John Nordin
It happened to President Obama this past week: a gaffe. He was introducing California Attorney General Kamala Harris, he called her “brilliant” and “dedicated” and “tough.” He also said that “she also happens to be, by far, the best looking attorney general in the country. It’s true! C’mon.” Oops. A mistake. A gaffe. Protests.
Questions to Obama’s press secretary: Was it sexual harassment? Is it a revealing comment? Does Obama have too many men in his inner circle, a “boys club” where women aren’t taken that seriously, as charged by former Communications Director Anita Dunn, who even called the White House a “hostile workplace.”
Every time a politician makes one of these controversial remarks, vast amounts of mass media time are devoted to discussing it. Think of Romney and his “binders full of women,” Vice President Joe Biden’s advice that a shotgun was a better weapon for home defense than an AR-15, Obama claiming he visited 57 states, McCain offering his wife as a contestant in a topless beauty pageant at a biker bar, Dennis Kucinich talking of seeing a UFO, Herman Cain getting lost on Libya, or Representative Todd Akin talking of “legitimate rape,” to name just a few.
Nor are gaffes limited to the recent past. There was the “Dean Scream” in 2004 that effectively ended John Dean’s campaign, Michael Dukakis looking foolish in a tank damaging his 1988 presidential bid, Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz telling a vulgar racial joke that caused his dismissal in 1976, Senator Muskie crying in reaction to a slur on his wife, damaging his 1972 presidential campaign, or President Nixon walking on the beach in wingtip shoes and dress slacks in a failed effort to make him look relaxed. One might also add President Lyndon Johnson lifting his shirt to show scars from his gall bladder operation in 1965, though that didn’t seem to damage him very much until cartoonists started drawing the scars in the shape of Vietnam, a wound the president didn’t recover from.
Illuminating or distracting?
For all the noise that gets generated by gaffes by politicians, do they mean anything? Muskie would have made a decent president, and would have had a much better chance of defeating Nixon than McGovern. Does a president, like Nixon, need to be informal? Is there any real evidence to think that Dukakis would have been a weak leader?
Does a gaffe reveal the truth, in other words? Does it reveal something the politician is working to hide, and so the gaffe is a slip of the mask, a failure of the carefully packaged persona that exposes the darkness underneath? Or is it meaningless?
Both can be true. Sometimes we do slip and reveal truths we want hidden. And sometimes we just goof up and it means nothing. But how should we judge?
What is our standard?
Suppose someone does a hundred good things and one really bad thing. Is this a basically good person, or is this a fraud? Consider Thomas Jefferson who did and said a lot of very good things, but also had an affair with a slave and, even more egregiously, failed to free any of his slaves, even on his death.
Was he a flawed good man, or a hypocritical fraud?
Sometimes we decide that the one flaw wipes out all the other good the person has done. And sometimes we wave away the flaw as unimportant.
Romney, Obama and women
Both Romney (“binders”) and Obama (“best looking”) made comments widely taken as dismissive of women or sexist or worse. The real issue should be how do those two treat women? Do they respect smart, strong women? Do they seek out and surround themselves with the best women they can find? In a group of men and women, do they treat everyone fairly? Do they keep women in service or support positions and have a men-only inner circle?
We never found out did we? Romney’s remark could have been nothing more than a clumsy way of saying “I made an effort to seek out women for positions in my administration.” So it would have been worth some effort to discover if that was true – some argue it wasn’t true at all, but that got buried under an avalanche of abuse.
And what about Obama? There have been rumblings that his administration is not all that welcoming to women at the top. Despite one very powerful female secretary of state and two solid Supreme Court justices, Obama has not set the world on fire by his appointment of women. And some of the women he did appoint have been pushed out of the limelight.
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, despite her history of involvement with health care reform, was pushed aside during the Obamacare debate, and FDIC chair Sheila Bair had a hard time getting people to listen to her during the financial crisis, despite her excellent track record of understanding the issues and knowing what would work to fix the problems.
But how much attention has this issue received? Not very much. Not half as much as one single, probably unscripted comment about a woman who he also called “brilliant.”
Instead we had his remark parsed in microscopic detail. Is it just a slip of the tongue, proved by how quickly he apologized? Do we cut him some slack because she actually is considered physically attractive by many, or is the deciding detail that this particular woman appears to spend a lot of time and effort on appearing attractive, and therefore it is acceptable to compliment her on her efforts?
While all that is engaging, much more interesting would be a discussion of how women actually fare in the upper reaches of White House policymaking.