So this TV ad for Marie Callender caught my eye, evoking her grandmother’s warmth and love to motivate me to buy, say, Honey Roasted Chicken ready for the oven. After reading the box, I passed; all but a few of maybe 100 ingredients emerged from a chemical factory.

 

So is the ad a lie? Not really. ConAgra Foods is merely pushing my grandma buttons, employing a mythology to sell product. This is the strategy, too, of the Karl Rove alumni now selling John McCain and Sarah Palin.

"This election is not about issues," said Rick Davis, a top McCain campaign operative. "This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates."

Exactly. Even the campaign theme, "Country First," evokes the flag. It’s just a guess but I would wager Davis first considered "America First," discarding it only because an isolationist organization of the same name (heavily Republican) fought bitterly to keep the U.S. from confronting Hitler’s Germany.

Then we have McCain, a war hero who — having overcome his reluctance to exploit it — waves the flag incessantly. And his running mate is an evangelical Christian.

What was it Sinclair Lewis said in 1935? "When fascism comes to America, it will come wrapped in the flag and cross." But I digress.

My point is that the GOP campaign is all mythology aimed at keeping you from analyzing the ingredients, er, issues.

Not just a war hero, McCain is (they say) "the original maverick." No, the original was Samuel Augustus Maverick, a 19th century cattle rancher who wouldn’t brand his calves. And no, while McCain used to stray from the Republican herd, he boasted recently that he’s voted with President Bush more than 90 percent of the time.

And Palin is not just a Christian (whatever that means) but also an advocate of "small town values." Many are praiseworthy, no doubt; it’s also true small town kids leave for the Big City to escape small town small minds.

To escape Sarah Palin, maybe. For there’s more to Palin than the mythology — a conservative reformer hockey mom who tells it like it is.

She may have tried to ban books from the Wasilla library, she gets per diem for work at home, favored earmarks and the Bridge to Nowhere before she didn’t, raised taxes and budgets in both Wasilla and Alaska, announced her daughter’s unmarried pregnancy only to complain when reporters paid attention and – fanfare! – invoked God’s help to build a natural gas pipeline.

Mythological creatures put their opponents on the defensive. First, the "other" must wrestle with the implication he’s not as patriotic or "Christian. Second, he has the burden of uncovering what the mythology obscures. And here’s the best part for Rovians — this back-and-forth distracts attention from the issues, like war, jobs, education, health care, the Constitution. See how masterfully Dan Foley’s commentary in this very New Mexico Independent mentions none.

For the most part, the Obama campaign isn’t fighting back. He keeps talking like a law professor, as if logic ever excited anybody outside the university or public television.

Ah, liberals. Their weakness is not just their faith in a desiccated rationality; it’s their morality hang-up. Politics is about power first. Rovian Republicans, for whom the end justifies the means, understand, so they do whatever it takes to win. Listen closely to the McCain TV spot about Obama’s tax proposals for bald-faced lies the candidate "approved."

Some naïve liberals – am I redundant? – expect mainstream news organizations to weigh in on behalf of truth, but they prefer "objectivity."

Objectivity can mean focusing on external reality — as if what politicians say represents their beliefs or actions. Or, trying to keep one’s preconceptions out of the story — as if that’s possible. Or, balancing the two sides to a story - as if stories have only two sides.

What objectivity never means is the active pursuit of truths.

Thus, Jon Stewart aired a videotape last week in which John McCain, the 2008 candidate, debated John McCain, the circa 2000 target of Karl Rove. The two McCains disagreed on the Iraq War; Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest; the "Christian right" and more, raising questions of integrity.

You didn’t see it on ABC, CBS, NBC or PBS because it’s in their interest to be seen as "objective." And Fox is, of course, the Republican network.
 

Myths are explanatory stories, not lies. Thus, the narrative that patriot McCain and "Christian" Palin will be agents of change may best be described, quoting from my American Heritage Dictionary, as "fabulous, imaginary."

 

Not unlike Marie Callender’s Honey Roasted Chicken, I suspect.