No Laughter Allowed?

Sometimes I wonder whether the media are draining every last ounce of spontaneity out of politics.

Every candidate now knows, at any moment of the day or night, anything you say can and will be used against you.

Take this harmless Hillary joke. Repeating a question from an Iowa resident over the weekend, she says the person wanted to know "what in my background equips me to deal with evil and bad men"--and shoots the audience a look. Everyone laughs.

OMG! Was she taking about Bill?? Who else could she have meant? Another excuse to talk about The Marriage!

So the senator gets peppered with questions by reporters, expresses exasperation ("You guys keep telling me, 'Lighten up, be funny' ") and winds up on the cover of the New York Post and the bite keeps getting replayed on television. So much for her position on Iraq.

If we've left no room for humor in politics, we've created a problem. One of the reasons that John McCain got good press in 2000 is that he let reporters ride around with him on his bus, and since they were getting an unvarnished view of the man, warts and all, they didn't jump on every wisecrack and try to pump it up into news. In a terrific Vanity Fair profile, Todd Purdum frames the question this way: "What's so different about--and potentially risky for--McCain is his perpetual willingness to think out loud, unplugged and unfiltered."

Most candidates aren't--and that's in part because of the media's perpetual "gotcha" stance. Why risk having a one-liner turn into a one-week controversy? This, in turn, gives rise to the poll-tested, focus-grouped, blow-dried robo-pols--precisely the sort that reporters complain are boring. They are boring. But it's become dangerous to be interesting.

Why does everyone feel free to give Hillary Rodham Clinton personal advice? The latest is from London Daily Mail blogger Don Surber:

"Let's cut to the chase: The Hillary campaign is held back by one man. Divorce him.

"Divorce is a family value. My maternal grandmother divorced her first husband. My mother divorced my father. Three of my four sisters are divorced. Hell, Tammy Wynette divorced. Twice.

"Divorce is what happens when the marriage contract is irreparably damaged. It has nothing to do with love, but everything to do with survival.

"Every day, hundreds of young women with little babies to feed work up the courage to divorce the rat they married. Hillary should dump him already.