The Difference Between A Pitbull and a Hackey Mom

Okay I'm a big lame so more debate stuff.

Watching the DNC, I was taken by Joe Biden's biography.* So again, last night, when Biden peeled back a layer of sexism and retold how his experience and concerns as someone who has lost loved ones and as a single parent are no less real because he has a penis, I was again struck by the story and moved by his connecting it to matters of policy.

Of course it could be boiler plate. Maybe it is a go-to line for him and people who know him better see right through it. It's not like I don't know people who make up for any lack of substance by pretending to tear up when speaking. But it seemed relevant and sincere last night and not at all like a canned line to mention his wife and child's deaths.

G'uh, I guess 'cos my wife and baby make me a baby- just thinking about his experience makes me all babified again. But maybe with time, if it turns out Joe Biden mentions his dead wife and kid as a catchall response- "Hey, Joe, how many houses do you have?" "However many it is, my dead wife doesn't get to share any of them with me"- something like that- it'll make me angry rather than empathize.

So, that said, I believed his hesitation and emotion in the answer was real, it seemed like one of those deep moments wherein personal experience/pathos is confronted with the broader world and makes one feel with and for other people. It's good that there are politicians who can do that. But it was an awful moment on the C-Span split screen, just awful. Ronald McDonald couldn't respond at all like a human. That's the "real" people are attracted to? Your wife died, but John McCain's a maverick.

At least she didn't say John McCain was a POW.

Okay, so maybe she was overcoached and couldn't get over the need to stay on message. Maybe her journalistic background took over- just look at the camera and smile. Maybe she didn't hear anything anyone said all night, she just knew to go to the cards. Those may be good excuses for seeming cold and uncaring. They don't bode well for arguing that she's a competent leader.

* Please note- That doesn't mean I think he is a Regular Joe. No one in the Senate is. (Except for Russ Feingold, PBUH.) It simply means I'm human- not "the boy who couldn't cry".

ed.- I couldn't find the split-screen version... but I guess I didn't look too hard for a C-Span take on the moment. Trust me, it's worse when you see her grinning through the whole thing and then jumping right into her Maverick notes.