Is it a big story that the president of the United States, in an interview with a respected historian, referred to his rival on the record as a “bulls—–er”?
Well, of course not, because he’s a liberal Democrat. Move along, nothing to see here.
In 2000, when then-candidate George W. Bush was caught on a mic calling New York Times reporter Adam Clymer an “a–hole,” it was a three-day story.
But Bush was a conservative Republican attacking a liberal reporter (author of a hagiographic book about Teddy Kennedy). Therefore, he had to be punished.
So you’re not going to hear all that much about Obama’s vulgarism, I’m guessing. After all, the president was talking about Mitt Romney, for whom maybe 10 percent of the nation’s working press corps will vote.
And, with a closer-than-close election approaching, the media are even more inclined to circle the wagons and glue an Indiana senatorial candidate’s controversial words to Romney, rather than raise questions about the astoundingly disrespectful words actually coming out of the president’s own mouth.
But that’s not the only reason you won’t hear as much about it as you might have.
There remains, even now, a real squeamishness about repeating the word Obama used. Note how I used dashes to render it, even in a newspaper whose front page on Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a couple of months read “PEACE OF SH!T.”
How will news anchors and others be able to speak it aloud without triggering hostile viewer reaction and possible FCC action against them? Even Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and the other late-night comedians will have to be bleeped, lest they run afoul of their (admittedly lenient) Standards and Practices departments.
But that won’t be the case much longer if the president of the United States feels it is acceptable to speak it on the record.
And I suspect that kind of cultural shift, in which there is no barrier to vulgarity whatever, would be one even those of us who have the unfortunate habit of cursing like sailors (do sailors still curse like sailors?) would consider a great loss.
There is a certain expectation of formal demeanor from the man who serves this nation both as head of government and as head of state; such formality may seem false and stagy in our no-tie culture, but it represents some kind of symbolic stormwall against what seems like an overwhelming tide of cultural coarseness.
In this respect, the shocked response to George W. Bush’s remark a dozen years ago made a certain amount of sense, even though he was speaking it privately. Presidential crudity of the past (expletives deleted, interns in the side office) was, or was intended to be, private.
What makes Obama’s remark different was that he spoke it on the record. More than that; he attributed the attitude behind its use to the wisdom of children.
“You know, kids have good instincts,” Obama said when told of a 6-year-old who was rooting for him. “They look at the other guy and say, ‘Well, that’s a bulls—–er, I can tell.’”
Let me skip over the fact that this is stunningly untrue; if it were otherwise, we wouldn’t have to tell our children to beware strangers with candy. Kids are, at root, far more ingenuous than the president makes them out to be; even more important, we want them to be ingenuous rather than cynically sophisticated.
We just lost one small but significant piece of ground in the endless and exhausting battle to preserve a zone in which they can be permitted to remain innocent.