Caroline’s Tics, Um, Still Beat Crass Jokes: Commentary by Margaret Carlson
bloomberg.com
Dec. 31 (Bloomberg) -- It can be hard to adapt when the ground shifts beneath you. Caroline Kennedy is having difficulty adjusting to life outside the cocoon of Manhattan and Boston, where she’s treated like a princess.
She has no trouble attracting crowds. They’re all adoring. She doesn’t have to say much. Just being there is enough. Attach Kennedy’s name to a cause and she makes it a success just by showing up.
She could be forgiven for thinking life would go on as usual after announcing she would like to fill Hillary Clinton’s Senate seat. If you’re an ordinary candidate, you’re lucky to get on “Morning Joe” and squeeze in a few talking points --and that’s if you’re running for president. If you’re Caroline Kennedy, you’re on primetime, hosting the Kennedy Center Honors off a sparkling script on a teleprompter.
That was before the press -- and others who want the seat -- got their hooks into her. Now Kennedy is out there without a script, prompter or even notes and getting hammered in the tabloids for meandering, vague responses. In a 30-minute session with The New York Daily News, Kennedy said “you know” more than 200 times.
On tax cuts: “Well, you know, that’s something, obviously, that, you know, in principle and in the campaign, you know, I think that, um, the tax cuts, you know, were expiring and needed to be repealed.”
It’s, Like, Hard
I feel her pain. Any parent knows that attempts to remove conversational crutches from your teenager’s speech are likely to add them to yours. For several years, I couldn’t like, you know, shake the word “like” from my vocabulary.
Maybe that’s why, when interviewing, I don’t transcribe verbal tics; they reveal weak rhetorical skills, not weak thinking. But Kennedy needs to recognize quickly she’s in uncharted territory where no flub goes unpunished.
Another politician who didn’t realize his playing field had changed is Tennessee’s Chip Saltsman, running for chairman of the Republican National Committee. He sent a Christmas CD to 168 committeemen containing a song titled “Barack the Magic Negro,” sung to the tune of “Puff the Magic Dragon.” He thought the racial parody of the president-elect would elicit a hearty ho, ho, ho from his fellow Republicans, and maybe their votes.
Saltsman wasn’t completely wrong. Some Republicans leapt to his defense, saying that Rush Limbaugh had played the tune, satire is meant to poke fun, and why don’t we all get a sense of humor.
No Big Deal
“When I found out what this was about,” Mark Ellis, the chairman of the Maine Republican Party, told Politico, “I had to ask, ‘Boy, what’s the big deal here?’ Because there wasn’t any.” Alabama Republican committeeman Paul Reynolds said it “didn’t bother me one bit.”
Former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee also backed Saltsman, who managed his campaign: “Chip should have been more careful in his selection of Christmas gifts, but no one who knows him would ever suggest that he in any way would purposely disparage other people.”
But what about the title alone? Huckabee’s idea of a joke can be iffy. Addressing the friendly National Rifle Association last year, he heard a bang and ad libbed that the noise was Barack Obama diving to the floor after “somebody aimed a gun at him.”
Limbaugh has played the song parody, but he’s an entertainer held to standards of his advertisers and listeners, not to those of a major political party. Second, it’s sophomoric satire at best. And humor at another’s group expense isn’t as funny as it was 50 years ago. (It was never funny to the group being poked at.)
Criticized for Criticizing
Current RNC Chairman Mike Duncan, who doesn’t appear to have enough votes to win re-election on the first ballot, came out against Saltsman and has been criticized for siding with the media.
In January, the RNC will hold debates at which contenders will discuss how they intend to reach out to minorities. They could use the opportunity, if not to be on the right side of history, at least to be on the right side of a demographic trend that will soon see minorities be the majority. Among the 500 or so attending the Republican Governor’s Conference dinner in Miami in November, there wasn’t one black guest. The only minorities present were waiting tables.
Unlike Saltsman, who may have disqualified himself for any job, Kennedy still has a good chance of winning the vote of New York Governor David Paterson. She can say she’s the candidate who would have the ear of the new president and the instant standing to help Paterson’s beleaguered state, which is proposing to tax Diet Coke to make ends meet.
No Resume Required
That will require getting past not only her “you know” habit but her lack of a standard political resume. Men without them aren’t as suspect; witness the election to the Senate of Bill Frist (a surgeon), Orrin Hatch and John Edwards (attorneys), Herb Kohl (department store heir, owner of the Milwaukee Bucks), Bill Bradley (fresh from the Knicks), Robert Bennett (a public relations exec and son of a Utah Senator). I could go on.
Notice that the list includes no women. We say we want fresh faces in politics until we see one that doesn’t speak in 30- second sound bites. A woman working at unconventional jobs while her children are young -- writing two books on constitutional law, serving on a raft of boards and setting up a novel public- private partnership with the New York City schools -- need not apply.
Kennedy was drawn into this odd non-campaign for which her Bouvier genes do not prepare her, though her Kennedy ones should. She now has to show she’s a trooper by getting up after being ridiculed. Think of all the philandering, felonious, lying, cheating politicians who have no trouble asking for votes after doing worse. All she’s done is stammer.
(Margaret Carlson, author of “Anyone Can Grow Up: How George Bush and I Made It to the White House” and former White House correspondent for Time magazine, is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.)
To contact the writer of this column: Margaret Carlson in Washington at mcarlson3@bloomberg.net
Last Updated: December 31, 2008 00:02 EST |
