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(s)Elections See other (s)Elections Articles Title: Lady Macbeth vs. Billy Budd Lady Macbeth vs. Billy Budd By JOSEPH EPSTEIN Whether the outcome of last Tuesday's Pennsylvania primary is good or bad for the Democratic Party isn't of great interest to me. My stake in the continuing contest is entirely personal, and has to do with my mental hygiene, which it is ruining. I'm thoroughly hooked by the campaign, turned into a one-subject news junkie. I have only to see the names "Obama" or "Clinton" atop an editorial or news article, or hear the phrase "Campaign 2008" on television, and I am gone, as lost as an adolescent boy reading his first pornographic novel. I cannot seem to get enough print, television, chat or highly repetitive schmooze on this subject. What's the attraction? The contest pits Hillary Clinton's empty though fierce ambition against Barack Obama's naïve yet carefully orchestrated idealism. It's like Yale's Lady Macbeth versus Harvard's Billy Budd. As long as I'm tossing around literary allusions, perhaps John McCain might be compared to Herman Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener: When it comes to expanding government, he really "would prefer not to." I have always considered the Clintons as little more than a branch of William Faulkner's Snopes family, in their cases Snopeses who have given high SAT scores a bad name. I don't find it easy to imagine how anyone outside her immediate family could find Mrs. Clinton, in her bouncy campaign persona – Hubert Humphrey in drag – appealing. More easily imagined is Mrs. Clinton at the start of a new day, slipping into yet another pants-suit, stepping into the makeover room, plastering on that frozen smile, and taking three deep breaths before hitting the bricks in the hope of coming across as more sincere than a Brian Williams necktie – while doing her best impression of a deeply caring person. So enraptured have I become by the political morality play of the Democratic primaries that, with much shame, I have returned to watching the McLaughlin Group on PBS on Saturday nights. This shameful recidivism has occurred after a rigidly self-imposed, three-year absence from the cacophonous effusions of Eleanor Clift, Pat Buchanan, Mort Zuckerman and the rest. The barking of these dogs as the caravan passes should be beneath a man who prefers to think himself cultivated. What do I care what they think, especially when I already know what they think? Like so many of the punditi of our day, they are all, as E. M. Forster termed it in his "Aspects of the Novel," "flat characters," by which he meant characters utterly predictable in their opinions, behavior, character – characters from whom one should expect no surprises. Each morning I check the New York Times for new stories about Hillary and Bill Clinton's fresh feelings of betrayal, as more superdelegates depart their glorious cause. I also read for further accounts of bad company that Mr. Obama has kept. (Will he turn out to have lunched with Osama bin Laden in Sadr City in 1989?) On the New York Times op-ed page, I read Maureen Dowd only when she writes on my obsession. Scorn is Ms. Dowd's specialty; she has only to open her laptop and black toads fly out. A Clintonologist of longstanding, she earned her chops bashing Mr. Clinton, and is now palpably happy for the opportunity to be trashing his wife. As the votes come in from each state on primary election nights, I switch between Fox News Network and CNN – Gee, Dad, it's a Wolfblitzer! – where the pundits are lined up wall-to-wall. There's David Gergen, the very model of the insider, under his precarious comb-over, solemnly pontificating in the hushed tones of a man delivering the real lowdown. William Bennett, who has acquired the girth of two ambassadors to the Congress of Vienna, instructs everyone on what conservatives will and will not tolerate. Campbell Brown, in her most-popular-girl-in-the-graduating-class mode, harvests the irreconcilable opinions of the various passionate Clintonites, Obamists and McCainians. The feeling is that of a family dinner to which only one's most argumentative relatives have been invited. Rocky Marciano's mother reportedly said that she was glad when her son deserted baseball for a career in boxing. After all, she didn't raise the boy to be a catcher. Neither did my mother raise her son to watch Chris Matthews, Bill O'Reilly and Larry King. But there, pathetically, I am sometimes to be found. All because of this blasted campaign. I could go on to further confessions, but I have to get ready for the probably also indecisive North Carolina and Indiana primaries. Scratch his eyes out, Lady Macbeth. Don't let her push you around, Billy Budd, baby. Ah, Bartleby! Ah, America! Ah, humanity! Mr. Epstein is the author, most recently, of "In a Cardboard Belt!: Essays Personal, Literary and Savage" (Houghton Mifflin, 2007).
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