The mob now howling for Richard Riordan's head almost perfectly exemplifies one of the many things gone painfully wrong in the place where American politics and media intersect.
What has developed into a virtual case study of "gotcha journalism" began innocently enough a little more than a week ago, when the former Los Angeles mayor, now California's education secretary, dropped into the Santa Barbara Central Library to help promote a summer reading program for children.
As a local television camera rolled, Riordan sat down and read and then chatted with a group of children. One of them, 6-year-old Isis D'Luciano, asked if he knew that her name meant "Egyptian goddess."
Riordan, whose sense of humor is notoriously antic, dated and frequently inappropriate, kidded back: "It means stupid, dirty girl."
There were titters of nervous laughter. The poised and patient little girl politely corrected the visitor.
"Hey, that's nifty," he replied. Riordan subsequently apologized and, later, after parents of some of the children present complained, issued formal regrets. His boss and longtime friend, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, called the exchange "unacceptable in any context" but said through a spokesman that he doesn't want Riordan to quit.
But as story followed story and column followed column, the furor grew. In contemporary public life, a verbal gaffe that turns into a seven-day story has become something else and, by week's end, this tempest had boiled right out of its teapot.
On Thursday, an editorial in the Sacramento Bee declared that "California shouldn't have an education secretary who makes offensive, damaging remarks to young children for no apparent reason." State Sen. Sheila Kuehl (D-Santa Monica) declared that Riordan has been so damaged by the affair that Schwarzenegger ought to reconsider his suitability for the post. "People just shake their heads and wonder if there's something wrong with him," she said of Riordan.
Then came the attempt to racialize the incident. It would be nice to call it "the inexplicable attempt," but as classic "gotcha" stories develop, it was depressingly predictable. Assemblyman Mervyn Dymally (D-Compton) organized a group of civil rights groups to protest Riordan's remark at the Capitol on Thursday. As Dymally told the San Jose Mercury News on Wednesday, Isis was "a little African American girl. Would he have done that to a white girl?"
Inconveniently, Isis D'Luciano happens to be white.
