“You don’t blow a bunch of cash in Vegas when you’re trying to save in college.’’
It’s not me saying that, it was Barack Obama, last month. Good advice, but as is often the case when you’re president, it landed him in hot water, so two weeks ago he went out of his way to praise the city and encourage people to visit and spend sums of money smaller than the college fund.
“Let me set the record straight – I love Vegas, always have,” he said. “Love Vegas. Enjoy myself every time I’ve got an opportunity to visit.”
There are a few verbal “tells” there. Just as George W. Bush mangled his words when he spoke about things he didn’t seem to care about – poor people, education – but never slipped when canceling international treaties or threatening small nations, so Mr. Obama says “let me be clear” or “set the record straight” when he’s about to be insincere. He also tends to drop the first person singular noun and begin his truncated sentence with the verb when he’s BS’ing.
It’s an occupational hazard and an irony that the leader of the world’s only superpower can’t express too many opinions in public, lest he have to grovel before some hypersensitive constituency. Our sense of “victim entitlement” has really hit overdrive when the president has to go out of his way to praise Vegas as a wholesome place to go lose your money.
Politicians are a bunch of phonies, we all know that, but we hesitate to acknowledge the part we play in making them so.
“I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession which I entered before my husband was in public life.” – Hillary Rodham Clinton, March 1992.
Ms. Rodham, er.. Mrs. Clinton got herself in hot water with that one, even had to share her cookie recipes. Although she had to phony up to make amends, I always thought the initial comment was a shot at all the phony political wives who never dared to have a career, lest it cause the least distraction from the alpha male in the relationship.
Similarly, Barbara Bush during the 1984 election campaign said of Geraldine Ferraro, “I can’t say it, but it rhymes with ‘witch.’” She too, had to backpedal and resort to such inanities as writing her cocker spaniel’s “autobiography” to soften her tough ol’ broad image.
So, it’s a curse, I suppose, this phoniness. (We won’t mention the Edwardses.) Once in a while, a politician comes along and cuts against the phony grain, making a name for him or herself as a straight shooter in the process. John McCain was that guy, until he ran for president and doused himself in Eau de Phonee.
Which is not to say public figures should abandon all phoniness. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi brags about his plastic surgery, appoints his mistresses to run ministries and all but dares the courts to indict him on criminal charges. That’s going a bit too far the other way.
A nice happy medium – Pierre and Margaret Trudeau, say. He was thrown out of the officers’ corps during World War II for lack of discipline, he married a woman 30 years his junior and she partied at Studio 54 (sans culottes) just before a Canadian national election. He lost that election, but staged a comeback a year later.
Alas, the US is not Canada and never will be. If the phony phad merely provided phodder for parlor games, it would be one thing, but the virus attacks every system in the body politic. It leads politicians to tell us they’re working on our behalf while they’re selling us out to the banks and oil, coal and insurance companies. It leads individual senators to cut of unemployment payments and send federal workers on furlough. It causes political parties to dangle the future of the nation over a cliff, because what they really care about is power, not governance.
In the end, phoniness may be the death of our democracy.
Phorced to be Phony
“You don’t blow a bunch of cash in Vegas when you’re trying to save in college.’’
It’s not me saying that, it was Barack Obama, last month. Good advice, but as is often the case when you’re president, it landed him in hot water, so two weeks ago he went out of his way to praise the city and encourage people to visit and spend sums of money smaller than the college fund.
“Let me set the record straight – I love Vegas, always have,” he said. “Love Vegas. Enjoy myself every time I’ve got an opportunity to visit.”
There are a few verbal “tells” there. Just as George W. Bush mangled his words when he spoke about things he didn’t seem to care about – poor people, education – but never slipped when canceling international treaties or threatening small nations, so Mr. Obama says “let me be clear” or “set the record straight” when he’s about to be insincere. He also tends to drop the first person singular noun and begin his truncated sentence with the verb when he’s BS’ing.
It’s an occupational hazard and an irony that the leader of the world’s only superpower can’t express too many opinions in public, lest he have to grovel before some hypersensitive constituency. Our sense of “victim entitlement” has really hit overdrive when the president has to go out of his way to praise Vegas as a wholesome place to go lose your money.
Politicians are a bunch of phonies, we all know that, but we hesitate to acknowledge the part we play in making them so.
“I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession which I entered before my husband was in public life.” – Hillary Rodham Clinton, March 1992.
Ms. Rodham, er.. Mrs. Clinton got herself in hot water with that one, even had to share her cookie recipes. Although she had to phony up to make amends, I always thought the initial comment was a shot at all the phony political wives who never dared to have a career, lest it cause the least distraction from the alpha male in the relationship.
Similarly, Barbara Bush during the 1984 election campaign said of Geraldine Ferraro, “I can’t say it, but it rhymes with ‘witch.’” She too, had to backpedal and resort to such inanities as writing her cocker spaniel’s “autobiography” to soften her tough ol’ broad image.
So, it’s a curse, I suppose, this phoniness. (We won’t mention the Edwardses.) Once in a while, a politician comes along and cuts against the phony grain, making a name for him or herself as a straight shooter in the process. John McCain was that guy, until he ran for president and doused himself in Eau de Phonee.
Which is not to say public figures should abandon all phoniness. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi brags about his plastic surgery, appoints his mistresses to run ministries and all but dares the courts to indict him on criminal charges. That’s going a bit too far the other way.
A nice happy medium – Pierre and Margaret Trudeau, say. He was thrown out of the officers’ corps during World War II for lack of discipline, he married a woman 30 years his junior and she partied at Studio 54 (sans culottes) just before a Canadian national election. He lost that election, but staged a comeback a year later.
Alas, the US is not Canada and never will be. If the phony phad merely provided phodder for parlor games, it would be one thing, but the virus attacks every system in the body politic. It leads politicians to tell us they’re working on our behalf while they’re selling us out to the banks and oil, coal and insurance companies. It leads individual senators to cut of unemployment payments and send federal workers on furlough. It causes political parties to dangle the future of the nation over a cliff, because what they really care about is power, not governance.
In the end, phoniness may be the death of our democracy.
© Mark Floegel, 2010