God save the queen - maybe.

My head of state in New Zealand is Queen Elizabeth II. We're still part of the Commonwealth, still a fragment of the once-huge British Empire. While we have our own Prime Minster and all that, in theory, the Queen is our big boss, even if the power is more ceremonial than not.

In recent weeks the debate on New Zealand's future has flared up again, with the leader of the opposition party saying it's time to start making plans for a republic. "We need to start the conversation now," said Labour leader Phil Goff. Prime Minister John Key seems to be content with vagueness, having said before a New Zealand republic is "inevitable" but not actually doing much more than that. Bills introduced to actually move the debate don't get far; the most recent one failed on its first reading in Parliament.

The sentiment generally seems to be that when Queen Elizabeth II dies or steps down, NZ (and probably Australia) will move to sever their last ties to the monarchy. The notion of poor King Charles III doesn't seem to instill a lot of confidence in people. (We might still have Queen Elizabeth for another 20 years though - while she's 84, her mum lasted to 101.)

However, you could argue that without the ties to the motherland New Zealand suddenly becomes a mighty small country at the bottom of the world. Australia already has a lot over us economically. Would losing the monarchy actually benefit us in any tangible way on the world stage? Do we need it to stay afloat? Yet culturally, we're hardly "Southern Britain" anymore. NZ is a vibrant, multicultural nation - a little bit Pacifica, a little bit Maori, a little bit Australian, a little bit Asian. Britain really is an awful long ways away. We're our own identity now.

I've got nothing against old Queenie, and I find the novelty of it all kind of interesting to observe coming from the American system of government. If pressed, I'd have to admit the whole notion of a hereditary leader, as limited as her actual power might be, kind of flies in the face of my good ol' "anybody can be President" American idealism.

But I'd bet firm money a change is going to happen, in the next decade if not sooner. I certainly see no harm in the notion of planning for it, but there seems to be a political timidity to engage on this -- for fear of offending the last hardcore monarchists. But it's foolish to wait until Queen Elizabeth II kicks the bucket to even start thinking about the future. While there's a kind of quaint charm to the idea of the monarchy, in reality New Zealand stopped being just an outpost of empire some time ago. It's only a formality that we still have a Queen.

(Speaking of outposts of Empire, I'm off to the United States for a long-overdue holiday and will be on blog hiatus until mid-October sometime. Cheers mates!)

The truth is out there

This is the kind of thing that just depresses me about my home land to no end.

Whether or not you agree with his politics, it really, honestly has been proven without a doubt that Barack Obama is not a Muslim. That he was not actually born in Indonesia or Guatemala or wherever. He may be a liberal tax-and-spender, but he's no foreign invasion leader. Yet the lies persist.

I just don't get it. Is believing in whatever the vast right wing conspiracy of the day is just shorthand for "I don't like the guy's politics"? Much as I despise the administration of George W. Bush, I never bought into the conspiracy that he somehow planned/knew about 9/11. Yet people just love their conspiracy theories. As if a secret Muslim infiltrator could actually get elected President in Fox News America?

It's frankly embarrassing sometimes at my work, where I'm surrounded by Kiwis, Australians, Brits and South Africans, and having to defend the US when a story like this comes across the wire. It feeds into all the sad stereotypes people have about my country. (Of course, every country has its idiots, demagogues and ranters, a fact I like to point out when anyone gets too high on the 'bash America' bandwagon. New Zealand politicians tend to be less brash and omnipresent than Americans, but it's got its share of well, wankers.)

A great reason for why the Obama myths persist in mainstream society lies in the fact that media are scared to death of stating an outright fact when it comes to politics, for fear of offending some demographic. Too many stories on this sort of thing mushmouth their way around the point, using vague language rather than just calling a lie a lie, an untruth an untruth. Journalists today have been taught that being factual isn't being "balanced."

I dunno. Is it just easier to believe whatever you're told that fits into your personal worldview? But as the always thoughtful Arthur puts it, propaganda works. Say something enough and people will start to believe it. It's a shame that the 24-hour news cycle, always logged on Internet world of knowledge and freedom seems to have in many ways actually made this kind of climate worse. The truth is out there... somewhere, I guess, maybe.

Who's drinking the tea party?

I'm an expatriate, but I've never subscribed to the whole "I left America because I hate it" notion of being an American living overseas. We moved to New Zealand because of family, and because hey, it'd be neat to live in a foreign country for a while, however long it ends up being for. George Bush being President had nothing to do with it. But I love many many things about the US, miss it a lot, and usually stick up for it when I get the occasional "America-bashing" comment from people here.

But I admit -- I don't understand this "Tea Party" nonsense or the school of Sarah Palinism at all. The incoherent rage and anger of people like the Glenn Becks and Bill O'Reillys and so forth is bizarre to me. There are people on the Republican end of things I've respected, but they seem to be a dwindling voice amongst the crazies. People on both sides of the political divide get angry and idiotic, but I don't know, it just seems like the American right wing has a patent on over-the-top lunacy.

Living overseas, I see everything now through a curious filter of distance. I wonder, are people really getting crazier, or is that just the way it seems from afar? I end up often feeling like I need to apologise for my country, or trying to explain to people that a politician or a talk show host does not equal a country.

When you get people like Sarah Palin saying things like 'Don't retreat, just reload," and you think about the likelihood that a certain amount of disturbed, gun-owning people are likely to take that as more than just rhetoric, you have to wonder. If left-wingers talked about shooting Bush, they rightfully would've been prosecuted. It's hard to imagine endlessly red-faced, violence-invoking rhetoric isn't going to lead to real trouble.

I dunno. Maybe it's just the up and down of politics as always (people have been shouting about politics as long as they've had larynxes, after all). Maybe the Internet, the Twittery and Facebookery and so forth just make everything that much louder and less avoidable. I try to tell my NZ friends that all Americans aren't like the Palinites -- that the Tea Party folk just are a very vocal, very loud fringe element that gets a lot more press than the number of people they actually represent. But maybe I've been out of America too long and the lunatics have actually taken over the asylum. Can anyone tell me?

From 6000 miles away, it truly appears sometimes the US has gone a bit crazy

US. Rep. Barney Frank, I love you:

CNN: Barney Frank goes toe to toe at health care town hall

...While Rep. Frank attempted to respond to all questions, he gave up when one woman compared health care proposals favored by Frank and President Obama to policies of Nazi Germany.
"When you ask me that question, I'm going to revert to my ethnic heritage and ask you a question: On what planet do you spend most of your time?" Frank asked.
"You stand there with a picture of the president defaced to look like Hitler and compare the effort to increase health care to the Nazis," he said, adding such behavior demonstrated the strength of First Amendment guarantees of what he called "contemptible" free speech.
"Trying to have a conversation with you would be like trying to argue with a dining room table," Frank said to the woman. "I have no interest in doing it."



...The "Hitler card" is the biggest cliche in the book for fanatics of ALL political leanings, a nuclear bomb of rhetoric when perhaps a mild slingshot would do. Can we all, left and right, just drop the bloody thing unless the person we're comparing to Hitler actually has planned genocide and global conquest?

I've already said my piece on the health care "debate" on this well-commented post, so I won't go there again, but really -- why are the 1% of nutjobs getting 99% of the coverage? Shouters beat talkers, I guess.

What a maverick!

How do you show leadership potential and your suitability for the presidency in 2012? Well, by quitting in the middle of your term, for no apparent reason.

The Sarah Palin roadshow -- you can't make this stuff up anymore. Reminds me a bit of John McCain "suspending" his campaign to deal with the economic crisis, because politicians surely can't be expected to deal with more than one thing at once. Big gestures, empty substance. I found it hard to believe I'd find a politician more loathsome than Bush Jr, but wow, Palin's naked cynicism and pandering knows no bounds, does it? One would hope she does run against Obama, just to see him wipe the floor with her.

Every time I think the current state of the Republican Party in the US can't get any more comical, they manage to top themselves. The Dems are hardly perfect, but honestly -- it's just getting absurd on the red team.

Happy Fourth of July, all y'all.

Congratulations, Mr. President

President Barack Obama.

Oh yeah. That's what I'm talking about. It's very nice to feel excited rather than vaguely depressed at an inauguration. I remember how good it felt in 1992, before Bill Clinton's seamier side tainted his presidency, to feel that "your team" won one. And it's fine to feel some optimism after an awful lot of bad news days.

And what a fine speech by Obama today (but was there any doubt really?). Brief but powerful and finely carved as a statue from granite. I get a sense when he speaks that he means what he says, that they aren't just words on paper, and of course knowing that he's a decent author himself I highly imagine much of the memorable turns of phrase -- "our patchwork heritage," "the bitter swill of civil war and segregation," "the kindness to take in a stranger when the levees break," -- come directly from Obama's pen. The man can give a speech.

But still...

Still... it might be totally, utterly immature of me, but somewhere in the 13-year-old boy in my head, I have to admit, wouldn't it have been really kind of cool if he'd started off the speech like this:



Um.

I'm so, so sorry. But I've been waiting to use that joke for a year now. Sorry.

So long and thanks for all the mess

I don't hate George W. Bush, really.

I am fundamentally optimistic about people, and even at 37 years old I still find myself surprised when they live down to your expectations. So it was with Bush -- I didn't vote for him, didn't think much of the smug daddy's boy, but after all the agony of recounts, etc., I was willing to give him a shot. It's kind of hard now to remember that somewhat more idyllic pre-9/11 world, but what I recall of the 2000 election was real disappointment -- Al Gore is a terrific man and would have been a terrific president, I believe, but he was a lousy, slow-reacting candidate, much like John Kerry. Bush out-folksed them. I was disappointed, but I wasn't horrified. Another mediocre Bush like his dad. How bad could it be?

I certainly couldn't have imagined how poor Bush would be. Even though I moved away from America more than 2 years ago, I've had to live with the quasi-burden of being linked with Bush many a time -- one man once started berating me about "my" President, as if we hung out together at the BBQ or something. Having lived overseas, I can totally affirm the impression that Bush has radically hurt America's image overseas. He's confirmed the worst suspicions many have and made them forget about the all the fine, trailblazing things about America.

Despite all the reasons I've got, though, I've always found it hard to hate Bush. I feel sorry for him more than anything, for the damage he's caused and the willful blindness that's led us into it. I wouldn't call him stupid, either – merely stubborn, incurious and ideological to the extreme. Maureen Dowd had a fine line in her Bush kiss-off column in The New York Times: "W. was immune to doubt and afraid of it. Obama is delighted by doubt."

Some of it wasn't Bush's fault -- I have never believed all the 9/11 government conspiracy theories -- but it was his consequence. Great presidents have almost always risen to the crises given them -- Lincoln, Roosevelt -- while the ones regarded as the worst have looked history in the eye and failed. There's a reason few people remember who James Buchanan, Warren Harding or Franklin Pierce were. Bush took things like 9/11, Hurricane Katrina and the economic climate and made them all worse through inaction, miscalculation or outright incompetence. His legacy will be echoing for a long time.

I don't hate him, though. I hate what he's done and how he's made people think my country isn't as good as place as it really is, as it really can be. Contrary to what some folks think, liberal expatriates can and do love America too. Barack Obama's got the weight of a million expectations on him starting tomorrow, but y'know, even if he doesn't deliver, at least the adulation and optimism he's unleashed has had a kind of cleansing effect. Is it over the top, the Obama hyperbole? Well, sure, but at least it's washed the taste of the last 8 years out.

Please. Just. Go. Away.

"I think media should be abolished from, you know, reporting,” Joe "The Plumber" Wurzelbacher said. “You know, war is hell. And if you’re gonna sit there and say, ‘well, look at this atrocity,’ well you don’t know the whole story behind it half the time, so I think the media should have no business in it.”

I'd try to write something but this buffoon's blathering really just kind of demands slackjawed silence. Or maybe a quote from Harlan Ellison is a better rejoinder:

"We are not entitled to our opinions; we are entitled to our informed opinions. Without research, without background, without understanding, it’s nothing."

You don't get the "whole story" without some form of media, whether it's a book, a TV or a podcast. This is what a steady diet of Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter will get you -- a species so divorced from the concept of freedom of speech that they see it as an option rather than a necessity.

I could watch this all day long.

Kind of hypnotic, ain't it?

...You know, say what you will about Bush (and I will), but the man does have good reflexes.

New Zealand: Time for a change, too

Politics, politics, politics. New Zealand's Election 2008 has come and gone, and I am just about utterly drained of all insight after a week packed with parsing polls and picking politicians in two nations, but I'll scrape together a few thoughts on Aotearoa's vote:

• In what wasn't really a surprise, National has unseated Labour in the government pretty decisively (Labour barely won 34 percent of the vote), and our new Prime Minister is John Key. Sad to see as I do like Helen Clark, who will still go down as one of NZ's great leaders, but at the same time I never really felt like the electorate was behind her, and frankly, almost any politician is going to have a hard road trying to stay in office after nearly a decade there. As I've mentioned before, I was far less emotionally invested in this country's election than I was in the US, where I would've had to take to bed for a week if McCain had won. I'll see what National does, I guess -- Key is rather mild in demeanor but some of the folks aligned with him are a bit right wing for me.

• Curiously, both Clark and Key tried grabbing for the Obama mantle; Clark noting that the US chose to go left, so vote Labour, Key saying the US went for change, so vote Nationals. There are interesting contrasts and parallels with the US election, though -- a seasoned politician is defeated by a relative political novice, and the opposition party makes big gains. The difference here is, instead of the centrist-left taking over, our government is now moving more to the right. (Ironic, of course, that we left the US during the dark days of Bush and moved to New Zealand, only to have Obama win the US and the right win New Zealand!)

• An interesting quirk of New Zealand is that the Electoral Act here actually makes it illegal to do ANYTHING on Election Day that might be construed as influencing votes. Which means suddenly overnight thousands of big campaign signs disappeared; newspapers on Election Day had barely a word about the vote, other than a few non-candidate related short pieces; if you have a bumper sticker on your car you've got to take it off on Election Day. Yow.

• So when we went to vote yesterday I was surprised by how basic the ballots were -- no propositions, no sewer board district candidates, nothing but "two ticks" -- the party vote and the local MP candidate vote. Makes it easy to fill out! Peter was very interested in watching Mum and Dad cast their vote and even got a sticker for voting (which, um, they didn't really let him do).

And with that, we're off to the beach -- as the good wife put it, "two elections in one week is just too much!"

One election down, one to go!

Yeah, man, it's all-politics week on Spatula Forum, by god, because it sure seems like there's nothing else going on in the world! A handful of random musings on elections both in America and here:

• Obama-Mania: Yeah, I know they're all just trying to make a buck, but when was the last time you saw everybody selling T-shirts with the president's face on them? Or newspapers selling t-shirts with their own front page on them? ...The guy who bought 10,000 copies of the Bellingham Herald as an investment, however, I don't know about him. He'll be like the guy with 10,000 worthless copies of the "Superman dies" comic in his basement, won't he?

• "Palin thought Africa was a country, not a continent"?... Hell's bells, I don't like the woman but even I have trouble believing that could be true, but they were saying this on FOX News of all places. The walls have fallen and all the factions are spilling their guts, it seems. If even a fraction of what's being said is true, I thank the voters Sarah Palin never got to be within a few heartbeats of the White House. Will she be back in 2012? Can't wait for all the tell-all books.

• Turning to New Zealand... Imagine for a moment that in a US Presidential election debate not one but BOTH of the leading candidates admit they're not really all that religious. Can't see it? That's what happened in NZ's final leaders debate between Prime Minister Helen Clark and National's John Key before tomorrow's election. The kind of far-right fundamentalism exemplified by Palin is fairly non-existent as any kind of major force here, pretty much confined to very minor parties. For both leading candidates in an election to stand up and say they don't know if there is a God would just never happen in the US. About a third of New Zealanders call themselves non-religious, quite different from America, so maybe the candidates here just know their audience better. Either way, interesting difference.

• So tomorrow is our New Zealand election and yes, I know, it's been historic and world-changing ... wait, that's the American one. This one has been pretty dull, with National likely to assume power after nearly 10 years of Labour, but still, it's my first time voting down under and I'm excited to do that. The MMP system means that I cast two votes, one for party and one for a candidate, and I can split those up if I want to (vote for Green Party as a party and a Labour candidate, for instance). So you're able to strategize your vote a bit here and minor parties are way more influential than they are in the US. It's very likely some kind of coalition between National or Labour and the smaller parties will have to be formed to get the magic 50-percent of Parliament mark, so while the voting is tomorrow it could well be days before we really know who's going to run the country the next three years. I'll report tomorrow night from Election Day!

President Barack Obama

Wow. What a moment. What a fine day.

I don't care your politics, if you aren't the slightest bit moved by what happened today, you're incapable of seeing the bigger picture. Just 150 years ago, Barack Obama might well have been enslaved to another human being. Fifty years ago, in certain states he could have been beaten to death just for trying to vote. When he spoke of 106-year-old Anna Nixon Cooper tonight, and her journey from "a time when there were no cars on the road or planes in the sky" to today when "she touched her finger to a screen, and cast her vote," for a moment I felt the quivering membrane of history, and how quickly something can change.

No, he won't be perfect, no, he won't "save us all," but by gosh, I am proud of what America did tonight, and while I can't be there to celebrate, I'm lifting a glass or two to cheer him on.

President Barack Obama. Wow. It's easy in all the clutter and noise of our 24-7 wired world to downplay what a gigantic thing this is, that a black man is now President-elect of the United States of America.

The sun is shining in New Zealand tonight after rain much of the day, and we saw a big honking rainbow out the window of our kitchen. Yeah, there's trouble in the world, but just for tonight, let's bask in how we much we've done toward atoning for the scars that have long marked America's shining optimism.

Elections, elections, everywhere an election

I do believe I'm suffering from a kind of pre-election catatonia --- as I may have mentioned, I've got TWO elections this week and being as I work in the media, it's kind of all-election all-the-time for me lately. Having absorbed the glowing power of a thousand unrelenting Internet pundits, I'm too dazed to offer a post of much substance.

Thus all I can really say is this:


I may not live in America anymore, but I was born there and love it still, and just for once in this rather grim decade, I'd like to see the "good" guys win. So go vote, no matter who you plan on voting for, and whatever happens, stay cool, amigos. I'm sure whatever happens I'll be back with something to say about it. And once this one's over I'm gearing up for New Zealand's election Saturday! I'm a voting fool! (No wisecracks, please...)

Yes we can

So we finally got our absentee ballots from California today. (They apparently got lost in the mail and had to be faxed.) Man, does it feel good to finally just vote after what feels like eons of campaigning. (Hey, remember back when Hillary Clinton ran for President?)

Yeah, I backed Barack and hopefully a hell of a lot of other Americans, at home and abroad, will be doing the same. I really didn't think I might be voting for a black man for President anytime soon; if I ever thought about it, it was like, well, maybe by 2020 or so we'll get to that point.... Whoever would have thought this guy, a state senator not that long ago, could have gotten to this point? It sure helps that John McCain has run one of the most inept campaigns in years.

Remarkably, three of the six folks running for President on the official California ballot are African-American – that's gotta be some kind of record. Of course, of those three, one (Keyes) is a certifiable lunatic and the other (McKinney) has her own share of controversies. But still, wow.

I'm just hoping come November 5, for the first time in 12 years or so, I can say, "Yeah, I voted for that guy," and not have it be in a sad tone of regret for what coulda been.

McCain mutiny, Magazine and band-aids

Random Friday notes!

• How you know that your once-toddler is growing into a truly rambunctious and rowdy 4 1/2-year-old boy -- he managed to have band-aids on BOTH legs and his elbow earlier this week. It's a busy life being a moderately clumsy boy who falls down a lot. Sometimes his legs look like he was run over by a truck and I'm vaguely worried Child Services might think we're beating on him. Ah, to be a boy again, where you don't creak for weeks when you fall flat on your face...

• OK, after five debates this past month (four in the U.S. and one New Zealand), I'm officially debated-out. Still, yesterday's American finale was interesting to watch as the slow implosion of John McCain's campaign continues. Yes, he could still win, and I'm certainly not going to rule it out, but boy, overall his performance in these debates has been dismal. Interestingly, it's not so much what he said as how he performed. Obama has proven to be pretty masterful at projecting a cool, collected vibe, even if it sometimes is a bit stiff. But McCain has been all over the bloody show at all three debates, by turns hyperactive, frazzled, arrogant and insecure. I watched much of yesterday's debate on the big-screen at work, with the sound lower so I was focusing more on the visuals than the words, and McCain was just jittery, vibrating on that chair like a volcano in the rough. These debates have shown the sound bites are sometimes less important than the image ones, I think.

• Very cool retro discovery of October for me is the post-punk band Magazine. I've been re-reading my "Rough Guide To Punk" and they sounded interesting, so I plunked out on the collection "Where The Power Is". After grooving out to it all week, I'm definitely going back for more of their albums. Frontman Howard DeVoto was originally in The Buzzcocks and after splitting with them set off to make his own band. Wow, what a cool sound they had -- kind of straddling the line between punk anger and synth-pop, they're like the missing link between the Sex Pistols and Depeche Mode. "Where The Power Is" covers the band's 1978-1981 heyday, and goes from the raging explosion of "Shot On Both Sides" to the doom-pop "This Poison." Special props to the epic "The Light Pours Out of Me" and guitars 'n' keyboards workout of "Definitive Gaze", although my favorite tune might be the snide and twisted "A Song From Under The Floorboards." Devoto sneers in his Johhny Rotten meets Peter Garrett voice, "I know the meaning of life / it doesn't help me a bit." Too cool.

• Well, after mulling it over I plunked down my $150NZ (urk!) and am going to see Neil Young in January, along with Prodigy, TV On The Radio and all the rest at the Big Day Out 2009. I wavered a bit but looked over at all my Neil Young CDs (I don't have everything from this prolific singer, but I've got nearly 20 of 'em) and said, My My, Hey Hey, OK. Besides, living in New Zealand, you really have to take into account the likelihood of a performer ever coming through here again. Sadly, faithful wife isn't going, so heck, if anyone in Auckland is going and wants to hang, let me know...

Live blogging! The New Zealand Election Debate!

OK, here's some fun -- I'm going to live blog my impressions of the first televised debate between Labour's Prime Minister Helen Clark and National leader John Key. It's my first time viewing one of these in NZ, and will be interesting to compare it to the American counterparts. Shame they're not including the minor party leaders in this as they actually can have much more impact on politics here than in America, but so it goes....

7.00 Good lord, this set looks exactly like the game show "The Weakest Link." Scary. The blue lighting on the background audience is odd.

7.02 Wow, Helen Clark's voice is REALLY deep.

7.03 And John Key's is less deep. He keeps bobbing his head from left to right.

7.04 Couldn't moderator Mark Sainsbury have bothered to shave? He looks like a hedgehog.

7.06 I do like the format of the questions -- filmed on YouTube and submitted by Kiwi citizens here and overseas. It kind of makes this feel more participatory.

7.09 Why do Key and Sainsbury call her "Helen Clark" on every reference? It sounds weird.

7.15 Yikes, a lot more shouting and going back and forth than in the US debates. Which is good, because it feels like they're really debating, but is bad because there's a fair amount of talking over each other and "Helen you're wrong" combined with "No John, you're wrong."

7.17 Very heavy focus on economy. So far, Key is kind of presenting the everyman view a bit more while Clark is coming off a tad surly.

7.17 Hey, they have commercials here!

7.24 It's curious -- Clark makes a passing reference to releasing housing affordability policy tomorrow. I'm still not used to how, less than a month before the election, all the parties are just unveiling their policies. Campaigns here are definitely far more foreshortened than the U.S.

7.28 Suddenly, all hell breaks out -- an argument over shower nozzles! Awesome. (A rumoured plan to reduce shower water pressure that has been badly received.) Again, very squabbly and in-your-face arguing -- "You might be used to shouting people down at home, you're not shouting me down," Clark tells Key, and the audience audibly grumbles.

7.30 Sainsbury goes off on a crusade about money - "Do you feel rich?" he asks. Clark is a bit nonplussed, while Key turns it into a campaign pivot.

7.43 A debate about climate change is interesting, focusing on NZ's "clean green" image and the cost it takes to maintain that. However, Key starts to lose me by asking "What's the point" of a tiny country like NZ leading the world in being carbon-free? Yeah, we're no China, but still...

7.45 Some goofballs start beat-boxing for no particular reason in the middle of their YouTube question, which comes off really geeky.

7.53 Tough words on crime, but neither really comes across with a sterling answer on a rising problem in NZ, especially in Auckland.

8.00 A curious digression into the 1981 Springboks Rugby Tour which is a defining moment in NZ history, especially since it involves rugby (and apartheid). Trying to pin Key down on what he thought on an event 27 years ago (when he was 20 and as he admits, it wasn't that important an issue to him at that time) seems a bit like a kiwi "Ayers moment," i.e. much ado about nothing much. Clark continues to be fairly aggressive, often to her detriment I feel.

8.08 Final 20 minutes before any Maori issues are brought up.

8.22 It's curious for me that Clark is basically using the same argument as John McCain, even though politically they have next to nothing in common -- it's all about experience and the record.

8.25 Finally a questioner brings up the exclusion of the other six party leaders. I guess they have been included in the past and Clark refers to it as being a "bit like a game show." She's seen the set!

8.30 So it ends as it began, with shouting at each other.

Final thoughts: Well, interesting. I've been saying all along I'm a bit less invested in this election than I am the American one, where I've known since March or so I was voting for Obama. Politically, I'm simpatico with most of Labour's positions, but was curious to hear more from John Key. Frankly, Key was better than I thought, while Clark was less than she often is capable of. She's a terrific politician and a very good speaker, but today she seemed to let Key get under her skin and was too combative and borderline rude. There was too much interrupting and shouting by both candidates, though. Clark looks great when she smiles but spent a lot of time scowling, whereas Key came off fairly relaxed and more articulate than he has in news segments. He was often artfully vague though, like most politicians.

I'm fairly sure who and what I'm voting for myself, but it's been good to get an idea what will happen if -- as the polls seem to show -- Key does become Prime Minister.
Grades: Key B, Clark B-

Boring election vs. evil election

So, it's about one month before Election Day in two countries. I wish I could say the New Zealand election was particularly interesting, but frankly, it's been an utter snooze so far. Campaign laws dictate the parties can't even begin "official" campaigns until a month out from the election, so that might be part of it, but really I think it's just a total lack of suspense. As I've written before, Labour's running for a fourth term, and the opposition National has had a lead in the polls for -- well, all year, really. At this point it's hard for me to get that interested in a campaign that lacks passion. I'm frankly more interested in the minor parties and what role they might play in a coalition government's makeup. Maybe this race will change in the next month, maybe not.

Meanwhile, in the US, well -- this is an election that will be talked about for a long time, no matter what happens. What's been amazing to me is just how low and awful John McCain's clan have sunk. No hurdle is so low they can't crawl under it. The latest of course is the thinly veiled racism and "other" card, with hatchetwoman Palin repeatedly dropping code words about Obama. "Who is the real Barack Obama?" McCain asked today. Because, y'know, Obama's different if you get my meaning. I hear he's a Muslin or something like that. What we should be asking is, what happened to "straight talkin'" John McCain, or has he always been this way? You reap what you sow, and if you sow hate, that's what you get.

It's amazing that the "inexperienced" Democrat has run the far more mature, statesmanlike campaign, while McCain has been running as if he were some hotblooded county sheriff yanked off to Warshington for the first time. I hope the poll trends are correct and the right choice is made Nov. 4. Frankly, if McCain/Palin govern like they campaign, we'll be launching nukes in North Korea by Groundhog Day, journalism will be outlawed and Pat Robertson will be Secretary of State.

The funniest damn thing I've seen all week

McCain: The Mavericking Maverick.

John McCain meets Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, courtesy of the mad mind of Matt Shepherd.

Brilliant.

Polish posters, presidential debates and R.I.P. David Foster Wallace

Random notes for a random Wednesday:

• I like cool movie posters. I like the Polish people. Thus, this awesome website featuring 50 Incredible Film Posters From Poland is well worth my and your time. Amazing re-inventions of some of the most famous movies of all time in crazily cool expressionist art that's kind of like Ralph Steadman meets Salvador Dali. Go look and gasp. The one at right? Cuddly robot comedy sequel Short Circuit 2. Holy moses.

• Rest in peace, author David Foster Wallace, who apparently committed suicide last week. He kind of went from "next big literary thing" in the mid-1990s to a "whatever happened to," which is quite sad, but I found him a tremendously gifted journalist and nonfiction writer. Reading his collection "Consider The Lobster And Other Essays" a year or two back I thought it was pretty fascinating, microscopically detailed looks at all the errata of modern life, from lobsters to porn to dictionaries. Wallace was a writer who loved to play games with the form, using footnotes, flow charts and more; a regret of mine is that I tried reading his massive novel "Infinite Jest" many years back and just couldn't get through the 1,000-plus page monster which now stands as his biggest epitaph. I hope to try it again one day, and it's said to know whatever demons drove Wallace means we'll never see what he might have done next.

• The presidential debates are coming up, and in what I think is rather a cool development, the very first one is being held at my alma mater, the University of Mississippi in Oxford. Not often that Oxford gets to be the center of the Media Universe these days but for one night, it will be. Intentional or not, an interesting symbolic pick with the first black presidential nominee at a school that has its own very large place in racial history. What I wouldn't give to be working at my old paper for that one day! Here's a cool article about the preparations for it.

One man, two countries, three votes

So how often do you get to vote for the leaders of two countries within a week? New Zealand's prime minister finally called the general election date last week -- November 8, just four days after America's own November 4 election you might have heard about. Like in Britain, an election date has to be chosen here by the party in power. Fascinating thing is, out-and-out campaigning is basically not allowed here UNTIL the election date is announced. So within like 8 hours of an election being announced, big-ass signs like these started popping up everywhere in Auckland.

I have to admit -- and a lot of New Zealanders have told me they feel the same way -- the US election is a heck of a lot more interesting this year from a political junkie's standpoint. So where do we stand? My totally uneducated thoughts two months out:

The US: OK, in retrospect I was totally wrong about the Palin effect on McCain's campaign. So far, that is. I still think this is Obama's election to lose, but the Republicans have run an increasingly venal, vile and frequently flat-out lying campaign that unfortunately, has often worked for them in the past. I hope for Obama, but I fear for McCain/Palin, frankly. The best assessment so far I've read was in The New York Times by Bob Herbert today: "While watching the Sarah Palin interview with Charlie Gibson Thursday night, and the coverage of the Palin phenomenon in general, I’ve gotten the scary feeling, for the first time in my life, that dimwittedness is not just on the march in the U.S., but that it might actually prevail." And, "For those who haven’t noticed, we’re electing a president and vice president, not selecting a winner on American Idol.'"

New Zealand: I still stand by what I wrote a couple months back in my last NZ politics post: After nearly a decade, Labour's Prime Minister Helen Clark is up against a much bigger opponent than her titular rival John Key -- boredom. Running for her fourth three-year term, she's been behind in the polls for months. I like Clark and hope she gets in again, but I wouldn't bet on it.

The thing is, National's Key has very little to offer to me other than not being Helen Clark. There was an exhaustive two-part profile of the man in the Herald a couple months back that amazed me mostly by how bloody dull Key seemed to be. A man with very little political experience who's made a heck of a lot of money as a businessman, but other than that, not much that says "New Zealand needs Key!" He had the nerve to compare himself to Barack Obama recently which pretty much got him nothing but laughs in response. He's a terrible public speaker as well.

If Key is elected, I predict his political honeymoon to be about 20 minutes as New Zealanders realize what an empty suit he is. As for myself -- well, the cool thing about New Zealand is that voting for a minor party actually matters. If a party gets more than 5 percent of the vote, they get seats in Parliament. And as I mentioned before, in NZ we get TWO votes -- for the candidate and party. So I'm seriously considering splitting my vote, and going for a candidate I haven't decided on as my local rep, and voting for Green as the party vote to lend them a decent voice in power. I dunno though -- as the campaign has just started here officially, I barely know who my local MPs are. Hopefully that'll change soon as our campaign kicks off -- minus the pageantry of huge conventions and just a wee bit shorter than America's two-year-plus nomination marathon.