This election has been making me think about Cinderella a lot. That pumpkin sure had to be some kind of Freudian symbol, don’t you think? It has definitely made me wonder what John McCain and Barack Obama are going to turn into as soon as the election clock strikes midnight.
I have already some really weird changes taking place since I voted in my first election — Nixon vs. McGovern in 1972. It may strike someone as surprising – noting the conservative core of all my columns – but I voted for World War II hero and Distinguished Flying Cross recipient George McGovern. That was after my Australian mother convinced me that by listening to Nixon talk she saw something seriously wrong with this American man’s mental health.
I have seen several other post election meltdowns since Nixon where very promising candidates turned into pumpkins after the Election Day. After 1988’s Election Day, Michael Dukakis became a pumpkin who split the whole scene. In contrast, after 1976’s Election Day, Jimmy Carter turned into a pumpkin who lingered on four years as President Pumpkin from Plains.
There have been other Election Day surprises that have gone in a different direction. Everyone seemed to think that the then 64-year-old Senator John McCain was simply going to grow into an old Senator Pumpkin after losing a vicious and very dirty battle to George W. Bush for the Republican Presidential nomination in 2000. Instead McCain won that battle against Bush after all. It is President Bush who has since become the public pumpkin who can only be shown at a Republican convention via satellite. Look, don’t mess with McCain. He is Andrew Jackson reincarnated.
In the meantime we have learned over the past eight years how mischievous McCain can be. He was famous for being mischievous at Annapolis and in his Top Gun flying school. His mother recalls how McCain would react to being thwarted even as a toddler by holding his breath until he passed out. McCain is also remembered by Republican Mississippi Senator Thad Cochran for his dramatic performance decades ago on a “good will” trip between some United States senators and a selected group of Communist Sandinistas. After listening a while to one Sandinista run down America, Cochran remembers McCain simply taking the young Communist guerilla warrior by the throat and throttling him.
It should be understandable now why McCain bypassed both Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee for vice president over the relatively unknown Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. While McCain put himself on the cross for America at Hanoi Hilton, Huckabee and Romney both skirted the issue of military service for their own religious reasons. Because of the personal Golgotha that McCain came close to in North Vietnam, he simply prefers seeing the vice presidency with a woman who is giving her beloved son to the war against terror.
There are even Republicans like Senator Cochran and Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah who are still uncomfortable getting one-on-one into the same Senate elevator with McCain. As Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman said at the Republican National Convention, “God made only one of John McCain.” Conservatives generally feel much safer with softer predictable people, but McCain is constantly sharpening his sucker-punch arsenal.
Probably that is why no conservative ally of George W. Bush’s went near the much-repeated public statement that the Arizona senator put out in his Election 2000 battle that John McCain couldn’t sign on to a computer. The conservatives know McCain better – they knew that statement was another trap for another McCain sucker punch. But Senator Barack Obama fell for it.
And so now we have the almost embarrassing scene of Obama putting out an extremely expensive and widely-seen TV commercial ending with Barack Obama saying “I approve this message” that McCain cannot even use a computer – Ha! Ha! Ha! And then comes the inevitable punch line to the practical joke McCain pulled on Obama — data showing how the North Vietnamese broke the bones in McCain’s hands and arms to the degree that he needs staff to do computer work for him. The episode has made Obama look either dead-headed in the classical sense or insensitive to an inhuman extent – in either case he looks less than presidential.
But Obama brings out the mentoring dimension in his opponent McCain. McCain always wants to take Obama to Iraq or town halls and teach himself something, in the same way McCain is bringing along young Sarah Palin and mentoring her to be an even greater American. In this vein, I think the heat McCain had been throwing at Obama is the best political thing to have ever happened to this still awkward young legislator. If Obama can learn to swing a bat correctly at McCain’s heat, he might someday be qualified to step to the plate against Vladimir Putin’s criminal spitballs. But not now.
Obama has still not turned into a pumpkin, but he has not turned very presidential either. Alas, sometimes it is difficult for a middle-class child who gets a terrible lot of Ivy League attention to deal again with common people and our hospital germs.
I give credit for Obama staying in the game longer than any of his democratic competitors this year. Surely he would have been much more popular by this time, though, if he had been talking more about economics this year of economic cataclysm rather saying so much that he doesn’t look like any of the other guys on a dollar bill. I guess that’s one of the many problems of being young – spending time worrying about what people think of you.
Chris Sharp
Commentary
Chris Sharp is an Educator and a prize-winning professional writer. His commentaries represent his own opinions and not necessarily the views of any organization he may be affiliated with or those of the West Ranch Beacon.