If The Truth Fits

When I stayed up late last week watching the drama unfold in the U.S. election, I was keeping up with the opinions of people that weren’t holograms by seeing what all the Americans that I follow on Twitter were saying. It was a fun way of gauging the zeitgeist in America at the time, I think that all but one of the people that I saw tweets from were Democrat/pro-Obama, so naturally they were pretty excited. One thing that I did notice was that when John McCain gave his concession speech (which was admirable considering it was way past his bed-time) lots of people commented on how gracious his speech was, and all of a sudden he’d managed to elevate himself above the negative campaigning that had kept his campaign wading in the mud for the past few months.

It was in that moment I realised that if we had been watching ‘McCain the loser’ for the past year that a lot more people might have wanted to vote for him. For me, we were seeing the real John McCain in those few minutes for the first time in well over a year, the John McCain that I actually thought would actually make a pretty good candidate (and a pretty good President) when I saw him on a few Daily Show interviews and also in a couple of articles I read online. That McCain was a man that I could respect because of the content of his character and the way that he held himself, after he sold out his own beliefs it felt as if I was being forced to respect him because he is a war hero (respect he obviously deserves, but I did feel it was rammed down our throats somewhat).

It made me wonder who would be President elect right now if McCain had stayed true to himself throughout the campaign rather than pandering to the interests of people that he wouldn’t have necessarily seen eye to eye with a few years ago. I understand that the fine art of compromise is all part of the political game, but if you bend over backwards for everyone then it becomes pretty obvious, pretty quickly, that you don’t have too much of a spine, and if I know Americans, that is not a quality that they particularly care for. Hopefully now that the election is over the McCain of a few years ago can return and do some good, not as much as he would have achieved if he had become President, of course, but I’m pretty sure he didn’t want all of that “saving the world” pressure that Barack’s under now anyway.

Of course, I’m pretty sure that if JM had spent a little more time thinking up his pick for Vice President beyond “oh, she looks nice” then things would have been a bit closer, but it sure as hell wouldn’t have been more interesting.

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Yes, I know that most people would have reported this story yesterday when it actually became a reality, but I thought that it would be a pretty good idea to wait a day to let it all sink in, and to make sure that Barack Obama was in fact the President elect, and that this wasn’t all some cruel hoax and that George Bush was going to have a live address to the nation in which he decides that his Presidency is going to turn the corner right around 2011 and that it’ll probably be for the best if he just stayed in his current job. To be fair to GWB, with the job market the way it is at the moment (especially as a man over 60), its probably going to be easier for him to change the constitution to allow him a third term than to try and get another job that isn’t being a greeter at Walmart.

Okay, Barack Obama is really going to be the President of America, as long as he spends the next few months surrounded by bullet proof glass (come on, not everyone in the US has made enough ’social progress’ quite yet). The official party line here at Pop Vulture was that we weren’t backing one candidate over the other, but I think it was pretty obvious whose side we were on, which is why I had goosebumps at around 11pm (EST) on Tuesday night. I mentioned in my last post that I was staying up here in France to watch the election, and I made it all the way to the end (or the beginning, if you’d prefer), and I think that the tiredness of staying up until 6:30am heightened my emotions to a level that Americans were feeling. When Obama came out an made that speech in Grant Park, and my God what a speech it was, I’m willing to admit that at moments I was welling up, and I’m well known for my heart of stone, so Barack Obama has done something pretty there, in terms of emotion for me, he’s reached the heights of the OC series finale (yes, I went there).

A lot of people on the news that are rather older than me have been saying for the past couple of days that they never thought they would see a black man as a President in their lifetime. Most of them have probably got 20-30 more years ‘experience’ than I do, but I didn’t think that I’d see it in my lifetime either. I just kept thinking that something was going to go wrong, millions of people going into voting booths and with a pen hovering over the Obama/Biden box, they thought “sure, there’s no actual evidence that Barack Obama is a muslim/terrorist/elitist/socialist/communist… but… I dunno” and lowering their pen to McCain/Palin, or deciding to just throw their vote away altogether and vote for Bob Barr.

I think that 10 years ago, no matter how well qualified or deserving of the office, a black person could not have been President, I realised that technically they could, but I don’t think America was ready for it. Even a couple of years ago I think it would have been a much tougher task, which is why I think that the Onion (yes, the website dedicated to news that isn’t true) hit the nail on the head with their article ‘Nation Finally Shitty Enough to Make Social Progress‘. Still, way to go, America.

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As I type this blog post, the results are starting to come in for the 2008 US election. I’m going to be staying up until this thing is decided, and as Wolf Blitzer just said “its early in the night” on CNN I get the feeling that I could be in for a fairly long night. It would be silly for me to try and call states and inform you about the polls, but the team over at Mashable (a blog about social media and websites) have put together a great list of sites that can guide you through what is a pretty confusing process. They’re calling it the Ultimate Election Day 2008 Toolkit and whilst I haven’t exactly been hunting around for other Election Day Toolkits, if you’re intending to follow the election online it will probably be a very good place for you to go for links.

Whether Obama or McCain is the winner, one thing that has really inspired me about the past couple of days is the level of activism and interest displayed by the American people in this election, resulting in what will probably be one of the highest levels of voter turnout in US history. I know that Obama has energised a lot of voters that wouldn’t have necessarily been too interested, and the McCain has managed to awaken a lot of Republicans, but I still found it very impressive. It almost seems that amongst young people its actually ‘cool’ to be interested in politics and that there’s a bit of a stigma if you don’t vote, which is pretty amazing amongst a voting bloc typically known for stubbornly sticking to apathy.

In Britain I remember things being extremely different in the past couple of elections that I’ve been involved with (I’ve only been able to vote in 1 general election, and a couple of local ones). Voter disinterest and apathy is rife amongst all races, classes, and backgrounds, something which I find pretty depressing. I don’t really know why, maybe people have lost faith in the process, maybe they’ve lost faith in politicians of all ideologies (why bother voting when you don’t believe in any of them?). Or perhaps, and this is a theory that’s fairly ‘out there’, they’re actually all pretty happy, and figure that whoever is in charge things will be pretty much the same. Still, as someone who studied politics at university for 3 years and has had a keen interest for many years more than that, I’ve always believed that voting is important and that if you don’t vote, then you haven’t made your voice heard and you don’t deserve the right to complain about the peopke who represent you. I’m not saying that people who don’t vote shouldn’t have the same human rights as voters, but I feel that there’s something disingenuous about people bitching about their government when they couldn’t even be bothered to send in a postal vote or head down to the polling station.

We Brits and other people in Europe often sling a lot of mud at Americans for a lot of reasons, but its days like this that make me really believe in people, and it makes me proud to be coming to America next month.

Yesterday I wrote about a few different celebrities and how they weren’t fans of Sarah Palin, one of which was Lindsay Lohan. Just to refresh your memory, between attending glamorous social events and walking around with Samantha Ronson having her picture taken by paparazzi, LiLo blogged on her MySpace that she “cannot hold [her] tongue anymore when it comes to Sarah Palin,” and then laid into her for a few hundreds words (one of the few things that Lindsay and I have in common) before instructing her legions of fans to go out and vote for Obama. After overcoming my own prejudice that someone like Lindsay Lohan (professional eye candy) could have a decent opinion, I read through what she had to say and found that, much to my chagrin, I agreed with much she had to say. Yes, she’s not exactly the world’s best blogger (it’s polite to link to your sources!), but I think that her fundamental points make a lot of sense. Oh, now is probably a good time to point out once again that we here at Pop Vulture don’t necessarily endorse or support one candidate over another, however blatantly obvious it is that I favor one over the other (at least on the Vice Presidential end of things).

It turns out that Lindsay doesn’t want to just soapbox on her blog (one of the many thing Lindsay and I don’t have in common) and offered to host a series of events in support of Obama that would try and energize young voters, because apparently young people don’t like Obama enough yet, but she her advances were rebuffed, which I assume is something that doesn’t happen to Lohan very often. Apparently, a top source from the Obama campaign told the Chicago Sun Times that the Mean Girls star ”is not exactly the kind of high-profile star who would be a positive for us.”

I can see where Obama’s people are coming from, not so long ago it was hard to hear the words “Lindsay Lohan” without them being preceded by “troubled star” or followed by “is heading to rehab again,” but beyond the fairly mild scandal of her getting a girlfriend Lindsay seems to have stopped being being such tabloid fodder. Trust me, I’m pretty surprised at myself to be taking the position of defending a celebrity, but I think that if a girl like Lindsay can turn it around in the high-pressure and high-temptation world of Hollywood that she wouldn’t actually be the worst person that they could have to front a few events.

Y’know, Heidi Montag didn’t have this trouble when she announced she will be voting for John McCain, in fact, he took it really well, saying that “she’s a very talented actress.” (hold up, The Hills isn’t real?). Yeah, its really reassuring when a potential President looks straight at a camera and lies like that, isn’t it?

Since I’m a Brit writing for an American audience, I feel like I should discuss 9/11 on this anniversary simply because I’m sure its something that’s dominating the media today in the USA and is dominating the thoughts of many Americans around the world. I don’t don’t want to give some kind of faux-patriotic speech though, and I don’t want to be too sentimental either, because I think to do so would be disingenuous. When the attacks occurred I was 16 and in school, thousands of miles away from the plane crashes. I just don’t have a true frame of reference to understand what an event like that can do to a person, a city, or a country as a whole. The July 7th Tube Attacks in London, but I don’t think they had the same kind of impact on the national psyche. Yes, we were shocked, but the images on television and in print lacked the raw horror of planes hitting iconic symbols of America and what it represents. That’s why I don’t feel that I can write a heartfelt message of hope and solidarity without the words ringing hollow.

I can, however, go straight from that above post to discussing stories in the news which have appeared today (what are the chances) that are all related, in one way or another, to the tragic events of September 11th, 2001.

First up, 2008 has become the deadliest year for US soldiers in Afghanistan. I still think that people believe in the invasion of Afghanistan, perhaps initially some Americans looked upon it as a vengeance thing, but in time I’d hope that once people became more aware of what the Taliban did to their own population, that it stopped being an issue to putting right the wrongs of what happened to their own country, but to freeing the Afghanis of Taliban tyranny. I don’t know what has caused the increase in deaths, it could be that American soldiers have moved into more dangerous areas, insurgents have changed their tactics, perhaps more soldiers have been moved into frontline positions, there are lots of reasons why this could be the deadliest year of the war, but its a pretty amazing coincidence that this unfortunate landmark was achieved on today of all days. Oh, and George Bush’s solution to fixing their current woes in Afghanistan? Sending in less people than he’s been advised to… because that worked out so well in Iraq

Second, and related to the “we aren’t winning the war on terrorism” theme of the day, General Petraeus, the outgoing US commander in Iraq, has said that the US-led coalition in Iraq has a long hard road ahead of them, and that ‘he did not know that he would ever use the word “victory”‘ in relation to Iraq. Well, of course he’ll never use the word ‘victory’ in Iraq, he’s about to leave!

Third, McCain and Obama have called a truce to election related sparring to commemorate 9/11 together. I like this, its one of those things that he-affirms your faith in politicians actually having a soul, even if their teams probably decided that ‘working’ on 9/11 would be more damaging to their campaigns than not doing it. According to the AP article they also suspended all campaign ads that were critical of their opponent, so presumably they were still running adverts that said how awesome they were.

Lastly, and with extremely tenuous links to my main theme, it turns out that the US-Mexico border fence is running behind schedule and will cost $400 million dollars more than previously assumed, and consider that they’d appropriated around $2.5 billion for it already. The fence is only going to be 670 miles long, and the border is 1,969 miles long, do they really think that the main thing stopping illegal immigrants is being to lazy to go around it?

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Can you believe that my last post was about how I’m a bit of a political pushover, consciously knowing that I put too much value on aesthetics and showmanship rather than integrity, personality, voting record and policies, and then the Republicans went and picked Sarah Palin, a woman who is definitely not ugly, as their pick for Vice Presidential nominee?

It’s almost as if the Republicans were huddled in a dark room last week and started to get a bit desperate choosing their VP, a bored intern started surfing some blogs and someone shouted across the room from behind a glowing LCD screen “hey, there’s a British guy that doesn’t care about whether the candidate is actually any good or not, he’s only interested if the person looks and sounds good.” With that, it was decided, Sarah Palin, despite not being the most experienced candidate in the world, was picked as a Vice Presidential candidate. Yes, in just a week of blogging for Pop Vulture, I have managed to change the American political landscape forever, obviously there’s no way to prove that, but similarly, there’s no way to not prove it, so let’s just assume that I’m the cause of this nomination. Imagine what I’m going to achieve next week (Madonna tour cancelled due to poor tickets sales perhaps? *Crosses fingers*)!

I don’t actually know that much about Palin, everything that I see on the net and hear on TV seems to be gossipy and often irrelevant, her 17 year old daughter is pregnant, she came second in a beauty contest, she doesn’t know what a Vice President does (although I’d presume that she probably does now), she might be a computer hacker(!), she enjoys eating caribou burgers, and she goes for midnight runs. I got all of those news stories just by searching for ‘Sarah Palin’ on Google News, and they were severely outnumbering the amount of ’serious’ stories that would teach you about the woman politically rather than just giving us some trivia. It’s frustrating, but there are websites out there that will help you find out what you need to find out about her (and lots of other politicians) to help you make the decision for yourself. Mashable, a blog that usually deals with Social Networking and media, put together a post about 7 resources you can use to help you learn about Sarah Palin that are more apolitical than more sources. And of course, you should also check out Sarah Palin ‘Facts’, which provides you with vital information like this, “Sarah Palin once bit the head off a live Osprey snatched from the air as it tried to fly off with a fish she caught.”

I almost feel sorry for her in a way, being a woman in politics means that there are so many more expectations of her. She needs to appear to be a good wife and family woman, yet strong and independent, able to make tough decisions on her own. Since she’s now regarded as being a ‘hot politician’, or, if your mind is stuck in the gutter, a ‘VPILF’ (I’m not going to tell you, Google it if you’re confused), she has to make sure that she never has a hair out of place, but that she doesn’t spend too much time on her looks, otherwise she’ll just be giving more ammo to the pundits that believe she’s all show and no go.

I know that Obama, Biden, McCain and Palin are all going to be walking on a tightrope for the next couple of months, trying to balance out every aspect of their lives so that they can appeal to as many people as possible, but I think that’s Palin’s rope is going to be an awful lot thinner than everyone elses.

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I know it feels as if you can’t turn on the TV or pick up a newspaper without seeing Barack Obama staring back at you, but I’m sure that you’d like hear the views a British guy who lives a few thousand miles away and won’t be voting in November’s election has to think about Obama the day after he delivered the most important speech in his career… so far.

I like the guy. Oh, I feel that right now is probably a pretty good time to point out that the official stance on political affiliation here at Pop Vulture is that we don’t do it, we want you to make your own decisions, because it’s your vote. So if you agree with what I say, that’s awesome, but if not, that’s cool too, like I said, it’s your your vote, and I would be scared of being the guy that swayed you one way or another, that’s just way too much pressure to put on a young man.

Anyway, to get back on point, I like Barack Obama. The thing is, I don’t really care what his policies are, I don’t really care what his voting track record is, I don’t really care about his lack of foreign policy experience, all that really draws me to him is a vague feeling of, well, hope (I was really hoping to avoid using that word) when he’s making speeches. When he speaks I actually believe that he might actually change things (change, another word I’d hoped to avoid in this article). I’ve already accepted that logically its a bad way to decide who I think should be the next President of the United States, even I know that decision should be based upon logic and reasoning based upon evidence, not the way a man talks when he’s stood on a stage in front of seventy-five thousand people, but here we are, I can’t change now, can I?

I guess it all comes down to how much of a sucker I am when it comes to ‘the big speech’ in movies. One of my favourite movies of all time is ‘Any Given Sunday’, and I know that the film itself isn’t particularly good, but Al Pacino makes grand, inspiring speeches every pretty regularly for its duration, so it found itself being rapidly propelled up the list of ‘films that I think awesome’ simply because of the speeches. Similarly, when I was talking about Aaron Sorkin being interested in writing a film about Facebook yesterday, I mentioned how I thought that Martin Sheen’s character in the West Wing was a great President, he also made great speeches. Of course, it was pretty easy for Martin Sheen to be a great President, its always easy to make someone seem great when all the events are dealt with are fictional. The Barack Obama story, how he grew up and became who he is today, almost sounds like a fictional tale to me, as if someone invented him so that in 50 or 100 years time someone could write a inspirational film telling the people of the future how the world worked before the robots were in charge.

As if I hadn’t given you fair enough warning about not deciding who to vote for based upon my opinions, here’s something that should make sure you get the message. I quite like George Bush. Not as a President, the past seven and a bit years have clearly been a disaster, I wouldn’t even trust him to run a bake-sale, but I think he would be absolutely great at a barbecue, I bet he’d turn up with steaks as thick as the Bible.

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