There’s a new king of the Barack Obama tribute music video genre, MC Yogi.
Obama ‘08 - Vote For Hope from MC Yogi on Vimeo.
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Archive for the 'Culture' Category Page 2 of 3
I’ve often wondered exactly how films and television affect the way we dream. Growing up, I remember hearing that most people dreamed in black and white. This was something that made no sense to me. My dreams were in colour. All of my friends dreams were in colour. It was only adults who claimed to have dreams in black and white, and there was something very sad about the idea that as we aged it was possible that the colour would be drained out of even our dreams.
As I got older, though, and continued to dream in colour, I suspected that people who dreamed in black and white did so because they were used to black and white television and films. Dreams, after all, are like movies in our heads. This has always been the case for me, at least. Dreams even tend to use devices like close-up, slow motion, and change of perspective that are common in film, but totally foreign to our everyday experience with vision. It seemed reasonable to me that the brain was borrowing from these media to make our dreams, so if someone thought of films as being in black and white, they would dream in black and white, but if they thought of films as being in colour, their dreams would be in colour as well.
A new study from Ewa Murzyn, a post-grad student at the University of Dundee seems to have verified exactly that. People who grew up with black and white television dream in black and white, those who didn’t mostly don’t. Now I want more in-depth studies about how the media primes our dreams. Do people who never watch scary movies have scary dreams? What about the correlation between pornography viewing and sex dreams? Do people who play a lot first-person shooters have murderous dreams? Is there any way we can find out what dreams were like in the golden age of radio?
One thing I’m fairly certain of is that my son will grow up having dreams in beautiful colour and high-definition. That’s a lovely thought.
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The New Yorker’s Politics Issue had some great reads in it, including the eloquent endorsement of Barack Obama, and the fascinating profile of Arianna Huffington, but my favourite piece was written by Jill Lepore and titled Rock, Paper, Scissors. It is an historical overview of the messiness and madness of the American electoral process. In particular, the piece focuses on the adoption of the secret ballot (also known as the “Australian Ballot“) in the United States.
One of the things that great writing about history always does is to remind us that there are some notions that we don’t even think about today, ideas we find so commonplace and sensible that it is hard to believe they haven’t always been the status quo, but were once considered radical or controversial. For instance, Lepore tells us that 150 years ago, voting wasn’t a simple matter of showing up at the polling place and filling out your ballot. In fact, polling places didn’t even have ballots. Voters had to provide their own.
Nowhere in the United States in 1859 did election officials provide ballots. [...] Voters got their ballots either from a partisan, at the polls, or at home, by cutting them out of the newspaper. Then they had to cross through the throngs to climb a platform placed against the wall of a building (voters weren’t allowed inside) and pass their ballots through a window and into the hands of an election judge.
Violence and intimidation at the polls was common in this era. That is true not only in the U.S., but here in Canada as well. (According to the Canadian Encyclopedia, British Columbia adopted the secret ballot in 1873, Ontario in 1874, and P.E.I. didn’t adopt it permanently until 1913.) The primary reason, it seems, that violence flourished at the polls at this time in history was that suffrage was expanding faster than the mechanisms needed to handle it.
In this fall’s Presidential election, every citizen who is eighteen or older—except, in some states, prisoners and felons—will be eligible to vote. Somewhat more than half of us will turn up. We won’t be clobbered, stabbed, or shot. We will not have to bring our own ballots. We will insist that how we vote be secret. The founders didn’t plan for this. No one planned for it. There is no plan. It’s patches all the way down.
[...]
With the exception of Benjamin Franklin, who anticipated Malthus, the nation’s founders could scarcely have imagined that the population of the United States, less than four million in 1790, would increase tenfold by 1870. Nor did they prophesy the party system. Above all, they could not have fathomed universal suffrage. In the first Presidential election, only six per cent of Americans were eligible to vote. And these men didn’t elect George Washington; they voted only for delegates to the Electoral College, an institution established to further restrain the popular will.
One of the most widely discussed studies of the last year was a paper that claimed that people who were exposed to the Apple logo displayed more creativity than people who were exposed to the IBM logo. The study, which came out of the University of Waterloo and Duke University, also reported that people who were exposed to the Disney logo behaved more honesty than people who were exposed to E!.
The idea behind all of this is a psychological phenomenon known as “priming.” There have been a number of interesting studies in this field. People who have been exposed to words associated with rudeness have been observed to behave more rudely than those who were not, and people exposed to the elderly have shown a tendency to move slower and display poorer memory. Essentially, if we have a strong enough association between a symbol and a particular behaviour, it seems that we are more likely to display that behaviour ourselves. So, because the idea that Apple is associated with creativity has been so efficiently drilled into us, our brains are now primed for creative work when we see that logo.
Makes sense. This is, after all, how marketers hope branding works. By associating themselves with particular traits or activities they build a connection between their symbol and the things that activity represents. Apple products don’t actually have to do anything with their design or function that helps us be creative, all Apple has to do is associate the notions of “creativity” and “Apple” enough times and our brains take care of the rest. This is the essence of their branding strategy. I suspect the same is true of “Axe Body Spray” and “sex” or “Budweiser” and “sex” or “Porsche” and “sex”.
The real goal for marketers, however, is build a connection between their product and the behaviour of “buy this,” and I’m not certain that goal is being achieved by any of these branding efforts. If having an Apple poster on my wall while using a Windows machine has the same effect on my creativity as using an Apple product, then why bother laying out the extra cost of buying Apple? In fact, if priming is so effective, why not just put up posters of our creative heroes, images we associate even more deeply with the sort of work we want to produce, than some corporate logo? Perhaps the notion of filling our rooms with the icons we adore, as so many of us did when we were in high school, is a brilliant way of influencing our behaviour.
The idea of sympathetic magic is deeply ingrained in cultures throughout the world. From lucky talismans to superstitious rituals, to the habit of collecting items that were once possessed by famous people, or eating the hearts of our enemies to absorb their life force, humans have long history of connecting symbols with outcomes. We can scoff at the idea of prehistoric man throwing spears at cave paintings of deer in the hopes that it would magically provide them with a more successful hunt, but as an early form of priming this makes perfect sense. By associating the ritual and the image with the actual hunt, perhaps the brains of our ancestors were better prepared for action when they saw deer on the plains.
So, thanks Apple for creating a symbol we can associate with creative work. It reminds me that I should get a picture of Don Delillo to put above my desk.
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One of the great quotations that liberals love to pull out of their hats it this one from John Stuart Mill: “Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.”
That’s one of the reasons our reaction to Sarah Palin is so natural. She fits neatly into the stereotype we hold of conservatives as backwards, backwoods, bible-thumpers who have no interest in, or understanding of, national issues or global politics, let alone the philosophical underpinnings on their own beliefs.
The stereotypes we hold about conservatives are constantly reinforced by blowhards like Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh who spout idiocy that appeals to the basest aspects of human nature: fear, ignorance and selfishness. We listen to these men and imagine our idiot, racist, sexist, homophobic uncles cackling with glee at having their worldview reflected back at them and justified. (This is our image of typical McCain supporters.) Even though we run into intelligent thoughtful people who are conservatives and who dismiss Bill-O and Rush as slavering populists who have nothing to do with their movement, we just can’t imagine being on the same team as the vast population of stupid folks that make up the conservative base.
The man we want to stand with is Mill.
In the most recent issue of The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik outlines Mill’s life by way of reviewing British journalist Richard Reeves’s book, John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand.
One of the most fascinating aspects of Mill’s life is that he was, in a way, the Mozart of philosophy:
Chosen for an experiment in education, he was crammed with learning by his father and his father’s mentor, the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham. The aim was to produce a mind distended out of all proportion—force-fed facts, as unlucky geese are force-fed corn. The foie gras of the boy’s mind was then to be dined on by a grateful nation; the boy’s life, like the goose’s comfort, was secondary. Latin, Greek, ancient history, political economy: “By the age of six,” Reeves notes, “young Mill had written a history of Rome; by seven he was reading Plato in Greek; at eight soaking up Sophocles.” By twelve, he more or less sat his examinations for university entrance.
A childhood robbed of all child-like things is sad to contemplate. Though it did produce a great mind, there were consequences. Mill plunged into a two-year-long depression at the age of twenty. He couldn’t write or work. He took refuge in music and poetry, particularly the romantics, and that finally lead him out of the darkness.
Gopnik’s training as an art historian shows through in one of the best parts of the essay where he describes how the influence of art lead Mill towards conservatism at this point in his life.
His love of poetry and music and art also led him toward conservative thought. Aesthetes always bend to the right, in part because the best music and the best buildings were made in the past, and become an argument for its qualities. Someone entering Chartres becomes, for a moment, a medieval Catholic, and a person looking at Bellini or Titian has to admit that an unequal society can make unequalled pictures. To love old art is to honor old arrangements. But even new and progressive art is, as Mill knew, a product of imagination and inspiration, not of fair dealing and transparent processes; the central concerns of liberalism—fairness, equity, individual rights—really don’t enter into it. Mozart, whom Mill loved, would have benefitted as a person had he lived in a world that gave him the right to vote for his congressman, collect an old-age pension, and write letters to the editor on general subjects, and that gave his older sister her chance at composing, too. But not a note of his music would have been any better. Art is a product of eccentric genius, which we can protect, but which no theory of utility can explain.
As Mill emerged from his depression though, and started to consume the works of Continental philosophers like Wilhelm von Humboldt, he turned his mind to the idea that we should all have the right to build the best world for ourselves that we can, according to our own ideals. He would become the paragon of liberal thought, an advocate of individual rights, the rights of women, and a fierce opponent of slavery of every kind. On every issue of his day, and even in ours, Mill stands as a hero whose advocacy was generations ahead of its time.
However, Mill’s life, it seems, would always be sad and complicated. The great early feminist Harriet Taylor was the love of his life, but she was married to another man for the first twenty years they knew each other. They were married when Harriet’s husband died, but as Gopnik notes:
John and Harriet’s intellectual idyll was long-lived in shadow, short-lived in sunlight. Mr. Taylor died in 1849, and in 1851 John and Harriet were married. But after only seven and a half years Harriet died of one of those sad, unnamed wasting diseases that blighted the period. Mill had a monument—of the same Carrara marble as Michelangelo’s David—constructed for her in Avignon, with an inscription that included the lines “Were there but a few hearts and intellects like hers / this earth would already become the hoped-for heaven.” That same month, Mill sent off to the publisher the finished manuscript of “On Liberty,” dedicating it to the memory of “the friend and wife whose exalted sense of truth and right was my strongest incitement.” (Darwin was finishing “On the Origin of Species” that same year, and also saw it published the next; the two books remain the bedrock of the liberal age.)
At the time of Mill’s own death, he was not highly regarded. He had entered politics after Harriet’s death and he was regularly jeered for his radical views in parliament. The press mocked him for his feminism and obstinant stance against slavery. He did have some followers amongst the lower-classes however.
His working-class admirers helped raise a statue to him on the Thames Embankment. But Mill asked to be interred in a remote French town. Five people came to his burial. This was the one place he wanted to be, with Harriet, in the tiny cemetery outside Avignon, where he could rest beside the one love he had had. In the end, it was all he knew.
I always think it fitting somehow that the lives of great men (and women) are so often sad. Their greatness would almost be too much to contemplate if they didn’t also have to pay a worldly price for it. In the end, isn’t that the story of Christianity as well?
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In the days leading up to Super Tuesday, Michael Chabon wrote one of the most lyric and powerful defences of a politician I have ever read. Obama vs. the Phobocracy, though it was written only a few months ago, feels like it belongs to an earlier time. Reading it again today reminds me of the hope that Obama’s candidacy truly represents. Before we got bogged down in the day-to-day sniping and histrionics of this campaign, before hatred of Sarah Palin seemed to dominate the discussion, before the constant mocking of McCain’s age, we had the simple luxury of being able to imagine what it would be like to have a President like Barack Obama. The main question at that time was whether we were ready to let ourselves believe, or whether we would let fear win the day; fear of “the other,” fear of losing yet again, and most powerfully: fear of our own disappointment.
Well, Obama won the nomination and we moved on to a new phase of the campaign. Inevitably, there were disappointments along the way. It’s hard for anyone to remain perfect in our eyes. That first blush of love must wear off as we get to know the real man in whom all of our hope was invested. Even for us progressives, the most wide-eyed Obama supporters, by the time of the Democratic National Convention, this race had become less about Hope than it was about Winning.
Michael Chabon’s wife, Ayelet Waldman, was an Obama delegate to the convention and he tagged along for the ride. The experience as Chabon has written it up in The New York Review of Books, in a piece called Obama & the Conquest of Denver, manages to capture the exhilaration of this moment in history, even given the realities of a long and difficult campaign. Chabon acknowledges the fact that Obama has been a little bit tarnished by the race so far, but he concludes that the candidate has comported himself with as much honour as could be expected and that he has revealed himself to be that which he has always claimed to be: a principled, but pragmatic man.
No major writer at the moment confesses such a debt to genre fiction as Chabon does, and he starts off describing the convention as though it was some combination of scenes from Dune and The Lord of the Rings.
It was [...] like the change that might occur between the first and second volumes of some spectacular science fiction fantasy epic. At the end of the first volume, after bitter struggle, Obama had claimed the presumptive nomination. We Fremen had done the impossible, against Sardaukar and imperial shock troops alike. We had brought water to Arrakis. Now the gathered tribes of the Democratic Party—hacks, Teamsters, hat ladies, New Mexicans, residents of those states most nearly resembling Canada, Jews of South Florida, dreadlocks, crewcuts, elderlies and goths, a cowboy or two, sons and daughters of interned Japanese-Americans—had assembled on the plains of Denver to attempt to vanquish old Saruman McCain. Suddenly it was hard not to feel that we were, once again, teetering on the point of something momentous, but something different than the previous momentousness.
There is some spectacular writing here. This is Chabon describing the concelebratory nature and mass nostalgia of the whole event:
There was a daily mass recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance. Everyone stood up—on the last night, Obama Night, tens of thousands stood up, and put their hands over their hearts, and said the magic word, indivisible. I was a little self-conscious about doing that, at first, but found that I still remembered the words perfectly, and it was like singing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” at the seventh-inning stretch, an act of collective recollection of the past, of a time when people routinely stood up and sang together, stood up to recite pledges, credos, oaths, poems. The entire party convention is a collective act of that kind. It’s a throwback, a holdover, a relic, like baseball. It’s also, weirdly, a formal, public celebration of spoken language, a kind of political eisteddfod.
Wonderful word that: eisteddfod. I had to look it up.
If I have a complaint about this piece, it’s that Chabon simply can’t let the baseball analogies go. Here he is on the impossible expectations of Obama’s acceptance speech:
Like everyone, I found myself wondering about the speech that he was going to give on Thursday night. Everyone seemed to agree, employing another term from the approved glossary of bromides, that his speech needed to be “a home run.” Obama needed to “hit it out of the park.” But that was not quite the honest truth. We needed Obama to hit it out of the park. That was what we had drafted him to do. He was our hottest prospect in a very long time. Everything we hoped for in the grandstands he would carry to that podium on his shoulders. And that was why I had come to Denver: to add my little featherweight of hope to his burden.
The Republican Convention was dominated by mocking attacks at Obama, with very little room, it seemed to me, given to the ideals that the conservative movement is based upon. It was nice to be reminded in Chabon’s piece of some of the truly wonderful moments of the DNC:
At one point (Bill Clinton) said, “Barack Obama knows that America cannot be strong abroad unless we are first strong at home. People the world over have always been more impressed by the power of our example than by the example of our power,” and I felt, for the only time before Stevie Wonder sat down behind his keyboard on Thursday night and started in on “Signed, Sealed, Delivered,” something of the shiver of pleasure that artistry induces. Only Obama and Governor Brian Schweitzer of Montana on Tuesday night, who abandoned his prepared and vetted speech for a skylarking series of off-the-cuff remarks, managed to pull off the same difficult trick of sounding, while engaging in oratory, like he was putting his genuine beliefs into the only form, the only words, that truly suited them.
There has never been a more highly anticipated political speech than the one that would wrap up the convention. Surely there have been speeches that were more watched, and there have definitely been speeches that were more important, but there has ever been another speech where so many people were expecting to witness greatness from a speaker.
But I still had not heard what I had come to hear, what we had all come to hear, the speech of a lifetime (to date) by the greatest orator of his generation. One of the things that had served to discourage me over the course of the primary season was a general acceptance of the premise that oratory was a specious, feckless, inherently untrustworthy art. The Obama camp would rightly dispute the charge of offering only “pretty words,” but they never seemed to argue the larger truth: that ultimately words were all we had; that writing and oratory, argument and persuasion, were the root of democracy; that words can kill, or save us; something along those lines. “You can only say what you can first imagine,” as I heard Tobias Wolff (the short-story master, not the Obama campaign adviser) explain to a group of people at an Obama fund-raiser. It was a mark of Obama’s fitness to lead, to me at least, that he possessed sufficient natural reserves of imagination to kick oratorical ass.
Because of the expectations, there was no way that the speech could fail to disappoint, at least a little bit. There was simply too much work to be done in the speech (outlining specifics, appealing to undecided voters, reassuring Americans that he was really one of them) to allow room for a truly great speech from beginning to end. There were great moments, and there has never been a better performer, and the last 15 minutes of the speech were truly wonderful. Ultimately though, it was what the speech represented, more than the speech itself, that mattered. Chabon writes:
Over the years my hometown of Columbia lost its vision and became divided by lines of race and class and religion. The candidate who promised to try to remake our politics had yet to fulfill his goal. He might fail. But promises, I thought, were like speeches; if you didn’t make them, you would never be able to imagine the better world that they implied.
In the end, the notion of that better world is what matters so much about this election to me. I understand the pragmatic arguments that McCain supporters make. I can even recognize the fact that Obama’s resume might seem thin to some people. I suppose I can even make peace with the fear of the unknown and that will drive some voters away from him. Ultimately though, I just don’t understand how people can resist the hope of a better future that only Obama could possibly deliver. Even if he fails, even if all the hope turns out to have been false, it will have been worth it just to try, just to have that moment when the problems of the world seem solvable.
After Obama vs. the Phobocracy and Obama and the Conquest of Denver, I cannot wait for the third installment of the great Chabon/Obama trilogy, hopefully to be titled: Barack Obama in “Raiders of the Lost Constitution”
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Some people believe that the defining conflict of our era is Islamofascism vs. the permissive culture of Western Civilization, others think it is Blue State liberalism vs. Red State family values, and a few will tell you that it is Kenny vs. Spenny.
These people are all idiots. The defining conflict of our time is Accounts Receivable vs. Accounts Payable. Get Your War On, based on the clip art comic of the same name by David Rees, is now a weekly video series on 236.com. Here are a couple of the best episodes.
Sarah Palin and the Rape Kits
“Sarah Palin and the rape kits? Sounds like a punk band. Are they good?”
You Are Loved
“Josh Groban would never say something like that!”
(I tried to embed those videos here, but for some reason that wasn’t working.)
Here’s an old article by Doug Paton from the Ryerson Review of Journalism that explains the origin of the comic.
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In honour of their 75th anniversary, Esquire has presented a list of “75 books every man should read.” They admit the list is “incomplete and utterly biased”, but they also claim that the list comprises “the greatest works of literature ever published.” That’s silly. Their list simply isn’t pretentious enough, or wide enough in scope, to make that claim. Rather, this is a list of 75 books pretty much guaranteed not to bore you.
The inclusion of Flannery O’Connor is incredibly strange. Not that the book isn’t worthy, but she’s the only woman on this list, so either Esquire thinks that O’Connor’s short fiction is the best stuff ever written by a women for men, or they didn’t realise that “Flannery” was a chick. There are some great books by women that would have fit in perfectly with the tone of this list (The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, White Teeth, Play It As It Lays, etc.) and they should have been included to make O’Connor stand out a bit less.
The thing that really annoys me about the list though is that Esquire insists on presenting only one book per page on their website, making it a chore to get through, and making it impossible to scan the list quickly. So, as a service to you, I’ve compiled the entire list below. There are a couple books here that I’m not familiar with at all (A Sport and a Pastime, Winter’s Bone), but their inclusion is high enough praise that I’m really looking forward to reading them. Thanks, Esquire.
- What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, by Raymond Carver
- Collected Stories of John Cheever
- Deliverance, by James Dickey
- The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck
- Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy
- The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky
- The Known World, by Edward P. Jones
- The Good War, by Studs Terkel
- American Pastoral, by Philip Roth
- A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories, by Flannery O’Connor
- The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien
- A Sport and a Pastime, by James Salter
- The Call of the Wild, by Jack London
- Time’s Arrow, by Martin Amis
- A Sense of Where You Are, by John McPhee
- Hell’s Angels, by Hunter S. Thompson
- Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison
- Dubliners, by James Joyce
- Rabbit, Run, by John Updike
- The Postman Always Rings Twice, by James M. Cain
- Dog Soldiers, by Robert Stone
- Winter’s Bone, by Daniel Woodrell
- Legends of the Fall, by Jim Harrison
- Under the Volcano, by Malcolm Lowry
- The Naked and the Dead, by Norman Mailer
- The Professional, by W.C. Heinz
- For Whom the Bell Tolls, by Ernest Hemingway
- Dispatches, by Michael Herr
- Tropic of Cancer, by Henry Miller
- Revolutionary Road, by Richard Yates
- As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner
- The Killer Angels, by Michael Shaara
- Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
- All the King’s Men, by Robert Penn Warren
- One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey
- Sophie’s Choice, by William Styron
- A Fan’s Notes, by Frederick Exley
- Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis
- The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami
- Master and Commander, by Patrick O’Brian
- Plainsong, by Kent Haruf
- A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole
- Affliction, by Russell Banks
- This Boy’s Life, by Tobias Wolff
- Winter’s Tale, by Mark Helprin
- The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow
- Women, by Charles Bukowski
- Going Native, by Stephen Wright
- Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad
- The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, by John LeCarré
- The Crack-Up, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, by George Saunders
- War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy
- The Shining, by Stephen King
- Winesburg, Ohio, by Sherwood Anderson
- Moby Dick, by Herman Melville
- Midnight’s Children, by Salman Rushdie
- Labyrinths, by Jorge Luis Borges
- The Right Stuff, by Tom Wolfe
- The Sportswriter, by Richard Ford
- American Tabloid, by James Ellroy
- The Autobiography of Malcolm X, by Alex Haley
- What It Takes, by Richard Ben Cramer
- The Continental Op, by Dashiell Hammett
- The Power and the Glory, by Graham Greene
- So Long, See You Tomorrow, by William Maxwell
- Native Son, by Richard Wright
- Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, by James Agee and Walker Evans
- Angle of Repose, by Wallace Stegner
- The Great Bridge, by David McCullough
- The Dharma Bums, by Jack Kerouac
- Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry
- Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov
- Underworld, by Don DeLillo
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain
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One thing that disappoints me about every politician I like is their unswerving devotion to populist trade policies. Here’s that I want in a politician:
- Someone who understands that free trade helps everyone, rich and poor alike
- Someone who understands that it is alright for jobs to go whereever labour is cheapest
- Someone who also believes that we should also have terrific social programs at home and a first-rate education for everyone
- Someone who doesn’t think that their morals or family values are superior to anyone else’s
I guess you could say, I’m looking for someone who combines all the best aspects of socialism, libertarianism and capitalism all in one package. Is this too much to ask? In the meantime, Go Obama.
Obama Promises To Stop America’s Shitty Jobs From Going Overseas
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I love Aaron Sorkin. I’m a sucker for everything he does. My friends and I quote from The American President freely and at length. I think The West Wing is the greatest television show that’s ever been a television show. Hell, I just bought Studio 60 on DVD.
So, imagine my delight when I learned that Maureen Dowd asked Sorkin to write up a hypothetical meeting between Barack Obama and Jed Bartlet.
This is how it starts:
BARACK OBAMA knocks on the front door of a 300-year-old New Hampshire farmhouse while his Secret Service detail waits in the driveway. The door opens and OBAMA is standing face to face with former President JED BARTLET.
BARTLET Senator.
OBAMA Mr. President.
BARTLET You seem startled.
OBAMA I didn’t expect you to answer the door yourself.
BARTLET I didn’t expect you to be getting beat by John McCain and a Lancôme rep who thinks “The Flintstones” was based on a true story, so let’s call it even.
OBAMA Yes, sir.
BARTLET Come on in.
Visit Dowd’s page at the New York Times for the rest. It’s well worth the read. (Thanks for the email on this, Shuman!)
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