If Barack Obama and
John McCain end up facing each other in the general election this year, one
particular special interest group will find itself unexpectedly discomfited:
the comedy writers of America.
Politically, these men and women may well support one or the other of the two
candidates enthusiastically. But professionally, they will find an Obama-McCain
contest a burden, for the simple reason that it is surprisingly difficult to
make fun of either candidate. The result might well be the least entertaining
presidential election in recent history. But also, perhaps, from a civic point
of view, the healthiest.
The reasons for the two men’s relative immunity from mockery
and satire are different. In Obama’s case, it begins with his enormously
appealing public persona, and his obvious, heartfelt sincerity. Try mocking a
candidate like this and you will probably end up looking mean-spirited and
cynical. The racial factor contributes as well. Whites have a hard time publicly
mocking brilliant, accomplished African Americans like Obama, for fear of
seeming to draw on racial stereotypes.
It’s telling that while “Saturday Night Live,” routinely features presidents and presidential candidates in its
skits, and has done so since the days of Chevy Chase and Gerald Ford, it has
never had one of its actors impersonate Obama. The one time a “Barack Obama”
appeared on the show, last fall, it was the candidate himself, in a cameo. As for McCain, the
most important reason is, of course, his heroism as a P.O.W. in Vietnam. Try
mocking a man who has sacrificed as much for his country as McCain, and you end
up looking not only mean-spirited, but positively unpatriotic.
The extent to which both Obama and McCain are impervious to
the sort of mockery which proved so destructive to Al Gore or John Kerry has
been obscured, in recent months, by the Hollywood writers’ strike--which has
therefore, objectively, worked to both men’s disadvantage. After all, Hillary
Clinton and the recently-departed Mitt Romney are anything but invulnerable to
mockery and satire. Imagine what the skit-writers from “Saturday Night Live”
could have done with Clinton’s “angry moment” in
the New Hampshire
debate, or Bill Clinton’s frantic attacks on Obama. And even though the
smartest political satire on TV, “The Daily Show,” has been back on the air for
a month, without its writers the comedy has suffered, with host Jon Stewart
more inclined to draw blood from Wolf
Blitzer than from the candidates, or while staging a (hilarious and silly) mock-feud
with Conan O’Brien. Hillary in particular should give thanks that the writers’
strike has decreased the number and intensity of barbs fired at her from
late-night television.
From a comedic point of view, an Obama–McCain race is
therefore likely to be quite a dull affair. But from a civic one, a relative
lack of mockery and satire might come as a relief, given our recent experience.
Of course, satire has always been part of the democratic process (think of the
way Martin Van Buren was skewed as effete and ineffectual in the election of
1840). Still, the current media universe has increased its power and importance
exponentially. As soon as our monstrous regiment of bloggers, talk-show hosts,
late-night comics, and columnists identifies a trait in a candidate that makes
him or her look like a figure of fun, they fall on it with all the subtlety,
grace and charm of a group of third-grade bullies who have figured out that a
classmate’s last name rhymes with that of an embarrassing bodily function.
Whether it is Al Gore’s supposed serial mendacity, John Kerry’s rich-boy
effeteness, or John Edwards’s alleged obsession with his hair,
such a storm of mockery instantly develops that the mainstream media feels
justified in covering it as a story, thereby giving it further play and further
obscuring the candidate’s positions and qualifications. It hardly matters that
the trait in question is usually either non-existent, or essentially irrelevant
to how well the candidate would do as president. Late-night television comedy
is only one part of this equation, of course, but a key part. The barbs first
sharpened in the hands of the Lenos and Stewarts, and the team from “Saturday
Night Live”, get repeated ad nauseam across
the media landscape. It helps, incidentally, when the candidate in question
seems to lack a sense of humor. In public, at least, Gore and Kerry, like
Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney, all come off as humorless, while Obama and
McCain--like George W. Bush, at least when he was first introduced to a
national audience--are perceived quite differently.