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Friday, Jul 10, 2009
Readers ask, Camille dishes: On Democratic woes, the Weather Underground, Kanye West, Freud, alleged gay genes and "the long sleep."
By Camille Paglia
Read more: Camille Paglia, Opinion
Jan. 14, 2009 | Dear Camille,
When Obama is reading off a teleprompter or in a scripted environment like a debate (where the game is to plug in your prepared sound bites regardless of the question), he comes across as a magnificent and inspiring speaker. But there were several times during the campaign where he appeared to trip all over himself when off script.
Now in his comments about the Blagojevich mess, he comes across badly and makes it look like we are in for another four (or eight) years of people having to carefully parse every word. Do you get that same impression to any extent, and if so, does it cause you concern?
Blake Krass
Pflugerville, Texas
Because my support for Obama was based on his steady, tempered performance in the debates rather than on his soaring but rather vague speeches, I have never been troubled by any gap between his mundane and rhetorical selves. The widespread notion that Obama is inarticulate came from stunt tapes broadcast on conservative talk radio where his occasional hesitations on the road were stitched together to make him sound like a stuttering Bugs Bunny.
Who wouldn't misspeak from fatigue on the long, brutal national campaign trail? Only candidates popping pep pills or relying on a Versailles-like staff of flunkies to feed them talking points and buzzwords. Considering what a relative newcomer he is, Obama endured that punishing trial by fire amazingly well. Since the election, he has also projected a cordial dignity and thoughtful reserve that seem to have impressed and reassured observers across the political spectrum.
However, you are quite right to call the controversy over the indictment of buffoonishly sly Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich a "mess." That the normally deft Obama team mishandled its rapid response to it was obvious from the get-go. Obama's first statements about his and his staff's communications with Blagojevich were inadequate at best and misleading at worst. Then there was a second stage of needless blunders when Obama opposed the tarnished Blagojevich's perfectly legal appointment of Roland Burris to fill Obama's vacated Senate seat -- a foolishly hard line that the president-elect inevitably had to reverse.
The usual tranquil transition period between an election and inauguration has certainly been overshadowed by the murky Blagojevich scandal, but I think most reasonable people would give Obama a pass on it. Any new president must learn crisis management the hard way. No evidence to date directly implicates Obama in Blagojevich's follies. But Obama's future chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, the arrogant Chicago scrapper who was reportedly a conduit to the governor, already seems like an albatross who should be thrown overboard as soon as possible. Nobody wants a dawning presidency addicted so soon to stonewalling, casuistry and the Nixonian dark arts of the modified limited hangout.
I wish to present an observation, of sorts, from an evil conservative view.
I am not in the least bit surprised that the Obama crew is shaping up to look like a Clinton retread crew because it seems to me that the Clinton years are the only real benchmark of accomplishment that Democrats today can look to. Sure, they wiped up the Republicans in '06 and '08, but they haven't done much of anything of substance except torpedo Congress's already historically abysmal approval ratings and piss off their own Capitol Hill staffers. If anyone ought to be allowed (or encouraged) to smoke, it would be these D.C. staffers, and are you really willing to screw with that?
It is going to be interesting to see how the Democrat Party is able to hold up in this first year or so internally. In my humble opinion, Obama is not the leader of this party -- Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are -- and to see how Obama grabs hold of Dem leadership responsibilities, if at all, will be interesting. I think that the party is at a crossroads, with political posturing at the top (Obama's rapidly backpedaling policy plans), power and ego struggles (Hillary, Harry, Nancy, etc.) and a voter base that is starting to look and sound more like British Labour and that grows less tolerant of electoral posturing and only more restless in its pursuit of what I can only describe as radical change.
Obama will certainly have his hands full with his band of bozos, and because they control Congress and the White House, whichever way they pull themselves, so go the rest of us. Oh well, in God I trust, and in his faithful servant, John Browning.
Daine Zaccheo
469th FMC Info Sys Support Spc
Palm Bay, Fla., by way of Balad, Iraq
Thank you for your tart perspective on the travails of my party! In invoking God's "faithful servant" John Browning, I assume you are referring to the innovative Mormon gunsmith (1855-1926) who invented a staggering number of weapons and who is considered the godfather of today's automatic and semiautomatic firearms.
Surely both parties should be rooting for Congress to dig in its heels and assert its constitutional authority vis-à-vis the White House. The U.S. was meant to have a vigorous tripartite government, which has been weakened by the post-Nixon slide toward an ad hoc imperial presidency. The legislative branch shouldn't roll over and play dead like a cutesy pound puppy.
On the other hand, I agree with you that Congress has come across lately like a clumsy, flea-bitten bunch of "bozos." Its poll ratings are lower than stinking swamp mud. I have a soft spot for the nimble Nancy Pelosi, a master of the ladylike stiletto thrust, but Harry Reid is a cadaverous horse's ass of mammoth proportions. How in the world did that whiny, sniveling incompetent end up as Senate majority leader? Give him the hook! As for the "radical change" that you fear, it's hard to imagine (short of a crisis-driven imposition of martial law) how that will ever happen in our sluggish, consensus-driven political system.
Dick Cavett is someone whose column I almost always enjoy very much. But I agree that he put down Sarah Palin's use of language for no good reason. The example he cited (she was discussing Darfur and what Alaska had done in view of events there) was an almost perfect example of coherent thought on her part if you recognize that a longish sentence includes a parenthetical aside.
Here is the bit he cites in his column: "My concern has been the atrocities there in Darfur and the relevance to me with that issue as we spoke about Africa and some of the countries there that were kind of the people succumbing to the dictators and the corruption of some collapsed governments on the continent, the relevance was Alaska's investment in Darfur with some of our permanent fund dollars."
Here is my own very minor rework of her sentence (rework in italics): "My concern has been the atrocities there in Darfur and the relevance to me with that issue (as we spoke about Africa and some of the countries there where we see the people succumbing to the dictators and the corruption of some collapsed governments on the continent), the relevance was Alaska's investment in Darfur with some of our permanent fund dollars."
When she spoke, the sense of what she meant was clear, and a minor edit makes the sentence good enough for a print medium.
No doubt she can be attacked in several areas on substance, but it is interesting and strange that instead people engage in elitist attacks on her for being a hunter or for the way she talks. In point of fact, she is a very able communicator, as time will bear out, I am sure, and yet the number of people on the left who recognize her political gifts is very small.
Cavett will come back and entertain me again soon, I am sure, but this is one case where he's just lost his objectivity and comes off sounding like a prig.
Blaine Walgren
Excellent analysis! You have cut the entire ground out from beneath Dick Cavett's lofty claim of grammatical superiority to Sarah Palin by exposing his inability to sense a simple parenthesis in a spoken passage. I laughed heartily at your e-mail, for which I am most appreciative.
As I have repeatedly said in this column, I have never had the slightest problem in understanding Sarah Palin's meaning at any time. On the contrary, I have positively enjoyed her fresh, natural, rapid delivery with its syncopated stops and slides -- a fabulous example of which was the way (in her recent interview with John Ziegler) that she used a soft, swooping satiric undertone to zing Katie Couric's dippy narcissism and to assert her own outrage as a "mama grizzly" at libels against her family.
Ideology-driven attacks on Palin became clotted liberal clichés within 24 hours of her introduction as John McCain's running mate. What a bunch of tittering lemmings the urban elite have become in this country. From Couric's vicious manipulations of video clips to Cavett's bourgeois platitudes, the preemptive strike on Palin as a potential presidential candidate has grossly misfired. Whatever legitimate objections may be raised to Palin on political grounds (explored, for example, by David Talbot in Salon) have been lost in the amoral overkill that has defamed a self-made woman of concrete achievement in the public realm.
And let me take this opportunity to say that of all the innumerable print and broadcast journalists who have interviewed me in the U.S. and abroad since I arrived on the scene nearly 20 years ago, Katie Couric was definitively the stupidest. As a guest on NBC's "Today" show during my 1992 book tour, I was astounded by Couric's small, humorless, agenda-ridden mind, still registered in that pinched, tinny monotone that makes me rush across the room to change stations whenever her banal mini-editorials blare out at 5 p.m. on the CBS radio network. And of course I would never spoil my dinner by tuning into Couric's TV evening news show. That sallow, wizened, drum-tight, cosmetic mummification look is not an appetite enhancer outside of Manhattan or L.A. There's many a moose in Alaska with greater charm and pizazz.
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