The Donkey in the Room Kicks Obama

When Barack Obama characterized his opponents' campaign for change as "lipstick on a pig," was he implying that Sarah Palin, the world's most famous Pit Bull in Lipstick, was a pig? When the McCain campaign, and some observers in the public and the media, take umbrage at Obama for insulting Palin's gender, are they for real? Both questions admit of multiple, provisional, and even contradictory answers, because the entire situation condenses so many "subtexts" it could have been written for the stage by David Mamet or Philip Roth (that is if Philip Roth wrote for the stage).

Whatever Barack Obama's indiscretion may have been, it was a one-billionth fraction of zero compared to the assaults directed against Sarah Palin by the mob of stone-throwing TV scandal-baiters, newspaper opinionators, and Beverly Hills bloviators, not to mention the ugly world of the web, where any high school sophomore can outslime Rupert Murdoch. Stoning Sarah Palin has become an American liberal pastime. But Governor Palin has dealt with the attacks so professionally she might as well be, I don't know, Johnny Podres pitching in Yankee Stadium. No screaming fan ever got a hit off her, and from the looks of things they never will. Sarah Palin neither needs defenders nor has sought them; she's too busy attacking, because at the moment that's a big part of her job, she's good at it, and her opponent Obama seems unable to open his mouth without providing her with more opportunities. John McCain knows that Sarah Barracuda requires no "special treatment" to protect her against sexism, because she's more than a match for anyone or any mob that might try to harass her; and undoubtedly he selected her as his campaign running mate, and as a potential vice-president, for that very reason. So yes, I think there is something quite disingenuous about Team McCain giving Obama grief over his clumsy "pig" joke.

If Team McCain just wanted to talk Straight Talk about Obama's joke, these are some of the things they could have said.
-----They could have said that "lipstick on a pig" was a stupid cliche Obama parroted from the despised Dick Cheney.
-----They could have said that Obama has for weeks been robotically repeating a single empty mantra--excuse me, message--and that the Democratic candidate clearly has nothing in the tank.
-----Finally, they could have said that Obama's so-called message is a blatant lie, because what "lipstick on a pig" means is that McCain = Bush, and everyone--including Obama himself if we want to speak about disingenuousness--everyone knows that McCain isn't Bush. These responses, which are all true, are much more serious indictments of Obama's insipid joke and what it symptomatizes than the disingenuous complaint that it is offensive to women.

So why then would the McCain campaign make a defensive, whiny, and transparently disingenuous attack on Obama, when they could have decked him, or treated the joke itself as merely the trivial one-liner it is?

The reason Team McCain went whiny this week, I believe, is that they saw in Obama's "pig" remark an opportunity to smoke out an issue that is very important to the Obama campaign and indeed to the nation at this time. The issue is neither sexism nor offensive speech. The issue is Political Correctness. Political Correctness is the Donkey In The Room in the 2008 Presidential campaign, because Political Correctness is both the sole rationale for Barack Obama's candidacy (as an alternative to, say, Hillary Clinton's) and an issue that he alone of the candidates can claim. So from the standpoint of Team Obama PC is their candidate's WMD, not simply a game-changer but a rule-maker. The endlessly repeated pseudo-news that Obama's nomination is a "historical achievement" solely because the candidate is African-American, with the implication that his election would be an even greater "historical achievement" for the same reason, constitutes a blatant effort to coerce citizens into voting for Obama and to inhibit and discredit any criticism of Obama's qualifications. According to the Democrats, Americans face a monumental choice in 2008: for History or against it. Well, if you put it that way.....

All throughout the spring, as political operatives and experts who had declared Obama inevitable tried to deny that Hillary Clinton had put him on the ropes, we heard in interviews about the supposed "difficulty" of running against Barack Obama. For most citizens this commentary was "analysis," but for John McCain it was business of the most practical sort, because unlike the rest of us John McCain is in the unique position of actually running against Obama, and if there is a difficulty involved in running against Obama one of McCain's fundamental tasks is to overcome it. If he doesn't, he will lose.

So what was the difficulty of running against Obama supposed to be? What it amounted to was this: the public, or anyway all of it living in cafes instead of caves, allegedly felt a certain adoration of Obama that had nothing in particular to do with "issues"; and therefore the public did not want to hear Obama criticized on the issues, not to mention on other grounds. The basis for the public's alleged love affair with Obama was not exclusively his ethnicity, but more importantly his charm, seriousness, and potential to inaugurate an era of racial harmony devoutly to be wished. Obama was, in short, No Ordinary Candidate, and an ordinary opponent foolish enough to treat Obama like an ordinary candidate would find--or so the experts predicted--that all arguments against Obama would rebound fatally upon the opponents, because the public did not want to hear Obama brought down to the level of ordinary politicians. If anyone tried it, the public would think--indeed, the public would realize--that the opponent was opposing not just a candidate but the bright future of racial harmony itself. And anyone who would do that might well be a racist, especially since the candidate they were so unfairly opposing was African-American.

Hence, according to the commentators, campaigning against Obama would be "difficult" for a politician to do. What they really meant is that it would be impossible, and that they would make it so, because in "doing their jobs" as journalists and expert commentators they would have the solemn responsibility of enforcing rules of discourse that would fix the campaigning in Obama's favor and deprive the American voters of an open democratic discussion and freely made decision.

The fundamental task confronting a candidate running against Obama, therefore, is simply that of asserting the people's right to have a campaign, instead of the parade the Obamacrats had concluded was their entitlement. Obama's opponent must establish the democratic right to say out loud that the Emperor has no clothes, and to establish the right of the people to hear it, whether they want to or not; because that, Norman Lear, is the American Way. Moreover some voters do want to hear it, and others who think they don't will be glad to have the alternative perspective once they have the chance. McCain has already changed minds in this election, but to do it he had to violate the speech code. The offensive words that sounded like drills in the ears of liberals were these: "Sarah Palin." Among the other things liberals said about her, they said that McCain had offended women merely by putting her on the ticket. Now that's what I would call hypersensitivity, if I didn't know how disingenuous it really was.


Yes, Team McCain is disingenuous in slamming Obama over sexism, but precisely this transparent disingenuousnesss makes their real charge against Obama stronger instead of weaker, because the charge is that of trying to win the Presidency by imposing upon the campaigns a speech code that would shield Obama from legitimate and tough criticism. McCain's issue here is not sexism but Political Correctess, and disingenuousness is constitutive of Political Correctness, which could be defined as disingenuous allegations that feelings have been injured by insensitive (i.e. unintentionally offensive) speech or conduct. Team McCain's whining is a caricature of PC, but it will stick to Obama and not McCain, because everybody already knows that Obama's campaign has been powered by PC since day one and would ride it to the White House if allowed. The Obamacrats don't like finger pointing? Look who's talking!


Is this analysis too subtle for John McCain? No. McCain is a man who thinks. Not even Sarah Palin's worst enemies could deny, if they were honest, that McCain's selection of her was a stroke of political genius if nothing else. Comparing McCain to Karl Rove is far too complimentary to Rove: Rove might have picked Palin (though I doubt it), but he wouldn't have picked McCain. Only McCain had the insight and guts to realize that Palin could be his complement. If voters want change they can believe in, that's the kind of creative leader who can give it to them. And no liberal can ever provide that kind of change, not because liberals aren't quantitatively smart (high SATs, multiple degrees), but because ideologically liberals don't believe that any such thing as intellectual creativity even exists, so they expend their energies denying it rather than cultivating it. That's what it means to be an expert, and why experts are always ready to say that something surprising and not already approved must be stupid. But The Post Liberal will address the ideology of liberalism (i.e. the Progressive, not the classical type) at length at another time.