I can't believe Goobernor Booby's performance either, but the thing I want to say is that he's not our Kenneth from 30 Rock

A taste of everyone's favorite NBC page, including such gems as: "I was pretty addicted to coke back in my Wall Street days" and, stretcher-bound, "If I die, will you take care of my birds?" Our Kenneth is not the Goobernator, uh-uh, no way.

by Ken

Really, we should be talking about the president's speech today, not the stupefying spectacle that followed it.

Now, I make it a policy, or thought I did, not to watch presidential speeches. I mean, really, what do you learn? But I watched last night's, and wow! Talk about a guy showing real understanding of the fix we've gotten ourselves into -- not least that it goes way beyond the housing debacle -- with real determination and vision, not just for getting us out of this fix, but for using it as an opportunity to seriously change the course we're on for a better future.

That was some kind of speech.

Actually, though, I'm not sure there's much more to say about it right now. It all depends on the follow-through. If the speech turns out to be the starting point for the kind of re-creation of our economy and society it envisioned, it may go down as one of the great, seminal speeches in the country's history. If not, well, it will be (barely) remembered as just another spell of gum-flapping.

We need to see the details unfold. I'm not complaining about the amount of detail included, which seemed to quite right for a State of the Union-equivalent speech, where the purpose is to set forth the president's goals and try to rally support for them. In this regard, the president offered plenty of detail -- I'd say a breathtaking amount. If he can now back that up with concrete programs intelligently designed to bring us closer to the vision, I think he did a splendid job of rallying political support.

If the president can maintain this level of commitment and inspiration, I think he's going to have so much of the country behind him (there will, apparently, always be that other 30 percent) that the Republican pols are going to face the choice of working with him or becoming simply irrelevant politically, their only available game plan being the one they're using in Congress now to sit on the sidelines whining, hoping and praying that it all fails and they get to come in and pick up the pieces. This is, I think, a wildly risky strategy, and one that many Americans will have great trouble either accepting or forgetting.

Meanwhile, there's the grotesque spectacle poor Bobby Jindal made of himself, and while I hate to pile on, and think it may be all the more redundant considering that the goobernor may just have ended his political career outside Louisiana, it's kind of hard not to talk about that one of the saddest, lamest performances I've seen in my decades of watching American political theater.

But the thing that moves me to write is the evocations I'm hearing of 30 Rock's beloved super-weird super-page Kenneth. As I've written, not only love do I 30 Rock, but I especially love Kenneth (Jack McBrayer), as I suspect all viewers of the show do. As I wrote, he and Alec Baldwin's Jack Donaghy have been one of the elements of the show that always worked, back to the pilot episode, even while the other elements needed (how shall I say?) "seasoning."

But Kenneth is not Bobby Jindal. Kenneth is very weird, yes. Hardly an episode goes by when we don't find out that the depths of his weirdness lie even deeper than we thought. But Kenneth is not Bobby Jindal. Everybody loves Kenneth. Bobby Jindal, as far as I can tell from my mercifully limited explosure, and certainly off last night's fiasco, is just a creep. I mean, anyone who could start such a speech with that creepy telling of his life story, which ought to have some inspirational value, and instead make it sound utterly pointless, cheesy, embarrassing, and, yes, kind of creepy comes off as, you know, a creep.

Viewers may love Kenneth, but it would never occur to us to have him hold public office. Being an NBC page -- this is Kenneth's life work, and he's doing it, living his dream! Now, if Goobernor Booby has any interest in joining the NBC page program, I'll bet Tina Fey and Lorne Michaels know people they could talk to.

Normally I would never use the phrase "allowing for the right-wing spin" with Michael Gerson, since normally with MG if you take away the right-wing spin there's nothing left. But while I doubt that any of us would be much taken with the Bobby J he's touting in his Washington Post column today -- printed, alas, a day too late for our Michael's credibility -- this is apparently what his admirers see, or saw, in him. Is it necessary to say that none of this was on view last night, unless you count the unbearably mawkish litany of his personal background with which he opened, a subject that he's supposed to prefer to downplay! (Does he perhaps like to downplay it the way Young Johnny McCranky just hated talking about his POW experience, which he nevertheless seemed to do at every opportunity?)

All I can think is that someone (it can't possibly have been the governor's own idea) decided that the country would love him if he could just give them the old Sarah Palin dumbth. (That's a Steve Allen word, "dumbth." He thought there needed to be a word for, well, dumbth. You know, the way that something that's warm has the quality of warmth.) And it's really only a second consideration that only Sarah Palin can do Sarah Palin dumbth. The first consideration about Sarah Palin, always, is that zowie, she's hot! She shows up, and all those limp-dicked,beer-bellied limp-dicked Republican guys get a groin tingle, thinking, "Wow! 40-whatever, five kids, and still -- wow! man, could I make music on those bazongas!"

Is there anyone out there who wants to make anything with Goobernor Booby's bazongas?

The interesting thing is that, assuming Gerson is right about whatever appeal Booby is supposed to have for people for whom he has appeal, last night he did a 180 and -- I think -- destroyed his political career. More than anything now I'll be curious to learn the dirt, I mean the back story of that speech. Who exactly was involved in the strategizing and the implementation? Did somebody make Booby do it? Or did he really think it was a good idea?

I just couldn't believe that the clown had nothing of substance to say except, eventually, a few bromides. ("Tax cuts!") I mean, he -- and whoever -- must have been provided in advance with at least some form of the president's speech, and of course then they had the opportunity to watch it. Did it really not occur to any of them that the response they apparently had in mind had been rendered irrelevant? A speech this filled with determination and vision, this skillfully executed, would have been tough to respond to under the best circumstances, but who thought it would be smart to counter with a guy who's clearly not a dope in real life but chose, or was chosen, to play a village idiot on TV?

Of course, on the whole I'm grateful for the ineptitude of the production. In the old days, Karl Rove would have had his crack team of obfuscators and spinners lying in wait, armed with all their focus-tested buzzwords for an orgy of obfuscation and a breathless round of spin-the-media. This, this was simply hopeless. It's hard to believe that anyone with, say, a fourth-grade education could have been involved in writing that speech. And I believe if you'd plucked anybody off any high school Debate Club or Public Speaking Club in the country, he/she would have done a better job than Goobernor Booby did of making it sound like he was talking about something.

I'm sure Rush and Sean and Billo and the others will find a way to spin the two speeches, but I tell you, this time out, the kids are really going to have to work to earn their blood money.


KENNETH ON "THE PAGE WORLD" AND THE U.N.

I found this lovely deleted scene ("embedding disabled by request") between Kenneth and Jenna (Jane Krakowski), after he's demolished his page jacket and, since it was her fault (we actually saw this happen in the above compilation clip), she offers to buy him a new one, or at least talk to someone, and in horror at the prospect of her talking to that singularly august personage the head page, he warns her:

"The page world is a political rat's nest. It's sort of like the U.N. except we're still relevant in the modern world."

No, this isn't the deleted "U.N." scene. This is from the episode where Jenna got really fat, and TGS viewers loved it, so it became Kenneth's job to spoon-feed her to keep her fat in order to maintain those great show ratings. (He's playing "airplane hangar" with her here.)

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