Saturday, June 27, 2009

Quote of the Day (David Letterman, With a Belated Apology)

"I would like to apologize especially to the two daughters involved, Bristol and Willow, and also to the Governor and her family and everybody else who was outraged by the joke. I'm sorry about it and I'll try to do better in the future."—David Letterman, Late Night With David Letterman, apologizing for his joke about a daughter of Gov. Sarah Palin being “knocked up” by Alex Rodriguez on a visit to Yankee Stadium


I had been gathering my thoughts about the Letterman-Palin spitting match, only to be diverted by other subject matter (and some events unrelated to the writing of this blog) over the last week. Over the last couple of days, I wondered about just shelving the whole thing, thinking the matter was passé.

Ultimately, I thought better of it, for two reasons:

1) I had so much written already, so why discard it?

2) Even when she does nothing remotely newsworthy or even interesting, Gov. Palin possesses some mysterious quality that makes otherwise allegedly normal people—not just erstwhile aging GOP Presidential candidates but also current but aging talk-show hosts—lose their minds.

Given the distractions Palin caused his campaign, John McCain is probably wondering these days if her star quality and the precedent he set in choosing her was really worth the candle. Similarly, Letterman might be wondering if the chance to score a few cheap laughs at her expense was really worth a situation that scared the network suits and forced him to make an unusual and very public apology.

Nobody with any sense other than historians, I thought, would take any notice of Palin for, oh, at least another year and a half. Actually, I was praying that nobody would take notice of her. With an economy still taking on water, with the Middle East a mess and with North Korea bellowing at Japan and the U.S. and anyone else it has a mind to, the least I need is braying from another Presidential hopeful.

But damn if John Kerry didn’t go and put Palin in the spotlight again! (What was I saying about “erstwhile aging GOP Presidential candidates” just before?)

In the middle of last week, as speculation began to swell on where in the world was Mark Sanford, the junior Senator from Massachusetts said at a party gathering, "Too bad if a governor had to go missing, it couldn't have been the governor of Alaska. You know, Sarah Palin."

There were some guffaws reported at the event, but my guess is that these people must have been paid to do so. Otherwise, the remark offers ample evidence why a couple of years ago, after another gaffe (about the educational level of armed-forces enlistees) slipped from his lips, Democratic primary support went “missing” for its 2004 standard bearer. You know, John Kerry.

Leave aside the dubious humor of wishing someone could disappear. There’s that tone, the sense that Lord Kerry, whose comically high self-regard rivals a former barfly in his state, the fictional Dr. Frasier Crane, has deigned to tell us something we don’t know after a high-profile Presidential campaign that concluded less than nine months ago: i.e., that Sarah Palin is the governor of Alaska.

There’s also the fact that at the point when Kerry made his remarks, Gov. Palin was visiting her state’s troops in Kosovo and Iraq, where her oldest son has been stationed. I imagine that if something ghastly happened while she was over there, the senator would have to harrumph and backtrack on the double.

Tone and context were also part of what tripped up Letterman, but only part. The affair represented almost a Rorschach test in our national politics.

But before we get to that, to answer some questions you might have had:

* Do I think Letterman is sexually perverted toward teenage girls, as initially implied by Gov. Palin’s spokesperson? No. Give me a break.

* Do I think Letterman was sincere in his apology? No.

* Do I think Letterman is blameless in this whole thing? No.

It was fascinating to watch the sides line up on this issue. The more likely you were to be liberal or to love Letterman, the more likely you were to believe that Sarah Palin was, as one respondent put it on one Web site I saw, a “media whore.” The more likely you were to be conservative or to love Letterman’s former late night rival, Jay Leno, the more likely you were to want Letterman picketed, pickled, boiled, roasted on a pit, then fired.

I have a somewhat different perspective. I’ve never felt undying allegiance to Letterman or Leno, and though I’ve never voted Republican in a Presidential election, I’ve split my votes among Democrats, Republicans and independents in other races over the years.

If you want to characterize me, call me a contrarian, someone constitutionally averse to sticking with one set of people whose positions, through mutual reinforcement, will only calcify over time.

I don’t expect to vote for Palin for President if she runs in 2012. Her positions on the environment, energy and guns would, by themselves, lose my vote, but her resume is, to put it mildly, thin.

Letterman said he didn’t intend 14-year-old Willow, but instead her 18-year-old sister, the famously unwed mom Bristol, to be the target of his joke. I have no reason to dispute his defense that he’d never joke about a 14-year-old and statutory rape, and I think Palin was merely making political hay when she said she didn’t believe him.

Anyone who has ever put his words out for examination, either orally or in print, is bound to sympathize with the “Late Night” host’s bewilderment that the perception of his remark did not match his intentions. Which of us hasn’t said or thought, “Why don’t you understand what I’m trying to say?”

But none of this, in the end, constitutes a get-out-of-jail card for Letterman. This was not a joke wrenched out of context. Letterman is clearly nonplussed why so many people—not just conservatives, as you’d expect, but even the otherwise progressive National Organization for Women--were bothered by this.

So let me boil it down for him in a way that he—and other comics—should grasp:

Say what you want about politicians and officeholders. But if their kids are underage, spare us—and them—your barbs. They didn’t ask for it by entering public life. Just leave them alone.

Blogger Andrew Sullivan seems perhaps even more bothered than Letterman by all the fuss. Why shouldn’t people go after politicians’ families, he believes, since candidates put them on display for the voters?

Politicians, narcissists that they are, should understand that they enter the political arena at their own risk. And unlike shy, retiring Rachel Jackson or Mamie Eisenhower, today’s Presidential spouses are not just adults but, post-women’s-lib, active participants and public partners in their husbands’ campaigns.

But candidates' kids didn’t ask their parents to go for the grand prize. They have become collateral damage in partisan attempts to get at their parents.

It’s all part of the widening nastiness of politics over the last two decades. When he made fun of Chelsea Clinton’s looks on the air 15 years ago, Rush Limbaugh did nothing except expose his own cruelty. I was disgusted then, just as I am angered now at the treatment of Bristol and Willow.

Don’t get me wrong: after you pass 21, you’re pretty much on your own as far as your choices are concerned. If you’re one of Franklin Roosevelt’s sons, using your father’s name and power to get by, or Neil Bush, involving himself in a savings-and-loan just when this financial scandal became a big thing in his father’s administration—well, good luck.

But younger kids are different. Adolescence is about experimenting, stepping gingerly into a self you may not know yet. You’re not always going to make the right move.

If you’re a baby boomer, you’re likely to know of someone who’s made a fool out of themselves at least once with alcohol or other drugs during their teens. You might know someone, like Bristol Palin, in a crisis pregnancy. Heck, it might even have happened to you.

But chances are, you didn’t end up on the front pages of newspapers, on CNN or hundreds of blogs over it. Nobody is interested in it. Nobody should be, even if their parent is a politician.

A useful yardstick for assessing how to treat the erring children of politicians is Al Gore III. Two years ago, he was arrested for possession of drugs while he was driving. Since he was 24, that treatment was appropriate.

But while his father was Vice-President, when he was 13 and at the DC prep school St. Alban’s, the younger Gore was caught by school authorities with some mind-altering substances. The matter was publicized in the U.K., but not here in the U.S., because Gore made a personal appeal to journalists, many of whom had teenage kids at St. Alban’s and similar exclusive prep schools: What if it happened to your kid?

The reporters saw his point and almost universally sat on the story. I think they were right to do so. Kids should not be defined in the public eye at such a young age by a mistake, or even by a few of them.

I wish reporters—and comedians—would act with similar restraint today. Even if Letterman was correct that he went so far as to verify Bristol Palin’s age before ridiculing her (17 at the time of her pregnancy), he still would have been wrong to do so. The fact that so many other comedians besides him had already done so was no excuse.

I think Letterman’s joke boomeranged on him, in a way it might not have under other circumstances, because of:

* The sheer mass of his jokes about her. Evidently, over the last year, his number of jokes about Palin outnumbered those by Leno, Conan O’Brien, and Jon Stewart—none of them, be it said, disinclined to go easy on the governor—combined. Letterman had laid the foundation for a perception that he had something of a vendetta against her.

* The “Top 10 Highlights Of Sarah Palin's Trip To New York”. Some of the other remarks about Palin that night by themselves reeked with vehemence.

For instance, #9: “Laughed at all those crazy-looking foreigners entering the U.N.” A suggestion of zenophobia, perhaps?

Or #3: “Finally met one of those Jewish people Mel Gibson's always talking about .” Hmmm…anti-Semitism? If that was not what that one was about, what exactly was he hinting at?

Or #2: “Bought makeup from Bloomingdale's to update her ‘slutty flight attendant’ look.” Since when are flight attendants “slutty”? Since when is Palin? Since when has any major female candidate in memory been labeled “slutty,” aside from this instance?

It took a lot longer for Letterman to apologize to the Palins than he did when he made Paris Hilton cry a year and a half ago for her stint in the slammer. There’s a problem there.

I think Letterman will come back from this misstep, but it will take him longer to recover than he did from his disastrous appearance hosting the Academy Awards in the 1990s.

Last fall, Wall Street Journal media critic Dorothy Rabinowitz speculated that Letterman’s on-air fury over being ditched by John McCain was reminiscent of Arthur Godfrey’s exposure as a crank when he went after Julius LaRosa in the 1950s. The Sarah Palin incident makes that observation look especially prescient now.

It would be a shame if this highly talented comedian became defined by a mistake. But that was the same treatment he accorded Bristol Palin. He was certainly right, after Palin initially protested, that his joke was in "poor taste." He was also right to accept his mother's advice and apologize to the Palins. Let's hope that, like Bristol Palin, he'll make an effort to learn from his mistake.

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