Always Classy

In her whiny and unaware post mortem of the campaign with conservative radio host-turned-filmmaker John Ziegler, Sarah Palin brought up something we don't talk a lot about here in the Land of Opportunity. Apparently unaware that America is supposed to be a classless society, she went right to the "C" word when discussing Caroline Kennedy's media coverage:

Palin questioned whether (Caroline) Kennedy's bid for the Senate "will be handled with kid gloves," and if so, "we will perhaps be able to prove that there is a class issue here" when contrasted with the scrutiny of her campaign. Kennedy, of course, is trying for an appointment to be one of 100 rather than running for vice president, and has drawn critical coverage for a series of halting interviews.

Palin is delusional through the interview, forgetting key aspects of her media treatment such as: she only talked to the media a few times and when she did she didn't make any sense.

She blames the media for that, which is fascinating since the kind of questions she fumbled were not hard-hitting. (Imagine a Mike Wallace ambush: he jumps out from behind the shrubbery, shoves a microphone into the nefarious evildoer's face, and barks, "What newspapers do you read?") But when Palin made her point about social class she was dead on, and way more accurate in her depiction of the media than is the standard right-wing ideological complaint.

The right can't come to grips with two simple facts: the media are all over the map ideologically and not all bad coverage is the result of ideological bias.

But class is a different thing. Class is, in large measure, what determines the tone of one's media coverage. Class is a pervasive factor in the media, and we almost never talk about it.

If you look across the newsrooms of the big dailies and TV nets, your'e looking across workplaces where there's near-uniformity of social class. Everyone went to the same schools, and they have the same circle of friends and make the same over-sized paychecks. Their isolation from everyday life is extreme (remember Connie Chung covering an earthquake in San Francisco from the back seat of a limousine?), and their attempts to make up for it (e.g., the "man in the street" interview) are farcical. Another seldom-talked-about aspect, given the dominance of TV news, is that everyone involved in the elite media is pretty, and pretty people have an easier time in life than not-pretty people.

Part of Palin's problem with the media was social class. There are those on the left who say she's elite herself because she and her husband earn an elite income of nearly $250,000 a year. But class long ago separated from income in the United States; that's why Donald Trump will, no matter how rich he is, be forever a short-fingered vulgarian. Even a cursory class analysis shows that Palin's claims of middle-classiness seem more like climbing than pretentious humility. We have people like Palin in Kentucky, and no matter how big their house is, everyone knows they're hillbillies.

Consider the facts: Palin went to five different colleges, none of them academically demanding. She was a beauty queen. She and her husband have been seasonal workers -- fishermen some times of the year, oil field workers during other times -- in industries that require long separations from home and family. She's got a son who had a few scrapes with the law and went into the Army and a daughter who was knocked-up by a high school dropout. (Palin protests that he's not a dropout because he's working on his GED. You have to drop out of high school before you can get into a GED program, and the fact that she believes getting a GED is not dropping out confirms her hillbilly worldview.) She's governor of a state where one of the main political issues is whether government should require people to have their trash professionally disposed of, or whether they should be trusted to load it up into their pick-up trucks and dispose of it properly themselves. (We have that argument every now and then in Kentucky, and the people who are against government trash removal tend to be the people who dispose of their trash by driving out on a country road and dumping it into a ravine -- which is not very classy.)

Caroline Kennedy, on the other hand, is upper class -- a fascinating study of the long-term effect of great wealth, given that her grandfather was viewed by the establishment as a nouveau climber unfit for polite company. Caroline, compared to most, has lead the friction-free life that most of us can only marvel at. She's been ushered through life by an adoring  establishment. I'm absolutely certain her application to Harvard didn't receive the same scrutiny that mine would have, just for example. I'm guessing she didn't have to claw her way into the various law and foundation jobs that have occupied her since. And her comically easy rise in politics -- few even bothered to claim that she had anything going for her but her name -- is a disgraceful reversion to the English system of peerage that we fought a revolution to get rid of.

All of that said, I don't believe her media coverage has been any less devastating than Palin's. It's been less pervasive, given that she aspires to be a Senator rather than Vice President, but it's been just as deadly.

But Palin is right that Kennedy's coverage has been different, and that the difference has been a difference of class.  Palin's coverage was loud and buffoonish because Palin was, in the eyes of the Ivy Leaguers at the back of the plane, loud and buffoonish. Kennedy's coverage, on the other hand, is delivered in the low, serious tones of the upper class, the way one talks privately about a well-liked equal who's embarrassing herself carrying on with the busboy.

Both Palin and Kennedy are jokes, they're just different kinds of jokes. One is Monty Python and one is Benny Hill, and all Palin can hear is the laughter aimed at her own pratfalls. She drops back into the right-wing refuge of blaming the media and declining to deal with reality, even though she instinctively understands that reality well. It is a class issue, and a smart politician would turn that into something marketable. Ronald Reagan did it. Reagan was far from high-class, with family dramas of his own and social inadequacies the likes of which the White House hadn't seen since Truman. But Reagan channeled whatever class resentments he had into something besides bitterness and self-pity.

Palin, it appears, isn't going to do that. For all the shots she's taken, she's a stint as head of the National Governor's Association and one good appearance on Charlie Rose away from redemption. But instead of getting serious, she wastes her time commiserating with ideological bozos like John Ziegler. That says to me that she hasn't got a clue.

Comments

[Steve]

Let it go Tom. You don't like Palin. We get it.

Shouldn't we be discussing more important things like King Barry's propsed trillion dollar boondoggle or even his upcoming coronation?

Speaking of King Barry, why is it that when he demanded that people lay off of criticism of Queen Michelle that was OK, but if Palin complains about the media attacking her family that is "whiny and unaware"?

[Trop]

Right on. Palin is white trash personified.

If Palin were smart, she'd fade from the limelight and do her job: Be a good governor, let her reforms pass the test of time, cultivate her intellect (if that's possible) and then emerge new an improved.

I hope Caroline Kennedy isn't handed Clinton's Senate seat. A big state like NY is brimming with talent. The seat should go to someone with a demonstrated capacity to win elections and govern.

[NewMexiKen]

Excellent, Tom.

[Lee]

All is want to know is, did your daily read, Andrew Sullivan, ever find out who really was the true mother of Trig.

I mean, he, a journalist writing under the banner of The Atlantic spent, what, a half dozen to dozen posts on it, right?

[Wally]

Just being a gadfly, here, since I basically agree with you. But. You look bad when one post makes fun of Joe the International Journalist and the next post complains that journalists are all cut from the same cloth and have no connection to us regular folk. C'mon, Joe's just a regular guy who doesn't like to pay his taxes. A fancy journalism degree from a fancy school or some expereince as a reporter would just taint him with the bias you say the media has toward the upper class.

[Tom]

OK, let's take these one at a time:

Steve, Governor Palin is a phenomenon of current politics and is thus worthy of attention, if not for what she is then for what she says about the spent conservative movement. You will note that the theme of this particular post was not how much I dislike her, but how badly she's managing an opportunity to become something more than she was in the last campaign. I'd argue that it's even sympathetic, since I spend much of the post explaining how she's right.

Lee, I think Andrew Sullivan has spent more than a dozen posts talking about Trig, and I find those posts embarrassing. But, alas, I don't control Andrew Sullivan, and I have no desire to spend my life pointing out when people who i do not know do embarrassing things on the Internet, unless they're funny. Andrew Sullivan is not routinely funny.

Finally, Wally: I do not say that all journalists are alike. I say that the journalists at the elite dailies and television networks are all alike. That is, itself, something of an overstatement, since an occasional public school graduate sneaks through the filter. (Connie Chung, for example, went to the University of Maryland.)

I also do not consider Joe the Plumber to be a journalist. He's going wherever he's going to make ideological points. That makes him either a commentator or a propagandist, depending on whether he pretends to be a journalist or not.

There is no danger, whatever Joe's merits may be, that he is going to be employed by one of the elite dailies or television networks.

[Pursuit]

Hey, Andy's beginning to dig in to Travolta's dead son! Great daily read Tom!

Cheap shot aside, I'm surprised my co-readers just zipped by your most provocative statement; that America is supposed to be a classless society. Says who? While we are dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal and endowed with certain rights, we are by no means a classless society in design or execution. For goodness sake, the creation of the Senate and its members appointment (Hey they couldn't have anticipated Blago!) was designed to limit the influence of the dirty rabble.

Truth is, the idea of America as a classless society is a myth created to soothe the feelings of the Great Unwashed. America's class lines are clear for anyone who cares to notice, and important for the functioning of our society. I recommend the definitive work on this subject, Paul Fussel's "Class".

[PhoenixRising]

We have that argument every now and then in Kentucky, and the people who are against government trash removal tend to be the people who dispose of their trash by driving out on a country road and dumping it into a ravine -- which is not very classy.

Um, Tom? My sister lives in Kentucky. The directions for how to get to her house are: Head out of town, turn downhill off the pavement at the second break in the guardrail, and head uphill at the ford. (The ford is the part of the river where appliances pile up if the river is low enough to cross.) If you don't see a washer or fridge or something, don't try to cross in the car, head up to the footbridge.

I live in a state even poorer than KY, per capita basis, and we have trash service. Alaska, due to our national petroleum addition, can afford trash service, but like my relations on the south side of the Ohio River, they choose to spend their incomes on other things, which makes them trashy. The fact that this woman believes that the governorship of Alaska qualifies her to opine on class is all the evidence I need that she's as silly and vapid as she came across in October.

[Tom]

Fussell's Class is, in my opinion, one of the finest pieces of social commentary ever written, and since you've clearly read it you surely recognized its influence on this posting. It was everything I could muster to keep the phrase "prole drift" out of things.

I agree that we're anything but a classless society. Fussell's book, you recall, begins with a discussion of the myth of a classless America and the pitfalls of discussing class.

Here's a link to the book on Amazon if anyone out there wants to read it. It's very funny.

[Pursuit]

Prole drift! There is a blast from the past!

I was assigned "Class" in an MBA marketing class. It is very funny, but more importantly, spot on about the truths of class in American society. The interesting thing is the reactions of people who read it generally fall into one of two camps. Either they recognize the truth and enjoy the humor, or they go into deep denial and become deeply angered by what is written.

[Tom]

I give "Class" to people I hire as a welcome gift. I think its insights into how American society works are amazing. I'm impressed that you read it as part of a marketing class. You had a smart professor.

And you're right: some people are deeply offended by it.

[Lonely Rich Women]

Interesting post. They were never going to be President and Vice President.

[Wally]

Tom,
you are a success. Your blog has finally attracted lonely, rich women.

[Adam]

Basically in agreement with Tom's post, and now buying CLASS...