Earning the Chance to Lose...(or win)

I have a new obsession: the 2008 presidential election. I follow it with an intensity most men only muster for their favorite sports team...or sex. I find politics to be heady stuff: polls and speeches, power and influence, maneuvers and machinations, scandals, debates, rebuttals and retorts. American politics is human nature at its best and worst.

The Darwinist in me really gets turned on by this stuff. The Christian in me absolutely abhors it. Kind of.

The Republican process seemed to end before it got really interesting, but not before I realized that Mitt Romney’s name and hair scared me. Still does.

Anyway, John McCain should be a formidable Republican nominee; military hero, experienced senator, and well-known for his candor and maverick attitude. I’m looking forward to the moments where he goes “off script” and speaks his heart. I just love when politicians do that.

The Democratic drama, however historic it may be, is still unfolding between the two remaining candidates.

Barack Obama is the grandiloquent speaker whose words inspire in ways most politicians envy. Words like “destiny”, “hope”, and “change” seem to mean something when he speaks them. People flock to his rallies in droves and he exudes political rock star status as effortlessly as Michael Jordan dunks or John Grisham writes novels about lawyers. Barack's racked up states, votes, delegates, and has fund-raised the crap out of everyone else.

Hillary Clinton is the savvy senator and former First Lady. When Hillary says she will wake up each morning thinking about how she can fight for the American people, she’s believable. She is politically adept, tough as nails and if I’m about to mix it up with someone, I would want her watching my back 'cuz I have no doubt chick would fight dirty if she needed to. Hillary’s the Jack Bauer of politics and the cat with nine lives; when all the pundits count her out, she pops up again and gets the job done.

The two are not without flaws. Hillary has enough baggage to fill an Airbus A380, while Barack’s affiliation with Reverend Jeremiah Wright has badly tarnished the initially transcendent nature of his campaign, rudely thrusting race into the election in ways that we are still talking about.

A great deal has been said about Hillary Clinton’s chances of becoming the Democratic nominee. At this point, even if she won every remaining state in play, she would not capture the required number of delegates to secure the nomination. Neither would Obama.

And there’s a new wrinkle: Superdelegates.

The morning after the North Carolina and Indiana primaries, I watched Tim Russert tell an MSNBC panel that he’d recently heard Chris Rock joke about how no one had ever heard the term "superdelegate" until a black guy was in the lead for the nomination.

Like a number of Rock’s comedic observations, there may be some truth behind the joke. 794 people not required to announce a candidate preference in advance and free to change their preference right up to the second before they declare their choice at the convention might make for great television, but is poor political form.

Senator Clinton’s argument to the Supers is simple: yes, Obama’s won more states, leads in total delegates and has more popular votes, but she is the stronger candidate and the one who stands the best chance of defeating McCain. She is the candidate who won the critical states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New York. She is the candidate who appeals to the broader base and is, thus, more electable.

Hillary Clinton believes her argument should override all other considerations. It’s a smart strategy, one salespeople refer to as changing the base: instead of addressing the concerns your potential client/customer has voiced, you subtly show/tell them that they aren’t really concerned about what they’ve said, but about something else entirely. Something you define for them.

Could such a strategy work? Absolutely. George Bush’s 2004 campaign convinced the majority of voters that they weren’t nearly as concerned about the economy as they had expressed in poll after poll leading up to the election. Instead, national security and whether a Kerry administration would protect them in the War on Terror was the pivotal issue. Bush, of course, handily won a second term.

An aside: Who actually thought up the title, "War on Terror"? It's sounds so lame, futile and...funny. For the first few months, I couldn't hear that term without snickering a little on the inside. Can you really declare a war on terror? I mean, I know we did just that, but seriously: Hollywood thrives on the fact that we can willingly be coerced to give our hard-earned money to theaters to see movies purposely designed to scare (or terrorize) the bejeezus out of us and now we've declared a war on it? Wow.

I don’t know whether Obama would triumph against McCain. Republican campaigns are nothing if not shrewd, ruthless, and willing to repeat a message any number of times and any number of ways to drive a point home. I have no doubt the conservative media will trot out more Jeremiah Wright clips, continue referring to Obama as little more than a ‘motivational speaker’ and say he’s achieved nothing over the course of his political career. They will question the substance of his platform, judgment, patriotism, readiness as a leader and everything else.

Yet there are no guarantees Clinton could defeat McCain, either. It is her opinion that she has been "fully vetted", all her skeletons exposed for the world to see. But is that ever really true for a politician? Political skeletons, no matter how deep they’ve been buried, have a funny way of reanimating. For all we know, the Republicans have already assembled a dossier of campaign-killing revelations. Or maybe the dirt they currently have is enough.

I believe that unless something truly catastrophic occurs, Barack Obama will have earned his ticket to the big dance. The Supers should not be permitted to usurp this accomplishment from him because their analysis concludes he may not be victorious. He should be given the same chance past presumptive nominees of his party has had: the chance to win. Or the chance to lose.

Obama may feel he’s up to the task, that he’s toughened his skin in recent weeks. I'm reminded of the “Star Wars” movie where a cocky Luke Skywalker defiantly asserts that he is ready to face his father, Darth Vader, and is not afraid.

“You will be,” Yoda responds. “You will be.” Luke Skywalker lost his hand to Darth Vader in battle. Al Gore and John Kerry lost their political voices to George Bush. What might Obama lose against his competitor?

And I thought Cinderella had it bad...

It’s not easy being a man these days. No matter what we do to try and shake it, bad press and negative publicity seem to follow us around like a Jeremiah Wright soundbite. And you know what? Frankly, we deserve a lot of it; there are times when we do some really crappy things to one another, and especially to girls and women. A recent news story is yet another example and it has got to be the most bizarre thing I’ve heard about in a long time...

...or at least since that whole Texas polygamy camp story broke a few weeks ago. Not exactly a shining moment for men then, either.

Back in 1984, Austrian Josef Fritzl (pictured left) decided that it would be cool to abduct his 18 year old daughter, Elisabeth, and keep her in the basement of his house. Josef had been sexually abusing Elisabeth since she was 11 years old, so I guess he saw abduction as a way to take their relationship to the next level. Josef liked his idea so much he, unbeknownst to his wife (Elisabeth's mother), kept Elisabeth captive for the next 24 years.

No, really…24 years.

Bizarre story, right? It doesn’t end there. With Elisabeth successfully imprisoned, Josef proceeded to father seven children, including twins, with her over the next two and a half decades. One child was stillborn. Josef permitted Elisabeth to raise three children and he took three others to raise with his wife, Rosemarie.

If you haven't figured it out by now, Josef was crafty. He had all the right moves: he reported his daughter as missing, told Rosemarie that their daughter had run off to join a religious cult, and somehow obtained a letter supposedly written by Elisabeth stating that she did not want to be found. When Elisabeth began bearing the children Josef would later take, he informed Rosemarie that Elisabeth had sent the three children to her parents to raise. The children Elisabeth raised were never permitted beyond the confines of their windowless cellar, a cellar behind a soundproof door with an electronic locking system. Escape, apparently, was an impossibility. It wasn't until Elisabeth's eldest child fell so ill he needed to be taken to the hospital by Josef that the truth of the horror Elisabeth and her children endured came to light. Sadly, a freelance journalist reported that one of the boys said he'd seen the moon for the first time when he was taken from his home by the police.

As they say on the show, "Loveline": Good times.

There are a great many things about this story that disturb me and a great many more things I hope I never come to understand. I don't get how a father could imprison his daughter in a cellar and keep her under lock and key for any period of time, let alone 24 years. I don't understand how he could commit sexual assault. Or take children to raise as his own, though maybe in Josef's mind, he saw this as an act of nobility. Whatever. Nor can I even begin to fathom the pain of a mother who realizes that the daughter she's worried, prayed, and fretted over for 24 years has been living under her roof the entire time, held captive by the man she married, the man her daughter called "Father". I can't imagine the thoughts that run through one's mind when the realization hits that the children you've been raising as your grandchildren are indeed your grandchildren...and also your stepchildren.

This whole thing is absolutely mind-blowing.

If Fritzl is convicted of rape in Austria, he faces up to 15 years in prison. Prosecutors say they are also considering whether to charge Josef with murder "through failure to act" for the stillborn child. That particular penalty could carry a maximum of 20 years.

Here's the truly mind-blowing part: even if convicted and given the maximum sentences (assuming the sentences run concurrently), Fritzl would likely end up spending less time in an Austrian prison than Elisabeth spent in his cellar. Of course, it's unlikely that 73 year old Josef would even live to serve out his full sentence, but still...come on.

Situations like this cause me to fervently hope that this man be banished to the deepest and most torturous recesses of hell. Satan should maybe even consider creating a brand new level just to accommodate Josef.

Just when you think men can’t sink any lower, we seem to find eerily disheartening ways to lower the bar even further.