Saturday, May 10, 2008
When we first meet Frank Waturi, the petty tyrant of the American Panascope advertising department in John Patrick Shanley’s fable Joe Versus the Volcano, Waturi (portrayed by the invaluable Dan Hedaya) is on the telephone, engaged in a battle of conversational attrition with a counterpart bent on an act of nepotism for some underachieving nephew. Waturi’s constant refrain — virtually the only thing he says during the call, in fact — is, “I know he can get the job, Harry. But can he do the job?”
Since 2000, when a goofy, affable, silver spoon-sucking C-student inexplicably ascended to the world’s highest elected office, I have identified Frank Waturi’s complaint as a recurring phenomenon in Republican politics: first, George W. Bush was touted as “the candidate you’d most like to have a beer with”; Arnold Schwarzenegger, powered by his stratospheric celebrity, refused to debate his opponents on policy and the issues, opting instead to travel the state by bus, setting up voter registration drives as if he was junketeering the release of one of his action movies; and the scandal-rocked Illinois GOP, desperate to mount a defense against the up-and-coming Barack Obama in the 2004 Senate race, courted Chicago Bears legend Mike Ditka, among others, before finally pinning their hopes on the doomed former diplomat (and Maryland resident) Alan Keyes.
None of these candidates were promoted on their ability to do the job, only to get the job.
Now, as part of her last-ditch Hail Mary campaign strategy, Hillary Rodham Clinton is touting herself less as the person who can step into the role of president on Day One (as she was so fond of claiming just a month or so ago) and more as the candidate most likely to defeat John McCain in a general election. Her argument being that the swing states in which she won Democratic primaries — Pennsylvania, Ohio, New Jersey — would capitulate to McCain in a contest against Obama; her implication being that those Democratic voters might cast their ballots for the experienced McCain over the neophyte Obama.
It’s the same case she intends to plead with the superdelegates in the 11th hour, appealing to their loyalty to the party and casting herself as the best bet to ensure a Democratic victory in the general election.
Enough already. Like Frank Waturi, I’m tired of hearing about who can get the job, and such a straw-man argument is reflective of the desperate straits in which the once-unstoppable Clinton machine now finds itself. That the Clintons would be above such Rovian pandering — this idea that elections aren’t about leadership but about beating the other guy — was perhaps too much to hope for. But there you have it. When your arsenal has been depleted by a formidable opponent, sooner or later you’ve got to throw whatever rocks you can find on the ground nearby just to stay in the fight.
That Hillary Clinton continues to fight is somehow admirable, but it is also indicative of the dawning realization that she is obsolete if she cannot perform this last bit of political magic, this wresting of victory from the very jaws of defeat.
“I’m staying in this race until there’s a nominee,” she told a crowd in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, on Thursday. “I’m going to work as hard as I can to become that nominee.”
If she is unable to do so, she will be a victim, more or less, of the same youth movement that propelled her husband into the White House in 1992 (when he ran against then-68-year-old George H.W. Bush) and kept him there in 1996 (when his opponent was then-73-year-old Bob Dole). Sixteen years older now, and a Baby Boomer herself, Hillary Clinton must now pin her aspirations on rallying an aging, dying, more conservative demographic just as likely to cast its ballots for 72-year-old John McCain as for her.
That Obama, emanating hope for the future, can marshal the youth movement better than Hillary isn’t far-fetched. In fact, it’s downright Clintonian.
Never mind that Hillary is a woman who has come this close to shattering the highest point in the glass ceiling on behalf of all women. At this point she is a 60-year-old woman who still has enough youth and vitality left in her to make a case for herself as bringing something new and exciting to the presidency.
If only she could. If only she weren’t weighed down by the albatross of politics as usual in the face of a more youthful, more vital opponent with a more exciting message of change — an opponent who has already begun looking beyond August, beyond November, toward a future into which he wants to lead us.
What drives Hillary now is sheer will and desire in the face of a personal destiny that is slowly evaporating before her very eyes. Because if she fails now, her best hope is to try again as a 64-year-old woman in 2012 or a 68-year-old woman in 2016, when the odds of her being anything but a fading example of unfulfilled promise and opportunity will be slender at best.
And so she reaches for the rocks at her feet — whether it’s subtle race-baiting or just-one-of-the-boys whiskey drinking or the insipid notion that she is better able to get the job by stealing three states from John McCain in November — and she throws them wildly into the air in the hope that they will hit some undefined mark and strike some random nerve that will awaken the electorate to the realization that her rightful place is behind a desk in the Oval Office.
That Hillary fights on to the bitter end is admirable. But she no longer fights because she wants to lead and believes she is best suited to do so. She fights now because, more than anything else in her entire life, she wants to get the job.
Tuesday, May 06, 2008
It’s a scarlet letter of sorts, a telltale expression of shame and regret — possibly reflexive or involuntary, like a facial tic that gives away one’s poker hand or the synaptic impulses that make polygraph needles go all jittery — that has been the de rigueur stamp of the moral shortcomings of the famous and infamous for the past two decades. The public face of personal failure, if you will.
You’ve seen the expression I’m referring to, the one in which the perpetrator curls one or both lips back over his teeth so that they all but disappear, clenching down as if he’s making a determined, concentrated effort to clam up, to take back the confession, to say no more to incriminate or indict himself further in the court of public opinion. Though of course it is already too late — the gavel has already dropped by the time he concedes under the weight of his guilt and humiliation.
For your consideration, then, I present a rogues gallery from the rich and varied history of what I have dubbed The “I F***ed Up” Face:
- Most recently, when New York governor and onetime crimebuster Eliot Spitzer confessed publicly to having serially patronized an exorbitantly priced call girl, he made the face.
- When President Clinton finally admitted that he did in fact have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky, he made the face, which reappeared regularly during his subsequent impeachment ordeal.
- When NBA star Kobe Bryant was forced to admit publicly that he had cheated on his wife — an act of damage control to refute allegations of felony sexual assault on a 19-year-old girl he met at a Colorado resort — he made the face. And Kobe must have felt really guilty about the whole matter, because he too kept making the face.
- When Vice President Cheney confronted the media after shooting campaign contributor and alleged friend Harry Whittington in the face during a quail-hunting outing, he exhibited the closest approximation of the “I F***ed Up” face that his perma-sneering facial muscles would allow.
- When it finally occurred to President Bush that his administration hadn’t really done a heckuva job in response to Hurricane Katrina, he couldn’t help but make the face. Truly, I think he’s genetically predisposed to make the face, for which he continues to develop new variations to accompany his assorted blunders, miscues and disasters, the way Michael Richards kept inventing new ways for Kramer to enter Jerry’s apartment. (Of course, before Bush can enter, he must first figure out how to get the door open.)
- When New England Patriots head coach and supposed tactical genius Bill Belichick was grilled about his coaching staff illegally videotaping their opponents’ defensive signals and pregame walk-throughs, he made the face.
- When Roger Clemens spoke out against accusations of steroid use in the Mitchell Report, his denials were adamant, but his face seemed to tell a different story. Now, as allegations of sundry extramarital indiscretions have begun to pile up, prompting Clemens to admit publicly to having made unspecified “mistakes” in his personal conduct over the years, one imagines that it won’t be long until he puts on his “I F***ed Up” face yet again.
Monday, May 05, 2008
The results are in, and here are the top-line statements from the quarterly reports of the five major oil companies I linked to in my post dated April 19:
- “ConocoPhillips [NYSE:COP] today reported first-quarter net income of $4,139 million, or $2.62 per share. This compared with $3,546 million, or $2.12 per share, for the same quarter in 2007. Revenues were $54.9 billion, versus $41.3 billion a year ago.”
- “BP’s first-quarter replacement cost profit was $6,588 million, compared with $4,444 million a year ago, an increase of 48%.”
- “Royal Dutch Shell’s first quarter 2008 earnings, on a current cost of supplies (CCS) basis, were $7.8 billion compared to $6.9 billion a year ago. Basic CCS earnings per share increased by 15% versus the same quarter a year ago.”
- “ExxonMobil’s first quarter net income was a record $10,890 million, up 17% from the first quarter of 2007.”
- “Chevron Corporation (NYSE: CVX) today reported net income of $5.17 billion ($2.48 per share – diluted) for the first quarter 2008, compared with $4.72 billion ($2.18 per share – diluted) in the 2007 first quarter. Earnings in the 2007 period included a $700 million gain on downstream asset sales in Europe.”
It doesn’t really matter whether they’re exclusively to blame for our being screwed at the pump (and now in the skies and soon in the checkout lane as well). That they’re profiting so mightily from our being screwed — quarter after quarter after quarter — while somehow avoiding being screwed themselves is reason enough to suspect them of a great deal more than merely benefiting from the whims of a free-market economy.
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
After all his whining and bitching and posturing and trade demands during the last off-season and the beginning of this season?
M.V.Puh-leeze.
Some blathering, blow-dried suburbanite sat down next to me at the bar tonight, pontificating about all things hoops, showing off his mad NBA chops to the bartender and anyone within earshot, and talking about what a big Lakers fan he is, what a big Kobe fan he is — which is a redundant statement now that Kobe has made the Lakers all about Kobe. Clearly he never had to live in L.A. and put up with Kobe’s egocentrism ever since he narrowly escaped prosecution, bought the silence and support of his beautiful, long-suffering trophy wife, decided he was invincible1 and anointed himself the de facto prince of Los Angeles.
I was trying to eat my dinner in peace, so I kept my mouth shut, but I’ll say it now for the 12 of you who regularly attend this meeting, and I’ll project and enunciate so the few bashful first-timers hanging around the coffee table at the back of the room can hear me too.
Ahem.
If Andrew Bynum doesn’t go down in late January, forcing Lakers G.M. Mitch Kupchak to make a deal with Memphis for Pau Gasol, we’re not even having this conversation right now.
Kobe is still the same prolifically scoring prima donna he was before. He’s just happier now because the Lakers are winning games and because they actually made it through the first round of the NBA Playoffs for the first time since Big Diesel was still wearing the purple and gold, which of course makes it look like Kobe did it all by his lonesome.
Trust me: as soon as they falter, we’ll hear all about how it’s someone else’s fault. After all, Kobe doesn’t actually make the players around him better — à la Jordan, Magic and Bird — he just complains about them when they fail him.
Pau Gasol is not the best player in the league by any stretch of the imagination, but the 2007-08 Lakers certainly didn’t gel until the long, tall Spaniard arrived at Staples Center.2 If the final M.V.P. vote is tallied in Kobe’s favor, he should turn right around and hand the trophy to Gasol.
Besides, Kobe doesn’t need the hardware. Just being able to call himself M.V.P. will be enough to ensure that he continues to be a pain in Jerry Buss’ ass for years to come.
1 Conveniently overlooking the fact that he’s, you know, not.
2 Before the trade, the Lakers record was 28-16. Since February, they were 22-5 with Gasol in the lineup and 27-9 overall.
Monday, April 28, 2008
Ordinarily I’d be content to butter myself up by noting that “great minds think alike,” but just this once — The New York Times and its circulation of a bazillion readers be damned — I want the record to reflect that, in posting my own homage to wrestling great and onetime noir actor Stanislaus Zbyszko, I beat to the punch David Mamet, the most acclaimed playwright of his generation, by 10 days.
Don’t sweat this one too badly, Dave. I hear second prize is a set of steak knives.
Thursday, April 24, 2008
The Having-Your-Cake-and-Shoving-It-In-The-Other-Guy’s-Face Edition
Really?McCain Criticizes Katrina Response as ‘Disgraceful’
NEW ORLEANS — Senator John McCain took direct aim at the Bush administration on Thursday as he stood in the lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, the area hardest hit by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and declared that “never again will a disaster of this nature be handled in the terrible and disgraceful way that it was handled.”
Would this be the same John McCain to whom George W. Bush presented a cake on his 69th birthday, August 29, 2005 — the day Hurricane Katrina made landfall and tore through the Gulf Coast?
At any point during that photo op in Glendale, Arizona, do you think McCain asked Bush, “Isn’t there something else you ought to be doing right now, Mr. President?”
Saturday, April 19, 2008
Friday at the office, two co-workers were queued up at the main copy machine in my workspace when a third co-worker, an older woman, perfectly harmless but given to making the sort of dotty offhand remarks older women sometimes make, entered and noted me standing by, biding my time in pensive thought, plotting my next few moves. She, however, did not identify it as pensive thought and instead asked, “Did you lose something?”
I beg your pardon, I thought. That’s the read you’re going with here? You with your acute powers of observation and the three trivial details about me that you’ve collected to date. Would you like to rethink “Did you lose something?” or will that be your final answer?
It occurred to me then that those close to me and a great many of you, dear readers, have long since slipped past the velvet rope and learned what to expect when you venture into the members-only lounge of intelligent discourse and casual conversation with me. But for the layperson, the average (or below-average) interloper who wanders away from the tour group into my backstage areas and restricted corridors, my dilemma is this: how to politely, civilly admonish these unsuspecting souls that they do not want to try to get inside my head, as they are ill equipped to deal with what they will find there.
When George W. Bush took office in January 2001, the price of crude oil was hovering somewhere around $36 a barrel, and at the time, we probably thought that was an outrage. During the seven-plus years of his administration, that figure has tripled — the price of crude recently hit $115 a barrel and continues its inexorable climb.
In addition to the sting you and I feel at the pump, rising fuel prices translate to higher transportation costs, the results of which are as varied and far-reaching as sharp price increases on certain food items in our grocery stores and restaurants; a local recycling service unceremoniously dropping my current employer as a customer this past week because the overall cost of dispatching a truck to us once a month nearly exceeds the dividend they reap from the office paper and cardboard we recycle; and, perhaps most notably, the shockwaves rippling through the airline industry these days as major carriers struggle to maintain not just profitability but in some cases solvency, including:
- Southwest Airlines, which this week reported first-quarter profits of $34 million but plans to reduce its growth in 2009 over concerns about soaring fuel prices and a sagging economy;
- Continental Airlines, which reported first-quarter losses of $80 million;
- American Airlines, whose parent company reported a $328 million first-quarter loss;
- Frontier Airlines, which recently announced that it is seeking Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection; and
- Delta Airlines and Northwest Airlines, which are presently pursuing a merger to consolidate their routes and services.
Thursday, April 17, 2008
When the actor Richard Widmark died at age 93 a few weeks ago, to my shame I had to confess that I thought he had died some years earlier. As an actor, Widmark had shunned celebrity and publicity and managed to keep a low profile — a habit that served him especially well in retirement, considering that I had left him for dead already.
As an act of both contrition and homage, I immediately moved his 1950 film Night and the City to the top of my Netflix queue.
Barely a week later, while I was still awaiting the DVD’s arrival, the film’s director, Jules Dassin, died in Athens at age 96. (Oddly enough, I think I may have suspected Dassin was still alive all this time, but still: what are the odds of something like that?)
Dassin was blacklisted during the Red Scare of the 1950s — in point of fact, he actually was a Communist at one time and was unapologetic about it. Producer Darryl F. Zanuck had hired him to direct Night and the City around the time the shit was hitting the fan and, knowing that the studio would be on the hook if Dassin shot the film’s most expensive sequences first, was complicit in helping Dassin to complete his last Hollywood film before he exiled himself to Europe for good.1
Set and shot in London, Night and the City tells the story of a small-time American hustler named Harry Fabian (Widmark) who dreams of hitting the big time with a scheme to become a wrestling promoter. The catch is that wrestling in London is a monopoly ruled by a shady, mobbed-up character named Hermes Kristo. Harry’s ace-in-the-hole, however, is a budding friendship with Kristo’s father, the legendary Greco-Roman wrestler Gregorius.
When casting the film, Dassin was adamant that he would not hire an actor and teach him how to wrestle; instead he would hire an actual wrestler and teach him to act. He had in mind a very specific image of the man he wanted, a wrestler who had been famous when Dassin was a boy. That wrestler was a Polish immigrant named Stanislaus Zbyszko (née Cyganiewicz), popular in the 1910s and ’20s, who was about 70 years old at the time and, as luck would have it, available for work. Night and the City is the only dramatic film role he ever assayed, and I daresay he’s the best thing about the movie.
Which is no slight against the film or its cast. Widmark turns in an astonishing performance as Fabian, a perpetual-motion machine pinballing through the London nightscape at the speed of his own tragic ambition, alternating from con-man swagger to childish petulance, from manic persistence to helpless defeatism with such frenetic fluidity that you can see him unraveling before your very eyes. It’s a plate-spinning act performed by a drowning man, and Widmark here is held underwater by a strong supporting cast that includes Herbert Lom, Mike Mazurki, Googie Withers and Francis L. Sullivan.2
But it’s the novice Stanislaus Zbyszko who steals the show.
Standing 5’8” and weighing around 260, Zbyszko looks like a sculptor’s half-assed attempt to chisel Ed Asner out of a chunk of granite. A 2003 enshrinee in the Professional Wrestling Hall of Fame, he brings a mix of professional realism and old-world gravity to the role that lends the movie more credibility than even the finest noirs could hope to achieve. Dassin couldn’t have cast the role better if he had built Gregorius from a kit.
Fabian’s enlistment of this gentle giant in his scheme eventually leads to a confrontation with Kristo’s star wrestler, The Strangler, that is the highlight of the film and one of the most extraordinary fight sequences I’ve ever seen.
The fight takes up a full four minutes of screen time, and unlike most filmic fight sequences, it’s not about the infliction of pain or the spilling of blood; it’s about struggle. Shot largely in closeup to show grimacing faces, tense hands applying their violence, limbs locked in viselike grips, torsos pressed against each other in unyielding isometric conflict, it’s a primal battle of endurance whose combatants employ only their strength and will in an effort to vanquish the other.3
In this epic battle pitting old-school artistry against new-breed flash, the stocky 70-year-old Zbyszko is more than match enough for the towering 42-year-old Mazurki, a veteran screen heavy who throws punches without ever appearing to be pulling them. (For all I know, he and the old man reached an accord on the set not to mince around like a couple of lightweight thespians.) As these warriors grapple, their animalistic grunting, snorting and growling serves as a bassline against the shrill and insistent exhortations of Fabian and Gregorius’ younger son, the wrestler Nikolas.
Having watched the film in its entirety last week, I have since replayed the fight sequence at least a half dozen times, powerless to seal the disc in its envelope and return it to Netflix.
In my cursory research of Zbyszko, I learned that he died at the age of 88 on September 22, 1967, a mere 48 days after I was born. Interestingly, his place of death is listed as St. Joseph, Missouri, just an hour away from here. I find myself compelled now to investigate whether he is buried there, so I might visit his grave and pay my respects for what he accomplished during his brief film career.
While I’m there, I shall ask him to give my regards to Widmark and Dassin as well.
1 It would be five years before Dassin would get around to producing another film. That film, Du rififi chez les hommes, more widely known as Rififi, is regarded, by myself and a great many others, as one of the greatest heist films ever made.
2 Avid cineastes might recognize the corpulent Sullivan, who, tailor-made for Dickens adaptations, holds the distinction of portraying Mr. Jaggers in not one but two versions of Great Expectations, including David Lean’s 1946 version. He also played Mr. Bumble in Lean’s 1948 adaptation of Oliver Twist.
3 Imagine, if you will, the polar opposite of the kitchen knife-fight sequence in Paul Greengrass’ The Bourne Supremacy but at once its equal in intensity.
Tuesday, April 08, 2008
Monday I received a follow-up e-mail from a co-worker regarding a business transaction, at the end of which she inquired:
To which I replied:[…] Watching the game tonight? KU fan I hope : )
The day passed. I clocked out and went home. The big game commenced. Mario Chalmers hung the moon with 2.1 seconds remaining in regulation. A new chapter in NCAA history was written. Nets were cut down. Et cetera.KU alumnus, actually. Class of 1990. Rock Chalk Jayhawk!
Thanks, J.
Tuesday I returned to work to find the following e-mail waiting in my inbox:
Notwithstanding her excessive use of exclamation points, I figured she was just screwing with me a little, so I initiated the following exchange:From: J.X.
Sent: Tuesday, April 08, 2008 8:38 AM
To: Brent Shepherd
Subject: RE: Cost Center
Bummer we lost!!!!
J.X.
The reply I didn’t send might have read something like this:From:Brent Shepherd
Sent: Tuesday, April 08, 2008 8:51 AM
To: J.X.
Subject: RE: Cost Center
If you’re referring to 2002 against Maryland or 2003 against Syracuse, then yes, those were bummers.
This, on the other hand, is what awesome feels like.
Rock Chalk,
Brent
From: J.X.
Sent: Tuesday, April 08, 2008 8:54 AM
To: Brent Shepherd
Subject: RE: Cost Center
My husband turned off the TV as there was two minutes to go and he told me that KU lost. This is great news-
I am so excited KU won -
J.X.
Assuming of course that it is a man we’re talking about.From:Brent Shepherd
Sent: Tuesday, April 08, 2008 8:55 AM
To: J.X.
Subject: RE: Cost Center
J., your husband is an asshat.
Probably at his office right about now, surrounded by his own co-workers at the water cooler, he’s experiencing the harsh, stinging bitch-slap of that realization.
As are you, I would imagine. Get back to me later and let me know what it feels like to be married to a fraction of a man.
Brent
And she — having professed an interest in the game to begin with — just took his word for it.
I mean, who in pluperfect hell does a thing like that? Have these people never heard the name Yogi Berra before?
More to the point, have they never watched a Final Four game? Or, hell, any college basketball game, for that matter?
Basketball isn’t like hockey or soccer, in which Minute 90 looks no different than Minute One1 and the whole thing can end in a 1-1 tie. In college hoops, the last two minutes is when everything that truly matters happens. Who doesn’t know that?
It’s one thing to not even watch the game. That’s fine. Tournament fanatic that I am, I get that it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. I might even understand if one professed an utter indifference or a virulent hatred for both teams vying for the championship.2
It’s another thing to reach the two-minute mark and give up hope for the team that’s trailing, to imagine that there is no conceivable way they can make up the difference as the remaining seconds tick away. I’m sure plenty of people experienced that sensation last night.3
But you don’t turn off the TV. Ever. Not until the play clock is full of zeroes.
Holy hell, people. This is the most essential rule in all of sport. Jot it down in large, legible block letters and tape it above your TV if you must:
1 Except maybe sweatier.
2 As I felt for the contestants of the most recent Super Bowl, pitting what’s-his-face against the other guy whose breathing guts I hate.
3 Not me, oddly enough, but plenty of others.
Saturday, April 05, 2008
It feels good. Real good. Damn good. Almost sexual. Amazingly, remarkably, freaktastically good. 1
But Monday night’s outcome matters at least as much, if not more. I’ll get back to you then.
In the meantime, Rock Chalk Jayhawk. KU. 2
1 Imagine, if you will, that “good” is a two-syllable word. It would sound something like “goo-wood.”
2 And yes, Roy — in case you were wondering — this changes nothing. You’re still dead to me. This is the way it works. With footnotes.
Tuesday, April 01, 2008
Clinton likens herself to ‘Rocky’
Of course. Hillary’s a fighter. She’s tough. She’s fearless. She’s resilient. She’s seen it all before. She doesn’t stay on the ropes for long. You can knock her down, but she keeps getting up off the canvas, and she won’t stop bringing the fight back to you until the final bell rings.
It’s a perfectly apt comparison, especially considering that, in the first movie, Rocky loses to the black guy.
Sunday, March 30, 2008
Wheat recently directed me to a New York Times column by David Brooks, who, I agree, is usually a blithering windbag, but who therein makes some salient points about the entrenched, embattled, often desperate presidential campaign of Sen. Hillary Clinton. It has set me to mining my gift for fiction, peering into my murky crystal ball2, which, as regular visitors to this site might concur, is a proposition fraught with peril.
For all the implicit and explicit entreaties, by the punditry and populace alike, that Hillary accept the inevitable and concede the Democratic nomination to Sen. Barack Obama sooner rather than later, for the good of both her party and her country, I’m here to tell you that I don’t see it happening any time soon. It simply isn’t true to the nature of the Hillary Clinton I’ve observed during the past two decades and come to understand on this most basic level.
Once a candidate has had a taste of being his or her party’s proverbial Presumptive Nominee, it’s hard to let go, and Hillary had it in spades back when the Democratic hopefuls were a cluttered field of eight. Her ascension to the nomination was all but assured to her by the party machinery and the pundits and her marriage to the greatest political asset of the last half century and her own Midas touch for fundraising, to say nothing of the GOP blowhards who salivated openly at the likelihood of a dream date with Hillary in the general election. It was all wrapped up, a foregone conclusion, a done deal.
Right. You might ask Howard Dean sometime how invincible he felt in 2004.
While you’re at it, you might ask John McCain how confident he was about his chances last August.
F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote that there are no second acts in American life.
Clearly he didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, having drunk himself to death by the age of 44, thereby precluding his own second act. If he had stuck around a while longer, he’d have realized that American life is lousy with second acts, littered with the damn things3 — I practically trip over them to get to my car in the morning. And you can draw a straight line from any number of them directly through the junior senator from New York and straight on to the next tenacious can-do spirit who refuses to leave the rest of us in peace.
Whatever the outcome of the 2008 presidential election, we won’t have seen the last of Hillary Clinton. To believe otherwise is folly.
It’s going to get ugly before it’s over. Uglier than it already is. A bare-knuckle street fight like something out of a Charles Bronson movie.
And when the end arrives, finally, irrevocably4, on an August night in Denver, then and only then will Hillary admit defeat — before her devoted supporters, before her party, before her country and the world, even if she doesn’t yet admit it to herself.
There will be no so-called Dream Ticket. Stop kidding yourselves.
Hillary will, however, put on a brave face and publicly renounce, if not privately reject, some of the things she’s said about Sen. Obama. She will act as though she never questioned his fitness to lead, decried his lack of experience or maligned him as a candidate writing checks with his words that his actions as president couldn’t cash. She will fulfill her obligations and for the next couple of months lend her perfunctory support to her party’s platform and its nominee, her erstwhile rival.
After the election, she’ll return to the Senate to ride out her second term, but she’ll likely lose her zeal for public service, roiled as she might be to serve four years in the shadow of President Obama, second-guessing and Monday-morning-quarterbacking his every move as she had foreseen it in the Clinton 44 newsreel footage of her imagination.5
She could announce that she will not seek re-election in 2012 and thus vacate her seat in the Senate.6 (She would never say it out loud, but the subtext would be this: “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.”)
She could settle down in Chappequa, kick back a bit, drop out of the public eye for a while, practice law somewhere or take on the occasional speaking engagement or lend her star power to various boards of directors.
She might finally get around to divorcing President Clinton, if all our lurid conjectures turn out to be true and she no longer has any use for him since he failed her not only as a husband but, perhaps more grievously, as her political ace-in-the-hole, unable to satisfy his obligations in their alleged marriage of convenience.7
And perhaps this last move would turn out to be the best of her life, both personally and politically. Not because I believe in the cleansing power of divorce — you know me; I’m a romantic — but because it might release her from the greatest and most binding of her professional calculations and pave the way for a more honest personal inventory. In which case she might get even farther out of town, drop even further off the grid.
She could take a lover, if she hasn’t already, dropping her guard, giving in to her softer side and allowing herself to focus her attentions on a constituency of one instead of the 300 million on whom she had pinned her aspirations for so long. And it could be that this other person does her the biggest favor of all — immediately for the sake of their relationship, in the short term for the sake of Hillary’s own personal well-being, but in the long run for the sake of the campaign she should have run all along and may someday have another opportunity to launch.
He or she could persuade Hillary to cut the bullshit and be honest with herself. Fully, unreservedly, unflinchingly honest with the woman in the mirror, for perhaps the first time in a great many years.
I know people who say that Hillary Clinton in person, one on one, is as charming, relaxed and engaging as her husband is famously reputed to be. The difference being that the president exudes much of that same charisma on camera and before large audiences, whereas Mrs. Clinton seems clipped, self-conscious, stage-managed to within an inch of her life. (She attacks Sen. Obama’s eloquence as a smokescreen, yet she herself is the front woman for some extremely well-written campaign speeches. She simply isn’t blessed with the oratorical gifts that Sen. Obama brings to the arena; either that, or she reads her speeches clumsily from index cards specifically to differentiate herself and reinforce her argument that pretty words or words spoken prettily do not a leader make.8)
There is an extent to which a life after politics, however brief, might actually be the elixir that makes Hillary a better politician. (Provided her comeback is not shrouded in Nixonian paranoia or still too deeply mired in her own ambition, this latter being her tragic character flaw.)
One need look no further than the post-defeat transformation of Vice President Al Gore: After conceding the presidency and leaving Washington in 2001, it would have been really easy for him to feel bitter and disenfranchised by a system he had devoted so much of his energy to in the past three decades. Instead, he chilled out, reassessed himself, redirected his focus on the issue about which he is most passionate, and finally returned to the public stage a more relaxed, approachable, self-assured figure, the kind of man capable of winning a general election if he so desired (though, by all accounts, he has no such desire at this time).
The question is whether or not Hillary has it in her to effect that kind of personal transformation, to give up being a political animal just long enough to become a human being again, to be genuine rather than disingenuous, and to return to the public arena relieved of all the baggage piled up between her and the united support of her party and, ultimately, her country.
She could be a Hillary who can openly admit that she made a mistake in supporting President Bush’s war resolution in 2002 instead of parsing the language to evade responsibility for her own vote. She could be a Hillary who tells America what she believes in instead of what focus groups and internal polling have told her Americans want to hear her say. She could be a Hillary who speaks the hard truth and credits Americans for being able to handle it instead of crafting language calculated to win her the most approval on any given day. She could be a Hillary who, like Sen. Obama, possesses a vision of America that is bigger than her belief in herself as the rightful occupant of the Oval Office.
That’s a Hillary for whom I might be happy to cast my vote, and one I might rally behind as an American citizen.
But only Hillary can write her second act. And the sooner, the better.
1 My apologies to anyone who soiled themselves just reading the title of this post.
2 Read: half-empty bottle of Maker’s Mark.
3 Hell, as unspectacular as my American life is, I’m in the midst of my own second act even as I write this, with any luck closing in on the dramatically satisfying midpoint event that turns my story on its ear and takes you, dear audience, careening along with me toward a bombshell revelation, a climactic triumph, or a spectacular flameout such as only I can engineer.
4 The ceremonial end, that is; the mathematical end having occurred much earlier, if it hasn’t already.
5 Admittedly, though, the Schadenfreude of a possible Obama defeat, combined with the specter of a McCain presidency could be enough to reinvigorate her for the long fight that would lie ahead.
6 Absent a Giuliani comeback on his home turf, and perhaps even in the face of it, I like the Democrats’ odds of keeping that seat, at least in the short run.
7 Giving credit where credit is due, the Clintons have weathered all their public and private firestorms at least long enough and well enough to raise their daughter, Chelsea, into a remarkable young woman by all appearances. Having fulfilled this most basic responsibility, they’re no longer honor-bound to stay together just “for the kid.”
8 It goes almost without saying that, after the last seven years of functional illiteracy in the Oval Office, I am exhilarated by the prospect of a president whose oratory and statesmanship stir my soul and stoke the fires of my patriotism. Is that so wrong?
Friday, March 28, 2008
I don’t even like aerosol cheese products, but the other day at work there was a can of spray cheese sitting alongside a box of Wheat Thins in a public area, and I found myself contemplating an urge to wait for an optimal number of people to be standing nearby as I passed so I could grab the can, tilt my head back like a Pez dispenser and spray as much cheese in my mouth as possible, then nonchalantly walk away.
