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Style and Substance

While the rest of Washington—and the country—wonders if Elena Kagan would work for good or for evil as a Supreme Court justice, The Washington Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Robin Givhan has other things on her mind. Whether Kagan leans left or right in her judicial demeanor is for court observers to debate. But in matters […]

While the rest of Washington—and the country—wonders if Elena Kagan would work for good or for evil as a Supreme Court justice, The Washington Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Robin Givhan has other things on her mind.

Whether Kagan leans left or right in her judicial demeanor is for court observers to debate. But in matters of style, she is unabashedly conservative.

Like, say, every other Supreme Court nominee?

The other men and women who have gone through this process have not been daring in their wardrobe choices either.

So why waste valuable real estate on the pages of the fifth-largest newspaper in the country to discuss how Kagan “put on rouge and lipstick for the formal White House announcement of her nomination,” but otherwise “embraced dowdy”? We even get the critical information that she wore “sheer black hosiery” at the press conference. It’s not as if those column inches couldn’t be filled with more in-depth reporting and analysis of more important stories. I searched in vain yesterday for a skeptical piece on Obama’s National Security Strategy.

And Givhan had actually already written this piece before—when Sonia Sotomayor was going through her confirmation hearings for the court. The two lawyers embraced the same Washington Woman style: black skirts and black pumps with jackets in either black again or in bright, simple colors (with that sheer black pantyhose on which Givhan is so fixated).

Givhan seems continually frustrated that she can’t judge Sotomayor’s and Kagan’s fitness for one of the most important jobs in the land simply by looking at their labels. In the new piece, she says in the passive voice that “[a]ll hints of personality were deftly extracted” from Sotomayor’s person, while she complained in the earlier piece that Sotomayor’s attire “offered no hints of personality” and “expressed little personality.”

How many high-powered government lawyers do communicate their individuality through their clothing? Kagan is not interviewing for a job in a creative field—as much as some might see interpreting the constitution as such. But Givhan, who was stuck moving to dreary Washington from the more fashionable New York when her beat expanded to cover the first lady, wants to see this city transformed.

Kagan’s version of middle-age seems stuck in a time warp, back when 50-something did not mean Kim Cattrall or Sharon Stone, “Cougar Town” or “Sex and the City.”

The thought of Kagan, Sotomayor, or—heaven forbid—Ruth Bader Ginsburg dressing 20 to 30 years younger than their actual ages gives me a shudder. But I suppose none of us knows exactly what they’ve got on under those black robes. (As the just-released Sex and the City 2 suggests, Muslim women wearing black burqas just might be rocking Vuitton and Valentino under there. That diaphanous film, in which the foursome take on Abu Dhabi, did a better job of connecting fashion and politics than the first clothes critic to win the Pulitzer Prize ever has. Sure, the criticism might not be on the highest level here. Carrie sees that even women’s mouths are covered in some Muslim attire. “It’s like they don’t want them to have a voice,” she muses as she watches a woman eating French fries, lifting her burqa up slightly to taste each one. But what other part of our popular culture is addressing the clash of civilizations? And as you can imagine, if you know anything about the HBO series that spawned the film series, there is certainly a clash here.)

Perhaps the strangest part of Givhan’s piece is her description of how Kagan sits.

She walked with authority and stood up straight during her visits to the Hill, but once seated and settled during audiences with senators, she didn’t bother maintaining an image of poised perfection. She sat hunched over. She sat with her legs ajar.

This is, at least, the only creative observation of the article. I don’t think I’ve heard that description of slightly open legs before. Even funnier is the caption to the picture of Kagan talking to a senator that accompanies the piece:

UNUSUAL: Most women, including Sen. Amy Klobuchar, cross their legs when sitting, but not Kagan.

Weird woman! She doesn’t cross her legs! What does this say about her sexuality—and her suitability for the court?

Oddly enough, Kagan is “hunched over,” while in the previous piece Sotomayor “slouched.” But that wasn’t a bad thing to Givhan then.

The jackets had plenty of buttons so they didn’t gap if she slouched — and really, who could sit with ballerina posture during all that mind-numbing questioning and non-answering?

Maybe that’s why Givhan is so uninterested in questions of substance. They’re “mind-numbing.”

It might be facetious to point out the inconsistency here. It must be hard to write a second piece about another legal career woman who’s a dull dresser so soon. And it’s not as if Givhan is coherent in her calls for a more glamorous political class. I wrote a piece a while back about her snarky view of Carla Bruni, the woman now married to French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Writing then, she complained about Bruni’s beauty.

Models already get the star athletes. The bookish debate-team captain should get the prime minister.

She didn’t approach Carla Bruni on the substance, either—Bruni is an enormously talented singer-songwriter who had a successful career after she modeled and before she met Sarkozy. It seems women can’t win with Robin Givhan. They either dress too plainly or too elegantly. In neither case does Givhan consider the context—something intelligent women do every day when they get dressed for work.

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Style And Substance

Andrew Bacevich reminds us that Obama has not made any moves to change or challenge the consensus on national security: What the president is doing and saying matters less than what he has not done. The sins of omission are telling: There is no indication that Obama will pose basic questions about the purpose of […]

Andrew Bacevich reminds us that Obama has not made any moves to change or challenge the consensus on national security:

What the president is doing and saying matters less than what he has not done. The sins of omission are telling: There is no indication that Obama will pose basic questions about the purpose of the US military; on the contrary, he has implicitly endorsed the proposition that keeping America safe is best accomplished by maintaining in instant readiness forces geared up to punish distant adversaries or invade distant countries. Nor is there any indication that Obama intends to shrink the military’s global footprint or curb the appetite for intervention that has become a signature of US policy. Despite lip service to the wonders of soft power, Pentagon spending, which exploded during the Bush era, continues to increase.

The recent back-and-forth over Obama’s actions in Trinidad has caused many observers to mistake the shift in tone, important as that can be, for something more significant. Prof. Bacevich reminds us that on many of the most important questions Obama is largely indistinguishable from many of his current critics. I might go so far as to say that the summit in Trinidad, like many of the earlier summit meetings this year, was almost entirely unremarkable, except that Obama’s opponents on the mainstream right showed how ready they are to lash out at any gesture or move, however meaningless and harmless in itself, and declare it proof of Obama’s naivete, weakness, folly, etc.

Even though Obama does not question “global power projection, global military presence, and global activism,” and probably could never have won election had he done so, it is imperative for these critics to use any perceived blunder to claim that America is somehow “losing ground.” It doesn’t matter whether these criticisms make sense (for the most part, they don’t), and it doesn’t matter that no one can actually point to any “ground” being lost. What does matter is that Obama’s shift in tone be made far more important in the public’s mind than his support for continuity in overall U.S. foreign policy. This way, should anything go awry during Obama’s tenure, any failures will be pinned on the relatively trivial stylistic changes rather than on the misguided hegemonism that Obama’s critics champion even more than he does.

It is interesting that the mainstream right has “rediscovered” their opposition to excessive spending and exploding deficits, and quite a few have once again learned to fear and loathe expansive executive power, at least when it comes to economic policy, and suddenly talking about the inviolability of the Constitution is very much in vogue again, but on national security matters the script remains the same and there is no hint of any opportunistic “rediscoveries” of principle. One might have thought that the brief blip of realism and skepticism of U.S. hegemony that appeared on much of the right in the ’90s would reappear now, if only for partisan purposes, but what we have been seeing instead is something like the Republican shift in foreign policy from a mostly neutralist stance in the ’30s to the predominantly global anticommunist “rollback” position of the ’50s and ’60s.

Of course, if we took this comparison too seriously, it would greatly exaggerate how non-interventionist the right was in the ’90s, but the movement is in the same direction towards support of “global power projection, global military presence, and global activism” since the end of the Cold War and obviously this accelerated in the last eight or ten years. For some reason, most of the mainstream right keeps falling into the habit of embracing “global power projection, global military presence, and global activism” and movement conservatives have been, for the most part, among the most zealous advocates of all three. This has been the pattern for so long that it is almost as if they no longer know how to respond to the heirs of the Old Right, much less would they know how to adopt their arguments to criticize an activist foreign policy directed by left-liberals. This helps to make clear that post-Cold War administrations may come and go, other economic and political principles may be compromised as needed, but misguided, excessive hawkishness and nationalistic bluster are constants on the mainstream right through the decades.

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