Did Barack Obama intend to call Sarah Palin a “pig” and John McCain an “old fish”?
How would I know?
It’s certainly not implausible. His audience took the lines that way and liked them. He is surrounded by people who make little effort to disguise their loathing of Republicans in general and Governor Palin in particular. If he uttered a deliberate slight, it may never have occurred to him that offense could be taken.
Still, only a mind reader can know for sure, and I have yet to meet anyone who is literate in telepathy. Of course, that’s true of many, many similar kerfuffles that have erupted in recent political history. Did George Allen intend to apply a newly coined racial epithet to a dark-skinned operative from his opponent’s campaign? Did Trent Lott mean to endorse segregation? Many commentators were very sure about those cases. Quite a few have also been sure, of late, that there is a racist subtext to Republican mockery of “community organizer” as a shining Presidential qualification. Every statement made by public figures (especially right-wing public figures) is nowadays scrutinized for racism, sexism, homophobia and all the other contemporary sins, to the point where one almost expects them, in self-defense, to script their offhand in advance and have them reviewed by diversity consultants.
But what do we learn from this scrutiny? If we infer from subtle verbal clues that Candidate X is, in his inmost heart, prejudiced against women, blacks, foreigners, Jews, Catholics, homosexuals, necrophiliacs or whatever, we may convince ourselves that he is an unsatisfactory human being – just like every other person on this planet. Elections are not, however, contests in competitive sainthood. The object is to make the best choice to carry out a particular set of duties. Someone who tells crude jokes or secretly harbors stereotypes based on race, religion, sex or ethnicity may nonetheless be able to put bias aside and perform admirably at his job. Bear in mind, too, that his opponent may be no less bigoted but merely better at covering up.
The first Queen Elizabeth wisely said that she had “no desire to make windows into men’s souls”. Passing verbal slips, jokes, offhand comments, outbursts of irritation, gendered pronouns and the like through the filter of Political Correctitude in order to draw conclusions about character is to peer through dark, clouded windows. This whole pig-and-lipstick business will do a bit of good if a few liberals wake up to the absurdity of modern hyper-sensitivity. Our country would be a better, or at least a jollier, place if Barack Obama could say what he thinks about his rivals and be judged by whether it makes sense, not by its conformity to artificial proprieties.
In other words, what was wrong with his statement wasn’t the business about fish and pigs and lipstick but the assertion that he – the Chicago machine loyalist, the buddy of Tony Rezko, the legislator who got government money for his political donors and voted against switching funds from the “Bridge to Nowhere” to Hurricane Katrina victims – is more of a reformer than a governor whose career was built on fighting corruption within her own party. One might, if sensitivity did not reign, say it is a case of the pot calling the kettle black.
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