Jill Porter: Thanks to the Old White Guy and the Old Gray Lady
THE NEW YORK TIMES may have raised some questions about John McCain yesterday, but it sure answered a biggie: How does an old white guy get attention when he's running against the potentially first African-American or female president?
THE
NEW YORK TIMES
may have raised some questions about John McCain yesterday, but it sure answered a biggie:
How does an old white guy get attention when he's running against the potentially first African-American or female president?
A sex scandal, of course.
Or, in this case, a sorta, kinda sex scandal alluded to in a front-page story that has already generated backlash against the Times.
But we'll take what we can get: With the election focusing on substantive issues, when it isn't Clinton-bashing or Obama-genuflecting, the public discourse was getting way too mature.
Thus the feverish glee of TV and radio talk-show hosts yesterday with the arrival of fresh meat regarding the presumptive GOP presidential nominee.
And who wouldn't rather devour fresh meat than, say, worry about whether our own schoolchildren devoured some of the tainted meat from a California slaughterhouse?
In case you missed the "scandal," the Times' story suggested that McCain may have had a romantic relationship with a lobbyist named Vicki Iseman. Or so his staff members feared when he ran for president eight years ago, the story said.
Iseman's clients had business before the Senate Commerce Committee, on which McCain sat. And he allegedly wrote letters on behalf of legislation that would have benefited those clients.
Both McCain and Iseman denied having had an affair. McCain also denied doing political favors for her.
Still, the political set piece unfolded in the comfy way we've become accustomed to:
* We have the photo of the Stunning Blonde in a gold evening gown plastered in the newspapers.
(What, there was no picture of her in a business suit? Would anyone care if she wasn't glamorous? Can't a girl do her job without being considered a corporate hooker who's sleeping her way to favorable legislation?)
* We have the predictable news conference, in which the politician drags out the adoring wife to bolster him as he stands in front of reporters and denies everything.
(Frankly, true political gender equality will come, not when we elect a woman president, but when a woman elected official holds a news conference to deny a rumored love affair - with her husband standing by her side, gazing on adoringly.
Don't hold your breath.)
* And then, courtesy of the breathless warp speed of the news cycle, we have backlash to the story overtaking the story itself.
At this point - but who knows what will have happened by the time you read this - it seems the allegations will actually help McCain.
For one thing, as several bloggers and my colleague Karin Berry pointed out, the affair may reassure people who fear McCain's too old for the presidency.
If the 71-year-old has the vigor to handle an alleged romance with a woman who's 30 years younger, and a wife - who, by the way, looks like her twin - who's 18 years younger, then the White House will be a cakewalk!
Also, right-wing radio titans who've castigated McCain in the past for eschewing the conservative agenda rallied around him yesterday in the story's aftermath.
They found a common enemy: the liberal media.
"In the conservative world, if The New York Times does a 'hit job' on you then you wear that as a conservative badge of honor," wrote blogger David Brody.
Rush Limbaugh dismissed the Times story as "Page Six-type gossip." Laura Ingraham called the Times story "ridiculous."
"This is a hit job on a Republican politician, from left-wing reporters working for a left-wing-promoting news rag. Nothing more, nothing less," a blogger wrote on Politico.com
But the mainstream media - including me - was also scratching its head over the story, which read more like sloppy innuendo than documented misdeeds, attributed almost entirely to anonymous sources.
Still, we're in the Times' debt for diverting the presidential campaign from the high road.
Surely, this is the closest we'll get to a scandal in this political season.
The skeletons in Hillary Clinton's closet are so old they've got osteoporosis.
And Barack Obama?
I've no doubt that if Michelle caught him in an affair, he'd wind up needing a sex-change operation to finish the job.
So thanks for the distraction to the old white guy and the Old Gray Lady. *
E-mail porterj@phillynews.com or call 215-854-5850. For recent columns: