The best cultural reference of the conventions…
… came this afternoon as Chris Matthews batted around the RNC post-mortem with a couple of analysts on MSNBC. He finished the segment with this observation:
Did you ever see the movie Mrs. Doubtfire? Where the guy, Robin Williams, fails as a husband, and he comes back dressed as a housekeeper, and he gets a job so he can have responsibility for the kids again, having failed them as a dad and a father and as husband.
Is this what John McCain’s doing, and what the Republican’s party doing out there in St. Paul—coming back as Mrs. Doubtfire? ‘We’ve failed in our role for eight years We’ve got a new costume on, accept us and give us custody of the country again, ’cause we look a little different.’ It’s a Mrs. Doubtfire strategy!
From the concept to his prose it’s a good example of how Matthews, for all his idiosyncrasies, remains a cut above the normal cable political hosts.
You can find the segment on this page, under the link “Conventions are over—now what?” at about the 6:45 mark.
As a contrast, this was David Gregory’s lede-in, which followed immediately after:
The conventions are over, Whew! So who has the momentum now and who is winning this battle over change? As the race for the White House enters the home stretch….
Yawn.
(Keith Olbermann, of course, remains a master of such references. One was Thursday night, as Matthews went on about Sarah Palin, comparing her to Norma Rae. Said Olbermann, almost under his breath: “Norma Rae by way of Tracy Flick.”)
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Funny, that. Reading the public email from the self-described housewife (Anne, last name beginning with K I think) giving a hometown perspective on Palin also made me think of Tracy Flick.
(Though in Election, for all her unlikeability, Flick has more done to her than she does to others [within the narrative of the movie, at any rate]. The real monster is the self-rationalizing prick [and viewpoint character] Jim McAllister, who abuses his power and ruins himself trying to ruin her, which is why it’s satisfying to see him reduced to pathetically lobbing a soda at her limo at the end. It’s a wonderfully sneaky movie, setting you up to loathe Flick and cheer for McAllister, even as McAllister manipulates the election, then outright steals it, cheats on his wife [and loses her], justifies his idiot friend who lost his job after seducing Flick [for which McAllister blames Flick, despite the film making it clear who seduced whom], and of course loses his own job and career at the end: and blames Flick for everything. And much of the audience for the movie seemed to agree that Flick is the main villain, taking McAllister’s viewpoint on faith, and because Alexander Payne makes Flick’s unlikeableness clear from the start [though I think those sequences can also be read as being filtered through McAllister’s viewpoint].)
(I, um, tend to go on about Election.)
A bit OT but did you see the way the Wall Street Journal allowed Peggy Noonan to go in and change her column online about one hour after she made that public gaffe on TV? That made me mad. I was just going to use her column in my class and then when I went online to print it, it was all different and rhetorically nuts. Frankly, her self justification just made her sound crazy. I think there should be a law not allowing journalists to change their columns! (Hell, I never got to!)
I so agree about Matthews. He is also the guy who pointed to the hypocrisy of the cultural cons who bemoan the “elitism” of 2 black community leaders (the Obamas) who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and then took their talents and put them in service for others — exactly the supposedly “American” thing to do! Plus he called Bush a clown more or less, and said the GOP’s strat was “crap”. I am so grateful to Rupert, ultimately, for making this happen.