By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 5, 2005
8:54 AM
Laura Bush certainly picked the right audience for her comedic debut.
If you're going to be funny and make fun of the president, do it in front of a couple thousand reporters.
I knew the first lady had done well at the White House correspondents dinner (even if some of the jokes were a little canned for my taste.) What I wasn't prepared for was the explosion of coverage casting her as, if not the next Jon Stewart, at least the administration's newest rock star.
Laura has long been more popular than her husband, which is why she spoke at the convention and played a key campaign role and sometimes shows up on Leno. And journalists, it turns out, are easy to seduce if you throw away the talking points and show you have a sense of humor. Nancy Reagan famously did this in 1982, mocking her f ashionista image with a 'Second Hand Rose' routine that brought her more sympathetic coverage.
Since first ladies are inherently less partisan figures, the press doesn't hesitate to build them up. Barbara Bush got her dog to write a book. Hillary was the subject of incredibly puffy profiles before getting hammered over Whitewater and the vast right-wing conspiracy. Laura has been portrayed as a friendly librarian, but didn't have a sharply defined image until now.
In Washington, though, even being funny is controversial, so some commentators have been ripping the Laura Bush routine--a flap that drew the attention of the newest NYT columnist, John Tierney:
"Her timing had the audience howling, and the edgier lines had them gasping. Jokes about pent-up sexual frustration from a prim librarian? With her born-again husband sitting there and enjoying it? And cameras recording it for Republican preachers who are determined to get sex out of schools and off television?
"For the mainly Democratic audience - this was a crowd of Washington journalists and luminaries from Hollywood and Manhattan - it was an evening of cognitive dissonance. How to reconcile this charming image on stage with the Bush they love to bash?
"Mrs. Bush's performance, and her husband's reaction, wasn't a shock to the reporters who cover the White House. For years they have tried to convince their friends outside Washington that Mr. Bush is actually not a close-minded dolt, and Mrs. Bush is no Stepford Wife or Church Lady. Yes, they're Texans who go to church and preach family values, but they're not yahoos or religious zealots.
"The coverage of Mrs. Bush's comic debut may change some minds, but for devout Bush-bashers, it's much easier to stay the course. If you live in a blue-state stronghold, a coastal city where you can go 24 hours without meeting any Republicans, it's consoling to think of the red staters as an alien bunch of strait-laced Bible thumpers.
"Otherwise, how do you explain why they're Republican?"
The colorfully named News Corpse says the media should take a deep breath:
"The humor-challenged media is tripping all over itself to to praise the First Lady's appearance before the White House Correspondents' Association. Apparently their funny bone twitches uncontrollably at the sight of Laura being able to read from a sheet of prepared jokes. The talk in the television press has ranged from, ' Get this woman her own show .' to, ' Maybe she should run against Hillary .'. . . .
"I suppose it's too much to ask that the people who brought us Monica Lewinsky, Chandra Levy, Michael Jackson, Terri Schiavo, the Old Pope, the New Pope, and Jennifer 'Runaway Bride' Wilbanks, would suddenly chose to avoid blowing things up beyond all sense of proportion."
American Spectator's Wlady Pleszczynski isn't backing the White House on this one:
"I'm not sure about Laura Bush. Imagine if Hillary had pushed her husband aside to deliver the presidential address at the annual White House Correspondents' Dinner. Then we'd have had two impeachments for one. As it is, her elegance, grace, and lovely elocution aside, Laura's Saturday surprise was appalling. How many scores did she settle -- with her own side?
"She mocked Dick Cheney's tricky health. She depicted Mrs. Cheney as a male strip club tipper. She described the three architects of the Iraq war as butchers and brutes. This is what passes for humor while we still have soldiers dying in Iraq? Her clincher of a laugh line -- 'George, if you really want to end tyranny in the world, you're going to have to stay up later' -- reduced her husband's singular goal to nothingness. Either that, or Laura confirmed she was on MoveOn's payroll.
"As it is, her description of her husband as a bore of a man who's asleep by nine each night should keep the Tina Brown/Maureen Dowds in business well into their retirement. Soon enough we learned that Laura herself actually has never watched 'Desperate Housewives,' but heard about the show from her two daughters, who just love it. That's reassuring: to be reminded of the twins' and their ghastly performance at the 2004 GOP convention. Which in turn reminded one of Laura's speech to the delegates, in which she joked about a father turning his children's clothes pink in the wash while their mother is off serving in Iraq. It simply is amazing how complacently accepting the princely Bush first couple is of all the cheapness and rot in our culture. (And I won't begin to analyze the Bush milking the male horse joke and what it says about the Bushes' cynical use of the religious right.)"
Aw, why not?
President's Intern (no, I don't think it's that one) has "never been so disappointed in anyone as I am in the First Lady, Laura Bush. Mrs. Bush, speaking at the recent Correspondents Dinner took it upon herself to embarrass and humilate President Bush in the eyes of the entire world.
"How can President Bush stand up to those North Koreans and Iranians now that they know his manhood is suspect? Mrs. Bush made it clear that the President goes to bed every night at 9 p.m. without doing anything 'exciting'. Well, perhaps saving the Free World from terrorism all day long just makes a man tired. Perhaps Mrs. Bush in her dowdy nightgowns just doesn't appeal to a man who can have any woman in the world -- assuming he weren't a righteous Christian.
"So what if President Bush isn't interested in sex. He's got other interests like putting tinpot dictators in their place. You don't need a big penis (excuse the expression) to invade Iraq. In fact, if President Clinton hadn't been having sex with anything that moves, maybe he would have had the time to invade a country or two. . . .
"You can bet that back home in Texas, when a wife says she's out watching male strippers, those concealed weapons Texans carry become unconcealed quick enough. If my Momma ever said anything like that about Daddy in public, you can be sure I'd be half an orphan with a father on probation."
But I'd bet the prez signed off on the monologue in advance.
David Corn of the Nation sees a cold political calculation:
"It was a good performance but weird, for Laura had jabbed at her husband for not reading books, had suggested he was no powerhouse in bed, and had encouraged everyone in the room--and all those children at home glued to C-SPAN--to envision George W. Bush pulling on the penis of a horse. (I wondered how social conservative leader James Dobson, who was scheduled to be at the dinner, reacted.) It was not hard to figure out why the White House decided to have Laura upstage George. Her approval rating is almost twice his, and his number--in the mid-40s--are at a record low. But an HBO routine? Afterward, both Al Franken and Bill Maher were complaining that they could not have gotten away with that horse joke."
Ramblings of an Incoherent Mind says the first lady was just a mouthpiece:
"so laura bush was a hit at the press dinner last night in washington. good for her. but better for her speech writer. while i do applaud laura bush for having the ability to wow the audience at the dinner, i think the media is making a big deal out of nothing. calling her a hit and a show stopper is a bit far fetched. if she personally wrote the jokes i would agree that she should be given so much credit. but she didn't. like all good politicians, and their wives by proxy, she had a good speech writer. the only credit that she deserves is for her ability for public speaking and her timing on the jokes. though that was probably scripted too."
Incoherence means never having to use capital letters, I guess.
For the defense, we have Instapunk:
"She is, beyond any possibility of doubt, a lady. Now she has demonstrated what many must have suspected anyway, that she also has a sense of humor and is acquainted with both sex (she has two daughters, for God's sake. Where did they come from?) and the personal foibles for which her husband has been mocked by others and himself. Only she can do it without rebuke. She is his wife. She is participating in an entertainment that has always been cast as a roast, of which the President is always the butt of jokes. There is (supposed to be) an air of good humor about the occasion, as well as the sharp use of humor."
On to less funny subjects. . . . Looks like there was something to those spying allegations involving AIPAC:
"Federal agents arrested a Pentagon analyst Wednesday, accusing him of illegally disclosing a highly classified document about possible attacks on American forces in Iraq to two employees of a pro-Israel lobbying group," says the New York Times.
"The military analyst, Lawrence A. Franklin, turned himself in to authorities this morning and was scheduled to make an initial appearance in federal court in Alexandria, Va., later in the afternoon. If convicted, he could be sentenced to a maximum of 10 years in prison."
The GOP continues to retreat on the ethics front:
"Two of the five Republicans on the House ethics committee will not participate in any investigation of potentially improper travel by House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, the panel's chairman said Wednesday," reports USA Today.
"Lamar Smith of Texas and Tom Cole of Oklahoma contributed to DeLay's legal defense fund last year, creating what outside ethics experts regarded as a conflict of interest."
The New Republic is still steamed at Bill Frist for speaking to a religious group that claims the Democrats are using filibusters "against people of faith."
"The substance of this charge is almost too stupid to rebut. But, as the majority leader has seen fit to lend it his imprimatur, here goes. We begin by noting that Democrats, despite their alleged hostility to believers, have somehow found it within themselves to approve the overwhelming majority of the president's judicial nominees--over 200 confirmed; ten blocked--even though a similarly overwhelming majority of nominees would probably term themselves God-fearing Christians. What's more, we can say with some confidence that, to the extent that a tiny handful of judges is indeed anathema to Senate Democrats, it is the nominees' extreme judicial and ideological views, not their religious ones, that makes them so. Many have the kind of contempt for settled precedent--particularly when it comes to abortion--to qualify them as 'activist judges,' to borrow a phrase. . . .
"Leveling the anti-faith charge against Democrats is, at heart, simply an exercise in the crudest form of identity politics--the idea that questioning a person's views is tantamount to discriminating against that person's identity group. It's the exact same kind of argument conservatives rightly rejected when African American liberals embraced it in the 1980s and 1990s. It is no more compelling now that the right is embracing it today.
"Frist's cry of religious bigotry is particularly ironic: What could be more religiously bigoted than claiming that anyone who disagrees with you must not be a true person of faith?"
Former Bush campaign aide Patrick Ruffini says the prez isn't doing as badly as the polls would suggest:
"One of the surest signs that people in Washington think too much of themselves is when they start genuflecting on public opinion. You get some good poll numbers on some garden variety policy question, and it's, 'The American people demand passage of this amendment in the nature of a substitute to the Conference Report!' Not so good numbers, and it's Senators on Face the Nation proclaiming thoughtfully, 'The American people just aren't there yet.' It's as if 287 million eyeballs were perpetually glued to C-SPAN, in alternating fits of extreme glee or disgust.
"Far too often, we are too reluctant to admit that the impolitic reality is often none of the above. On lofty questions of policy, perhaps it isn't that the American people are for or against -- but that they just don't care. Americans care more about Michael Jackson than judicial filibusters. They are more concerned with Paula Abdul than with the Pozen proposal for progressive indexing. And that is as it should be.
"Currently, how it works is that if your side is losing 64% to 29% in a capriciously worded poll question, you're dead in the water. But what pollsters rarely ever ask is how much people care about the question they just answered. How relevant is it to their lives? Did they discuss something similar at the dinner table last night? When it comes to most policy issues, the organic level of interest outside the Beltway approaches zero. And guess what? An 'overwhelming majority' of zero is still zero."
A socialist senator? Jon Margolis has this report in American Prospect:
"The People's Republic of Vermont strikes again.
"Four years ago, Senator Jim Jeffords delighted liberals and outraged conservatives by abandoning the Republican Party, depriving it (however briefly) of its Senate majority. Two years ago, Howard Dean's anti-war presidential candidacy made him (also briefly) the left's hero, the right's scourge.
"Now another left-of-center Vermonter is about to agitate the national body politic, inspiring liberals and infuriating conservatives, with this difference: Bernie Sanders is really a lefty. . . .
"'I will be running as an independent,' Sanders said in a telephone interview. 'But if you're asking my philosophy, yes, I am a Democratic socialist.'
"In the U.S. Senate? No mortal has uttered such a sentence and entered that body. But right now Sanders is a good bet to get elected. So if you thought the Republican Party, the conservative blogosphere, and the right-wing chatterers were aghast at Jeffords' defection and Dean's faux front-runnerdom, try to imagine the inner turmoil (and the outward manifestations thereof) provoked by the thought of a self-described socialist sullying the corridors and carpets once trod by Daniel Webster, William H. Taft, and Everett Dirksen. Serious breakdowns could occur."
Finally, a Daily Kos poster named acbonin criticized The Washington Post's Brian Faler for writing an "occasionally accurate article" on whether the FEC should impose requirements on bloggers. Then he writes:
"As Brian Saler frames it..."
Faler, Saler. Looks like occasional accuracy isn't limited to the Old Media.