"Why couldn't Obama have picked somebody respectable as his running mate, you know, like John Kerry did?"
About this Quote
The joke lands because it’s a double insult wearing the mask of a civics complaint. Coulter pretends to pine for “respectability” in a vice-presidential pick, then name-checks John Kerry as the model of good judgment. That’s the needle: Kerry’s 2004 running mate was John Edwards, who later became a scandal machine, turning the word “respectable” into a trapdoor. The line isn’t really about Obama’s choice (Biden, in context) so much as a partisan flourish that says: Democrats can’t be trusted to select decent people, and even when they appear to, time will expose the rot.
The intent is less policy critique than social sorting. “Respectable” here isn’t a neutral adjective; it’s a tribal credential. Coulter’s audience is invited to laugh at the premise that Obama could ever meet the standard, while also enjoying the retroactive humiliation of Kerry for having once been treated as the grown-up option. She’s leveraging the conservative media-era advantage of hindsight: elections become morality plays where the other side’s personnel choices are framed as character reveals.
Subtextually, the quip also frames Obama’s legitimacy as conditional, something he must earn by proximity to figures the right recognizes. It’s a familiar Coulter move: convert political disagreement into a status verdict, then deliver it with a punchline so the cruelty can pass as cleverness. The line works because it compresses two decades of Democratic brand management - technocratic “seriousness,” vetted centrism, the promise of steadiness - into one sarcastic question that implies the whole project was always a con.
The intent is less policy critique than social sorting. “Respectable” here isn’t a neutral adjective; it’s a tribal credential. Coulter’s audience is invited to laugh at the premise that Obama could ever meet the standard, while also enjoying the retroactive humiliation of Kerry for having once been treated as the grown-up option. She’s leveraging the conservative media-era advantage of hindsight: elections become morality plays where the other side’s personnel choices are framed as character reveals.
Subtextually, the quip also frames Obama’s legitimacy as conditional, something he must earn by proximity to figures the right recognizes. It’s a familiar Coulter move: convert political disagreement into a status verdict, then deliver it with a punchline so the cruelty can pass as cleverness. The line works because it compresses two decades of Democratic brand management - technocratic “seriousness,” vetted centrism, the promise of steadiness - into one sarcastic question that implies the whole project was always a con.
Quote Details
| Topic | Sarcastic |
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