Frank’s Case Book

The will come a time when it is impossible to understand how Senator Barack Obama’s reference to the old metaphor of putting lipstick on a pig, as a colorful way to indicate a vain attempt to make something fundamentally unattractive appear beautiful through the expedient of a cosmetic change, caused such an uproar. Perhaps was near contemporaneous exploration of the issue will be of some small future value for all those political science theses that will be written on the subject.

Here are Obama’s words:

“John McCain says he’s about change, too.And so I guess his whole angle is, ‘Watch out, George Bush! Except for economic policy, health care policy, tax policy, education policy, foreign policy, and Karl Rove-style politics, we’re really going to shake things up in Washington. That’s not change. That’s just calling something the same thing something different. But you know, you can put lipstick on a pig. It’s still a pig. You can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called change, it’s still going to stink after eight years. We’ve had enough of the same old thing.

Clearly, within the immediate context of the quotation, the “lipstick on a pig” referred to the Bush policies that could not be made to look better. If that same metaphor had been used earlier in the the campaign, it would be impossible to read any different meaning into it. Unfortunately, it was not a metaphor Obama had recently used, but one that unleashed after the nomination of Governor Sarah Palin for vice-president.

Days before, Palin had cited the now famous joke: “What is the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull… Lipstick.” The joke became a signature comment and the word “lipstick” was specifically associated with Palin and her feminity. It is in this total context not only the context of his words that day that Obama had made his remarks. Moreover, the phrase “old fish” could be applied to Senator John McCain.

Taken together, the remarks could be viewed as a clever swipe against both halves of the national ticket. Indeed,the smirking laughs that followed Obama’s comments indicate that the the audience got the joke.

Until they changed their coverage to hide this crowd reaction, ABC news reported:

“The crowd rose and applauded, some of them no doubt thinking he may have been alluding to Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s ad lib during her vice presidential nomination acceptance speech last week..”

while AP recorded the same impression:

“”You can put lipstick on a pig,” he [Obama] said to an outbreak of laughter, shouts and raucous applause from his audience, clearly drawing a connection to Palin’s joke even if it’s not what Obama meant….”

It is impossible to peer into Obama’s mind and know his intention. There remain a couple of possibilities. The more negative interpretation is that he was making a vaguely misogynistic remark against Palin. The less damning one is that he was unaware of how the remark would be interpreted. This is not quite the image of the clever constitutional law lawyer adept a parsing sentence and interpreting words in the context of the times.

It is interesting to examine a time line of the public life of Senator Barack Obama, the top of the Democratic presidential ticket, and Governor Sarah Palin, number two on the Republican ticket.

From 1992 to 1996, Sarah Palin served two terms on the city council of the small town of Wasilla, AK. During the same time, Obama was a lawyer and community organizer in Chicago. The year 1996 was important for both. Palin ran for and was elected mayor of Wasilla, while Obama was elected to the Illinois State Senate.

Palin served as mayor for her two-term limit to 2002 and then ran unsuccessfully for Lieutenant Governor of Alaska. Instead, she ended up serving on the state Ethics Commission and the Oil and Gas Conservation Commission.  In 2004, Obama was elected to the US Senate where he has served since. In 2006, Palin was elected Governor of Alaska, overcoming the old-boy Republican establishment in Alaska.

Essentially, we have a young national legislator versus an young state governor. While it is legitimate to argue that a US Senator gains experience considering national issues, a state governor gains executive experience managing a large governmental enterprise. Both are important for a President or Vice-President.

If Obama and Palin were not running for national office now, it would be hard to make a case about whom had greater experience necessary to be the national chief executive. However, over the last year Obama has been running for President. This has not so much increased his legislative experience, but it has given the nation an opportunity to listen to him and assess his seriousness on issues. Is not so much that he has acquired experience, but that the country has grown accustomed to him and in some modest way taken his measure.

While Obama has been campaigning for President, Palin has been running the state government of Alaska. Only Alaskans really have had time and exposure to appreciate her merits and recognize her flaws. By the time the election occurs this fall, we will have had ample opportunity to take the measure of Palin. Is not so much that she will gain experience, but we will grow in our experience of her. In any objective office-holding sense, Obama does not have more experience then Palin and arguable less, rather we have more experience of him. This lack is remedial.

In March of 2003, Barack Obama was state senator in Illinois dealing with the Illinois Born Alive Infact Protection Act (BAIPA). The key goal of the act was to make it an affirmative obligation to render conventional medical treatment to all children born, even if the birth was a consequence of an induced abortion. The act brushed against the ragged, politically dangerous edges of the pro-choice and pro-life movements.

One aim of pro-life advocates was to ensure that children born alive and completely separate from their mothers are not treated as medical waste, but accorded appropriate medical attention. Pro-lifers may want to prevent abortions, but there is a much broader constituency who would want to protect children already born. Testimony before Congress has reported cases where live children, the product of unsuccessful abortions, were unceremoniously disposed of rather than treated. The concern was clearly not just a theoretical one.

Pro-choice advocates were concerned that about the legal assertion of rights for babies that were theoretically pre-viable; though one might  expect viability to change as a function of medical technology. Specifically, the  Illinois BAIPA declared, “A live child born as a result of an abortion shall be fully recognized as a human person and accorded immediate protection under the law.” The pro-choice community is perhaps rightly concerned that someone sometime in the future might ask the embarrassing question: How is a being a fully recognized human only moments after being excess tissue?

The legislative dilemma is how to reconcile the humanity of treating with medical respect babies born alive versus the concerns of the pro-choice community to avoid the legislative precedent of declaring babies born alive as persons. Obama and his Democratic colleagues implemented a compromise by adding a clause to the  law that would effectively prevent the law’s use a precedent against abortion. Specifically they added:

“Nothing in this Section shall be construed to affirm, deny, expand, or contract any legal status or legal right applicable to any member of the species homo sapiens at any point prior to being born alive as defined in this Section.”

Curiously, the record shows that Obama voted only for the amendment, but still voted against the bill. The problem is that Obama’s district was still sufficiently to the Left, that deviation from pro-choice purity, even at the cost of the maltreatment of born-live infants, would have had political costs. Either Obama believed that such infants do not deserve such protection or that the political costs of approving the bill were too high. The whole episode was hardly  a “profile in courage.”

If this story became widely acknowledged, it would make Obama appear far out of the national mainstream on the issue of abortion. When asked about the vote in 2004, Obama claimed, according to the Chicago Tribune, that  he voted against the state legislation but would have supported a similar federal bill because “the state measure lacked the federal language clarifying that the act would not be used to undermine Roe vs. Wade, the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court opinion that legalized abortion.” However, contrary to Obama’s assertion, the two bills are nearly identical. Obama knew they were nearly identical because he was chairman of the committee that amended the bill so that it would resemble its federal counterpart.

Rather that conceding the issue, Obama accused his pro-life critics of “lying” about his record. Finally, Obama’s campaign’s has conceded that the federal and state bills were near identical. The only way to reconcile his vote in Illinois against the BAIPA and his later claim that would have voted for the nearly identical federal act, is that in both cases he was acting in immediate political self-interest.

There is certainly room to argue about Obama’s first vote in Illinois, though it does depict him as part of the extreme pro-choice wing of the spectrum. However, there is no excuse to misrepresent his vote and worst to call others liars for disputing what turns out to be the facts of this case.

It is not surprising that this story has not been discussed much in the pro-Obama press, but the story is slowly emerging. One character test for Obama supporters is how do they deal with this report. The reactions can involve either be honesty, dishonesty, or deliberate self-deception

One honest reaction is to concede Obama’s serious mistake and consequent dishonesty, but still maintain their support given his overall record and ideology. However, this would tend to undermine the serious messiah complex of some Obama supporters.

The dishonest way is to continue to obfuscate the issue and to attack the veracity of opponents. This will undoubtedly be the reaction of political partisans.

Perhaps the most common way for Obama supporters to deal with the issue is denial. Rather than examine carefully the details of this serious vote and related dishonesty, they will just to avert their gaze. They will not take the time an effort to determine out the truth. It easier to believe that political enemies are after your candidate than to face an unpleasant truth.

A pro-life advocate, Jill Stanek, performed the difficult task of digging up many of the original documents some of which are linked to in this post.

It is often interesting to watch old movies and television programs. Although there are certainly classic movies and programing with a timeless quality, it is often illuminating to see the world through the unique cultural vision of the period . Perhaps the most conspicuous and consistent difference is the past glamorization of smoking before the 1960s, whereas by contemporary standards smoking is considered déclassé. Other times we are reminded of more heroic perspectives.

This week the TV Land network aired an episode of Lou Grant with an important message for our times.  If you remember back to the 1970s, the character Lou Grant, played by actor Edward Asner, began with comedy, the Mary Tyler Moore show, set in a Minnesota newsroom. Lou Grant was a spinoff drama, where character Lou Grant was now a news editor of the fictitious Los Angeles Tribune.

In the particular episode, Nazi, reporter Billie Newman (Linda Kelsey) is pursuing a story about an American Nazi  who turns out have been born Jewish. The salient point here is that the reporter was fearful for her life, but pursued the story nonetheless. The show was not shy about moralizing, and the message here was clear: Fidelity to the truth and the unfettered right of free expression often requires courage. In this case, the reporter was not threatened by government censorship, but self-censorship induced by fear of private person or group.

Three decades later, that message of courage seems to have been forgotten. Sherry Jones is  a journalist who has taken a considerable interest in Islamic culture and pursued its study. That study and several years of writing led to a fictionalized historical novel about Mohammad and his favorite wife Aisha. Random House publishing company advanced Jones $100,000 for two books, of which The Jewel of Medina was the first.

Now Random House has lost it publishing nerve. As far as we know, there have been no specific threats against Random House or the author. Rather, the book was sent to Denise Spellberg, a scholar in Islamic studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Spellberg warned that some Muslims might find the book offensive. After the experience of the Danish anti-Mohammad cartoons that caused riots and the fatwa issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini for the death of Salmon Rushdie who wrote the Satanic Versus, Random  House is apprehensive.

With this recent history, the concern about a violent reaction to a book that is perceived, rightly or wrongly, as insulting to Islam, is not irrational and precautions are prudent. However, if Random House and the author are convinced of the literary quality of The Jewel of Medina, they would demonstrate considerable moral fortitude in proceeding with the publication. If not, they will help establish precedent that one can successfully intimidate the publishing community.