Remaking "Grease" in Denver

In cinematic terms, the political convention underway in Denver may be interpreted as a subtle remake of "Grease."

With poll data showing John McCain virtually tied with Barack Obama, the latter's handlers now realize the folly of pretending that the audacity of hope belongs exclusively to freshman Senators who develop a jones for Oval Office stationery 142 days into their first term. Now those advisors have a problem: They got chills; they're multiplyin,' and they're losing control.

Think of Denver as Rydell High, except that Sandy represents a voter demographic rather than a straitlaced blonde who gave herself an extreme makeover. Sandy fell for "Barry" Obama over the summer ("met a boy, cute as could be"), but when she left the Saddleback Civil Forum earlier this month, she was aghast at her own respect for the old warrior with whom he is contending, and so she passed a warning to her crush: "You'd better shape up, 'cause I need a man, and my heart is set on you."

Consider the message received. Fortunately for John McCain, some people on the Democratic National Committee are tone deaf, and part of their response to Republican resilience involved building main stage convention props like the kind of monstrously overwrought podium you only see when a TV display wall mates with a planetarium ceiling.

Barack will not mug for the cameras in a muscle shirt the way John Travolta did, but Democrats now swoon through summer nights, hoping the rest of us will join them in a chorus of "Tell me more! Tell me more! Was it love at first sight?"

Meanwhile, the allegedly nonpartisan press, fresh off a cover version of "Hopelessly Devoted to You," is doing its best to convey every jot and tiddle of the Obama narrative as given to them by his campaign. They want voters to look at Obama and think "We Go Together." The risk in this, of course, is that the gap between the Democrat call for "change" and "chang chang changity chang shoo bop" is a small one, and either mantra can give your legs a tingly feeling.

So prefabricated Americana hangs in the Denver air like dust motes spiraling through a shaft of sunlight, and paid operatives are desperately trying to bottle patriotism for anyone who harbors doubts about the candidate who edited the Harvard Law Review but never wrote an article for it, as J.R. Dunn pointed out in a witty recap of Obama's idiosyncratic career choices.

Often the marketing pitch feels slightly off. When hackers took advantage of a self-consciously edgy "texting" strategy for announcing a vice-presidential pick by proposing names of their own on the same networks that Obama had intended to leverage for his official announcement, spokeswoman Jen Psaki tried to make light of the hoaxes by saying that "despite their popularity, Mickey Mouse and Michael Phelps are not on the short list at this time."

"At this time?" That's rich, as though Obama had reserved the right to name Mickey or Michael later, if an unabashedly patriotic icon did better in focus group polling than the talkative Washington guy whom he actually picked. Senator Joe Biden must feel so appreciated.

Unlike Obama, the kids in "Grease" had no need to prove their American bonafides, even though one of them was played by an Australian pop singer-turned-actress. That nobody in the movie was running for President is entirely irrelevant: At the western end of Route 66 in the twilight of the doo-wop era, even juvenile delinquents took American virtues for granted.

Hawaii? Indonesia? Kansas? Kenya? They’re all part of Obama’s biography, but the burden of his "otherness" rests neither with those places nor with his ethnic heritage, and certainly not with the convenient fiction that he is a “light worker.” The salient fact for our purposes redounds again to the "mother road." It was there, on the eastern end of Route 66 two generations after "Grease," that a community organizer kick-started his political career by consorting with people who scorned American virtues: not just Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers, but also Gamaliel Foundation head Gregory Galluzzo, as Stanley Kurtz has noted. Galluzzo runs a foundation whose "faith and democracy platform" asserts that "segregation and racism are one of the primary and driving forces inside American politics, culture, and society." The foundation thinks kindly of religious faith, but stands worlds apart from civil rights leaders who said things like "my country 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing."

With friends like that, who needs enemies? Just last week, Lisa Fabrizio summarized the dilemma facing the Democratic National Committee as pithily as possible. Do make time to read her essay if you missed it.

My focus has been on exploring the motives for the display of patriotism that we now see from Democrats. Although Obama and many of the people rooting for him want us to think otherwise, their difficulty has almost nothing to do with the man at the top of the Democratic ticket looking different from other men on our currency. Benjamin Franklin and Andrew Jackson do not look much alike, either. But neither of them believed that irredeemably Marxist slogan about dissent being the highest form of patriotism until your own people are in power, and quite apart from the unseemly haste with which he inserted himself into their company, Obama is hard-pressed to give similar assurances to a skeptical public.

For all his talk about change, Obama is not above intimidation. As editors at Investor's Business Daily wrote recently with an assist from back issues of the Chicago Tribune, "The man now running for president on a message of giving a voice to the voiceless first entered public office not by leveling the playing field, but by clearing it."

Conduct like that is downright un-American, which is why Obama's thin record requires more polish than the reflective surface of the jelly bean-shaped "Cloud Gate" sculpture in Chicago's Millennium Park. The only way to prettify Obama's leftist views is to stage the modern equivalent of bread and circuses, so cue the Fifties music and the blue-eyed blonde with her heart set on the grinning boy who swaggers around with leather-jacketed friends. It's times like these that we could do with a failure to communicate, because what we're witnessing is a Rocky Mountain Lie.