Who Wants to Be President of HELL?

The sky is gray-brown over the north slope of the San Gabriel Mountains, whether from another disastrous wildfire or just the filth from Los Angeles sucked through Cajon Pass by some trick of the wind, again. All the houses around me are vacant, bank-owned, abandoned. A dozen fat greasy ravens perch on a slumped telephone pole, looking for dead things. The Dow Jones index is plunging, again, 600 points today, a few hundred yesterday, five hundred before that, down 40 percent from a year ago. If you’re part of the lucky elite few, the ones with money, you have so much less now

If you’re poor – and you probably are, because John McCain says you need at least $5 million to be considered wealthy – then you no longer have the stuff that helped you survive. Credit. No crappy used car with a 16 percent interest rate for you, hobo. No more buying groceries on the Discover card and carrying that balance forever. No more raises. Hell, no more jobs.

Presidential candidates have been trotting out that “This is the generation that for the first time could do worse than their parents” line for a generation now. And you know what? We are here now. This is it. Only cheap credit and fancy accounting and cheap energy and Chinese labor dragged out our “prosperity” for this long, because the collapse really began in the early 1980s, during the Great Reagan Recession from which we’ve never truly recovered.

Sure, the rich did well, especially in the 1990s. Before this year, anyway. But that’s the top 5 percent of Americans, the households bringing home more than $150,000 a year, and more honestly the top 1.5 percent of American households, the ones earning more than $250,000.

The rest of you? Eh, not so good. Your income declined. Your debt exploded. If you’ve got a mortgage, well, sorry about that. If you’re renting, hopefully your speculator landlord won’t lose the place and make you homeless. On September 29, when the Standard & Poor’s 500 index fell 8.4 percent in a single session, all 500 company stocks plunged except for one: Campbell’s Soup.

We’ll all be eating canned soup, soon, and we’ll be lucky if it’s a fancy name brand soup like Campbell’s. Who would want to be president of this bankrupt national wreckage?

And so it begins
The presidential campaign began on November 8, 2006, the morning after the midterm election gave Congress back to the Democrats – with some special help from the likes of child-fucker Mark Foley, mistress-strangler Don Sherwood, fireman-hating Abramoff stooge Conrad Burns, wingnut Arizona Abramoff stooge J.D. Hayworth, alcoholic Ohio crook Bob Ney, Abramoff lackey and famous Northern California asshole Richard Pombo, drunken wife-beater John Sweeney, actual Pennsylvania space alien Curt Weldon, Florida basket-case Katherine Harris, and the spectacularly named crazy lady Shelley Sekula-Gibbs, appointed to serve out Tom DeLay’s last few weeks in office. She made a brave attempt to keep the famously Republican 22nd District Texas seat in the GOP column, and election officials were wonderfully generous with the variations of her weird name that would be accepted on the write-in ballots.

“Shelley Dracula Cunt,” for example, was accepted as a clear vote for “Shelley Sekula-Gibbs.”

Jesus, that was all two years ago. It wasn’t really a different America, but the stuff we talked about sure was different. Iraq, remember that? Whatever happened over there, anyway? Polar Bears! We had to all buy a Prius because the Polar Bears were melting away. A Muslim dude, Keith Ellison, won a Congressional seat in Minnesota. The wingnuts were very upset about that, because what next, a black Muslim president?!

But everybody knew Hillary Clinton was going to be our next president. The happy times were coming back. Or at least the vaguely happy, semi-peaceful status quo of the 1990s. It all seemed so certain.

No decent candidates even bothered on the Republican side. What a bunch of dull losers! Mike Huckabee, eating squirrels and playing bass and being fat, where did that guy come from? All those hobbit congressmen, brave vanquisher-of-Mexicans Tom Tancredo, our own southland clown Duncan Hunter, creepy Mormon robot Mitt Romney, old what’s-his-name, Country Bear Jamboree, from the teevee show about the law & order. There was Walnuts McCain, too, who would make a vanity run to celebrate his hundredth birthday. Nobody cared at all.

Oh, and there was wee Ron Paul, too. Squeaky voice, perpetual whining about Gold Doubloons and the Founding Fathers. The Republicans hated him. Phil Gramm and the Bush Family did everything but hire an assassin to keep Dr. Paul out of his Texas district’s Congressional seat. But he won it back, defeating a Democrat funded by the GOP. Why did they despise this little Fiscal Conservative?

And why did tens of thousands of Internet nerds suddenly decide this fringe right-wing baby farmer was their New Hope? Why did they start spelling “revolution” with “evol” highlighted so it would sort of spell “LOVE,” backwards? Oh and Jesus Christ why were they soliciting online donations from their fellow hobbits to rent a blimp of all things?

Ron paul needed a blimp
Last December, not long after the Dow Jones Industrial Index hit an all-time record high of 14,164, I flew to Norfolk and got a car and drove across the Great Dismal Swamp to Elizabeth City, North Carolina, because there was a blimp there, and the Ron Paul fanatics had somehow collected enough donations to hire the thing for a month.

The problem was that nobody much had heard of Dr. Congressman Ron Paul, so they didn’t know he was the only American politician who loves Freedom, because he’s against the Iraq War and in favor of medical marijuana. Also, gold – he is very concerned about whether or not a dollar bill can be traded in for gold. (It can’t, because the Federal Reserve hates Freedom.) At some mysterious point in the middle of last year, Ron Paul developed a huge Internet following of maybe a couple hundred thousand people. They believed the remaining 140 million American voters would all vote for Dr. Paul if only anyone knew he existed.

But the Mainstream Media also hates Freedom. Despite an autumn of wildly successful online fundraising stunts and MeetUp groups in every state and Ron Paul signs springing from America’s dissatisfied exurbs and dedicated Paulians showing up to tilt GOP “straw polls” from Oregon to Florida, the Evening News had yet to announce Dr. Paul’s inevitable ascendancy to the White House. Something huge and crazy was necessary – something that not even the biased liberal big-government warmonger nanny-state propagandists at CNN and Fox News could ignore.

Ron Paul needed a blimp.

Over the first week of December, three dedicated Paul zealots turned a ridiculous fantasy of Photoshopped Ron Paul dirigibles sailing over hobbits and elves from Lord of the Rings into an actual lease of a 200-foot-long marketing airship for $200,000. It was, by all accounts, the first presidential campaign airship in American and possibly World History.

They formed a for-profit political-advertising corporation to evade Federal Election Commission rules that would limit donations by people who had already given heavily to Ron Paul’s official campaign. Top election-law attorneys were supposedly clearing the craft for buzzing such sensitive air targets as Lower Manhattan and the U.S. Capitol. It was going to dump tea into Boston Harbor, too.

I was the only writer to be promised a seat on the historic maiden flight. I was probably the only one who asked.

The blimp was scheduled to depart the former Naval Air Station at Weeksville, just south of Elizabeth City. I arrived the Sunday afternoon before launch with my sleeping bag and suitcase – these dudes said I could bunk in the hangar with the loyalists, and we would rise before the sun itself, with a dozen people aboard its luxurious gondola, as hundreds of freedom lovers had some kind of jamboree, cheering the launch and the message on the flanks of the airship: “Who Is Ron Paul? Google Ron Paul. RON PAUL RevoUTION.”

There was nobody there at all. I waited all week for the Paultards, checking their YouTube messages, sending unanswered e-mail to their Media Representatives, loitering around the blimp company’s giant hangar at the swamp’s edge by day, and drinking in one of the two places that served liquor by night – Applebee’s and Ruby Tuesday. The Ron Paul Blimp finally launched a week late and a day after I gave up and went home. It flew around the Carolinas for a while, and eventually managed a trip to Disney World in Florida. Dr. Paul continued to not win any primaries, and eventually sort of halfway dropped out of the race, although he continued to raise millions from his weird followers.

Hillary Wins aCaucus
This endless campaign has not lacked for moments that make democracy seem like the dumbest possible way to accomplish anything. One bright Saturday morning in late January, I am speeding across the Eastern Mojave – where the world’s only Ron Paul REVOLUTION truck stop is perched above Interstate 15 at the Afton Road exit – headed for Nevada’s “First in the West” caucus. Specifically, I’m headed to the Wynn hotel and casino on the Las Vegas Strip to witness a real-live caucus event, in a casino banquet room.

It’s my second trip to Vegas in a week, as the Democrats had a debate the previous Thursday. So many Democrats had already dropped out, back then! Richardson, Dodd, Biden, Vilsack. (Poor Dennis Kucinich hadn’t quit, but he was barred from taking part, because his wife is so hot.) Something that seemed completely reasonable at the time, like a hundred-foot-long giant-letters sculpture in the debate arena’s parking lot that said “EDWARDS,” just seems insane to even consider today. Think about it: Nine months ago, it was a perfectly acceptable idea that John Edwards might end up on the Democratic ticket. And he was carrying on with that crazy woman at the same time! Scumbag.

Anyway. A weird experiment would take place here in the Silver State: Unionized casino workers, forced to labor at all hours to serve the needs of drunken gamblers, would be allowed to caucus at their casinos. I wandered the opulent bowels of the massive Wynn building until I spotted a distant clump of television cameras perched on the shoulders of what appeared to be Wookies, but were actually cable-news crew guys. Press credentials were distributed. We were herded into a silent, empty ballroom.

A few hundred workers arrived in their various cliques from the Culinary Workers Union: cooks in comical chef’s caps, waiters, busboys, everything but cocktail waitresses in the famously skimpy Wynn’s minidresses, which is all the camera Wookies wanted to see. I wandered around the official caucus area, in one corner of a ballroom that could hold thousands. A few people gave half-hearted “HILLARY HILLARY” chants, but most of the limited enthusiasm was for Obama, patron saint of casino workers. What reigned was confusion.

Nobody knew how to do a caucus. There were more sinister “observers” than actual caucus workers – Hillary’s campaign had sued to stop the casino caucus from happening at all, as the poor were in the tank for Obama.

Caucuses are, by design, complicated affairs best suited to small towns in Iowa, where everybody knows everybody and every four years this proud tradition is exercised in familiar environments like the local elementary school. Mrs. Strickler always makes the brownies and Mr. Pratt always sets up the microphones. There was no such organization in Nevada, where everyone is from somewhere else.

Here in the Wynn chamber, the workers slowly and ineptly gathered in their little groups, while party organizers argued over the rules and others tried to translate everything into Spanish, and then somebody would re-translate it, and a half-hour passed, and the workers meandered around with lost looks on their faces, and the reporters were herded back into our corner, and suddenly some guy was at the podium announcing the vote – 185 for Clinton, 181 for Obama, and eight for Edwards. Wrangling occurred, maybe. Impossible to tell from our media pen a hundred yards away. And Hillary was the winner, by a two vote swing. She won the caucuses all over Las Vegas, only losing up north in Reno, where the Democrats are all Bay Area elitist retirees.

This was one of the few caucuses the Clinton campaign didn’t attack as giving an unfair advantage to Obama. Because he lost.

Signed, Sealed, Delivered
Denver, late August. I have rented a house, sight unseen, from an English guy who advertised his uptown duplex for the Democratic National Convention. Miraculously, the house is as nice as the description, in a lively little neighborhood that is teetering somewhere between crackhead chaos and yuppie gentrification. I will wake more than once to the neighborhood sounds of bad trouble in the night – at 3:30 a.m., a very angry man yells, “Give me back my money you sonofabitch!” The footfalls of the sonofabitch pass right under my window, a block up from Colfax. The angry man sounds to be about 20 yards behind.

We are here, in this house where the owner named the wireless network BuckFush, with every political journalist on the planet. Each day we must trudge down to a Comfort Inn on the edge of downtown and get our daily passes. One morning, a melodramatic guy from Africa is pleading his case to the stonefaced young DNC guys doomed to this awful daily duty in a claustrophobic windowless hotel conference room. The fancy news organizations have interns to do these pickup chores. My two comrades and I split up the duty, based on how drunk we are when we finally abandon our laptops and crawl up to bed.

The DNC is exhausting and tense. Far too many delegates seem to be here to make mischief, wearing entire tacky wardrobes covered in Hillary logos. Darth Vader SWAT teams and National Guard are everywhere, black helicopters swarm the sky, and it takes no less than two hours to penetrate the Green Zone fortress and get inside the Pepsi Center, where seats are at a premium and 75-year-old white-haired ladies will threaten your life for the crime of, say, holding a seat for your colleague who just ran to the restroom.

But nothing competes with the long, dull horror of getting to Barack Obama’s stadium acceptance speech at Invesco Field. You cannot drive, and you can’t even walk, really, as the security perimeters are miles around the Mile High Stadium and it’s 95 degrees and it is just tense. We catch a special shuttle bus not far from our Uptown house. There’s a heavily armed cop on each of these shuttles, and our credentials are carefully scrutinized before we’re allowed to board. While stopped at a fancy downtown hotel, a bleached blonde in outrageously high heels bursts into tears when she’s not allowed on the bus, because there’s something fishy about her credential. Her hairy male companion tosses his cigar in the gutter and boards without her. Ned Lamont, who we all hoped would drive Shitty Joe Lieberman from the Senate in 2006, is on the bus with us. He asks something about D.C. delegates and my colleague Jim Newell answers with a stream of rude nonsense. Ned just smiles.

Hours later, I’m finally inside the stadium. Sheryl Crow is singing what seems like the longest, lamest song in the banal history of pop music, as I wander from level to level looking for someone who will let me take a seat with my apparently low-rent pass. I ask an authoritative-looking thickhead for help and he declares my credentials worthless, I should’ve never been allowed inside, somebody fucked up, etc. I realize it’s not just one lousy Sheryl Crow song, but her entire recorded catalogue, a midtempo soundtrack for a day of shopping at the Grove, on Percocet. I run away and vanish into a crowd of elderly black Democrats in their Sunday best – so many elegant purple suits and fedoras.

Once it becomes clear I’ll never get a seat, I relax and enjoy the crowd. There are these wonderful old black people, here to watch the first-ever African American with a very real shot at becoming president, of America, a country with a marvelous Constitution that nonetheless allowed the vile institution of human bondage to continue to be decided by some later generation. There are beautiful people, and high school kids who seem almost comically sincere and excited. There are working class people with big hair. Like the crowd at the Galleria in Glendale, I couldn’t guess the pedigree of half the people here.

Stevie Wonder takes the stage, and I slip through the crowd to find a place overlooking the stage. He starts with some gospelly thing that does nothing for me, but he’s got the crowd. And then he breaks into “Signed, Sealed, Delivered,” which is both Obama’s end-of-rally song and one of the greater Motown pop-soul hits, the kind of composition and production that seems like it came from another, much sexier planet.