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Hitchens endorses Obama
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Famed writer Christopher Hitchens has come out in his weekly Slate.com column and endorsed Barack Obama for president. As a faithful reader of Hitchens, this surprised me more than a little. Ever since his well-documented post-9/11 transformation from a liberal intellectual in The Nation to a supporter of the Iraq war and what Hitchens himself calls a "single issue voter," he has been openly disdainful of the Democratic party. His single issue by the way, is the war on terror. After supporting Ralph Nader in 2000, Hitchens endorsed George W. Bush in 2004.
And that's not all. Hitchens has been a ruthless critic of Obama, going after Reverend Jeremiah Wright back in March, and calling Obama "vapid, hesitant and gutless" as recently as September 25th. So why the endorsement?
Why, indeed. Hitchens is convinced, as are seemingly more and more people, that McCain, in the words of Hitchens, is "suffering from an increasingly obvious and embarrassing deficit, both cognitive and physical." In other words, McCain's not all there, and it's almost impossible to ignore. No major national writer that I can think of has come out in quite these terms and used this argument against McCain until now. It's about time.
I have my own "maybe McCain's not quite all there" story. I was in Dubuque, Iowa in early January for the caucuses. In the interest of full disclosure, two of my friends and I were there doing work for Barack Obama's campaign. I have since had my own problems with some of the stances that Obama has taken, but I will always be proud of every second that I spent helping him strip the Democratic party out of the greasy, bloodstained hands of the Clintons. At any rate, on January 2nd, the day before the caucuses, my friends and I could see the writing on the wall. The i's had been dotted and the t's had been crossed, as they say, and it was obvious that Obama was headed towards a sizeable victory.
So instead of sitting in the sub-freezing-temperature-ridden Dubuque Obama office and making annoying phonebank calls with our frozen fingertips, we decided to go out and see some other candidates. Bill Clinton was speaking at a junior high across town, and later, John McCain would be coming into the Dubuque Airport for a quick rally.
The rally itself was a rather sad affair. There were about 40 people there, and at least a dozen of them were Ron Paul supporters (predictably ranting about the fictitious "NAFTA Superhighway" before McCain took the stage). McCain was introduced by none other than Tricia Nixon, a sad looking woman who only managed a smile when McCain praised her father's illegal bombings of Hanoi. After McCain's speech, he took some questions from reporters, posed for a few pictures (the one below taken by me is of McCain and my friends Jacqueline Campos and Michael Johnson), and then started to head out. So did we.
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We left the airport's hangar where the rally had taken place and walked to the front door, where our car was parked. As we walked to the door, we heard a voice behind us ask, "Hey guys, where we goin'?"
It was McCain. He thought we were his staff.
We turned around, and before we could get over the shock of what was happening and say something back, McCain's actual staff called out, "John! Over here!' in a very exasperated tone. Have you ever been to a nursing home and heard the staff yell at one of the confused residents? Same tone.
McCain stumbled, gave us a sheepish, embarrassed look that I will never forget, and ambled back to his staff. We could have taken him back to the Dubuque Days Inn for their excellent "dollar happy hour," I'm sure of it.
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