amphitheater at the county fairgrounds.

Unfortunately, everyone who isn’t sticking around to catch a nipple-slip from Governor Palin has already left the building.

Even the man who tried to prosecute William Ayers in 1973 said recently that he’s “amazed and outraged” at McCain-Palin’s latest attempt to tie Obama with a man alleged to have helped hatch an ill-fated terrorist conspiracy when Obama was eight. Obama met him nearly forty years later, when Ayers and his wife held a coffee for Obama at their home, and they later served on a local antipoverty charity that met four times a year. This is what the McCain-Palin campaign is selling as “palling around with terrorists.” Next time you come to class bring a pencil with some lead in it.

We’ve got a long fourth-quarter to go and anything’s possible. But if Obama grabs another fumble and takes off down the sidelines, don’t be surprised if someone on the McCain sideline loses their nut and clocks him with a Gatorade bucket as he runs past.