Feeling it

I’m finally learning how this blog site “visits” thing works. And it is confirming, in strange ways, a lot of my suspicions about this presidential campaign.

All the “visitors” in the past week aren’t reading about Mount St. Helens or my motor scooter diaries. No need to “warn” them that I’m going off their topic of choice: Sarah Palin’s glasses.

Alas, they never even see the posts about what E10 does to two-stroke engines or how I walked away from Mount St. Helens a wiser man.

And they will never see these words either.

No, they are coming directly to the “spec-tacular” Sarah post.

Yesterday when I googled “Sarah Palin” and “glasses,” the Red Electric came up something like eighth on the list. No wonder I had 800 visits on Saturday, up from the normal 40 to 50. It’s still running around 150.

As the glasses freaks mellow out and go back to doing whatever they do, the visits will drop.

The rush to read about Sarah’s glasses is a reminder that it’s not what Sarah (or any politician) says that will get her or him elected. It’s not what she tells Charles Gibson; it’s how she looks — how she “feels.”

Yes, television is a tactile as well as a visual medium.

Tactile is a concept, first applied to our “Teflon president” Ronald Reagan. Nothing stuck to him because he was just such a “feel good” guy with a sunny personality,

And nothing is sticking now to Sarah with her intriguing marmish glasses and her “frontier fundamentalism.”

Not Bristol’s baby
Not Troopergate
Not Bridge-to-Nowhere flip-flops
Not hubby’s secessionist streak
Not state per diems on her own house
Not bravely shooting fish (wolves) in a barrel (on the tundra) from an airplane.

Why isn’t it sticking? We don’t live in a rational, thinking times. We see, relate and feel. That’s why the Christian Right us so excited about Sarah. Religion and reason don’t mix. It’s all about “feeling it.”

How Sarah looks and acts trumps what she has (and hasn’t) done, and certainly what she merely says.

Memo to Barack Obama: Look and act presidential and pissed as hell! Let’s feel it!

Don’t quietly lay out your education policy in front of a bunch of kids, teachers and administrators assembled in a school library, as you did the other day. (Shhhhh!! This is a library.)

Take it to the streets, Barack. Put it to throngs. Large ones.

Whip them up. The streets are where drop-outs end up. Tell 'em that if they “get back in school,” the Obama administration will make the schools worth getting back into.

Go after the plutocrats, the politician with nine houses, the “bubble” politician who thinks you aren’t rich until you make $5 million a year, the oil barons and the Gucci Gulch lobbyists.

Do it, do it fast and do it with feeling!