Was McCain Sleeping?

Blogging has been super slow lately. Teaching is taking its toll. I’m in the process of stockpiling lectures and revising an article, so I’m super busy. Also, I’ve been scratching the political debate itch in class, instead of here.

During a lecture on classical liberalism, we got into a great discussion about what Karen Hughes should have said to the Saudi women in 2005, as a lead into Mill’s justification for a representative democracy.

The State of the Union was a big topic of discussion in all my classes. Most of the students watched it, and I pumped them about their impressions. Many people thought that Nancy Pelosi and Hillary were suppressing waves of nausea throughout the speech. They were amused at the back slapping and hand clapping. A number of students pointed out that McCain looked like he was sleeping. Image, as we talked about in my media class, can be more important than content.

Apparently, a lot of people picked up on McCain’s closed eyes. Tom Zeller writes in today’s Times that McCain may have just blown his campaign as video clips of the sleepy McCain hit YouTube.

It is, perhaps, also no surprise in the age of YouTube — where unscripted video clips have become political Molotov cocktails — that a “McCain sleeping” snippet was uploaded to the Internet and was being discussed and linked in short order.

Whether the original intent was political sabotage or simple humor is hard to say, but either way the clip went straight for Mr. McCain’s Achilles’ heel: his age. He is now 70 years old. By 2008, if elected, he would be the oldest president to move into the White House.

So a video of the elderly statesman appearing to doze during the president’s speech — and particularly during a portion of the speech where terrorism was being discussed — seemed to put questions of his fitness for office in stark relief.

McCain’s gang retaliated by uploaded videos of him clapping and looking alert. They said that he was just reading the speech on his lap and not asleep at all. Politics in the YouTube era. Excellent fun.