Recent events brought to mind Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign for President, in particular his famous claim that he “did not inhale.” It seems so ludicrous today, a statement like that, and I’m quite sure it represents a pinnacle of rhetorical tolerance within American culture. Come with me, shut your eyes, and bring yourself back to that moment…

Okay, great. Can you see the near redness of Clinton’s nose? Are you walking on the bridge to the 21st century?

Good. Now, please try and recall the treatment John Kerry (in all his hair-laden stiffness) received when trying to explain such mere discrepant iotas as his vote on the eighty-six billion dollar Iraq War resolution, or, for that matter, just about anything else he tried to explain to the feral press corps. Now wonder along with me, how
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it was that Governor Clinton got away with such blatant political doubletalk while Senator Kerry was skewered for such minor contradictions? Of what substance is the “teflon” coating that deems Ronald Reagan so smooth during the Iran-Contra affair, or our current President Bush so unflappably unflapped while weaving his linguistic labyrinthe of logic?

Once again, Doolittle has the answer. I bumped into him at the track last week. As always, he was talking politics, and when I wondered aloud about teflon, he told me, hopping from foot to foot, that every good politician is “glib.”

“They gotta be glib,” he said, “and they gotta be proud of it. Openly glib is like openly gay. They can’t keep their glib in their back pocket and just pull it out for their friends and loved ones.”

There was a hole in Doolittle’s jeans large enough to expose the varicose veins bulging up on his hipbone.

“Give me someone who’s comfortable with his glibidity, and that’s a politician. That’s someone who can take a ride on the swing voter,” said Doolittle.

At that he looked me in the eye, swung his left hand down into a long smile rainbow arc, and with a loud “whoop” extended his middle finger to the sky. “How do you like that?,” Doolittle shouted up at to no heaven in particular.

“When it comes to the American public,” Doolittle again spat with no small ire, “there’s tightrope walk tween talking down and talking up, and the best of these guys balance irony and sincerity like a Louisville slugger on the tip of the nose.”

That’s according to Doolittle anyway. He has a whole system of theories on what makes a good “Presidential.” He’ll tell you that they have to be “glib, white men with simple names from the South or the West. No furriners, no Northerners, nobody with an -owsky dangling off the end of their driver’s license.”

I wish he was wrong, but I bet he’s right about the irony (which would be ironic seeing as Doolittle himself is such an unironic fella -- he’s all business, all the time, unless I’m missing something.) Later that day, I realized
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how closely Doolittle’s theories meshed with that great essay on late-American irony, David Foster Wallace’s 1990 piece, “E Unibus Pluram.” In the aim of focusing a later generation of fiction writers, Wallace points toward the ironic sensibilities of today’s consumptive crowd. Television, he says, is reponsible for “the contemporary mood of jaded weltschmerz, self-mocking materialisim, blank indifference, and the delusion that cynicism and naivete are mutually exclusive.”

In his essay, Wallace describes how a typical American citizen, dubbed “Joe Briefcase,” views his world through the ironic lense of televisually saturated consciousness. Wallace clams that the ironic detachment which informs the way many Americans think about the world is eroding the cultural communicative power of cultural discourse. He writes, “irony and ridicule are entertaining and effective, [but]… at the same time they are agensts of a great despair and stasis in U.S. culture, and that for aspiring fiction writers they pose especially terrible problems.” While Wallace is concerned with fiction writers’ ability to be an active cultural mirror, American telelvisual irony poses similar problems for politicans.

Televisual politics traces its roots back to John F. Kennedy's famous 1960 presidential debate performance, where, through a number of smiles and chuckles, Kennedy was famously able to let the television audeicne know he was enjoying himself. Television has changed a great deal since then, much of that having to do with Wallace-ian irony, so that now a political figure must find a way not to appear over-sincere. Typically this ins done by making jokes, or using blatantly ludicrous folksy language (for example, Bush once used the word "crawdaddying" to describe a skittish Democratic reaction to a Republican proposal). When John Kerry was defending his vote on the Iraq War money, and was subsequently skewered for a complex answer, it's beause he just couldn't master televisual glibidity. He was straightjacketed by the sincere earnest rhetoric of the sincere, earnest Democratic base. To some extent, both parties have this problem, where their more outspoken activists betray greater faith in the communicative power of language. These folks on the right and the left believe more stronglhy in sincere communication, probably because they don't watch a lot of prime time network reality programming.

But, after you pander to your base, you have to remember that, political politicans are really fighting over the so-called swing voters, that slim portion of the American public that's smack in the prime time mainstream. For
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the most part, these people are the ones that watch a lot of television, and for a politican on the national stage to ignore the rules of modern-day postmodern television is highly dangerous.

According to the Merriam-Webster online, glib is probably a modification of Low German glibberig which means, “slippery.” What a glib politican is able to do, and John Kerry never was quite able to get this down, is slip between his public and private roles. He can stand there before you making a speech, while at the same time calling attention his knowledge of his role as a “politican” (you see I’m putting the words in quotes). W. Bush can do this quite well, at one point seeming almost comically sincere, but later nicknaming the reporters, for example, "Nicholas" would become "Nick" or "Nicky" or "Big Nickel." Winking to the TV camera, while annoying, meshes perfectly with modern televisual sensibility, and thoe more politics becomes just like a Survivor popularity contest, the more the sticks in the mud get voted off the island.

In fact, those of us unlucky enough to live in Minnesota are treated every few weeks to the latest escalation in televisual poltics, in the form of Minnesota's soon-to-be-senior Senator Norm Coleman. In his tenure as a Minnesota politican, Coleman has set a new standards for ironic political rhetoric by blatnatly affecting the vocal (and physical, and social) mannerisms of Mayor Quimby from the SImpsons. It should come as no surprise that swing voters, who probably get most of their information from glancing at the newspaper headlines while they watch the Simpsons, would vote overwhelmingly for a man who so personifies an uber-ironic cartoon icon. Looking further ahead, into the murky waters of the future, glib politicians will no doubt become ever more so, as mediated, self-referential, "quotation mark" personalities further saturate our culture.

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