Smiling without looking stupid
Douglas Burns
The late Arizona congressman Mo Udall, author of the priceless book “Too Funny To Be President” and a man who was just that, used to get off this great line during his run for the White House in 1976.
“I was in New Hampshire, thousands of miles from home with my car stuck in the snow,” Udall said. “My advance woman urged me to shake a few hands in a nearby barbershop. I stuck my head in the door and blurted, ‘Mo Udall, I’m running for president.’
“The barber replied, ‘Yeah, we know, we were just laughing about that this morning.’”
Udall, arguably the wittiest politician the modern nation has known, always made the case that humility is attractive.
“My experience is that putting myself down is the best kind of humor; it creates empathy, humanizes any message, and puts people at ease,” Udall said. “Self-deprecating jokes have the added benefit of inoculating one against egomania.”
As a young speechwriter for Missouri Congresswoman Pat Danner in the mid-1990s, I devoured Udall’s book and speeches. He had it right, I thought, with the self-deprecating remarks. Knock yourself down, show the crowds and voters your candidate has a sense of humor, the confidence to be the butt of her own jokes.
The only problem: self-deprecating humor doesn’t work with female politicians because people are likely to actually believe the punch lines.
The recently deceased Betty Friedan, the recently retired Sandra Day O’Connor and the recently appointed Hillary Clinton have taken women far, but they still struggle to be taken seriously with much of the electorate and can’t risk employing the kind of humor and speaking styles that warm crowds up to them. It’s terribly unfair but true.
When Udall joked about people finding his candidacy funny, people found it folksy.
Hillary Clinton could never deliver that line. People would take it seriously. That goes double for Sarah Palin. This creates an immense challenge for the female candidates delivering speeches — not to mention their speechwriters.
Audiences are far more conscious of body language and facial gestures, the appearance factor, if you will, with women. Smile too much and you look the part of the fawning cheerleader. Get too tough in your remarks and you come off as shrill and risk getting the bitch tag. Come up with a whopping one-liner on a rival, and male voters, even many of those with you on the issues, instinctively feel emasculated along with your foe.
It would be easy to write this off as deeply ingrained gender bias that even a child of a single mother, and a politically active and progressive one at that, can’t fully shake. But there’s more to it.
The largest obstacle for women in politics may be, well, other women, former Lt. Gov. Art Neu, a Carroll Republican, once told me.
“I think it’s older women who think a woman’s place is in the home, and they ought not to do that,” Neu says. “I suspect that’s still prevalent in the state, but it’s dying out.”
Neu says there have been exceptional women in Iowa politics on both sides of the aisle for generations. No one, however, has been able to crack the political glass ceiling.
Most voters would never admit to gender bias publicly, but will exercise their right to vote their minds, even if motivated by sexism, at the polls, a factor that may skew early polls in races with women candidates.
All of Iowa’s neighboring states have elected women to either the U.S. House of Representatives or U.S. Senate. We never have.
Moreover, Iowa has never elected a woman as governor, although the state’s last three chief executives have had female lieutenant governors. Arguably, the highest-ranking female official in the history of the state — one who was elected of her own accord and carried real power — was former Attorney General Bonnie Campbell, a Democrat who tried unsuccessfully in 1994 to step where no woman has tread on Iowa’s political ladder in her bid to become governor.
It is this history and culture with which Hillary Clinton had to contend in 2008 and may very well face Sarah Palin in the next few years.
That’s no laughing matter. CV
Douglas Burns is a fourth-generation Iowa newspaperman who writes for The Carroll Daily Times Herald and offers columns for Cityview.
