Ethics Newsline®

The Maverick and the Pit Bull

Sep 8th, 2008 • Posted in: Commentary

by Rushworth M. Kidder

Political conventions, like the ones we’ve seen in recent weeks, aren’t known for gravity and depth. Audiences tune in with two questions: Who are these candidates, and what makes them tick? So the answers often are less about public policy than personal values.

Which is why last week’s Republican convention was so fascinating. Officially, it introduced presidential candidate John McCain and his vice president pick, Sarah Palin, to a wondering public. More casually, it introduced two remarkable metaphors from the animal kingdom: McCain the maverick, and Palin the pit bull. Each metaphor set out a sharply different view of personal values, and each, for better or worse, emerged as the candidate’s defining image.

“I’ve been called a maverick, someone who marches to the beat of his own drum,” McCain said, hammering home a self-definition he’s long used. Then, by wryly noting that “sometimes it’s meant as a compliment and sometimes it’s not,” he suggested that maverick, for him, means someone who would rather be right than popular.

In fact, the word signifies a lot more. When coined in 1872, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, it meant “a calf or yearling found without an owner’s brand” — named after Texas land baron Samuel A. Maverick, who either accidentally or deliberately (historians differ on this point) left his cattle unbranded. By 1892 it had taken on a distinctly negative charge, meaning “a masterless person” or “one who is roving and casual.” More recently it has come to mean a dissenter who, independent of cultural dictates, resists groupthink and won’t go with the flow.

For McCain’s generation, however, the term is linked inextricably to the widely popular comedy-western series Maverick, which ran from 1957 to 1962. The primetime TV show launched James Garner’s career as Bret Maverick, the sartorially spiffy gambler who drifted across the Old West as a slightly superhuman anti-hero — unbranded, casual, independent, but scrupulously honest as he either hoodwinked the bad guys or flattened them with a punch.

Not surprisingly, then, the maverick in McCain’s lexicon is also a reformer — tough and wily, but engaging and polite. So McCain the Maverick was fully in character last week when he told his Democratic rival, Barack Obama, that “you have my respect and my admiration.” He was also in character when he added, “We are fellow Americans, and that’s an association that means more to me than any other” — a classic maverick positioning, designed to scandalize any old-school conservative for whom being a partisan trumps every other association.

Palin’s metaphor is even more complex. Offered as a joke in her acceptance speech, it depended, as jokes often do, on a vivid and jarring incongruity. Calling herself a “hockey mom,” she continued, “You know, they say the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull: Lipstick.” The crowd roared its approval, and within moments the blogosphere was abuzz with an image that forever will characterize her personality.

But what exactly did she mean? For most Americans, the pit bull (a breed of terrier) evokes an image of deadly, uncontrollable canine aggression. Taking its name from the pit for which these dogs were specifically bred, the word arose in Shakespeare’s England to mean an enclosure in which animals (typically dogs or cocks, as in the word cockpit) fought to the death in a bloodlust gambling sport.

Today such fights are illegal — a point driven home by the 2007 conviction of Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick on federal dog-fighting charges. For a long time, even owning a pit bull has been suspect: A report published in 2000 in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association noted that pit bulls caused far more human fatalities than any other breed. Palin’s Alaska staff also could have reminded her that, just two weeks before the convention, the Anchorage Daily News reported that a six-year-old East Anchorage girl died after being mauled by a pit bull.

What makes Palin’s metaphor complex is that she both adopted it and distanced herself from it — disguising it with a feminine touch (the lipstick), and allowing her supporters to wriggle free by saying, “It was only a joke!” Yet the jest is already getting out of hand. At a post-convention Palin rally, a hand-lettered sign appeared saying, “Read my lipstick” — an unfortunate allusion to president George H. W. Bush’s famous line from the 1988 Republican convention (”Read my lips: no new taxes!”) that came back to help destroy his 1992 reelection bid after he agreed to raise taxes.

What, then, are we to make of these candidate’s values? That depends on how you read these metaphors. The maverick offers a tough, independent civility — or a refusal to be chained by any predictable loyalties. The pit bull offers a do-or-die defense of her cause — or a relentless, teeth-baring ferocity. Common to both metaphors is an overtone of the uncontrollable — and a sense that being unrestrained and masterless is, somehow, a good thing. Time will tell whether either candidate means what their metaphors say — or whether they’re just innocent folks whose real values got mauled by a couple of catchy but unexamined phrases.