(Photo by ronbrinkmann/Flickr.)

First, I would like to congratulate Barack Obama for running a smart, well-organized campaign. He had a message and he stuck to it. Obama reminds me of New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick. He studied harder than his opponents. He engaged in some light cheating. He forced the other guy to play his game. John McCain reminds me of the coach of my Cleveland Browns, Romeo Crennel. He was disorganized. He was always behind. He flipped a coin on major decisions.
 
For non-sports fans, Obama was Kanye West on the Glow in the Dark Tour, a spectacle of light and sound. McCain was The Little River Band showing up two hours late to the Marion County Popcorn Festival.

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Peggy Noonan of The Wall Street Journal captured the narrative of the campaign better than anyone. I am now a fan. She is a conservative, but she gave Obama credit when credit was due and was not afraid to call out McCain and Sarah Palin. Noonan is thoughtful and gracious. I enjoyed what she wrote about Tina Fey after the “30 Rock” star appeared as Palin on “Saturday Night Live.”

“To spoof someone well takes talent, but to utterly nail a political figure while not brutalizing him takes a real gift, and amounts almost to a public service. After all, to capture someone is a kind of tribute: it concedes he is real, vivid, worthy of note. We are not as a nation manufacturing trust all that well, or competence, or leadership. But some things we do well, and one is comedy. Fey plays characters who are sour, stressed and who, on ‘30 Rock,’ live in a world that is cynical, provisional and shallow. But to observe life so closely takes a kind of love.”

Every word of that is true.

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A certain other columnist did not do too badly either when he predicted Obama would win in his April 13, 2008 column Speech! Speech! Speech!

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I have failed to elect the winner in all four presidential elections in which I have been eligible to vote. This streak dates back to my junior year of college in 1996, when I was still a member of the Republican Party and voted for Bob Dole. (I am now an independent.)

True Bob Dole story about Bob Dole: I dressed as Dole for Halloween in 1996. It was a move born of pure laziness. I was like, “Hey, I have a blue suit. Hey, I have a pen I can hold. Hey! I have a costume!” Another true story: We had a party at our house – Halloween is huge at Ohio University – and during the party the doorknob to the bathroom broke off while I was inside. This happened as my friends were leaving to go Uptown. I had two choices. I could sit in the bathroom all night and miss the party of the year. Or I could climb through the eight-inch vertical gap in the window above the toilet. For any Bobcat, this is a no-brainer. Everyone behind my house witnessed, probably for the only time in history, an inebriated Bob Dole climbing sideways through bathroom window of a ramshackle house.

(Above: Bob Dole doesn’t like climbing out of bathroom windows. Bob Dole prefers egressing through doors! Photo by Visit Hillsborough/Flickr.)

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I am glad this election has increased Anderson Cooper’s fame. The CNN star needs to be on television all of the time so that I can enjoy more moments like the ones below.

I get the feeling that if Cooper had not worked his way up at CNN, he would have wound up as the local commentator on the NBC affiliate in Buffalo who is given one minute on the 11 o’clock news to inveigh against “those loudmouths at city hall” and “all this newfangled technology” and “the damn potholes on Niagara Street.” I wish the guy continued success, but I also hope his career tanks, just so this actually happens.

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This election has added two new terms to my vocabulary. The first is “to go Biden.” A person goes Biden when he says crazy things without acknowledging that any crazy things are being said. An example: “My dad totally went Biden on me yesterday. He said I haven’t been walking the dog like I promised to. I was like, ‘Dad, I’m 28. Lucky has been dead for eleven years.’ And he goes, ‘Who wants pizza!?!’”
 
The second one is “to go Palin.” A person goes Palin when they talk to other people as if they are a character from “Our Town.” Here is an example: “Please pass the butter, dear. Because it’s the passin’ of the butter and the butterin’ of the corn that makes the chewin’ and the eatin’ of the corn so darn delectable, doggone it.” (WINK!)

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Good luck, Barack Obama. You have a lot of tough days ahead. Whatever happens, please do not go all Biden on us. That job is taken.

(Photo by faeryboots/Flickr.)

Some prominent conservatives are throwing their support behind Barack Obama. Who are these people and what do they have to say? I explain it all in my latest post on dipdive.com

Maybe you’ve heard of this guy in the last 24 hours…

The following is from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s Web site, which featured this Associated Press report written by one of Ohio University’s finest, Phillip Elliott.

Who is Joe the Plumber?

He is Joe Wurzelbacher, an Ohio man looking to buy a plumbing business who came to symbolize the notion of spreading the wealth in Wednesday night’s third and final presidential debate between Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain.

Earlier this week, when Wurzelbacher got a chance to speak with Obama during a campaign appearance in Toledo, he told Obama that his tax plan would keep him from buying the business that currently employs him.

Sensing an opportunity during the debate, McCain cited that exchange when the candidates were asked to explain why their economic plans are better than their opponent’s. McCain said Obama’s plan would stop entrepreneurs from investing in new small businesses and keep existing ones from growing.

“Joe wants to buy the business that he has been in for all of these years, worked 10, 12 hours a day. And he wanted to buy the business but he looked at your tax plan and he saw that he was going to pay much higher taxes,” McCain challenged Obama.

Yes, my name is Joe. Yes, I am from Ohio. Yes, I have questions about Obama’s tax policies.

No, that is not me.

I read the Drudge Report every day just to follow the antics of Democratic vice presidential nominee Joe Biden. I like political spectacle and the senator from Delaware seldom disappoints.

Recently he has contradicted Barack Obama on the economic bailout, called an Obama attack ad against John McCain “terrible,” said that Hillary Clinton might have been a better choice for vice president, asked a politician in a wheelchair to stand up, tapped a reporter on the chest and told him to work on his pecs and has now given the world this gem:

“When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the princes of greed.”

Roosevelt was not president when the stock market crashed in 1929. Televisions in 1929 were experimental. 

The quote reminds me of other impossible moments in American presidential history, like Washington’s midnight ride, Lincoln’s pickup basketball games, the time Theodore Roosevelt shot the Secretary of State for “looking at him askance,” when JFK landed on the moon and taught America to believe again and how Reagan single-handedly won the Cold War thanks to an orange tabby cat named Milo and a fawn pug named Otis who traveled across the country and along the way taught America to believe again.

I could go on.

There was also the time Andrew Jackson beat the entire state of Tennessee in a game of cards and when Grover Cleveland became the first president to serve, leave office and then return to the White House to pick up his hat, which he had forgotten, only to be informed that he was president again.

Mr. Biden, no matter what your advisors say, please keep talking.

Headline taken from the greatest military film of all time.

Photo by russelljsmith/flickr

(Note: A copy of this column also appeared this week on dipdive.com. - Joe)

I do man hugs. I have to. I live in Los Angeles.
 
Men don’t just shake hands here. That would make sense. Los Angeles is not big on sense. When any male Angeleno who lives within a 20-mile radius of the 405-10 interchange greets or says goodbye to another male he’s known for more than two weeks, we hug it out – bro-style. I have theories on why we do this.

For starters, Los Angeles is so spread out geographically that, because we are desperate for human contact in any form, we hug anyone who will touch us. We all have lifelong friends whom we hug upon greeting. These are the people who stand up at our weddings, who come to our family funerals and who know our bail bondsmen well enough to invite them to picnics. But what about new friends who expect a hug? Many of these men, I suspect, are quietly crying out, “I am lonely. Press your breast against my breast, if only for a moment, other-guy-whom-I’ve-hung-out-with-maybe-three-times.”
 
My second theory revolves around the fact that Los Angeles is a networking town. The more people who are on your hug list, the more powerful your image. In New York, a player shows off his status by traveling via helicopter or personal jet. In Los Angeles, a player shows off by being photographed in a lingering, uncomfortable, three-way man hug with Ron Howard and Brian Grazer. This is how Edtv got made.
 
Finally, your average Angeleno will go to great lengths to be nice to almost anyone, even if he or she hates that person. In the part of the United States located east of Interstate 5, which is almost all of it, you probably know where you stand with a person. When you cross I-5 west, the person who is nicest to you probably hates your guts the most. This is because your average professional Angeleno is a tangled limb of compromises that is the inevitable result of the collision between wanting to succeed and wanting to be accepted by a community.

Hunter S. Thompson called the two goals exclusive. “For every moment of triumph, for every instance of beauty, many souls must be trampled,” Thompson said, probably before blowing something up.

Now before you get all, “Boy, Joe, you sure hate man hugs, quit being such a man hug Nazi,” let me also say that man hugs can be used for good. When I see an old friend, sometimes I want to tell him that I missed him. Because I’m an American heterosexual male, I can’t actually verbalize how much I missed him without adding, “Haw-haw!” Instead I give my friend a hug – a hug that says, “I sure missed you, pal, in a completely nonsexual way.”

Man hugs also can make great art. There is only one proper way that The Shawshank Redemption – a movie that revolved around male friendship – could have ended, and that was with a man hug. Red walks up the sunny Mexican beach. His hat blows into the surf. He doesn’t look back. He’s locked in on his old friend Andy, who is sanding a boat at water’s edge. The camera pulls back as their bodies melt into a well-deserved man hug, quite possibly the greatest movie man hug of all time. Second place belongs to Ed Norton and Meatloaf’s man hug in Fight Club.
 
A Man Hug also can be used to end fighting, as we have learned from Entourage, which gave a grateful world the phrase, “Let’s hug it out, bitch.”

All of which brings us to – potentially – the most important man hug in history.

Back in 2004, while most Americans turned their attentions to Lance Armstrong’s sixth Tour de France victory, “Avenue Q’s” stunning upset over “Wicked” at the Tony Awards for Best Musical and Jimmy Fallon’s last appearance as a cast member on “Saturday Night Live,” a man hug occurred that could affect the rest of our lives.

John McCain, who had kept his distance from President Bush after Bush ended McCain’s 2000 presidential bid in the South Carolina primary, not only campaigned for the president in the summer of 2004, he also gave the president a small kiss and a big hug.

That particular man hug was important because Democrats are now using it to portray a McCain victory as a four-year extension of the Bush administration. It’s probably the most damning visual image of the 2008 presidential campaign, far worse than the footage of Obama addressing Russia’s invasion of Georgia while wearing a windbreaker.
 
The Bush-McCain man hug photo is damaging on many levels. It supplies visual confirmation of a fear shared by Democrats and Independents that it’s difficult to tell where Bush ends and McCain begins. And it’s not flattering. The body language is awkward, which probably is a result of the fact that both men needed the hug politically more than they wanted it personally. It also is one of the most one-sided public man hugs of all time.

Here it is again so you can follow along on the breakdown:

McCain goes all in with both arms. His left hand rests near Bush’s waist. This puts McCain in the less-dominant position. A war injury prevents McCain from raising his arms very high.

Bush does not go all in. His left arm is wrapped dominantly around McCain’s shoulder while his right arm waves – probably to McCain’s fleeting independent streak. In this photo, the president only commits half of his upper limb resources to this hug. There may have been a full hug at some point, but we don’t see it.

It looks like Bush is leaving his bro McCain hanging.

McCain, as The New York Times reported this week, hugs running mate Sarah Palin in a manner that is “businesslike” and “to the point.” That’s the strategy behind a proper man hug.

In a proper man hug, each party places one arm across the other party’s shoulder, so both men share dominance. There is at least a three-inch gap between heads. Chests bump for one second. Back slap is optional.

I know these things. I live in Los Angeles.