The title and operating conceit is taken from a song in “Sunday in the Park With George,” a paean to the joys and anguish of creativity. “Look I made a hat / Where there never was hat,” sings George triumphantly at the end of the song, a glorious act of completion that at least temporarily shoves aside the personal wreckage manufactured along the way. No wonder that Sondheim has chosen for his title “the only song I’ve written which is an immediate expression of a personal internal experience.”

“Finishing the Hat” is as emotionally layered as his best plays, and glints with the same searching intelligence. The book is alive with orchestrated bursts of instruction, gossip, reflection, honest self-assessment and gimlet-eyed criticism of Porter, Gershwin, Hart, Coward and the rest of our pantheon of lyricists — all of it gracefully harmonized and sung with a strong voice that is free of pedanticism. It’s a superbly plotted work of art, with Sondheim controlling the reader’s experience just as he controls an audience’s.

The author of these pages is impelled by a strong desire to tell his personal story — or at least the public side of his personal story — through the development of his art and his oeuvre. But he is equally motivated by the insistent tug of a responsibility, an urge to transfer the details of his craft, which he does with often brilliant explanatory precision (and in occasionally exculpatory detail, as he is wont to deconstruct and sometimes justify his own failures). He writes with the elegiac rush of the master of a rapidly dying art. Sondheim was, famously, mentored by Oscar Hammerstein (even though he often puts Oscar through the Oedipal wringer), and it often feels like he, lacking a parallel heir in his own life, hopes that somewhere out there is a young man or woman whom he can teach and touch without ever looking upon: a projection upon his readers of the student he once was. Sondheim is so in love with the wonderment of words, and how they hold hands with music and theatrical context, that he can’t stop himself from sharing what he’s learned: this is a memoir that’s also a master class that’s also a mission.

From the first page of the introduction, Sondheim shatters the pretension that lyrics are poetry, describing any “printed collection” of lyrics as a “dubious” proposition, because lyrics are lifelong partners with melody, and hence meant to be sung, not read. He believes that the most successful examples are those that speak simply and directly, and disdains those that are “awash with florid imagery.” The former lyrics can soar poetically when “infused with music” while the latter collapse under the weight of their self-consciousness. To make the point, he uses two lyrics from Hammerstein, celebrating “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’” for its profound, Frost-like plain-spokenness, and skewering a couplet from “All the Things You Are,” arguing that Jerome Kern’s beautiful music ironically “makes the extravagance of the words bathetic.”

Sondheim also uses the introduction to reflect on the current state of musical theater. The tidings are grim: “I used to think that the need for live theater would never die; I fear I was wrong.” He categorizes it as a “fringe enthusiasm” and admits freely to the minimal cultural impact it now has. “The lyrics of contemporary popular song, of rock and rap and country, are the ones which reflect the immediacy of our world, much as theater songs did in the first half of the twentieth century. They are the sociologist’s totems.”

He is both mournful and cutting in his ruminations on this theme, lampooning musical theater as falling into three categories of uselessness: there is “stolid, solemn uplift equipped with impressive lumbering spectacle” — the name Andrew Lloyd Webber does not have to be spoken to be heard — and there are “elaborate concerts of familiar pop songs threaded along a story line.” The third cluster, a relatively new one, as Sondheim notes, is the “self-referential ‘metamusical,’ which makes fun of its betters by imitating their clichés while drawing attention to what it’s doing, thus justifying its lack of originality without the risk of criticism.”

With that dismissal Sondheim gets to the heart of the post-modern problem, its use of artifice to avoid emotional openness and hence critical perspective. It’s one of a long list of throwaway gifts this book delivers, many in footnotes as a signifier of his trust in the reader’s attentiveness.

Despite his skepticism about the value of memorializing lyrics in print, Sondheim excuses his own enterprise because his “largely conversational” lyrics “stand the chance of being an entertaining read.” (This conversational quality is one of the highest lyrical values for him, which might shock some — more likely, many — who view his songs as dazzling intellectual gamesmanship, distant from the vernacular or the emotional.) But Sondheim insists that the larger reason for this voluminous effort is that he cherishes mastery, believing that “the explication of any craft, when articulated by a skilled practitioner, can be not only intriguing but also valuable, no matter what particularity the reader may be attracted to.” So, he reveals, while he doesn’t cook — and possesses no interest in the arts of the stove — he is a voracious reader of cooking columns, because the formal challenges of food preparation mirror those of songwriting: “Choices, decisions, and mistakes in every attempt to make something that wasn’t there before are essentially the same, and exploring one set of them, I like to believe, may cast light on another.”

A short, spirited defense of rhyming follows the introduction. “Rhyme and Its Reasons” is both a charming lecture, replete with samples and examples, as well as a broadside against those who equate true rhyme (as opposed to near or slant rhyme) with “stifling traditionalism,” and who associate “sloppy rhyming with emotional directness and the defiance of restrictions.” He argues passionately for the role of discipline in lyric writing, and all art forms: “Craft is supposed to serve the feeling” he instructs. And he writes more eloquently than most literary critics on the nuances of composition: “There is something about the conscious use of form in any art that says to the customer, ‘This is worth saying.’ Without form, the idea, the intention, and most important, the effect, no matter how small in ambition, becomes flaccid.”

We have “lazy ears” Sondheim diagnoses, because “pop music has encouraged [listeners] to welcome vagueness and fuzziness, to exalt the poetic yearnings of random images. There are wonderful lines in pop lyrics, but they tend to be isolated from what surrounds them.” This belief in the necessity of situational relevance is pervasive; nothing is more important than truth in character and context. In one of his unbuttoned footnotes, Sondheim points out his own misuse of rhyming in his very first show, Saturday Night, illustrating how, in the song “One Wonderful Day,” he commits the “sin” of “substituting rhyme for thought” in an accelerating, antiphonal exchange of adjectives between the characters Celeste and Bobby.

The bulk of “Finishing the Hat” is devoted to thirteen plays, starting with the mid-1950s “Saturday Night” and ending with “Merrily We Roll Along” (1981). Included in the 27-year period are the plays that established Sondheim’s reputation and marked his journey from the brilliant but restless young lyricist who largely worked respectfully within Broadway’s constraints — in “West Side Story,” “Gypsy,” “A Funny Things Happened on the Way to the Forum,” and the failed “Do I Hear a Waltz?” — to break-out works of words set to his own music — like “Company,” “Follies” and “Sweeney Todd” — which created a distinctive and celebrated universe of climate, character, and complexity.

Each chapter intriguingly displays exhibits of Sondheim’s typed lyrics, often with handwritten emendations. And each follows the same structure–a brief paragraph that describes the premise of the play (what Sondheim calls “The Notion”), followed by “General Comments” that range from remarks on the circumstances of the play’s production–including relevant gossip–to exacting lyrical analyses, which often become occasions for wonderful mini-essays. Consideration of “Have an Egg Roll, Mr. Goldstone” (from “Gypsy”) provides a lovely excuse for a digression about “list songs,” referencing Cole Porter and Yip Harburg, with astute appreciation of what makes good lists incrementally witty, even when it means condemning his own jazzy gamesmanship.

Of special interest are the critiques of legendary lyricists that are nested within every chapter. In his typically tight compositional fashion, there’s always a connection between the play under discussion and the particular songwriter he appraises in counterpoint. For example, his examination of Noel Coward appears in the chapter on “Follies”, in which Sondheim recounts how he was looking for a stylistic referent for the song “One More Kiss,” and eventually seized — unflatteringly — on Coward, because the Englishman’s syntax was so distant from conversation, and because his lyrics were “overstated, sentimental and ‘written’ rather than experienced.” Sondheim titles his lambasting of Coward “The Master of Blather,” and offers a description of his patter songs–”always at dispassionate breakneck speed, every word clipped as if it were topiary in order to give the impression of brilliance”–that is every bit as uproariously accurate as anything Kenneth Tynan could write.

None of these essays on lyricists — not the one that takes apart Lorenz Hart as “the laziest of the pre-eminent lyricists,” nor the one that knocks Alan Jay Lerner’s lyrics for not just lacking “personality,” but also being absent any “energy and flavor and passion” — are mean-spirited. When Sondheim writes that he has never “laughed at or been moved by a Lerner lyric the way I have by many of his lesser-known peers,” he balances his assessment by describing “My Fair Lady” as “the most entertaining musical I’ve ever seen (exclusive of my own, of course),” even if he means “entertaining” to be a very specific and limited form of praise.

For all his innovation and experimentation, Sondheim is a disciplined formalist, with abiding principles. He writes that only three principles are necessary for a lyric writer, “all of them truisms.” They are “Content Dictates Form,” “Less is More,” and “God Is in the Details.” He describes the Six Sins of Lyric Writing, with examples from his own work–including “sonic ambiguity” and “architectural laziness.” He spends a lot of time explaining structural dramatic problems and how he arrived at lyrical solutions. He explains with note-perfect clarity why “Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd’ works as an opening line, both linguistically and musically. And from the same play, he provides a charming divagation about the importance of invented place names, and why “Kearney’s Lane” is superior to Kearney’s “street,” “square,” or “mews.” Like Frank Lloyd Wright and other formal disciplinarians, Sondheim is a gifted minter of aphorisms:

“The only reason to write a show is for love–just not too much of it.”

“Poetry is an art of concision, lyrics of expansion.”

“I don’t think that farces can be transformed into musicals without damage–at least, not good musicals.”

Sondheim has often been accused of a chilly remoteness in his work — which he acknowledges, professes surprise at, and attributes to how the brittle characters in “Company” clung to his ongoing reputation. This book’s coolly analytical eye could, ironically, contribute to that perception. But that would do Sondheim a profound disservice; his ability to break a song down to its molecular level, to view it under the microscope of creative objectivity — yes, there is such a thing — gives him a truer understanding of the broken, beating heart that is assembled out of those elemental germ lines.

Sondheim has also lived through too much, and worked with too many towering personalities, to keep all those details to himself. So there are beguiling tidbits about his relationship with Leonard Bernstein — complicated but profoundly respectful. Bernstein taught Sondheim how to “approach theater music more freely and less squarely” and to “ignore the math. Four bars may be expected, but do you really need them all?” As for Jerome Robbins, the fiery choreographic genius of “West Side Story”, well, he even intimidated Bernstein; in one incident Jerry’s refusal to compromise sent Bernstein to the closest bar, where Sondheim empathetically followed him.

The tracery of Sondheim’s own development through each successive play, the deepening of his art, his willingness to take the kind of gutsy artistic risks Bernstein taught him to, and his ability to focus his heightened self-awareness on every step of his impassioned career make this a rare and valuable portrait of the artist as a young and aging man.

In the final chapter, devoted to “Merrily We Roll Along,” Sondheim writes that, other than “Finishing the Hat,” the only other song drawn directly from his own experience is “Opening Doors”–a show-business song about youth and possibility and compromise and disappointment. “We’re banging on doors, / Shouting, “Here again! / We’re risking it all on a dime” goes the final chorus. Sondheim writes that “this song describes what the struggle was like for me and my generation of Broadway songwriters. I’m sure it must often have seemed frustrating at the time, but in retrospect it strikes me as the most exhilarating period of my professional life.” How very Sondheim: he ends this long, ovation-worthy book with a song that starts at the beginning. Before there was a hat.

But, in truth, it’s far from the end. The last words of “Finishing the Hat” are: “And then I met James Lapine.” What lover of musical theater isn’t already queuing up for the second volume, the one that includes the hat itself?

The shared assumption of the interview was that the president is in a bind. Rarely if ever did Obama challenge any of the rhetorical assumptions of Kroft’s questions — even the highly debatable notion that Americans rejected “big government.” Add up the total votes for Democrats — including Boxer, Brown, Cuomo and others — and an argument can be made that more votes were cast for a progressive, involved role of government than a rejection of government as a force for good. But there was no push-back by the president on anything. He was a man who had clearly arrived to take his lashes.

Is there no Obama between the passionate intensity of the oratorical Obama — the yes-we-can figure who can electrify hundreds of thousands — and the contrite, emotionally neutered, humbled Obama we saw last night? Is there no principled, but pragmatic leader who knows where he wants to go, who can radiate connectedness without using “folks” in every other sentence, who even his enemies grudgingly concede is a formidably appealing foe?

If the president can’t find a consistent voice, if he remains an unfathomable figure because he’s not one person but many — then his presidency is doomed. Ronald Reagan, to whom Barack Obama is often compared for his communicative skills, was always Ronald Reagan. He was Reagan when he nominated Goldwater, Reagan when he was shot — and joked that he hoped that doctor was a Republican — Reagan when he told Gorbachev to tear down the wall. It may have been a performance, but it was an unvarying one.

But we have multiple Obamas — the fiery Obama of the rallies, the complex and searching Obama of the Philadelphia speech on race, the long-winded, perseverating Obama of the debates, the curiously compliant Obama of the early days of TARP, the hands-off Obama who let Congress write his foundational, presidency-determining piece of legislation. And last night, we had the little-boy Obama who had to explain to his boss why the PowerPoint presentation on the “Public’s Perception of Early Twentieth Century Economic Hedonics” was so poorly received by the client.

Obama’s post-shellacking theme is that his failure was one of communication, that “leadership is more than legislation” or some such frighteningly obvious platitude. The Republicans counter that their midterm triumph wasn’t because the president didn’t get his message across, but that his policies and the direction of the company were understood and rejected.

The truth is closer to what President Obama is saying, but he gets it wrong. In successful leaders, form and function, content and style, are inseparable. Policy is personality, personality is policy. Listen to FDR’s Fireside Chats — delivered in the depths of a real Depression — and you hear the ineffable qualities of leadership come singing through. He’s direct and unsparing about the current situation; he lays out bold policy options with precision and clarity; he radiates enormous confidence without false optimism; he acknowledges the need for sacrifice but never comes close to despair; he’s someone who can’t get out of a chair, but someone you would leap from a chair to follow anywhere.

The Barack Obama in this “60 Minutes” interview wasn’t someone you’d follow to a break-out room. In fact, he didn’t even make it clear where he’s headed. To some Land of the Compromise? Or the Compromised? And he forgot one little detail about the interview: There’s an audience out there. The president never once looked away from Steve and spoke directly to the American people about the election, and where he wants to take us now. He looked grim, he flashed his trademark grin only once, he lacked guts. And he looked scrawny. Evolutionary biology says we are drawn to leaders who are physically strong and able to lead us through long periods of hunger, till the hunters come back. President Obama doesn’t look like he could survive a few weeks of famine.

Much has been written about the parallels between this midterm election and 1994, when Newt Gingrich rolled into town to take on Bill Clinton, with the big question mark being whether Barack Obama has the former president’s capacity for shape-shifting, his survival skills, his political antennae. The comparison is only half right. Yes, President Obama has to deal with a divided Congress and a wave of red-meat Republicans at his throat. But President Clinton had established himself as a fully formed individual by that time; as Peggy Noonan wrote at the end of the August, Americans had a framework for him, as they had for other presidents: “Bill Clinton: Southern governor. Good ol’ boy, drawlin’, flirtin’, got himself a Rhodes scholarship. ‘I know that guy.’” Indeed, the president himself said that he was a Rorschach test, upon whom people projected what they wanted to see. Now, the test itself is being tested.

President Obama, as far as the American people are concerned, is still a work-in-progress, and it’s going to be a real challenge to complete a personal work-in-progress when so much national work remains to be done. Last night, we needed to see a passionate, engaged president who admitted a setback but remains undeterred. A forceful, purposeful and appropriately humbled but not demoralized figure. Instead, we saw an incredibly smart man who is incredibly lost. And the lost cannot lead.

Now before the responses start to flood Salon’s well-prepared servers, let me say that I know male candidates are running campaign ads every bit as vicious, and I know the argument that the same behavior that gets men characterized as competitive in business settings gets women dubbed as bitches.

I’m not passing judgment on the equity of gender stereotypes, I’m simply saying that the apparent failure of a couple of hundred million dollars of negative advertising in California and Connecticut — spent by successful, well-positioned Republican businesswomen in a wave election — calls for some examination.

While each of these campaigns clearly has its own set of theatrical and personal dynamics, they were all fatally infected by a virus of meanness — a nasty volcano that is triggering the “Mean Girl” response in voters, particularly women voters. (Brown is winning by 55%-34% with women; Boxer by 53%-35%, and Blumenthal is beating McMahon by an astonishing two-to-one.)

In Connecticut, McMahon’s troubles start with the fundamental thesis of her campaign — that her leadership at WWE proves she can run a successful enterprise. But women don’t like wrestling. While part of that does come from the degrading way that women have been portrayed, I think the deeper reality is that women don’t like the cultural coarsening that wrestling has created. And women who have had sons, I believe, are even more offended by this; they’ve been the ones fighting to get the TVs shut off and who’ve been pressured to buy the licensed drek at Toys R Us.

In this context, McMahon’s attacks on Richard Blumenthal haven’t helped her; they’ve been violent in a different way. It’s not the spots that go after him for his alleged lies about military service that have backfired; it’s snarky, mean-spirited spots like this that speak right from the vicious heart of the Mean Girl persona.

This is so transparently fake, and those women are so profoundly snotty and unlikeable, that these Mean Girls make you actually feel bad for Richard Blumenthal.

Realizing this, the McMahon campaign has rushed a Nice Girl spot into the rotation, featuring Stephanie McMahon and lauding her mom as a closet June Cleaver. But it is too little, too late. The imprint of smack-down, snotty Linda has taken hold.

In California, Carly Fiorina has attacked Barbara Boxer not just on the political level, but also on a deeply personal one. It started with this web video, which I’ve previously written about, and that portrays Boxer as someone whose personal arrogance, and helium-filled ego have grown out of control. As an announcer recounts Boxer’s ever-swelling narcissism — “soon her elitist self-image grew so that it overwhelmed the Capitol and drifted West” — we see Boxer’s enormously swelled head breaking through the rotunda. It’s just plain mean, no two ways about it.

More recently, Fiorina has continued to attack Boxer as wrapped up in the trappings of her own bloated aggrandizement, picking up the footage from the now-famous Congressional testimony where she asked Brigadier General Michael Walsh to drop the “Mam” and call her “Senator.”

Actually, this clip doesn’t make Boxer out nearly as badly as Fiorina’s media team must think it does. She’s polite, not snotty. In fact, a lot of women who’ve worked long and hard for their own success, and did so in the face of male bureaucracy — and what better symbol of that is there than the Army? — probably sympathize with her.

Fiorina’s personal attacks are Boxer a paradigmatic act of a Mean Girl — as was, of course, her off-mic comment about Boxer’s hair being “so yesterday.” It’s a woman-on-woman hate crime that most women are finding offensive.

Even the commercials that attack Boxer on her politics — like this one which accuses her of almost single-handedly returning California to Depression-era poverty — are so exaggerated that their unfairness has overwhelmed whatever legitimacy they might have had.

Boxer was vulnerable, but Fiorina’s team mistook that vulnerability for a license to bludgeon.

Meg Whitman has been a Mean Girl, too. She hasn’t attacked Jerry Brown quite as personally, but her relentless battering has turned her into unpleasant figure — a billionaire charmless harridan of the airwaves. Her vast fortune — in the political version of a Victorian morality play or an O’Henry short story — has turned against her.

As Jerry Brown’s campaign manager, Steven Glaser, has stated:

“In more than 30 years of working on campaigns, I have never seen a candidate’s ads have such a negative effect on that same candidate.”

Spots like this “legacy of failure” have backfired for two reasons. The first is that Californians have a complex relationship with Jerry Brown — many who disagree with him, and even dislike him, have a grudging respect. But Whitman’s advertising so vilifies him, is so fundamentally disrespectful, that it serves to make the negatives fall away, and even re-ignites the positive.

The second reason Whitman’s advertising has tanked her is that she’s supposed to be a calm, prudent, thoughtful businesswoman. But she’s portrayed herself as just another mean-spirited politician who hires ominous-sounding male announcers.

Meanwhile, in Florida, Alex Sink, a Democrat, is leading Rick Scott in what is still a very close race. Without going Mean Girl, she’s hammered Scott, the former CEO of a hospital chain that had serious legal problems, in commercials that have said he “can’t be trusted.” And worse. But the spots have a credible, documentary feel — they’re not pitched at the exaggerated level of the Whitman and Fiorina ads. They use authority figures and newspaper quotations to make their case in a way that’s strong but not shrill.

Sink’s campaign shows that you can attack and attack without falling into the spiteful Mean Girl archetype.

This was the year for Whitman, Fiorina and McMahon, but their campaigns blew it. In a time of economic dismay when voters might have gone for smart, business-savvy and caring centrist women from outside the mudbox of politics, each of them let their advisers morph them into candidates-as-usual.

Data consistently shows that women leaders are seen as more honest, intelligent and compassionate than men — the latter by a stunning score of 80% to 5%. That means the Whitman, Fiorina and McMahon campaigns squandered three things — the economic environment and the enthusiasm gap the Democrats face; their vast spending advantage, and the natural advantages women have.

Nate Silver at his fivethirtyeight.com blog says that Whitman’s chances are just 6%, and Fiorina’s are 8%.

How did these successful CEOs run such massively inefficient corporate campaign operations, and in doing so damage their personal reputations?

Could it be that in all cases, their political strategists were men? Men who were so focused on the economic advantage their candidates had that they failed — in two cases — to recognize their natural gender advantages? Makes you wonder why there are no nationally-known female campaign strategists, other than, perhaps, Nicole Wallace and Torie Clark — and they’re actually spokespeople more than campaign strategists.

But that’s another story.

The strategy behind it is obvious – too obvious, in fact: Make decriminalization a vote for law-and-order. The ad features Joseph McNamara, a weather-beaten, ostensibly tough-minded former police chief (San Jose) and beat cop (NYC) who speaks with a curious semi-stroke slur. The argument is flinty-eyed, having nothing to do with individual rights:

“Let’s be honest: The war against marijuana has failed. I know from 35 years in law enforcement. Today, it’s easier for a teenager to buy pot than beer. Proposition 19 will tax and control marijuana just like alcohol. It will generate billions of dollars for local communities, allow police to focus on violent crimes, and put drug cartels out of business. Join me and many others in law enforcement. Vote YES on Proposition 19!”

This is the wrong strategy. You don’t convince people to legalize marijuana by telling them the drug wars have failed, any more than you’d try to get people to vote for eliminating speed limits because the highway patrol is too slow. As for the drug cartel argument, well, most people don’t really care about drug violence in Mexico.

The supporters of Proposition 19 should have made it a personal safety issue. They should have said to moms: Do you want your children going to dangerous men in dangerous places to buy drugs, or do you want them to be able to buy it cleanly and safety? We don’t want young people to smoke dope, but we’re realists and we don’t want to put them in danger, either.

Why the advertising now? Back in September, it looked like California was going to live up to its reputation and become the first state to vote for Reefer Madness. Polls showed Proposition 19 leading by as much as 52-41.

But now, Prop 19 appears to be in trouble; the Chamber of Commerce has kicked in $350,000 for radio commercials opposing it, warning of “stoned workers on the job.” (Anyone who shops in California knows we’ve lost that battle; its retail cash registers are operated by smiling automatons who are zonked out of their minds.) Thing are getting so tough, in fact, that George Soros has kicked in a million bucks for the fight.

What’s happening in California, it seems to me, is that voters are rethinking the need for decriminalization, since the proliferation of medical marijuana dispensaries – and the loose rules for obtaining a “prescription” – have brought down the barriers enough for most people. Recently, in fact, the feds pointed out that there are more medical marijuana dispensaries in San Francisco than there are Starbucks, although the pro-weed forces have questioned the calculations. The point is, it’s not like anyone who really wants weed can’t get it. Super-availability is beyond what most people feel is required.

Back in 1970, Hunter S. Thompson ran for sheriff of Pitkin County, Colo., on the “Freak Power” ticket. His platform – radical at the time – is ironically mainstream today, a combination of what California is voting on, what Mayor Bloomberg is doing in New York, and what low-density zoning is achieving.

Thompson’s policies included “… promoting the decriminalization of drugs (for personal use only, not trafficking, as he disapproved of profiteering) tearing up the streets and turning them into grassy pedestrian malls, and banning any building so tall as to obscure the view of the mountains.”

Whether Proposition 19 wins or loses, we are all gonzo now.

The spot opens with Sharron sitting peacefully with a mug of coffee — it’s a benign suburban tableau, or even a talk-show moment — and she tells us that she approved the message that brought such rancor to Joy. Then the Mama Grizzly attack begins: a series of images that portray an Arizona under siege. A predictably ominous announcer paints a picture of “Waves of illegal aliens streaming across our border, joining violent gangs … forcing families to live in fear.”

The images are grainy, black-and-white shots of streaming Mexicans; there’s even a clever quick cut to a video monitor that’s capturing images of the illegals. It feels like real time.

The announcer continues: “And what’s Harry Reid doing about it? Voting to give illegal aliens Social Security benefits, tax breaks and college tuition … even siding with Obama and the president of Mexico to block Arizona’s tough new immigration law.”

I believe that what Joy found most offensive about this ad — and what many others have also spoken out against, including Elisabeth Hasselbeck — is the iconography as opposed to the words. The ad is a visual anthology of every stereotype of Mexican youth — head-scarf-wearing, gang-joining, border-busting, mug-shot-glaring, tattoo-flaunting ruffians. Contrast this with the shots of innocent young white kids in school, as the announcer notes that Reid voted against making English our national language twice. Officer, officer, come quick; they’re stealing our language from us!!

The spot closes with a pronouncement that makes Harry Reid not just complicit in these waves of terror, but in favor of them: “Harry Reid. It’s clear whose side he’s on. And it’s not yours.”

The spot is so over-the-top that it crashes into parody. Angle has been bashing Reid on his immigration policies from the beginning, but I don’t think that’s driving her slim lead over Reid in the polls; the resentment against “Leader Reid,” as Obama calls him, is deeper than that, although Rasmussen calls the race a “toss-up.” I think the public has pretty much made up its mind on immigration, and a spot like this might actually win Reid some sympathy because it’s such a wicked assault, and does clearly cross the line into ethnic politics. If the spot dooms Angle to hell, it would be an ironic fate; better to be doomed to a life of eternal pain for something sinfully effective, or sexy and pleasurable.

In her rant, Behar called this a “Hitler Youth commercial” and that Angle is a “moron on top of being evil.” Of course, Behar is an entertainer, so she’s permitted — indeed encouraged — to use invective, to make invidious comparisons, to do whatever she has to do to get ratings and support her brand.

But the truth of the matter is that Sharron Angle is an entertainer as well — and the “Wave” commercial is her entertainment product. It’s designed for effect, like Behar’s assault. And like Behar, she uses shock to attract and connect with her audience, and trots out stereotypes to attack: grimy, thieving Mexicans vs. neat rows of obedient Hitler Youth. So both Behar and Angle are using entertainment values to manipulate their audiences, and we deserve better no matter who’s sitting in front of the coffee cup.