What, exactly, was the joke?

I propose a rule of public life: if you say something appalling, and you defend yourself by saying you were trying to be funny, you must then explain what the joke was.

Michael Barone (who, sadly, shares the name of one of my best friends from high school) said the following to a group of academics:

“The liberal media attacked Sarah Palin because she did not abort her Down syndrome baby," Barone said, according to accounts by attendees. "They wanted her to kill that child. ... I'm talking about my media colleagues with whom I've worked for 35 years.”

Unsurprisingly, Barone was met with a chorus of boos, and some people walked out. Barone does not dispute the accounts of his words but says that he "was attempting to be humorous and ... went over the line."

Mike Allen and Andy Barr report this defense without comment. We are accustomed to cutting people slack for saying offensive things in jokes, which itself is a tricky matter, but in this case and many like it, isn't there a way to point out the obvious, which is to say, it's not a joke.

I don't mean that this is not a laughing matter--death is perhaps the most fundamental basis of humor. I mean that Barone made no attempt to transform the darkness of his sentiment into humor. Instead, Barone made a perfectly straightforward claim about the motives of his colleagues, with no indication of irony at any level. I can imagine a wide range of reactions to his comment, from my own disgust to the approval of a Palin supporter who suspects the worst of the media. What I can't imagine is that anyone would find the idea of reporters wishing Palin's baby out of existence to be funny.

I realize that Barone is probably calling his comments "humorous" because he is scrambling for any way to deflect attention from their obvious meaning. I still want to see him try to explain the joke.

Categories into which you cannot put yourself

David Sedaris's charming little piece on undecided voters includes this line: "calling yourself a maverick is a sure sign that you’re not one." My wife and I had made the same point about "maverick" and have begun, with the help of friends, to construct a list of such terms--ones that, when applied to oneself, constitute strong evidence that "you're not one."


1. A maverick (important exception: NBA basketball players, who, if they say they are Mavericks, most likely are)

2. A raconteur

3. Not a racist

4. Not meaning to offend you

5. A crook


Any more, readers?

Joe Biden, nuance, and same-sex marriage

Headline! Palin, Biden agree on gay rights at debate!

They most certainly did not.

In all the political commentary I've seen since the Biden-Palin debate, I haven't seen anyone take up Biden's comments about gay marriage in detail. Perhaps this is because he was prompted to avoid nuance; in fact, he gave an extraordinarily nuanced answer. I'll put the entire exchange on the subject at the bottom of this post, but here's the bit I want to focus on:

IFILL: The next round of -- pardon me, the next round of questions starts with you, Senator Biden. Do you support, as they do in Alaska, granting same-sex benefits to couples?

BIDEN: Absolutely. Do I support granting same-sex benefits? Absolutely positively. Look, in an Obama-Biden administration, there will be absolutely no distinction from a constitutional standpoint or a legal standpoint between a same-sex and a heterosexual couple.

The fact of the matter is that under the Constitution we should be granted -- same-sex couples should be able to have visitation rights in the hospitals, joint ownership of property, life insurance policies, et cetera. That's only fair.

It's what the Constitution calls for. And so we do support it. We do support making sure that committed couples in a same-sex marriage are guaranteed the same constitutional benefits as it relates to their property rights, their rights of visitation, their rights to insurance, their rights of ownership as heterosexual couples do.

[...]

IFILL: Let's try to avoid nuance, Senator. Do you support gay marriage?

BIDEN: No. Barack Obama nor I support redefining from a civil side what constitutes marriage. We do not support that. That is basically the decision to be able to be able to be left to faiths and people who practice their faiths the determination what you call it.

If I were a politician who supported same-sex marriage--or at minimum had no strong feelings opposing it--and I also wanted to lower the profile of culture-war issues by sounding as if I opposed same-sex marriage, this is precisely the way I would frame the issue.

The debate's discussion of same-sex marriage resulted in apparent agreement between Biden and Palin: both said they opposed it, and Palin--in a way that clearly surprised Biden and Ifill--seemed to agree with Biden in favoring full legal equality for same-sex couples.

Biden, however, added a crucial and instant clarification of what he meant by saying "No" to Ifill's question about allowing same-sex couples to call themselves married. Quoth Biden, with my emphasis: "Barack Obama nor I support redefining from a civil side what constitutes marriage. We do not support that. That is basically the decision to be able to be left to faiths and people who practice their faiths the determination what you call it."

This is not Sarah Palin's position, or anything like it. In fact, this logic, if implemented, would be fatal to the religious right's effort to stamp out same-sex marriage.

The problem for conservatives on this issue is that they have to win every fight. To keep same-sex marriages from continuing to spread, they need to keep the laws of every state on their side. As we have already seen, that's a tough thing to do, and any failure makes the job tougher, not only by getting people used to sharing the country with same-sex married couples but also by opening up the middle ground that New York now occupies in recognizing same-sex married couples from other states.

The only way to stop this is to redefine from the civil side what constitutes marriage, by means of a federal constitutional amendment or a series of amendments to state constitutions. And that, of course, is precisely the measure that Biden says he and Obama oppose. This step is important in itself: if I read it correctly, it amounts to the statement, "No, I don't support same-sex marriages, but they're already happening, and we're not going to do anything to stop them."

The second step, however, is even more interesting. After stating clearly that he advocates full equality in everything but the term "marriage," Biden says that he would leave the terminology in the hands of "faiths and people who practice their faiths." We're so used to high-profile religious opinions opposing same-sex marriage that we can miss the implications of that statement. If you give same-sex partnerships full legal equality and then let churches decide what those partnerships are called, then to abolish same-sex marriage, conservatives need to keep every religious organization on their side--which is patently impossible. There are already liberal religious groups with clergy sympathetic to same-sex marriage, and if there aren't enough of them to serve the purpose, more would surely spring up.

Therefore, the position Biden articulated was, in defiance of Ifill's prompt, packed with nuance. Various commentators, from Carl Bernstein to the right-wing CNSNews, have suspected (and in the latter case, documented) that Biden and Obama actually want to create more opportunities for same-sex couples to marry. What they have not realized is that Biden signaled that desire in the very comments to which they refer.

As a supporter of gay rights, I am pained to hear politicians say no, they don't support gay marriage. But if Biden must do that, I am heartened that he seems in the next breath to articulate a strategy of resistance to and, before long, victory over the right's opposition.

"Palin, Biden agree on gay rights at debate"? No, they didn't. Good thing, too.

---


IFILL: The next round of -- pardon me, the next round of questions starts with you, Senator Biden. Do you support, as they do in Alaska, granting same-sex benefits to couples?

BIDEN: Absolutely. Do I support granting same-sex benefits? Absolutely positively. Look, in an Obama-Biden administration, there will be absolutely no distinction from a constitutional standpoint or a legal standpoint between a same-sex and a heterosexual couple.

The fact of the matter is that under the Constitution we should be granted -- same-sex couples should be able to have visitation rights in the hospitals, joint ownership of property, life insurance policies, et cetera. That's only fair.

It's what the Constitution calls for. And so we do support it. We do support making sure that committed couples in a same-sex marriage are guaranteed the same constitutional benefits as it relates to their property rights, their rights of visitation, their rights to insurance, their rights of ownership as heterosexual couples do.

IFILL: Governor, would you support expanding that beyond Alaska to the rest of the nation?

PALIN: Well, not if it goes closer and closer towards redefining the traditional definition of marriage between one man and one woman. And unfortunately that's sometimes where those steps lead.

But I also want to clarify, if there's any kind of suggestion at all from my answer that I would be anything but tolerant of adults in America choosing their partners, choosing relationships that they deem best for themselves, you know, I am tolerant and I have a very diverse family and group of friends and even within that group you would see some who may not agree with me on this issue, some very dear friends who don't agree with me on this issue.

But in that tolerance also, no one would ever propose, not in a McCain-Palin administration, to do anything to prohibit, say, visitations in a hospital or contracts being signed, negotiated between parties.

But I will tell Americans straight up that I don't support defining marriage as anything but between one man and one woman, and I think through nuances we can go round and round about what that actually means.

But I'm being as straight up with Americans as I can in my non- support for anything but a traditional definition of marriage.

IFILL: Let's try to avoid nuance, Senator. Do you support gay marriage?

BIDEN: No. Barack Obama nor I support redefining from a civil side what constitutes marriage. We do not support that. That is basically the decision to be able to be able to be left to faiths and people who practice their faiths the determination what you call it.

The bottom line though is, and I'm glad to hear the governor, I take her at her word, obviously, that she think there should be no civil rights distinction, none whatsoever, between a committed gay couple and a committed heterosexual couple. If that's the case, we really don't have a difference.

IFILL: Is that what you said?

PALIN: Your question to him was whether he supported gay marriage and my answer is the same as his and it is that I do not.

IFILL: Wonderful. You agree. On that note, let's move to foreign policy.

Sarah Palin, Katie Couric, and the art of the softball question

“Softball question” is a silly metaphor: any anybody who has played softball seriously knows, softballs can be wickedly difficult to hit solidly when tossed by a skilled pitcher. This fact is obvious at the upper levels of fast-pitch softball, but I know those pitches aren’t what the metaphor calls to mind. Rather, it means to conjure the image of the high-arcing slow pitch.

The magic of a good slow-pitch tosser lies in the ability to require hitters to do something very hard that seems reasonably easy. If you can throw a low pitch that catches the front outside corner, then a high one that arcs through the back of the strike zone by the batter’s hands, you can humiliate a whole lot of hitters, including the present writer. Part of the humiliation comes from the knowledge that to the crowd, the task seems easy enough, and often, it seems manageable to the batter, too. It’s hard to pop out on a slow pitch and admit that you were just beaten.

It is in this sense that Katie Couric’s most devastating questions to Sarah Palin have been softballs. We are used to thinking of interview questions in the same misguided way we think of pitches: we think the toughest questions are the ones that regular people couldn’t even foul off. But in an interview, those questions create sympathy for the person trying to answer. If Couric had asked Palin to describe, with specific examples, her sense of the editorial differences between the Washington Post and the New York Times, everybody would have seen that to be a tough question. Palin could refuse to answer such a question, and many—probably most—people would react only by thinking less of Couric for asking it.

And that’s why such questions are not the hardest kind to answer. Instead, the very hardest questions seek out your weakest points and then give you all the flexibility you want in answering them. This approach cloaks the difficulty of the question with the apparent (but entirely false) generosity of flexibility. I’ll call this approach the Nasty Softball Question. I’ve seen a few masters of the NSQ, especially in graduate schoo, but Couric has outdone them all in her interview with Palin, and in a series of NSQs, the wickedest one Couric tossed was this:

And when it comes to establishing your world view, I was curious, what newspapers and magazines did you regularly read before you were tapped for this to stay informed and to understand the world?

My goodness, that is a thing of beauty. It seems reasonable, even coddling. Every serious person reads some periodicals, right? And Sarah Palin has a degree in journalism! What could be more fair and friendly than asking her for some titles of newspapers and magazines?

But this is genuinely tough for someone in Palin’s position. Think of the answers she might give for newspapers. Modern Republican electoral strategy depends on the demonization of the most obviously authoritative papers, especially but not only the New York Times. I’ve seen some people accuse McCain of hypocrisy, for example, because he demonizes the Times but also crows when the paper agrees with him. But that’s the point of the strategy: if you frame the paper as giving a Democratic interpretation of every issue, you discredit the stuff you don’t like and increase the propaganda value of the stuff you agree with. But the Rovian undermining the most journalistically authoritative newspapers put Palin in a bind: she couldn’t cite the obvious choices, and naming anything else would risk reinforcing the impression that she is provincial and unready. The best newspaper I can think of for Palin would be The Wall Street Journal. And how do you think Uncle John McCain would have liked his campaign to be linked more closely with Wall Street right now?

(Later update: Bingo! given another shot, Palin offers the NYT, the WSJ, and the Economist. Then she adds a defensive bit about economic successes as a governor to head off the problems with the financial publications. An excellent strategic answer, given breezily but showing the precise calibration of days of backstage prep.)

I can imagine effective answers for Palin to give, answers that would establish her as a serious reader but add a bit of aggressive irony—I read the Times because I need to know what you journalists are doing to us, that sort of thing. But that’s an answer people like McCain or Giuliani can get away with; it’s much harder to pull off that attitude when introducing yourself to a national audience. Again, I’m not saying good answers weren’t possible, just that this was a ferocious NSQ.

And it was all the more ferocious for one more crucial reason: it’s an easy question for Democrats to answer. The question is an NSQ for Palin precisely because she’s a creation of the right-wing base. Couric has taken advantage of this factor repeatedly: I mean the idea that a question seems fair if you ask it to both sides. (This campaign has featured this false fairness more than previous ones, I think.) The Supreme Court question illustrates the point. Yes, it’s a question Palin should be able to answer, certainly better than she did. The standard question she was probably ready to answer--“What do you look for in a Supreme Court justice?”--would have allowed the kind of generalities she was ready to state, and the request for a specific case shouldn’t have thrown her so badly. At the same time, there was no chance that the question would phase Biden, whose experience would give him a variety of ready answers. The fact that Couric asked both candidates the same question did not make it equally difficult, and I see in Couric’s questions a pattern: Couric used the surface appearance of fairness and generosity to hit Palin’s weak points, in ways precisely calibrated to accentuate the Democrats’ strengths. And all this in a way that the McCain people can’t argue against directly.

When you watch a debate or see questions asked to job applicants, speakers, and so forth, keep an eye out for these properties:

1. Does the question seem to relate to the person's declared interests or ambitions, but actually shift the ground slightly away from where he or she feels solid?

2. Does the question then let the person pick his or her own example, thus raising the expectations that the person will sound authoritative?

3. Does the question invite an obvious answer that is or seems to be a trap?

If the question meets two or (especially) three of these standards, you're witnessing a Nasty Softball Question. Be ready to witness a humiliating pop out to the catcher.

Friday Five: Links to take you to the weekend in style

Via boingboing: College Humor does a great little bit of satire: Fake Disney movie trailer for the Sarah Palin story

The effect of income anxiety on lottery ticket purchases

The Radiolab episode on making the hippo dance, or presenting academic ideas to a non-specialist audience

Obama: The price of being black

Via Kottke, Roger Ebert on how to read a movie

Sarah Palin, Barack Obama, and the race of folk wisdom

I'm going to spend a few sentences explaining why I think Sarah Palin's place in politics is oddly and vexingly like Barack Obama's, so let me foreshadow the end of the argument by illustrating the profound difference between them. Imagine Obama saying at the Democratic National Convention,

Before I became a senator of the great state of Illinois, I was a community organizer. And since our opponents in this presidential election seem to look down on that experience, let me explain to them what the job involves. I guess a community organizer is sort of like a small-town mayor, except that you have actual responsibilities.

As I'm sure you know, this is a reversal of Palin's famous zinger from the RNC, with a similar level of sneering inaccuracy. While Palin's line about community organizers immediately stood out as unusually inflammatory and mean, this Obama version would, I think you'll agree, have ended the campaign in an instant: hello, President McCain. I'll return to this.

Lots of Democrats, including me, are feeling their heads explode anew every time Palin reveals her ignorance of the fundamentals of federal policy: she doesn't know what the "Bush Doctrine" is (OK, it's complicated, and an informed request for clarification would have been fine--but not a look of uncomprehending fear), she doesn't know how Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac work, she doesn't know how countries get admitted to NATO--this last in a way that brought her alarmingly close to arguing for a war with Russia that even McCain wouldn't seek. And pointing out these problems seems only to prod Palin's supporters to new levels of defensive loyalty.

Obama's supporters have a similarly defensive loyalty. The defensiveness does not arise from policy-related gaffes, which Obama avoids with wonderful deftness: as M. J. Rosenberg has said (supported by details that are worth reading), Obama "knows his sh*t." But when his rivals challenge Obama's experience, the defense lies not in his knowledge, exactly, but in his "judgment," which partly means judgment but is also politically acceptable code for curiosity and, yes, utterly extraordinary intelligence--not only the possession of such intelligence but the unapologetic willingness to display it.

In other words, Obama supporters want someone with that kind of mind running the country: dispassionate, probing, academic. Big issues require elite capabilities, the kind of extraordinary talents that may be visible in a young candidate. This fact explains part of Obama's longstanding education gap among Democrats, which is more widely known than when I first noted it but remains underanalyzed. This valuing of the extraordinary young candidate works directly against the logic of blue-collar unions, which tend instead to value experience and credentials.

The logic of the Palin candidacy holds that big issues require the expansion of common sense: a connection with regular people and a certain set of values trump policy and elite rhetoric. As David Brooks points out today, this conflict between Obama and Palin has deep roots in American political rhetoric--or, I would say, in a longer, more European line of thinking about the potential sovereignty of the people. The arguments about Obama and Palin reflect centuries of debates about the relative powers of individual intelligence, personal experience, and collective (or folk) experience.

This last factor deserves more attention. Every major candidate must make a populist claim to the wisdom of the folk. Among the four major candidates now, Biden makes the most conventional claim: he has experienced a working-class childhood in Scranton and a terrible tragedy within his family. The other three candidates' claims are more interesting. McCain has used his military experience to express his solidarity with others' experience of battle, a routine political idea in itself but remarkable in its ability to cover for McCain's otherwise entirely unfolksly and occasionally sordid personal life.

As ever, though, the truly fascinating cases are those of Obama and Palin. Obama does speak convincingly of his family's financial difficulties, but his signature piece of folk experience has always been his move from editing the Harvard Law Review to doing community organizing on the South Side of Chicago: this is the folk connection of an elite man. And his rhetorical populism was until recently characterized by the call-and-response tradition of American Black churches. His DNC speech was essentially an artful reworking of old material with the call-and-response sequences removed.

Palin, however, identifies strongly with a "small-town" background. Other parts of her RNC speech have attracted more attention, but this theme was dominant: she claimed to represent a small-town culture that Washington and media elites could not appreciate, but the folk can.

The oddity of these identifications is that, taken narrowly, they are losing electoral identifications. A Democrat doesn't win an election by winning the Black church vote; a Republican doesn't win by winning the small-town vote. In the politics of folk identification, therefore, Obama and Palin are targeting the popularly marketed fantasies of these identifications, the fantasies that have made hip hop and country music into "popular" genres.

The difference is race.

Palin can mobilize the small-town identification explicitly, even relentlessly. The notion that rural people can represent the purer form of everybody is authorized by centuries of cultural products. While the identification with urban culture may be as powerful as that with rural folk, it must be hinted at and hedged against. In the conventions, Palin emphasized her rurality while Obama dropped the most racially-inflected elements of his rhetoric.

Palin played up her rural roots most memorably in the sequence I referenced at the beginning of this post:

Before I became governor of the great state of Alaska, I was mayor of my hometown. And since our opponents in this presidential election seem to look down on that experience, let me explain to them what the job involves. I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a "community organizer," except that you have actual responsibilities.

This statement was, from the beginning, obviously extreme. As Nate Silver put it based on the advance text before Palin spoke, "it seems awfully petty for a party campaigning on the theme of service .... If you want a punchline that underscores liberal 'elitism', why not go after Obama's time as the President of the Harvard Law Review instead?"

My answer: this line was always about the reaction it would inevitably produce, which is the retelling of the well-known story that includes the Harvard Law Review and the South Side of Chicago. Palin's sneering portrayal seeks to reframe Obama's story of selfless service in a way that emphasizes simultaneously his elite education and his blackness. Thanks to the obvious demographic differences between small-town Alaska and South-Side Chicago, Palin's speech carefully mapped the common-elite opposition onto a white-black opposition.

Now consider my reversal of Palin's statement at the top of this post, its unspeakable mirror image. Unlike Palin's, it privileges mobility over rootedness and urban experience over rural experience. In the reversal, you can see what kinds of elitism are (and have long been) acceptable and unacceptable in American politics.

Friday Five: Links to take you to the weekend in style

James Fallows gets precisely the importance of Sarah Palin's blank look in response to the Bush Doctrine--and also usefully corrects Charlie Gibson's definition of the Doctrine. (See also Palin's total misunderstanding of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and of NATO.)

This is another Palin thing, but that's not why I post Thomas Merton (via Timothy Morton) on the theology of the devil.

Via Lifehacker, an academic calendar template for Excel

I'm looking forward to the next act of Errol Morris.

Sarah Vowell on presidential uncertainty

Friday Five: Links to take you to the weekend in style

A twofer, because the Daily Show is on fire. (Let's face it: Republicans aren't used to the gender politics game, and the Daily Show folks are just the ones to say how.) Bristol Palin's Choice and, even better, Republican hypocrisy.

Jason Kottke's Olympic moments on YouTube

How to wrap meat

10 words that will help you win at Scrabble

The real meaning of college access

Following up on Sarah Palin

Since I've already written about the underappreciated upside of Sarah Palin's nomination, I now offer the contrary view of why the relatively minor problems that have surfaced in the last few days seem to have unusual traction.

Reporters have information about candidates that they want to share but feel constrained not to. The constraint may come from ethical concerns, from editors, or from peer pressure, and it may be controversial: if you read any left-leaning citizen journalism, for example, you probably know that John McCain has said appalling things to his wife in front of reporters, but mainstream journalists have shown no inclination to recall that fact in the context of McCain's policy positions that relate to women's rights and issues. Many Republicans feel that Barack Obama has similarly been let off the hook for statements he and his proxies have made.

Now may observers are noting that the press seems unusually tenacious in examining Sarah Palin. I've seen some potential explanations and can imagine others, from sexism to religious bias to media resentment.

I suspect something a little different: my guess is that reporters have been struggling for a while with how to convey the fact that John McCain has been screwing up major points of foreign policy, making impetuous decisions, and generally exhibiting a lack of managerial control. This information dribbles out here and there, but no story has brought it all together in the way that the Palin appointment has.

On the heels of a Democratic Convention that, among other things, displayed the Obama team's formidable managerial and logistical skills, the Palin appointment highlighted McCain's impulsive hotheadedness in a way that had nothing directly to do with foreign policy. Suddenly, reporters who felt they could not ethically say, for instance, that McCain's reaction to the Georgian crisis was ludicrously belligerent and ill-considered, could say instead that it seems awfully strange to choose a Vice President at the very last minute with very little information in hand.

Hence the McCain campaign's furious efforts to defend the vetting process--a process that, after the announcement of the result, seems much less important than McCain's alarmingly shaky grasp of the geography and ideologies of the Middle East. Everybody involved understands that the argument over the vetting process is the publicly acceptable proxy for the argument over McCain's stability.

I could be wrong about this case, but I am more confident in the general assertion that many times the press seems hung up on a relatively minor political story, we are seeing journalists attempt to convey something they've been uncomfortable about keeping quiet.

Underestimating Sarah Palin

Based on what I've read in a number of venues, I venture to say that if you support Barack Obama, you may well be underestimating Sarah Palin's potential benefits to John McCain's candidacy. Here are four reasons why:

1. Many people see this choice as a pander to Hillary voters and think it won't work. I agree that the pick won't work especially well in that way. But half of the electorate doesn't like Hillary Clinton, and a solid majority of independents don't like her. A lot of people who like the idea of seeing a prominent female politician will be very happy to see someone other than Hillary Clinton play the role.

2. Attacking Palin is going to be very dangerous. A great many people will see her primarily as an amazing woman: a dedicated mother who stands by her principles and has launched an impressive career while raising a bunch of kids. This is all accurate: I think Palin's policy positions are terrifying, but I hope the Obama people are thinking very carefully about how to respect Palin's personal accomplishments as they attack her policies. Getting the tone of this wrong will seriously rile up the right-wing base.

3. A point related to #1: I see a lot of commentary assessing potential reactions to Palin based on the opinions of college-educated women. But at least initially, men like the Palin pick better than women, and to the extent that choosing Palin involves targeting ex-Hillaryites, I'll wager the swing group is the less educated, more socially conservative, more Appalachian core. I can easily imagine people from my Appalachian hometown (where my mother has long been amazed at the resistance of Democratic women to Hillary Clinton) connecting with Palin, especially if, say, Biden says something that sounds condescending and eggheaded and dismissive about her.

4. Palin's background is in journalism, specifically broadcast journalism and more specifically sports journalism. I've only seen a couple of her TV clips, but she seems to handle that environment very well, and (unlike McCain) she should be very good at reading a teleprompter, which will be important next week.

All that said, I think such a cynical, pandering, precipitous choice should ultimately hurt McCain's chances. But if Democrats think it will be easy to dismiss Palin's appeal, they could pay dearly for the mistake.