They just don’t get it. That’s literally true of the critics, who, almost universally and quite unfairly have panned Jenna and Barbara Bush’s speech last week at the Republican National Convention.
”To judge by the reaction of the scribes around me, it was cringe-inducing,” declared the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz, a bellwether of media conventional wisdom. “I’m not sure what that was about,” sniffed CNN’s Judy Woodruff. A “frankly discordant moment,” agreed her colleague, Jeff Greenfield.
Media liberals weren’t the only ones to lament the girls’ speech. Conservatives, too, joined the chorus of denunciation. “I’m sure the twins will grow up to be lovely women,” said Weekly Standard editor, Bill Kristol, on the Fox News Channel. “But the last half-hour did not help, so far as I can tell, President Bush’s campaign for reelection.” “How bad were the twins?” asked former Reagan speechwriter Peter Robinson on NRO Wednesday. “Way bad. So bad that I honestly found myself yearning for the Kerry daughters and their tale of Licorice the hamster.” The twins “came off, frankly, as ditzes,” opined Roll Call executive editor Morton Kondracke on Fox.
He’s exactly right: Jenna and Barbara Bush (but especially the former) did come off as ditzy blondes (though they don’t have blonde hair). That was the whole point of their shtick, which I, for one, found quite amusing and endearing. The twins’ speech (really a comedy act) was a takeoff of the 1995 movie Clueless, starring Alicia Silverstone. As a Washington Post review observed, Silverstone’s character, Cher, is a “comically overprivileged, super-popular, spoiled-bratty, Beverly Hills galleria golden girl.”
Like most such teens, Cher is self-absorbed and focused on status and material well-being; however, like most young Americans, she also has a good heart. Indeed, as the Post noted, “the plot turns on her efforts to prove (at least to herself) that she’s not totally shallow.” Her quest to be more than just another pampered suburbanite is driven by the loving example set by her hard-working father, a lawyer with an indomitable blue-collar work ethic, and his thoughtful assistant, Josh, upon whom Cher has a budding crush. (Josh is also Cher’s stepbrother, but they are not blood relations.) In the end, of course, Cher learns that what really matters in life is not how much money you have, or how popular you are, but what good you can do for your fellow man.
Seen in this context, the twins’ speech has deeper and more significant meaning than might first appear. In Clueless fashion, they made fun of themselves in order to acknowledge their youthful foibles and show how they have grown and matured into responsible young adults. And they gave pride of place to their mom and dad for showing them the way–for giving them a real sense of right and wrong, for instilling in them what we today call “values.”
“We’ve learned a lot more from them about what matters in life,” Barbara Bush explained, “about unconditional love, about focus and discipline. They taught us the importance of a good sense of humor, of being open-minded, and treating everyone with respect. And we learned the true value of honesty and integrity.”
Why does this matter? Because we like to know that our president is both a real man (as opposed to superman) and a good man. That, as a parent, he grapples with the same issues we all grapple with: raising well our children in an often-hostile pop-culture environment.
That’s why the twins’ Clueless humor was so important and so revealing: It showed that the Bush family was not immune to the same cultural pressures that confront all American families today. Quite the contrary: The same TV shows, movies, and music that capture the interest of America’s youth also captured the interest of the Bush twins.
“Our grandmother, Barbara,” Jenna Bush said, “doesn’t like some of our clothes, our music, or most of the TV shows we watch…. She thinks Sex and the City is something married people do, but never talk about.” Now, this joke has some media stuffed shirts tut-tutting their disapproval. “What they hell were they thinking?” cried Howard Kurtz. “Sex jokes about former first lady Barbara Bush?”
But this clearly was nothing of the sort. This was not a sex joke; it did not involve any prurient or scatological interest or punchline, which is what one typically means by a “sex joke.”
The twins instead were using a pop-culture phenomenon–the eponymous HBO show–to show that they, too, live in 21st century America. They, too, are besieged by the same sorts of pressures and temptations that confront young people today. And they, too, have an older-generation relative, their grandmother, who is trying to keep them on the straight and narrow.
“Grammie,” Jenna warmly said, “we love you dearly, but you’re just not very hip.” The humorless media observers didn’t get it, but I certainly did. So, too, I suspect, did millions of younger–and yes, hipper–Americans.
This is good for George W. Bush and good for the Republican Party. Liberals and leftists, after all, love to caricature the GOP as sexually repressed religious zealots who live in a humorless alternative universe. With their unfailing grace, laughter, and good humor, Jenna and Barbara Bush showed otherwise; and moderate swing voters surely took notice.
“We spent the last four years trying to stay out of the spotlight,” Jenna Bush earnestly said. “Sometimes we did a little better job than others.”
This was followed by uproarious laughter in the convention hall. Tabloid tales of underage drinking, fake IDs, and alcohol-induced make-out sessions have dogged the Bush twins throughout their recent college years. These are rather garden-variety offenses common to millions of college students, but when you’re the daughter of the president of the United States, everything takes on an outsized importance.
Then Jenna delivered the perfect punchline, accompanied by loving smiles, deep laughter, and mock sincerity: “We kept trying to explain to my dad that when we were young and irresponsible, well, we were young and irresponsible!”
Jenna delivered most if not all of the punchlines. The University of Texas graduate is clearly a better and more expressive public speaker, with a more developed comedic sense, than her more serious sister Barbara, a Yale graduate.
“When your dad’s a Republican and you go to Yale, you learn to stand up for yourself,” Barbara said.
Millions of college students–and graduates–at Yale and elsewhere, know exactly what Barbara meant. The academy has never been hospitable to conservatives as William F. Buckley, Jr. pointed out 53 years ago in God and Man at Yale. And, as Dinesh D’Souza and others have observed, the situation has gotten progressively worse in the intervening decades. Score one again for the hip Bush twins.
Keep at it, girls. Both your dad and the Republican party need you. The media derision you’re hearing is a testament to your success.
–John R. Guardiano is a writer based in Arlington, Virginia.