Splain’ stupid

By Christopher Tidmore
Contributing Writer

Sen. John Kennedy boasted last week that he wanted Biden’s Supreme Court nominee to know ‘a law book from a J. Crew catalog’. Quickly, the Twitterverse concluded the rather obvious notion that by the Louisiana Senator’s definition, Black female jurists generally did not.

Making the controversy even more pathetic, Kennedy’s staff could not have been unaware that the former African-American First Lady regularly was seen in J. Crew cardigans, and frequently dressed herself in outfits from the brand. Time magazine quickly posted a story online entitled ‘the “15 Times Michelle Obama Wore J. Crew”. His quip, then, ended up serving as doubly offensive, seemingly to attack the general population of Black women lawyers, and, in particular, the one whose husband sat in the Oval Office.

The truth is that Kennedy’s comment was probably not intended as a blatant racial dog whistle. He had used the metaphor before, in other contexts outside of President Biden’s pledge to appoint a Black Female to the U.S. Supreme Court. It’s been a frequent quip of his. The Junior Louisiana Senator’s comments might constitute the only thing worse – an exercise in pointless partisan drivel to appeal to the uneducated – which only serves to demean the sacred search for a Justice to replace Stephen Breyer.

However, closely held ideological stands have never been his strong-suit. There is a serious question if John Kennedy really believes in anything. Remember, in 2004 he ran as the liberal alternative on the Democratic side the moderate Congressman Chris John and against David Vitter. He attacked Republicans on Social Security privatization and castigated most of the Bush administration’s policies. His closest ally in the race was fellow candidate Arthur Morrell, as they both courted the vote of the progressive left.

It took less than four years for Kennedy to transform himself from liberal Democrat to conservative Republican in order to run against Mary Landrieu. Even by the standards of the rapid GOP conversion of southern politics to a dominant Right, his metamorphosis induced political whiplash. Kennedy employed these homespun aphorisms as a means to connect with a predominately rural Caucasian Conservative electorate who otherwise would have had nothing to do with the former Rhodes Scholar. His adoption of an exaggerated southern twang, an accent far more pronounced than his real speaking voice, emphasized his “oldspeak” strategy. In time, he would become famous for these ridiculous metaphors, Louisiana’s own Senator Foghorn Leghorn.

It would be easy to accuse Kennedy of simple racism. Certainly implying that an African-American woman cannot be as qualified as any other candidate for the Supreme Court stands as such. However, the Senator‘s real crime comes from deliberately putting forth a metaphor that just is plain stupid in order to appeal to the stupid.

His strategy, on the other hand, is not stupid; it just lacks any principles. Kennedy taps into one of the most unfortunate trends in our politics, a suspicion of the smart. As the author of the Foundation series, Isaac Asimov, once observed, “Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’”

Kennedy’s J.Crew metaphor constitutes a less than subtle way of sending that message to his core constituency that “stupid is as stupid says,” so love me as one of you, even as I show my contempt for you. And the reactionary – and the nativist – fall for it every time.

This article originally published in the February 7, 2022 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.