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Eerie McCain, weird Bill Sunday, Jun 8, 2008 By John Brummett Let me warn you that today's topics are not substantive. We're not going to extend health insurance or lower oil prices today. We're going to talk style and sex. Criticize if you must. Read if you please. Anyway, the way to extend health insurance is to vote Democratic and the way to lower oil prices is to consume less. What can you say after you've said that? Let's move on. There is John McCain's creepy forced smile. Seriously. It's Topic A. He'll be tooling along in a speech, reading from the TelePrompTer, when, all of a sudden, he'll stop and implant this clumsy and hideous lip-and-tooth thing. He apparently is trying to oblige image handlers who have instructed him that he needs to convey, in case it is not otherwise evident, that he has just presented humor or cleverness. It's like those letters I got as a child from my sweet and now-departed granny and aunt. They'd write something, then pen "ha." I first saw this horror in an early Republican presidential debate when McCain declared that he would follow Osama bin Laden to the gates of hell. Then he paused long enough to gather up this supposed smile, then bared it. It was positively eerie. Following a mass murderer and crazed terrorist to the gates of hell, which is a darned sight farther than George W. Bush pursued him, is not one bit funny or grinnable. So the Republicans decided to roll McCain out the other night to get him some primetime exposure during Barack Obama's night of glory. And all anyone is talking about - other than that Obama gave a sterling speech while McCain and Hillary Clinton didn't - is that McCain did this child-frightening faux smile twice. Once he did it when he made an apparent quip about Obama's being entirely too young to have made so many mistakes. The other time was when he tried to turn around Obama's signature line about change we can believe in. This goes to the greater matter of McCain's limitations as a communicator. He is engaging in an interview. He has a history of strong connections in town meetings, which is why he is daring Obama to join him in no fewer than 10 of them. But when he seeks to soar or entertain in general oratory, he makes Bob Dole seem like FDR. The Republicans had the poetry for eight years with Reagan. They had it for six years with Lincoln. They had it one night with the first George Bush when he delivered Peggy Noonan's line about a thousand points of light. They had a poetry of style, if not necessarily spoken word, with Teddy Roosevelt. Otherwise they're the prose party, and not very good prose at that. Now to the other thing: What the heck is the matter with Bill Clinton? Why is he so mad? Why is he so red-faced? Is he tomcatting again? This was stirred in large measure by the Vanity Fair article by Todd Purdom, husband of Dee Dee Myers, former Clinton press secretary. It was a lengthy piece quoting not one identified source, the mark of big-time, high-dollar journalism. And it was about how Clinton has been jet-setting around with bachelor playboys - including one producer who got Elizabeth Hurley pregnant - and doing sometimes curious business deals and spending private time with maybe this actress or that, one of whom vehemently denied any such thing. And it was about how Bill has never been what you could call unabsorbed in himself, and about how he used to keep his staff and the Secret Service hostage on weekends while he labored over whether to play golf or where to go on vacation. The discussion, which I alluded to the other day, centers on whether that open-heart surgery messed up his head or if he's been this way all along. I've told you before about either-or questions. Sometimes they aren't. ------- John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699. |
