If there’s one thing the last 72 hours have taught us, it’s how hard it is to be a woman and a Republican these days. Take the woman who has dominated the news over the weekend, Alabama Senator Katie Britt. She appeared on national TV to give the Republican rebuttal to Joe Biden’s State of the Union Thursday and for her efforts was famously lampooned by Scarlett Johansen on Saturday Night Live.
The phrase “deer caught in the headlights” seemed to have been invented to describe Britt as she posed in front of what appeared to be a greenscreen image of her own kitchen. She went from weepy to ecstatic to inordinately sincere and back again, zig-zagging her way through a script some committee of Trump campaign staffers had lashed together for her to act her way through. The disconnect between the words she read off the teleprompter and her voice and expression was, uh…how can I put this? Jarring isn’t quite right. Annoying? Well, yes, there’s that.
What’s that feeling I’m reaching for, hovering just out of reach of my consciousness? Okay, I’ve got it. Watching Britt’s face and listening to her whisper her way through the introduction of her remarks, I felt embarrassed for her. Really, I did. She had no sense at all of what she was saying, or how to say it, because she was just reading words, not expressing them, or feeling what she said. She whispered, “our country is less secure,” and then smiled widely into the eye of the camera. That is simply not the way you say those words, and having said them, how you react to what you’ve said. It doesn’t even rise to the level of fake. It’s just…nothing, a pure emptiness knowable only to, yes, Katie Britt.
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I’m going to do something I probably shouldn’t attempt. I’m going to try to figure out why she read the phrase the way she did and then punctuated it with her wide, entirely inappropriate and obviously insincere smile.
Katie Britt is a product of the University of Alabama “Machine,” the informal but hugely powerful group of fraternity and sorority members who run the Student Government Association by proxy, electing presidents of the association each year, and through them influencing and in many cases running student life on the........