Both Rick Perry and Mitt Romney are betting much of their Strawpollian lives on commercials that feature the spouse trot. It’s a questionable strategy, one that’s transparently manipulative and likely to reinforce the candidate’s existing supporters rather than bring in the undecided.

Each of them are not-so-subtle attacks on Newt Gingrich’s wandering eye, and his roly-poly body that has historically been not too far behind.

Romney’s spot goes for the jugular in the most obvious fashion. Anne Romney hammers the message that peccadilloes are a presidential non-starter by saying “You can never predict what kind of tough decisions are going to come in front of a president’s desk. But if you can trust they will do the right thing…if you really want to know how a person will operate, look at how they’ve lived their life.”

Of course, that’s completely specious reasoning that is agnostic of politics, given that ghastly decisions have been made by uxorious Commanders-in-Chief, and brilliant ones by those who were led around by their own chief commander.

She closes by going as close to nuclear on Newt as a putative First Lady can get “…I think that’s why it’s so important to understand the character of a person. To mean that make a huge difference. Maybe to some voters it doesn’t. But to me it makes a huge difference.”

Meanwhile, Rick Perry’s spot features his wife Anita, sporting some serious big-hair that reinforces their Texas cred, the one element of his candidacy that is in no need of any validation.

She recounts their courting and marriage as “…an old-fashioned American story, I married my high school sweetheart.” Then she causes some Christopher Hitchens grave-turning – I’m actually pleased that his ire is being raised so shortly after his demise – by saying “…we grew up in small towns, raised with Christian values…and we know Washington D.C. could use some of that.”

At the end of the spot, Rick enters the frame unexpectedly – Gawker called it a cat-like pounce and says with the faintest of chuckles that he “really approves this message.”

It’s an attempt at humor and intimacy that falls flat as a tortilla made by an illegal immigrant.  It also reinforces Perry’s lack of gravitas, and highlights the struggle that political consultants find themselves in these days, as they navigate between the need to show warmth and humanity, and to project leadership.

Will these spots – and others that are bashing Gingrich work?  An evangelical group in Iowa has sent around a video that’s makes Perry’s and Romney’s spots look like subtle poofs.  It’s a high-energy accounting of his debauchery, calling him the “Kim Kardashian” of the GOP.

Romney should be more worried about Paul in Iowa, and should defer attacking Gingrich until later.  If Paul wins, Romney gets embarrassed and his inevitability gets seriously dinged.  Meanwhile, most polls show Gingrich in third place anyway, running behind Romney and Paul  – who are in a dead-heat according Nate Silver in the New York  Times, and few points ahead of Bachman.  The Times gives him a 9% chance of winning the straw poll.

Romney is making real strategic mistake.  (For Perry, it doesn’t really matter, his candidacy is done.)  What’s more, Gingrich’s true vulnerability here and elsewhere isn’t his multiple infidelities as much as a perception of high-beta emotionalism in general.  He’s off the peak of his polls, but if Romney, Perry continue to go after his spousal problems, it will backfire and highlight their individual weaknesses: Romney’s smooth and potentially fatal judgmentalism and holier-than-thou-ness, and Perry’s trigger-happy superficiality.

There are some people who believe a cheater is a cheater – falsum in uno, falsum in omnibus, as they say in Latin – and others who can compartmentalize.  Those mental framings are fixed, and money spent to shift them is money wasted.

“We will never forget them this morning as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God.”

My issue, though, is that while the America the president describes might be the one he and his tight circle of advisors inhabit, it is not the one I see, or that most Americans do. The White House is in a bubble that magnifies the partisanship, the incivility, and the coarseness of the conversation. It is not surprising that from his point-of-view “our discourse has become so sharply polarized” that “we are far too easy to lay the blame for all that ails at the world at the feet of those who think differently than we do.”

But most American do not reside in a Manicheistic world that cleaves into an Olbermann/O’Reilly divide. There are over 200 million adults in America, and only a small fraction of them – like 3% – are regularly watching the cable programs that burn with heated rhetoric.

In fact, it’s the other way around. As the Pew Report puts it:

“Centrism has emerged as a dominant factor in public opinion as the Obama era begins. Both political parties have lost adherents since the election and an increasing number of Americans identify as independents. {In fact} The proportion of independents now equals its highest level in 70 years.”

The fact that most Americans are in the middle, that millions of us are rejecting the dogmatism of the two major parties, belies the description of the country that Obama put forth yesterday. The reality is that there aren’t many Americans for whom politics is the ultimate lens through which they see the world. There are only a handful, in fact, of those who will view the events in Tucson as a platform for ideological debate. When President Obama warns against speaking “…on the usual plane of politics and point scoring and pettiness that drifts away with the next news cycle” he is speaking from his own struggles and wounds, but isn’t capturing the mood of the vast majority of Americans – those for whom he should speak.

Outside of the dysfunctional world of the Beltway, or the absurd demonization of political advertising, or the ratings hunt that drives cable TV to ever-increasing heights of manufactured hysteria, or the rants of noisy but ultimately small groups of flame-throwers, most of “us” go about our lives with a level of civility and tolerance of differing political perspectives that doesn’t chime with the portrait of America painted last night. I am well aware that the Tea Party was the elephant in the room in Arizona – but it’s a mistake to turn its emergence, and its spotty performance in November, into a proxy for American attitudes.

Yes, the president is right on one level. Who can argue that we should “listen to each other more carefully” and “pause for a moment and make sure that we are talking with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds.” But last night, he made broad and sweeping generalizations that are inaccurate summations of the current state of American society; his implicit use of Fox and MSNBC and radio talk shows as proxies for our state-of-mind is as mistaken as any political stereotyping, whether it be immigrants as dangerous criminals or government workers as lazy sloths.

I understand why the president used the meme of a polarized nation as his foil. Creating an opposing framework is a classic rhetorical device. But in doing so, in misreading the true nature of American character, he actually credentialized the extreme voices – those on the angry right and angry left – who view the world in exactly the same way he describes. The “we” the president chose as his rhetorical peg is far, far less universal than the pronoun itself signifies.

The spot, which as been likened to a “horror movie trailer” has a simple message:  “It’s never just HIV.”   Concerned that condom use is waning because HIV is becoming a manageable, medicable condition – no longer a death sentence – public health authorities decided to scare men into compliance with some new information.

Here’s the text:

“When you get HIV, it’s never just HIV. You’re at a higher risk to get dozens of other diseases–even if you take medications–like osteoporosis, a disease that dissolves your bones, and dementia, a condition that causes permanent memory loss. And you’re over 28 times more likely to get anal cancer. It’s never just HIV. Stay HIV free. Always use a condom.”

It’s not exactly artful, and it does feel like it was produced by the same people who crank out the political spots that warn of the dangers of invading immigrants and job-snatching Chinese. But it’s unmissable.

Some gay groups have complained that the commerical “stigmatizes victims.” Francisco Roque of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis said that:

“It really paints this picture of gay men as these sort of disease-ridden vessels, and so the message is really sort of, ‘Stay away from gay men.’”

The Health Department stands by the message, and Larry Kramer, the gay activist, thinks it’s just great, writing;

“This ad is honest and true and scary, all of which it should be. HIV is scary, and all attempts to curtail it via lily-livered nicey-nicey ‘prevention’ tactics have failed.”

The GMHC has it all wrong.  The New York City Health Department is the health department, not the Human Rights Department.  It has very specific mission: to save lives.  If they think that showing graphic footage of anal cancer will do that, then that’s what they should be doing.  Just like their controversial anti-soft drink campaign – the one that showed blubber being poured out of a soda bottle – stigmatized fat people.

Mayor Bloomberg has taken a lot of flack for his efforts to regulate healthy living, and has been accused of being the Nanny Mayor for intervention in everything from trans fats to salt to the posting of calories in fast-food restaurants.  (Though the long-term results are unclear, a Stanford study did find that people consume fewer calories when confronted with the frightening numerical impact of a whomping-big bacon cheese construction project.)

While I generally recoil at government attempts to influence the personal decisions we make, I find Bloomberg’s muscular fashioning of his role to be admirable in many respects, if only for his refusal to accept the immutability of human behavior.

For as long as I can remember, public service advertising, whether it be from the health department or any other government agency, has been bland, and toothless, sandpapered down to harmless rounded edges by fearful functionaries.  That Bloomerg’s Health Department had the courage to create the HIV commercial, or an earlier spot that graphically presented the dangers of smoking, is profoundly commendable.

If other municipalities had the guts to create media messages that were actually capable of changing behavior – whether it be to get parents to read to their kids, or save for retirement, or to keep credit card debt down to a reasonable level – we’d piss off a lot of people, and be a better society for it.

Because nothing that Sarah Palin does is by accident – or put less freightedly – because everything she does is strategic and plotted – the title (and subtitle) of her new book are worthy of some social and linguistic analysis.

1.   America By Heart celebrates the source of all natural goodness, the heart of the matter.  It proclaims the value of pure, unabashed, gooey emotion.  It disdains the perseverations of logic and proudly shouts that its author is unburdened by the woolly, weak and untrustworthy intellectualizing of those who’ve lost their ability to feel a connection with the country.  As in, yes, President Obama.  She’s setting up 2012 as a battle between Id and Superego.  She may not contain multitudes, but she’s Whitman’s barbaric yawp.

2.   America By Heart creates a implicit foil:  America By Mind.  Elitists believe they can think their way to understanding America, and by extension to solving its problems. But real Americans know that they need to feel their way there.  It’s a derivation of George Bush’s “from the gut” articulation of his criteria for belief and action, which led to Colbert’s coinage of “truthiness” as an expression of the kind of truth which is intuitively known.

3.   America By Heart promises that its readers will confront a voice that is bold and unedited -  speaking directly from the bloody chamber – a persona totally consistent with Governor Palin’s gutsy“going rogue” behavior during the presidential campaign, and her unedited, unmediated Twitter conversations with her followers. The Heart cannot be stopped.

4.   America By Heart triggers the lyrical resonance of the phrase “by heart.”  When we learn something by heart we’ve made it a part of us, deep and true and abiding.  It’s a throw-back syntax to childhood memorization, and the Pledge of Allegiance.   It would unlock a buzzing nest of neural circuits in the Implicit Association Test.

5.   Family, Faith and Flag are three impossibly loaded, alliterative words.   And of course, they follow the ancient “rule of three”  for added emotional thrust.  Each word is deeply symbolic,  and taken together they both replay and re-cast the Culture Wars. The “F” also anticipates “freedom” and “fighting” – other seminal words in the Palexicon.

6. To neutralize those who question her thoughtfulness and ability to ponder the world’s weighty subjects, she’s clever enough to begin the subhead with the word “Reflections.”

Millions more people will see and hear about the title than read the book.  The associations and imagery of the title  will be processed on an unconscious level and add to the constellation of brain cells that hold the coordinates of the Palin brand.  When it comes to her followers, she knows them by heart.

Last week, a liberal religious group called the American Values Network launched a campaign that imagines the global disaster that could befall us if the START treaty isn’t ratified by the Senate.  (Why a liberal group would give itself a name that sounds exactly like one of those kitschy, sanctimonious monikers favored by right-wing groups is beyond me.)

Also beyond me is why they decided to make their argument by “updating” Lyndon Johnson’s classic but freighted 1964 Daisy commercial that ran just one time, but has become legendary among the commentariat.  Daisy II is a failed exercise in self-referential media recursion.

Here’s the START ad, followed by its inspiration.

The original spot – launched in the fiery heat and nuclear paranoia of the Cold War – was breathtaking in its power.  Goldwater was being portrayed by the media as trigger-happy, and LBJ’s commercial connected that stereotype to our deepest fears.  Miraculously, it did so without making Johnson come across as “weak” on defense, a charge that has haunted the Democrats to this very day. (And this very treaty extension.)

Those who analyze Daisy I typically focus on the extraordinary power of the visual concept, and the audio track that cross-fades the little girl’s petal counting with a missile countdown.   So it’s easy to overlook the way LBJ wraps it all up at the end, quoting Auden in the process.

“These are the stakes.

To make a world in a world in which all of God’s children can live, or to go into the dark.

We must either love each other, or we must die.”

How shocking to hear a president – and not just any president, but LBJ, who became a failed war president  –  speaking in the ancient days of 1964 in a syntax of such pre-hippie innocence.

But Daisy II is a commercial lacking any of that emotional payload.  Those who know the referent, and I’d have to say that’s less than 10% of the viewing public, will struggle to make the connection.  It’s a long road of cerebration between the fear of Goldwater with his finger on the button, and terrorists getting their hands on loose nukes in the absence of U.S. inspectors on the ground in Russia.  (If you don’t know the original spot, the new one simply fees out of joint.)

Here’s how Daisy II tries valiantly to make the logical connection:

“In a world where terrorists seek to destroy everything we hold dear, Russia’s nuclear weapons cannot be left un-monitored.”

This simply packs too much together.  The nexus between START’s provisions – and the vulnerability of Russia’s nuclear weapons stockpile – is a complex and winding argument.  After all, the issue of Russian “loose nukes” getting into the hands of terrorists isn’t directly part of the START treaty.

But if START is rejected or set back, it will damage the mutual U.S. and Russian efforts to secure those weapons. Foreign Policy reports that Senator Lugar has criticized his Republican colleagues for threatening to delay START ratification using that argument:

“Lugar also warned that the failure to ratify the treaty could have drastic consequences for other facets of the U.S.-Russia nuclear cooperation – especially the Nunn-Lugar effort to secure loose nuclear materials throughout the Soviet Union.

‘There are still thousands of missiles out there.  You better get that through your heads,’ he said, directing his comments to members of his own party.”

American Values Network is spending good money on a good cause in a bad way.  They should be making Lugar’s argument with a twist – that we can’t rely on Russia to protect our nuclear weapons and without START we will lose our ability to secure them.

As the Council on Foreign Relations has noted, Russian authorities have “broken up hundreds of nuclear-materials smuggling deals.”   This is scary stuff, far more shocking and anxiety-provoking than the abstraction of Daisy II. That’s why the Obama administration was able to corral a clutch of bi-partisan eminence geezers to support START ratification, including Kissinger, Baker, Albright, and Scowcroft.

It would have been far more effective to take a documentary approach – the way PBS with their Frontline show about loose nukes. The scenes of unguarded nuclear missiles in a post-9/11 world are far more compelling than 1964’s greatest hits.

“They’ve got a nature humankind can learn from” she noted, doubtlessly referring to their qualities of peaceful resolution, altruism, and willingness to compromise without sacrificing principle.

Her respect and my ding represent the alternative poles of the 2012 presidential race.

Cynics and critics of the show aside, and there are legions of them, Sarah Palin’s Alaska does prove one thing.  Her woman-of-the-wilderness persona is not a manufactured aura, as was Connecticut-bred and Yale-educated George W. Bush’s Texas branding.   You can’t fake that.  And just as this creates an allergic reaction – and triggers mockery – in an urban sensibility, there’s also a very real part of the American psyche that’s drawn to this rawness and primitivity, the seat of our values and instincts.  So we’re torn.  Andrew Jackson was lambasted as a nearly illiterate country bumpkin, but the famous last lines of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (and we celebrate the author’s autobiography this week) signal a counter-urge:

“I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.”

And in super-cool, super-hip Arugula America, where it’s artisanal everything, Sarah Palin’s reptilian appeal is not to be dismissed.  This is about the mutual pressures of ideology and geology, just as genes and environment aren’t alternatives, but co-conspirators in the shaping of destiny.  If in 2012 we’re feeling that our culture has become just too obsessed with creating the perfect child or the perfect stress-free, cage-free, hormone free Thanksgiving turkey, then the Jacksonian impulse will be ignited.  We felt that way in the ugly post-Watergate era when the rural roots of Jimmy Carter, and his Andy Griffith-esque hometown of Plains, George, seduced us.

With that in mind, last night’s premier of the eight-part reality show on TLC was actually quite cleverly constructed, because the politics and rhetoric were kept to a minimum; the untouched Alaskan wilderness was the star, with Palin herself the co-star.  The “reality” aspect of the show was boring, just some dreary domestic scenes that were shot at the Palin Western White House (oops, a slip of the keyboard) – a rambling but generic home that looked like it was designed by an architect fresh out of a Courtyard by Marriott project. (I wonder if even Rand Paul was moved by sweet domestic bliss of watching Piper and her mum making cupcakes.) I looked carefully but didn’t see a single book anywhere (am I being East-coast snarky?}  If anyone else did, let me know.

The sexy portions of the hour-long show were the outdoor family adventures – flying on a float plane, fishing, watching grizzlies, rock climbing at Mount McKinley and avoiding the treacherous crevasses.   This isn’t any brush-clearing photo-opp, but an accurate reflection of what we call a “lifestyle.”  Sure, it’s easy to mock these tundra-hugging rubes, but to those people who crash against limits every day, the notion of the “Final Frontier” exerts a primordial tug.

The political, as noted, was kept to a minimum. The opening sequence finds Sarah outside her home, and as she’s describing the longitude and latitude she notes “ You can see Russia from here.”  Pause.  “Almost.”  The bit works.  There’s also an exchange about Joe McGinnis, the author who rented a house next to Palin, ostensibly to do some neighbor-to-neighbor research for a book he’s writing about her. She says that Todd built a 14-foot fence between them, which is a “Good example of what we can do to secure our nation’s border.”  And there’s a scene where she shows us the studio from whence she delivers her commentary on Fox, but other than some opining about taxes – with an emasculating moment where she asks Todd about the impact of the taxes on his business, so he’s not just seen as a snow jock – it’s not polemical.  Just snoozy.

TLC has gone to great lengths to maintain the apolitical nature of the show, even putting up a “Not Taking Sides” blog.  There’s been a lot of buzz that this is nothing less than an eight-hour commercial for Palin 2012, which on some level it probably is, but she’s entitled to use her personal brand any way she wants.  More to the point though, it’s Alaska that’s getting the attention – and even including earmarks, it could turn out that Sarah Palin has more to gain from Alaska than Alaska has to gain from her.

Sarah Palin’s Alaska is a new documentary series that takes viewers into the country’s ‘final frontier’

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 mid-term 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 the 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 of the 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.

Specifically, we speak of the merchandise and tchotchkes that candidates around the country have offered at their online stores.  This treasure trove of message-burdened retailing – which often provokes the question “Do they really think anyone would wear this crap? – shows that negative, mean-spirited campaign isn’t limited to paid media.   It also makes you wonder if there’s any link between the ability to lead and the ability to create a really luxurious hoodie.

Herewith, some of items that captured the outré-goofiness of this campaign.

Hanging Chads on Display

The most puckish merch we stumbled upon came from Marco Rubio’s site, where you can get your hands on “Authentic hanging chads from Palm Beach County Election.”  Ten of these dangling artifacts, plus a certificate of authenticity, will set you back just $25.  And lest the message of this ironic gesture pass you by, the site reminds you that “Every vote counts.”  Oh, like a good free-market conservative, there’s also a toll free number for “big savings on larger orders!”

The Devil Wears Shoulder Pads T-shirt

No Prada in Nevada!  Harry Reid is offering this flattering, Angle-bashing casual wear to remind voters of a curious incident with Sharron and a local football team.

As the Reid website describes it:

“Years ago, the Tonopah High School football team suffered an upset loss at the hands of Laughlin High. When Laughlin came up on the schedule the next year, Tonopah’s coach and players decided…to wear black jerseys to fire up the team to avenge the previous year’s loss. Enter Sharron Angle. She spearheaded a group objecting to the coach’s plan, not because they wanted to put the loss to Laughlin behind them, but because she claimed that jerseys in the color black were Satanic. Sharron Angle, of course, is free to take an anti-black-jersey stance. And, frankly, this baffling position pales in comparison to her stances on Social Security (against it) or bringing nuclear waste to Nevada (for it). But the T-shirt speaks for itself. Get yours today!”

We would be remiss if we didn’t zoom in on the striking front and back iconography.

Take advantage of California’s gorgeous weather and buy a pair of these comfortable yet pointed “Meg-A-Myths Flip Flops” at the Jerry Brown store.  Perfect for strolling on the beach and watching the off-shore drilling rigs.

Meg-A-Myths Flip Flops

Meg’s Store Was Closed, But eBay Wasn’t

I couldn’t find a store on Meg Whitman’s site, which is strange given that she was CEO of eBay, one of the largest stores in the world.  Not wanting to let you down, I clicked over to eBay and found this image of Meg on a slice of toast, with a starting bid of $20.

A No-Fashion Platform

Poor, uninspiring Carly Fiorina.  Her store resembles a Soviet-era supermarket, with just a few dreary options for sale.  Not even any bad-pun “Put Boxer on the Ropes” hats.

“How Long is 28 Years in the Senate in Dog Years?”

Meanwhile, here’s Barbara Boxer having a bit of fun with a doggy bandana, now marked down from $12 to $8, perhaps as a central plank of her economic recovery program.  Note that there’s a typo on “bandana” in the copy below the photo.  That’s because it was proofread by her entire health care reform staff.

Andrew, What Were You Thinking?

So we have to ask, what’s with this quasi-fetching and potentially under-age girl onAttorney General Andrew Cuomo’s website.  We’re somewhat stunned.

Fire that copywriter! We’re appalled that the Democratic National Party is pushing the “F” word on a T-shirt.  Perhaps reflecting the same frustration President Obama expressed on the Daily Show about his administration’s inability to communicate the magnitude of its accomplishments, you can wear this shirt and proudly let the world know that Health Care Reform is a Big Fucking Deal.

Here’s how the copy serves the whole thing up:

Validating the Theory that your First Idea Is Often a Crappy One

“There are things that are a big deal — birthdays, anniversaries, the NCAA Championship game. And then there are things that are a BFD, like delivering health insurance to 32 million Americans. We worked hard together to make health reform a reality, and now you can celebrate this historic victory with this shirt.”

Being Frank With Barney

During the campaign, Barney Frank commented that the Tea Party movement was trying to “tie him to the railroad tracks.”  As the Tea Party Express notes on a page of their well-stocked store, “It’s only polite to oblige.”  It’s the only example of threatened murder could find.

Wishful Shirting?

Russ Feingold doesn’t have much for sale on his site, just a bumper sticker and this backbone T-shirt.  I can’t see people wearing this to many events other than CAT scan.

Swing Voters

The GOP store has some fab stuff, including this Inaugural Golf Ball Set, which shows they’ve got the courage to look a cliché straight in the eye.

I just spent some time watching the Meg Whitman, Carly Fiorina and Linda McMahon attack ads, and I kept going back to the archetypes Tina Fey nailed so uproariously in “Mean Girls.”

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 in business that gets men characterized as competitive 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.

Hunter S. Thompson would be disappointed that the first TV ad in support of Proposition 19 – which would legalize marijuana for recreational use – is such a bag of conventional political wind.

The strategy behind it is obvious – too obvious, in fact:  Make de-criminalization 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 you 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 re-thinking the need for de-criminalization, 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, Colorado on the “Freak Power” ticket.  His platform – radical at the same – 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  (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 Prop 19 wins or loses, we are all gonzo now.