Jindal Bad, Obama Good
I really do love Esquire magazine, as I’ve noted at this website before. I love Chuck Klosterman’s column, I love the fashion advice regarding clothes I’ll never be able to afford, and I love their monthly spotlight on different boozes. It’s good stuff.
But I hate their political coverage. Not necessarily because it’s liberal–I love the “New Yorker’s” political coverage, after all–but because it’s childishly liberal. Consider their profile of Bobby Jindal in this month’s issue, replete with lines like these:
Known variously as a “wunderkind technocrat,” a “speed-talking policy wonk,” a “problem-solver, not a politician,” a “credit to all South Asian-Americans,” “the next Ronald Reagan,” (Rush Limbaugh), a “guy who looks in the mirror and sees a white man,” and a “scary, ultraconservative religious fanatic in cahoots with the religious right” ….
His rubbery lips formed a crooked smile, exposing his slightly bucked teeth, which seemed brilliant against the contrast of his skin. …
… Jindal had, for some reason, refused the customary television cosmetics, lending to his countenance a somewhat unfortunate Nixonesque swarthiness. …
The young governor winced, like a bookish kid who’s just realized he’s wandered into the wrong area of the playground. He looked down into his spidery hands, arranged at the moment as if they were holding an invisible bowl. …
And that’s not even counting the 1,400 words spent trying to portray him as a crazy religious extremist because of the “exorcism” he witnessed.
Could you imagine Esquire ever running a similar story about Barack Obama, a man Jindal is explicitly compared to at the beginning of this profile? Could you imagine an Esquire writer highlighting Obama’s ears, or toothy grin, or “swarthiness”? Could you imagine Esquire dredging up memories from Obama’s past (like, oh, say, his relationship with domestic terrorists and America-hating preachers)? Would Esquire publish a picture juxtaposing Jindal with what appears to be a witch doctor,* as this one did?
We don’t really need to imagine; there’s a little blurb about Obama in the same issue of Esquire. After comparing him to James Madison, Martin Luther King, Elvis, and Susan B. Anthony (not bad for a one term Illinois senator!), Esquire has this to say about Sen. Obama:
Every politician who’s ever run for president gins himself to be the embodiment of the best things America perceives about itself, but Obama was doing so after seven years in which the country, steadily and fearfully, had abandoned in practice all those things it still believed about itself in theory. He was attempting to redefine American Exceptionalism–a concept that has done more good than harm in the world–for a new century in which America has been a lot of things, but exceptional isn’t one of them.
In other words: Obama is here to redeem us. Jindal’s just a scary foreigner who can’t be trusted.
*The artist explains elsewhere in the magazine that the figure juxtaposed with Jindal was inspired by a “defleshed” image of Adam (of Adam and Eve fame). Hokay.