The Presidential Pageant of Steam
    By Michael Winship
    t r u t h o u t | Guest Contributor

    Thursday 02 August 2007

    Next week, in my upstate New York hometown, people will come from all over to attend the 47th Annual Pageant of Steam.

    Farmers, aficionados and the merely curious will wander a hundred acres of displays - antique, steam-powered tractors and threshers, steam engines that pulled plows and powered machines to dig wells, cut lumber and make shingles. Most of them still work.

    Folks will eat chicken and biscuits, hot dogs, roast pork and fish fry. The old-fashioned smell of coal smoke will fill the air, and it all will be reminiscent of a time when steam power ran the machines and drove America forward toward its coming of age, a time when the place where I grew up was far more rural and less the lake resort and bedroom suburb it has become.

    My family used to go every year. My younger brother Tim would display his miniature engines in the models tent: a steamroller and turbines with teakettle whistles that powered generators and tiny tools. Their midget boilers were heated by Sterno or Esbit, those lozenge-size, white tablets you use in certain kinds of camp stoves.

    Why, you ask, do I wax so misty about the Pageant of Steam? Isn't it obvious? Long rows of outdated, sputtering, wheezing automatons spewing pressurized, wet, hot air - they remind me of this year's presidential debates.

    There's another one coming up this Sunday on ABC. The Republicans. Forewarned is forearmed. Set your TiVos on "stun."

    On the one hand, one shouldn't be cavalier about the so-called "debates." For all their frequent tedium, they provide invaluable insight not only into candidates' positions but also their grasp of reality. Who can forget 1976, when, in mid-debate, then-President Gerald Ford liberated then-Communist Poland, several years before Lech Walesa got the same idea?

    Nor should we forget that for many years there were no presidential debates at all, and then, a sixteen-year gap between the Kennedy-Nixon encounters of 1960 and the Ford-Carter debates of '76. They're not to be taken for granted.

    But this year's series of lineups featuring the talking heads officially vying to be our next CEO have been a fairly trying affair. Until last Monday, that is, when the format was considerably enlivened with questions to the Democratic candidates submitted by the public via YouTube.

    Talking, anti-global-warming snowmen, fake rednecks worried about the candidates having their feelings hurt by all the talk about Al Gore, a guy who calls his assault weapon "my baby" - now that's entertainment.

    It got off to a rocky start with the first question. Zach from Utah asked, 'What's going to make you any more effectual, beyond all the platitudes and the stuff we're used to hearing?" Chris Dodd came off the block with the same old, same old platitudes that proved the questioner's very point.

    But as the evening progressed and the candidates loosened up, the unusual range of questions, unlike a lot of what they'd be getting from Beltway journalists and pundits, elicited some interesting answers. Thus, a question about African-Americans receiving reparations for slavery prompted a heartfelt response from John Edwards about racism and poverty, and a query about whether presidents should meet with the leaders of rogue nations triggered a stimulating weeklong discussion, primarily between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, but including all candidates of both parties, on the nature of American diplomacy. (It caused a lot of finger-pointing and name-calling, too, but I choose to take the high road.)

    What's funny now is that co-sponsors YouTube and CNN (with the Republican Party of Florida) scheduled a similar debate for the Republicans on September 17, but the spontaneity and freewheeling nature of the Democratic event seems to have elements of the GOP running scared.

    Four Republicans have accepted the invitation - John McCain, Tommy Thompson, Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul. But Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney have claimed scheduling conflicts - and Romney daintily sniffed into his sleeve to the Manchester Union Leader that "I think the presidency ought to be held at a higher level than having to answer questions from a snowman." Can I get a harrumph, please?

    Why the hesitation? Some of the contributors at the website Talking Points Memo offered theories: Giuliani's fear that a New York City firefighter might hit him straight between the eyes with a question about 9/11; an elitist disdain for the general public; fear that the YouTube format might expose to public view the extremism of the party's right wing, or even a belief that "the current Bush Republican Party is so beholden to a worldview based on denial and suppression of evidence that exposure to unpredictable questions presents too great a danger."

    As they say at the Pageant of Steam: hiss.

    If you want to weigh in and sign a petition, some Republican bloggers have started a web site called www.savethedebate.com. It's already having some impact - Thompson and Huckabee came on board because of the pressure and Rudy and Mitt are said to be reconsidering if schedules can be made to work. CNN has offered to change the date, so we'll see how serious they are.

    In the words of the Atlantic Monthly's Andrew Sullivan, "Ducking YouTube after the Dems did so well will look like a party uncomfortable with the culture and uncomfortable with democracy."

    Or, as Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall succinctly asked, "If they can't face YouTube, how can they defeat the terrorists?"

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    Michael Winship, Writers Guild of America Award winner and former writer with Bill Moyers, writes this weekly column for the Messenger Post Newspapers in upstate New York.