"If I Had Gone Last I Would Have Known What The Game Was"
There was an interesting article in Sunday's Times. I'll post it as comment nubbier one. I find the anecdote about the question about your biggest weakness fascinating. I was disappointed when I was once asked that question in a job interview. Afterwards a friend who is advanced in his field said that its a question he always asks and that there's a right answer. The street wisdom about how to handle that question is to say that your weakness is that you have too much of a strength. Another friend of mine once posed this query on a date and the response he got was, "I'm too good." It's interesting that Mr. Obama and me seem to be the odd men out who don't know the game. When he was asked the question in a debate he said he was messy. When I was asked (the way I was asked was crafty, "What would an employer say as a criticism about you?) I was too honest. I should have said, "That I have a well earned positive reputation, ace interviews, and that I am in demand (poo poo poo)."
posted by rabbi neil fleischmann @ 10:05 AM
5 Comments:
PART I
August 9, 2009
The Way We Live Now
Funny How?
By MATT BAI
It’s hardly fair, this thing we do to our politicians: when they refuse to depart from their carefully worded scripts, we deride them as wooden, fraudulent, synthetic. When they dare to reveal genuine passion or irreverence, though, we pound away at them for displaying insufficient self-control. Such was the case with Barack Obama’s recent and calamitous news conference, when the president plunged headlong into a debate over race relations. A barrage of criticism, which followed Obama’s extemporaneous comments, centered on his use of the word “stupidly” to describe the behavior of the Cambridge police. But perhaps the more jarring if overlooked moment in Obama’s answer came just before that, when he endeavored to cast himself in the place of his friend Henry Louis Gates Jr., whose trouble began when he needed to break into his own home. “I mean, if I was trying to jigger into — well, I guess this is my house now, so it probably wouldn’t happen,” the president said. Then he flashed a mischievous grin and added, “Here I’d get shot.”
It’s hard to imagine an edgier joke than this — the nation’s president, its first black president at that, teasing about being gunned down in the White House foyer. Had Obama not gone on to malign a cop, it almost certainly would have dominated the next day’s punditry. And yet the moment was in keeping with what we have learned about Obama in the months since his inauguration. The president, it turns out, is quite funny — and sometimes a little reckless. Obama had to make his first apology just days after being elected president, for joking about Nancy Reagan’s séances. He ran into trouble with advocates for the handicapped in March, when he suggested to Jay Leno that his bowling on the campaign trail belonged in the Special Olympics. And before the Super Bowl, he angered fans of the singer Jessica Simpson by appearing to make light of her supposedly ballooning weight. (Fortunately for Obama, fewer than a dozen of those fans are old enough to vote.) You have to have a pretty determined sense of aggrievement — or just a dim view of the president generally — to take genuine offense at such throwaway one-liners. And yet they tend to obscure, if only for a day, Obama’s more serious objectives, undermining the comedian in chief’s reputation as an innately disciplined politician.
PART II
Obama is hardly the first television-age president to employ a sometimes unsettling wit. John Kennedy remarked in advance of the 1960 campaign that his father had asked him not to buy too many votes because he wasn’t about to pay for a landslide, and presidents have long turned to professional joke writers to humanize them. What makes Obama’s humor more combustible isn’t just its spontaneity but also its distinctly postmodern, Seinfeldian premise. There’s an absurdist quality to the president’s less serious side, a sense that he woke up this morning to find himself occupying this singularly bizarre place in American life and that he has just now become aware that he’s the only sane guy in the room.
This was the impulse he displayed last year when the Democratic candidates were asked in a debate before the Nevada caucuses to disclose their own weaknesses. Obama, answering first, admitted that he inclined toward messiness, while Hillary Clinton and John Edwards self-servingly confessed to caring too gosh-darn much about other people. “If I had gone last, I would have known what the game was,” Obama joked afterward, with mock bewilderment. “I could have said: ‘Well, you know, I like to help old ladies across the street. Sometimes they don’t want to be helped. It’s terrible.’ ” More recently, Obama sounded mystified by plans for a new presidential helicopter. “The helicopter I have now seems perfectly adequate to me,” he remarked dryly. “Of course, I’ve never had a helicopter before, you know? Maybe I’ve been deprived and I didn’t know it.” Other presidents mastered the telling of the canned political joke. Obama’s shtick is that he finds such stagecraft, the falsity and pomposity of modern politics, to be as laughable as we do.
Such a perspective is entirely new in the White House, born perhaps of the same deconstructionist ethos that gave us “The Simpsons” and The Onion — self-aware acts of ridicule that would have seemed wholly out of place in the age of “All in the Family.” Our more recent presidents, reared in the age after the Great Depression and World War II, have tended to be deeply earnest types, class presidents and conventional insiders, the kind of men who affixed their flag pins to their lapels without a second thought. Parody, on the other hand, is an act of subversion, the province of the kid in the back row who refuses to grant the institution its inherent authority. In such moments of transgression, Obama seems inherently uncomfortable with the garish décor of the imperial presidency. With each self-mocking digression, he registers a small blow against the excessive reverence for the office that made possible, in some measure, the missteps of his predecessor.
What we sense about Obama in these moments too is an exasperation that runs below his surface equanimity. Humor enables him to publicly vent emotions that only those closest to him might otherwise see. (The notable thing about his riff on Gates’s encounter with the police was that you had the sense he had given it before, privately, while lying in bed with his wife or on the basketball court with friends.) Perhaps this is why some people you talk to find Obama’s humor off-putting and smug, an expression of hidden contempt that belies his twin mantras of hope and change. No doubt some of the president’s advisers, too, would prefer to see him take fewer comic risks. For others of us, though, Obama’s wit is closely linked to the outsiderness that got him elected. His improvisational asides are like bubbles of air reaching the surface of placid water, reminders that while he remains immersed in the process of Washington, his lifeline to the world outside remains intact.
I read that article and thought Bai nailed the Obama humor awkwardness.
"What we sense about Obama in these moments too is an exasperation that runs below his surface equanimity." His jokes have a little sting to them, an edge. Like, you can make me play nice in public, but know that I'm not a docile pussycat, man.
"His improvisational asides are like bubbles of air reaching the surface of placid water." Yup.
Quite the worshipful article, I thought.
K - I didn't ind th earticle worshipful. A - I really liked that line about bubles of water, almost cited it - well crafted senence I thought.
In yesterday's NY Post there was a piece by Charles Hurt, which cites an interesting Obama comment regarding government health care:
I mean if you think about it...If you think about it. UPS and FedEx are doing just fine, right? It's the Post Office that's always having problems."
Discuss. Politely. If you want.
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