TARPing Over the Financial Crisis

By Leslie Savan

I was on the public radio show Marketplace the other day to talk about the role that those strange new acronyms erupting from the financial crisis--TARP, CDO, CDS, LIBOR--are playing in our lives.

Is TARP (Troubled Asset Recovery Program), for instance, subconsciously providing us the smallest bit of comfort, deceptive as it may be? A tarp, after all, is used to cover things up, stop a roof from leaking, or haul out the trash. Whether to protect or to hide something, a tarp is your friend.

The warm ARM (Adjustable Rate Mortgage) isn't new, but it was always there to welcome you with wide open biceps to Bush's great Ownership Society--even if those arms would later hit millions with usurious interest rates, forcing them into foreclosure.

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January 7, 2009

The Media Dodge the Shoe, Too

By Leslie Savan

Once there was a time when a viral video hit didn't have to star the president of the United States ducking a shoe, and in those days it went something like this:

"Hamster on a Piano (Eating Popcorn)" is #4 on Time magazine's Top 10 Viral Videos for the year, but if the people could vote, it would surely be pushed down to #5 in the wake of the George Bush shoe-dodging video. Or even lower, if one of the Bush mash-ups--Curly missing W and hitting Larry with a pie gets my vote--joins the original up there in desktop heaven.

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December 19, 2008

Bush's Ranch Dressing

By Leslie Savan

So it's official: George W. Bush is not a cowboy. We pretty much suspected he wasn't when we learned that, for all his bow-legged strutting, the man's afraid of horses. But last week, Bush let the other Lucchese boot drop: He and Laura bought a $2 million, fancy-pants house in Dallas's toniest neighborhood and will soon be high-tailin' it out of that eight-year-old stage set of a "ranch" in Crawford. Any uncleared brush can go clear itself.

Oh, the couple will undoubtedly drop by the old chuckwagon, do some weekends maybe (and it could well become the safe-house George retreats to when, and if, the long pent-up Furies finally claim his mind). But the move to Dallas is a 180 from what Laura told USA Today during a ranch tour in April, 2001, that she and George "want to grow old here."

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December 10, 2008

About Obama's Even Temper...

By Leslie Savan

I want to respond to some of the comments on my last post, Obama's Trickle-Down Equanimity. Many of you understood it as I meant it, that Obama's calm and patience is something worth emulating, both in our own lives (it kept me from smashing my husband's head with a skillet) and on the larger world stage. As dyce18r wrote, "Time to start accepting the new era of tolerance, the old fear and loathing stalwarts are losing their momentum..."

But others apparently took my ending, "Do we have the, uh, guts to follow?" to mean that we should follow Obama blindly: "This is the type of garbage people [read] in Russia when Stalin took power. The stuff the poor souls in North Korea are reading right now," as RUNUTS put it.

I asked my inner Obama and he told me to refrain from saying to RUNUTS, "How could you so totally misread this, you *!%$&@*!" Rather, I'll say, I could have been clearer, and thanks for giving me the opportunity to be so now.

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December 4, 2008

Obama's Trickle-Down Equanimity

By Leslie Savan

The other day I noticed that my husband had for the tenth time ruined the slick seasoned surface of my cast-iron skillet by scrubbing it with Brillo. I started to get ticked off, building up a tiny tornado of fury; boy, am I ever going to tell him. Again.

But then I thought, Would Obama let this get to him? That tall cool drink o' distilled water would never blast Michelle for a domestic faux-pas like this, but here I am going ballistic because my spouse tried to clean a pot? Then poof! (or plouffe!): my anger was gone.

Not to get all hagiographic about it, much less to liken the President-elect to "The One" (the name the McCainiac right sarcastically used to paint him as the false Messiah), but Barack Obama's calm, nonreactionary response to the worst that politics and economics can throw at him has begun to establish a new emotional policy: trickle-down equanimity.

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November 28, 2008

GOP Plays a Mean Saxby

By Leslie Savan

Most of us outside of Georgia think of Saxby Chambliss as the guy who ran the most disgusting senate ad ever (at least until Liddy Dole's "You're an atheist!" spot this year). In 2002, Republican Chambliss attacked Democratic senator Max Cleland, who left three limbs on the battlefield in Vietnam, for lacking "the courage to lead" against the likes of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, whose images play John the Baptist in the ad to a series of photos of Senator Cleland, carefully cropped to hide his heroic injuries.

Because of that spot, most of us view the hungover Georgia election on Dec. 2 through a lens of justice and revenge, just as Bill Clinton did Wednesday, at an Atlanta rally for Jim Martin, Cleland's would-be vindicator. "When I saw someone wanting a Senate seat so bad that he accused Max of endangering the national security of this country..." Clinton said, shaking his head and trailing off, as if there simply were no words to describe Chambliss's perfidy.

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November 20, 2008

Sarah's Faked Alaska

By Leslie Savan

While Sarah Palin talks and talks and talks in media appearances this week, the press is still letting her get away with (at least) one big, easy-to-spot lie.

For weeks, she has been asked, What went wrong with that Katie Couric interview? And Palin has repeatedly excused her disastrous performance by saying she was "annoyed" with Couric, because Katie had condescendingly asked, What do you read up there in Alaska? That's proof, Palin insists, that Couric and the liberal elite media look down on her--and by extension, all people out there in the "real America"--and she, for one, is not going to take it anymore.

Here's Matt Lauer, on Wednesday, letting Palin babble on, not bothering to question her premise:

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November 12, 2008

McCain Goes Hot-Tubbing on Saturday Night Live

By Leslie Savan

When I heard that John McCain would appear on Saturday Night Live last weekend, I fretted: Will the likable "old McCain" charm votes back from Barack Obama? (And will he get a last-minute boost Monday night from SNL's election-eve special?) Just because Sarah Palin's SNL spot did nothing to dent Tina Fey's caribou-in-the-headlights impression, there was no guarantee that the cast would not fawn over the frequent guest and one-time host of the show.

But McCain was never pitted against his SNL doppelganger (Darrell Hammond) as Palin was. McCain was pitted against himself. And you gotta say, once he was back on the Rockefeller Center stage, he came off not only game and self-deprecating, but...happy. It really wasn't the performance you'd expect from a race- and red-baiting politician mired in the closing days of a losing campaign.

Still, McCain probably didn't win or lose votes Saturday night so much as he took his first steps towards reclaiming his damaged legacy. Like Al Gore's famous hot tub appearance on SNL, which tipped us off to his decision not to run in 2004, McCain's que cera performance (evident elsewhere on the trail in these last few days) was almost an admission that he knew he was about to lose, padded out with every imaginable electoral excuse. Standing next to Fey's Palin, he presented a cheerier, more ironic version of the victimhood he's been pulsing with for months. "Barack Obama purchased airtime on three major networks," he said. "We, however, can only afford QVC." He went on to hawk kitsch like Joe the Plumber action figures, pork-cutting knives, and the "10 commemorative plates that celebrate the 10 townhall debates between Senator Obama and myself. They're blank, he wouldn't agree to those debates."

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November 3, 2008

Obama Ad Hits McCain's Winky-Dink Veep Pick

By Leslie Savan

A wink is as good as a nod: An Obama ad finally takes on Palin and the unbearable frightfulness of her cutesiness, though not by itemizing her lies, sneers, and Joe McCarthy ways. It doesn't need to do that--just showing her face, at the right moment, casts her as the summation of John McCain's recklessness.

It's not unheard-of for a presidential nominee to run ads against the other guy's running mate. Dukakis hit Quayle, and Humphrey skewered Agnew (both to no avail). But beyond a few digs on the stump, Obama has largely tip-toed around Palin. And here, of course, Obama is only using Palin to make the point she seems to have been born to convey: That you can't trust McCain's judgment on the biggest issue of the day, the economy, because you can't trust his judgment on the biggest decision of his campaign, his veep. Simple, true, and wordlessly tied together with a pop-perfect punchline, her wink.

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October 29, 2008

Must-See Campaign Vids

By Leslie Savan

In a field of great new independent political videos, these two stand out. They were both released in the last few days.

"The Vet Who Did Not Vet" explains McCain's pick of Palin in the way Spongebob might explain it to Patrick.

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October 27, 2008