New York Times Redux

As my one reader knows, I’ve been critical of the crimes of the New York Times, though theirs have paled in comparison to those of ABC. So I’ll give them an at-a-boy when they do something to indicate a spine behind all that extraneous flesh. Thank you NYT for today’s editorial, The Low Road to Victory. Nothing new, but something good and right and true.

Euphemisms

In The Big Sink, Perry Bathaus wrote:

So all the polls are in and apparently to everyone’s surprise white rural, gun-toting, cheap-beer-drinking, high-school-educated unemployed bowlers prefer Clinton to Obama.

I’m sorry, but why can’t we just say white “racists” prefer Clinton to Obama?

I’m with you Perry!

America Votes on the Number Two Issue

Ok. Fear, smear, sarcasm, threats and potential lawsuits, and leaked memos …. apparently it all did the trick.

Congratulations Mark (“Being human is overrated“) Penn.

Maybe Walters Bagehot and Lippman, and Leo Strauss, were right after all.

This newsclip, by the way, is irresistible — (thanks to my infinite friend):

Poll: Bullshit Is Most Important Issue For 2008 Voters

Tony Rezko = Dr. Phil?

Please tell me its a coincidence that that the Tony Rezko federal corruption trial was scheduled to begin on the eve of the biggest election day of the primaries since Super Tuesday?

Is it possible this whole thing is just a case of mistaken identity? Maybe Barack Obama thought he was dealing with Dr. Phil all along. Who wouldn’t trust Dr. Phil?

But don’t believe the rumors that Tony Rezko is Dr. Phil’s alternate personality, like Dr. Jeckyll’s Mr. Hyde, his dark side, despite the evidence of deep ties between Dr. Phil and Hillary (see below):

http://revver.com/video/606694/dr-phil-rushes-to-hillary-clintons-bedside/

Tactics and Antics on the Stump

Pat Buchanan was a guest commentator on MSNBC this morning. I almost never watch MSNBC, and typically don’t watch news in the morning. A little Bloomberg with breakfast, maybe, to see how far my stocks have tumbled overnight in European trading. But for the first time in my life…drumroll please–no, I’m not going to mention pride in my country… although?…–I’m finding myself addicted to campaign politics. I’ve been impressed by how Buchanan has been generally able to tone down his political convictions in his role as debate commentator. To his credit, he focuses most of his remarks on the tactics of debate, and surely serves as one barometer of public response to some of the antics emerging in the campaign.

In his commentary on last night’s presidential debate, however, Buchanan made a regrettable remark about Hillary Clinton’s stump style. He preceded the remark with a reference to her many personalities (I think he called her “Sybil”): her assumption of a respectful, even honorific tone toward Senator Obama one moment (as she concluded the last presidential debate) and her ostensibly outraged indictment the following day: “Shame* on you, Barack Obama”; her hammed-up, sarcastic mockery of Obama as a charismatic, if not snake-oil, prophet out of touch with reality and with no concrete plans and of his supporters, a good swath of the American public now, as a bunch of blind supplicants hoodwinked by the visionary’s charisma; her ‘I’m a fighter’ theme in such stark contrast to her public tears and valedictory gestures. [*“Shame” was a recurrent theme of the recent stump speech, where she also compared Obama to, of all people, George W. Bush and implied that if the American public votes for Obama, they'll get “shafted” once again and should be ashamed of themselves for even considering it; “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me”—at least you have to give her credit for correctly citing the cliché that Bush famously bumbled.] I am going to resist the temptation to criticize Senator Clinton for her choice of tone and words, or linger on the question of whether there is any central intelligence in the campaign selecting the occasion and timing of the emergence of these multiple personalities or estimating their impact. (But seriously, does her team really think that Sarcasm and Shame are winning strategies against Hope and Change in this election season?)

The Clinton campaign strikes me as a dog in a bear trap, willing to chew off its own leg in order to survive. The overarching strategy of her campaign in this last stretch of the nomination process appears to be: “You take the high road, and I’ll take the low road.” I find it disappointing because I think Senator Clinton’s campaign in the lead-up to Texas and Ohio could have been much more successful if she had made it a footrace on the high road. My belief is that it’s too late now, but my advice to the Clinton campaign is to give up the posturing, the theatricality, the mock vulnerability and mock outrage, and the feigned adulation for her opponent. The many faces of Hilary are tactical, yes; but they are also antics. And that’s one of the major difference between the campaign strategies of the two democratic candidates. After what the American people have been through over the last decade, the American public is a body re-awakening as if from a long sleep to the exhilaration of active and informed engagement in the democratic process. And I think that it is (or we are) doing so precisely because there is already an acute sense of responsibility, if not shame, for the consequences of having either opted out of the heart of process, or so passively engaged in it until now. And while enthusiasm for charisma is high, and the qualifications of the candidates will be important, I believe that the demand for personal integrity and authenticity is going to be the deciding issue in this election. In this political context, the strategic adoption of four distinct personalities in as many weeks, and two opposite “emotional” stances toward her opponent in twenty four hours, runs the risk of sending a message to the public that dissembling and inconsistency are fairplay, and that it is just good politics to adopt tones and stances for different audiences as the occasion demands and as the heat of competition requires. [Senator Clinton admitted last night, with a laugh and a smile, to the tactical nature of her shifts in tone.]

Fans of politics-as-usual will credit Senator Clinton for her tactical abilities as a political Proteus. But one of Senator Obama’s arguments is that if experience is defined only as the resourceful and expedient deployment of a battery of tactics as the occasion demands without a governing intelligence to adjudicate (call it smarts or a moral compass), that is, if it is defined as politics-as-usual, he will gladly cede the monopoly on that political virtue to his opponent. In this sense, Senator Clinton’s complicity in the U.S. government’s decision to “drive the truck into the ditch” and her seemingly inconsistent campaign strategies strike me as part of a consistent pattern of deciding not to decide, of deciding to choose expediency over conviction, of choosing to do and say what her advisors have determined to be the most popular things to do or say depending on the state or situation. And perhaps this is the reason why more than any other issue when that of health care arises, even if she is being pressed to speak about the details of her policy, she will turn the subject to her “convictions.” If on every other issue her position is driven by tactics rather than conviction, at least this one, at least her position on health care, is driven by conviction. When asked by Senator Obama to articulate her policy details, she has resorted in both debates to an assertion of conviction: “it is one of my deepest convictions that.” Conversely, when asked to answer questions about where she stands, or what she believes, she has often responded with an inventory of policy details: (‘beliefs are beside the point, there are complexities to be dealt with’). I doubt this tactic reflects confusion on her part about the difference between conviction and policy points, as if the assertion of one was the same as the articulation of the other. This is the very confusion that she warns the public not to let Senator Obama get away with. Her criticism of Obama on precisely this issue would seem to indicate that her substitution of one for the other is a consciously adopted strategic tactic: “if asked about detail x on issue y, talk about how important this is as a personal issue of yours and refer to anecdotes of individuals, personalize it” OR “if asked where you stand on this issue, talk about how complicated the details are, cite examples, and mention ‘experience.’”

To get back to Pat Buchanan’s gaffe. When asked to comment on the various positions that Senator Clinton has taken over the past week, and particularly her tactics on the stump, he paraphrased Samuel Johnson’s (in)famous quote: “Sir, a woman’s [public speaking] is like a dog’s walking on his hinder legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.” Mr. Buchanan’s regurgitation of Samuel Johnson’s quote to explain the failure of Clinton’s stump strategy over the past weeks is on the surface offensive for obvious reasons: at the very least, it is blatantly misogynist. And it is ill-informed, denying America a heritage of effective female public speakers. Not to mention its problematic elision of political public speaking and “preaching” (Johnson’s original reference) or the fact that to have used this quote to talk about Obama would have gotten him fired, big time, Imus style. But on another level Mr. Buchanan’s citation of Johnson was misguided because it misattributes to a flaw in Senator Clinton’s sex—women can’t give stump speeches—what is arguably the fatal flaw in her campaign strategy—Hillary can’t win on the high road.

Buchanan’s co-hosts showed proper embarrassment, but their nervous reaction, short of cutting to a commercial break and canceling his contract, ultimately raised another issue dear to Samuel Johnson’s heart and for which he is more highly regarded: literacy. Buchanan’s cohosts were dumbfounded not only because of the offensiveness of his statement but also because they didn’t even recognize the name of Samuel Johnson. “Boswell’s Life of Johnson!” Buchanan cried in disbelief, to vacant stares, thus demonstrating that the two generations of by all appearances Euro-stock majority in which Buchanan has invested so much of his political capital to unify the country do not share a common culture. The televised generation gap qua literacy gap must have struck Mr. Buchanon as a cultural instance of the larger problem, real or imaginary, that he has tried to tackle through his public attacks on immigration in the United States: that “we” no longer know where we stand because we no share a common identity, be it rooted in bloodlines, culture, or religion. This was a metamoment, for television especially over the past decade is both the culprit and the rapporteur of the decline in literacy. With all due respect to the well groomed young innocents (and as we all know that’s DC cant for I’m sticking it to you now!), the networks are as much to blame for dumbing down television news by replacing journalists, who for all the negative associations the public may have of them have also traditionally connoted literacy, experience, and an appreciation for history, with white-toothed well-dressed witty young people with good builds and pretty faces. I’m proselytizing now, but not only were Buchanan’s interlocutors unfamiliar with Johnson, they were also unable to contest his sexist comment by naming one single female speaker in America. Buchanon responded to the dumb and dumbfounded faces of his cohosts and jumped to his own rebuttal by throwing up… Margaret Thatcher! It’s one thing for MSNBC’s news anchors to provide vacant stares in response to references to the albeit antiquated reference to obscure figures of eighteenth century British literature, but quite another for them to be floating adrift when prompted to call up the name of one female politician with acumen as a public speaker.

But maybe the question is not whether Hillary Clinton can give a good stump speech or can be consistent or even whether her campaign strategists are competent. The real question, at once more naive, more profound, and more tragic, may be: whether she can be authentic. Has she so imbibed or stewed in the juices of politics-as-usual (to borrow from one of Obama’s recent speeches) that it is impossible not only to shed affectation but also to even know where she herself actually stands. This is the same threat to the integrity of the private self that runs through the literature on theatricality: the risk that actors may cease to become their own persons because they become nothing but an agglomeration of their roles. Is the demise of Senator Clinton’s campaign evidence that there is no there there? no private self calling the shots outside the circularity of the majority caucus/campaign cycle that Lewis Carroll captured so well in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: where polls determine the antics and tactics adopted to better candidates’ standing in the polls. Maybe this all means that we should think of a politician’s integrity in a different, more philosophical light than is usually marshalled in political discussions on the topic. Critiques of ‘old school political tactics’ typically suggest that politicians lack integrity because they are always calculating; factors in the calculation are self interests and special interests, with the public interest a distant third. But the disintegration of Senator Clinton’s 2008 campaign, if indeed it turns out to have been a failure, may rather suggest that the greatest threat to effective leadership in this country is when political tactics substitute for and annihilate the integrity of the personality of the politician. Because all politics are tactical, this may be better stated that when antics take the place of tactics in a campaign strategy, our deepest concern should be not just that it muddies the waters of politics but that it begs the question whether there is a person running for office or whether the prospect of office is running and ruining the person.

It is my belief that Senator Clinton is to be credited for strategically adopting every position she has taken over the past weeks and that none of these (except perhaps the outburst at Tim Russert about being always ‘called on first’ that began last night’s debate) represents genuine “emotion,” which could be a good or bad thing depending on your perspective. The issue is not that Hillary Clinton can’t be consistent or can’t make good speeches, but that her consistent strategy has been to not make good public speeches, which is to say speeches that appeal to the public’s desire for politicians who claim to represent the public good. One of Obama’s singular strengths is his tactical insistence on the high road at almost every instance. When asked if he ever cast a vote that he regretted, he described the stance he didn’t take in congress: on the Terri Shiavo situation. One the one hand this could look like a tactical answer because of the issue’s relatively low place on the ranking of issues at stake in this year’s campaign. On the other hand, the fact that Obama’s answer is so below the radar (by contrast to Senator Clinton’s greatest regret: to vote to go to war in Iraq) might suggest to prospective voters that his is a genuinely felt regret, the result of sincere reflection that this political inaction, an error of omission rather than commission, was an instance of moral weakness in which he succumbed to the temptation to fall in line with consensus politics. If so, then his answer tactical though it may have been suggests a place deeper than politics from which political decisions should be made. If there is such a place, whatever we call it, let’s hope–or entertain the hope-–at least for the moment, it is a place that might just save politicians of all parties from the bear traps of “politics.”