We can hear the emotion

A few months ago my blood pressure went up a bit when I read that a large portion of the electorate disapproves of Barack Obama because he isn’t sufficiently “emotional.” Why, I wondered – and I still do – would anyone in his or her right mind want the president of the most powerful (for now) nation on earth to be more emotional? This is not a Hallmark card, I thought. This is not a love song, or a eulogy. This is a country, and running it, or trying to, seems to me a job best done by someone who is not prone to the maudlin stupidity that plays well on the local news, where there are tears for every occasion, from wheelchairs for veterans to trips to Disneyland awarded to terminally ill children.


So I suppose I should not have been surprised when I turned on Good Morning America on Monday. There, in all her glory, sat Robin Roberts, who I think is one of the most toxic individuals on the airwaves. I know nothing of her personally, but her on-air conduct is so devoid of anything I’d call intelligent that I often wonder, when watching her, just how humiliating it must be for the correspondents, the ones who have covered and explained actual news over the years, to have to defer to her on national television. In all fairness, she is probably playing to her audience, which is even more disturbing to me. At any rate, her coup d’état for the morning was an interview with Patrick Kennedy, Teddy’s son, whom she was interviewing, allegedly, about the late-night passage of the healthcare reform bill. “Can you tell us what it was like … emotionally?” she said. Jesus Christ, I thought, here we go. She managed to get him almost in tears, which is such a common thing that it doesn’t even make me cringe anymore. That would be like being shocked to hear that someone once had a serious drug problem and has written a book about it. So the morning after the passage of what I think is the most historic legislation of our time, once the younger Kennedy was finished talking about his father, Robin Roberts, having earned her money for the day, I suppose, thanked him for his time, adding, “We can hear the emotion in your voice and see it on your face.”