Opinion: Can you hear me now? Oops!

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In Monty Python’s ‘Life of Brian,’ those spectators arriving late for the Sermon on the Mount find themselves too far away to understand the distant speaker. ‘What did he say?’ one asks. ‘He said,’ a neighbor responds, ‘’The Greeks shall inherit the earth.’’

One wonders what George Washington and Abraham Lincoln really sounded like. Not until around 1900, when this newfangled recording equipment was invented, does society begin to capture the voices of its famous people, mainly politicians--Teddy Roosevelt, William Jennings Bryan, William McKinley. As the microphone magnified the audience, however, it also magnified the dangers.

Even today politicians, who are fully accustomed to having microphones shoved into their faces constantly, sometimes forget those things are always listening. Remember George W. Bush sharing an epithet with Dick Cheney about a certain reporter in the crowd? The CNN announcer going to the ladies room while her portable microphone was still on?

Well, yesterday at the NAACP forum in Detroit, microphones captured a cryptic exchange between Hillary Clinton and John Edwards. The forum was actually over. Ex-Senator Mike Gravel had just gone on denouncing Bill Clinton’s free trade policies. Edwards walked over to shake Clinton’s hand. She forgot about her lapel mike. It was still on and transmitted the following...

‘Our guys should talk,’ says Clinton. ‘We’ve got to talk because they, they are, just being trivialized.’

‘They are not serious,’ Edwards responded.

Clinton agreed. ‘You know, I think there was an effort by our campaigns to do that. we got somehow, you know, detoured. But we’ve got to get back to that...’

So what is it the Clinton and Edwards campaigns need to get back to cooperating on? Our guess is jointly working to marginalize the cantankerous claims of the hopeless Gravel campaign. But we’ll have to wait and see.

--Andrew Malcolm