Since this clip has now disappeared from YouTube, the victim of a take-down order from NBC, it’s worth knowing that you can still watch it here (where NBC would have liked you to watch it in the first place).
The video has already gone viral, as they say, and given rise to speculation as to the role of Fey in the McCain/Palin campaign (not to mention future SNL episodes). It hardly seems worth crediting that NBC would offer some pale Fey imitation as Palin, but given McCain/Palin’s penchant for bamboozlement, one never knows. Indeed, since Fey has a day job, as the AP reports:
For the long term, “SNL” executive producer Lorne Michaels reportedly has an as-yet-undisclosed “Plan B” and “Plan C” for a Palin impersonator, in lieu of Fey.
If Governor Palin makes a future debut as Tina Fey inpersonating her, remember — you read it here first.
Whether Sarah Palin thinks Barack called her a pig remains unknown, but “her campaign advisers and those blushing violets around the uber-sensitive John McCain are more offended than nuns in a nudist romp,” according to Matt Frei of the BBC. Indeed, “[t]he governor of Alaska has become a kind of campaign superhero who can morph like liquid mercury,” while Joe Biden “has clearly been swallowed up by the witness protection programme,” as Frei puts it.
The McCain campaign combines utterly shameless lies and false claims with a posture of victimization towards the Obama camp’s attempts to fight back. The logic of McCain’s attacks seems to have nothing to do with expecting that anyone will believe the lies and distortions. They are now so shameless that FactCheck.org has objected to McCain’s use of its information and language. But the point seems to be to rattle Obama, to keep him on the defensive, and above all to avoid an honest debate about issues.
It will be interesting to see what happens as McCain again campaigns by himself, without his running mate by his side playing the adoring little woman. I may be a sexist, but I think Palin’s chief virtue for McCain is that she is a cipher. I think the McCain campaign will strive to maintain this situation, to avoid allowing her to individualize herself very much. The danger in her talking to the press except in a tightly controlled situation is not that she might appear ignorant or foolish but that she might begin to look like her own person, a situation that would immediately diminish her value to McCain, first as the adoring cheerleader for America’s great hero, and second as a person who can be played off against countless female stereotypes to McCain’s advantage. The Washington Post, on today’s editorial page, delivers a serious reproof to McCain over his pretended feminist outrage.
No matter that Mr. McCain used the lipstick-on-a-pig phrase himself, referring to (female) Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s health-care plan, or that (female) former McCain aide Torie Clarke wrote a book with that title. In the heat of a campaign, operatives will pounce on any misstep and play to the referees over any arguable foul. We understand that, and certainly the Obama campaign has not been above such tactics. But this cynical use of the gender card is unusually silly.
The Washington Post editorial writers still think McCain is a serious man, but a man who chose his running mate entirely as a political calculation, and a disreputable one at that, a man who comes to believe in his own inflated campaign image and who again and again stands behind lies and distortions regarding his opponent is not a serious man; no more serious, indeed, than a woman who allowed herself to be represented on the cover of Newsweek with a shotgun slung over her shoulder. I didn’t realize until today that the Newsweek cover is likely a deconstruction of this. O tempora, o mores!
“Fore-armed: that’s half a octopus!” If you look at my Comics page, you’ll find some good news about Pogo Possum. There’s an official Pogo website here, as is only right and just. One thing for sure, you won’t find Pogo putting lipstick on a pig.
I’ve been a pogo fan at least since high school when Simple J. Malarkey and the Jack Acid Society delighted us (well, some of us) in my high school civics class. I also loved the strip’s spoofs of the then popular Mickey Spillane crime novels, which dressed Albert the Alligator up in a trench coat. The Wikipedia article on Pogo is actually pretty good.
Pogo’s creator, the late Walt Kelly, once wrote a piece in Atlantic, in which he defended the thesis that all humor involves the enjoyment of pain. I couldn’t find that one quickly, but here’s another that muses about children, noise language, and nonsense (so called). Constantine von Hoffman has called Kelly the first graphic novelist. His 2007 birthday salute to Kelly is worth reading. You can read Kelly’s autobiography at the Kelly Website, together with a good deal else that will delight you if you remember Pogo as I do.
Back where the lipstick meets the pigskin, the McCain campaign has now apparently adopted the big lie as a central strategy. As Michael Kinsley pointed out in a column not too long ago it’s hard, even for reporters, to deal with a big, complicated lie. I would add, especially when the lie is presented shamelessly and succinctly in a TV ad or smoothly and with utmost gravity as in the original swift boat campaign. Here’s one of the most recent McCain swift boaters. You have to admire such shamelessness, in a way.
Of course, they’ve already been caught on this one, though I’ll bet they don’t take it off the air. What I’m wondering is what makes McCain’s strategists think there’s a receptive audience for this kind of stuff that’s large enough to justify the expense. With John Kerry it was the fact that his anti-war activism had always been problematic for many Americans. McCain, generally, is trying to link Obama’s opposition to the war in Iraq unfavorably to protest against Vietnam. But what specifically about Obama makes him vulnerable to the kind of lies contained in this video? Are they perhaps developing some theme other than the now familiar Sarah Palin victim trope?
Perhaps when you’re running a relentlessly negative campaign it’s useful to accuse your opponent of the same thing. Or perhaps what’s worth the expense is keeping Obama off his game, and the public distracted. The wolves are a sleazy touch that may backfire, though — more beautiful than frightening to my eye.
On Saturday I participated in a commemoration of the Walkless Talkless Parade in support of women’s suffrage at the 1916 Democratic National Convention in St. Louis. About 100 members of the League of Women Voters of St. Louis gathered at Boileau Hall at St. Louis University and walked for a mile or so carrying yellow umbrellas. All the walkers were female, but some of us male members of the league helped in other ways. I directed traffic at one of the parking entrances and attended the speech making, which was good fun. Here’s a photo of the march as it began on Vendeventer Avenue.
The original Walkless Talkless Parade was the brainchild of Edna Fischel Gellhorn, a St. Louis Civic leader and one of the founding members of the League. 7000 women lined both sides of Locust Street downtown so that the DNC delegates had to pass them on their way from their hotel to the convention hall. Gellhorn described it as follows in a 1964 interview:
We decided we didn’t want to have a parade but we did want to be noticed …so thousands of us, in yellow sashes, carrying yellow parasols, lined both sides of Locust Street. . . . In front of the old Art Museum we had a tableau. The tableau was a memorable event. The women representing states that had women’s suffrage were draped in white. Those from states with partial suffrage . . . were draped in gray. Those from states with no votes for women, including Missouri, were draped in black . . . [T]wo little girls . . . represented future voters.
According to a recent biography, one of those girls was Martha Gellhorn, Edna’s daughter who would become the first female war correspondent. Edna Gellhorn was a graduate of Bryn Mawr. My source for the quotation is a page at the Bryn Mawr website where you can see a youthful photograph of Gellhorn and several photos of the original “Golden Lane.” The league also has a page about Gellhorn, where you can see a copy of her portrait and listen to a recorded speech and part of a 1969 television interview.
