Election '08: One Long Humiliation Contest

By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com. Posted May 1, 2007.

The strangest thing about the premature reappearance of the presidential debates is the palpable, seething contempt they inspired in commentators everywhere, liberal and conservative. One after another, columnists lined up to shit on the candidates, calling them names like phony and desperate and grasping and clown, and rightly so -- for there was something obviously perverse and obnoxious about these terminal ambition cases hogging the airwaves already, pushing us to get on board with their insane power-fantasies a full fifteen months before most of us should even start thinking about the next election.

An American Enterprise Institute analyst graded the candidates on their "creepiness" factor. The Houston Chronicle compared the debates to a stock car race, where everybody is really watching in hopes of seeing a crash. The Cleveland Plain Dealer said the debate was like a "political beauty pageant in which the mission of the contestants was to hop, skip and swerve without falling on their faces," the result "more dizzying than edifying." And so on and so on... more than one reporter cracked that it was a far cry from Lincoln-Douglas, etc.

They were right, of course, and in that sense there was nothing strange about the names the media honchos threw at the candidates. What was strange was the context. Here you have a mainstream power ritual mocked openly by the mainstream media. The brutal humiliation of the candidates as people has become part of the process in our democratic transfer-of-power ritual; even the candidates who are "taken seriously" by the major press organs and said to "have a real chance" are savagely abused at times like this by the campaign scribes, who go out of their way to depict the presidential hopefuls as shameless, greedy buffoons who will do or say anything for a chance at the throne. Particularly now, where their mere participation in such silly early debates is openly ridiculed.

By the time a candidate wins the nomination, of course, the winning candidate will have been made to jump through ten thousand grossly humiliating hoops, forced to wear closetfuls of stupid hats, posed with footballs and hockey sticks, asked to play the saxophone and the clarinet, grilled about his teeth and his haircut and the fat girl he banged in high school, and basically been made to perform like the lowest, scraggliest, street-hungriest organ grinder’s monkey the world has ever seen. Anyone who can still respect the candidate as a human being by the time he's reached this stage has a serious defect of perception -- he's just not paying attention. Because stripping the candidate of the last shreds of his self-respect is clearly an important part of the ritual, especially early on.

There must be something to it -- it must be beneficial to the American power apparatus somehow to demean the individuals who seek to occupy its highest offices. Maybe it's because while dignified human beings are unpredictable, an old turned-out whore can be counted on to do anything for forty bucks -- and these are the kinds of people we need in the White House. Who knows what it is. Whatever the reason, they're starting the seal show earlier and earlier each cycle. And this year, the first round of the freak parade took place in Orangeburg, South Carolina, where the Democratic party unveiled its '08 team of craven auto-flagellants.

I watched the debate. Here are three things one can deduce about the race from this first performance:

1) In the '08 campaign, the media has replaced the word "electable" with a "tier" system.

I must have missed the memo on this one, and if anyone out there knows the source of the phenomenon, please don't hesitate to let me know. But virtually every single post-event write-up of the debate included a self-conscious breakdown of the candidates into "tiers," with a number of papers using lines like "Among the so-called 'top tier' candidates, Hillary Clinton performed best..." The tier thing was so universal and ubiquitous that I found it frightening -- it was very difficult to find a post-mortem that lacked it. Some examples:

"Indeed, [Dodd] could be bitter that the so-called top tier of candidates, his Senate colleagues Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, and his former colleague John Edwards have a combined tenure in the chamber barely half Mr. Dodd's 26 years." -- Mark Leibovich, New York Times

"And among the top-tier candidates, it was done in ways that only gently challenged one another." -- Scot Shepard, Cox News

"Watch for a breakout performance by one of the 'lower-tier' candidates. New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, probably the best-credentialed guy in the race, wants a chance to sport his resume." -- Candy Crowley, in between doughnuts, CNN

"The lower-tier candidates can't be hitting singles. They have to hit the long ball." -- Dave "Mudcat" Saunders, senior strategist for Edwards, as quoted in the Chicago Sun-Times

"Biden was by far the best of the so-called 'second tier' candidates." -- Zach Epstein, the Daily Colonial

"Other Democrats considered to be in the top tier of their party's nomination race -- Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois and former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina -- initially did not even allude to a military response." -- Craig Crawford, Congressional Quarterly

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Matt Taibbi is a writer for Rolling Stone.

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