John Edwards, toward whom I've been leaning, seemed pursed, wan and disappointingly flat, while Barack Obama was skittish and vacuous. However, when Obama nimbly replied to a question on foreign policy, he took off like a rocket. For a brief moment, he exuded the relaxed authority and personal magnetism of a major player on the world stage. If Edwards tanks, I'm jumping to Obama.
I thought Hillary Clinton did surprisingly well for most of the debate. Until the last question, when she veered into her trademark splenetic stridency, she was calm, centered and practical. It was a no-crap side of her that we have virtually never seen, so addicted has she been to her glammed-up, diva-sanctified-by-suffering persona, whisked from gig to gig by limousine and private jet.
Whether this change of tactics will allay the widespread doubts about Hillary's credibility remains to be seen. It unfortunately followed a series of gross missteps where Hillary kept doggedly doing a cringingly bad Southern drawl for African-American audiences and then had the audacity to suggest it was evidence of how gloriously "multilingual" she is after living in Arkansas. Pass the mint juleps, Auntie Mame! We sho' never heard that lip-smacking down-home gumbo when little ole Hillary was first lady of Arkansas and then of the United States.
With his quick humor and easy grace, Mitt Romney emerged in my view as the clear winner of the first Republican debate. Will his Mormonism be the sticking point? A recent caller to Sean Hannity's radio show, hosted that day by WABC's always lively Mark Simone, shockingly denied that Mormons are Christians. The implication was that evangelical Protestantism is absolute truth -- which would also put Roman Catholicism beyond the pale. This is a bad sign of tunnel-vision sectarianism, which if it increases would blight American culture and be fatal to the arts.
Rudy Giuliani was awkward and abashed in a supporting role at the debate as just another cipher in the pack. While I'd love to see an Italian-American in the White House, I'm ambivalent about Giuliani. He'd surely kick ass to upgrade and standardize sluggish government agencies after the cronyistic pig rut of the Bush era, but he has his own problems with cronyism as well as a history of blurring the line between public responsibility and private ax-grinding, as in his unilateral attack on the not entirely innocent Brooklyn Museum in 1999. (I chronicled that sorry episode in my lecture on religion and the arts at Colorado College in February; the text is forthcoming in Arion.)
For voters looking for a "strong man" in the nebulous war on terrorism, Giuliani would have deep cross-party appeal in a general election. But he is a Machiavellian in the mercurial mold of Cesare Borgia, whose rubric was that the ends justify the means. I got queasy watching Barbara Walters' interview in March with Giuliani and his third wife, Judith Nathan (who would be a brassy hard sell as first lady). All that ostentatious, lovey-dovey, hand-holding stuff -- is it a simmering hormonal stew produced by Giuliani's post-prostate-crisis meds?
Rudy and Hillary seem weirdly analogous in their glibness and artificiality. Of course, they've been symbiotically locked for years: Hillary owes her senatorial rank to the New York Democrats who drafted her (a non-resident of that state) to counter Rudy's anticipated run, which never materialized because of his illness. If she's Sister Frigidaire (her youthful nickname) and the Queen of Denial (Bill's enabler), Rudy is a casuistical crypto-priest of ramrod rigidity. Billing and spooning with Judy on Walters' show, he seemed like a puritanical poker coming up through the runny butter-cream frosting like a 5 o' clock shadow.
In other news, my reading of last month's horrific Virginia Tech massacre (which I discussed with the Sunday Times of London's perspicacious Sarah Baxter) is that it is yet another warning, after the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School, that our present educational system is an insane pressure cooker, dangerous above all for boys, with their restless physical energy.
High school (which has become just a frantic, callow rat race for brand-name college admission) is not an eternal principle of the universe. It was invented relatively recently -- a point solidly made by Jon Savage in his interesting new book, "Teenage" (which I reviewed last weekend in the New York Times Book Review). Age segregation by grade, in my opinion, is a mechanistic atrocity that spawns ruthless social cliques, who oppress and enrage the losers in the provincial pecking order.
As I have argued for years, we desperately need a return to vocational training. The virtually universal conversion of American high schools to a pre-college track over the past half-century has watered down the curriculum to its present deadening uselessness. Lower-middle-class and working-class families who pay taxes have a right to expect that primary schools will prepare their children for a productive life.
My platform calls for a revalorization of the trades (which are related by craftsmanship to the art schools where I have taught for most of my career). Upper-middle-class families should be ready to support their children's unorthodox choice for a career in carpentry, masonry or landscaping. We need to strip the elite aura from the claustrophobic "prestige" jobs in sterile corporate offices, where high salaries drug the worker clones from recognition of their own imprisonment and castration.
Next page: The unparalleled camp of "Children"; Rosie's welcome exit