Smoke and Mirror Politics
From the time they could talk my kids have heard the age-old axiom from me: “If you lie, it will grow and compound itself until you can’t keep track of what’s true and what’s not.”
Bill Clinton is not absent-minded, nor is he stupid. He is, by all accounts, one of the most gifted politicians of our time, able to move between wonky and glib with remarkable smoothness and accuity, which is what makes it difficult to understand why he would revive the story of Sen. Hillary Clinton’s embarrassing “misremembering” and make it even worse by embellishing it more than she ever did! Even more astonishing, his riff was not in response to a spontaneous question, but part of a speech he was giving. He intentionally inserted more ‘misrememberances’ than Hillary did.
There is no question in my mind that a politician as astute as Bill Clinton knew exactly what he was doing. The real question is “why”? Why raise an issue that was dead umpty-eleven news cycles ago at all, and then why embellish it with easily verifiable truths?
There are two possible explanations, one psychological, one practical (sort of). The psychological explanation says that Clinton understands that the nomination is out of Hillary’s reach, he is not as supportive of a Hillary presidency as he says, and gaffes like this just before the Pennsylvania primary will drop her chances of winning, leaving her treading water.
I don’t believe that for a minute and opt for the practical explanation. As I said, Clinton is a master politician. By “misremembering the misrememberance”, and then stepping back and letting Hillary correct it, the last impression he leaves is that Hillary is honest, and he is the ‘misrememberer’. In other words, he shields her from the lie, putting the fallout on him. Since she has made a point of separating herself (and rightly so) from him, it may actually be an effective tactic for most voters.
However, it only works for people who catch a snippet of the evening news for their political updates, which is about 90% of the voting population. All they will remember a week and a half from now is that Hillary didn’t lie or misspeak; Bill did. At this point it’s so twisted around that no one could really make an account of the truth and get away with it as truth, because of the constant lie distortion.
And really, why should it have become such a big deal anyway? Truth be told (and it wasn’t), it wouldn’t have been a big deal but for the repeated efforts to highlight the Bosnia experience some sort of experiential advantage over Barack Obama. To be caught ‘misremembering’ about a linchpin of the argument takes on a different strength, particularly when they insist on attacking their opponents over similar details.
You’re going to see more of it over the weekend as both campaigns play push-pull with the news cycles. Tonight we have the “breaking news” that Barack Obama “misspoke” about bitterness in Pennsylvania small towns. In fact, his remarks were not that different from what he said in his speech on race. Here’s an excerpt from the speech:
In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience – as far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything, they’ve built it from scratch. They’ve worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they’re told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.
Like the anger within the black community, these resentments aren’t always expressed in polite company. But they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation. Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.
(Emphasis added by me)
Here’s what he said on the taped remarks of his speech last week:
So, it depends on where you are, but I think it’s fair to say that the places where we are going to have to do the most work are the places where people feel most cynical about government. The people are mis-appre…I think they’re misunderstanding why the demographics in our, in this contest have broken out as they are. Because everybody just ascribes it to ‘white working-class don’t wanna work — don’t wanna vote for the black guy.’ That’s…there were intimations of that in an article in the Sunday New York Times today – kind of implies that it’s sort of a race thing.
Here’s how it is: in a lot of these communities in big industrial states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, people have been beaten down so long, and they feel so betrayed by government, and when they hear a pitch that is premised on not being cynical about government, then a part of them just doesn’t buy it. And when it’s delivered by — it’s true that when it’s delivered by a 46-year-old black man named Barack Obama (laugher), then that adds another layer of skepticism (laughter).
But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there’s not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
Context is everything. Truth is everything. This is why we tell our kids we can handle the truth but lies are intolerable. It’s why transparency matters in this campaign. It is as easy to apply Obama’s reference to churches like Trinity as it is churches in Pennsylvania. Given the obsession that the Clinton campaign has with the Reverend Wright anger, it would be an effective answer to the constant hammering on that. When he says “these communities”, why would Clinton or McCain assume that those are white Pennysylvania towns and not towns with angry black folks (like some in Indiana)? Smokescreens, of course. The disingenous need to force an issue into the headlines with the willing complicity of the press, bloggers, and cable news stations drives non-stories into stories on a nearly 24/7 basis.
In the few minutes I spent pondering these questions, all three cable news networks led with the Obama remarks as ‘breaking news’, bumping the Bill Bosnia misremembering off the front page, the Bush-Cheney tax returns off the front page, and airing with amazing and brazen alacrity an out-of-context snippet of remarks he’s made before and will likely make again. Although they were acceptable on other days, in other news cycles, for this one it is expedient to spin them away from the issues and toward candidates’ advantage.
Of course, a disservice is done to all of us as well as Hillary Clinton and John McCain when they blow smoke. We are no closer to understanding what these candidates are about, what they believe in, or whether they’ll treat us differently than the administration in office today. In fact, it could be argued that we can expect another four years of secrecy, smoke and mirrors like the last eight with either one of these candidates, if a judgment were to be made on how they’re manipulating the press, and by extension, the electorate.
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