Rudy Giuliani<\/a> is able to answer every question with \u201c9\/11.\u201d<\/p>\nThis sort of ritual fosters an evasiveness and pretense that requires something less than candor or honesty on the part of both the asker and the (non)answerer. Even if you\u2019ve never been a guest on Meet the Press,<\/i> you\u2019ve had a similarly distasteful experience \u2014 a taste of the same awkwardly stylized disingenuousness \u2014 if you\u2019ve ever interviewed for a job. \u201cWhat are your weaknesses?\u201d the interviewer asks, reading from the standardized list of questions in the prepared script. Your task, at that point, is to recite a response from the standardized list of answers (\u201cI\u2019m a perfectionist,\u201d \u201cI care too much,<\/i>\u201d \u201cMy awesomeness, like the sun, can be blinding\u201d). Do not answer candidly, or honestly, or relevantly, or in any way related to the generally accepted meaning of the English words \u201cwhat,\u201d \u201care,\u201d \u201cyour\u201d or \u201cweaknesses.\u201d Straying from the script will mean you don\u2019t get the job.<\/p>\n
The ritualized pretense of the job interview and the ritualized pretense of the political interview came together in a recent Democratic \u201cdebate\u201d in which the moderator, Tim Russert of course, actually asked the candidates \u201cWhat\u2019s your biggest weakness?\u201d<\/p>\n
The question seemed to confuse Barack Obama. The Illinois senator responded to Russert\u2019s question with the ultimate Beltway faux pax<\/i> \u2014 a response to the question. He said he was disorganized and always losing papers amid the cluttered piles on his desk.<\/p>\n
That was hardly an excessively confessional moment \u2014 Obama was surely withholding his biggest<\/i> weaknesses \u2014 but it was close enough to an actual response that the rhythm of the ritual was thrown off. Obama had failed to do what the ritual required of him, which is to stay on message. His job was to wait until Russert\u2019s lips stopped moving, then repeat his talking points \u2014 change, hope, out of Iraq, whatever. Those talking points, of course, do not include anything about whether or not his desk is organized.<\/p>\n
John Edwards went next. When Russert\u2019s lips stopped moving, Edwards said, \u201cI sometimes have a very powerful emotional response to pain that I see around me,\u201d and springboarded into his talking points. He walked the thin line between artifice and artificiality, and artfully recited an answer from the standardized list.<\/p>\n
Obama has since joked about that debate: \u201cIf I had gone last, I would have known what the game was. I could have said, \u2018Well, you know, I like to help old ladies across the street. Sometimes they don\u2019t want to be helped. It\u2019s terrible.'\u201d<\/p>\n
He\u2019s since mocked his own ineptitude and Edwards\u2019 polish, joking that his former opponent told Russert that his biggest weakness was, \u201cI am just so passionate about helping poor people.\u201d<\/p>\n
Both variations of that joke gently chide Edwards and himself for playing along with and clumsily not playing along with, respectively, the absurd rituals of Russert-World. The barb in such comments, however, doesn\u2019t cut into either of the candidates, but into the ritual itself and the pompous, insincerity of the moderator \u2014 of Russert and Russertism in all its incarnations.<\/p>\n
Sen. Obama earns major points with me for acknowledging, and thus deflating, that distracting and corrosive absurdity. Bonus points for self-deprecation, and half an extra bonus point for the elliptical praise of his former rival (only half a point because he\u2019s probably sucking up for an endorsement from the man I hope to see as our next Attorney General).<\/p>\n
But wait, couldn\u2019t there be another opposite-from-the-apparent way to interpret those comments? Couldn\u2019t Obama\u2019s jokes be taken as mockery directed at John Edwards and, what\u2019s more, at \u201cpoor people\u201d themselves?<\/p>\n
Well, we could try<\/i> to interpret them that way. \u2026 Hmmm. \u2026 No, maybe if we squint and tilt our heads? \u2026 No. Uh-uh. I can\u2019t manage that.<\/p>\n
For that level of determinedly obtuse humorlessness, we\u2019d have to turn to Roger Simon of The Politico<\/a>.<\/p>\nSimon \u2014 who hopes one day to grow up to be Tim Russert himself \u2014 announces that \u201cBarack Obama mocked John Edwards in a speech.\u201d This, he says, was \u201cso bizarre\u201d that he could scarcely believe it, but he did, after all get the tip, and the spin, straight from Mark Halperin \u2014 former editor of \u201cThe Note,\u201d i.e., the L\u2019Osservatore Romano<\/i> of the Church of Russert. So it must be true.<\/p>\n
After all, Obama couldn\u2019t possibly be making fun of people like Russert and Halperin and The Politico. Everyone knows they<\/i> are all deeply serious and weighty and beyond mockery. So he must, therefore, have been mocking Edwards<\/i>. And poor people. And puppies. Poor<\/i> puppies. Yeah, that must be it.<\/p>\n
Trying to explain humor to Roger Simon would be like trying to explain peacock blue to someone blind from birth.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Political interviewers of the Russert school often ask questions without listening to or caring about the answers given. The substance of either the question or the answer isn\u2019t the point. The ritual, whether called an \u201cinterview\u201d or a \u201cdebate\u201d (their term for simultaneous interviews during which the interviewees remain standing) is really an attempt to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":111,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[24],"class_list":["post-1864","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-journalism"],"yoast_head":"\n
Don't answer that<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Political interviewers of the Russert school often ask questions without listening to or caring about the answers given. The substance of either the\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2008\/02\/07\/dont-answer-tha\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Don't answer that\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Political interviewers of the Russert school often ask questions without listening to or caring about the answers given. 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A former managing editor of Prism magazine, Fred worked in the parachurch nonprofit world for a decade and then for a decade in the newspaper biz. He began blogging in 2002. In 2003 he began writing a review of the best-selling Left Behind series. Eight years later he still hasn\u2019t finished reviewing the second book of that series and the experience has left him a broken shell of a man. Fred knows the difference between the possessive \u201cits\u201d and the contraction \u201cit\u2019s,\u201d and he is acutely bothered when others mistakenly confuse the two, yet he himself just kind of instinctively types the apostrophe whether or not it belongs there. Some feel this is his greatest hypocrisy, but those who know him better know better. He\u2019s guilty of much greater hypocrisies. Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. You can reach him via email at slacktivist at hotmail dot com.\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/author\/fredclark\/\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Don't answer that","description":"Political interviewers of the Russert school often ask questions without listening to or caring about the answers given. 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A former managing editor of Prism magazine, Fred worked in the parachurch nonprofit world for a decade and then for a decade in the newspaper biz. He began blogging in 2002. In 2003 he began writing a review of the best-selling Left Behind series. Eight years later he still hasn\u2019t finished reviewing the second book of that series and the experience has left him a broken shell of a man. Fred knows the difference between the possessive \u201cits\u201d and the contraction \u201cit\u2019s,\u201d and he is acutely bothered when others mistakenly confuse the two, yet he himself just kind of instinctively types the apostrophe whether or not it belongs there. Some feel this is his greatest hypocrisy, but those who know him better know better. He\u2019s guilty of much greater hypocrisies. Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. You can reach him via email at slacktivist at hotmail dot com.","url":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/author\/fredclark\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1864","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/111"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1864"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1864\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1864"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1864"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1864"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}