Sister Act
Wednesday, Sep 01, 2004; 8:40 AM
NEW YORK--I don't want to be unfair to Jenna and Barbara. Growing up in a fishbowl isn't easy.
But to paraphrase what Jay Leno said to Hugh Grant after his little escapade with a street hooker: What the hell were they thinking?
And what was the person who vetted their speech thinking?
Sex jokes about former first lady Barbara Bush?
I've been covering conventions a long time, and this might have been the weirdest moment since George McGovern gave his acceptance speech at 3 a.m.
I mean, it looked like a video you would make in your basement, and then show only to your closest friends. To judge by the reaction of the scribes around me, already pumped up by Arnold, it was cringe-inducing. Maybe they were trying to appeal to the Paris Hilton crowd.
Fortunately, their mom gave a nice speech to round out the evening.
I thought I must have been living on a different planet when Fox's Chris Wallace started gushing over how the young women had been funny, sexy, intelligent and so on. The reviews were not so kind on the other channels, or in the morning papers.
Take the Los Angeles Times: "The Bush daughters, fresh from their booing this week at the MTV Video Music Awards in Miami, came onstage at the Republican National Convention on Tuesday night and introduced a new strategy in the war on terrorism: giggling. . . .
"The strategy Tuesday, apparently, was to have sisters Jenna and Barbara humanize and soften the grim-faced Politburo image that dogs the Bush-Cheney campaign, which hasn't made much of an effort to court those young Americans who call it a good day if they've remembered to TiVo 'The Simple Life.' So here they were, girlie and giggly and glammed-up (Jenna in some kind of Juicy couture-looking track suit top over white pants, Barbara in a black cocktail dress).
"They told slightly off-color jokes, apparently to drive home the point that, supporting a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage aside, their parents weren't totally freaked out about S-E-X. Her grandmother, Jenna said, 'thinks "Sex in the City" is something married people do but never talk about,' getting the show's name wrong. Barbara said, 'Jenna and I are really not very political.' She's the one who graduated from Yale.
"The Republicans, you were reminded, are really good at chest-thumping and flag-hugging, but they ought to stay away from showcasing their privileged, Prada-wearing first daughters until the campaign is over. After the speeches were over, even CNN's talking heads seemed to be struggling to make sense of the sisters' sister act. Judy Woodruff stammered, 'I'm not sure what that was about,' while an incensed Jeff Greenfield called the appearance a 'frankly discordant moment.'"
The New York Post, which likes the Republican convention better than it liked the Democrats'--"CONAN THE AMERICAN" is today's banner headline--finds no socially redeeming value in the daughters' shtick:
"The Bush twins made their national television debut last night -- with a string of weak one-liners that drew cringes from the crowd and at one point brought a soft rebuke from their grandparents.
"The twins, Barbara and Jenna Bush, had the job of introducing President Bush, who in turn introduced First Lady Laura Bush.
"For much of their brief time on stage, the twins seemed to amuse themselves more than the crowd."
