The Hood Ornament Effect or, Why the U.S. Needs a Parliamentary System

Orson Bean once told Merv Griffin or Mike Douglas that he did not read the newspaper, nor follow current events.

"Reading a newspaper is like focusing on the hood ornament of your car while you're out driving in the country," Bean explained. "You miss the beauty of the world around you."

Watching the talking heads on Face the Nation and Meet the Press (John Edwards and Mike Hucakbee, though not sure which was on which), it dawned on me: American politics essentially is hood ornament-gazing.

I haven't "blogged" in almost two weeks as, frankly, following American politics and politicians disgusts me. Reading blogs one realizes that there actually is a disease called graphophilia, where someone becomes addicted to writing. Like "Thomas Wolfe" disease, that is, diarrhea of the pen, the political junkie infected with graphophilia writes on and on, day after day, until he (and its always a he) has created a mountain range of molehills, a range that in the junkie's own mind rivals the Rockies or the Andes, nay, the Himalayas. And they are still molehills.

The beauty contest that is the Presidential selection process essentially is about electing the Mole-in-Chief. Is it no wonder why the Presidency and American politics is such a tragicomedy? Tragic when seen up close, a comedy when one steps back, then a tragedy for the rest of the world that has to bear the brunt of the Mole-in-Chief's policies for four-to-eight years.

Look at the wallpaper in your room, or some object on the wall. Take your index finger and bring it very close to your thumb, and then bring it up to your eye If you are concentrating on a small detail on the wallpaper, suddenly, framed in such a way, it has assumed massive proportions. It has filled the "space" and psychologically, has become the "world" from this Point of View.

And it is false, just like the American Presidential election process is false.

We are focusing on personalities rather than issues. One can say we are focusing on the way a candidate, like Barack Obama, articulates the issues, but we would be wrong. We are focused on the way a candidate like Obama frames the issues, markets the issues, which is essentially thumping the tub for him or herself.

In a parliamentary system, the party picks the leader and the candidates who will run for a seat in Parliament. The voter focuses on the party and the issues, not on the personalities. One votes one's interest, as articulated by the party, not because John Edwards is better looking, in his WASPy button-down way, then Bill Richardson, whose face is a map of Mexico.

In a parliamentary system, a man like Richardson with his full resume (cabinet member, United Nations ambassador, governor) would be the head of a party. The press, and I mean the Boston Globe, not the National Enquirier, would not make up fantasies that Obama's world travels as a boy uniquely position himself as a diplomat (which he hasn't been -- this incidentally, is Obama's own fantasy that the Globe, seeking for a Rockefeller Republican, bought), ignoring the fact that Bill Richardson actually IS a diplomat.

This is insanity.

On the one hand, you have the real thing, an experienced man with executive and international experience, and he is ignored by a major American newspaper to tout the more marketable brand.

My father said that the essence of American life is that someone, sometime, is always trying to sell you a horse made out of horseshit, claiming its a real horse.

In the late 1960s, when the book The Selling of the Presidency came out, revealing how during the 1968 Presidential contest, the two candidates (Humphrey and Nixon) used Madison Ave. advertising firms who sold them with strategies used to flog dogfood and cigarettes, American pundits were outraged. Now, the talking heads on the boob tube hail Mitt Romneys religion speech, utterly devoid of substance, as a good "marketing move," a canny "advertisement for myself" from Mitt to evangelical Christians.

It's not the tail wagging the dog, it is a horseshit simulacrum of a horse being bridled and piss-tested and entered into the Kentucky Derby. It is baseball on steroids, which the sporting press was entirely conscious of us, and indeed, was part of the conspiracy to sell that conglomeration of horseshit to the sports fan, who is a dumb slob and could care less. Integrity is something for other people.

The United States, which has just endured seven years of a Mole-in-Chief who has utterly disgraced this country, is going to reap the rewards of the dragon's teeth it has sowed for the last generation.

The Selling of the President, or the Obama & Oprah Show

Was the US ever a real democracy? I had this conversation with my niece's husband, who is going back to Macdeonia (with her) rather than stay in the States. He simply cannot believe that the US is not a parliamentary democracy, let alone one with proportional representation, and that the Presidency is a beauty contest. (The Founding Fathers never gave much thought as to how, that is who, was elected president. An intelligent gas from Pluto could make the cut, if he/she/it could prove he/she/it was born in the U.S. and 35 years of age or older, for all the FFers could care.)

The U.S. was set up to be a republic, that is, a democracy (which George Orwell in Politics and the English Language said was a word that meant whatever the rulers wanted it to mean) wherein a small elite could control a large population. The U.S. originally was a slaveocracy, in which the South dominated the North until population pressures shifted Congressional representation to the free states circa 1860, which threatened to upset their lock on the electoral college, which meant a veto on any anti-slavery politician.

Four of the first five presidents were from Virginia, and in the first 36 years of the Republic, Virginians held the presidency for 32 years. Virginia reneged on its offer to give half of the land to the District of Columbia, it was so politically potent. The District is just Maryland territory. (Why it was never taken after 1865, I'll never know.) Then, Jackson of Tennessee, a late comer to the Union but still a rebel state, was president for another eight years after John Adam's son did his 4 year stint.

So, in the first 48 years of the Republic:

Rebels: 40
Yankees: 8

And the population of the North was more than that of the South, which is why they made slaves count as 3/5ths as a person to apportion Congress (and taxes). To boost the South. Why not give factory owners an extra vote? But they didn't. Such was the price of union. Like the confederation of Canada, it means that the South has had its hand in the North's pocket for 200 years! (Quebec will never secede, a real issue in my neighborhood when I was a kid, because it would lose its welfare check from Ottawa.)

The heyday of the GOP from 1865-1933 obviated the Slave Power, but it came roaring back (the Solid South) with FDR in the Thirties, and has maintained a stranglehold on politics ever since, first as part of the New Deal coalition, then as part of Nixon-Reagan's Southern Strategy appeal to bigotry.

Now, the front-runner for the Democratic Presidential nomination seemingly is Obama Baracka -- I mean, Barack Obama (just had to look it up), who qualifies as a "Rockefeller Republican." This is Senator Ed Brook, with a hipper "aura." I actually like what I hear from him, the professorial touch, which means there's no way this guy can win a general election! But the fact is, Hillary Clinton is right: He has no experience in government, outside of a few years in the state Senate of utterly corrupt Illinois, and a short stint in the equally corrupt U.S. Senate. The man is brilliant, but I remember that F.D.R., the greatest president since Lincoln, was a B student at university, but had great executive ability which was in evidence at Harvard College. Managing a government and inspiring people are two different things. (F.D.R. could do both.)

Bill Clinton was a governor. It seems to be a better training ground for the presidency, a governorship, than does the Senate. Andrew Young was right: Baracka will be eaten alive, should he ever get elected. Then again, Jimmy Carter was a governor, but only for four years (Clinton was governor of Arkansas for over 12 years. The again, F.D.R. was govenror for only four years, but he was "to the manor born", so to speak.)

Carter was a pitiful president, but a great ex-president. Can we afford an Obama presidency, which likely would be a debacle that would had the White House back to the GOP for a generation?

It is unlikely, with the Blue States being anchored in the old slaveocracy of the Confederacy, that Obama could win the presidency. Any Democratic candidate starts out down by over 210 electoral votes, at a minimum, and there is no way that he would make any inroads into the Reagan coaltion, based as it is on the South defecting to the GOP over integration. A Republican has to win 60 electoral votes to win the Presidency, whereas a Democrat has to win far more.

The Democrats pretend this isn't so, but it is the reason Gore lost the election, and even more spectacularly, that Kerry lost an election to a man the country didn't want to re-elect. You will find many if not all liberals, like former Goldwater Girl Hillary Clinton, support the electoral college, as it is a good device to keep the n------s in check. Granted, liberals love black people: it's n-----s they hate. (One has to protect one's property values, and keep taxes reasonably in check.) So don't take it personal, Obama.

Barack Obama has replaced O.J. Simpson as "America's favorite Negro." It's a post that hasn't been properly filled since the unfortunate slayings outside of Nicole Brown's condo almost a generation ago.

What turns me off of Obama -- is his first name really Barack? -- is an ad he ran here in New Hampshire, in which he gives an "inspirational" stump speech saying there is no two Americas, no Republican America, no Democratic America, and then has colleagues from the Illinois state senate thump the tub for him. It's all bullshit. John Edwards is far more dead on accurate in saying there is two Americas. Dam -- there are a multiplicity of Americas, and Obama's third-grade civics lesson isn't going to change that.

Hillary Clinton is right: Obama is running for the Presidency for his own vanity. That's about it.

Oprah Winfrey came to New Hampshire to headline a rally for him, and his poll ratings shoot up. THE PRESIDENCY IS JUST A PART OF SHOW BUSINESS, like baseball and other sports have become. Style IS substance.

In 1968, the book The Selling of the President was considered hot shit, that Madison Ave. was being used to sell Nixon (who graced the cover) and Nixon like cigarettes or boxes of soap. Twitt Romney gives a crappy, non-committal speech on religion, and he's praised for a good MARKETING strategy.

It's all meretricious and a joke.

* Up from 202 in 1988.

Mitt Romney's Spectacularly Sexist Attack Ad

I published an article "Mitt Romney's Spectacularly Sexist Attack Ad Elucidates Mormon Misogyny" on Associated Content several days ago. The gist of the article is that Romney, as a Mormon, cannot abide the fact that Hillary Clinton, a woman, could be President of the United States.