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A small point about the debate last Friday: Obama called McCain "John" routinely in the first part of the debate, switching to "Senator McCain" only after McCain pointedly refused to return the favor by saying "Barack," ever. In debators' terms, it was a clear win for McCain: He stiff-armed his opponent and took for himself more authority. As I was watching, I kept thinking Obama should stop, and then eventually he did.
But Saturday-morning quarterbacking by looking at the polls Rosa cites, I wonder if some voters in the middle read Obama's concessional speech patterns in a different way. LIke Obama's statements that McCain is right about various points, the friendly wave of "John" could be read as confident and magnanimous. Maybe Obama will be more aggressive in the next debate—certainly he'll hear lots of exhortations to move in that direction. But I wonder if these courtly overtures served a purpose, even if McCain is using it against him in the ad he cut before the debate ended. If nothing else, it says something that Obama came off as McCain's equal even while repeating, "John is absolutely right."
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So I thought McCain did slightly "better" in the debate than Obama. Like Dahlia, I thought Obama came across as wonky—he had trouble shifting from long, rather academic-sounding answers to short and punchy. I though McCain seemed folksy and confident while Obama seemed annoyed and sometimes defensive. McCain was aggressive; Obama was a little overly polite. McCain had a theme: "Me experienced, Obama naive." Obama—well, he was being too complicated.
But what do I know? The preliminary post-debate polls and focus groups suggest that most people saw something different in that debate. A CBS post-debate poll of 500 uncommitted voters saw 39 percent saying Obama won, 24 percent saying McCain won, and the rest declaring it a draw. And the CBS poll doesn't seem to be an outlier. According to the Financial Times:
A CNN survey of viewers said 51 per cent thought Mr Obama had won the debate, compared with 38 per cent for Mr McCain, with a big majority of women backing Mr Obama. In a Fox News focus group most viewers said Mr Obama had emerged the winner.
Same with the Frank Luntz and Stanley Greenberg focus groups.
Strikes me that most media commentators reacted as I did. But are we parsing these debates in a way that no one else was, making mountains out of too many molehills? (Or did everyone else just fall asleep halfway through the debate?)
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OK, I think I heard John McCain say, in his debate with Obama, that a) he was going to be voting for the $700 billion recovery plan ("Sure." Well, really, who knew?), and b) that if elected president, he would cope with the resulting budget squeeze by having "a spending freeze on everything but defense, veteran affairs and entitlement programs."
Lots could be said about this. (Obama: "The problem with a spending freeze is you're using a hatchet where you need a scalpel.") But what's bugging me is the notion that there is Only One Truly Special Group of People in the Country—only one group worthy of specifically exempting from an across-the-board spending freeze—and that's veterans. Naturally.
Don't get me wrong, veterans have put up with danger, hardship, and a great deal of general bureaucratic idiocy on behalf of our often muddle-headed country and deserve to have this muddle-headed country treat them with respect and concern. Overhauling and improving health, mental health, and educational benefits for veterans should be a national priority. But in a time of economic and foreign-policy crisis, should it be the only priority, aside from defense spending and maintaining entitlement programs? Really, John? Are programs that benefit veterans clearly more important than infant and child health programs? Than programs to prevent the further spread of HIV/AIDS? Than investments in critical infrastructure? Than increasing port security? Than early childhood education? Than improving first-responder capacity? Really?
I don't think McCain really believes that, but sacrilization of "our troops," and by extension, all veterans, has become standard in American civic religion. Beats blaming the troops for the mistakes and bad acts of their civilian commander in chief, no question—but it's not a particularly healthy state of affairs, either.
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I suppose the eternal mystery of this campaign remains that the same Barack Obama who is one of the most gifted speakers and writers of our lifetimes can manage to be such a bland, wonky, tentative debater. My own sense is that after watching John McCain careening around the country all week on the express train to Crazyville, bland and wonky seems kind of reassuring. I could wish that Obama would stop agreeing with McCain and praising his great leadership, especially after the ninth time McCain implied he wasn’t quite ready to trade in his pull-ups for the Batman underpants.
Still. Big props to McCain for stating that we “must never torture a prisoner ever again.” It shows that McCain—unlike Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Gonzales, Mukasey, Feith. et al—is sufficiently honest to admit that yes we have been torturing prisoners and yes it’s shocking. McCain has said this before although he also disappointed a lot of us when he declined to vote last winter to force the CIA to conform their interrogation techniques to the Army Field Manual (enabling the United States to officially ban torture while still retaining the ability to say, “I know a guy”). If both candidates for president can say aloud that the United States has permitted torture, and understand the significance of that for the rest of the world, it gives me some cause for hope. Not for war crimes prosecutions. I didn’t say I’m drunk here. But at least for some kind of moral reckoning when all this insanity comes to an end.
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It looks like the Sarah Palin rape-kit myth is still alive and flourishing. A reader sent along this editorial in the New York Times today by Dorothy Samuels decrying the policy and asking Palin to give voters an explanation.
Unfortunately, all this piece does is help perpetuate the myth. Thankfully, in addition to the blog posts I linked to in my first post about this, Jim Geraghty at the National Review Online has done his own thorough debunking, which I quote from below.
Samuels writes: "[W]hen news of Wasilla's practice of billing rape victims got around, Alaska's State Legislature approved a bill in 2000 to stop it." However, the Alaska state legislature did NOT pass the bill in response to Wasilla's policy of charging rape victims. As Geraghty points out, the bill came about because hospitals were charging victims.
Lauree Hugonin, director of the Alaska Network on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault, spoke at several committee meetings. She noted in response to Smith's comment that while he had not found an instance where law enforcement has forwarded a bill, "hospitals have. It has happened in the Mat-Su Valley, on the Kenai Peninsula, and in Southeast, and that is why the bill is being brought forward."
Further evidence that the law was not targeted at Wasilla:
Yet in six committee meetings, Wasilla was never mentioned, even when the discussion turned to the specific topic of where victims were being charged. (The Matanuska-Susitna Valley, the surrounding region—the most densely populated region of the state, and roughly the size of West Virginia—is mentioned in passing.)
Samuels also quotes from an article in the local Wasilla paper that police chief Charlie Fallon didn't want to pass the burden along to taxpayers. That is an undeniably boneheaded and offensive statement. What she leaves out is his statement that he was TRYING to bill INSURANCE COMPANIES, not victims. "In the past we've charged the cost of exams to the victims insurance company when possible," is what he said. The story is old and incomplete. It doesn't say what Fallon would do if the insurance company rejected the claim. But the current mayor of Wasilla says there is no record of a victim being charged for a rape kit.
Lastly, Samuels claims that the Palin campaign has not addressed the issue and has released a statement saying only that "Prevention of domestic violence and sexual assault is a priority for Gov. Palin." However, Palin addressed this matter two weeks ago: "Palin spokeswoman Maria Comella told USA Today in an e-mail that the governor ‘does not believe, nor has she ever believed, that rape victims should have to pay for an evidence-gathering test.' "
I did make a small error of my own in my first post about this matter. I wrote that a quote from a Democratic legislator in Alaska that Palin likely didn't know about the policy brought me little comfort. I misread his quote. In fact, that legislator, Eric Croft, said he believed that Palin DID know what was going on, and he's helped smear Palin by saying that the legislation came about because of Wasilla.
I think we can all agree that victims should not have to pay for their rape kits. And billing insurance companies is a far from ideal solution. Reimbursing a victim with state money after she's already had to pay out of pocket is even worse. But it's a problem that's hardly been exclusive to Wasilla or Alaska. Fortunately, states have been quick to pass laws against such practices once word gets out.
But the fact remains that this is a nasty and untrue rumor about Sarah Palin that's been circulating for weeks. If you're an Obama supporter who gets frustrated that people still believe he's Muslim or won't put his hand on his heart for the Pledge of Allegiance, you should understand the frustration that Palin supporters feel when this slime is taken at face value.
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Because of the economic and political news, not much attention was paid to the speech by Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the United Nations. The representatives of the United States and Israel left the room, but Ahmadinejad was embraced and applauded by other member nations for an anti-Semitic rant right out of Der Sturmer. This Holocaust denier who weekly predicts a second Holocaust for the state of Israel, warned the assembled delegates of the powers of sly, manipulative Jews: “The dignity, integrity and rights of the American and European people are being played with by a small but deceitful number of people called Zionists. Although they are a minuscule minority, they have been dominating an important portion of the financial and monetary centers as well as the political decision-making centers of some European countries and the U.S. in a deceitful, complex and furtive manner.”
There is much, much more. Here are three good pieces by Bret Stephens, Eve Epstein, and Anne Bayefsky on how such Nazi-style speech has become terrifyingly acceptable. I looked for a liberal commentator who might mention how chilling it is that a leader of a country seeking to become a nuclear power would so boldly speak of his desires for the elimination of a sovereign state and a people, but couldn’t find one. I did, however, see a defense of Ahmadinejad in Salon by Juan Cole, whose only critical words were for Barack Obama for condemning the speech. Cole finds the Iranian leader to be “quirky” and “colorful,” and says, by way of illustrating Ahmadinejad’s benign intentions, that if he really had genocidal fantasies, the Iranian regime would already have murdered the Jews still living in that country. In case that leaves you with any doubt about the regime’s desires, here’s an article about a march today in Iran in which tens of thousands chanted “Death to Israel” and a book was released mocking the Holocaust with illustrations of hook-nosed Jews.
(Photo of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, President of the Islamic Republic of Iran by TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP/Getty Images)
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E.J. and Marjorie: agreed. Palin is so bad in the Couric interviews that I'm embarrassed for her. I'm also struck by how tight she sounds. Her throat seems constricted, and her voice is pitched higher, as often happens when women get nervous. When Hillary Clinton let herself show emotion and said she'd found her true voice back in January, Meghan pointed out that Hillary suddenly sounded natural. The timber of her speech deepened with her rising sense of comfort. It's like the opposite is happening with Palin. And in terms of women's presence on the national political scene, it's not a good thing.
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E.J. thanks for sharing Katie Couric's interview with Sarah Palin. All I have to say is OMG indeed! If this election weren't so serious, John McCain's pick would be one continuing laugh riot. I have lost all respect for him, not just because of Palin -- although she's the icing on the cake -- but because he has betrayed every single one of his many stated principles. McCain may not want to "lose a war in order to win an election," as he said of Obama, but he is certainly willing to compromise on everything else in order to win this election including possibly placing the country in the hands of a vice-president who is sooooo not ready for prime time.
I love how McCain is now trying to get out of debating Obama on Friday after a bad week of press coverage and an uptick in the polls by Obama. What a cynical stunt that reeks of fear, desperation, and shameless political posturing. So a two hour debate is going to somehow cut into his time single-handedly solving the economic crisis between now and Friday?
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This is what happens when you try to turn your VP pick into someone, as Betty Friedan used to say, "fluffy."
“I am honored to meet you,” Ms. Palin said.
“You are even more gorgeous than you are on the (inaudible),” said Asif Ali Zardqari, new president of Pakistan.
“You are so nice,” Ms. Palin replied. “Thank you.”
“Now I know why the whole of America is crazy about you,” Mr. Zardari continued. At which point an aide told the two to shake hands.
“I’m supposed to pose again,” Ms. Palin said.
“If he’s insisting,” Mr. Zardari said, “I might hug.”
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Here's the interview on the economy, and here's the interview on foreign policy. Total viewing time is about eight minutes.
I am speechless. She cannot possibly be this uninformed. You absolutely have to see these for yourself to believe them. These are self-mocking; they could be SNL appearances. Tina Fey couldn't possibly improve on this.
This is why they've been keeping her under wraps.
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When I'd read that Wasilla, during Sarah Palin's mayoral tenure, had a practice of charging victims for their "rape kits"—the forensic examination required to gather evidence against the perpetrator—I was as horrified as anyone else. The explanation that it was the policy of the local police chief doing the billing, and even a quote by a Democratic member of the state legislature that Palin probably knew nothing about the policy, brought little comfort. At the same time, it just didn't make any sense, so I tempered my horror with skepticism.
Fortunately, it turns out that skepticism wins the day. Thanks to very thorough debunkings by bloggers Charlie Martin of Explorations and Bob Owens of Confederate Yankee, we can put this bit of nastiness to rest.
First off, the Wasilla police chief, Charlie Fannon, is on record as having tried to bill victims' insurance companies, not the victims themselves, for the rape kits. In other towns in Alaska, hospitals were trying to bill victims, prompting an Alaska state law forbidding the practice. If this practice still seems creepy or exclusive to macho, rough-and-tumble Alaska, well, it happens to be the practice in other states, too, like North Carolina (until recently) and ... Illinois.
Some conservative bloggers are trying to play "gotcha" and point out that Barack Obama co-sponsored a bill in the Illinois state senate that provides state money to cover services provided to victims who have neither state aid or insurance, meaning that Illinois also tries to get insurance companies to pay up, just like little ol' Wasilla. Best I can tell from my rudimentary reading of the Illinois code, Obama co-sponsored an amendment to existing legislation that already had the insurance clause in there, and the amendment had nothing to do with rape kits. So, I'm not going to engage in gotcha-ism. We could play that game all day long.
What bothers me is that, while the media has been quick to investigate and shoot down every claim that Sarah Palin makes—that she stopped the Bridge to Nowhere, that she opposes earmarks—the nasty rumors are taken at face value. It takes bloggers, working on their own time and with tools no fancier than Google, to figure out that she's not personally sending bills for $1,200 to traumatized rape victims and that no, she did NOT cut funding for teen mothers, unless you define "cut" as not providing as much of a budget increase as had been had asked for (same with funding "cuts" for Catholic Charities and the Special Olympics).
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At the risk of violating landlord-tenant confidentiality, Dahlia, I want to tell a story that may make you trust Campbell Brown on this.
I once had a new tenant moving into a small Adams Morgan apartment my husband and I owned as an investment. The painter had been a bit sloppy about spattering, and the new renter asked me to have him come back and clean up the now-hardened paint along the baseboard floor. I knew he would drag his feet on completing this chore, so I told the new tenant I preferred not to bother him. She looked at me straight in the eye and asked, "Is this how it's going to be, Bonnie?" My considered answer was, "No, I’ll come personally this Sunday and wash your floor," which I did. After that, Campbell Brown, then a young campaign reporter at NBC, was an ideal tenant, and she and I never had another problem.
I now picture Campbell looking Sarah Palin in the eye with a similar expression and asking her the same question, Gov. Palin, is this how it's going to be? and understand why the McCain campaign is trying so hard to keep them apart.
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Dahlia, my suspicion is that the McCain campaign doesn't really know what to do with her. They are afraid not that she'll say something stupid and embarrassing but that she'll say something too street-smart, or wicked, or aggressive. A woman with her reckless confidence might be appealing to conservative women but not necessarily to men. Based on nothing but my intuition, I'm guessing part of the reason the Palin effect is fading so fast is that they've tried so hard to turn her into a pet—adorable, as you say, but mute. So now she's fetching but useless. And who else could we blame but her male handlers? It can't possibly be her choice. One suspects she would love to take the liberal media on, given the chance.
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Campbell Brown is not the first commentator to claim that the McCain campaign’s monthlong muzzling of Sarah Palin represents “sexism” although she’s probably the most forceful. Andrew Sullivan has also railed against the sexism of the McCain campaign—which has more or less treated Gov. Palin like the Bush twins were treated—adorable but off-limits.
Not sure what I think about the tactic of blaming the boys for this, though. On the one hand it’s a clever response to the Palin trick of turning every quirk of every eyebrow into “sexism.” On the other, I can’t help but respond to it the same way Nayeli reacts to the grotesque “Declare Yourself” ads. Is this really about someone else’s choice to sew Palin’s mouth shut? Yuck. Why do we keep talking about women as though they lack any agency? Are we really going to condemn the McCain campaign for treating her as an object, with demands that they “free” her? I understand why smart women in the media are enraged with Palin’s refusal to engage them. It’s appalling. But I don’t think it’s good for women to direct that rage at her male keepers, handlers, or advisers, either.
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There is an amazing photo spread across this morning's Washington Times of Sarah Palin, shot from behind the head of Colombian President Alvaro Uribe. (Sadly, I can't find it online). Palin, radiating confidence, looks like she wants to ravish him, if not suck his blood. Now we got absolutely no actual information out of this foreign affairs speed dating. ("It was fine," said Hamid Karzai. And: "We talked a lot about a lot of things.") So we are not insulting her to say it was just an image building exercise. And the image conveyed by this photo, featured in a friendly conservative paper is: That is one MANSLAYING v.p. candidate we got.
This, plus the "Hottest VP" buttons, plus the action figure in a miniskirt, makes one suspect that conservatives are promoting the sexy Christian girl image rather than offended by it, as they claim to be.
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Dahlia, I'm of the school that we should be easy on Todd. The campaign's description of this controversy is, of course, absurd: they claim people are criticizing him for being "an active dad who wants to be with his kids and with his wife when he's not on the slope," says a spokeswoman in the Washington Post story. But of course no one in his right mind would criticize him for that. That's all just part of the "First Dude" mythology, where he does kamikaze races with a broken arm while holding a child in the other. People criticize him for those strongarming phone calls to city and state officials, for helping to write the budget when he's just as unqualified as his wife.
Still, the reason I think we should lay off is because it's high time for a new First Lady/First Dude standard. There is some part of us that clings to the notion of First Person as arm candy, even though we know that's a fiction. In life, we expect a spouse to stand up for his or her wife or husband, to support them even to the point of thuggishness. We even admire that at some level. And yet we can't bring ourselves to transfer that attitude to politics.
I'd much prefer a First Lady who makes bullying midnight phone calls than one who runs anodyne library fairs or plants flowers, which seems like the last vestiges of the mid-century housewife. Lady Bird Johnson was able to turn her gardening into a national green crusade. But now the First Lady as domestic goddess always comes off as an awkward fit. I'd like for there to be a space for a Hillary-style wife to run a health care task force if she's qualified to do that. Or even a Cherie Blair, competent but removed. And it's hard to defend a new model if we instinctively slam on Todd.
And yes, you're right, Dahlia, our ambivalence on this question shows through. We need no more proof than the recent Greta Van Susteren interview of Todd, which is truly one of the most excruciatingly awkward conversations I've ever witnessed. Talking Points memo ran a geniusly edited version.
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With today's dust-up over blocking press access to her meet-and-greet with foreign dignitaries, Sarah Palin reminds me ever-more of the vice president she is absolutely not meant to invoke ... Dick Cheney. She assumes the press has base motives and scorns its watchdog function--today's lesson was that print reporters and TV producers can't even be trusted with the handshake pleasantries. As governor, she prizes secrecy and loyalty among her aides. She hides her e-mails in a private Yahoo account. Palin's rationale may be different than Cheney's, especially when it comes to her treatment of the press. She has skated on thin talking points when trying to discuss foreign and domestic policy in the few interviews she's granted since McCain chose her, and that's not Cheney's problem. But if she makes it to the office of the vice president, might she prefer that it remain a closed box? It looks like the answer is yes. Even if that's not the fresh look the McCain campaign wants to promise.
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Ewww, Nayeli, I agree with you entirely: Those ads are creepy. Worse than creepy, really: They're advertising the sexiness of violence against women. Duct-tape her! Sew up her mouth! Dominate that chick! The voting tag line reads as an afterthought to the main message that rape is just soooo hot. Maybe there's a secret plan to bring out the misogynists while suppressing the women's vote?
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Why are pro-voting ads so frequently creepy? When seemingly oblivious celebrities express their views on the candidates themselves, the results can be entertaining or mildly insightful. But for some reason all of the stars' charm and charisma gets lost when they start standing up for our electoral system. These ads for Declare Yourself, which feature a gagged and sobbing Jessica Alba, Christina Aguilera, and Andre 3000 among others, are particularly frightening to look at. By the ads' logic, if I don't vote I'm essentially submitting myself to a brutal vigilante silencing technique, like having my mouth stapled or bolted shut.
Declare Yourself isn't alone in its tendency to threaten and alienate its audience despite better intentions. The "Vote or Die" campaign that began in 2000 promotes its own violent message, particularly when organizer P. Diddy gets aggressive or weirdly personal about the issues. Aguilera is actually a double offender in the scary ad game, having already taped this eerie display (those eyes! that smile!) for Rock the Vote last May. Not that Madonna's original Rock the Vote ads or Gwyneth Paltrow's stilted plug for absentee ballots were any more appropriate or appealing.
It's obviously important to get the MTV set involved in this election, and perhaps there's nothing better than a good shock to get this point across. The Declare Yourself ads' literal "use it or lose it" message is certainly attention-grabbing, but do these violent images really make people want to vote? They just scare the heck out of me.
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Today’s Washington Post offers yet another fascinating article about the many ways in which Todd Palin holds a quasi-official role in Sarah Palin’s political world. Last week’s piece on the CNN Web site similarly highlighted the blurry boundary between Todd Palin’s efforts to help out his wife with the childcare and, er, run the state of Alaska. Todd Palin was copied on hundreds of e-mails having to do with state business (Palin campaign spokeswoman Meg Stapleton is quoted explaining, "[T]he governor is asking him to print them off or take care of business.") Salon describes him as helping write the state budget and generally “lurking around” the statehouse. The New York Times has him gaily co-exercising his wife’s veto power and browbeating her subordinates over the telephone.
We all agree that Todd Palin exerts some significant degree of unofficial power over his wife’s administration, but no one seems to know what to do with that fact. We are definitely not subjecting Todd Palin to the treatment experienced by Hillary Clinton when she and her husband first unwisely tried to market themselves as “two for the price of one.” That scared the bejeesus out of America. But reports of Todd Palin’s broad involvement in his wife’s governing is characterized variously as benign stay-at-home fathering that somehow spills over into personnel matters or some kind of inevitable Alaskan brand of personal/political blurriness.
I keep wondering if overtly criticizing Todd Palin’s outsize role in his wife’s executive life runs afoul of the ever-blurrier Palin sexism foul line. You would think the opposite would be true: If Sarah Palin is being assisted by a powerful male with an uncertain portfolio and a hankering for secrecy, wouldn’t that sexism? I know we live in upside-down world these days, but isn’t it sexist not to worry that the reason Sarah Palin can so effortlessly do it all is that the first dude is doing a lot?
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Julia asked the McCain campaign about the actual cost of Cindy McCain's convention outfit and got no answer. Here's my similiarly cold-shouldered question, which a reader sent in via e-mail and I posed to the campaign a couple of days ago: What's Sarah Palin's history of domestic travel? Which parts of the country other than Alaska and Idaho has she spent significant time in or visited briefly? How much time has she spent in the South, the Midwest, the East Coast, and doing what? The McCain campaign can exaggerate Palin's foreign travel history while she disparages the notion that a record of meeting with foreign dignitaries is a good thing in a vice presidential candidate, I suppose. But what's the argument for not explaining how well Palin knows the different regions of this country—the one she says she is ready to run? Has anyone seen a good run down that I've missed?
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Leave it to one of my journalistic heroes, Sydney Schanberg, to uncover war hero John McCain’s really puzzling behavior toward those POWs who never made it out of that cage in Hanoi. Forget how many houses the guy has; this is important stuff. Schanberg’s devastating investigative piece, which appears in this week’s Nation, begins: “John McCain, who has risen to political prominence on his image as a Vietnam POW war hero, has, inexplicably, worked very hard to hide from the public stunning information about American prisoners in Vietnam who, unlike him, didn't return home. Throughout his Senate career, McCain has quietly sponsored and pushed into federal law a set of prohibitions that keep the most revealing information about these men buried as classified documents. Thus the war hero who people would logically imagine as a determined crusader for the interests of POWs and their families became instead the strange champion of hiding the evidence and closing the books.’’ What about it, John? I’d really like to understand.
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I'll see you and raise you, Julia; I don't give a rip how much Cindy's outfit cost. Of all the phony-spumoni windows into character, the gotcha of pointing out that presidential candidates and their spouses have done well in life, and thus have nice stuff, really does nothing for me. (It's not eating arugula that makes you an elitist, or wearing diamonds that makes you Marie Antoinette, either; Cindy travels around the world doing relief work, so case closed on that front.) I just did a piece on Michelle Obama for Reader's Digest, too, and I saw where one reader had posted a complaint that if I weren't such a crazy Michelle lover, I would have pointed out the damning fact that she wears $500 Jimmy Choos! And not only that, but she sees a personal trainer! OK, duly noted, but are we really voting on shoes now? In the race for worst-shod, I guess Ralph Nader would win. :(
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Speaking of feeling sorry for Cindy McCain, I felt a spasm of pity for the woman during the GOP Convention, when Vanity Fair’s “Politics & Power” blog published a post called “Cindy McCain’s $300,000 Outfit” claiming that one of her looks—the mustard-colored one, with the evil-countess collar—cost 300 grand. The sensational figure quickly got picked up by the Huffington Post, Talking Points Memo, the Los Angeles Times, even U.S. News and World Report; one HuffPo commenter railed: “THIS LADY IS PERFECT EXAMPLE OF THE 'LET THEM EAT CAKE' AND 'LATTE DA' MENTALITY OF BOTH THE BUSHIES AND MAC AND WIFE.”
But the claim—republished everywhere—was just a guess! Vanity Fair’s “fashion department” estimated prices for most of Cindy’s clothes and accessories, and said her earrings, if real, were three-carat diamonds worth $280,000. The sum is plausible for a pair of earrings that size (I called Harry Winston, which had a particularly high-quality pair on sale for a cool half-million), but every diamond expert I consulted, from Norman Landsberg in New York’s diamond district to Jim Shigley at the Gemological Institute of America, said it is impossible to estimate the size of a diamond—and even to tell whether it is synthetic or natural—from a photograph. “How would anybody actually know unless they had the earrings in their hand to examine them?” Landsberg said. “It would just be an incorrect guess.” One point of difficulty: Diamonds come in different shapes and can be broad but shallow, or relatively narrow but deeper, so it’s tough to accurately estimate carat size even if you can make a good guess about the diameter of a gem in its setting. The editor of Vanity Fair’s site, Michael Hogan, said the figures came from “a source who is a major player in the diamond industry” who “provided the estimates for the number of carats and the price.” But unless the source is the guy who sold Cindy the studs, the guess has a pretty big margin of error.
So: Cindy may well have been wearing jewelry that cost more than a house. (When Slate e-mailed the campaign to ask, it never responded.) But perhaps, conscious that her husband had recently taken flak for wearing $500 loafers, she opted for fakes. Or perhaps the earrings were a gift. Or an heirloom. Or something she bought years ago, for much less. The point is, we don’t know. Vanity Fair was candid that it was just publishing estimates, but that didn't stop the figure from ricocheting around the Web. The whole flap struck me as a new low in price-tag journalism—the already basement-level practice of reporting on the cost of political figures’ haircuts, glasses, and clothes. I understand our obsession with what politicians spend, but we shouldn’t bash Cindy for extravagance when we don’t really know the details.
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Wow, this Detroit Free Press interview with Elizabeth Edwards about John's affair is only the eighth-most e-mailed story on their site today; that Motor City must be one exciting town. The true lede of the story, about half-way down, is that she postponed getting a mammogram "for about eight years even after a benign spot showed up on a test. She blames herself, saying that like many women, she was too busy with her children's lives and was preoccupied with trying to get pregnant.'' Though I continue to think the world of Elizabeth and pray for her every day—yup, that may be the least Slate-y thing ever said on this site—that is some world-class denial and explains a lot. (About her marriage, I mean.)
On the other hand, denial is not all bad! She says straight-up that she is consciously repositioning her husband in their children's eyes, buffing up his image and legacy where they are concerned. Because they are his constituents now, and she wants them to see "their father being an advocate for poverty, not for this current picture of him to be the one they carry with them, as young people and as adults." (She also makes clear that if it ever was all about him, those days are over: "[T]he decisions I make are based entirely on what is the best thing for my children.'') She did graduate work in English lit before going to law school, and she's also using her considerable narrative powers to reshape the story she tells herself. Which is something we all do as life goes on, though rarely as dramatically as this: "It's an ongoing process of finding your feet again, retelling your story to yourself. You thought you were living in one novel, and it turns out you were living in another." From Jane Austen to Jay McInerney—ouch.
Asking whether she's "over'' the betrayal is not the remotely the right question, she says, and points out that "had her leg been amputated, instead of a child dying or her husband having an affair, people would not ask: 'Are you over that leg thing yet?' " But while she's working on that leg thing, "she finds comfort in 'Anthem,' a Leonard Cohen song whose lyrics she has posted in her kitchen. ... Reciting the words, Edwards said: "Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in."
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People who've never been in a Wal-Mart think she is parochial because she has never summered in Tuscany.
—David Brooks on Sarah Palin
When I read the part of Maureen Dowd's column yesterday that said she had "sautéed'' herself in "Sarahville" and ventured into a Wal-Mart to see how the other half shops, I figured she had taken the David Brooks Challenge. I also was picturing her at the superstore in Alexandria -- and even that I would have given a pretty to see, as my granny used to say. (Was she wearing sunglasses? Did an assistant approach the tattooed woman for her?) But if she went personally to the pray-away-the-gay church in Wasilla, that's a whole other field trip.
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When I sat down with Cindy McCain for Reader's Digest, the most dramatic thing was how changed she was from 2000, not only physically, though that's also true, but in her demeanor. I remembered her from her husband's first run as being a lot of fun—not in the "Guy walks into a bar ...'' sense, but she'd always seemed genuinely amused, which is about all you can be as the circus is passing by. In those days, she sometimes said true things, too—not anything wildly out-of-school, but that she'd never before spent so much time with her husband, and that any day John trotted out a new joke was a happy, happy day. Also, I must say that I admired her as a wife, for being so supportive and all-in. When my husband wrote a book that came out that year, I remember promising him that at Politics & Prose, I was going to be on my very best Cindy McCain behavior for at least five minutes, and look at him like he was the last piece of cake; I wasn't completely kidding, either.
Now, though, she seems like an altogether different person, someone I hadn't met before. As I say in the piece, she's been through a lot since 2000, so maybe that's it. But she does seem far more brittle, like she's been warned that if she says anything remotely in keeping with human experience, someone will come and do harm to her loved ones. Part of her is really strong, or she would not go on these humanitarian trips all over creation; I think that's probably the truest part of her, and where she can really be herself. Another part of her, however, seems just plain petrified, and maybe that's not an irrational reaction, either.
Anyway, Dahlia, to answer what you asked me, I am not usually an asker of very tough questions—go with your strength, I say, and I'm more Larry King than Tim Russert. (I was going to say I was more Baba Wawa, but she and the rest of the "View' crew were tougher on John McCain than anyone else has been this cycle.) Yet I finally did get so frustrated with Cindy's beyond-boilerplate answers—she's never seen her husband lose his temper, they've never had an argument, he constantly amazes her because he's "so young''—that I did, to my own surprise and believe me to hers, blurt out a question about whether the stories that he'd called her an ugly name were true, I guess just to see if it mattered what I asked. Her response: "Oh, no! Oh no, no, no! Oh please; you know something? No. But I—no, absolutely not; preposterous!''
She did go out on a limb and suggest that abortion wouldn't be a big issue for voters this year: "You know something? We have a war, an economy that's failing right now, we have people without homes and jobs, we have an immigration issue and those are the issues of the day.'' But she declined to say whether she agreed with her husband's view that Viagra should be covered by insurance, while birth control pills should not: "You'd have to ask him with regard to what you're talking about.''
And, here is what maybe should have been my lede: She has the shiniest legs I've ever seen.
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Hey Melinda! Reading your great Readers Digest interview with Cindy McCain today all I could think was: Can she possibly be as frail as she sounds? With the exception of the great tale of her rolling up her sleeves to singlehandedly balance the campaign’s books, it all comes across like she’s made of crystal, and reflects quit