This is pretty funny:
…if you were looking for symbolism, there was the moment when Emanuel finished shaking hands with commuters at a Chicago Transit Authority station and shoppers at a supermarket and climbed back into his black Dodge Caravan, in which he could be seen vigorously washing his hands — in clear view of television cameras and reporters.
I think this is going to be entertaining, starting with all the legal shenanigans he’ll have to pull to even get on the ballot.
[Late afternoon update]
Per comments:
Folks, the issue is not whether or not he should have disinfected. It was his clumsiness in or indifference to getting caught on camera. I’m not sure what he is, but he’s no politician.
I, for one, think that handshaking should be outlawed, or at least socially discouraged, and particularly in political campaigns. Think of how much productivity and even life is lost to viruses due to this archaic social ritual.
You wouldn’t want him to get a communicable disease after shaking hands with the unwashed?
No Leland, washing your hands after shaking hands with the hoi polloi is inevitably racist.
“You wouldn’t want him to get a communicable disease after shaking hands with the unwashed?”
No, Leland, I certainly wouldn’t want to get a communicable disease from shaking hands with him. (Not that I would – too slimey.)
It shows his contempt for people to do what he did how and where he did it. I often use hand sanitizer after going through the checkout at the grocery store, especially in winter – particularly if I use their pen to sign something – but I do it quietly and without fuss.
Anyone who isn’t clever enough to surreptiously use some hand sanitizer in a car has no business in politics.
To play devil’s advocate for a moment, didn’t Cheney get caught doing the same thing back in the 2004 elections? I guess because I do deskside computer support I am touching a lot of strange keyboards and mice and use the sanitizer quite a bit. So, I have a hard time faulting anyone for this. Particularly after I touch a keyboard encrusted with food, snot, and lord knows what else.
Well, it is a public health issue. If I shake hands with a thousand people, not only do I get a chance of catching germs from the lot of them, but I also could spread germs between them (the latter being the real shame). Serious, if someone with the flu is ahead of you in line, not only could you catch the flu from being near them (that is, they shouldn’t be anywhere near a group of people in the first place), but also by shaking hands with the same pol (warm, moist surfaces such as hands, being a good place for flu viruses to survive).
Folks, the issue is not whether or not he should have disinfected. It was his clumsiness in or indifference to getting caught on camera. I’m not sure what he is, but he’s no politician.
I, for one, think that handshaking should be outlawed, or at least socially discouraged, and particularly in political campaigns. Think of how much productivity and even life is lost to viruses due to this archaic social ritual.
I know lots of people who are fastidious about going to the gym to give their muscles a workout, yet are deathly afraid of giving a similar workout to their immune system. Which is what things like handshakes end up doing. How else to you propose to get yourself exposed to those viruses and such in order to develop immunity to them?
I guess my comment was as misunderstood. Yeah, I understand washing hands after touching other’s hands or public stuff like door handles and handrails. Got it. Do it. But I also don’t tend to shake somebody’s hand, walk a short distance away and then obviously wash my hands as if “they were unwashed.” Here’s the deal, if the other person just washed their hands, you can shake it without fear of getting a disease. In otherwords, if we presume others are as clean as you; you can safely touch their hand.
Alas, assumptions are bad and a fist bump is more sanitary. And for sure, don’t shake hands with any politician, left or right, unless you want the diseases of about the dozen or so other people the politician just touched.
Rand, as I understand your position, disinfecting after shaking a lot of hands is sensible and humane, but impolitic if you are detected. A good politician would never take the risk of being detected disinfecting, even if it meant infecting a lot of people.
A good man would err the opposite direction: he would disinfect as often as possible, even if it increased the chance of being caught on camera.
Sounds like nothing he does could satisfy you. If he is caught disinfecting he is clumsy or indifferent. If he isn’t, then he’s performing an archaic social ritual that exposes everyone involved to infection.
Oh, you want to know what would satisfy me. Sorry, I misunderstood.
What would satisfy me would be honest politicians, and an electorate who actually wanted such.
For example, “I want to come out and meet all of you, and I’ll do so, but I also want to end the ancient ritual that results in so much spread of disease — the handshake. I want to meet you, but if you feel a need to shake my hand to get my vote, I’ll do it to please you as a voter, but I’m going to wash afterwards, not because I consider you personally unclean, but because everything is unclean, and I don’t want everyone who shakes hands with me afterwards to have to functionally shake hands with everyone with whom I’ve shaken hands previously, so I’ll be cleaning as often as possible. Please don’t take it personally.”
Well, here’s video of the sanitizer incident. If anything, the sanitizer is just a symptom of what appears to be most everyone’s contempt of Rahm’s return to Chicago.
Actually, if I saw a politician clumsily sanitizing his hands after shaking a thousand hands, it would increase the probability that I’d vote for him. This smoothness, the political skills of a practised manipulator of public perception, is precisely what I dislike the most about “good” politicians. They’re men who are good at lying to you. I don’t want to be represented by accomplished liars.
I want to be represented by men who are so clumsy about manipulating their public image that they have no hope of hiding their screw-ups or misdeeds.
Indeed, this is why I could never understand why people got after GWB for being clumsy in his speech. I always found that re-assuring — there was no chance this guy could smoothly put one over on me. He was always just going to say what he really thought, because he hadn’t the speech-center competence to do anything else and get away with it.