Commentary

Dropping Bombs

FTR-Dropping Bombs-The New YorkerWhat's the role of ridicule in politics?

Think of ridicule - the blowtorch of rhetoric, the scimitar of political life - as a self-styled member of a dysfunctional family. Ridicule is the one who blasts pretension, demolishes artifice, scorches phoniness. As a family member, Ridicule would be particularly annoying. A smartmouth. A pest. Occasionally a wit. Occasionally a monster.

Burlesque, Caricature and Lampoon would be the slightly safer siblings, gathered 'round the family tv set, while Satire - devious, brilliant, scrupulously controlled avatar of anger - sits quietly up in his ivory tower, plotting his next move.


In American politics, he rarely gets the opportunity. In fact, satire hardly ever even gets into the broader landscape of American culture, unless your name happens to be Sedaris or Chris Buckley or (maybe) Saturday Night Live. Satire's usually too subtle, and too complicated; it has a long windup. We seem to respond better to the more visceral members of this family, the ones that deal in full-force body blows or dismemberment, not in a carefully modulated brain tease that might actually require us to think, or understand references, connections, underlying meanings and double-double-meanings.

The perils of satire in American political life are self-evident, and even more so when a candidate for president happens to be the first biracial person in U.S. history to win a major-party nomination - or the first female Republican to win one for vice president.

Satire of either candidate is bound to be misconstrued, which is what happened with the July 13 cover of The New Yorker by veteran artist Barry Blitt. Fist bumps. Portrait of a satisfied Osama Bin Laden hanging over the Oval Office fireplace. Michelle Obama in Che Guevara garb, with afro, and packing heat. Here was full-blown satire, delivering a quick uppercut to the jaw of every right-wing blowhard out there who'd maligned the Obamas as terrorist stalking-horses. No one understood it, from the left or right; worse yet, most took it at face value. Beaten down, Satire once again limped off the field of battle, too smart for its own good.

The Associated Press reported in September that the raciest campaign ads, the ones that go for the jugular, are videos released through the online backdoor. The Obama and McCain camps have avoided traditional media buys when it comes to the most provocative spots. These types of ads used to be slipped into direct mail or radio. New videos have popped up at the rate of one or two a day since the conventions, but only about five spots have been a part of the TV ad buy - approximately $15 million by late September.

There's a lesson to be learned here as the campaigns of Barack Obama and John McCain enter their final month. If Satire can't be used as a battlefield weapon, then what member of this family can? Could the answer be Ridicule?
Bulletin: Under the auspices of hard-hitting new campaign manager Steve Schmidt, the McCain campaign produces a commercial that compares Obama to the biggest celebrities on the planet - also the biggest airheads on the planet.
Bulletin: Searching for an antidote to mid-September Palin-mania, the Obama campaign cooks up a line that turns Sarah Palin's own words against her. "You can put lipstick on a pig. It's still a pig," he said of the McCain policies. (Her line at the Republican National Convention in September: "What's the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? Lipstick.")

Problem was, the jabs bombed. The McCain hit on Obama was deemed peculiar, the Obama one on Palin, sexist. And so there's a lesson to be learned here. As the 2008 presidential race heads into its final and desperately humorless turn, a weary and anxious electorate waits expectantly: Which candidate will be the first to come up with a truly effective, memorable and history-altering zetz? Ridicule has yet to enter the stage, but will it ever?

Ridicule has had a long claim on political campaigns, particularly in the TV age. To orient oneself quickly to particularly sensational examples, a mere two words suffice - "Dukakis" and "tank." Or another, in three words: "Where's the beef?" Or another: "Quayle" and "potatoe" [sic]. Ridicule can be so powerful, so effective
that it can take an entire campaign - a vast field of action, of dueling promises and ideas, of thousands, of millions of sound bites and news stories on CNN or the evening news, and hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of campaign ads - and reduce it all to one phrase or a few syllables. This is the stuff that sticks, even if nothing else of a campaign can be recalled 10, 20, 30 years later. These are the words that can change fortunes and history. Sometimes these words (or images) will be used in a campaign commercial, sometimes not, but at its most effective, ridicule is a powerful mnemonic, and victory can go to the campaign that can harness it.

Ridicule's role in political advertising becomes particularly vivid on TV because you really don't even need a full 30 seconds to convey the ridiculous. One quick sound bite will suffice. When Sen. John F. Kennedy ran against Vice President Richard Nixon, an offhand Eisenhower quote helped sink his rival. Asked by reporters to give an example of an idea of Nixon's he had adopted, a genial and forgetful President Eisenhower joked, "If you give me a week, I might think of one. I don't remember." The Kennedy campaign used the line in its own ads. (Adlai Stevenson eschewed ridicule in his two campaigns against Ike in favor of satire, and you know where that got him.)

Will Ridicule work its black magic this time? If not, there's always Burlesque, Caricature and Lampoon. We've still got a month to go.

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