The Twenty Greatest Songs of the Millennium

One of my closest friends brought over a DVD the other day for us to watch, called "1000 Years of Popular Music," and then--poor fellow--he tried to watch it in my presence. The inspiration for the video was straightforward: journeyman guitarist Richard Thompson had been asked to contribute his own version of a list of the twenty greatest songs ever, for a compilation scheduled to appear in Playboy Magazine. Having taken the assignment literally, Thompson compiled a list that honestly (and earnestly) spanned the entire preceding 1,000 years--and then never heard from Playboy again. So instead he decided to play all twenty selections for an intimate house of paying customers, and film the whole thing for indie distribution to my cat-shredded living room. The film itself makes for a fine concert video--Thompson is by turns witty, sardonic, curious, thought-provoking, and then witty again--but the list of songs that he compiled struck me (at least) as nothing short of woeful. Too much attention had been paid to spanning those thousand years relatively evenly, and even more-too-much attention had been paid to "introducing" the audience to pieces with which they might not have been previously familiar. Neither of which was the assignment.

The obvious thing to do in response--as shouted to me at the top of his lungs by my exasperated friend at 0:53 into the film--was to make a list of my own. So here it is, folks: The twenty greatest songs of the past 1,000 years. Comments and controversy are, as always, welcomed and encouraged. (Note: In cases where the lyrics and music were written by different people, or the song was written by someone other than its most well-recognized performer, the two are separated by a backslash immediately following the title.)

20. Some Enchanted Evening (Rogers & Hammerstein, 1949). I'm an enormous fan of musicals, really can't get enough of them--provided that the musicals in question, are South Pacific. Sorry, Carousel fans; sorry, Phantom: there's really only ever been one musical, and that musical is, at the end of the day, a straightforward morality poem that could easily be summarized by the last two lines of its most unforgettable song. A lesson by which the rest of us could live the rest of our days and never be unhappy or conflicted, about anything, ever again, anywhere, ever: "Once you have found her, never let her go. Once you have found her. Never. Let. Her. Go." Take it from someone who knows.

19. Danny Boy (Rory Dall O'Cahan, 1622.) I've seen men who wouldn't cry if you dropped a ten-pound mallet on their pinkie-toe burst into tears before the lyrics of this song even get started. That alone would put it on the list, leave well enough alone the fact that its iconic power to evoke this very reaction, among these very such men, has become so ubiquitous that it has risen to the stature of a movie cliche. Trust me on very few things, but trust me on this: If you're watching a movie about a young guy trying to get a break, and there's a scene where some older guy is lying in a hospital bed, wanting to help the young guy get what he wants from some other old guy, rest assured that the healthy old guy will find himself in the next scene, standing beside the sick old guy's hospital bed, being serenaded with Danny Boy. ...And when the healthy old guy starts bawling like the fat sister at the wedding, that's your cue that the young guy will get his break. Roll credits.

18. All Shook Up (Elvis Presley, 1957). The King of Rock n' Roll actually has a bit of a problem when it comes to this list--and that problem is tempo. Google the phrase "greatest Elvis Presley songs," or "best Elvis Presley songs," or any other variant thereof, and what you'll soon discover is that the top place-holders in these amateur anthologies are songs that should be sad, but which Presley still had to sing at a pace you could dance to down at the soda fountain. Return to Sender would be a vastly superior song than All Shook Up, in almost every conceivable way, except for the nagging little detail that our desperately opining letter-writer is imparting to us his tale of woe in four-eight time! Presley sounds manic, indeed almost happy about the whole thing. (And who knows, maybe he was.) No such shoulda-been-sad song could possibly aspire to Millennial greatness. Toss out all the overwrought nonsense (Suspicious Minds and In The Ghetto, to name just a sampling), and you're left with All Shook Up. ...And here's the thing about that: It's still one of the twenty best songs of the last thousand years, without preface. That's how good this guy really was.

17. Hava Nagila (music: Bukovina trad./words: Abraham Zevi Idelsohn, 1914). You can have fun at just about anybody's wedding. Some are more sombre than others, some are more formal, some are just turgid and nutty. But if you've never sat in the audience while persons of the Jewish faith sang this song and danced around a bottle on the floor at the reception, well, sorry, you've just never really been to a wedding. By the way, as soon as the song is over the father of the bride is put in a chair and hoisted high over the heads of the four strongest young men in the room, who then proceed to twirl the old guy like the pull-string on a children's toy. Somebody pass the Digitalis before the staff has to dial 9-1-1.

16. I Feel Fine (Beatles, 1964). Simple messages are often the best, but sometimes those messages aren't as simple as they first seem. Norwegian Wood, for example, is widely thought to be a play on words; the listener is apparently supposed to hear it as, "Knowing she would." Other times, the message has no hidden meaning beyond that which the listener brings--and occasionally those songs rise to superlative stature for that very reason. With the line, "I'm in love with her, and I feel fine," we are meant to think nothing in particular. And then we go away for a while, we shave, we do the dishes--and finally it hits us: No, actually, those two sentiments don't constitute an automatic redundancy. Yes, I'm in love with her. And, yes, I feel fine. Not like those other times, when being in love with "her" made me feel like a stooge.

15. I Hear a Voice a Prayin' (American Spiritual, c. 1860.) First of all, I have a confession to make: I didn't want this song, in this slot; I wanted Swing Low, Sweet Chariot. Trouble is, after watching a couple of hundred YouTube videos of Swing Low, I finally gave up. All the easy-to-find renditions are either way too fast, way too affected, sung in way too high a register, by people way too white, or some combination of all of these. All of this rocking back and forth and clapping hands has about as much business in Swing Low as would an accordion and a kazoo. To do this song justice it must be sung as if its performance were the only lingering distraction from a daily routine so horrible as to make untimely death (which is what the singer is hoping for, make no mistake) seem like a breath of fresh air. In the meantime, it's probably the fifteenth-greatest song of the past thousand years, but I'm not going to put it in the list if positively nobody on the face of God's Green Earth can pull his head out of his insecurities long enough to stop trying to be smarter than the songwriter and sing the damn thing right. ...What was I talking about, again?

14. I've Got You Under My Skin (Cole Porter, 1931 / Frank Sinatra, 1956). Yeah, yeah, yeah--You would've picked New York, New York. You would've picked Lady is a Tramp. You would've picked My Way. Thing is, if you're looking for the quintessential Frank Sinatra experience in a single song, you'll have to find three things in it when you get there: First, it has to have those big, brassy backup players that swell up halfway into the song; the trademark instrumental interlude that must have made the early years of Las Vegas seem like a children's theme park for adults, back when it wasn't just a children's theme park for children, the way it is now. Second, you've gotta have fun listening, instead of wading chest-deep through Frank's unflattering (and undeserved) overwrought self-celebration. And third, the song has to be an intimate picture of Frank, saying just the right things--a dash of vulnerability, a hint of smug self-confidence, just a smidge of driveway stalker tossed in on a larf--to get some smoking-hot showgirl to take her pants off. This would be that song, folks.

13. Gimme Shelter (Rolling Stones, 1969). I'm a sucker for big emotional shifts in my music, especially if the stylist has managed to front-load the shift, turning it into a piece that's all about anticipation--not unlike the rickety death-march to the top of an old wooden roller-coaster. There's something coming, it's big, and we're just along for the ride. Paint it Black by the Stones does this. Eminence Front by The Who does this. John Lee Hooker's Boom-Boom-Boom-Boom does this. But by far and away my favorite example is Gimme Shelter. By the time Mick starts singing, the fact that he's finally delivered on the promise of the lengthy and yet at the same time palpably nervous introduction means we don't actually have to care whether we can make out what he's saying, or not. Which--admit it, now--you can't, anyway.

12. Lorena (Henry D. L. Webster, 1856). I could've picked a bluegrass song for this list. I could've picked an iconic song from the American Civil War. I could've picked a song with haunting simplicity and a touching, un-selfconscious affection--a song in which a man shows no qualms about pining for his departed love. I could've picked a song that had drifted slowly across moaning battlefields of unspeakable carnage at nightfall, or one that had careened across crowded, dirt-floor taverns full of men of low character in the small hours. I could've done each of these things. So I did.

11. Subterranean Homesick Blues (Bob Dylan: 1965). Best. Music. Video. Ever. Oh, and the most-copied, into the bargain. I remember seeing Dylan (on television) playing at the Live Aid concert in 1984, and thinking, "Wow! That guy's still making music???" Point being, it'd only been twenty-one years since he started at Newport, at that time; it's been twenty-four years, since. And he's still making music. I'm just gonna say "yikes," to that.

10. Carmina Burana: O Fortuna (Anon., early 13th cen. / arr. by Carl Orff, 1803). What makes a great song, anyway? I suppose it has to have a memorable tune, at the very least. It has to be efficient--though not necessarily short--and it has to carry at least the potential to appeal to a wide range of audiences. No polkas will ever show up on anyone's list of the twenty greatest songs of all time. But really, how many thousands upon thousands of musical selections would pass such a coarse filter for selection? To qualify as a truly great piece of music, it would seem, the song in question has to be inescapably evocative, in some way: There must be no doubt, whatsoever, that what you'll be doing for the next four minutes is sloshing around inside whichever subset of yanked heartstrings the song-stylist had in mind for you. And you will travel a long way through your local used-CD store before you get lucky enough to find a single piece of music as inescapably evocative as O Fortnua. Even now, after it's been done to death by Hollywood, I defy you to listen to it without getting goosebumps.

9. Truckin' (The Grateful Dead, 1970). Your choice of the ninth-best song of the past thousand years may be better than my choice of the ninth-best song of the past thousand years. But my choice of the ninth-best song of the past thousand years has extra pot, and she's passing it around. End of argument.

8. Shenandoah (American traditional, early 19th cen.). Dancing around the living room in your sock feet is fun; locking arms with three drunk buddies in a bar and spilling your beers all over the place as you sway back and forth is fun; sometimes even crying your eyes out is fun. But every once in a while, you gotta put on your black tails and stand on a riser and do your tiny little part in producing something that's both achingly beautiful and has nothing to do with you. Shenandoah is an amazing piece of music, to be sure, but that isn't what it's about. It's about being a part of something bigger than yourself. It's about excellence. It's about dressing up and doing your job. Call me a dinosaur, but it seems to me we could use a little more dressing-up and doing our jobs, these days. And when it's just right--when the parts come in at just the right moment, with just the right dynamics, it's one of the most excellent creations mankind has ever conceived. Mark this down as a bankable statement of fact: On the occasion of my memorial service, if four people should bother to show, I want them to come dressed-up and ready to sing this song.

7. These Boots Are Made For Walkin' (Lee Hazlewood/Nancy Sinatra, 1966). There weren't a lot of strong female role-models in 1966--certainly not strong enough to threaten to "walk all over" a cavalier boyfriend, and certainly, certainly not whose last name was Sinatra, growing up in that house. Never mind the paralyzingly seductive vamp, never mind Ms. Sinatra's ingenious flattening of the key phrase--tossing it away as the matter-of-fact observation that it surely was. Never mind the song's ability to burrow deep into your brain and squat there, more or less forever. These Boots is, for its time and place and the brutally womanizing patriarchy in which its singer grew up, nothing short of miraculous. I don't remember off the top of my head what was the unofficial theme-song for the entire feminist movement but, gosh, those bra-burnin' sandal-wearerin', Bella-Abazug-votin' mamas sure could've done worse. Walk all over me all you like, ladies. I promise I'll be good.

6. Empty Chairs (Don McLean, 1971). This was a tough one for me, for some of the same reasons that I had trouble picking a Sinatra song, or a U2 song, or a Rolling Stones song. Clearly McLean is a virtuoso song stylist but, equally clearly, neither one of his two most iconic songs is this one. Granted, Empty Chairs isn't a spontaneous elegy to Vincent Van Gogh. Granted, Empty Chairs isn't a sprawling, almost impossibly expansive fever-dream about the untimely death of Buddy Hollie, either. On the other hand, the very thing that frustrated me about Thompson's list was its insistence on paying tribute, and not so much on actually picking those that he felt were the best. And Empty Chairs is the best Don McLean song, period. What it lacks in complicated time-signatures and florid impressionist imagery, it more than compensates for with its de facto preeminence in a strangely under-utilized subgenre of love song: the I-wish-I-hadn't-taken-her-for-granted song. "And I wonder if you know / that I never understood," pines McLean in the chorus, in strains so chastened and heartsick that you can't help wonder who the inspiration was for the whole thing, "that although you said you'd go / until you did / I never thought you would." We should all be so lucky to hit on an idea so simple and yet so desperately important in our everyday lives. Once you have found her, never let her go.

5. Poliushka Pole (Lev Knipper / Viktor Gusev, 1934). During his concert, Thompson told a joke about the difference between heaven and hell: "In heaven," he grinned, "the British great you at the door, the French are the cooks, the Germans are organizing everything, and the Italians provide the entertainment. In hell, the French great you at the door, the British are the cooks, the Italians organize everything, and the Germans provide the entertainment." It's a good joke, to which I offer this friendly amendment: In hell, the Soviet Government would sanction the music--while in heaven, choruses of ordinary Russian soldiers would sing it all. Forgive my pink diapers, do, but every time the swell comes in at the end of the twelfth measure of this ode to the joys of collective farming, the hair on my arms still stands straight up. It's just an amazingly stirring piece of music, made incomparably more so by the fact that we don't know the dreadful lyrics. Of everything on this list, from the Rolling Stones to Irish folk tunes and back, Poliushka Pole was the very first song I thought of when I set about to tackle this project. That's not hyperbole, folks. Oh, and if you're looking for an honorable mention in the department of stirring Russian folk tunes, you could do a lot worse than this.

4. The Christmas Song (Mel Torme and Bob Wells, 1944 / Nat King Cole, 1946, 1946, 1953, 1961). So, why this song and not White Christmas? How could a list of the twenty best songs of the past millennium not include anything sung by Bing Crosby, or written by Irving Berlin--much less snub a song that happens to be both at once? Because this song is better. To begin with, White Christmas is an utterly depressing song. Most people don't know that, because most people don't really bother thinking about the lyrics--but in fact, the premise of the song is that a young man is stuck someplace far away from his family and friends over the holidays, and doesn't even have the literal cold comfort of snow, to brighten his spirits. It's no accident that White Christmas was the song used by Armed Forces Radio to signal the remaining American servicemen in Vietnam that Saigon was about to fall. (Excuse me while I slit my wrists.) The Christmas Song, by contrast, evokes every last one of all our most cherished and heartwarming holiday images--through a device no more clever or mysterious than simply listing them, one at a time. Oh, and something else: Nat King Cole was a vastly better singer than Bing Crosby could've been on the best day he ever had. There, I said it. Sue me.

3. Bad (U2, 1984). Not everyone is a fan of U2, especially now that they've put themselves through the license-induced shredder of half a dozen reinventions in the past ten years. "They've gone from being U2," a friend of mine once wrote, in a music review, "to being a parody of U2, to being a light-techno ripoff of U2, to being a U2 retrospective, to being a U2 cover-band." But love 'em or not, this raffish lot from Dublin has done as much to place their stamp on modern popular music as any single act in the history of modern popular music. They've sold more records than the Beatles. They play to bigger venues than the Rolling Stones and they've somehow managed to become more sanctimonious than Crosby Stills and Nash. But as with so many other acts listed here, it is this very success that sows within itself the seed of a genuine quandary: How to pick just one U2 song? It had to be ubiquitous, which ruled-out One Tree Hill (my first choice), and its lyrics couldn't openly invite ridicule among the non-believers, as in With Or Without You--which, I just have to say this, is quite possibly the stupidest set of song lyrics in the history of number-one records. It couldn't invite pretension from its audience (Sunday, Bloody Sunday) and it didn't want to be a Jimmi Hendrix tune before it grew up (Bullet the Blue Sky). It had to be stirring, in only just that very particular way that Edge's borderline wacka-chicka guitar playing manages to be, making the hair on your arm stand straight up in spite of itself. It had to be a full-on, adult-portion U2 experience. It had to be a great tune, it had to have a great concept (okay, I get it now, so don't leave?), and it had to have one of those classic, out-of-breath-but-not-energy denouements that Bono loves so much, at its end. I don't know about you, but me, I'm wide awake in America--and I'm not sleeping.

2. Wish You Were Here (Pink Floyd, 1975). I'd argue for this song if all it had going for it is the clever radio-then-with-us introduction; I'd argue for it if all it had were the lines, "Did you exchange / a walk-on part in the war / for a lead role / in a cage?" And I'd go straight to the mat for it, and argue all night on its behalf, if all it had to show for itself was that tendency among single men of a certain age to start locking arms in the back booth and swinging their beer mugs when Gilmour finally finds his way to the title verse. Call it a three-for-one sale, I guess.

1. Funiculi, Funicula (Peppino Turco/Luigi Denza, c.1880). The act of listening to modern popular music is very often little more than exercise in pretending to be miserable about the problems of the world. Teen angst, a relatively new staple in American bourgeois culture, has taken on a marketing mystique all its own--leading to the improbable image of fabulously wealthy musicians in their early twenties, sitting in semicircles on MTV soundstages and acting as if their lives couldn't possibly get worse. But in all our lives, there comes a moment when depressing music no longer seems quite so grown up, anymore. Yes, the world has troubles--yes, people have been and will continue to be unkind to us. But in the end, most of us come to accept that the true sign of maturity isn't so much in being able to diagnose the wrongs of the world, as to steer a center course between apathy and self-destruction. Il faut cultiver nos jardins, as Saint-Exupery would have it--we must all plant our own gadens. That's why the top spot on my list is reserved for a song so joyful that I cannot imagine anyone listening to it without smiling, regardless of whether he knew the words. Regardless of whatever else was going on in his life at the time. Regardless of whether it would make him look uncool to smile, or not. Only one song I can think of manages this: Funiculi, Funicula. And that's what makes it my choice for the single greatest song of the past thousand years. We must all plant our own gardens; why not sing a happy tune while we do it?

So, there you have it. The twenty greatest songs of the past thousand years, according to your humble columnist. Post whatever comments you may have without sanction or abridgment, please-- or, send me a private message to author@escapeclause.net if you'd like to submit an entire list in reply. And despair not: if nothing else comes of all of this, at least my friend may finally look forward to being able to see his movie.

Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida
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To Tide You Over, A Quick Word or Two

First of all, your intrepid columnist apologizes for having once again conducted himself in a manner somewhat less than intrepid over these past few days. It's a desperately busy time around the college where I inflict my sardonic pseudo-superiority on poor unsuspecting middle-class suburbanites who after all just want to go someplace dimly lit and sit in a cubicle for the next fifty years. But this morning as I was browsing my regular stable of political news sites, I came across the phrase "oogedy-boogedy Republicans," complete with a definition. The whole thing inspired me to dash off a quick column, even though I'm already late for a meeting with a student who'd like it very much if I could teach her an entire macroeconomics course in the hour before her test.

The definition of an oogedy-boogedy Republican is, roughly, someone whose religious/moral convictions (one might say hypocrisies, at this point) renders him or her an undesirable face for persuading the low-information middle of the virtues of the conservative movement. Think Haley Barbour meets Jerry Fallwell with a dash of Grover Norquist thrown in, and you've got the three-headed monster of oogedy-boogedeyism pretty well nailed. Or you could just pull up a press-pool photograph of the current President and skip the trouble of hybridizing the view, I suppose. At all events, the collapse in popularity of the modern social-conservative movement, it is argued, is the result of the fact that the oogedy-boogedies have alienated the persuadable middle. This established, the path back to Republican power is supposedly self-evident, in the form of decreased oogedy-boogedeyism. It's a compelling and articulately rendered argument; it only has one small problem: It is unambiguously wrong.

The modern social-conservative movement, as it happens, is the principal benefactor of Republican power over the past forty years. Many people like to think that modern conservatism began with the Reagan revolution in 1980, but in fact the first truly modern Republican was the first Californian who ran for President on a platform of hating media bias and railing against big government, all while manipulating live television addresses and running up a tab in Vietnam even bigger than Lyndon Johnson's--Richard Nixon.

It was Nixon (or perhaps his campaign elite, which we forget were very elite indeed before they started firebombing Brookings Institutions and vandalizing psychiatrists' offices), who first saw that the Republican brand wouldn't win enough votes in any nationwide election on a simple platform of defending the well-to-do from excessive taxes.

In 1968 the Republicans had lost seven of the past nine Presidential elections, going back to 1932, and Nixon's team ingeniously saw how simple the explanation was: the under-educated voters in the lower middle class didn't have to think too hard about policy, to vote Democratic. What Nixon needed was a campaign designed to allow those same people to vote Republican, instead, equally without thinking. In an era when whole cities were being burned they ran ads calling Democrats soft on crime; in an era when doors were first being opened to genuine racial equality they ran tradition-heavy ads aimed at white voters in the south; in an era when the federal budget deficit was exploding with every shell dropped over Pleiku they ran ads suggesting that everyone was going to pay higher taxes if we kept returning Democrats to power. It was a brilliant strategy, precisely because of oogedy-boogedeyism, and it has worked ever since.

The Republican playbook for my entire lifetime has been just this, and until now it has worked in every un-asterisked election of that period: '68, '72, '80, '84, '88, '00, and '04. Only in the aftermath of Watergate, and twice with the unwitting aide of H. Ross Perot in the nineties, have the Democrats managed to wriggle out of the unwinnable trap of winning voters away from oogedy-boogedy voting behavior, without talking down to them and risking dismissal as elitist. Just ask John Kerry.

Better yet, just ask Michael Dukakis--since this one election, 1988, probably serves as the best example of the playbook working to perfection. It happens that 1988 was my first vote, and I didn't know anyone who really wanted Bush Senior to be President, and yet I voted for him--along with rather a large assortment of other people who didn't like him either--precisely because the other guy's positions looked mealy-mouthed, weak, strung across a framework of tortured reasoning, and generally unprincipled. It was all a complete fiction, born strictly of playbook manipulation: drive up the other guy's negatives, shore-up your teetering voters (like me, at the time), push emotional hot-buttons, let everyone off the hook of really having to think too hard about all of this. They say you should never leap at the first opportunity to go to bed with someone, because that person will always be your first. To which I say, ain't it the truth.

Fast-forwarding to more recent times, when the Terry Schaivo matter was front-page news across the entire country (and nowhere more so than Florida). Many of my most politically astute friends couldn't figure out why the Republicans would be so "foolish" as to side with continuing care for Terry, when the general public was coming down 62-38 for having her life terminated with dignity--and I for one saw it as a brilliant move, precisely for its resonance with the oogedy-boogedies. As long as the Republicans could keep those people held together, it didn't matter if 62 percent of the public disagreed with them, because half of those 62 percent wouldn't vote, anyway; the opposition to oogedy-boogedyism was too disorganized.

Until the second term of Bush-II, that is. And here at last we come to the point: Low-information voters who might be tempted to reject oogedy-boogedy tactics are also, by that very combination of traits, extremely unlikely to drag themselves to the polls in an ordinary election cycle. The mistake the Republicans made, in the second term of the Bush-Jr. White House, was to give them an excuse to do so. Between the fruits of bone-headed deregulation of the financial markets, the shockingly ham-fisted response to Katrina, an all but universally discredited folly in Iraq, repeated and callous disregard for civil liberties and constitutional due process, and everywhere the smug impunity--not of oogedy-boogedyism at all, but of power--the current administration forgot that the oogedy-boogedy is about winning low information voters who would otherwise vote Democratic. Having made the mess too obvious, in other words, the administration made even oogedy-boogedy voting behavior pointlessly abstruse. The reason to vote for McCain was as clear as it had been to vote for Nixon; the reason to vote for Obama was even clearer.

Much will be written in the next few months and years about how the Republicans will win their way back to power in this country. Some will say that the Republicans have to move to the center, and those who believe this will throw their support behind someone like Mitt Romney or George Pataki. Others will say that a lack of fire in the belly of the oogedy-boogedies is precisely why Mr. McCain lost, and will throw their support behind a certain, turkey-pardoning Governor from the great state of Alaska. Both sides are wrong. The path back to power for the Republicans will be to disconnect oogedy-boogedy voting from the arrogance of power, by picking someone who can be oogedy-boogedy without actually scaring the shit out of everybody in the process. That's Bobby Jindhal, or, perhaps even more effectively, Mike Huckabee.

But something else has to happen if the Republicans are to return to power anytime soon, too--something that hasn't happened in the aftermath of elections that superficially look like the one we've just had. This vote that we've just finished casting looks, to your author and to a great many people smarter than he, like a "realignment election," in which people find new, low-information excuses to back the opposite party from the one they've been supporting up to that time. In this century, it's happened twice before: 1932 and 1968. And on both occasions, it took a lot more than decreased arrogance and a less scary candidate to reverse that election's effects.

Fortunately for us, the kind of opening that a Mike Huckabee would need, to reassert the success of Republican oogedy-boogedyism, seems unlikely to be handed down to him on a silver platter. Mercifully, the long-term prospects for Republican ascendance will for a time not rest with Huckabee, Jindhal, Romney, Pataki, or anyone else with an (R) after his or her name, but rather in the capable hands of a certain skinny guy from Chicago--a skinny guy from Chicago who will very soon be getting down to the very, very hard work of erasing all of the oogedy-boogedy playbook's diverse and ugly consequences.

Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida

PS: I did promise you this would be a short column, didn't I?


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A Former First-Lady and a Guy Named Tim

With his announcement of the national security team yesterday, President-elect Barack Obama materially completed his cabinet and White House staff. There are of course more appointments to be made, and some of those are promised to be Republicans, but the major positions of the new Administration are now mostly known. You've seen it written in many other places already, but it bears repeating that this is a demonstrably pragmatic-looking Administration, at least in terms of its top personnel, though the "centrist" label is far better-deserved for the cabinet secretaries (whose independent power has gotten out of whack under Bush-II anyway), than for the actual White House staff, from whom the policy initiatives are supposed to flow. A run-down of exactly what we know, and what we may expect, is in order at this point:

By far the biggest appointments announced so far are, on the domestic policy side, Timothy Geithner for Secretary of the Treasury, and, on the foreign policy side, Hillary Clinton for Secretary of State. The Clinton appointment has of course roadblocked the recent coverage of the transition--dripping as it is with Shakespearean pathos and the veiled prospects of poor message discipline, in-fighting, leaks, and even the chance of fresh new scandals.

With this selection, Mr. Obama demonstrates once again that he is willing to take calculated risks on the political side of the ledger if the end-result is to channel the productive energy of a one-time rival in his favor. And if you hesitate to agree that this can be a very, very favorable strategy indeed, just go back and look at some of the things that were being written in late July about Joe Biden. Indeed the best part of the decision, from Obama's standpoint, is that whatever drama emerges from this move will redound to Clinton's detriment rather than his own. Obama's credential as a disciplined manager who evokes strong loyalty and all but leak-proof message control is permanently punched--while the reputation brought to the situation on the same scores by the Clintons is... well... not quite as distinguished. If Mr. Obama finds himself in the worst-case scenario of having to fire Mrs. Clinton, few will remember back to these past days and weeks as an invitation to question his judgment in picking her for the job.

But if the Clinton appointment is the one garnering all the news, the Geithner appointment is surely the one that tells us considerably more about just what sort of Administration the new team promises to be. Geithner is neither a liberal firebrand nor a Chicago-style political crony (the two things we were promised by the radical right to expect from Obama's inner circle). What he is, instead, is a uniquely qualified individual with a full resume aimed specifically at the job. As President of the New York branch of the United States Federal Reserve, Mr. Geithner's current position straddles the fence between the regulatory function of the Fed (all district banks regulate the banking activity in their districts), and the monetary policy side (since the New York bank, in particular, enjoys permanent standing on the Federal Open Market Committee, where the money supply is raised or lowered by simple majority vote).

The most visible of the Treasury Secretary's jobs in the next Administration will be to account for the bailout money that has been shoveled willy-nilly at the financial sector over the past few weeks, and to more prudently spend whatever of that money is left (which won't be much). But the ongoing job of the Treasury Secretary--to raise the necessary bond revenue to cover deficit-spending--is likely to become a significant challenge in the next four years, as both the Social Security Trust and the government of the Peoples' Republic of China find it increasingly difficult to purchase new bonds at the daily Treasury auction. Once this simmering crisis erupts onto the scene, perhaps within the first two years of the incoming government, Geithner's track-record as a cool head on the FOMC, and his proven credential as a proactive, outside-the-box thinker will serve us all, regardless of party affiliation. It promises to be a very difficult assignment, and essentially no one is as qualified to fulfill it right now.

There is at all events a desperate need for a fresh look at the question of regulatory oversight of the financial markets, and on this front as well, Mr. Geithner scores high marks for taking just the sort of pragmatic, centrist approach to such questions that the Obama appointments are receiving so much attention for in general. Clearly the Bush/Paulson approach has left the nation's financial system in tatters--but it's not obvious to even some of the most liberal thinkers on the subject that a return to the days of Glass/Steagall wouldn't exacerbate the problem by disincenting capital. It's a poignant thought to consider for the pro-regulation crowd that many of the best-performing securities during the current bear market would have been illegal before Glass-Steagall was repealed. However one looks at it, the Geithner nomination is a laudable, perhaps even brilliant decision. Call it two-for-two, if you must, though there have certainly been others outside the scope of this particular column.

Oh, and there's one last major element of aplomb to Mr. Obama's galaxy of selections made thusfar: Geithner, who might otherwise have had one of the most visible (and probably controversial) tenures in the history of the Treasury, doesn't like publicity. He's a wonk, just as all the district bank presidents in the Federal Reserve system are wonks. So how does a President who wants the most effective performance from such a key player, do his part to help ensure that's exactly what he gets? How about by nominating an ambitious, headline-hungry formal rival for Secretary of State?

Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida

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Film Review: The Wind Will Carry Us (1999)

Like many of the best foreign Directors, Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami apparently doesn't lose much sleep at night over the question of whether his films have too little plot. Far from the roar of pyro crews and the all-nighter hothouses of CG post-production that are modern Hollywood, Kiarostami is free to explore the question, not of how much eventfulness an audience may tolerate in a two hour sit-down in a darkened theater, but rather how little. Without exception his films are explorations into the subtlety of characterization--questions of morals and morale, decision vs. destiny--often hinging on a single event buried deep within the fourth reel and, in case we hadn't yet caught the premeditation in such choices, delivered off-camera anyway. Though perhaps an acquired taste for Western palettes, Kiarostami's introspective character pieces are always provocative, always moving, and in the end, always a treat to the senses to which few other filmmakers may aspire, and The Wind Will Carry Us is the apogee of his portfolio. It is a film so adroitly timed, so pitch-perfect in every tiniest detail, that its completion would surely have stranded a lesser individual with the crippling sensation that he would never be able to make another film again.

The film opens with a long take of the (unexpectedly?) beautiful Iranian countryside, in wide-shot--a tiny-looking International Scout making its way down a winding road only barely noticeable in an unremarkable corner of the scene, while the vehicle's four occupants, recorded in production sound instead of ADR, can be heard quietly bickering about whether or not they've misunderstood their driving directions. Even at this early juncture two things are inescapably apparent about the experience that this film will represent: First, our director sees no reason to explain himself--you know as much about who these people are and where they're going as anyone else, and no more than you're supposed to--and second, if you'll pardon the pun, this film is hardly in a hurry to get anywhere. Through a series of long takes shot at different angles along the route, this anti-scene of four guys gently squabbling about the proper turnoff continues for over five and a half minutes, long after the opening titles would have been over and done with, had there even been any.

Eventually the quartet finds their intended destination--a small village carved into a steep hillside and notable to our eyes as the sort of un-even-roofed hodgepodge that we'd be less surprised to find in desert Africa. Indeed after finding a young guide on the outskirts of town, our presumptive lead character (and the only one of the four whom we will ever see on camera throughout the film) makes his way literally across the tops of the earthen dwellings that will encompass his universe for the duration of the picture, hopping first up two feet to transit the next interval, and then down again.

Kiarostami devotes this opening reel of the film to establishing not just the film's tempo, but also its principal source of mystery--that these four obviously urban Tehranians have checked themselves into the closest local semblance of a guesthouse, apparently for the purposes of monitoring the health of an infirmed and elderly local, convalescing at the opposite end of the village. Throughout his long walk across the rooftops with the boy who will be his foil, our lead character--"The Engineer"--inquires repeatedly and with implied familiarity about the old woman's health, the boy's side-mouthed answers revealing either discretion or ignorance; we aren't supposed to know which.

I can think of no higher tribute to Kiarostami's achievement with this picture than that, by the time we actually discover what these four men are doing here and why they've taken so much interest in the health of an old woman, it no longer really matters to us anymore: Like the characters themselves, we've become immersed in the day-to-day rhythm of this at once surreally alien and improbably familiar little community. Its cranky restaurant matron, her semi-estranged and possibily philandering husband, the arrestingly pregnant and then arrestingly un-pregnant innkeeper, the hauntingly beautiful young woman who milks a cow in darkness so that their collective guests might enjoy just one more locally tricky little comfort from home.

The film is described by assorted critics as a mystery, and to that extent they're right: we are meant to wonder, of course, who these people are and how they came to find themselves in such a far-flung place with such a seemingly insignificant agenda (indeed at one point in the film the Engineer's three accomplices become so bored that they literally disappear, never to be seen again). But to describe the film with this single identifier is to entirely miss Kiarostami's point. There is mystery in life, of course, but it isn't the glamorous, maybe-they're-spies kind of mystery that we so often find ourselves escaping into at the movies; it is rather the mystery of mundanity--the strange shooting-script by which all of us on this homey little planet of ours seem to play out the same micro-dramas, the same rivalries, the same petty squabbles. The mystery in life is that it could contain so little real mystery, and yet seem so mysterious--so wondrous. So beautiful.

The Key Grip awards this film five bald heads, his highest rating. Highly, highly recommended.

Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida
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Blue-State Economics

On one level, there's little shock-value to be derived from the near total absence of Republican mischief-making in the aftermath of November 4th: They did, after all, just get their watches wound in the national election. But taking a slightly longer view, it's not obvious exactly when this same measure of electoral defeat has stopped them before. Past Democratic transitions have been marred (to say the least) by a bull-headed intransigence on the part of the defeated, born of equal parts denial, ideological certitude, and base-whipping. Just ask Bill Clinton.

If all is quiet on the right flank in Washington these days, it may just be that the Republican agenda-makers, especially on the domestic side of the ledger, have awakened to the bankruptcy of their ideas--but probably that isn't it. The far more likely scenario is that the right is lying in wait for the sort of substantive policy shifts that Barack Obama has already promised and already (during the campaign) been assailed for. Once the assault on these shifts has agitated their own base into a frenzy of disdain, Republicans can renew their time-tested formula of overwhelming the national agenda with catch phrases and vitriol, inevitably casting the Democrats in a weak light, despite the power and snatching away the independents.

It is worth considering how things got this way.

The modern discipline of economics is surprisingly neutral on questions of political discourse: Progressive income taxes may be defended on the principal of "diminishing marginal utility," by which a dollar taken from a wealthy person and given to a poor one has a net-beneficial effect on all of society's collective happiness, to pick one random but unusually topical example. Environmental regulations may be defended on the principal of "internalizing social costs," wherein the non-monetary repercussions of a firm's activities are converted into monetary ones through fines and regulations -- to pick another. Minimum wage laws may be defended as having negligible effects on the employment of unskilled labor, since the unskilled labor in question is already being used in its smallest possible quantities by the firms employing them, to pick a third.

And yet, as adaptable as the underlying principles of modern economic thought would seem to be to such progressive claims, the academy is at the same time populated by individuals so ubiquitously and inflexibly Conservative as to render them the frequent butt of both merriment and derision at the hands of their would-be colleagues in the other social sciences. "An economist engages someone else's ideas about the way the world works," wrote one columnist in a recent edition of The New Yorker, "the way a bulldozer engages a picket fence."

This phenomenon is largely attributable to the coincidental (and misguided) desire on the part of professional economists to be regarded as objective, physical scientists--more like chemists and biologists, and less like their messy-headed brethren down the hall in Psychology and Poly-Sci. If the practitioner has to be clean, then the practice has to be clean too--which in turn means that the rich (progressive) texture of policy debates must melt on contact with the paradigm, to prevent it from looking unresolved. The anguish of jobs lost to technological change, the qualitative detriment of polluted air, the elusive tabulation of the spoils of a war on poverty--all of these are matters dismissed with a smug wink and the back of a hand.

As the paradigm has polarized itself to the right, at the same moment in time and for the same reasons the rhetoric from Conservative Think Tanks has tailored itself to a world in which the cleanliness and simplicity of an answer is its highest virtue, existing in a perfect synergy with the rank-and-file's inability to regard a complex idea as anything but a threat. (Surely the good people at Americans for Tax Reform don't really intend for their government to be "drowned in the bathtub"? Surely Grover Norquist has been to enough school to know that bridges in the host city of the Republican National Convention will, absent a government that's just been drowned in someone's bathtub, fall unceremoniously down?) With such a de facto simple paradigm to claim as their own, the Norquists of the world have all the excuse they need to reduce a messy world to painfully simplistic causes that play perfectly with the low-information voters in swing districts, regardless of whether they genuinely believe anything they say, or not.

It would be tempting to presume a January 20th expiration date on such laments--to believe that some sort of corner has been turned. But the bitter reality of the matter is that Mr. Obama's performance was at its shakiest when he found himself confronted by a self-appointed Ohio foot soldier so perfect for the slick-sided provincialism of the modern conservative economics that he was drafted by the McCain campaign as its chief spokesman before the sun had set. It won't get any easier from there.

The Democrats will not win an economics argument in this country on the basis of raw numbers alone; they never do. Now that the battle has been won, the Democrats must take a big-picture approach to winning the larger war. Selling complex, messy ideas like progressive income taxes (to say nothing of the restoration of a modicum of governmental oversight) will require a fresh infusion of street-smart packaging to match such hate-button phrases as "death tax," a fire fought with fire, as it were. If the Obama Administration dismisses such efforts as quotidian (or, worse, elitist), or if it presumes victory before the fact on the strength of its mandate, they could surely suffer the same fate as wide-eyed Democratic Administrations in years past. The good news is that they're already winning this P/R battle with cool-headed, pragmatic appointments and centrist views. In other words, they're winning it the same way they won the election.

Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida
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Travel Reflections: Sarajevo

My innkeeper, Faraz, rubs an afternoon nap from his eyes as I apologize a second time for bothering him. He is of the best tradition in such things, not really an innkeeper at all—at least not a modestly paid desk clerk who can’t be trusted to know of which he speaks—but rather the eldest son of a man fortunate enough to own a home with a long row of bedrooms down a chilly hallway with a toilet and a basin at its end. He owns his advice to me as he owns his city: implicitly, unthinkingly, dispensing his thoughts across a threshold leading rearward to a strange-scented and chaotic living quarters, having opened the door just enough to lean through it in his sock feet. The pause he enters into when I ask him where I should have dinner is oblique, pointed away from me and at the floor—at once earnest with intent and casually offered, as though no one else had asked this question of him before.

Ten minutes later through a chilly nightfall across streets of gently sifting snow, I am at the eastern end of the central city, the Bascarsija, where Ottomans and Europeans once haggled over the staples of greed and power, and where today the scars of a fresher and bloodier form of haggling have been plastered over like stubborn memories: bullet holes and mortar craters primed and painted and left to show, as if what happened here could be displaced from one’s mind as easily as a passing windstorm in the American Midwest. That’s where we found Betty Johnson’s mailbox the next morning; this over here is where the Nesic family was blown to pieces in their beds by a rocket-propelled grenade.

At the time of the Bosnian independence declaration in 1991, more than a million people lived here—the Bosniaks—nestled together in a long, oval-shaped valley surrounded by the cupped hillsides of the Bosnian Serbs. Within weeks of the declaration the Serbs had effectively seceded from the secession; for three nightmarish years they hurled mortars and grenades down onto the streets of this once grand and prideful city from a range too near to miss. Tonight the few straggling shoppers with whom I share the pedestrian street seem not to notice the scarred facades—but this, I realize all at once, serves only to heighten the pathos. They don’t notice the bomb craters and the bullet holes because they’re used to it all, and just how could that be possible?

I am at the “wrong” end of the city, perhaps an hour’s walk from the Opera hall with scarcely twice that time at my disposal. At last I have found the restaurant: narrow, half lit, a soot-blackened front casting its shadows across my expectations. No, wait, the door is open, the air thick and comforting and warm. A young man beckons me through the entryway, and again I find myself presuming the company of a proprietor’s son—but how could I know? Is it simply his manner, there before me in his spattered apron: part over-eager sideshow huckster, part mafia-quiet surety of his circumstance? Do I disgrace him with the impudence of such ideas, or venerate him for their inherent tinge of envy? If either is apparent he betrays no sign as he leads me up the fractious pinewood stairs, past the scarred whitewash and muted steel of the kitchen and through a notch in the ceiling no bigger than an attic-hole, to the shoebox diorama that is his upstairs dining space: six tables long, one table wide, low-ceilinged, low-lit, empty.

It would take more than idle speculation to pique the young man’s temper, of this I have no doubt as I take my seat and requisition my beer. He has earned his mafia-quiet surety (if not his sideshow hucksterism) by the simple fact of his survival. I pour the beer slowly when it arrives; there is little room for fractious impatience in a place that has seen such stoicism, little room for inflexibility, little room for pettiness, here. And at last it is this, the true drama that I am so fortunate to have been spared in my so often comically melodramatic life, that brings me short: It could’ve been this way on so many other occasions, but wasn’t—absent the ghastly history of a place where people had, and continue to have, genuine problems. It could’ve been this way a thousand times; it could’ve been this way with parents; it could’ve been this way with bosses and professors; it could’ve been this way with friends.

It could’ve been this way with Rachel.

It could have been, she could have authored, a chapter in my life when nothing much mattered that was past or future: acceptance without pity, affection without context, a companionship without label, purpose or agenda. I could’ve ridden carelessly in the fickle currents of her interest, could’ve spent the rest of my entire life savoring our first, my first, the gray-green light of the bedroom, the curiously specific way that her expression had opened to me, just before her body—how it had seemed to me the way it might have seemed to lie down before God, blinking and mesmerized, beholden and terrified. I could’ve been grateful for that alone, instead of insisting that it mean anything, after.

The darkness outside the window is surprisingly opaque. Wood smoke trails up the stairs after me, suffusing the alcove. There are today about 700,000 people in Sarajevo, though the ramshackle trams and dreary hillscapes afford as much proof as the pock-marked facades downtown that this will never be a place of international communion again, never again a crossroads—never again host an Olympics. Sarajevo is a city whose back has been broken. Still its people carry on. They run restaurants. They answer the doors at guesthouses. They cope.

In a way it’s fitting that I should find myself cloistered this evening in a bistro such as this, its unselfconscious mishmash of checked tablecloths and Ottoman artwork and sad little Hapsburg-era flourishes in the architecture, pondering the destinies of my ambitious young applicants. It is fitting since, despite a coddled bourgeois existence in a country always so far from war (even war of its own doing), it is my own destiny that has seemed so often to elude my shrewdest efforts at direction. There are so many self-contained vignettes from a brusque and testy past, that should in recollection look just like this one—when I should have sensed the gift of spontaneity, the joy of missing some event across town. How much more rewarding, how much more textured could the archive of my past now be?

It could have been this way with Gerry.

There could have been joy in every cranky phone call, a treasured poignancy in every exasperating argument. In Ames, when he picked fights over matters neither of us could possibly have cared about for longer than the classroom lecture that had incited them, I could’ve nodded in his direction and chucked him on the shoulder and savored the very fact of his continued presence in my life. Later, when he began calling me socially, it could’ve struck me as the most natural thing in the world, instead of taking me repeated explanations to accept. In Las Vegas, when he first suggested that things might happen between us—things I could never have imagined until the very moment that he was speaking them—I could’ve responded with warmth and gratitude in the presence of such fearless friendship, so unconditional. So trusting. I could’ve needed less convincing.

It could have been this way with Gerry? Surely it must have been this way with Gerry—the stubborn, impulsive, short-tempered friend for whom the plan had always been to leave us all too young, drowning in a hospital bed in the unsympathetic clutches of cystic fibrosis. How could I have missed so many organic moments in the company of someone with so few of them to spare?

The sea bass arrives, now—conveyed to me up that same, almost comically narrow and fidgety flight of stairs. There is no music, no comment from the waiter, no bon appetit. This, I understand as I pass the first morsel of fish between my lips, tangy with the salty crust and lemony flesh beneath—this is Sarajevo. Not all of Sarajevo; not any Sarajevo. Not tomorrow’s Sarajevo or, more to the point, yesterday’s Sarajevo, either. But mine: A sheltered moment to understand the wisdom of adaptability, the folly of control—the envy one can feel for those who’ve improvised a path to happiness when all around them was destruction and despair. My Sarajevo: A battered little restaurant at the far end of the Bascarsija, a place hard to find and harder to choose. A missed ballet. A cold night, a falling snow, wood smoke—solitude. A plate of fish.

Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida
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The Ten Myths of Election 2008

Most of us aren't thinking as much about the election anymore as we are about turkey, presents, and a certain presumptive nominee for Secretary of State. And that's too bad, because now that we have a little more distance from the thing, it's a lot easier to come to a few sober--if not necessarily popular--assessments of what really happened over the past year and a half. Here, then, are the Key Grip's assortment of the ten biggest misunderstandings, misapprehensions, misinterpretations, and outright misses of the 2008 Presidential election cycle. If I've done my job, at least one of these will make you mad; that is, after all, what I do best.

10. It was John McCain's money disadvantage that sank him in close states. The shame of this one is that it sounds the death-knell for public financing of election campaigns, but the truth of the matter is significantly more complicated and has a great deal more to do with McCain's inability to take the ground war seriously. The intrepid young (?) journalists at fivethirtyeight.com spent a significant amount of time and personal treasure criss-crossing the country in the final four months of the campaign, and in stop after stop--battleground after battleground--they found Obama field offices in the least likely of places, bursting at the seams and open well after dinner, while the McCain field operation in the same places was either empty of volunteers or entirely non-existent.

McCain lost Indiana by a hair's breadth and Nevada by an eye-popping twelve points, and both of those results were largely attributable to the massive turnout advantage brought to bear on the situation by Team Blue. If recent election cycles have proven anything, you can't win toss-up states without a solid ground operation, and the McCain people (like the Clinton people before them) seemed pathologically incapable of taking the Obama organization seriously enough to answer it--despite the fact that most of the hardest work could've been carried out by volunteers.

9. A Republican couldn't possibly win in 2008. This country has a long and storied history of holding its nose and electing people that it either doesn't want, or who come from a party that it doesn't want. The most recent example is George H. W. Bush in 1988 -- whom absolutely nobody in this country was thrilled to have as our forty-first President but who, owing to the swift and precipitous collapse of the Dukakis campaign, found himself backing into the top job on account of being the last man standing. The better example, though somewhat less modern, is the time-worn story of Harry Truman (a man whose disapproval ratings were for a time even higher than Nixon's were in August of '74) coming from nowhere to beat Thomas Dewey for a full term in the Oval Office in November of 1948. To suggest that, post Bush, post Katrina, post Iraq, there was no way any Republican could've carried 270 votes is to ignore whole swathes of America's singularly peculiar political history. McCain--or possibly someone else--most assuredly could have won.

8. Mr. Obama's agenda will prove difficult to secure in such a center-right country. America is not a center-right country. What America is, rather, is a country that wants a Head of State as much as or more than it wants a Head of Government--and thus it routinely elects people who talk in short sentences, press the same hot-buttons all day, and aren't quite up to the messy job of governance (Reagan, Bush I, Bush II) if those people can also manage to run an entire campaign without looking weak, indecisive, palpably dishonest, or unable to hit big-league pitching (Dukakis, Kerry, Gore, McGovern). The fact that most of the people who've passed this metric in recent times have been Republicans is a semi-accident of the Republican party's far deeper stable of individuals willing to be stupid about governance in favor of a carefully crafted leadership image. When Democrats advance people who are in fact capable of looking the part of a strong leader, it doesn't even matter if they are Catholic, a philanderer, talk with a funny Massachusetts accent, and their father was a war profiteer with borderline antisemitic German sympathies and contacts.

7. Barack Obama was inevitable. This is partly a reprise of number 9, above, but the specific question of Mr. Obama's supposed cult of personality bears an independent thought or two, precisely because it so willfully disregards the facts surrounding his ascendancy. In early 2004, Mr. Obama was, at best, the second-most popular candidate in the Illinois Democratic primary for U.S. Senate. Then the Democratic frontrunner, Blair Hull, was forced to withdraw when he became embroiled in a domestic abuse scandal and Obama raced in to fill the vacuum. Obama's presumptive opponent in the general election for the seat, Jack Ryan, was also forced to withdraw after damaging information about his child custody battle with an ex-wife in California was released to the press. With no one else to run, the Illinois Republican party turned to Alan Keyes, a man so extremist in his conservatism that he no longer even considers himself a member of the Republican party because it's--wait for this one--too moderate.

With his inevitable trouncing of Keyes (and the stirring keynote address he'd given at that summer's Democratic National Convention), Obama became a national figure overnight and shortly thereafter he began to organize himself toward a run for the Presidency. But fate had one more blessing to bestow on the supposedly methodical-genius Obama, and this particular blessing would come from the least likely of sources: The Republican-controlled state legislatures of Michigan and Florida, both of whom ignored national agreements to schedule their primaries after the "first four" of Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada. Instead those two delegate-rich states scheduled their primaries "too early," and in consequence were (temporarily) disenfranchised by the Democratic Party.

Had these two states held primaries on Super Tuesday, the President-elect wouldn't necessarily be Hillary Clinton right now, but it certainly wouldn't have been Barack Obama, because Clinton would've clobbered him so forcefully in the Super Tuesday primaries that he'd never have been able to recover. Take nothing away from David Plouffe's brilliant general election campaign, please, but the cold hard fact is that it took an unusual haul of artfully timed serendipity just to get Mr. Obama into that position in the first place.

Moreover, on the day the Lehman failure precipitated the first big crash on Wall Street (and John McCain uttered his now infamous gaffe about the fundamentals of our economy being strong), Mr. Obama wasn't ahead by six or eight points, he was trailing by three. Much of that was convention bounce, but still: The notion that Obama and his people deserve the credit, the whole credit, and nothing but the credit for their victory two weeks ago is about as far from the reality of the election we've just had as anything I've yet heard. Would Mr. Obama still have won without this enormous assist from the Citigroups and Lehmans of the world? Perhaps. But it certainly wouldn't have been a 365-electoral-vote wave, the way it was.

6. Obama's decision to pick Joe Biden was designed to bolster his foreign policy credential. Rightly or otherwise, Barack Obama and his campaign never much worried about the prospect of a foreign policy debate in the general election campaign. If the Republicans had tried to turn this into another referendum on security, Mr. Obama (as the fall cycle has proven) was capable of pivoting the discussion to his advantage in a variety of ways, without the help of Joe Biden.

This myth is particularly frustrating to me because it's such an insult to Joe Biden: The idea that Obama would never have "risked" picking such a rambunctious and talkity partner if his own weak resume on foreign policy hadn't forced his hand, completely misses the point of the Joe Biden selection. Biden is middle-class through and through, and just the sort of public figure against whom charges of Massachusetts elitism were just never going to stick. He raised Obama's stature not so much with foreign policy voters (is there any such thing?) as with Catholics, working-class voters in Ohio, the Jewish vote in Florida, and anybody who worried that an Obama Administration would be distant and aloof. Say what you will about Joe Biden, he's not distant and aloof.

5. John McCain's biggest mistake was choosing Sarah Palin. This one is actually half-right: It was a huge mistake to pick Sarah Palin, and this very column said so at the time. With the combination of her youth, inexperience, and manifest unreadiness, Palin's selection to be McCain's running-mate opened the door to renewed consideration of McCain's age, judgment and temperament. But as poor a choice as she was--and in the end she certainly damaged her benefactor more than she helped--the question that such analysis begs is, who else? Mr. McCain's very strength as a candidate, his very appeal in the first place, was that he could pitch himself as the country's premier independent: a politician without a brand. It's a marketing strategy that makes for great theater (even when it's mostly a bald-faced lie), but it does raise some serious problems when it comes to picking someone to balance the ticket.

Had McCain chosen, say, Joe Lieberman, then the evangelical right--without whom McCain couldn't possibly prevail--would've stayed home. Had McCain chosen one of his prominent opponents in the primary campaign (say, Mitt Romney), the evangelical right would've revolted against that choice, too, with the added drawback that Mr. McCain himself didn't like any of his prominent opponents in the primary campaign. Had he picked a candidate who was suitable to the evangelical right and also not Sarah Palin (say, Haley Barbour), he would've alienated the swing voters in the middle even faster than Palin herself ultimately did. What Mr. McCain needed was a devout culture warrior, pro-life to the extreme, who liked to hunt and fish and generally kill other living things while talking about being pro-life, and yet who still carried at least the longshot prospect of consolidating his claim on the persuadable independents-- especially women. In 2008, there was exactly one person who came even close to fitting that description, and he picked her.

4. The PUMAs were McCain's best path to victory. File this one as a counterpoint to (5), perhaps, but the idea that there were legions of disaffected Hillary voters out there, prepared to cross over and vote McCain, was even at the time so fanciful as to seem downright comic. PUMAs were never going to cross over in force and vote for McCain, and there's more than one pretty good reason why.

To begin with there is the small problem that a great many of those supposed PUMAs were actually Republicans who'd been recruited by the hate-wing radio crowd to pretend they were Hillary supporters, in the hope of sowing dissension in the Democratic party. The more these people did exactly what Rush Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham and Ann Coulter were telling them to, by logging in to comment fields in the blogosphere and droning on and on about how pissed they were that Hillary was getting such a raw deal, the harder it became for the senior McCain campaign staff to discern that they were, in point of fact, liars from within their own party who never had any intention of voting for Hillary in the first place. If there is one great untold story left among the debris of the losing side in this great contest, it is the as-yet unspoken admission that the campaign literally head-faked itself on this question, picking a woman to appeal to a constituency that they themselves had conjured out of nothing.

Add to this the small problem that there wasn't a Democrat left on Planet Earth who was prepared to commit the same sort of ritual seppuku in the voting booth that had denied a clean win to Al Gore in Florida back in 2000. Mr. Bush saw to that. By the time of the Lehman meltdown, the Democratic party was as united behind its own brand as it has been in my lifetime by a margin too wide to measure, and no woman on earth would have made any difference in partisan-base support for the Democratic ticket--not even Hillary Clinton herself.

3. Defeating Barack Obama would've resulted only from making him look scary and different. The Lee Atwater / Karl Rove / Steve Schmidt playbook is to convince persuadable voters that the guy they wish they could vote for is unacceptable on sweeping character grounds, then move in for the kill on a specific question of policy. You show your opponent riding in a tank, and then you follow that up with the Willie Horton ad. You stand passive while a 527 accuses him of lying about his purple hearts, and then you hit him on his right flank over his voting record about Iraq. This technique is referred to as "stripping the bark off" the opposition, but the most important aspect of it is the timing of the two approaches: You can't call someone a tank-riding, unpatriotic, weak-kneed liberal if you've already endeavored to engage him on policy grounds, and you certainly can't do it if the general public has already gotten to know the other guy and come to respect him.

It's no accident that the McCain candidacy enjoyed its strongest polling during the weeks immediately following the Paris Hilton ad--the tactic was pure Atwater and it worked. Many people were still making up their minds about Barack Obama, and here was a concise, not entirely groundless, almost funny TV commercial to assist in making the final judgment on character.

The problem wasn't so much with the ad itself (though of course anyone reading these words would rather live in a country where such tactics didn't work), as with the fact that the attack was leveled immediately prior to the conventions. Mr. Obama neutralized the effects of that commercial by winning back the persuadable character voters at his own convention, after which news of Mr. McCain's choice of running-mate had the unintended effect of blotting out any consideration of anyone else's suitability for high office for the weeks afterward. By the time Sarah Palin herself was standing on an airport runway before a microphone, saying "The American people have a right to know who the real Barack Obama is," the American people already felt they knew who the real Barack Obama is--he had passed the "living-room test" and become someone we were used to thinking of as one of our own. In consequence, instead of asking the question Ms. Palin wanted us to ask, we turned their attentions to the question of just who this interloping stranger was, leveling such nasty innuendo.

2. The Obama campaign won by widening the playing field. Again, this is certainly at least half-true: You weren't going to win an election for President in 2008 by defending all the states that John Kerry had won, and not winning any others. But just below the surface of this inescapable reality lies a Machiavellian bait-and-switch so deft and so brilliant that I find it personally frustrating to have seen so little written about it: Barack Obama and Joe Biden never seriously contested the states in which the Democratic party had always been believed to make or break its fortunes every four years. From Arkansas to West Virginia, along a roughly arrow-shaped swathe of the country on the south side of the Ohio river basin, Messrs. Obama and Biden never spent serious ad money, never made serious campaign appearances, never hedged their electoral bets, and in consequence never stood a chance.

The brilliance of this wasn't in the money that it saved--heaven knows there was plenty of money--but in the agenda that it allowed them to ignore. Democrats and independents in Arkansas and Louisiana and Tennessee and Kentucky and West Virginia had for a generation been thought of as the ideological key to victory for Team Blue (think of a certain Governor from Arkansas or, more recently, a certain first-term senator from North Carolina).

By attempting to build a coalition around the voters in these states, the Democratic party consistently presented itself as a "donkey designed by committee," with no clear sense of what its priorities were or how best to respond to the venomous attacks that were being launched from within its own power band. By running on a platform that carried broad appeal in other parts of the country--one might even say, a platform that carried broad appeal only in other parts of the country--the Democratic ticket of 2008 accomplished something that the Democratic tickets of 1988 and 2000 and 2004 could not: They cabined-off the influence of the upland South. Make no mistake, it was a brilliant campaign on so many levels as to leave them too numerous to count here, but a fifty-state strategy it manifestly was not.

1. Elections are won and lost using time-tested formulas. Here at last we come to what I believe is the core lesson from this campaign season: Successful election campaigns aren't one-size-fits-all. In 2004 if you were a Republican who wanted a (second?) term as President, you ran a security-conscious, character-assassinating, slash-and-burn election campaign designed to paint your opponent as a mealy-mouthed fumbler who can't be trusted to stick to his word in a pinch, and you won. In 2008, you try the same set of tactics, orchestrated by many of the same senior campaign staff, and you lose.

Now, on one level this observation is a tautology. People realize that each election presents both candidates with a different set of challenges and a different set of opportunities. (Imagine a Bush v. Gore election in the middle of the sort of financial crisis we've just had, and you've pretty well proved this point to yourself on a sample of one.) But electoral strategies also succeed or fail owing in large measure to the personality of the candidate him- or herself, too--and this would seem to be far less obvious to at least the people who were running John McCain's campaign, if not Hillary Clinton's.

Mrs. Clinton, lest we forget, ran the bulk of her primary campaign on the platform that Mr. Obama couldn't grasp the bitter realities of a permanent Democratic minority on the electoral map-- offering herself as the only candidate who knew to play for John Kerry's 252 plus one or the other of Ohio and Florida. This strategy would've served Clinton better than it served Kerry, for sure, but it also would have freed McCain from the majority of the downside consequences of his funding disadvantage. The 527's would've descended on Ohio and Florida with a gusto that makes the Swift Boat campaign look vague and indecisive by comparison, after which Clinton would've had a very difficult time defining herself in the eyes of the blue-collar Ohio independents as anything other than the gal with her fingerprints all over the Whitewater billing records.

Meanwhile, the same John McCain who once decried the polarizing influence of the evangelical opinion leaders in his own party could be heard approving television commercials in which Barack Obama was accused of trying to teach sex education to kindergarteners and fighting to prevent post-natal care for the surviving babies of botched abortions. Not only did these attacks ring hollow with an electorate that had already come to know and respect Obama, but the backlash of such a character reversal redounded mercilessly to McCain's own detriment. McCain -- perceived until this election as a principled centrist who would tell it like it is, regardless of hiw it was -- had been coached by Steve Schmidt and Rick Davis into campaigning like just another Bush, at the one time in history when presenting one's self as just another Bush would prove singularly devastating for one's electoral fortunes.

Much will be written and said about this election for years to come. It may, indeed, become the sort of watershed that people have already suggested, thus heaping even more expectation onto the shoulders of a certain skinny kid from Chicago. But out of the shadows of all these crazy and surprisingly durable myths about how the race was run and why it turned out the way it did, the one inescapable truth that has already crystallized is that John McCain lost this thing every bit as much as Barack Obama won it. ...And that McCain lost it, in the end, when he lost himself.

Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida Click Here to Read More...