Lately, two developments have shown how the McCain camp is likely to fight Obamania in the general election.  As is the case with all things McCain, neither is new.  But Obamoids have given McCain and his minions their opening.

At least since the ridiculous furor over the New Yorker Cover (which has now, itself, been satirized on the latest cover of Vanity Fair) commentators have been asking why it is that we can't make fun of Obama.  The answer depends on which camp you're in.  It's either "the man's intrinsic dignity doesn't lend itself to mockery" or "it's the media, stupid".

While Obama is obviously a serious and dignified individual, Americans are not the only people for whom evidence of a sense of humor of some sort is important in their leaders.  Eisenhower once said: "A sense of humor is part of the art of leadership, of getting along with people, of getting things done."  Humor is humanizing, and democratic peoples tend to walk a fine line when it comes to how human they want their leaders to be.  Human, usually, but not too human.

Humor comes in an array of colors, of course, as well as off-color.  Our current Comedian-in-Chief's sense of it has always leaned towards snide. He's a better butt of jokes than a teller of them, as it turns out.  Bill Clinton's sense of humor is dry, self-deprecating, sophisticated, and sly at times.  (He has also proven a durable butt of jokes, but for obviously different reasons than No.43.) Bush The Elder doesn't seem to have had a sense of humor at all, but neither did his opponent, Michael Dukakis.  Reagan's was mostly good-natured and goofy, even when bitter and biting. 

McCain's humor is similarly reminiscent of the rat-pack era, when women were "broads" and blacks were "coloreds".  These days rape- and ape-jokes don't go over so well, so when McCain just can't resist (and you can always tell he's making a funny because he does that little Muttley laugh of his) his campaign packages his cluelessness as "politically incorrect."  Bad jokes in the service of the greater Culture War.  Sure, it's damage control, but it'll do.

Because truth is, no one really expects conservatives these days to have anything other than a primitive or retrograde sense of humor.  If McCain was popping off bon mots right and left, they'd suspect him of being more of a closet liberal than they already do. 

The rare glimpses of humor we get from Obama don't help his cause much, either, though.  Easily the most oft-repeated example of Obama's supposed sense of humor is his reaction to his primary opponents' answers to a debate question: "What is your greatest weakness?"  Obama went first, and said his desk was always a mess.  Edwards went for "my passion".  Clinton: "impatience."

Next day Obama told a group of groupies:

Because I'm an ordinary person, I thought that they meant, `What's your biggest weakness?' If I had gone last I would have known what the game was. And then I could have said, `Well, ya know, I like to help old ladies across the street. Sometimes they don't want to be helped. It's terrible.'

First of all, as someone who actually has dedicated my life to helping old ladies who don't want to be helped across streets, and am current Secretary and Treasurer of the Geriatric Cross-Walk Assistants Union, I don't find this funny at all.  But Obamoids desperate for a quip to prove their candidate's comedic chops have been circulating this one for months. 

They say that aside from being an unbelievably eloquent and powerful riposte, it shows he's also a sterling wit with a self-deprecating sense of humor, because he suggests he was too naive and pure of heart to think of an insincere answer before his opponents did.   Which is about as self-deprecating as his remark that his ears wouldn't fit on Mt. Rushmore.  And about as funny.

And people are right to suspect that the real punchline to every "self-deprecating" joke Obama tells is the same.  The punchline to the debate answer joke, basically "I'm too honest", is in fact, on inspection, more an eye-roller than the responses of the other candidates.  He's actually outdone them both in the sanctimonious self-regard of his spin.  His comments after the debate suggest he would like us to believe that his greatest weakness is the thoroughgoing honesty and utter lack of cynicism that led him to answer that a messy desk was his "greatest weakness."

If he's suggesting he really thinks that his "greatest weakness" is a messy desk, one candidate for a greater weakness might be that he obviously can't identify his greatest weakness.  A hint: your ears might not be the only thing that wouldn't fit on Mount Rushmore.

The prospects of an Obama sense of humor have become so dismal that even his most ardent supporters have stopped trying to argue that he's got one, and have taken instead to lecturing their fellow Americans that the world is not a very funny place anyway, and isn't it about time we all grew up and got serious about it, like Obama? 

And to that I say, humankind has been around awhile, and things have looked pretty grim before.  Some of our best humor has come out of our darkest days.  Rabelais wrote Pantagruel in the middle of the Plague, for Pete's sake.  Humor is one of our species' most brilliant adaptations, a separate intelligence you might say.  And without it, life would not be much worth preserving in the first place.   It would look something like Cormac McCarthy's The Road, but without that hilarious big surprise musical number at the end.  Oops.  Spoiler alert, heh heh. (Well, why'd you think Oprah chose it for her little book club?)

Anyway.  It's pretty clear the raging debate over the existence of Obama's sense of humor in the absence of evidence benefits the GOP.  All the Democrats need is another dour prognosticator of doom to lecture Americans on the evils of taking the piss.  Obama is hoping that his mantra of "hope" and "change" will distract swing voters from his shriveled anterior cingulate and frontoinsular cortices (areas of the brain associated with humor, empathy, and, well, hot flashes if you must know).

Look for McCain and his surrogates to take every opportunity to depict Obama as a freakishly humorless brother from another planet:


So that's the first prong.  Prong number two is also yielding early results.  The McCain camp has begun to complain about media bias.  And the case here is more cut and dry. 

Let's say you had the choice of covering the unveiling of the new Quantum-powered Fisker Karma, a limited edition plug-in hybrid premium sports sedan that goes from zero to sixty in 5.8 seconds and sells for a cool eighty grand, or the hundredth anniversary of the Tin Lizzy. 

Or let's say you had the choice of reviewing either Shrek! The Musical on Broadway, or the Old Chenango Road Players presentation of The Glass Menagerie at the VFW Hall in Owasco, New York. 

Or say your editor gave you the choice of writing your all-expenses-paid review of Masa in the Time Warner Center, Masa Takayama's 26-seat restaurant where tasting menus start at $300 per person, or checking out the new May Wah Fast Food in Little Italy, where a pork-chop over rice with a side of those mouth-watering sour pickles will run you about $4.75.

Or what if your porn fairy godmother presented you with the choice of sharing an overnight jail cell with Mickey Rourke circa 1994 versus Mickey Rourke/Jocelyn Wildenstein circa now?

That, sadly, is the nature of the choice facing the press covering this election.  Of course they'd rather blow Obama.  Stop your bitching — it's got nothing to do with his politics.

I have already noticed a chastened press trying to give equal time to ole Tin Lizzy, though.  But they do it with that look on their faces, like they've just forced down a slug of Mylanta.  You can tell they'd rather have the Kahlua and cream.