The inexplicably famous Pauline Kael quote about not knowing anyone who voted for Nixon happened 38 years ago. Why are Republicans still talking about it (Mary Matlin in Politico — no link, h/t Reader J)?
Mary Matalin, among the few Beltway Republicans who have consistently praised Palin, said she would advise Palin against trying to build relationships with mainstream media (MSM) outlets, since their reporters “at best, don’t understand (Palin) and, more commonly, have an elitist, Pauline Kael world view where people like Palin are hicks from the sticks.”
Part of what’s so strange here is that the idea that liberal New Yorkers should be ashamed of having voted uniformly against Nixon somehow lives on for 36 years after Watergate.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Well, Mary Matalin (whom Bush II despised and refused to hire) and her husband were last relevant 18 years ago, so you have to adjust your cultural clock.
Alex S.
Sometimes even Nixon is just a strawman. And your titles are a treasure.
sidhra
Nixon was a crook, in fact. So there’s that.
kth
Can’t prove it, but I’d be willing to bet that Pauline Kael wasn’t really surprised that Nixon won in 1972, but was satirizing the insularity of the people she hung out with.
Just as “politically correct” was coined by liberals to characterize fellow liberals who were overly earnest and irony-deficient. Of course there’s no symmetry: conservatives aren’t capable of that kind of self-awareness, and liberals wouldn’t bludgeon them with their own witticisms if they were so capable.
Lolis
Being right or smart is never rewarded in political punditry.
erlking
But, Palin IS a hick from the sticks. That’s her whole shtick, isn’t it? (and yes, Dr. Seuss is rolling in his grave)
Isn’t her whole persona about being a fuck up from nowhere, and that’s what makes her great–“commonsenseconservativism” and inarticulacy?
So, why slag Pauline Kael?
I’m confused.
El Cruzado
Not to mention it goes both ways. Epistemic Closure is the fancy-words way to say the same thing.
asiangrrlMN
Ka-thunk. Ka-thunk. Ka-thunk. My head hitting my laptop. Why is MM3 given a platform for her idiocy?
@erlking: Because. Shut up. That’s why. Also. Too.
Dennis G.
It is a safe bet that most reporters these days wouldn’t know who Pauline Kael was. Hell, I bet that most of them would place her as a host of a Food Network cooking show. Only a Washington DC elitist–such as Matalin–would bring up a writer from over 35 years ago as a benchmark for today’s mainstream media.
Matalin has been crafting ‘culture wars’ since the eighties. Her rolodex, talking points, memes and ideas are showing their age.
She is a freak–a superfreak. And the strangest thing should be that anybody listens to her at all, but in Washington being a locked in the past has been is always a good con to run and fleece the rubes. And as grifters go, Matalin is one of the best.
Cheers
J
I miss Pauline Kael.
Jason
I anticipate Matalin next warns Palin against embracing Susan Sontag’s “volcano” metaphor for womanhood, and to emcee Alaska’s VDay celebrations by turning to a Brechtian austerity in her Vagina Monologues. Because that’s something Pauline Kael would just hate.
Steve M.
If “elitist” = “dislikes Palin,” then half the country is elitist.
Suffern ACE
@Jason: Pauline Kael would probably not like the Narnia movies so there would be reason to be suspicious of her motives.
JGabriel
Pauline Kael jokes are au courant compared to the Chappaquiddick jokes that still make the rounds in conservative circles. We’re talking about people who think it’s cutting edge to claim that Obama is the love child of Malcom X and The Weathermen.
,
flounder
Wyomingite hicks like me have never heard of Pauline Kael until now. Go figure.
Probably 30% of the people I know would vote for Palin just because she wears camo and pisses of the right people, 50% wouldn’t because she exemplifies all of the moronics of those other 30%, and the other 20% are an enigma.
Brian S (formerly Incertus)
Conservatives like Matalin don’t have arguments or discussions–they hold grudges. In that, they are the children of Nixon as opposed to Reagan, and so it makes perfect sense that they would think that Kael’s statement is still relevant.
Also, consider the demographic they’re appealing to. They probably remember the quote in question. No one under fifty does, and that’s what’s going to hurt them in the near future.
mclaren
The GOP remains trapped like a fly in amber in the year 1972, when hippies were scary and dirty and the Weather Underground wasn’t a website for updating your weather info.
tkogrumpy
The unique thing about high level GOP spokestwits such as Matalin is that they are intellectually perceptive about shit that never actually existed.
KG
@mclaren: no, no, no, it’s always 1980 for the conservative movement and the GOP. A reference to 1972 is simply a comment on a recent event.
tkogrumpy
I lived in Mass. in 1972 and worked tirelessly for McGovern, but even in Mass. I knew many who were passionate about Nixon, or maybe more accurately scared shitless of the DFH McGovern.
Tom Q
@kth: Completely agree. I was a regular Kael reader in those days and not only don’t recall her saying it, but recognize it as very much the opposite of her thinking. As far back as her review of Hud she was excoriating liberals for not understanding the sunbelt enthusiasm for Goldwater. If she said anything like what’s so often quoted, I guarantee it was a criticism of blinkered-ness — not an example of it.
For the record, I googled the quote a while back, and there’s no authoritative source — just a ton of right-wingers quoting it, and one debunking site that calls it “possibly apochryphal”. But I fear it’s in a class with Al Gore/”I invented the Internet” or Bogart/”Play it again, Sam” — lines that were never uttered but are believed to have been by so many people that it’s useless to get folks to stop quoting them.
ChrisB
Well, I’m from NYC and my parents hated Richard Nixon as much as I hate George W. Bush.
And I’m proud of them for it.
mvr
@kth:
Much wisdom in this comment. I remember being horrified that Bush the elder took the term ‘pc’ non-ironically and the national media followed right along.
FWIW, Pauline Kael has written some fabulous reviews over the years, not that I can name one at the spur of the moment.
MikeJ
Politico is Cahiers du Stupid.
Davis X. Machina
We would need the quote, invented or not, whether or not it was ever said or not, ironically or not, because it’s convenient shorthand for something we all know.
E se non è vero, è ben trovato
themann1086
I’d actually recently looked this up:
Via Wikipedia.
Anoniminous
@mvr:
Her review of “Bonny and Clyde” is a masterpiece of film criticism.
There is a link, but subscription- only, at the New Yorker website.
Brachiator
I would pay a lot more attention to this if Palin’s shadow staff didn’t consist of so many Eastern elitists (Bill Kristol, Ross Douthat, etc.) and if Sarah Palin(tm) was not a wholly owned subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch Enterprises.
Sarah Palin as an Authentic American is as much of a myth as the fantasy that the earlier Republican oligarch, George Bush, was a humble good old boy from Texas, and not an East Coast born scion of the old WASP ruling elite.
But at least we see how the GOP intends to double down on [insert name of GOP Nominee here] as a Real American vs Kenyan Muslim Elitist Obama.
It might even work the second time around.
Trainrunner
kth #4 is absolutely right. Kael was absolutely making fun of the New York circle. She fucking knew people who voted for fucking Nixon, for fuck’s sake. Stop repeating it.
fraught
In 68 and 72 everyone who lived in Manhattan said that exact same thing. You could start a conversation with a complete stranger in the street by saying, “What an asshole Nixon is,” and never get a hint of disagreement. It was how NYC was then. Even though Nixon later lived in New York it was not his kind of place.
Cacti
Palin’s entire persona is built around being a “hick from the sticks”.
And it’s looking like it’s mostly a put-on, as her new reality show confirmed Levi Johnston’s assertions that she can’t hunt or shoot worth a shit.
DougJ
@Trainrunner:
She said something about only knowing one person who voted for Nixon, perhaps in jest, and in any case she was aware of that being unusual, if she was serious. I think it’s fair to call it a quote about not knowing anyone who voted for Nixon, even if it’s not clear what she meant by that.
Suffern ACE
@Trainrunner: Why do elitists do that thing where they don’t mean what they say? It makes talking with them difficult.
Porlock Junior
@ChrisB:
“Well, I’m from NYC and my parents hated Richard Nixon as much as I hate George W. Bush.
And I’m proud of them for it.”
I’m from California, and my parents hated Richard Nixon before New York had even heard of him.
No no, I mean, Tell it Brother! NYC learned all too soon, and at least they had the sense to hate him right away.
“Hollywood’s often tried to mix
Show business with politics.
From Helen Gahagan
to — Ronald Reagan??
— Tom Lehrer, singing of George Murphy.
(George Murphy?? U.S. Senator from guess what state; talk about forgotten historical figures! A funny song, though, if you know the allusions. But I digress.)
Helen Gahagan (Douglas) was Nixon’s warm-up act practice dummy — she goddam was his first victim you inept editing option! — in the smear business.
Janet Strange
OK – I have to blogwhore. They think you’re stupid
GregB
I generally don’t wish ill on anyone but if any one couple should ever go Pam Smart and Chuck Stewart on one another, it should be the Matalin/Carville duo.
Batocchio
Matalin’s one of the most relentless of the “real Americans are right-wing conservatives” shtick. She also loves the related “bipartisan compromise means doing the conservative thing” gambit. Needless to say, this has lead to a lucrative career among the addle-brained and evil inside the Beltway.
brantl
My grandfather, who lived in Washington, D.C. was a Republican who hated Nixon. When he was running in the primary against Margaret Chaise, he sent fliers out in D.C. to smear her with full-out bullshit. She and he weren’t running in D.C., they were running in California. My grandfather called up the Nixon campaign and told them he would be donating to Chaise, though he never had before.
debbie
Being such a Cheney acolyte, I’m not surprised she’s holding this grudge. Good on Kael, still sticking it to them from beyond the grave.
Rick Massimo
Because they have nothing else. Because for 38 years the country has been run exactly the way they want it and it has turned into a shithole, and they will do or say literally anything to get you thinking about anything other than that.
Woodrowfan
I’ve heard the “I don’t know anybody who…” line before, but always from right-wingers. I’ve been told “I don’t know anybody who voted for Clinton, so how did he win?” and “I never met anybody before who didn’t like Fox News.” Mrs. Carville is projecting. it’s not the leftwing that’s built a echo chamber so they never have to hear any other viewpoint.
Note, the politically active on both sides do tend to stick to blogs and websites that agree with their perspective, and both sides have their own favorite political magazines. But there’s no leftwing equivalent to the range of RW talk radio or Faux News. Righties can read a rightwing daily paper, listen to rightwing radio, watch rightwing news and read nothing but rightwing books. There’s not an equivalent system for the left, not to the same degree.
Let’s look at what I have in DC.
Daily Paper:
RW: Times, Examiner
LW: N/A
(The Post leans right but has both left and right)
Radio Shows:
RW: WMAL, WAVA, WTNT, WWRC, all RW talk (WAVA is “Christian”)
LW: some NPR, which is mostly mushy middle-of-the-road
TV News:
RW: Faux, some MSNBC, some CNN
LW: some MSNBC
so who is it that lives in a bubble??
Tom65
This is classic Villager punditry – drop a name no one has uttered in thirty years to illustrate your (idiotic) point and everyone believes you’re a deep thinker.
4jkb4ia
Anecdote: My mom in the 1980s always thought that everything Pauline Kael liked was a film, as opposed to a movie. (Essentially my parents went to movies. They sometimes found themselves the only people laughing at a Woody Allen movie in St. Louis, but still. “Mr. Saturday Night” was another movie they suspected would gravely fail with the mass audience.) Then I grew up and was stunned to find out that Pauline Kael was known for a populist approach to movies that disdained the old middlebrow spectacles. So Pauline Kael has symbolism of what elites think is populism but really hiding an elitist approach that most “ordinary people” would not use. Yes, I have read Pauline Kael for myself.
4jkb4ia
@Tom Q:
Thank you. First Kael review I remember is “Return of the Jedi” so could not produce this.
4jkb4ia
Wikipedia: Kael wrote for the New Yorker until 1991, so this is not a matter of 35 years ago.
Comrade Kevin
@Porlock Junior: Oh my, George Murphy, what a prize. That same Senate seat was also held by S I Hayakawa, another one.