How to Get Noticed in America

Top tips to help Uncle John McCain see if he can't put the McCain back into 'election campMcCaingn' as we limber up to Long Island and D3.

Stand out from the crowd with the Top Three 3 Sure-fire Steps to the reaction you deserve.

 Be a hero. An American hero. America loves a hero.
 Accept your party’s – chose one – nomination for President.
 DO NOT under any circumstance BE JOHN MCCAIN.

That last one’s toughie, but it’s essential.

I’m down in Long Island to see if Drunk Uncle John McCain can refocus the focus of this increasingly folksy election focus by focussing on the issues that matter to ordinary American folk -- us. Yes, us – you and me – we, the people, need to reengage with this election on the level of substance rather than gloss and cheap shots. This will be a tall order for either candidate at tonight’s debacle debate. If you’re not convinced about how bad it’s gotten, just read the superficial dross that even I am spouting.

Oh, don’t look at me like that. Please, not with those big old prison camp puppy dog eyes. It’s a mess of your own making. You got us here and now you’ve only yourself to blame. You chose her. Your little stunt worked too well. And now the weather report shows that it’s hailin’ Sarah Palin! And I’m not complainin’.

If you’ve formed an exploratory committee, sussed out your options, and it turns out that there’s no way around it – you are Sen. John McCain, then, well, then there’s only one thing for it: you could have a go at grabbing back some airtime by being Noticeable Matt Damon as well.

This might seem at first like an even tougher call. Being two people is something you’re not used to doing; it might seem difficult. No need to worry: Matt ‘Noticeable’ Damon himself has been two people for years: Matt ‘Notable’ Damon, the fair-to-middling (should that be 'meddling'? - Ed.) 'Thespian' who needs a prompter to soliloquize anything longer than his own name, even when he himself wrote it; and yet at the same time the astute political genius Matt ‘Look at Me!’ Damon, who can use elected officials as sounding-boards for his own ignorance and America will act like he matters.

Down-home truths

The cold and the frost are here, and as I watch the 2008 United States vice-presidential debate the temperature drops below freezing; Sarah Palin sends a shiver down my spine.

As the nights draw darkly, temperatures tremble in the breeze, and dawn won’t break till morning I can begin to feel the creek in my bones that signals the onset of another cold Alaskan winter. This afternoon I moved my bed into a warmer room. I wedged it up against the stove with a chair. If I don’t have it jammed it squeaks and rattles and frightens the life out of me. The thought struck me that in this respect it couldn’t be unlike a Sarah Palin presidency.

Palin comparison
Although there’s a certain economy of discourses of truth adhered to at these events that is not to my taste, I watched the 2008 United States vice-presidential debate. Perhaps the cold was making me hungry, but the exchange reminded me of nothing more than fish. Joe Biden shark-smiled teeth like razors, but the thriller from Wasilla too proved she’s more than a minnow: Alaskan king salmon are popular for sport because they put up a good fight when you get them on the hook. Palin might sometimes look like a fish out of water but her Last Frontier pioneer spirit we see her through a ropey start to the bitter end, whichever way this tough cookie crumbles. Or put another way, there’s that small-town parochial partisan pettiness that’ll keep her fighting all the way. (One of her first acts as Wasilla mayor was to fire the police chief who’d supported her opponent.)

Whiter shade of Palin
Wasilla is also the name of the Ossetian god of storms. So it is in a way appropriate that Palin should cause a storm in a teacup on entering politics and a furor on her ascent to the national stage. However, the town’s name actually commemorates a Dena' ina Athabascan Indian Chief whose name meant “breath of air”. Whether this was fresh air or hot air was not specified. There might have been a lot of the latter down in Whitman County Thursday, but it’ll be an ill wind blowing in Washington if there’s a Palin Vice Presidency in the wind, and then we’ll all be left to twist in an extended metaphor that’s worn thinner than the Sarah Palin end of a regressive and ignorant conservative wedge.

Palin to insignificance
Regardless of which way the vice-presidential wind is blowing, the wind in the land of the midnight sun is very definitely cold. The doors bang and the windows rattle and the wind gently rocks the dilapidated cabin. I close my eyes for a while and listen to the chill wind shrieking around the old relic. It's a John McCain of a house and a wind that’s not unlike the Sarah Palin candidacy.

Folksy tales from the brave new world

I know it doesn’t matter – and you know it doesn’t matter – but if he didn’t quote The Tempest with quite such a simpering smile I wouldn't find myself wondering whether he can bowl as well as Obama.

But Joe Biden did. And while he does, and being of the old Wilde school of not attributing his sources, Palin’s modesty to misattribute her quotes is all the more notable. Those given to Anglo-American comparison should note that it was with something more subtle than the way our own Chameleon Cameron crowbarred a Thatcher salute into an otherwise rather progressive season of political party conferences, Sarah Palin's shining city on a hill was calculated to give the illusion that she’d quoted Ronald Reagan twice, and almost made you think that she’s read more Reagan than Winthrop. This illusion meant that she could court the Reaganites of the grand old party faithful without outraging the moderates, a reconciliation whose Tory counterpart Chameleon Cameron has still to fathom.

Unlike Cameron’s speech, in which they were both crammed uncomfortably into his one person, the 2008 United States vice-presidential debate saw accommodation and partisanship healthily apportioned between the two candidates, but at times with equally comic results: the beautiful and (genuinely) moving family-guy Biden emotion was sadly undermined by his repeated claim to “love” Sen. John McCain.

The Third Man

Lately, Chameleon Cameron has shown all the symptoms (in my medical opinion) of a man trapped in a Graham Greene novel or two.

It began with a friendly smile and as few policies as he could get away with – as long as nothing happens anything is possible. Like Our Man in Havana, he talked a good game, painted castles in the sky, but when you actually looked closely for the policies you saw that it was all really an elaborate vacuum. As with Noel Coward in the film adaptation, one found his style mildly amusing yet couldn’t but wonder whether he was at all capable of the seriousness the role demands.

In the old Tory days the heartless Thatcherites could swallow hard, close their eyes, tick the box, and think of England because they at least knew what they were getting. There was something secure in its vulgarity. You could appeal to them as you could to an English policeman, because you knew their thoughts. But Chameleon Cameron is a stranger bird. With a man in search of a character the road to Conservative policy is a journey without maps.

And yet – and yet – just recently, in the rubble of our financial institutions (where it is not too early for some to speculate on the death-throes of capitalist decadence), has he found one? With his newfound seriousness could he have gone from hug-a-hoodie wetness to his very own metaphoric megaphonic climb-the-debris-and-hug-a-fireman moment?

Remember when Tony Blair really started to get into the war. To properly loose himself in the role. When his matey straight-guy stuff got supplemented with sub-Churchill grandiloquence. Well, all of a sudden the heir to Blair seems to have been taking the same hubris pills and has begun to strike statesmanly poses. Chameleon Cameron approaches a season of political party conferences like one might a state funeral. Poseur he may be, but reaching out pseudo-bipartisan hands to a plodding and doddering Gordon Brown is such astute political flimflam that when he slaps on a serious haircut and concernedly pursed lips one hardly notices that he admonishes D. Miliband for claiming there’s no such thing as society in the same speech as thanking heaven for Thatcher.

But, at this point, however dishonest the mockery – or perhaps the praise – one fears that the brute fact of D. Miliband might be enough. While Brown may have gravitas to spare there’s no doubt that Chameleon Cameron can out-solemnise the pretenders. When you add to that the specific fact that he looks more and more dignified every time D. Miliband shows his gurning phizog in public you can’t help fancying his chances.