The Triumph of the Rat Pack (Debate) Cool

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The one leg on the chair while leaning forward. The calmness.  The clasped hands in his lap. The tall thinness of his suit. Okay, second-debate Barack Obama’s reminding me of someone….Got it! Marvin Gaye! No, not the 1971 skull-capped, bearded Marvin of “What’s Going On.” Not the stripping-down-to-his-underwear-on-stage, early ‘80s Marvin of “Sexual Healing.”  I’m thinking of the mid-‘60s Marvin, the young, suited crooner torn between pop stardom and pushing for membership in the realm of his dreams. See, Marvin really wanted to be the Black answer to jazz legend Frank Sinatra.

And who wouldn’t want to be the Black Sinatra? Frank was smooth as hell. He balanced sophistication and street-toughness. It didn’t even matter when he lost his voice in his golden years, figuratively—and almost literally—dying on stage. To many, he’s forever middle-aged, performing on a Vegas stage with his variety show collective, the Rat Pack, in 1960, supporting some young guy named John F. Kennedy for President.

Forget about those Robert or Jack Kennedy comparisons. In the second and third Presidential debates, Obama actually seems to be successfully challenging some Rat Pack energy. If he holds onto it, he’ll be jazzing it up in the White House.

Obama the iPod, McCain the cassette. Obama the scalpel, McCain the hatchet. As usual with American history, this all happened before. The Rat Pack—Frank, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., and Peter Lawford—conquered the stage when America was led by President Dwight D. Eisenhower. By the end of the 1950s, Ike had finished guiding the United States through the first Cold War dustups, the McCarthy Communist witch-hunts and the beginning of electronic consumption in the form of a refrigerator and television in every middle-class home.

Meanwhile, the Pack re-defined cool for a new generation in the new decade. Those dark suits, and the unflappable performers in them. Breaking down segregated doors in Vegas. The Pack made you feel that you were as new and hip as they, and that you could do anything, including giving Jim Crow some cement shoes, or even beating the Soviets to the Moon! Cue Obama, born in 1961. Using the references of that time, Obama is jazz quintet leader Miles Davis burying Big Band standard-bearer Glenn Miller, ushering in a new American musical era.

And McCain? He means well, in his own mind. He’s like Eisenhower—or your great-grandfather. (If you check Google Images or Wiki, you’ll see he even looks like Ike.) He’s formidable, but vulnerable. Notice how he wandered around during the second debate, like he didn’t know what else to do? Publicly, he’s wound up; he’s so anxious to win, he’s making sure he’ll lose. He still has his faculties, but has lost his style.

That loss is behind why he sees Obama as just a style-over-substance whippersnapper who doesn’t really know what’s going on. (I loved Obama’s second-debate line return jab: “Well, you know, Senator McCain, in the last debate and today, again, you suggested that I don’t understand. It’s true. There are some things I don’t understand. I don’t understand how we ended up invading a country that had nothing to do with 9/11, while Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda are setting up base camps and safe havens to train terrorists to attack us. That was Senator McCain’s judgment and it was the wrong judgment. When Senator McCain was cheerleading the president to go into Iraq, he suggested it was going to be quick and easy, we’d be greeted as liberators. That was the wrong judgment, and it’s been costly to us.”) McCain’s comments in the second debate about Obama’s tax proposals—that they were like “nailing Jell-O to the wall” and that “there has been five or six of them and if you wait long enough, there will probably be another one”—seemed funny coming from him. After throwing everything against the Obama campaign wall for months, McCain finally found his theme in the third, and last, debate with the story of Joe The Plumber. And what does McCain do when he finally has Obama on the ropes? He trots out the whole what-is-your-relationship-with-1960s-radical-activist-William-Ayers yawnfest and anything else he can think of.

McCain’s been floundering for another important reason: he’s torn between his sense of destiny and his sense of personal honor. So when he corrects a woman at one of his rallies who had called Obama an Arab, it reminded me of Ike calling in federal troops to escort those nine Black kids to that white high school in Arkansas in 1957. An admirable and important public gesture, but really a dodge from the central issue. Thanks, Great-Granddad, but that’s falling way short of what’s needed.

(A related aside: What’s up with politicians becoming all elegant and worthy of respect after they lose, or think they’re going to lose? Did you see McCain talking about Obama at that Manhattan fundraising dinner after the last debate? “It’s not for nothing that he has inspired so many folks in his own party and beyond. Senator Obama talks about making history and he has made quite a bit of it already. There was a time when the mere invitation of an African-American citizen to dine at the White House was taken as an outrage and an insult in many corridors. Today is a world away from the cruel and prideful bigotry of that time and good riddance.” Are these really the views of the same guy whose campaign links Obama with terrorism?)

Obama’s Rat-Packing contrasts him clearly with the emotionally shaky, jerky McCain. It’s why McCain kept making more effective points during the debates, but the American public called all three for Obama. Because the junior Senator from Illinois is so new, what he says sounds new, even if it isn’t. Because he keeps his cool, he sounds cool. It’s like Sammy Davis Jr. singing a corny standard and Dean Martin telling that same old joke. The audience eats it up, because the content is secondary to the source.

McCain’s time has seemingly come and gone. He’s fought his political aging from the moment Obama became the Democratic nominee. It’s why he chose Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate, since nothing makes an old guy look young and cool like having his arm around the waist of an attractive woman at least 20 years his junior. It’s why he bristled so strongly when Civil Rights Movement veteran John Lewis, a longtime Democratic congressman from Georgia, compared the (neo-)racist loudmouths at the McCain-Palin rallies with the George Wallace racist jamborees of the black-and-white television segregationist era. It’s why the 72-year-old McCain continually tries and fails to make himself the future of his party, hacking himself out of the GOP thicket, away from the eight-year-old Shrub.

But don’t take my written word. Here’s retired America’s Favorite Black Man, Colin Powell, subconsciously trying to not have the headline of his obit read, “The Man Who Led Us Into That Bull*(%t Iraqi War.” On Oct. 19’s “Meet The Press,” the Republican Powell turned Lincoln’s picture to the wall because of what he saw in Obama: “I watched Mr. Obama and I watched him during this seven-week period.  And he displayed a steadiness, an intellectual curiosity, a depth of knowledge and an approach to looking at problems like this and picking a vice president that, I think, is ready to be president on day one. And also, in not just jumping in and changing every day, but showing intellectual vigor.  I think that he has a—a definitive way of doing business that would serve us well.”

Yeah, Daddy-O. Now that cat’s reunited with his soul!  Powell is old enough to know that Frank Sinatra used to be called The Voice. That was because it was that young voice—bursting into the musical universe in the middle of the 20th century, fully formed—that changed and expanded the existing melodic cosmos, effectively fragmenting the pop music era, transforming the current into the recent past. Before Frank and After Frank. Obama’s new brand of rhetorical bebop may not last for half a century. But like it or not, the idea that the new, younger candidate corresponds with the new, younger century and its new, young “Boomer Echo” generation is gaining ground from sea to shining sea. And it’s that echo that has resonated around, over and under our present, matching cool for cool. Yes, McCain, Obama is “that one.” He’s leading the New-Jack Pack, and we’re all in the audience.

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