John McCain, underpants gnome

May 19, 2008

Yesterday afternoon, I was chatting with my friend Bill Simmon, discussing the week that was. I mentioned John McCain’s speech on Iraq earlier in the week, in which the senator talked about how great Iraq will look in 2013, at the end of what he hopes would be his first term as president.

Borrowing a page from one of Yglesias’ commenters, I presented McCain’s plan this way:

Step 1: Get elected.
Step 2: (awkward silence)
Step 3: Troops come home, world marvels at the stable democracy in Iraq

McCain, regrettably, has no idea what to do about Step 2. He knows what he wants to accomplish, but he can’t explain how he’d go about getting there. We’re just supposed to take a leap of faith, assuming he’d come up with a policy someday and it’ll all work out in the end.

After I told Bill about this, he immediately said, “Profit!” I hadn’t the foggiest idea what he was talking about.

Apparently, there was a 1998 episode of “South Park” in which Underpants Gnomes invade people’s homes to steal their underwear. They have a three-part business plan:

Step 1: Collect underpants
Step 2: (awkward silence)
Step 3: Profit!

The similarity between the Underpants Gnomes’ business plan and McCain’s Iraq policy is, of course, striking.

Then, this morning, I noticed this item over at Eschaton, with the headline, “Underpants Gnome.” Noting McCain’s plan, aimai wrote, “But will the voters need that many underpants?”

You know what this means, don’t you? The intersection of an emerging internet meme and the presidential campaign!

Yes, from now on, John McCain, at least on Iraq, should be considered an Underpants Gnome. At least, that is, until he’s prepared to explain what his Iraq policy is (beyond “stay the course”), and how and why it might work.

On a more substantive note, Hillary Clinton didn’t make the “South Park” joke, but she did note late Friday how foolish McCain’s approach is.

“It sounded a lot like ‘Mission Accomplished,’ only postponed into 2013,” said Clinton, referring to President George Bush’s declaration less than two months after the Iraq invasion that major combat was over. “From my perspective, it’s just more of the same. It’s a continuation of the Bush policies that have been failures.”

Quite right. As Josh Marshall added, “Your promises about what you’re going to accomplish in four years are implicit, and often explicit, in every presidential campaign. But taking a victory lap over your list of accomplishments that you haven’t even accomplished yet does come off a little silly.”

It’s probably not realistic to expect presidential candidates, lawmakers, and the DNC to start including Underpants Gnomes in their talking points, but as mockery goes, this one seems well grounded, doesn’t it?

For all us folks with math degrees, step 2 should really be “Hand Waving.”

  • heh. I assumed you knew the reference when youput up the original post. It isn’t exactly an emerging meme and pretty commonly describes almost any Rep plan for the last 8 years (which is one reason it has been used so extensively.

  • McCain’s Step 2 hinges on whether he can secure the assistance of Robert Smith of The Cure.

  • IMHO anybody who knows what an underpants gnome is would never vote for McBush anyway, and the people we’re after don’t follow South Park.

    I would suggest the less funny but still relevant Tooth Fairy, which is a known entity among the uneducated undecideds. Let’s put it this way; Both Bush and McCain have the same plan for victory, and Bush’s main advisor seems to have been the Tooth Fairy. Unless John McCain admits that Bush’s plan never was properly thought out, then he’s still relying on the same amount of “planning” that Bush did.

  • …the senator talked about how great Iraq will look in 2013, at the end of what he hopes would be his first term as president.

    I just love that we have to wait until 2013 for that ever elusive “stable Iraq.” He’s timed his campaign promises so that we’ll have to decide whether or not to re-elect him before before his “due date” for getting all this stuff done. I can almost see him in October 2012 saying, “Just give us a few more months, people; Iraq will look like a verdant paradise and the economy will be back on track… we’re so close, America, all you have to do is give me one more term…. FLAG PINS!”

  • John McCain for President of the United States is already a joke. A bad joke.

    Ridicule is a powerful campaign tactic, and McCain is the perfect target. The jokes almost write themselves.

    But this one is creative and exceptionally clever: John McCain – Underpants Gnome! 🙂

    Just one problem – do any Republicans watch South Park?

  • What drives me crazy about McCain’s spoken plans is his tone of voice, the one he gets when he is reading his speech. It sounds like he is talking to a bunch of kindergarten students. If some ingenious person were to illustrate McCain giving one of these speeches, I think it would do more to point out their simplicity, and his sing-song style of talking than anything else. Using logic to point out the obvious doesn’t get very far, or at least is hasn’t yet.

  • What a short memory you have Mr. Carpetbagger … step two is to sit everyone down in a room and tell them to cut the bullshit. Works every time!

  • You must not read slashdot. Pretty much every comment thread has one of these

  • For all us folks with math degrees, step 2 should really be “Hand Waving.”

    Economists assume a canopener for step 2.

    I had a boss who liked to joke about SMOP – a Small Matter of Programming. The SMOP was invariably left to me.

  • For all us folks with math degrees, step 2 should really be “Hand Waving.”

    For the physicists, either “hand waving” or something along the lines of “after a little reduction…” or “it is easy shown that…”

  • I keep reading this headline as “John McCain, underpants gone.”

    Somebody help me.

  • There was a great cartoon a few years ago, I think in The New Yorker, that was very similar. Several mathematicians (or physicists) are in a room with a large blackboard. On the left side of the blackboard is a series of complicated equations. On the right side is a series of complicated equations. In the middle, the words “then a miracle occurs.” I could go on explaining it, but a quick Google – and here it is:
    http://www.webamused.com/blogosophy/archives/002064.html

    Magical pony thinking.

  • Hmmmm, this reminds me:

    “Planning for after the war in Iraq non-existent”
    By Warren P. Strobel and John Walcott, Knight Ridder Newspapers

    WASHINGTON – In March 2003, days before the start of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, American war planners and intelligence officials met at Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina to review the Bush administration’s plans to oust Saddam Hussein and implant democracy in Iraq.

    Near the end of his presentation, an Army lieutenant colonel who was giving a briefing showed a slide describing the Pentagon’s plans for rebuilding Iraq after the war, known in the planners’ parlance as Phase 4-C. He was uncomfortable with his material – and for good reason.

    The slide said: “To Be Provided.”

  • Step1: Design snarky McCain as underpants gnome t-shirt to be sold on Cafe Press.
    Step2: ?
    Step3: Profit.

  • wvng…
    i think that was a far side cartoon, but i could be wrong.

    this whole mischegoss reminds me of nixon’s “secret plan” to end the war in vietnam when he ran in ’68 (which unfortunately was to widen it and let it run for a few more years and many thousands of lives).

    if john w. mcsame has a plan to end the mess-o-potamia, he should get his wrinkly ass off the campaign trail and get back to washington to put his plan to work (of course, like nixon, his plan — if indeed there is one — is probably nothing more than more troops, wider war, and another 10 or 12 friedman units!).

  • sorry wvng…
    didn’t go to your link until after i had posted. still sounds very gary larsonish, tho.

  • Dear Steve,

    this is what the old trolls of the internets generally consider an “old meme”
    though, in contrast to many of the oldest and hoariest of memes,
    ‘Underpants Gnomes’ remains fresh and delightful,
    as its target is most generally “people who make plans without thinking them through”
    and we haven’t any lack of those, even ten years later.

    I suspect, though can’t confirm, that Matt and Trey were more specifically
    poking fun at the mysterious business models of the emerging Internet Bubble.

    I can confirm that I find myself dying a little inside, every time someone “discovers”
    this meme for the very first time ever, and “realizes” it happens to be a perfect fit
    for the particular flavor of dumbasses that they themselves have been fighting against for aeons.

    If Obama is elected, you can be very sure, he’s going to get tagged with this
    one with this for every one of his brilliant plans that don’t pan out. If he loses, right-wing
    trolls will mock him with the same script. If McCain wins, he will be pilloried by left-wing
    trolls, and also if he loses too; the Gnomes have the amazing utility of a Swiss-Army
    toothpick and frankly, cut about as deep.

    Having said that, Matt & Trey themselves subscribe to a personal view
    somewhere between the Right and Libertarian ends of the body politic.
    They are very good at making fun of what they see as *dumb people*
    all over the spectrum, but have a nasty little private hate for librulz especially.

    Be careful when you invoke them; the South Park kids may be laughing
    *at you* instead of *with you*.

  • 🙂 Underpants Gnome. I notice McCain sniffs a lot.

    I think number two might be that other cultural meme, The Secret.

  • McCain’s whole speech on what our world would be like in Jan. 2013 after his first term in office (retch retch) sounded SO MUCH like a class prophesy high school seniors do saying what each class mate is doing 20 years later. I was left wondering what his class motto, song, flower and colors were. God help us all if he gets elected.

  • You missed the mark. The similarity between the Underpants Gnomes’ business plan and almost every politician who has ever run for office is more striking.

    1. Say anything to get elected
    2. (awkward silence)
    3. Look what a great job I did

    .

  • There was a great cartoon a few years ago, I think in The New Yorker, that was very similar. Several mathematicians (or physicists) are in a room with a large blackboard. On the left side of the blackboard is a series of complicated equations. On the right side is a series of complicated equations. In the middle, the words “then a miracle occurs.”

    I have that cartoon on a t-shirt; it’s always been one of my favorites. In fact, back in grad school, I actually used the “Then a miracle occurs” step in one of my (obviously not-quite) proofs in a class in either Advanced Combinatorics or Non-Linear Optimization, I can’t recall which.

    The fact that I can’t quite remember what course I used it (as well as the fact that I used it at all, of course) in might give you a good idea how well I did in that course.

  • Sounds like bushco original plan:
    Step 1: Bomb/invade Iraq.
    Step 2: (Get greeted as liberators followed by awkward silence)
    Step 3: “MIssion Accomplished”, Troops come home, world marvels at the stable democracy in Iraq

  • Oh this is just upsetting. I just had (as in, an hour ago) a conversation where we decided “1) Invade Iraq, 2) ??????, 3) Democracy!” bumper stickers would be awesome. We even talked about Cafe Press. Then I get home and find out I was scooped by a few hours on here. Grrrr.

  • I think this was done first on the “dilbert” cartoon show. I remember it because it was the same business plan our [Phd in business] owner had at the place I was working at the time.

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