(edited for clarity)

What can you say about John Kerry?

Former President of Iran Mohammad Khatami, right, shares a word with Senator from Massachusetts, USA, John Kerry after participating in a session ‘The Future of the Middle East’ at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Saturday Jan. 27, 2007. Kerry criticized the Bush administration’s foreign policy during the session, saying it has caused the United States to become “a sort of international pariah.” (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo)

Will Kerry be granted a Hugh Grant moment? I have no idea whether Kerry has totally stepped over the line this time. One of the things that concerns me is that even though I’ve got pretty good antennae, I don’t know where the line is these days—it keeps moving.

By which I mean that what is “acceptable” in political discourse changes faster than you can say “homophobe” (or “Islamophobe” or “anti-Semite“). And that what is “acceptable” behavior from the domestic political opposition changes faster than you can say “visiting Assad in Syria” or “paying respect to Iran’s Supreme Shithead [see above].”

There are arguments to be made that Kerry’s bizarre behavior could in fact help us—that in the Age of Global Political Correctness (TM), this sort of faux “public diplomacy” is appreciated by the global audience and that it makes us look good, in a good cop-bad cop kind of way. But only as long as there actually is a bad cop. Who knows? But we shouldn’t ignore the notion. It actually reminds me of Yitzhak Rabin’s determination “to fight terror as if there were not a peace process and to pursue peace as if there were no terror.” Which only sounds contradictory; I think it’s it may be the only way forward.

But back to the stuff that doesn’t make my head hurt—as in: will we forgive Kerry?

Because that’s what we do with our beloved and/or loathed celebrities: we try them in the court of public opinion, sometimes with great fanfare and sometimes almost under the radar. I also agree with author Paul Slansky, who says that we Americans are obsessed with redemption:

For [Michael] Richards, going on Letterman was a shrewd choice, says Paul Slansky, author (with Arleen Sorkin) of a wonderfully witty compendium of apologies called “My Bad: 25 Years of Public Apologies and the Appalling Behavior That Inspired Them.”

“Going on the late-night talk show, as Hugh Grant proved with Jay Leno years ago, is a fantastic stage for making an apology,” Slansky says. “The late-night talk show is almost by definition a safe, friendly environment. They’re thrilled to have you, and they’re not going to ask you any hard questions, then everybody talks about it the next day and it’s all over.”

Unless you’re Dick Cheney, it’s almost impossible to escape an incident unscathed without feeding the apology machine. Just ask Judith Regan, who ended up in even more hot water by responding to the outcry over her O.J. Simpson “If I Did It” book and TV special with an outlandish justification, casting herself as a victim, not a perpetrator - and apparently blaming her subsequent firing on a “cabal” of some sort.

So why has the apology become such an integral part of the often dicey relationship between media and celebrity?

“It probably has a lot to do with America’s obsession with redemption,” says Slansky. “People today have a major love-hate relationship with celebrities. The relationship is so fraught with Schadenfreude that people are thrilled when celebrities (mess) up, and yet they’re happy to see them back again. After all, most people aren’t genuinely sorry. Most apologies are a way of saying, ‘I’m sorry I let down my guard and let you see my inner ugliness.’”

That’s right, too, I think. We don’t necessarily need to believe that these “sinners” are reformed, but we are still addicted to the Redemption Narrative and we want to see it played out.

We like to watch.

Peter Sellers in Being There (directed by Hal Ashby and co-starring the divine Shirley Maclaine); based on the novel by Jerzy Kosinski

Jack Shafer seems to think that if only people were more aware of “unspeak”—the PR-fueled and poll-tested reductionist shorthand vocabulary that is introduced into our public discourse at an alarming rate; whose existence has been the source of contentious debate for at least twenty years (but who’s counting?); which has been used by political campaigns for at least as long; and that has picked up in global popularity as the Age of Political Correctness began— then we could simply stop the subliminial selling of political messages (i.e., propaganda) through the too-cunning-by-half use of language.

Pro-life supposes that a fetus is a person and that those who are anti-pro-life are against life,… Pro-choice distances its speakers from actually advocating abortion, while casting “adversaries as ‘anti-choice’; as interfering, patriarchal dictators.”

Unspeak (also the title of a book, by Steven Poole), Shafer explains, is

an attempt to say something without saying it, without getting into an argument and so having to justify itself. At the same time, it tries to unspeak—in the sense of erasing, or silencing—any possible opposing point of view, by laying a claim right at the start to only one choice of looking at a problem.

This stuff is right up my alley, but something is weird about Shafer’s piece. Shafer writes about this subject as if his audience were a tabula rasa and yet he never mentions the contemporary dark prince of political language —longtime Republican consultant/pollster Frank Luntz (currently unaffiliated, I just read somewhere). Shafer cannot possibly be unaware of Luntz.

Nor can Shafer be unaware that this technique is increasingly used by the Democrats—and indeed the media—who now engage in the language wars with panache (and success: they turned Bush’s “surge” into an “escalation”; and NBC took great pride in being the first to call Bush’s “insurgency” in Iraq a “civil war”).

What gives?

Also: does this apply only to the hidden political messages that are aimed at good-hearted Americans by evil corporationa and politicians?

Or do words like “Koranic food“—seriously!—count?

John Edwards is a populist, right?

Well, yes and no. He used to talk about the “two Americas.” Now, however, we know which one he lives in, because it turns out he’s got a 102-acre estate in North Carolina, with a 10,000+-square foot house—and more than 28,000 square feet of contiguous indoor space.

(via TigerHawk)

This Edwards story (advanced by Drudge, apparently—read the note at the top of the page when you click on the Carolina Journal link) is actually sort of lame. People who follow politics already know that Edwards made a lot of money as a lawyer. Still, the mode of attack is effective: unlike the words “rich trial lawyer,” the images of Edwards’s sprawling compound pack a punch. No one is going to miss the message (that Edwards is not exactly a man of the people).

Here’s a question for campaign strategists and party honchos, though: Is Edwards’s wealth and privilege a turn-off or a turn-on?

David Brooks, in his December 2001 essay “One Nation, Slightly Divisible” (and in his book BoBos in Paradise), suggested that class consciousness/resentment is not much of an electoral issue in the United States.

In that essay, Brooks wrote [emphasis mine]:

[W]hen [people in "Red" America" Franklin County, Pennsylvania] are asked about the broader theory, whether there is class conflict between the educated affluents and the stagnant middles, they stare blankly…. Do you feel that the highly educated people around, say, New York and Washington are getting all the goodies? … Do you see a gulf between high-income people in the big cities and middle-income people here? I got only polite, fumbling answers as people tried to figure out what the hell I was talking about.

When I rephrased the question in more-general terms, as Do you believe the country is divided between the haves and the have-nots?, everyone responded decisively: yes. But as the conversation continued, it became clear that the people saying yes did not consider themselves to be among the have-nots. Even people with incomes well below the median thought of themselves as haves. …

In case you’re wondering why:

They don’t compare themselves with faraway millionaires who appear on their TV screens. They compare themselves with their neighbors. … Many of the people in Franklin County view the lifestyles of the upper class in California or Seattle much the way we in Blue America might view the lifestyle of someone in Eritrea or Mongolia—or, for that matter, Butte, Montana. Such ways of life are distant and basically irrelevant, except as a source of academic interest or titillation.

Indeed. And Drudge has his finger on the pulse of America’s love of gossip.

But will this spot-of-bother hurt the Edwards campaign? Doubtful.