Happy election day pre-anniversary
It’s hard to believe, but November 4, 2007 marks the one year pre-anniversary of election day 2008. We don’t know about you, but it seems to us that we’ve already had more than an entire political season with all the campaign events, forums, debates, position papers, flip-flops, media prognostications, YouTube gotcha moments, and more. Indeed, by July 2007, the Washington Post had already complained about the debate fatigue evident in the presidential contests.
We have another year to go with all this. Will it get better? How much worse will it get? Last night Barack Obama appeared in the lead-off sketch on SNL. It was interesting in several ways:
The sketch is the largest link on the Obama campaign website this morning, but it really had very little to do with him. He appeared in the 4th minute of a 5:17 bit and had a few banal, forgettable lines. The sketch focused mostly on the domestic interactions of the Clintons. Hillary was portrayed as a cackling witch disguised in a wedding dress, and Bill as a likable cad with a roving eye and a hint of W.C. Fields about him. Bill’s lines included, “She’s a witch,” and, regarding the Kuciniches, “There’s a marriage he won’t regret in thirty years.” No one was shocked or even surprised by the vulgarity; indeed, it was pretty funny, a sign perhaps of the decline of us all.
Given that these characterizations of the Democratic first family have become commonplace cultural shorthand, it occurs to us that we may not be watching the longest campaign season in American history, but rather the continuation of a soap opera that is only of modest length as compared to the real thing. We’ll have to see whether the soap writers are up to the task in 2008……..But then again, life isn’t TV, is it?