A young Asian woman with a scone was holding forth. “They said on their own website that it cost 79 but I got here and suddenly it’s $1.20 and there’s like ten left, all in gross colors. I told the sales lady, ‘It was 79 on the website’ and she was like, ‘I don’t know anything about that, honey.’” The guy across the table stared at her from beneath a gelled shingle of hair, listening in that super empathic manner suggesting these two had yet to fuck.

At the next table, an older couple was berating their teenage son for his tardy appearance. He kept claiming his car had stalled on the way, an excuse not even he seemed to believe.

The woman making coffee was keening about the new device she wanted, only the Apple Store opened while she was on her shift, of course, so she had to ask her friend who worked at Pier One, but he couldn’t do it because he had his own stuff to buy, so she was going to have to ask her mom, who would probably mess it up and buy her, like, the Nano Four.

After a time, these voices began to merge. They composed a kind of seething national chorus. I will never get what I deserve.

And who was I to complain about their complaint? I say the same thing all the time.

***

It was a particular moment in time, in the suburbs of central Connecticut, where nearly all public discourse happens in a Starbuck’s or a Bertucci’s, in an Anne Taylor or a Pier One, where the Brownian motion of civic life is contained within white-trimmed malls.

I’d landed here on Black Friday, a newly minted “holiday” devoted to the sacred rites of shopping, to transitioning Americans from the corporeal gluttony of Thanksgiving to the retail gluttony of Christmas.

I should have been in a library, but I didn’t know where to find a library in central Connecticut.

I kept trying to think about the election, but I couldn’t get back there. It seemed ages ago. Instead, I thought of this line from The White Album, Didion’s long sad strange poem about how we let the Sixties slip through our fingers:

It is as though she feels deeply that all human effort is foredoomed to failure, a conviction which seems to push her further into a dependent, passive withdrawal. In her view she lives in a world of people moved by strange, conflicted, poorly comprehended, and, above all, devious motivations which commit them inevitably to conflict and failure…

 ***

Why does my heart operate like this? Why, in the face of good news, does it seize upon portents of ruin?

Are you like this, too?

How long did it take you to relocate your anxieties about the election to the rest of your life?

I gave myself about three hours. At last, I thought. Democracy has served as an instrument of moral progress. Americans have disavowed the use of selfishness and bigotry as political tools. Paul Ryan can now return to his given role as the star of an infomercial for a workout regimen that makes you poop gold.

Then Palestinians and Israelis started killing one another again and congressional leaders launched into their horseshit soliloquies about the sanctity of tax cuts and the same old huckster pundits were back in their pancake makeup, while the corporate money slunk back to the drawing board, in pursuit of more efficient ways to poison our common sense.

By the next day, the election had begun to feel like a stopgap, like some terrible disaster – not averted or vanquished, but delayed. And then even less. Like a diversion from the real business of America: the frantic effort to buy off our loneliness.

***

It’s more complicated than that, though.

I spent Election Day in the town where I’d grown up. I’d come to give a lecture and to visit my mom, who had just endured the removal of several internal organs, her second such surgery in the past five years. “It’s alright, Stevie,” she told me. “I wasn’t using them anyway.”

So I watched the returns with my folks on either side of me. The numbers came in from New Hampshire and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin; my dad and I began to feel the woozy flush of pessimists proved wrong.

But my mom wasn’t getting it. She stared at the blizzard of data washing across the screen, then glanced down at her belly, at the wound there. I could see, just for a second, how frightened she was.

By which I mean of course how frightened I was.

My dad clicked over to Fox, so as to witness Karl Rove confronting the voters of Ohio. But even this spectacle couldn’t distract him from the real story in that room. He wanted my mom to snap out of it, to act like his wife again, not some addled patient in danger of drifting off to the other side.

***

I watched Romney deliver his gracious concession speech at an airport bar, then caught the rest on a red-eye back to Boston, a hundred little blue screens aglow as our plane zoomed over the black mountains below. We landed at dawn and there was my own little family waiting for me at the airport, my beautiful tired wife and my tender shrieking children.

I should have fallen to my knees in gratitude. I should have found a God to thank. But I picked a fight with my wife instead, because she had the audacity to fall ill and to expect me to take care of her, when I was the one with the sick mother, the maybe dying mother, and anyway at the bottom of it all I wanted her, my wife, to become my mother, young and forever healthy, which isn’t fair, but is.

***

I was still in the Starbucks, still trying to figure out what to say about the election. It was barely a fortnight ago, but the squalls of Black Friday had blown me off course. I kept hearing the voices of those b-list actors from Dawn of the Dead, George Romero’s 1978 paean to zombie consumerism.

“What are they doing?” the blond says, of the blue-faced goons staggering around the mall. “Why do they come here?”

“Some kind of instinct,” her guy says. “Memory of what they used to do. This was an important place in their lives.”

***

My mother took part in the Civil Rights movement and was one of half a dozen women in her class at Yale Medical School and she raised three troubled sons and wrote two remarkable books and read every novel Charles Dickens wrote, most of them several times, and she has cared for her patients with great compassion and taken far too much shit over the years from my dad and me and my brothers. She deserved, and deserves, better.

And I guess that’s what I feel about the election, when I dig to the bottom of it.

It is my hope that Obama will become far more radical in defense of the common good; that he will suggest to Republicans, for instance, a return to the top tax rate of the Eisenhower era (91 percent). I would love to see him campaign for a constitutional amendment banning all private money from political races. I would love to see him empower scientists to solve our climate change crisis. And so on and so on.

***

But none of that will keep my mother alive forever. Or me. Or you.

The final crisis is always personal: how do we fight back against what Wallace Stevens called “the pressure of the real,” which I take to mean those anxieties that keep us apart from our souls. (I’m not sure I’m even getting that right. It’s based on something I heard Matthew Zapruder say far more eloquently.)

Maybe that’s what I was feeling in that Starbucks: the pressure of the real. Maybe I was afraid that it was too late for America, that election night 2012 would go down as little more than a twitch of conscience in the twilight of a wasteful empire, the fundamental malaise was too deep, the distractions too profitable, we would remain zombies to the end, unwilling to stanch our profligacy, to face the burdens of our historical moment, devoted instead to the spiritually empty pursuit of sensation.

Or maybe that was my fear talking. Maybe the pressure of the real can mean something else: that we love some people so much (and are therefore so afraid of losing them) that we have to create vessels of beauty to contain our terror. That our politicians fail us and the cherished among us die but that love and imagination, as commemorated in our words and our deeds, survive. That these human gestures form the invisible thread that binds the mighty to the meek, the wicked to the good, the living to the dead.

Maybe this can be taken as our proper work for the next four years: summoning the faith to see our nation as partly ruined, full of delusion and wrath, and still to wish for, and work for, and believe in, its resurrection.

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The left and right in this country are growing more isolated—and therefore alienated—from one another. Ask yourself: How many of my friends/acquaintances hail from across the aisle?

I felt it was important for Rumpus readers to hear what conservatives have to say for themselves. So I spent the past month interviewing a bunch, some in person (I found Angela, for instance, in the Denver airport, highlighting a Glenn Beck book), and some on-line.  I apologize to them in advance for my severe editing and slight reordering. My goal was to capture the gist of what they had to say, not to argue with them. I’ve added brief editor’s notes with factual clarifications when necessary.

***

Angela, a financial analyst, lives in Eagle River, a small city outside Anchorage.

WiG: What does “conservative” mean to you?

Angela: Family, religion, and less government.

WiG: How do you get your news?

Angela: Fox News. I’m a semi-regular viewer.

WiG: Are you following the election coverage?

Angela: Not really. All they do is throw mud at each other.

WiG: Are you familiar with the platforms of either party?

Angela: Not really.

WiG: How do you know what the candidates intend to do?

Angela: It’s whatever I hear on those shows, and I might look something up on the Internet.

WiG: On what sites?

Angela: None in particular.

WiG: What gives you confidence that Mitt Romney will be a good president?

Angela: I’m concerned about the jobs, and preserving traditional values, and our foreign policy, protecting ourselves. I think it’s horrible what happened to the ambassador [in Libya].

WiG: Do you feel President Obama was responsible for that?

Angela: Of course. He said it was over a stupid video. And he didn’t put extra protection on the embassy even though it was the anniversary of September 11^th.

WiG: What do you know about Romney’s specific plans to create jobs?

Angela: [Shrugs]

WiG: What do you know about his tax plan?

Angela: [Shrugs]

WiG: What do you like about Romney?

Angela: His religion. I’m Pentacostal, so I don’t agree with his views, but he seems to have more traditional values than Obama.

WiG: In what specific ways are his views more traditional?

Angela: [No response]

***

John, a father of two, works as a manager at Safelite, the auto glass company, and lives in Ohio. Both his parents were both teachers, but he was “politically clueless” until college, where he became a Reagan supporter. He was offended to hear people in a bar cheering because the President had been shot. He’s also troubled by paying too much in taxes, as he feels the government is a bad steward of his money.

John: I consider myself a conservative, probably a little more libertarian than Republican. The term to me means rugged individualism, pursuit (not guarantee) of happiness, and the freedom to be the biggest success or fuck-up I want to be.

WiG: I, too, remember Reagan being shot. I’m shocked people were cheering. Have Obama’s calls for political civility impressed you?

John: The president’s calls for civility are essentially a political inoculation against the same. Same as when Warren Buffett says he doesn’t pay enough taxes. When Rush calls Sandra Fluke a “slut” or when Bill Maher calls Laura Ingraham a “cunt,” that’s going too far. Politics is a blood sport and you play to win period.

WiG: Given your debt concerns, do you support measures such as closing loopholes for giant oil corporations? Or for millionaires?

John: Loopholes for corporations is kind of a straw man for me. Who owns these giant companies? In most cases it’s you and me with our mutual funds. If we tax these folks they will pass that cost back to the consumer, raising prices and making the business environment more difficult. For millionaires, you could do it, but they will lawyer up and figure out a way to not do it.

Romney’s recent dumbfuck move by saying that 47% don’t pay taxes is untrue. It’s 49%. When Obama says that “we are asking people to pay their fair share,” there is really nothing fair about it, because 86% of all income taxes are paid by the top 25% of income earners.

[Editor’s note: this statistic is accurate, and reflects national income distribution. According to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, the top one percent of American households possess 34.5% of our national wealth. The top ten percent possess 74.5%. The bottom 50% possess 1.1% of our wealth.]

John: …As for entitlement programs, both Social Security and Medicare are set up badly, a weird blend of capitalism and socialism that will only end badly. I believe there are folks that genuinely need assistance. I believe there are a ton of folks who are scamming.

WiG: What do you mean by “folks scamming”? Are there non-partisan studies about such practices? I ask because the argument for limited government seems to assume widespread incompetence or malfeasance. As with “voter fraud” claims, the integrity of this argument resides in the evidence of such abuse.

John: I don’t have a study, but from a few sites found info that the federal government made improper payments of around $125 billion last year. I think that whoever is president should tighten that shit up immediately. Maybe “tons of people scamming” is urban legend, or I could just be plain wrong … I think Romney is counting on Reagan’s model of lowering taxes, revenues to the feds increase, folks start new businesses and hire more folks who pay taxes. Yep, trickle down, but it worked.

[Editor’s note: “Reagan’s model of lowering taxes” did not increase revenues. It increased the national debt by 186 percent over his two terms.]

John: I think Romney is some “Ozzie and Harriet” type corporate weenie, that the country needs desperately at this time. He seems adult and not cool, but a fixer of sorts and I would like to see him in there. My core values translate to them in getting the debt under control, reforming entitlements to get people working, creating an environment where business can flourish, and him making polygamy the law of the land. Just joking, one wife is enough.

WiG: What do you mean by “reforming entitlements to get people working”?

John: I mean put the work portion back in “workfare.” I think on your side it’s a sign of pride that we have 53 million people on food stamps. If people need it, I’m good with it. That number horrifies me, I want people to win and win big and buy a yacht.

[Editor’s note: The claim that Obama sought to strip the work requirement from welfare is untrue.]

***

Jack is a senior editor at a small public relations company in northern New Jersey, and is gay.

Jack: Mitt Romney isn’t the Reagan that at least half the country would like. But I argue that we don’t need another Reagan—that example was given to us already. All we need to do is imitate it … By the usual and accepted measures of economic health, Obama’s strategy of more government intervention, regulation, and top-down economic control has been a failure. The growth rate has limped along at about 2.2%. No recovery period in recent history has seen growth this weak. The unemployment rate has persisted at or above 8% for about three-and-a-half years running, which is also extraordinary for a recovery period.

WiG: Given that our economy was shedding 700,000 jobs a month when he took office, what measures should Obama have taken?

Jack: I don’t believe he could have done anything about that particular problem at the time…

WiG: In your view, how and why did the economic meltdown of 2007 occur?

Jack: Contrary to the narrative that was pushed on us, “deregulation” was hardly the culprit. We can trace the problems back to Federal Housing Authority and HUD regulations, and the even more pernicious Community Reinvestment Act. The deregulation which followed was only at the margins … Of course, the emotionally satisfying explanation is that the whole mess was caused by Wall Street greed.

WiG: What should a President do when the economy he inherits is slumping? It sounds like you feel government should do as little as possible, and allow the free market to call the shots. Is that accurate?

Jack: In a perfect world, yes, that would be accurate. But we didn’t have a free market in the first place. There is no way a free-market solution was going to work in a decidedly unfree market environment…

As for my philosophical objection, the government cannot “create jobs,” nor can it “put people back to work.” These are not functions of the government as outlined in its charter, and the idea makes no sense in the first place. I want all politicians to stop claiming otherwise.

WiG: This morning, me and my kids walked past the elementary school they’ll go to, which is being rebuilt. There were about 25 guys working on the re-build, which was funded by taxpayers like myself. How is this not government creating jobs?

Jack: You answered your own question. Those jobs are funded by you, not the government. The government is merely the means by which your money is diverted to that project. Now building a school is of course a good and useful thing. But such a project does not represent an expansion of the economy—the resources used to build the school were diverted from another part of the economy. In fact, there are instances where rebuilding a school may not be the best use of resources. Believe it or not, there are times when it is more useful to renovate a chain of go-go bars, or build a new Wal-Mart.

WiG: Can you talk about your stances on social issues?

Jack: After the freakshow that was the DNC convention, I am quite honestly worn out by all the angry estrogen. But I will talk briefly about abortion. I was informed by a grad-school colleague of mine that until I have a uterus, I don’t have a right to an opinion about abortion (never mind the fact that I am thoroughly pro-choice). The stridency of these broads cannot possibly be making them many friends.

WiG: What do you mean by “angry estrogen”?

Jack: I prefer to let your readers chew on that one.

WiG: Honestly, Jack, you clearly pride yourself on being intelligent and precise, so what are you saying here?

Jack: …Sandra Fluke exemplified both the angry as well as freakish aspects of the DNC convention. She delivered her speech with a very large and secure safety net cast by her (extremely angry) handlers, as is always the case when she speaks publicly. Ms. Fluke was described by President Obama as “one tough and poised young lady.” He wisely left out the adjective “smart.” Insultingly, Ms. Fluke was foisted on us as some kind of intellectual powerhouse, an eloquent voice against the forces of white male patriarchy. Yet when Rush Limbaugh called her a rude name, suddenly she became this delicate little creature who was being bullied, and all rallied to her and cradled her precious little head and told her that Rush is, well, he’s just a big meanie. There, there now, child—it’s OK, Uncle Barack is on the phone, sweetpea.

… As for gun control, I am as staunch a supporter of the Second Amendment as I am of the First. The Left would have us remain as sitting ducks, relying on “Hate Crimes Legislation” to protect us from homophobes (or any other type of thug). I can’t imagine anything more “self-loathing” than that. While I am not actively against such legislation, I claim the right to arm and defend myself. I am convinced that if Matthew Shepard had carried a gun, he’d be walking among us today. As my friends at Pink Pistols say, “Armed gays don’t get bashed.”

… I won’t allow my blood to be spilled all for the sake of some vague, contradictory, and bossy opinions that others hold about “the common good.”

WiG: You believe Matthew Shepard would still be alive if he’d carried a gun. So was he a victim because he allowed himself to be? Given that we all might be victims of violent crime, should everyone carry a gun? Would this decrease, in your view, gun violence?

Jack: No, I don’t blame Shepard for his own death. But the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act is of little benefit to either of those gentlemen now. I don’t argue that people should or shouldn’t arm themselves. It’s a decision that each individual will make for himself.

WiG: Do conservatives respect your sexual orientation? How do they express this respect? Is it in their policies toward homosexuals? Can you be specific?

Jack: Most conservatives I interact with respect and agree with my political point of view. As for sexual orientation, my mission on the Right is not to alert them to the virtues of hot man-on-man action. Of course many of them raise an eyebrow at my sexual orientation and romantic proclivities. But once we have a discussion about John Locke, the Rule of Law, the Founding fathers, the Constitution of the United States, and F.A. Hayek, I have made a friend for life. (A hearty laugh at Debbie Wasserman-Schultz’s expense never hurts, either.)

This is a discussion that is impossible to have with a Liberal. It begins and ends with the same not-very-original charge that I am like a Jewish guard at Auschwitz and do I realize that the Republican party hates me?

I have never received hate mail nor have I ever been the recipient of personal invective from a conservative. The totality of vitriol comes from the Left. A recent example of gay Leftist hatred came courtesy of the ever-repulsive Dan Savage. He called GoProud “house faggots for the GOP.” We point out to Savage that it’s better to be a house faggot for the Right than a field faggot for the Left. Who has a better shot at cutting the master’s throat while he slumbers? My money is on the house faggot.

***

Jack’s making a particular kind of joke here—one with violent undertones. It speaks to what John said earlier: that politics is “a blood sport.”

My intention was to allow conservatives to speak for themselves. I interviewed a bunch, and chose three voices that struck me as representative. My not-so-secret hope was to dig beneath the binary dogma—to unearth the hopes that might unite us. I was after solace.

That I failed, and so abjectly, should occasion any number of emotions. At the bottom of them all is helplessness.

No there is no way for me to reach these folks: Angela who regards “politics” as some vague source of paranoia, John, with his friendly need to make sure nobody unworthy gets their hands on his dough, and least of all Jack, for whom politics is an arena to strut his intellect and externalize his self-loathing.

But politics isn’t about projecting your pathologies into the public arena, and it’s not about hurting people. Its essential mission is to enact morality in the world, to make the rules by which we care for everyone, not just ourselves. What matters isn’t who “wins,” but to what human effect? Is the greater cause of justice advanced? Is opportunity expanded? Is the suffering of our citizens reduced?

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• THE WEEK IN GREED #19: The Pressure of the Real
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• “Liberals Are Ruining America. I Know Because I Am One.”

Issues of military experience mattered, because Bush had launched two wars in the wake of 9/11, neither of which was going well. The central historical curiosity of that election is how Kerry’s service—he won a silver star, a bronze star, and three purple hearts—became a liability.

Kerry lost the election, if barely, for one simple reason: because he never turned to Bush during any of their three debates, looked him in the eye, and said, “With all due respect, Mr. President, you wouldn’t be so reckless about sending our young men into battle if you’d ever been under enemy fire yourself. But you haven’t been, sir. While I was in the Mekong Delta getting shot at and wounded, you were in Alabama working on a political campaign for one of your father’s pals. That’s not a political attack, Mr. President. It’s history.”

***

If Barack Obama loses his re-election bid in a few weeks it will be because he failed to confront Mitt Romney in the same manner, face to face, about his relentless and brazen lies to the American people.

Men born of wealth—like Bush and Romney—feel entitled to bullying the truth, and their opponents. It’s how they their mask their insecurity, and conceal their panic. Obama, a bi-racial kid raised without money, got ahead by avoiding conflict. In most contexts, this would be an attribute. But modern presidential campaigns are filtered by pundits, and decided by voters, who think very little about policy. They go with their gut. They go with the guy who seems like a winner, the guy who has made an ally of his aggression.

Because tomorrow’s debate is town-hall style, Obama will have to empathize with those in the audience, and attend to their questions. But voters at home, the ones still open to voting for him, need Obama to take the fight to Romney, to speak with urgency and moral force. He needs to have lines of attack prepared for particular topics, and those attacks need to tell a larger story.

The story is simple—Mitt Romney is a salesman. The grin, the swell suit, the sunny promises of moderation are a pitch intended to hide what you’re really buying: a shameless oligarch.

***

The overarching message:

Governor Romney has been running for office for twenty years now, and the only core position he holds is that he deserves to be President. Everything else depends on who he’s talking to. When he’s talking to rich fundraisers behind closed doors, and he thinks nobody else is listening, he says 47 percent of Americans are dependent on the government and can’t take responsibility for their lives. When he gets caught, he says, “Oh gosh, I didn’t mean that.” Now he’s for the middle class. During the Republican primary, Governor Romney promised to cut taxes for the one percent. In Denver, he swore up and down he wouldn’t do that. He used to be a moderate conservative. Then he was a severe conservative. Used to be pro-choice, now he’s pro-life. Used to be for his own health care plan, now he’s against it. Used to be against regulation, now he’s for it. Just shake the etch-a-sketch and presto chango: a new Mitt Romney. When reporters point out his ads are full of lies, his staff says—this is an actual quote—“We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers.”

That’s not leadership, Governor Romney. It’s salesmanship.

***

On Romney’s tax plan:

Governor Romney is constantly reminding us that there are six studies that prove his plan to cut $5 trillion in taxes—cuts skewed toward the wealthy—won’t raise the deficit. Six studies. Sounds pretty impressive, right? Until you read the fine print. Those studies are blogs and editorials written by conservatives. That’s how he defines a “study.” By those standards, I guess Governor Romney himself is the author of a rather famous study, the one entitled “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.” That’s the study about how we should have just let our auto industry fail. The only legitimate study of his tax plan revealed what common sense should tell you: if you give massive tax cuts to rich folks, middle-class families are going to have to pay it. That’s how it always is with Governor Romney. The sales pitch sounds great – until you look at the fine print.

***

On health care:

Governor Romney wants to turn Medicare, one of the most successful programs in our history, into a voucher program. Period. He likes to promise seniors he won’t touch their benefits. But that’s only because his voucher system doesn’t kick in for a few years. Like any good salesman, he’s put his political liability on layaway. But in the mean time he’s going to gut Medicaid programs for seniors and sick children. He says his plan will allow folks with pre-existing conditions to get insurance. It won’t. Five minutes after our last debate ended, his staff had to admit that was a lie. He says he’ll repeal Obamacare and let states come up with their health care laws. But that’s impossible—because the federal government actually subsidized most of his state’s health care plan. Those are the facts. Governor Romney knows those are the facts. His only hope is that voters won’t read the fine print on his health care plans, because if they do, it will make them sick.

***

On foreign policy:

For the last couple of weeks, Governor Romney has been running around shooting off his mouth on foreign policy—which is odd, given that he has no foreign policy experience. Actually, check that. He did visit England and manage to insult our closest ally. Then he tried to score cheap political points while our citizens were under attack in Libya, and he’s still trying to exploit that tragedy for political gain. Americans have seen this kind of bluster before. It’s what got us into two wars. My foreign policy isn’t about bluster. It’s about results. Under my watch, we’ve ended the war in Iraq, we’re winding down in Afghanistan, and we’ve decimated Al Qeada. Like President Bush, Governor Romney didn’t believe bringing Osama Bin Laden to justice was a high priority. I did.

Being Commander-in-Chief isn’t like being a candidate, Governor. You can’t just sit in a comfy armchair trying to win the next news cycle. You have to sit in the Oval Office and make the tough calls. Tough talk isn’t a doctrine. It’s another form of salesmanship.

***

On character:

Governor Romney has been running for president for years now and he’s made lots of promises: to cut taxes and reduce the debt and save Medicare and create twelve million jobs. After all this time, he can’t even tell you what’s in his tax plan. These aren’t serious proposals. They’re sales pitches.

Here’s what we do know about Governor Romney: he was born into wealth and made millions in private equity. His company closed down plants in America and shipped jobs overseas. He believes corporations are people. He makes more than $20 million per year on investments and pays a lower tax rate than an occupational therapist. He has a Swiss bank account and a tax shelter in the Cayman Islands. Despite being the richest citizen ever to run for President, he refuses to release more than two years of his tax returns, though his own father set the precedent as a candidate of releasing a dozen returns.

Governor Romney is a good businessman. He knows how to close a deal. But America isn’t a business. The job of the President isn’t to maximize profits for the folks at the top. It’s to maximize opportunity for all our citizens. The Governor is eager to talk about how much he cares for the middle class, because he thinks this will get him elected. But look at how he’s spent his life. Those are his values. Boil away the sales pitches and he’s for a government of the wealthy, by the wealthy, and for the wealthy.

***

The riffs above amount to less than ten minutes of talking. Obama will still have time to set out his own agenda, and say “um” a lot. But what’s precious in these debates—what turned the race against him last time—is the chance to project strength. It’s incredibly sad that such an attitude should have to prevail in a mature democracy. It speaks to the moral poverty of our Fourth Estate, and our electorate. But that’s where we are.

If Obama wants another four years, he has to find a way to fight against his instincts, and take a salesman out to the woodshed.

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Nonetheless, I want you guys to please take a few minutes to watch this, if you haven’t already:

It’s the first time in a long while that I’ve seen a television personality confront a political operative in such blunt terms at the level of his sin.

You can tell how unprecedented this event is because of how nervous the other talking heads are. They keep telling Matthews to calm down, to watch his tone. They treat him as if he’s gone crazy. Because, of course, the expression of genuine moral distress has no place on a polite corporate-sponsored television set. The whole point is to sell gourmet coffee, pal, not to save the world.

***

But what Chris Matthews is saying, right there on the teevee, is more crucial to understanding this election than the joyless spasm of propaganda that just concluded in Tampa.

The Republican Party, saddled with a stiff, elitist candidate, unable to run on its wildly unpopular policy ideas, and unwilling even to pretend that it cares about the concerns of minority voters, has gone racist.

They’ve crunched the numbers and concluded that the only way to win in November is to drive up the white turnout. And that the best way to do this is to remind white voters that Obama is not white, and that deep down he means to rip them off because that, after all, is what blacks folks do to white people.

***

This helps explain a fact that any sensible political observer should find profoundly mysterious: why Romney’s central line of attack to date has been to assert that Obama dropped the work requirement from welfare.

To begin with, why pursue a claim that has been so widely debunked? But even more curiously: why focus on an obscure issue like welfare reform? Why not attack the sitting president on his jobs record? Or the national debt? Or any of the other issues that American voters say they care about?

The answer, of course, is that Romney doesn’t really want to campaign about “a positive vision for the future” as his doe-eyed veep keeps repeating on the stump. He wants a campaign that will make white voters insecure and angry enough to come out in droves.

This is why the Romney welfare ads have been carefully stocked with hard-working, frustrated-looking Caucasians. The embedded message is simple: Obama is going to take your hard-earned tax dollars and give it to a bunch of his shiftless black pals.

***

Asked about these bogus welfare claims by USA Today, Romney asserted their veracity while offering no facts to substantiate them. It does not appear to have occurred to anyone at USA Today that they might fact check the matter.

Instead, the paper allowed Romney to suggest that Obama had stripped the work requirement from welfare, which he didn’t do, in an attempt to “shore up his base” for the election. Because, see, the president’s base is welfare recipients. Or, as they are commonly known, black folk.

USA Today: an awesome newspaper, and not at all a dumb tool of propaganda!

The president of the Republican super PAC American Crossroads, Steven Law, put it like this: “You can tell [the ads] are landing punches.”

***

Lee Atwater, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee, interviewed by the author Alexander Lamis back in 1981, put it like this:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.

And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

***

I’m not sure I have to mention that Mitt Romney is the first candidate ever to register zero percent of the African-American vote.

And yet, there is this profound expression of his soul:

***

I’m making a joke, but only because I find all this so heartbreaking. The Republican Party, after all, was founded by anti-slavery activists. It is the party of Lincoln, the party of the Emancipation Proclamation, the party that saw the Union through the Civil War and fought (though not hard enough) for Reconstruction. The founding ideology of the G.O.P. was “free labor, free land, free men.” Its members opposed not just the moral atrocity of slavery, but the notion that plantation owners should be allowed to usurp the best land and leave independent farmers with the dregs.

The party was founded, in other words, on egalitarian principles.

By the dawn of the last century, the G.O.P. had transformed into the party of business, which is a code word for profit. It drove off reformers such as Teddy Roosevelt, and encouraged the financial speculation boom that led to the Wall Street Crash, and the Great Depression.

***

In the second half of the 20th century, Republicans managed to recapture their mojo not by offering a unified vision of the country, but by adopting a strategy to divide the country along racial and economic lines. Richard Nixon was the first candidate to exploit the resentment Southern whites felt at the Civil Rights Movement. He did so using the coded language Atwater notes above.

It has since become a staple of the GOP playbook, from Ronald Reagan’s references to mythical welfare queens to George H.W. Bush’s use of the ominous Willie Horton ad against Michael Dukakis. Racial incitement has migrated into the media ecosystem via the leering innuendo of Fox News coverage, which specializes in ginned up stories of white victimization, from the New Black Panthers to Shirley Sherrod to Obama’s death panels.

The goal isn’t just to rile white voters up, but to make them feel that their own racist impulses are merely reasonable responses to a culture stacked against them.

***

The most despicable and concerted byproduct of this mindset is the effort, launched over the past few years by Republican state legislators, to disenfranchise poor and minority voters. Using fake claims of voter fraud, they have passed laws expressly designed to make it harder for such populations to cast a ballot.

Given the history of this country—the fact that women were granted suffrage less than a century ago, and that minorities were routinely deprived of the right to vote fifty years ago—it is astonishing that our Fourth Estate has been so quiet in the face of this moral regression.

And that we, the people, have been so meek.

***

The sad truth is that for most of us, “politics” is just something we watch on television, a thing to grumble about, to absorb our personal failings and anxieties.

Most of us won’t even see the worst of the racist garbage that Romney will need to get himself elected. It will be aimed squarely at the enclaves of white voters in the swing states he needs to find his 270 electoral votes. Thanks to Citizens United, you can be sure the pitches will be slickly produced and lavishly funded. No one will say the word “lazy” or the word “nigger.” You’ll just hear about “entitlements” and “government spending” and “welfare.”

***

Which brings us back to Chris Matthews and his outburst of conscience. What makes the clip so revelatory is the very real sense of anguish amid the “political experts” flanking Matthews. They’ve become so acquiescent to the GOP’s coded race-baiting tactics that hearing them called out feels scandalous, forbidden. Their panic is that of journalistic quislings forced, at last, to face the depth of their collusion.

As for Reince Priebus, the current chair of the RNC, he is no Lee Atwater. Atwater at least had the guts to tell the truth.

Priebus can only muster the petulant self-pity of a guilty man. He knows the jig’s up, that the monstrous cynicism of his party has led to these ploys. He knows that he’s stuck with a dud candidate and a platform that, if honestly expressed, would appeal to one percent of the American people. He knows that this strategy is nearing its end, that white Americans will soon lose their place as the dominant and unquestioned majority in this country, and become just another electoral faction.

But Priebus also knows that this is just television, just another segment on another morning show. The idea in politics is to win, not to be honest or fair or even far-sighted. So he sits there and he takes it.

He’s got a billion dollars in the bank.

He’ll have his say.

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BOSTON, Mass. (Rumpus Press) – Seeking to defuse a growing controversy over his involvement with Bain Capital, the leveraged buyout firm he founded, GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney appeared Friday on five network news programs to lie his fucking head off.

In clearly scripted and nearly identical language, Romney claimed he “had no role with regards to Bain Capital after February of 1999”—an effort to evade blame for the company’s subsequent outsourcing and firings.

Multiple filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, list Romney as the company’s “sole stockholder, chairman of the board, chief executive officer, and president” up until 2002.

In a report submitted to the SEC by Bain on February 20, 2001, for instance, Romney is identified as “sole shareholder, sole director, Chief Executive Officer and President of Bain Capital and thus is the controlling person of Bain Capital.”

Romney, who, unless he is lying, is 65, was not asked to explain how he could be the “sole shareholder, sole director, Chief Executive Officer and President of Bain Capital and thus … the controlling person of Bain Capital” while having “no role” in the company.

But investigative reporters were able to deduce a subtle flaw in Romney’s logic: either the SEC form was fraudulent, which is illegal, or Romney was lying his fucking head off.

Complicating matters are yet more forms, which Romney signed and which also reveal him to be lying. In 2002, for instance, the liar Romney signed a financial disclosure form, under the penalty of perjury, declaring he was not involved “in any way” with Bain after 1999, when he relocated to Salt Lake City to take over the Winter Olympics.

That same year, hoping to prove his residency in Massachusetts so he could run for governor, Romney, or El Mentiroso, as he is known amongst Hispanic activists, testified that “there were a number of social trips and business trips” that brought him back to the Massachusetts from Utah, including “board meetings.”

And back in 1999, presumably long before he planned to run for president, Romney told a reporter from the Boston Herald that he would “stay on as a part-timer with Bain, providing input on investment and key personnel decisions.”

Because it is technically impossible to not be involved with an entity “in any way” while also being a part-time employee of that entity who provides input and attends board meetings, Romney can be said, technically, to be lying and is ergo a liar.

In yet another financial disclosure form, Romney testified that he received more than $100,000 to serve as an “executive” at Bain in 2001 and 2002. It is unclear how much more than $100,000 Romney was paid for being an executive with “no role whatsoever” at Bain, because Romney has refused to release more than one year of his tax returns.

But reporters were able to establish that Romney was either paid for doing nothing, or that he actually did some work for Bain during those years—and is thus lying.

Romney, a liar, has a long and storied history of lying. He once claimed to have watched his father, George Romney, march with civil rights leader Martin Luther King. It was later revealed that the senior Romney, who was not, like his son, a prodigious liar, had never marched with King.

At six-feet-two-inches tall, Romney is not only one of history’s tallest presidential candidates, but arguably its most dishonest. He has repeatedly lied about his opponent, asserting that Barack Obama “did not cause the recession, but he made it worse.”

When a reporter from NBC news asked Romney about this claim, noting that virtually every economic indicator, from unemployment to GDP growth to stock prices, has improved under Obama, Romney said, “I didn’t say things were worse. What I said was that the economy hasn’t turned around.”

In other words, when confronted with one of his many lies, Romney, whose real first name is Willard and not Mitt, lied.

Romney also has accused Obama of doubling the deficit, cutting Medicare benefits, raising corporate taxes and failing to make trade deals – all of which are demonstrably false statements. He has lied about the budgetary effect of the President’s health care reform, claiming it will add a trillion dollars to the deficit, when, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, it will in fact reduce the deficit.

Romney also has lied about his evolving policy positions, such as his regard for Ronald Reagan, his willingness to sign a no-tax pledge, and his views on global warming. As governor of Massachusetts, he said, “I respect and will protect a woman’s right to choose.” What he meant by this, as he explained recently, is, “I never really called myself pro-choice,” which is, somewhat predictably, a lie.

Like many habitual liars, Romney has endured occasional disastrous forays into veracity. In January, he told an audience he was “not concerned about the very poor.” The following month, in an attempt to curry favor with voters in Michigan, where many people are poor, he mentioned that his wife, Ann, “drives a couple of Cadillacs.” He also told a heckler that “corporations are people, my friend.” The heckler, it was later learned, was not his friend.

Romney, whose faith of Mormonism includes a practice known as “lying for the Lord,” has also told audiences that his favorite foods are hotdogs and meatloaf cakes. There is, as yet, no evidence to suggest that he is lying.

Thus far, Obama and his campaign officials have refrained from pointing out Romney’s pattern of constant lying. His opponents in the Republican primary were not as deferential.

Asked in January whether he thought Romney was a liar, Newt Gingrich replied, “Yes.”

“You’re calling Mitt Romney a liar?” asked a stunned Norah O’Donnell, the network’s chief White House correspondent.

“Well, you seem shocked by it!” said Gingrich. He went on to note that Romney’s staff had created the Political Action Committee that battered Gingrich with negative ads. “His millionaire friends fund the PAC, he pretends he has nothing to do with the PAC – it’s baloney. He’s not telling the American people the truth.”

Romney, who lies virtually every time he speaks in public, has come under increasing pressure, both from liberals and conservatives, to release his tax returns.

To date, he has released only one full tax return, which showed that he paid 13.9 percent on more than $20 million income—the effective rate generally applied to a family making $20,000. The return, which presumably contains no lies, also revealed that Romney has a Swiss bank account, and unexplained investments in known tax havens such as Bermuda and the Cayman Islands.

Romney’s response to these calls for greater financial candor has been to express an understandable concern, given his own patterns of aspersion: “I’m simply not enthusiastic about giving [the Obama campaign] hundreds or thousands of more pages to pick through, distort, and lie about.”

Romney, who is like many liars extremely handsome, may announce his vice presidential pick as soon as this week, in an effort to distract the media from his refusal to release additional tax returns, and his habitual and possibly illegal deceptions regarding his departure from Bain.

It is not yet clear whether Romney will require his running mate to lie as much as he does.

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Which is fine. The money’s good, enough to send home a bundle every month and to pay for a one-bedroom outside Indio. You’ve got a coffee maker, a microwave, a flat-screen the resort was ready to trash. From where you came, from what you grew up amid, this is a dream life, safety and abundance, and you love America, even if nobody visits, and the only night sounds are the drone of the A/C and the dumb rumble of the big trucks on I-10.

***

But then it’s Friday morning and the guy who acts like your boss – he’s not really your boss, but he could make trouble about your papers, so he gets to deliver orders like they were his – tells you there’s no work today, no work tomorrow, or Sunday. You look at him like, What? Because this is late January, peak season, and the register lists every single room as booked through Monday.

Go home, he says. Don’t come back till Tuesday.

Am I in trouble? you say.

Just get the fuck out of here, he says. Crack some beers. Have a fiesta.

You want to ask someone what’s going on, but you can tell from the way this asshole’s talking to you that he’s scared, too, that whatever’s happening is bigger than he can pretend to understand. So what you do is park yourself behind a berm near the driving range, and watch as the black SUVs glide in from the airport. Men emerge from them, alone, in suits mostly, a few golf shirts. They blink at the sun, glance around, slip into the lobby. You’d like a closer look but you realize, suddenly, that there are private security guys flanking every entrance, standing in the small rods of shadow cast by the columns. There’s a queasy charge in the air that reminds you of something you saw as a little boy, standing outside the municipal building with your father. A phalanx of bodyguards passed by, at their center a plump man in a fedora and sunglasses.

You asked, Is it the governor, papa?

Your father issued a sharp hiss and lowered his head and you understood, without wanting to, that it was your place also to fall silent and look away, that this was the nature of true power, to make itself invisible, and to impose its will through the garish, costumed puppets of the church and state.

***

So you go home. What choice do you have? It’s not your place to solve the mystery of American democracy. But here, in fact, is what’s happening:

Charles and David Koch, inheritors of an oil and chemical fortune, have invited 250 of their wealthiest allies to a retreat which will raise $100 million in a single weekend. This money will be funneled into political action committees to buy television ads against the President. Virtually every single one of these ads will be driven by distortions, or outright lies. They will represent an unprecedented infusion of propaganda into the political discourse of the United States. The special interests once focused on morally malleable elected officials will try their luck lobbying a lazy and aggrieved electorate.

The reason you and the rest of the staff have been sent home—that the restaurants have been closed, the facilities locked down—is because the Koch Brothers don’t want people to know what they’re doing. If word gets out, protestors show up, then the media, then people start asking questions about the motives of those willing to pony up $100 million to shape the electoral process.

***

You can’t know this, but there’s a long back story here, which starts in 1973, when President Richard Nixon resigned under threat of impeachment. The Watergate scandal grew out of a break-in engineered by Republican operatives. They were seeking to illegally tape Nixon’s political opponents. The following year Congress, in an effort to curb corruption, set a strict limit on contributions. Republicans lost badly at the polls.

Ever since, they have been trying to figure out how to get more money into the political process without breaking the law.

It’s worth asking why conservative candidates need all this money and the short answer is because, as a rule, they can’t win on the issues. And they can’t win on the issues for the simple reason that their core economic policies—cut taxes for the rich, cut spending for everyone else, deregulate business—are wildly unpopular.

The way Republican candidates win, therefore, is the way Nixon won the presidency in the first place: by appealing to the primal negative emotions of an electorate willing to set aside its own economic self-interest. His Southern strategy was predicated on scaring white Democrats into voting for him by playing to their anxieties about an empowered African American population.

***

What Republican operatives quickly realized was that they needed a way around those pesky contribution limits. And the way around them was to form political action committees, PACs, that were officially unaffiliated with campaigns, but worked on their behalf.

These “independent groups” not only funneled millions of dollars into elections, but provided cover to candidates who enjoyed the political benefits of sleazy ads while dodging blame for running them. George Bush, for instance, ran for the presidency in 1988 against Massachusetts governor Mike Dukakis. Bush the elder won partly because of an “independent” ad featuring the mug shot of an African American murderer named Willie Horton, who had raped a woman while on furlough from a Massachusetts prison. The message was simple: elect Dukakis and your (white) women get raped.

The Bush campaign claimed to have nothing to do with the ad. But Bush’s media consultant, Roger Ailes, later joked about creating a version for the official campaign: “The only question is whether we should show Willie Horton with a knife in his hand, or without.” Ailes currently works as chairman and C.E.O. of Fox News.

Sixteen years later, George W. Bush was the recipient of a similar gift, when a group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth produced an ad questioning the valor of Bush’s opponent, John Kerry, who served in Vietnam. The ad deflected attention from the fact that Bush avoided serving in Vietnam.

Because these ads are, by nature, salacious and incendiary, the corporate media covers them obsessively, thus magnifying their impact. In this way, campaigns drift further and further from matters of actual policy.

***

From time to time, legislators have sought to limit the money in politics. But Republicans recently have found solace in the judiciary. Stacked with conservative appointees, the Supreme Court ruled two years ago, in Citizens United, that the government cannot limit spending for political purposes by corporations and unions.

The result has been a deluge of corporate money into PACs, and the expansion of a kind shadow army, consisting of operatives and ad men utterly unmoored from the codes of conduct that govern traditional political campaigns. To extend the metaphor: political war in this country has gone rogue. It is no longer waged by soldiers loyal to the Geneva conventions, but mercenaries who are beholden to nobody but the men who pay them.

***

And this, of course, is what brings us back to the Renaissance Esmeralda in Indian Wells, and to you, the worker sent home for the weekend. Because what the Koch Brothers are doing, while perfectly legal, is morally unsightly. Americans take pride in their democracy. They don’t like feeling that they live in some primitive backwater, where oligarchs meet in secret to buy elections.

And you yourself, though an immigrant in this place, mostly reviled, probably want to believe this, too. That’s partly why you came here. It wasn’t just because there was money to be had, but because you assumed that in America power resided with the many, not the few.

And this is why you feel such a strange foreboding as you watch these men gathering on the grand rotunda. You will feel it later on as well, in the night, the same reverberations of dread, as you gaze out your window at the flicker of the screens in the homes around you, the people staring into them, hypnotized by rage and innuendo, ready to believe. You will be reminded of the sudden obedience in your father’s eyes, the way he consented to his tyranny, the way he wouldn’t look up.

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That sounds cruel, but I don’t want to be cruel. There’s enough of that in the cultural bloodstream. I’m genuinely curious. So if any Mitt Romney supporters read this I’d love to hear what it feels like for you, especially if you’ve ever chanted Mitt.

I myself sort of feel for Romney. He keeps having to claim it wasn’t his idea to run for President over and over, which sounds disingenuous, and not just because Romney lacks the gift of sounding genuine. Consider his biography. He was born into tremendous wealth and ambition. His father was Governor of Michigan and ran for President. His mother ran for Senate. It’s not exactly subtle.

Mostly, when I see Romney, I think about this passage from The Grapes of Wrath:

“If you who own the things people must have could understand this, you might preserve yourself. If you could separate causes from results, if you could know that Paine, Marx, Jefferson, Lenin were results, not causes, you might survive. But that you cannot know. For the quality of owning freezes you forever into ‘I,’ and cuts you off forever from the ‘we’.”

***

I think about this insight not just in relation to Romney, but in relation to the manner in which we, as a people, think about and discuss politics.

There is almost no explicit discussion of governance, of the policies advocated by the candidates in question and the practical implications of those policies upon what the Founding Fathers (and later Steinbeck) referred to as the we. Politics, in other words, has become divorced from morality.

It’s become fashionable to blame this on the “media.” But our Fourth Estate, with a few exceptions[2], operates not at the behest of a creed or corporate sponsor, but simply by the rules of late-model capitalism: to mint profit. If they treat politics as a form of athletic combat, focusing on the polls score and trash talk, if they maroon their coverage a sea of celebrity gossip, it is only because we pay them to do so. They are merely the lens through which we choose to gaze.

***

So that’s what the WiG (The Week in Greed) is up against: our own willingness to think like owners, to be frozen into a suicidal self-regard, to ignore the moral outcomes of our electoral decisions.

It will also endeavor to cut through some of the more egregious bullshit that passes for coverage. Yes, I’m going to have to listen to NPR. (But only in the car, honest!)

A few days ago, for example, on Talk of the Nation, the host asked why the Republican candidates who stood no chance of winning the nomination were staying in the race. The expert panel droned politely. Nobody mentioned that running for President has become a lucrative job for political wash-ups, or that presidential candidates are, almost by definition, monsters of narcissism.

***

A few obvious questions:

*Will WiG (The Week in Greed) be following the campaigns on, like, a bus or something?

No. Current funding levels do not accommodate such coverage. Nor would I seek to compete with professionals such as David Foster Wallace or Stephen Elliott. This is more like an armchair psychoanalysis of the process.

*So you won’t have any “access” to the candidates?

No. But I would argue that the candidates, in an existential sense, have no access to themselves. I will therefore, on occasion, fabricate interviews with them.

*Will the WiG be related to the various Rumpus lamentations?

Only in the sense that they come from the same HQ of despair.

*But won’t the WiG have a liberal bias?

It will have a bias against greed, self-deception, disregard for the truth, and the more poignant instances of projection. Plenty of liberals indulge in these vices. I’m one of them.

*Can I send hate mail?

Totally. Direct vitriol to stevealmondjoy AT gmail.com.

*Will you be writing stoned?

Yes.

***

What else?

From time to time I will print items that strike me as particularly revealing of the current cultural climate. Here is an example. It is a letter to the editor by a man named John Anthony that appeared in Metro, the free daily distributed around subway stations in various major American cities.

Obama must be a sociopath

In my opinion, Obama is steeped in a repressed anger stemming from his dysfunctional childhood that was forged in the flames of elitist, anarchical and militant ideologies and manifested in a thirst for control and revenge. Look up “antisocial personality disorder” – I strongly believe we have elected a full-blown sociopath to the presidency. His polished charm, fluid deception, Olympian conceit, pedantic admonishings, fragile ego and rat-quick temper are signs of a seriously disturbed man. In this light, his actions are understandable, even logical. He’s angry and now he’s getting even.

The letter is dated April 10, 2009. That is, three months after Mr. Obama’s inauguration.

***

Something tells me Mr. John Anthony was not one of those folks chanting Mitt! Mitt! Mitt! a few days ago. (I see him more as a Ron Paul guy.) But he’s just as American as the rest of us. He’s part of the we.

Next stop: South Carolina, birthplace of the war of Northern Aggression.

[1] Broken Dream Machine aka “The Internet”

[2]Fox News pushes corporate interests that mimic the Republican agenda. But its content is essentially psychological. It’s Sesame Street for the aggrieved. It works because there are millions of aging white people in this country who enjoy feeling ripped off.

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