Mythic Alpha Male Rides In From The West
Roundup of commentary that seeks the deeper meaning of it all starts Washington Post’s Broder, going Goodall. In the Gombe reserve that was the Oxford stage, Obama submitted to alpha chimp McCain:
There were no knockout blows in the first presidential debate of the fall, but John McCain outpointed Barack Obama often enough to encourage his followers that he can somehow overcome the odds and deny the Democrats the victory that has seemed to be in store for them.
It was a small thing, but I counted six times that Obama said that McCain was “absolutely right” about a point he had made. No McCain sentences began with a similar acknowledgment of his opponent’s wisdom, even though the two agreed on Iran, Russia and the U.S. financial crisis far more than they disagreed.
That suggests an imbalance in the deference quotient between the younger man and the veteran senator — an impression reinforced by Obama’s frequent glances in McCain’s direction and McCain’s studied indifference to his rival.
Whether viewers caught the verbal and body-language signs that Obama seemed to accept McCain as the alpha male on the stage in Mississippi, I do not know.
But it reinforced my impression that McCain was the more aggressive debater. He flung the adjectives that stick in a listener’s mind, calling Obama “naive” and therefore “dangerous.”
Todd Gitlin at LA Times goes mythic, with a little mix and match. Clash of the Titans is Teddy Roosevelt vs the Shape Shifter:
This election campaign is about more than its issues, slogans, proposals, strategies, tactics, attacks or counterattacks. Like most presidential elections, it represents a collision of myths.
…
McCain himself invokes Theodore Roosevelt, the Rough Rider who, despite his New York origins, ranched in South Dakota and hunted throughout the West. Those who admire McCain tend to believe that it was men of this sort — rugged individualists, plain-spoken, straight-talking, self-sufficient men at home in nature (not in our effete cities) — who settled the West on their own. The myth discounts the immense role of the federal government in conquering the natives, seeing that the railroads were built, adjudicating disputes, arranging for water. No matter: Print the legend. In this image of the Old West, history belongs to the man who takes charge, the warrior in command who knows how to shoot and how to lead others to shoot as well.
To McCain’s incarnation of this powerful archetype has been added the sidekick Sarah Palin. Palin mobilizes a powerful and unusual — powerful partly because it is unusual — supplementary combination of myths. She is Annie Oakley, the sharpshooter who foolhardy men underestimate at their peril even if she has a penchant for tall tales. But Palin is also Wonder Woman, the super-heroine whose exploits and attractions appeal to both sexes. And she is Aimee Semple McPherson, the onetime revivalist and moralist of the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel. In the imagination of her followers, Palin is some combination of Glamour, Outdoor Life, Playboy and DC Comics.
…
If the Republican ticket harmonizes with deep mythic currents, the Democrats this year are pioneering, and a bit scrambled, in their mythic significance. Obama is the quintessential outsider — a “sojourner,” the New York Times’ David Brooks has called him. He hails from exotic Hawaii, alien Indonesia, elegant Harvard and down-and-dirty Chicago, all at the same time. To his devotees, he is part city-slicker, part man of the world; to his enemies, precisely this combination makes him suspect. Like the Lone Ranger, he rides into town to serve a community in need, but in a surprising twist, this Lone Ranger is closer to the color of Tonto.
Mythically, therefore, Obama is elusive, Protean, a shape-shifter who, when not beloved, arouses suspicion. Perhaps he is that object of envy and derision, a “celebrity,” as the McCain campaign suggested, but he’s also an egghead. He’s the professor — but one who can sink the shot from beyond the three-point circle. He too has a sidekick, but, if you judge by their resumes, it is as if Robin has chosen Batman. One thing is clear: He is not a man of the ranch. Personifying a welter of archetypes, he thrills some, confounds others and jams circuits. Some people ask, “Who is this guy?”
Gitlin doesn’t get into it, but I’d suggest a myth without a clear storyline and a mythic character … without mythic character … is a legend in search of its own deeper meaning.
NYT’s Maureen Dowd mixes, matches her metaphors, can’t seem to settle on one, but starts with Hollywood, so we’ll call it 2008 as theater:
The first debate seemed like the perfect moment for Barack Obama to re-enact the Code Red courtroom scene from “A Few Good Men,” to slide under John McCain’s skin and irritate until he goaded McCain into doing exactly what he really wanted to do: tell off the whippersnapper who’d never bled for his country.
It would have been easy for smarty-pants Obama to get in the face of the temperamental older guy, just as Tom Cruise did with Jack Nicholson, to push him into erupting into some version of that climactic speech, like, “Deep down, in places you don’t talk about at your fancy faculty club, you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall.”
The timing was ideal. McCain was so aggressively erratic as he did his free-form break dance around the economy last week that it seemed the only possible explanation was that he was creating a wild diversion to distract people from Sarah Palin’s stunningly junior varsity appearance with Katie Couric.
Once Garbo began to speak, and people realized that Palin had a few key lacunae in her understanding of the globe and even of her running mate’s record, the myth of the Alaska superwoman continued to unravel.
Between her nonsensical answers and his complicity in the deregulation that led to the financial catastrophe, he felt he needed to take another crazy gamble.
So he theatrically suspended his campaign and rushed back to get in the way of a bipartisan solution to the economic turmoil. When the two macho guys of the Republican Party — W. and McCain — took extreme measures not to look emasculated, they ended up emasculating themselves.
All of which raises the question. Why didn’t Dowd’s Hollywood hunk get all Cruise on McCain? Maybe he can’t handle the role. Dowd angsts, but fails answer:
Given the past week, the debate should have been a cinch for Obama. But, just as in the primaries, he willfully refuses to accept what debates are about. It’s not a lecture hall; it’s a joust. It’s not how cerebral you are. It’s how visceral you are. You need memorable, sharp, forceful and witty lines.
Even when McCain sneered, “I don’t need any on-the-job training, I’m ready to go at it right now,” Obama didn’t directly respond, but veered off into a story about his father being from Kenya and how he got his name. (Thanks, Barack, we got that from your book. It’s great for a memoir, but not a debate.)
McCain kept painting Obama as naïve, and dangerous, insisting that he “doesn’t quite understand or doesn’t get it.”
Obama should have responded “Senator, I understand perfectly, I’m just saying you’re wrong.”
On the surge, he could have said that McCain was the arsonist who wanted to be praised for the great job he’s doing putting out the fire he started.
When Obama took quiet umbrage at McCain’s attack about troop-funding, he could have pounded the lectern and said with real anger: “John, I am sick and tired of you suggesting that I would take funds away from our brave soldiers. I no more voted for that than you did when you voted against our funding proposals that would have imposed a timetable. And unlike you, I did not vote against funding increases for the troops that have come home with devastating physical and mental injuries.”
And who cares what Henry Kissinger thinks? He was wrong 35 years ago, and it’s only gotten worse since then.
Obama did a poor job of getting under McCain’s skin. Or maybe McCain did an exceptional job of not letting Obama get under his skin. McCain nattered about earmarks and Obama ran out of gas.
We’re left waiting for a knockout debate.
Good luck with that, Mo.
Topics: ancient mysteries, pols
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 10:36 am on Sunday, September 28, 2008
2 Responses to “Mythic Alpha Male Rides In From The West”
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September 28th, 2008 at 1:28 pm
The Shape Shifter. Perfect.
September 28th, 2008 at 4:32 pm
“We’re left waiting for a knockout debate.” Best three out of five, four out of seven?
Cheers