Thursday, April 30, 2009 - Posts
-
sponsorship
Willa, Hanna, isn't there a problem in writing a tell-all if you avoid telling about the most important thing? According to reports Elizabeth Edwards acknowledges that John confessed to her about his affair—although his confession was a lie in that he made it sound like a one-time slip instead of an on-going thing—but she does not mention at all the baby that has resulted. The fact that she doesn't is a kind of back-handed confirmation that baby is Edwards' since a tell-all book would be a good place to assert he wasn't the father if that was actually the case. I can understand Elizabeth wanting to tell her story. Hanna, as you point out, she feels comforted by being open. Because she is so ill, the criticism of her decision to do so, and of her choice to participate in Edwards' doomed presidential race will be muted. But why subject herself, and her family, to more public rehashing of what a creep her husband is? Hanna, he may have tried to create the appearance of sincerity, but he was always so disturbingly artificial. That actually may be the most authentic thing about him—how utterly insincere he is.
-
sponsorship
Willa, you question whether Elizabeth Edwards should have written a tell-all about her husband's affair. In my experience covering her during the campaign, she is, in her bones, a tell-all kind of person. In her books, in her speeches, in her blog posts, she reveals an extraordinary amount of personal information for a political wife—exactly what she did after her son was killed, where John touched her when they discovered her cancer had returned, how she yells at her kids. That is, however, not exactly the same as being honest. I've always thought of her as a model of Lionel Trilling's concept of "authenticity." What's most important to her is being true to herself at any given moment. If she is angry at her staff she will yell at them. If she hates John she will kick him out of the house. If the next minute she feels love for him, she'll feel it. Authenticity requires no consistency. So in her book I imagine she is heartbroken one minute and vengeful the next (such as when she calls Rielle, the mistress, "pathetic.") John, on the other hand, veers more towards Trilling's concept of "sincerity." He conforms himself to an external standard of moral uprightness and honorable behavior. Not a hair out of place, not a word changes in his stump speech; it's always consistent and polished. This is an outdated model, which is why I think he always seemed so insincere when he was trying to be sincere. Also, as we all know, he fell badly short of it.
-
sponsorship
I sure have. We all know how we're supposed to apportion our budget (10 percent into savings, no more than 30 percent towards housing, etc.), but how many of us really stick to that? And when we veer off course, what are the sirens pulling us away? I spend too much on cabs and Greek yogurt, for instance. This Mother Teresa figure drops $650 on dry-cleaning and a cool grand a week on skin-care.
So, to satisfy that voyeuristic impulse and perhaps do a little pop sociological research in the process, we're asking for XX Factor readers to participate in an experiment. We'd like to have a handful of women, from various parts of the country and occupying different income brackets, keep scrupulous track of their expenses for a week. We'll publish the results on Double X, the new Slate women's site that's launching in May. (We won't use your real name on the site, unless of course you want us to.) If you're interested in participating, send an email to DoubleX.slate@gmail.com with the subject line "Track My Spending," and we'll send along more details.
-
sponsorship
While it’s true as John says that the 100-day presidential milepost is media-made, it does afford time to ponder swift and striking changes, such as Michelle Obama’s rise in poll ratings. Less than a year ago, in June 2008, as the Washington Post pointed out in its 100-days section yesterday, Michelle Obama’s favorable rating was 48 percent. Now it’s 76 percent, meaning that this first lady is more popular than Hillary Clinton or Laura Bush at similar early junctures. Andrew Sullivan has acknowledged that Michelle’s “public relations success” is one of the aspects of this time period that surprises him. But last week, poll results from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press provided some clues as to why this has happened. To wit: conservative women like her a lot more than they did this time last year.
You can glean this from one of the center’s fun tricks: one way its pollsters probe the collective unconscious is to ask people a single word they'd use to describe the person in question. Among the top three words used to describe Michelle Obama are three—classy, nice, and intelligent—that were also in the top four for Laura Bush. But while Bush tended to evoke words such as ladylike, quiet, loyal, dignified and pleasant, Michelle Obama is more likely to cause people to say things like strong, confident, smart and wife. (Why in the world “wife” didn’t spring to mind in the case of Bush is hard to imagine, but whatever; Curtis Sittenfeld corrected that.) In the top twenty for Michelle Obama, the only pejorative was “arrogant,” which occurred to seven people, the same number that came up with “awesome,” “mother,” “outgoing,” and “terrific.” Laura Bush’s only pejorative was “invisible.” For some reason, both women prompted a good number of readers to say, simply, “OK.”
But here's where the one-word-thing gets sort of telling: As the Pew analysis points out, in July 2001, “conservative “ was the seventh-most-common word used to describe Laura Bush. Yet out of almost 800 respondents this year, only one person responded to the words “Michelle Obama” with the word “liberal.” Apparently, people see Michelle Obama as non-partisan, which presumably gives her crossover appeal. Someone who came into contact with her on a national service initiative recently described her to me as a “political tiger” who made effective behind-the-scenes phone calls, but the public does not see her as political.
And perhaps because that is the case, the cohort among whom Michelle’s polls numbers has risen most strikingly is Republican women. In January, Pew found, just 46 percent of Republican women had a favorable view of the new First Lady. Three short months later, that figure had risen 21 percentage points, to 67 percent. That’s a big change in a short period of time. To me, this suggests that the first lady's shrewdly tended public image, which emphasizes her family values—mother, wife, daughter, vegetable gardener—has gone a long way toward winning over women of a more conservative bent. Republican men like her better now, too, than they did in January—and a lot better than they did last year—though the change is not quite so striking. So Andrew, I think there’s your answer. Or some of it.
-
sponsorship
More from our feature
on kids' drawings of the commander-in-chief:
XX Factor reader Jaclyn Young sent in this Inauguration Day
card of President Obama drawn by her 7-year-old nephew, Shane. She called
Shane to thank him for his card, with "President Obama in what looks like a pink
bathing suit on the cover." His response: "Oh yeah, the pink bikini. I had
that idea first. If anyone else says they had the idea first, they are
lying."
Another reader, Mardi Pinkney, submitted this work by her
godson, Dominic Williams-Dzirasa, age 7. When Dominic learned of Obama's
victory, he said, "You mean there has NEVER been a brown
President...EVER? That's just
strange!" He drew this to celebrate the occasion.
And this one came from a friend of mine, Ilana Lorge, who
teaches third grade in Singapore.
It's by one of her students, Alex Soikkeli.
Want to brag about your own presidential portrait artist to
be? Keep the submissions coming!
-
sponsorship
Hanna, speaking of marriages that make you feel uncomfortable, the Edwardses are back in the spotlight today. The Daily News got its hands on a copy of Elizabeth Edwards' forthcoming memoir, Resilience, and have predictably highlighted the salacious stuff. (John Edwards told his wife Elizabeth about his affair with Rielle Hunter, whose name Elizabeth never uses in print, just days after he announced his candidacy. Upon finding out Elizabeth writes that she "cried and screamed, I went to the bathroom and threw up.")
The excerpts seem—and not having read the book yet, big emphasis on the seem— to be a kind of correction to the Stepford, "stand by your man" approach so often taken by political wives (and Elizabeth Edwards did, at least, refuse to physically stand next to her man while he made his confession and apology)—but only kind of. Edwards tells her side of the story and publicly chastises her husband ("He should not have run," she writes) but he's still her husband. Her critique has a narrow outer limit. Is writing about this better than keeping mum? Or, in a way, is it exactly the same? Is telling us all the true, clichéd things about why a person might decide to stand by her jerk that different from, or that much more informative than, silently standing by said jerk?
The News does pull out one genuinely heartbreaking quote from the book: "I lie in bed, circles under my eyes, my sparse hair sticking in too many directions, and he looks at me as if I am the most beautiful woman he has ever seen. It matters." And I'm sure it does matter, and yet, I can't help but wonder if the look she's describing resembles the supposedly earnest, empathetic stare Edwards utilized on the campaign trail, which some people, myself included, always found to be so disingenuous (and that turned out to be, to the extent that Edwards' ambition did trump his judgment, truly disingenuous). And then I wish I could un-think that thought, because it would be nicer to believe Elizabeth Edwards' version of things.
-
sponsorship
When I'm not a journalist, I'm a poet, and today some bad news came: Craig Arnold, winner of the Yale Younger Series of Poets prize and author of several collections, has gone missing on a small volcanic island off Japan. He was there on a creative fellowship exchange. A search party was sent out for him, but it's not clear whether the search is ongoing, and so poets and writers are trying to ensure that it is not given up yet. Here's a link to more information, and a call for help from anyone who might have connections in the area. Here is the beginning of a lovely poem of his, which you can also find on the Poetry Foundation Web site:
The bird who creaks like a rusty playground swing
the bird who sharpens the knife the bird who blows
on the mouths of milk bottles the bird who bawls like a cat
like a cartoon baby the bird who rubs the wineglass
the bird who curlicues the bird who quacks like a duck
but is not a duck the bird who pinks on a jeweller's hammer
They hide behind the sunlight scattered throughout the canopy
At the thud of your feet they fall thoughtful and quiet
coming to life again only when you have passed
Perhaps they are not multiple but one
-
sponsorship
As Slate's foreign editor, I'm always
aware of the odd and sometimes iffy news priorities the media invokes when
deciding what "foreign" stories to cover. And because I'm prone to guilt
(despite being neither Catholic nor Jewish), I spend a lot of time wondering why
I'm more interested in one place than
another—even when, all too often, the stakes, the body counts, and the atrocities
are much more mind-boggling in the place I just can't get all that excited about.
I mumble all this psychobabble because I'm currently
obsessed with the developing story of the vehicle that drove into a Dutch crowd
gathered to greet Queen Beatrix on Queen's
Day, a national holiday. As Britain's
Daily Telegraph put
it:
Witnesses said that the black Suzuki Swift appeared
to deliberately target an open bus carrying Queen Beatrix and her family. ... The
car swerved across police railings, where crowds of people were waiting to see
the queen pass, and slammed into the foot of a stone monument, where it came to
a halt, its bonnet crumpled and scraped.
Thus far, there are reports
of four people dead and 13 injured, and authorities seem to have agreed it was
a deliberate assault.
Still, four people dead? What's that compared with the body count in the Democratic
Republic of Congo? What's the horror of having a car drive at you when you're
waving at the monarch (even a cute, right-on one like Beatrix) compared with what civilians
are being put through in Sri
Lanka? Am I just reacting this way because I've been in a crowd like the
one in Apeldoorn, whereas I've never, say, gathered
firewood like the women of Darfur (a task that leaves them prone
to all manner of horrific abuses by marauders and Janjaweed militias)?
Or perhaps it's a gay thing. Queen's Day is a very gay holiday in the Netherlands.
Could this morning's incident be a homophobic attack? Yes, that's my excuse, I'm
watching out for my people. OK, guilt gone.
-
sponsorship
Vice President Joe Biden is clearly on a confidence high from having talked Sen. Arlen Specter into joining the other team. So now, after 100 days of relative silence, he's running his mouth again. On the Today show this morning, he said;
I would tell members of my family, and I have, "I wouldn't go anywhere in confined places now," the vice president said. It's not that he's going to Mexico, it's that you're in a confined aircraft, and one person sneezes, it goes all the way through the aircraft...So from my perspective what relates to mitigation, if you're out in the middle of a field and someone sneezes, that's one thing. If you're in a closed aircraft or a closed container or closed car or closed class room, it's a different thing.
This is, of course, not what the president said last night. He stuck to the basics: Wash your hands, cover your mouth when you cough. And the problem is not that what Biden said isn't true; the Mexican government has been spreading this message for over a week. It's that it gives the impression that public officials, trading on inside information, are telling their families something they aren't telling the rest of us. His spokeswoman quickly corrected the mistake, insisting he told his family the same thing he's been telling the rest of us: Only stay out of subways and airplanes if you're sick.
Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum
What did you think of this article?