Speaking to Politico‘s John F. Harris about the rah-rah-Obama speeches being given by Bill and Hillary Clinton tonight and Wednesday night, a veteran of the Clinton White House who remains close to both of them said “they are both going to do what they have to do…that does not mean they will enjoy it.”
In other words, the words in their speeches aren’t in question; it’s the tone and the pizazz that Billary will put into the delivery that people will be examining tonight (and tomorrow night) with a fine tooth comb.
If Hillary feels she can deliver tonight’s speech with 80% passion levels without anyone accusing her of being a wee bit half-hearted, she’ll give it 80%. And if she senses on the podium tonight that she can give it 70% without anyone saying she’s half-hearted, she’ll give it 70%. But there’s no way in hell she’ll give it 100% or even 90% — no way. Because she’d be very much at peace with saying “I told you so” on 11.5.08 if and when Obama loses. She’d love to run again in 2012. All she has to do is play the Obama game in subtle cutthroat fashion. Put on the show and do just enough so people can’t accuse her (or her husband) of undermining, blah, blah. Make no mistake — she’s The Beast and always will be.

Joseph Costigan, a political director for a union based in Dearborn, Michigan, called Unite Here, has told N.Y. Times columnist Bob Herbert that “we’ve been talking with staff in different parts of the Midwest, and we’re all struggling to some extent with the problem of white workers who will not vote for Barack Obama because of his color. There’s no question about it. It’s a very powerful thing to get over for some folks.”

We’ve all wondered and worried about the Undercurrent of Ugliness that lives in the hearts of lunchbucket Americans out there when it comes to race, and Tuesday, November 4th — Election Day — may, I fear, show statistically just how ugly this country really and truly is.
Think of that episode on Boris Karloff‘s Thriller called “The Cheaters” — a pair of magic glasses that shows what people are really thinking and feeling inside — and how it ended with the lead actor putting them on and then looking at his own reflection in a mirror, and screaming and clawing his face over what he saw. His screams, I fear, will be America’s screams on the evening of Tuesday, 11.4.
The right wing talk-backers on HE can spew their usual diseased crap, but when people say they prefer this or that candidate because of any number of factors, fine. Voting records, loyalties, character issues, intellectual capacity, whatever. But when it all boils down to one thing — when they say “I won’t vote for candidate A because of the tint of his skin and the shape of his nose and the suspected allegiances that we associate with people of his sort”…that’s simply evil.
As Chris Matthews said last night, Barack and Michelle worked hard and played by the rules and built their lives into a kind of American Dream, and for people out there to just wave it away and say “naaah, he’s a Muslim and not one of us so I’m not voting for him” — that is just flat-out sickening.
Costigan’s statement points again to the increasing likelihood that the 11.4 vote will be a squeaker, and that Obama has a decent chance of losing if the Generation of Shame (i.e., the under 25s) doesn’t vote for the Illinois Senator in sufficient numbers to counter-balance the 55-and-over racists.
Aaah, but will they? The youth vote is supposed to be energized this year like never before, with a good 75% or 80% favoring Obama….something like that. But we all know what happens when you place your bets on the youth vote, right? We certainly found out what the youth vote is worth in ’04. That’s why we call them the Generation of Shame ’round these parts.
“Talk for more than a few minutes with an Obama supporter in a white middle-class or working-class area and you’ll hear about a friend or relative or co-worker who has a real problem with the candidate. When Jack Davis‘s wife, Joan, who also plans to vote for Senator Obama, was asked about Democrats that she knew who would not vote for him, she replied, “My mother! She’s 85 years old. I’m sorry to say, but she will not vote for him.”
“Costigan believes — hopes — that the number of people holding [racially negative] views is relatively small, and that Mr. Obama, now with the help of Senator Biden, can surmount that obstacle.
“Surmounting it will be tough. Not only do the polls show this to be a close race, but the polls, when it comes to Senator Obama, cannot be trusted. It is frequently the case that a statistically significant percentage of white voters will lie to pollsters — or decline to state their preference — in races in which one candidate is black and the other white.
“After many years of watching black candidates run for public office, and paying especially close attention to this year’s Democratic primary race, I’ve developed my own (very arbitrary) rule of thumb regarding the polls in this election:
“Take at least two to three points off of Senator Obama’s poll numbers, and assume a substantial edge for Senator McCain in the breakdown of the undecided vote. Using that formula, Barack Obama is behind in the national election right now.”

It is probably inevitable that Sally Hawkins, the cheerful and indefatigable Poppy in Mike Leigh‘s Happy-Go-Lucky (Miramax, 10.10), will be talked up as a Best Actress nominee once the film starts showing around. (It opened in England last April and came out last week on DVD over there.) An elementary-school teacher who happy-vibes just about everything and everyone, Polly is an unstoppable alpha dispenser — spirited, effervescent — and Hawkins certainly inhabits her whole-hog.

Sally Hawkins in Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky

She carries Happy-Go-Lucky, she carries its spirit, and she does handle herself well in the sad-shock scenes at the end of the film with Eddie Marsan, the driving instructor with the correct manner and ferociously uptight, anti-immigrant attitude. In fact, the last 15 to 20 minutes contain the best stuff in the film, and I throughly respect Hawkins for her performance in this section. She handles her scenes with quiet maturity and resigned grace.
But her Poppy character epitomizes a sort of person I’ve never been able to tolerate — the emotional fascist who’s relentless about being happy, smiling and sparkly, but who also insists — here’s the problem — on forcing her bubbliness upon others (acquaintances, strangers, anyone) with the ultimate idea of converting them to their way of looking at life, or at least giving them a contact high to take home.
What’s especially oppressive and dictatorial about smiley-faced brownshirts like Poppy is their determination to gently bully you into submission. If you don’t get on board with the mutual-alpha, they’ll interrogate you like Laurence Olivier‘s Zell (the Nazi character in Marathon Man), looking at you with a quizzical grin and asking, “Are you happy?” or “Having a bad day?” Speaking from experience, I can advise that the best response is “I was feeling pretty good, actually, until you asked me that.”

Eddie Marsan, Hawkins

Imagine if Poppy was a born-again Christian asking total strangers, “So have you accepted Jesus as your personal savior?” and “Would you like to be saved?” The police would be called, she’d be cuffed and thrown into a van and taken down to the station. But there’s no recourse with the happy-happies.
I hate people who ask me if I’m happy because, of course, they’re not really asking me that. They’re saying they’ve observed my behavior, examined my vibe and decided that I just don’t have the right peppy-happy attitude, and that I need to adjust it right away so that it pleases them. I do meet these people from time to time. They’re like Moonies or Hara Krishna devotees — they’ve got the beautiful inner force inside them, and they know they’ve got that wondrous glow in their faces, and they’re determined to beat you over the head with it until you’re on your knees, bloody and begging them to stop.
Poppy feels like a kind of symbol of the whole happy-face movement of the ’70s, which for me represented a kind of alpha-vibe fascism that you could sense every so often in certain liberal-minded circles. Get with the positive attitudes or else! The late George Carlin once said on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” that “when fascism comes to America, it will not be in brown and black shirts. It will not be with jack-boots. It will be Nike sneakers and smiley shirts. Smiley-smiley.”

The French poster for Leigh’s film, called Be Happy over there, has a slogan at the bottom: “Adoptez la Poppy attitude!”
The term “emotional fascism” was first coined by Elvis Costello in the ’70s, and it’s real, you bet. There’s a scene when Poppy’s friend Zoe says, “You can’t make everyone happy” and Poppy replies, “There’s no harm in trying that Zoe, is there?” I am here to stand up and say that yes, there is harm in it, and would all the Poppy girls of the world please refrain from ever doing so again in my presence? It’s like being beaten with Mao’s little happy-face book during the Great Cultural Revolution.
There are many of us, I’m presuming, who look upon cheery, cock-eyed optimists as people you sometimes have to speak to at parties — sometimes it’s better just to suffer quickly and get it over with so you can move on — but if you see them coming down the street do cross over to the other side and duck into a book store or something, and then stay there for a good 15 minutes, just to be safe.

Cut together by the intrepid souls at 23/6…hats off.

Just got back from Mike Leigh‘s Happy Go Lucky, a movie about a quirky, plucky lady (Sally Hawkins) given to laying spirited, feel-good emotional fascism upon others, including the audience. If this sort of thing lights you up, you may do cartwheels. (As Patrick Goldstein did.) If you find it oppressive, as I did, you’ll be in hell. And yet this is a very assured, self-aware film. Respect must be paid to Leigh, who knows his characters and their world and precisely how to make it all unfold in just the right way.

I didn’t have time to post Ted Kennedy‘s devastating Denver speech earlier this evening. I haven’t at this moment seen Michelle Obama‘s speech, but here’s almost all of it.

Four paintings by Jeff Ramirez — “Verzweiflung”, “Geschmerzt”, “Kampf”, “Entsetzt.” 5 x 7 inches each. $475.00 each or $1,800.00 for all 4. Interested parties should e-mail the Crazy 4 2 Artwork guys at gallery1988@aol.com.

Politico‘s Jeffrey Ressner has posted a short profile of Cedering Fox, a special friend of yours truly and currently the voice of the Democratic National Convention in Denver. The best line, a description of Fox’s voice, is right at the top: “Soothing and smart. Slightly sexy. Raspy, too.”

Since winning his Best Actor Oscar for The Pianist (’03), Adrien Brody has appeared in one underwhelming so-so after another — The Village, The Jacket, King Kong, Hollywoodland, The Darjeeling Limited. I don’t mean to be snide or churlish, but I’ve lately come to imagine that there’s something called the Adrien Brody curse, or an equation between the poor guy being in a film and that film being a problem. Brody is a fine actor; his performances are always rich. But he has this thing about appearing in films that are either gloomy indies or commercial head-scratchers.

Adrien Brody, Rachel Weisz, Mark Ruffalo

I’d like to believe that his latest pic, The Brothers Bloom, will break the pattern, although I’m a little concerned by the light caperish tone of the ads and the trailer. Here’s what gave me particular pause — an 8.24 New York magazine profile by Logan Hill of Bloom costar Rachel Weisz.
“In the globe-trotting con-artist movie The Brothers Bloom, two lifelong grifters (Adrien Brody and Mark Ruffalo) devise double-crosses so fabulously complex that they begin to lose track of where real life ends and the bamboozle begins,” Hill begins. “To them, everything — identity, love, friendship, death — is a lie.
“Even the film’s title is a classic bit of misdirection, because the movie isn’t really about the guys, after all. It’s about the marvelous mark they pursue: Penelope, a basket-case New Jersey millionairess with a thousand talents and just as many fabulous outfits. And the saucer-eyed, seemingly guileless actor playing Penelope — Rachel Weisz, as you have definitely never seen her — steals the film right out from under the brothers’ noses.”
See what I mean? Sounds frothy, negligible.

Another story about ThinkFilm and David Bergstein stiffing people they owe money to? How many have we read along these lines?

Two days ago N.Y. Times columnist Frank Rich wrote that it’s time for Barack Obama to retire “change we can believe in” and launch a new campaign theme. That seems to be the general consensus — Obama 2.0 (and it had better be something that’s analagous to Windows XP over Windows 98) needs to begin on Thursday night. And I can’t imagine what he could say that would really make a serious difference in perception except…well, what about saying “it ain’t me, babe — it’s us”?

In July 1960 JFK said the following in his Democratic Convention acceptance speech: “Woodrow Wilson‘s New Freedom promised our nation a new political and economic framework. Franklin D. Roosevelt‘s New Deal promised security to those in need. But the New Frontier, of which I speak, is not a set of promises — it is a set of challenges. It sums not what I intend to offer the American people, but what I intend to ask of them.”

It would be great to hear something along these lines from Obama — no promises, no magic wands, grim up, we can do it — but the conventional wisdom is that the teletubbies are so submerged in their WALL*E lifestyles that being challenged to do greater things would be, like….whuhdesay?

As I wrote earlier this morning, the average middle-class American is (and has been for some time) totally drunk on tech-comfort martinis, and he/she really doesn’t want to know or hear about anything that interferes with the buzz-on. That’s because the narcotic effects of a flush 21st Century comfort life (SUV, iPhone, LCD, Blu-ray, prescription mood medication…the whole schmeer) is far, far more enveloping and reality-diminishing than the lah-lah lifestyle of the French aristocracy in the late 1700s or the family of Czar Nicholas II before the Bolshevik revolution.

Nonetheless, I think Obama needs to go for it anyway by saying “it’s up to you,” “a nation is only as great as its citizens,” and “I can’t deliver any magic potion — no president can — but we can make things better if we all decide to give it up some and pull together, and that means living in the here-and-now of the 21st Century and engaging in the world as it is, not as it was, and that means electing a president who — yes! — uses a computer and knows from Mac Powerbooks, and it also means fighting the corporations tooth and nail for the soul of our country, and that means pushing back on the politics of greed and selfishness, now and forever.”
The people who say they don’t yet know Obama after 18 months of campaigning are either lying. We all know that “he doesn’t share our values” is a racial code phrase, but anybody who’s still claiming ignorance or serious uncertainty about the guy at this stage is basically saying he/she would rather not have Cleavon Little be the town sheriff. That’s what it boils down to. The TV commentators rarely allude to, much less acknowledge, the ocean of racism that lives under this country’s terra firma, particularly in the backwater areas. It’s sorta kinda there, the media says, but not quite as much as you’d think. Bull. They’re doing the old sidestep.
The people who believe John McCain is better equipped to handle the military and political challenges of the presidency are simply coming from a place of dedicated ignorance. McCain has shown time and again that he’s doddering and fuzzy-brained, gets lots of things wrong, misremembers history, and is emotionally invested in bluster and aggression….and yet people say he’s the guy they’d trust more in the Oval Office. It’s insane, illogical. The real reason has to lie elsewhere.
Obama is far from perfect, but he’s obviously brighter, sharper, less macho- belligerent and more in touch with the here-and-now world than McCain is capable of being (or willing to be). He has as much if not more experience than Abraham Lincoln had when he began his first term as President; ditto Woodrow Wilson and JFK. Older conservatives just don’t like the idea of a black guy in the White House — that’s it. People are who and what they are, and you can’t wave a magic wand and change human nature. My mother — well read, loves the arts, never a conservative — used to voice racist reservations about Obama when she first heard about him.
A guy on a Yahoo answer page wrote fhe following about two weeks ago, to wit: “Experience is evidentally not a reliable measure. When judging presidential performance vs. their experience, it’s all over the map. No reasonable correlation between experience and performance.
“Of course, the same is true in business. For example, most of the computer companies that are now mega-corporations were started by kids in garages.
“I myself got hired by a very big, very famous company into a pretty important position with no experience, I just convinced them to do it. I wound up being one of their two top performing executives and brought very significant turnaround to several departments in the company. No experience.
“Nowadays, I hire people because of what they can do, not what they have done (or not).
“If experience was so important, then only the top senators would have a chance in elections, the ones that have been in the senate for 25 years or more. Has this been the case? Ever?
“Experience does not matter, either to performance nor to the American people. Because we’re smarter than that. Experience doesn’t guarantee a person — it just tells you about what type of person they are.”