Thundersticks, enthusiasm and the rope-a-dope

FYI: I’m currently unemployed so I have time during the middle of the day to watch speeches, Sportscenter or visit my niece — check out the video on this link and you will see what I mean. I have worked on Capitol Hill, written for The Hotline, a major campaign politics publication in Washington, DC, and spent the last three years in San Francisco Bay Area as a reporter. In addition, having grown up in a family rooted in politics, I care about the political process and want to attempt to bring a fan’s perspective to the McCain and Obama campaigns because 1) again, I care and 2) these guys need to be made fun of (they’re human just like the rest of us).

With that fan’s perspective in mind I noticed something today as I watched Sarah Palin and McCain at their rally in Lebanon, OH. It looked like a good-sized crowd from the aerial shots. The TV commentator dubbed it an “Obama-sized” crowd, which I’m assuming means they were his height.

Looking more closely, many at the rally had thundersticks — two inflated pieces of plastic clapped together in an effort to drown out the sound of anyone within thundersticking distance, a zip code roughly. They are popular at NBA games to distract players shooting from the free throw line and to lay them as a phallus on your friend’s shoulder.

(SIDE: Growing up playing basketball I’ve always imagined the most distracting thing would be if the stadium was going nuts and then cut to silence several seconds before you released the ball. The silence would be deafening: “What’s going on? Where’d everyone go? Do they know something I don’t? Am I going to die?” That would distract me but so would Billy the Singing Big Mouth Bass. That kind of cohesive effort on the part of the fans, however, would be difficult to coordinate, a point I’ll visit later on.)

For me, thundersticks burst prominently onto the national stage during the 2002 baseball playoffs with the Anaheim Angels — soon to be the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, which to me is the worst team name in professional sports including the WNBA — and the team’s Rally Monkey.

Imagine if you had two stale baguettes laminated and adorned with your favorite team’s logo. Slap them together and you make a loud noise. It is actually quite ingenious — I applaud him? — because the thundersticks creator essentially reinvented the clap.

When you first learn to clap you can’t stop because you learned how to make a new noise and everyone must hear it. I recently have had clapping contests with a friend in an illustration of the fascination with clapping. Mine is a shotgun while his is a kitten in a tin can. The thundersticks reproduce that emotion because guess who can make a new noise? You.

And everyone must hear it.

So for me, handing out thundersticks — and I’m assuming both campaigns do it in the interest of fairness — is akin to piping in crowd noise, using CGI to create a bigger crowd or handing out megaphones because it creates a false sense of enthusiasm.

Warm applause turns into frenzied clacking when thundersticks are introduced, exactly the transformation campaigns are looking for. But it’s a shame because event attendees — sports, political etc. — are no longer trusted to be engaged with the proceedings. Fans are drowned out by synthesizers or some baritone computer voice named Rick chanting “defense.” Crowds at political rallies are pockmarked with staffers initiating applause.

Because that is how you feign crowd interest and if one person seems interested then perhaps I’ll be.

(With all that said, anyone pursuing a environmentally-friendly platform should ban thundersticks because there is no way in H-E-double hockey sticks they are good for the environment.)

So there it was: a split screen of McCain and Palin amidst a sea of signs and thundersticks and Obama in Riverside, OH giving a speech in a high school. The background for Obama was simply blue with two American flags over his shoulders.

The stark contrast of energy was immediate and also notable because of Obama’s typical rhetorical vigor. Polls since the end of the GOP convention in St. Paul have McCain either winning by a handful of points or tied with Obama, who received little to no post-convention bounce. (I thought his acceptance speech fell a little flat even though he hit McCain pretty well. But he was speaking to 85,000 people in a stadium! Tough to bring the energy to a boil there or at least have it translate especially as most voters he is targeting are watching on TV.)

But if I were McCain I’d watch for the enthusiasm rope-a-dope by Obama. He’s trying to be presidential and prove there’s policy meat to his hopeful bones. Once he lays that foundation, he builds up fervor and whips supporters into a frenzy for a wave to crest on Election Day. Palin has provided a youthful burst to McCain’s campaign and made the GOP convo look like a party.

The easiest enthusiasm to reinvigorate, however, is genuine energy, not something bloated by thundersticks.

Fantasy Football drafts and choosing a vice president

To quote the fictional deadbeat Jim Anchower, it’s been a while since I rapped at you, but life changes and a cross-country move have given me a few more minutes (hours, days, weeks) to think about current news cycles, the concentration on GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin and her daughter’s baby-daddy, and my own personal news cycle, which is currently concentrated on my fantasy football team.

I recently moved from San Francisco — before anyone writes me off as a lefty, I did used to be a Republican (so now it’s just that I can’t make up my mind, right?) — forcing me to be the jerk in the fantasy football league who needs to IM/videochat/call in his picks. For those inexperienced in this kind of purgatory, you are a soul adrift: you don’t exist to all your league members getting drunk in someone’s living room as they try to set up a webcam so you can see them but not hear them. But you are not out of the league. So you’re part of the draft but not part of it, stewing in front of a computer 3,000 miles away and wondering whether anyone can hear you let alone thinks you snagging Cardinals WR Larry Fitzgerald with the 19th pick was too aggressive.

Let’s just say I should have been in a padded room.

The draft was Saturday night and when I woke up I needed a morning-after pill. My strategy of picking up running backs who catch a ton of passes quickly broke down after the first round when I took the 49ers RB Frank Gore. There was a run on wide receivers in the second round and I jumped up and grabbed Fitzgerald fulfilling a slight man-crush I’ve had on him since last season. But by now the video/audio chat was cutting out but I could still see my San Francisco friends giving me the finger and other forms of greeting.

That, coupled with some quick drinks, had me sufficiently distracted from whatever kind of game plan I had entering the evening (One could argue that I also began the evening distracted because The News Pony’s in-laws were having people over for Mexican food but I could not attend due to aforementioned draft).

The meltdown ensued.

The next thing I know I’m spending low draft picks — prime opportunities to take chances on little known players — on players that everyone knows suck. It was haphazard. I was attracted to them by what they accomplished in the National Football League years ago or by their names, which sounded cool. There appeared to be minimal thought to the chances I was taking. I couldn’t call them “guesstimates.” All I could call them were “splurges,” like a cupcake or the “Tom Hanks: Best of Saturday Night Live” DVD.

I did not sleep well.

Increasingly you may wonder why I’m thinking about this and Palin, but they are inextricably linked. John McCain picked her for his vice presidential candidate having met her once and spoken to her on the phone once, or thereabouts. She was undoubtedly vetted carefully by his campaign, and do not get me wrong I’m not arguing against the pick. But if what has been said publicly about his contact with her prior to her selection — I’ve had more contact with a girl who didn’t want to dance with me — is true then he appears to have made the choice on little more than why I chose recently-assaulted Raiders wide receiver Javon Walker in the 13th round.

She may go on to be the best pick since the court chose Kevin Federline and Javon Walker may lead the league in touchdowns (highly doubtful), but the choices appear to have been made quickly with little effort on the part of the ultimate decision maker. “Blink” author Malcolm Gladwell might argue that McCain and I would come to the same decisions on Palin and Walker after thorough research so we should trust our guts, but in these cases I would argue that at least the appearance of deliberation would benefit the campaign and my fantasy football team.

My team looks scrapped together and feels like it too. And having watched everything go down with Palin, I can’t help but have the same feeling about the McCain campaign. Now I’m going to rename my squad to try and rejigger the karma the team, but I don’t think there’s any “edit team settings” button for McCain.

Oh, hello.

Hey there, I’m David Smith. I do my best to follow the news but keep losing the map. With a couple of readers I hope to find the path and share a few jokes along the way. I like the truth and find that more often than not it is accompanied by a laugh, so let’s kick the tires on this Internet thing and take it for a drive. More about me in a few.