Did Sen. Clinton get too much—or not enough—heat for her (badly delivered) joke in a fundraising speech that Mahatma Gandhi worked for two years at a St. Louis convenience store?

My gut feeling is that it was rather innocuous. But it does raise the interesting question of double standards: as Keith Olbermann asked David Brock (no relation to my co-blogger, Brock Sides) on Countdown this evening, what if it was Bill Frist, or another Republican without a “bigot paper trail,” who made the remark instead of Hillary Clinton? Brock evaded the specific hypothetical, but I think it would have fit into the “Republicans are bigoted” narrative—lending itself to the sort of wire or NYT story that says the comment, while minor, fits into a long line of statements by Republicans (Lott, Thurmond, Santorum…). By contrast, nobody’s story on Hillary’s comments is going to bring up Robert Byrd’s segregationist past or his more recent “N-word” episode.

That raises the larger question: that of whether the dominant narratives are biased. “Republicans are mean” is a pretty easy narrative to fit any story about Republicans into: the administration wants to “put arsenic in drinking water”; Republicans are “cutting benefits.” But there’s not really a “Democrats are mean” narrative: nobody left of NewsMax would write that “Democrats’ plans for higher trade barriers will impoverish the third world,” “the Clinton Administration’s plan to increase regulation of NOx particles will cost the economy $X billion per life saved,” or “Kyoto, if fully implemented, would only decrease global temperatures by 0.X degrees Celsius in 2100.”

I don’t really know the answer to that. And it’s possible Republicans benefit from other dominant narratives: a Republican who took Howard Dean’s position on the war might be ascribed more credibility. These media narratives may just be the long-term results of what John Petrocik calls “issue ownership”: efforts by the major parties to sieze the position held by the median voter on particular issues. It is possible that because Democrats “own” racial issues, they insulate themselves from attack for being insensitive on race, just as Republicans’ ownership of law-and-order issues can protect them from the “soft on crime” charge.

Meanwhile, Steven Taylor didn’t see how the joke might be construed as funny.