Our political Quote of the Day comes from former Reagan speechwriter and columnist Peggy Noonan, who (unintentionally) nails what is wrong with our politics today. She writes:
Third, President Obama can’t stand to be made fun of. His pride won’t allow it, his amour propre cannot countenance a joke at his own expense. If Mr. Romney lands a few very funny lines about the president’s leadership, Mr. Obama will freak out. That would be fun, wouldn’t it?
So that’s what it’s all about. Not to say that American politics doesn’t provide many examples of candidates using irony, or sarcasm or mockery. But she’s suggesting another goal now.
The point is to make fun of the other person running for office so they freak out. This is not quite the same as the mind game candidates may do during debates to throw their opponent off course.
And to be sure Barack Obama doesn’t elevate the political discourse when he talks about Romney’s dog Seamus. But here is Noonan suggesting that Romney make jokes specifically to make Obama freak out in his speeches.
So let me get this straight: American politics now needs LESS serious discussion of issues?
It needs to be FURTHER dumbed down?
The Romney campaign needs to not focus more on presenting a detailed, serious, affirmative case on why voters need to fire Obama and put Romney in the Oval office — detailing how he’d make decisions differently, the content of those decisions and policies, and how he’d manage the federal government differently, in specific terms?
To be sure, needling the other side is not new to American politics. The most famous was FDR’s swipe at GOPers who were attacking him. FDR brought his dog into the discussion:
But that’s quite different than advising a candidate to specifically try to “freak” another one out using humor.
Entertainment is filled with comedians famous and not so famous who had gigs where their jokes bombed badly. Or, they did a joke that got reported and as time went on they realized it may have been unwise to do it. I suspect that will be the case with Romney’s recent attempt at political standup which I don’t think will help him much with that segment of independent voters who might consider a serious, thoughtful Republican alternative to Obama — which is why Camp Obama jumped on it and released a new ad.
On the other hand, it’s clear both parties are running elections aimed at getting out their political bases — and at this point Romney seems to be running a truly base campaign.
And Noonan, rather than urging him to focus on forging an image of clarity that Ronald Reagan had forged, rather that suggesting that his sole focus should be to run a campaign of content — no one ever accused Reagan of lacking that — is suggesting it’d be useful t run a campaign making fun of Obama, to freak Obama out because that’d be a lot of fun, wouldn’t it? And yes, Rush Limbaugh would love it.
By her suggestion campaigns would look like this:
The only question would be:
How long would it be before one of the candidates called the other one a “pooh-pooh head?”
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.