Now its Jeff Greenfield of CNN who says he was just telling a joke. Recently Greenfield compared Barack Obama’s dress to that of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on The Situation Room. Obama’s dress is described as “a jacket, collared shirt, no tie.” That’s hardly something radical with which to compare him to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
So now Greenfield says that he was just joking, just like he’s joking about Obama’s middle and last names:
GREENFIELD: Now, it is one thing to have a last name that sounds like Osama and a middle name, Hussein, that is probably less than helpful. But an outfit that reminds people of a charter member of the axis of evil, why, this could leave his presidential hopes hanging by a thread. Or is that threads? — Wolf.
It’s apparently all right for Greenfield to joke, but it is not ok for John Kerry to tell jokes at George Bush’s expense:
Greenfield: Which is why it’s reasonable to think that the principal victim of the Kerry comments is John Kerry, who has been out campaigning for Democratic candidates around the country, building up markers for a possible second White House run, just as Richard Nixon did, very successfully, in the 1966 midterms.
With Kerry canceling appearances this week to minimize fallout, that piece of a presidential campaign strategy now appears inoperative.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
GREENFIELD: And maybe the most puzzling part of this whole story is What Senator Kerry was trying to accomplish with that botched joke in the first place.
Mocking President Bush for not studying hard sounds just like that sort of Ivy League college campus, elitist ridicule that has proven utterly ineffective, even politically counterproductive. If the polls are right, the country has turned negative on President Bush because of what is happening in Iraq, not because of his SAT scores — Wolf.
At least Greenfield got it right that Kerry was joking about Bush and not the troops, but misses the point about how this fit in with Kerry’s frequent comments about Bush getting us stuck in Iraq. The problem with Bush is not his SAT scores but that he to us into a war without any understanding of the mess it would create or that the war was unnecessary. Even though Kerry botched the delivery, his joke made sense as there was an element of truth to it and it was pertinent to the issue of Iraq. Greenfield’s joke simply made no sense.
Although it made no sense, the joke is part of a larger picture of avoiding the issues with irrelevant jokes about Democrats. We’ve seen this with Dukakis in the tank, Gore supposedly inventing the internet, and John Kerry wind surfing. Now the joke is apparently that Obama is like the Iranian leader who is spending this week denying that the Holocaust occurred. Greenfield complains about the liberal bloggers who criticized him for his “joke.” I’m glad to see the blogosphere stand up to Greenfield on this, and wish it had done a better job of sticking up for John Kerry, and had been around for Dukakis and Gore.
Ron,
Out of curiosity, what do you think is the harm of Greenfield’s joke? Or are you simply pointing out his hypocricy and suggesting that such jokes should never be over-analyzed?
Do you think there is (or should be) a difference between how we interpret jokes made by pundits and jokes made by elected officials?
The difference is not whether its by a pundit or an elected official, but the nature of the joke which I already discussed in the post. Kerry joking about Bush getting us stuck in Iraq is consistent with his political message about Iraq. Greenfield’s jokes about Obama’s clothes and name have no bearing on anything significant, feeding into the Republican tendency to campaign on such inane topics while avoiding discussion of the actual issues.