A bumbling president, a rube candidate, a greedy politician — such are the caricatures of political life. Whether accurate or not, they can be more powerful than any argument.
Recall the fate of President Gerald Ford, doomed to be remembered as an irredeemable klutz, a judgment that readily slips into assessments of his political acumen. Why? Mainly because more than 30 years ago the comedian Chevy Chase used an incident in which Ford stumbled and made it the central feature of his impersonation on “Saturday Night Live.” Every Ford skit ended with disastrous pratfalls. The impression created a reality. That caricature, of course, may have been flawed since Ford was a star athlete in his youth. But the image persists.
Such is the strange influence of caricature in politics. During the recent vice presidential debates, for example, one candidate, boasting of a “mavericky” perspective, when asked about how to deal with the world economic crisis, said: “We’re gonna ask ourselves what would a maverick do in this situation, and then ya know, we’ll do that.” That same candidate, asked about global warming, said: “We don’t know if this climate change whosie-whatsit is man-made or if it’s just a natural part of the End of Days.”
Oh, wait a minute. That wasn’t Gov. Sarah Palin in the debate. That was Tina Fey doing her impression of Sarah Palin in the debate on “Saturday Night Live,” an impersonation — filled with perky winks and folksy gosh-darn-its and a self-conscious elimination of g’s at the end of whatever word she happened to be sayin’ — that was so resonant, it almost displaced Ms. Palin’s own performance as herself. Ms. Fey’s impression appeared on countless news reports, inspired political punditry, racked up hits on YouTube and was watched in full on the NBC Web site, nbc.com, where it had, at last check, nearly five million views.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/13/arts/13conn.html?th&emc=th
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