Guilty (38 page)

There is no other explanation for the embarrassing paeans to Obama's “eloquence.” His speeches were a run-on string of embarrassing,
sophomoric greeting card bromides. It seemed only a matter of time before Obama would slip and tell a crowd what a special dad it had always been to him.

In announcing his candidacy, Obama bravely proclaimed that he believed in “the basic decency of the American people.” And let the chips fall where they may! He decried “a smallness of our politics”—deftly offering a challenge to the small-politics advocates. Then, throwing caution to the wind, he stood up to the antihope crowd, saying, “There are those who don't believe in talking about hope.” He said we must “disagree without being disagreeable.” This was an improvement on the first draft, which read, “It's nice to be important, but it's more important to be nice.” This guy is like the ANWAR of trite political aphorisms. There is no telling exactly how many he is sitting on, but it could be in the billions.

Most weirdly, the major theme of Obama's campaign was the audacity of his running for president. A line from his announcement speech was “I recognize there is a certain presumptuousness in this— a certain audacity—to this announcement.” He titled his keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention “The Audacity of Hope”—named after a sermon given by his spiritual mentor, Jeremiah Wright, whom we were not allowed to mention without being accused of ugly campaign tactics. (Rejected speech titles from sermons by the Reverend Wright included “God Damn America!,” “The U.S. of K.K.A.,” and “The Racist United States of America.”)

What is so audacious about announcing that you're running for president? Every sitting and former U.S. senator has run for president or is currently thinking about running for president. Dennis Kucinich ran for president. Lyndon LaRouche used to run for president constantly.

But the media were giddy over their latest crush. Even when Obama broke a pledge and rejected public financing for his campaign—an issue more dear to the
New York Times
than even gay marriage—the
Times
led the article on Obama's broken pledge with his excuse. “Citing the specter of attacks from independent groups on the right,” the article began, “Senator Barack Obama announced Thursday that he would opt out of the public financing system for the general election.”
⁵
So he had to break his pledge! It was the Republicans' fault.

When Obama broke his word and voted for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) bill, the
Times's
editorial began:
We are shocked and dismayed by Senator Obama s vote on … Oh, who are we kidding? We can't stay mad at this guy! Isn't he just adorable? Couldn't you just eat him up with a spoon? Is he looking at me? Ohmigod, I think he's looking at me!!!!!!!!!!!! Couldn't you just die?

It has ever been thus. The establishment media function as a Greek chorus, informing the lumpen masses what to think of this or that person. Liberals are described as Adonis and Helen of Troy, while conservatives are described as dog food.

WHICH FEMALE IN POLITICS HAVE THE ESTABLISHMENT MEDIA described as “outspoken,” “funny,”
⁶
a “superstar,”
⁷
“passionate and smart,”
⁸
“influential,”
⁹
“flamboyant,”
¹⁰
“colorful”
¹¹
a “female warrior,”
¹²
with “national stature,”
¹³
with “flair and style,”
¹⁴
with “vitality and independence,”
¹⁵
and with “colour and style,”
¹⁶
who was “brimming with style”
¹⁷
and “funny and also … serious,”
¹⁸
who had crowds yelling to her: “You're beautiful!”
¹⁹

It's
Bella!
Yes, the late Bella Abzug, the grotesque, foulmouthed member of Congress from New York. An avid supporter of Joseph Stalin, Abzug also supported Hitler—at least until he invaded the glorious Soviet Union, forcing even Stalin to withdraw his support.
²⁰
She supported the Vietcong in the Vietnam War
²¹
and Jim Jones, the left-wing cult leader who presided over a mass suicide in Guyana.
²²

Notwithstanding hymns to her cultural significance, Abzug's influence was severely limited by the fact that even the liberal voters of New York refused to elevate her beyond the House of Representatives, rejecting her bids for both the U.S. Senate and the New York City mayoralty.

As for her renowned “style,” Abzug enclosed her perfectly spherical frame in frumpy thrift-shop, busy-patterned dresses and enormous floppy hats. Her speaking voice was always set at “bellow.” But the media insisted on describing Abzug as an American Venus. As she screeched her opposition to the Vietnam War, we were all supposed to concede that she was just as cute as a bug's ear.

In 2006, thanks to careful stage management, the Democratic
Party finally fielded some candidates who had been allowed to play outside as children. The
Washington Post
promptly produced an article gloating about how gorgeous the Democrats were. “Democrats seem to be fielding an uncommonly high number of uncommonly good-looking candidates,” the article boasted, noting that the “beauty gap” could determine who controlled Congress.
²³

One would think that a party that has inflicted Rosa DeLauro, Nita Lowey, Dennis Kucinich, Jerry Nadler, and Hunk of Burning Love Henry Waxman on the world would try to downplay looks as an issue, but these wouldn't be the first average-looking Democrats hailed as beauty queens. Among the raft of liberals we're required to pretend are dazzling beauties are Christiane Amanpour, Sandra Bernhard, Bernardine Dohrn, Gloria Steinem, and Tina Fey, who looks a lot more like Elvis Costello than Sarah Palin.

Not being a liberal, I don't particularly care what people look like, but I note that Miss America Pageant winners are almost always from the conservative South. Liberals also demanded that we all pretend the unathletic fat kid from Arkansas was a dreamboat—at least until his wife ran against Obama. For years, we'D been told how unbelievably sexy Bill Clinton is. If a beer belly, bloated cheeks, tiny, close-set eyes, and a big head equals handsome, where the hell is Newt Gingrich's modeling contract?

When a liberal male is described as having “movie-star looks,” it apparently means: “hotter than Henry Waxman.” When a liberal female is described as the reincarnation of Jackie O, that means: a Democratic woman who is less physically repulsive than Bella Abzug. A conservative female who is compared to Marie Antoinette is a stylish dresser; if she's called a “bimbo,” that means she's gorgeous. Reporters use a string of adjectives to describe a presidential candidate's wife not because readers are clamoring to know what Michelle Obama or Cindy McCain looks like. Remember, the purpose of news is not to inform, but to promote the left-wing agenda. Calling a public figure beautiful and stylish is a reporter's way of saying “thank you for supporting socialized health care”—which is at least better than Nina Burleigh's proposed
method of thanking Clinton for keeping abortion legal. (It involved a sexual act for which Monica Lewinsky will, ahem, go down in history.)

About once every half-century, the Democrats manage to produce a female who doesn't look like Bella Abzug. This always leads to fainting spells in the pressrooms and we have to hear about “Camelot” for the next half-century (and counting). There are books, operas, and songs about Jacqueline Kennedy's style for her singular accomplishment of looking like a Republican while being married to a Democrat.

The constant stream of put-downs of Republican women and exaggerated glamorization of Democratic women is so much a part of the fabric of news that no one even notices anymore. The identical characteristic will be given an entirely different cast based purely on ideology. Liberals are intelligent, conservatives are bookish; liberals are bubbly, conservatives are airheads; liberals are slender, conservatives are rail-thin; liberals are passionate, conservatives are angry; liberals are good with children, conservatives are suspected pedophiles.

Tipper Gore and Laura Bush were about as similar as any two potential first ladies could be: They were both attractive, of about the same age and body type; both had warm personalities and wore basic, classic clothing. And yet when their husbands were running against each other for president in 2000, a single column comparing their styles produced diametrically opposed adjectives for the two possible first ladies:

Just in case it still wasn't clear enough that Tipper was an effervescent dynamo likely to produce “a book of first lady photographs,” while Laura was a dreary bore, the column stated outright, “ ‘Tipper' Gore has the edge in pizzazz over Laura Bush.”
²⁴

What is the point of the media going into laborious detail about the physical appearance of famous people, anyway? They're famous— we know what they look like. The media try to change that, too. In a stunning presentation, updated yearly, Ron Robinson of Young America's Foundation puts on a slide show of the photos of conservatives and liberals from the covers of
Time
and
Newsweek.
Not only are there more covers with liberals, by about 20 to 1—and that's just covers of Obama—but liberals are always bathed in a beatific light, while conservatives are photographed in lighting that casts a menacing glow and always seem to show five o'clock shadows. (It's even worse for the conservative men!) When Robinson gave his presentation at
Time
magazine itself, one editor admitted they chose a background color for Newt Gingrich that would make him look sinister. The cover shots of Pat Buchanan and Rush Limbaugh were also grim. This is as opposed to their cover shots of Obama, which typically show him riding a flying white stallion while showering the countryside with gold dust.

Laura Bush may have been somewhat more “bookish” than Tipper, probably about the same as Michelle Obama compared with Cindy McCain. But while Laura Bush was repeatedly called “bookish,” Michelle Obama was only “intellectual” and “brainy,” both of which might come as news to anyone who had read her senior thesis at Princeton. Michelle wrote her thesis on being black at Princeton because blacks attending Ivy League schools are required by law to major in Being Black. She penned such gems as: “In defining the concept of identification or the ability to identify with the black community, I based my definition on the premise that there is a distinctive black culture very different from white culture.”
²⁵
As the blog Sweetness
&
Light says, “No wonder they wanted [her thesis] locked up until after the elections were safely over.”
²⁶

Brainy!

Democratic women will be praised for their fashion sense, while Republicans dressed nearly identically will draw contempt for their outfits. Reviewing the clothing on ABC's
The View,
well-known fashion plate Troy Patterson of
Slate
magazine raved about Michelle Obama's sleeveless black-and-white dress. Patterson approvingly quoted cohost Sherri Shepherd exclaiming to Michelle, “You are setting this trend where everyone wants to go sleeveless!”
The View's
conservative cohost Elisabeth Hasselbeck was wearing an outfit that would have been appropriate at the exact same cocktail party as Michelle, and yet her one-sleeve blouse came in for sputtering vitriol from Patterson, who said her outfit “treaded a fine line between merely inappropriate and plainly sluttish.”
²⁷

Laura Bush was savaged for her “prim,” “schoolmarm” looks with the deepest cut of all: “She's no Jackie O…. And that is putting it politely.”
²⁸
But guess who was Jackie O? That's right! Michelle Obama. Democrats simply tell the media how they would like to be described, and the media obey. Jackie Kennedy called her husband's presidency “Camelot,” so the press called it Camelot. Clinton wanted to be Elvis, so he was Elvis, albeit the fat one. Barack Obama told a meeting of journalists in August 2007 that his wife was “the Jackie O from the hood,”
²⁹
and hundreds of columns poured forth describing Mrs. Obama as the spitting image of Jackie O. At least that was one way the Obamas were very much like the Kennedys: It was all about cultivating an image.

To be fair, Obama probably didn't need to tell anyone what image Michelle Obama was going for. Her obvious imitation of Jackie O's style—the flipped-under hair, the sleeveless A-line dresses, the short strands of fake pearls—would have been laughable if done by anyone other than a media-designated saint.

A column in the
Seattle Times
purred that Michelle Obama proved “Jackie Kennedy didn't close the book on class, grace and style.”
³⁰
A McClatchy Newspapers columnist described her as “Clair Huxtable–
meets–Jackie Kennedy.”
³¹
Philadelphia Inquirer
columnist Karen Heller asked, “You know who looks like Jackie Kennedy? Michelle Obama.”
³²
She added helpfully, “Jackie Kennedy was the most popular first lady in history.”
³³
Another columnist said, “When Barack and Michelle Obama take the stage at the Democratic National Convention, comparisons will be invoked with John and Jackie Kennedy.”
³⁴
Shelly Branch, author of the book
What Would Jackie Do?,
excitedly reported on the “growing buzz about the striking similarities between [Michelle Obama] and former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy.”
³⁵
So, apparently, what Jackie would do is slavishly imitate another person's style, which I believe is the definition of having no innate sense of style. Adopting the Jack-Ryan-divorce-papers standard of what newspaper readers want to know, I think it would be “interesting” to see what the authors of these glowing articles about Ms. Obama look like.