“If anyone has any doubts about my age, please spend some time with my mother. I want to tell you that last Christmas, she decided she wanted to drive around France, so she landed in Paris, went to rent a car, they said she was too old, so she bought<\/i> a car and drove around France. And she’ll be 96 in just a few days. […]<\/p>\n
“So, I’m compelled to tell the story of the two inmates in the state prison in the chow line. And one of them turned to the other one and said, ‘The food was a lot better in here when you were governor.’ (polite chuckles) That’s not a joke you can tell in some states in America. […]<\/p>\n
“[After introducing former Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas], and from the great state of South Carolina, Sen. Lindsey Graham. After this meeting, if you’d like to talk to senator, either senator Graham, we will provide translators for any of you that need to, find them hard to understand. I find them hard to — anyway….<\/p>\n
“Do you know the difference between a lawyer and a catfish? One is a scum-sucking bottom-dweller and the other is a fish. And so there goes the lawyer joke, the lawyer vote again. I thank all of you for being here.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Is it me, or does one of these stand out?
\n
\nI’m trying to imagine what the reaction would be if Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, campaigning in “liberal Massachusetts,” mocked people with Southern accents and suggested his audience might need interpreters to understand those from South Carolina.<\/p>\n
My hunch is, the story would be everywhere<\/i>, and would be validation that Democrats are disrespectful to Southerners. That seems very unlikely to happen here.<\/p>\n
(Just as an aside, I do hope the Democratic nominee, whoever it is, remembers this and uses it on the campaign trail later this year. Obama or Clinton should tell voters in the South, “John McCain says he doesn’t understand Southerners and wants to offer interpreters to the rest of the country to understand you. I, however, hear you loud and clear….”)<\/p>\n
I don’t want to make too much of this. I realize McCain was trying to be clever, just as he was when he started singing “Bomb Iran” or when he maliciously went after Chelsea Clinton. I suspect there are going to plenty of people who hear all of this and say, “Lighten up; he was just kidding around.” Maybe so.<\/p>\n
My point isn’t to be up-tight about bad comedy; my point is that John McCain’s comedic styles are going to get him into some political trouble one of these days. Mocking southerners for their accents seems like he’s playing with fire.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I know a lot of people in politics find John McCain quite charming, thanks in large part to his biting sense of humor. If he hosts a town-hall forum, for example, and someone asks a challenging question, McCain calls the voter a “little jerk.” It’s not my cup of tea, but it’s apparently all part […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14464","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14464","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14464"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14464\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14464"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14464"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14464"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}