A Nut in Search of a Squirrel

Al Gore image consultant: Palin stole my mail!

JAMES TARANTO

Remember Naomi Wolf? She had her 15 minutes of fame back in 1999, when Time reported that she was helping Al Gore man up for the 2000 election: "Wolf has argued internally that Gore is a 'Beta male' who needs to take on the 'Alpha male' in the Oval Office before the public will see him as the top dog." For her services she had been earning $15,000 a month, although the New York Times reported that campaign manager Donna Brazile had cut Wolf's pay by two-thirds.

Things don't appear to have gone very well for Wolf since then. She resurfaced last night with a bizarre post on the Puffington Host titled "The Battle Plan II: Sarah 'Evita' Palin, the Muse of the Coming Police State." It begins as a standard Palin-hating rant:

I heard her echo Bush 2000 soundbites ("the heart of America is on display") and realized Bush's speechwriters were writing her--not McCain's--speeches. I heard her tell George Bush's lies--not McCain's--to the American people, linking 9/11 to Iraq. I heard her make fun of Barack Obama for wanting to prevent the torture of prisoners--this is Rove-Cheney's enthusiastic S and M, not McCain's, who, though he shamefully colluded in the 2006 Military Tribunals Act, is also a former prisoner of war and wrote an eloquent Newsweek piece in 2005 opposing torture. I saw that she was even styled by the same skillful stylist (neutral lipstick, matte makeup, dark colors) who turned Katharine Harris from a mall rat into a stateswoman and who styles all the women in the Bush orbit--but who does not bother to style Cindy McCain.

But then Wolf takes an even weirder turn. Wolf seems to imagine that she is actually being persecuted:

Almost everyone I work with on projects related to this campaign for liberty has been experiencing computer harassment: emails are stripped, messages disappear. That's not all: people's bank accounts are being tampered with: wire transfers to banks vanish in midair. I personally keep opening bank accounts that are quickly corrupted by fraud. Money vanishes. Coworkers of mine have to keep opening new email accounts as old ones become infected. And most disturbingly [sic] to me personally is the mail tampering I have both heard of and experienced firsthand. My tax returns vanished from my mailbox. All my larger envelopes arrive ripped straight open apparently by hand. When I show the postman, he says "That's impossible." Horrifyingly [sic] to me is the impact on my family. My childrens' [sic] report cards are returned again and again though perfectly addressed; their invitations are turned back; and my daughters [sic] many letters from camp? Vanished. All of them. Not one arrived.

Keep in mind, this is in the context of an article about Sarah Palin. Wolf apparently believes the governor of Alaska is stealing her mail.

What lies behind such fantasies? We suspect the answer is that for malcontented citizens of a free society, imagining that one is being persecuted is a means of self-affirmation, of styling oneself a hero. Like a nut in search of a squirrel, Wolf seeks validation in being preyed upon. She flatters herself that she is important enough for anyone to be interested in reading her mail. She even invokes the name of erstwhile Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky (though she misspells it).

What does this have to do with Sarah Palin? There may be an element of feminine jealousy at work, though it would be cruel to elaborate on this point. Mostly, though, Wolf is glomming on to Palin because Palin is a hot topic right now, and Wolf figures that by paying attention to Palin, she will induce others to pay attention to her.

To judge by this item, she figured right.

The Loser, the Murderer and the CEO
Remember Michael Dukakis? He was governor of Massachusetts in the 1970s and '80s, when a man named Willie Horton was serving time in a Bay State prison. In 1974, Horton and two accomplices had murdered a 17-year-old boy, stabbing the victim 19 times. Horton was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison, but in 1986 he was released on a weekend furlough, from which he never returned. Ten months later he turned up in Maryland, where he raped a woman and brutalized her fiancé.

In 1976 Gov. Dukakis had vetoed a bill that would have barred furloughs for first-degree murders. In 1988 Dukakis sought the Democratic presidential nomination, and one of his opponents, Sen. Al Gore, raised the furlough issue. Dukakis won the nomination anyway, but the issue persisted into the general election, in which Dukakis was trounced.

Now almost 75 years old, Dukakis is still bitter, PolitickerMA.com reports:

Former Gov. Michael Dukakis said Monday that John McCain's presidential campaign is using the same race-based tactics that were used against him in his 1988 presidential run.

The Brookline Democrat was referring to a recent McCain ad that claimed Democratic nominee Barack Obama received economic advice from Franklin Raines, the former CEO of the recently bailed out mortgage lender Fannie Mae. The ad features images of Raines and Obama, two African Americans, and then an image of an elderly white woman.

Asked if he considered the ad to be in the same vein as the infamous 'Willie Horton' ad ad [sic] run by a third party group in support of George H.W. Bush in the 1988 presidential campaign, Dukakis told PolitickerMA.com: "Essentially, yes."

But who exactly is being racist here? It's Dukakis who looks at Franklin Raines, thinks of Willie Horton, and makes a point of saying that both men are black. It is the liberal mythologizers of the 1988 election who have treated Horton as if his race, not his crimes, were the salient fact about him--as if Americans thought he should have been kept in prison because he was black, not because he was a vicious and dangerous thug who had been duly convicted of a heinous felony.

Writing in The Progressive, one Matthew Rothschild echoes Dukakis in complaining about putative Republican appeals to racism:

With Election Day approaching, McCain surrogates or supporters may not be able to resist the temptation to fan the flames of racism. Expect the snippets of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright to resurface. Expect video of Michelle Obama sounding militant. Expect disgusting ads about Obama's admitted drug use as a very young man. Expect that picture of Obama in Muslim garb again.

This campaign will ultimately be a referendum on the intractability of racism.

Obama has only two hopes. One is that the economic conditions will be so dire that white Americans who harbor racism will throw it overboard. And the other is that these white Americans might want to show themselves--or more likely their children and grandchildren--that they are not as hidebound as they sometimes seem.

The most bizarre thing about these complaints is that they seem oblivious to the fact that Obama is black. If it is true that a large number of white Americans harbor antipathetic attitudes toward their black countrymen, why would it even be necessary for Republians to "appeal" to racism?

We posed the question to a left-wing acquaintance of ours yesterday, and he replied in an email with some irrelevancies about Nixon's 1968 Southern strategy and Reagan's 1980 speech in Philadelphia, Miss. It really does seem that when American liberals talk about race, they are ritually reciting decades-old grievances, not engaging in even the most rudimentary thought process.

The Great American Gaffe Machine
The hits keep on coming from Barack Obama's running mate, Joe Biden. Yesterday Biden sat for an interview with Katie Couric of CBS News. He acknowledged that "a campaign ad that mocked Republican presidential candidate John McCain as an out-of-touch, out-of-date computer illiterate was 'terrible' and would not have been done had he known about it," the Associated Press reports:

"I thought that was terrible, by the way," Biden said.

Asked why it was done, he said: "I didn't know we did it and if I had anything to do with it, we'd have never done it."

Blogress Michelle Malkin notes that Biden also told Couric, "When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn't just talk about the princes of greed. He said, 'look, here's what happened.' "

The stock market crashed Oct. 29, 1929. FDR became president March 4, 1933. According to the Information Please Almanac, FDR made his first television appearance April 30, 1939.

Biden has also been contradicting Obama on key topics. Politico's Mike Allen reports on an Obama interview with erstwhile Couric colleague Matt Lauer of NBC's "Today":

The Democrat attacked Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) for initially opposing the federal government's intervention to save insurance giant AIG.

"I think what has been clear during this entire past 10 days is John McCain has not had clarity and a grasp on the situation," Obama [said].

But Lauer pointed out that Obama's running mate, Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.), had initially said the same thing--on "Today," no less.

"I think that in that situation, I think Joe should have waited, as well," Obama said.

Politico's Ben Smith finds video of Biden disagreeing with Obama on energy policy as well:

He was asked by an anti-pollution campaigner about clean coal--a controversial approach in Democratic circles for which Obama has voiced support, particularly during the Kentucky primary.

Biden's apparent answer: He supports clean coal for China, but not for the United States.

"No coal plants here in America," he said. "Build them, if they're going to build them, over there. Make them clean."

"We're not supporting clean coal," he said of himself and Obama. They do, on paper, support clean coal.

The answer seems to play into John McCain's case that Obama has been saying "no" to new sources of energy.

That ought to be helpful in Ohio and Pennsylvania.

The Washington Post reports that the Obama campaign has released a statement attributed to Biden "walking back" the criticism of the Obama ad making fun of McCain's disabilities: "Having now reviewed the ad, it is even more clear to me that given the disgraceful tenor of Senator McCain's ads and their persistent falsehoods, his campaign is in no position to criticize," Biden supposedly said.

Great Minds Think Alike

Gov. Jon Corzine of New Jersey "said the bailout's lack of built-in oversight reflects, 'really, almost a use of force in Iraq kind of authorization–do whatever you think is responsible. You got a carte blanche.' "--Abe Greenwald, Commentary Web site, Sept. 23

"Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared Monday that the turmoil on Wall Street was rooted in part in U.S. military intervention abroad and voiced hope that the next American administration would retreat from what he called President Bush's 'logic of force.' "--Los Angeles Times, Sept. 23