Quite frankly, it is unsettling when someone like David Plouffe says he’s never felt a higher level of personal anxiety for a presidential debate than the one tonight. Plouffe, if you follow the news, is the man who led Barack Obama’s two campaigns and has been through more debate prep and spin than he cares to remember.
Plouffe was talking with his fellow Obama team colleague David Axelrod and long time Republican campaign operator turned ardent Never Trumper, Mike Murphy on their “Hacks on Tap” podcast yesterday.
To summarize his key points of concern/anxiety and strategy for Biden:
1: Biden has to be not just “ok” or “passable” in the eyes of the general, largely disinterested public. He has to be surprisingly good. While expectations for him are low, despite Team Trump lately trying to re-imagine sleepy and senile a veteran, polished debater jacked up on coke or Mountain Dew, the TV audience — a much larger audience than has paid attention to this race until now — has to leave the night nigh-on-to-startled by the Joe Biden they’ve just seen. Anything less and the balance of the race remains static or, given a Biden flop, collapses to a point of no return.
2: Biden has to attack early and often on the abortion/reproductive rights issue and the threat of more like that to come given that Trump will likely have two more Supreme Court seats to fill next term. (He also believes CNN’s Jake Tapper and Dana Bash have to press that issue.)
3: On the economy, Biden has to have a deft pivot on Trump’s assertions that inflation and the world in general is out of control and things were much cheaper and calmer when he was in office.
4: If Trump comes out of the debate perceived as the victor, largely as a result of Biden fitting the perception that he is too old and feeble, Plouffe expects Trump to pass on the second debate in late September. He’ll have made his point and see no reason to risk a re-match. Likewise, Plouffe thinks Biden should consider something similar if he far exceeds expectations. In other words, this could be the one and only face-to-face we see … in a race where the country is unequivocally exchanging competence for chaos and personal retribution.
5: There has never been a debate remotely comparable to this one. No debate ever with so stark a contrast between the two candidates. Biden has to make that contrast indelible in the minds of viewers. And he has to do it while maintaining the image and tenor of the adult in the room.
I’ve noticed how this pandemic has added a new collection of common statements and questions among people with whom my wife and I socialize, distantly. The common, nearly universal statements are along the lines of, “My god! Did hear what he said/did today?” But a common question I never before heard so frequently, is “What are you watching?”
Those with the luxury of not having to home-school, maintain full-time work obligations or tend to an ill relative have been maxing out their couch potato quota. Being both Catholic and a small town Midwesterner who grew up surrounded by Lutherans, I still have a dim view of people who watch TV in the middle of the day. The tube only comes on after … you’ve earned it. Daytime TV watching was for shut-in old ladies and alcoholics. It’s still that simple.
But after dinner, after putting up a couple hundred bales of hay … or pretending to pay attention in school, a guy out in Montevideo could kick back free of guilt.
So it is today. When paying attention to what is really happening can drive you nuts faster than insipid soaps and sit-coms.
With that in mind, and purely as a distraction, I’ve worked up a list of What I’ve Been Watching, and Listening To since the corral gate closed.
The Plot Against America (HBO). Not exactly light or escapist, but a terrific adaptation of the Phillip Roth novel, wherein (our guy) Charles Lindbergh beats FDR in the 1940 election, cozies up to Hitler and unleashes torrent of pent-up facism and anti-semitism across the land, specifically on a working class Jewish family and their neighbors in Newark, New Jersey. John Turturro and Winona Ryder are the only two name “stars”. But the production heft of the show comes from the presence of producer/writer David Simon, of “The Wire” fame and also “The Deuce”. The six-part series quite pointedly diverts from Roth’s novel in its ending. (Here’s a spoiler alert interview with Simon on his thinking.) But in its telling, the verisimilitude of the sets, locations, props are first-class Hollywood … with plotting and dialogue compliments of one of the country’s greatest novelists. It’s a statement on who covers pop culture today that “The Tiger King”, the depressing equivalent of being trapped in an elevator with a dozen MAGA grifters, received overwhelmingly more press attention. (I’ve had exactly no one tell me they watched “Plot Against … ” .)
Ozark (Netflix). Clearly the writing team behind this series spent a lot of time dissecting “Breaking Bad” for what made it so compelling. And they decided one magic ingredient was … ever escalating stress and tension. I’ve been a fan since the get-go, maybe from spending some time in the ‘Zarks and sprawling Lake of the Ozarks. (I have my souvenir “Big Johnson’s Halfway Inn” t-shirt.) But maybe mostly because it’s always had Jason Bateman and Laura Linney, two excellent if just-below-the-radar actors. (Bateman has directed several episodes.) The adventures of a corporate numbers guy from Chicago getting cross-wise with the mob and being forced to flee to oblivion … i.e. the Ozarks … where he proceeds to mix up the Missus, the kids and everyone he meets with local heroin dealers, hillbilly trailer trash, the Kansas City mob and the inevitable psychotic Mexican drug cartel, all while running a cheesy floating casino has always been fingernail-chewing fun. But it got even more desperate this season. Not to give too much away, but let’s just say Mrs. Marty Byrde (Linney) develops ambitions of her own. Favorite supporting characters: Darlene, the not so loving spouse of the local poppy farmer, and of course Ruth, Marty’s aide de camp, a child of trash with the feral cunning of El Chapo.
Westworld (HBO). The first season of this series was close to classic television. But then you get Anthony Hopkins in anything and you’ll be convinced it’s Criterion Collection stuff. The way season #1 played with the soon-to-arrive dilemma over what really is consciousness, and then, if something inorganic displays consciousness is it therefore “human”? made for a remarkably intelligent mainstream TV show. Thanks, I strongly suspect, to familial connections to acclaimed film director Christopher “Dunkirk”, “The Dark Knight Rises”, “Inception” Nolan, (his brother Jonathan and wife Lisa Joy run “Westworld”), the show has always worked off an impressive budget. (If you’re a studio exec, it can’t hurt to keep Big Nolan happy.) That said, the second season was a mess. Besides the fundamental dramatic problem of diluting suspense by having every character you gun down, chop up or set afire “rebooted” by a refreshed algorithm, the entire season was pretty much all gunning and chopping and jumping back and forth in time. The “Westworld” on-line chat rooms didn’t seem to mind. But what I felt was a series floundering and searching for the next leap up into serious, speculative science. And that element arrived four episodes into this season’s run. The almost-already-here question of gigantic data bases knowing so much more about you than you yourself know finally showed it’s face. Worse, the data bases and algorithms know so much they can “predict” your future. In effect you are living the life they permit you to live. And have I mentioned the budget for this thing? Stunning production design. I’m hanging with it.
Citizen K (Streaming on iTunes and others.) Even if you’ve heard of “the oligarchs”, the Russian tycoons who leapt in and seized control of huge chunks of the economy after the fall of the Soviet Union, you probably haven’t spent as much time with any one specific character as you do in this new documentary by Alex Gibney, Oscar-winner for “Taxi to the Dark Side”, plus “Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief”, “The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley” and nearly a dozen others. The character here is one of the original oligarchs, Mikhail Khordokovsky, a guy who managed to corner a massive chunk of the Russian oil industry when benighted Boris Yeltsin came to the early-90s oligarchs for a loan to stave of economic collapse … and win reelection. It is simply impossible to watch Donld Trump operate and not see the guiding, mentoring hand of Vladimir Putin in his flagrant abuse of the truth and creation of a constant, competing alternative reality. Putin is the master. But unlike Trump, who is both a fool and lazy, Putin is disciplined and remorseless. Here, as Gibney tells the story of the war between Putin and Khodorkovsky, (essentially all the original oligarchs have been ruined if not killed and replaced by new oligarchs who owe everything to Putin), we understand the average Russian’s “helpless serf” need for a “strong man” to protect them from chaos. Excellent stuff.
Also, a couple podcasts that have moved up my list of faves.
“Hacks on Tap” Ex-Obama advisor David Axelrod and ex-GOP strategist Mike Murphy take 45 minutes a couple times a week to zing each other and try … try … to make some sense of the Trump administration dumpster fire. Murphy long ago bailed on any idiot who would support a certifiable nut job for the White House, so don’t expect any MAGA zealotry. But these two old pros know “the game” inside and out. Likewise they’re on speaking terms with everyone in the game today who isn’t wearing a scarlet “T” on their chest. Recent conversations brought in guests like ex-Obama Chief of Staff and ex-Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, who managed the entire show without dropping an F-bomb, and longtime GOP campaign operative Mark McKinnon, (the guy with the big hat on Showtime’s “The Circus.) The consensus of the latter was that Joe Biden needs to actually do this “fireside chat” idea that’s been kicking around. Sit down for an hour every week with Oprah, or David Letterman or, hell, Gail Collins from The New York Times and show America the guy this crew knows to be a regular, decent — empathetic — human being.
“The New Abnormal” Ten, twenty, thirty years from now the line, “Everything Trump Touches Dies” will be stamped like a watermark on this era, and credit will have to go to the guy who authored it, former Republican “master of the dark arts” Rick Wilson. Wilson has had two best-sellers — so far — ripping Trump, the Trump cult formerly known as the Republican party and TrumpNation, a matched set of new ones. The first book, “Everything Trump Touches Dies”, was as close to what I’d imagine Hunter Thompson doing with Trump as anything out there. And now — via his side hustle gig with The Daily Beast — (always behind the paywall) — Wilson, who lives down on the Redneck Riviera in the Florida panhandle and loves guns as much horses — has teamed up with uber New Yorker Molly-Jong Fast to deconstruct as much of Trump’s self-serving blithering as two humans can without risking strokes. The show just launched this week. But given Wilson’s high-profile on cable pundit-fests — (on MSNBC he once referred to Trump’s best-seller as “The Shart of the Deal”, a line that went over the head of the female host but cracked up other, cruder panelists) — this thing will catch on quick. And always wait for the end, where Wilson and Molly offer their picks for “Fuck That Guy” … of the week. (Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a truly contemptible low-life, got Wilson’s nod.)
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