by publius
I caught most of tonight’s schizophrenic Mortal Kombat/Kumbaya debate. I know you’ll be shocked, but I came away irritated with the Clinton campaign – more precisely, with certain tactics that I dare call Bush-esque. Hear me out.
To back up, and to echo Josh Marshall, HRC had actually been growing on me lately. The new wave of sympathy hit me one day as I listened to her talk confidently – and with such clear mastery – of some random policy point. I thought, “God, wouldn’t it be nice to have someone that smart and that wonky in the White House.” Her policy mastery didn’t so much win me to her side, as it cooled my opposition. It made me step back, get some perspective, and realize that an HRC administration would be a welcome relief – and would actually be cool in some wonkerrific respects.
But then I listened to the debate. And, ugh. What bothered me was not any of the silly things you usually hear about her personally. What bothered me was her tactics – and in particular, her misrepresentations. They were a particular type of misrepresentation that rang disturbingly familiar.
Josh Marshall got me thinking about all this when I read his scattered reactions to the debate:
I still think Hillary is just intentionally misrepresenting what Obama said about Reagan. It makes me cringe. As much I like her, it makes me cringe. …Just when I'm seeing Hillary's side of things, she comes back with crap like this 'present' stuff. Anybody who's looked into this knows the whole 'present' thing is garbage. It's a standard thing in the Illinois legislature.
Both of these attacks – i.e., Reagan and the “present” voting – are clearly factually false. And everyone who pays attention to the news knows it. And Clinton knows it too. Obama’s invocation of Reagan had nothing to do with praising Republican ideas, and the “present” thing has already been debunked too.
But still, she and her campaign keep harping on this -- dishonestly. What’s so infuriating is that, in doing so, they assume their audience is too ignorant to learn the truth. It’s not so much that they’re attacking Obama – after all, that’s politics. It’s that Clinton’s attacks illustrate a deep contempt for voters. Call it “the rube strategy” – we’ll say what we want and most people will be too ignorant to ever figure out the difference.
Understand, though, that this type of misrepresentation isn’t easy to do. It’s a fine art. You can’t just come out and lie baldly. The press will keep hitting you for that, and the public will take note. The key is to lie while maintaining plausible deniability – i.e., you must offer some explanation that is good enough even though you clearly don’t believe it yourself.
To see a perfect example of this tactic in action, take a look at the guy who patented it – George W. Bush. In the early Iraq years, you often heard Bush say something like “Saddam funded terrorists.” The clear implication was that Saddam funded al Qaeda terrorists. However, the nominal explanation – i.e., the source of the plausible deniability – was that Saddam funded Palestinian terrorists. With this fallback position in place, administration officials and pundits could go forth and falsely accuse with impunity.
It might have been a misrepresentation, but it was an effective one. Uninformed voters would hear “Saddam/terrorist” and be moved by it. They might not, however, read the NYT expose three days later on why this claim isn’t actually true. And if, by some miracle of God, a Bush official got called on it on TV, they could rattle off Palestinian names if they needed to. As I said, it’s an art. Rudy ain't mastered it.
The bigger point – indeed, the bigger outrage – is just how little regard Bush administration officials had for the public when they made these types of arguments -- arguments deliberately tailored to exploit the uninformed. They not only assumed voters would never know the difference, they relied on them never knowing the difference. It was a conscious exploitation of ignorance.
I hesitate to draw comparisons with Bush, because HRC would be a far better president on an infinite number of levels. But that said, HRC’s attacks are fundamentally very similar to Bush's. The “present” thing in particular consciously plays on voters’ ignorance of Illinois’s unique political system. Still, though, the allegation strikes a perfect balance. The Clinton team can go out and make the allegation. If, however, they get called out, they have just enough facts to throw out to keep the waters muddied.
The whole thing reminds me of Paul Ohm’s interesting law review article entitled “The Myth of the Superuser.” The idea is that online privacy debates focus too heavily on the capabilities of a small percentage of superusers who can evade controls, exploit loopholes, etc. It would be better, Ohm argues, if the policy debate focused on the larger percentage of regular users who aren’t all that resourceful (i.e., people like me).
The Clinton campaign has apparently taken Ohm’s advice to heart. Attacks like these are demonstrably false to the “super-informed,” but the Clinton campaign doesn’t care. They just want the message of “Obama Hearts Reagan” in the minds of people who are too busy to read multiple national newspapers and dozens of blogs.
All that said, maybe this is a feature not a bug. If you’ve become even more cynical than me about what it takes to beat a Republican, then maybe this practice is a virtue. and perhaps you’re right. But I’m still naively in the “expect more” stage. So I don’t like it.
I think ken must be getting a nickel for every time he types the phrases "republican editorial board/newspaper" and "praise/d republican ideas." He sure does like repeating them. It seems talking points are okay as long as they're HRC talking points. Because she's the savior of liberalism or something. The defender of the flame of progressivism against the Obamamole, minion of the right, alleged tender of goats and attender of semi-nice schools!
Posted by: Larv | January 23, 2008 at 07:02 PM
I think ken must be getting a nickel for every time he types the phrases "republican editorial board/newspaper" and "praise/d republican ideas." He sure does like repeating them. It seems talking points are okay as long as they're HRC talking points. Because she's the savior of liberalism or something. The defender of the flame of progressivism against the Obamamole, minion of the right, alleged tender of goats and attender of semi-nice schools!
Posted by: Larv | January 23, 2008 at 07:03 PM
Gary: This shows he's just like OJ inside, which is something Obama supporters don't want you to know!!!!!
Werd.
Official Beltway narrative: Nurse Ratchet vs. the Angry Black Man.
Sweet Jesus, I hate teh MSM.
Posted by: matttbastard | January 23, 2008 at 07:05 PM
Actually ken emailed me to say he's having a problem with his keyboard. The control and V keys are stuck down, otherwise he would post about how he really likes Barack's narrative of transformational politics.
Posted by: yoyo | January 23, 2008 at 07:19 PM
You've only scratched the surface. Once this is accomplished, Skynet will be in position to take over almost immediately.
Win.
Posted by: Ari | January 23, 2008 at 08:55 PM
Cut the Gordian Knot!
Posted by: DaveC | January 23, 2008 at 09:31 PM
ken, I couldn't agree more with your comments here
tell 'em ken!
it's true. sage words from a wise man.
rather unfairly (!), too, as you noted above.
Yeah, what a hypocrite she is, right? I' glad you're calling her on it.
That about sums it up.
Posted by: Michael | January 23, 2008 at 10:21 PM
I was wondering why a Republican editorial board would have endorsed John Kerry for president in 2004, but then I noticed that Ken actually wrote "republican". Apparently they're just big fans of being a republic. So apparently the criticism now is that Obama was approving of republican ideas, not Republican ones. Perhaps Ken is a monarchist.
Posted by: KCinDC | January 23, 2008 at 11:21 PM
"Imagine what he'd be like with his finger on the nuclear button!"
He'd be confused and disoriented, and probably hit the button without knowing it:
From today's LA Times:
That's what we need all right: a Prez who doesn't know his left finger from his right.
Posted by: Jay Jerome | January 23, 2008 at 11:30 PM
"He'd be confused and disoriented, and probably hit the button without knowing it"
On the bright side, I'm really looking forward to seeing Obama starring in this.
He's one funny guy. Angry, you know, very very angry -- but funny angry.
But also scary! Very very very scary!
I'm trying to figure out when the anti-Obama campaign wandered into commentary that seems reminiscent of this script.
This exchange particularly sticks with me:
So true.But I'm also thinking of Criswell's entire introductory speech.
Although it's somewhat over-literate for Ken, to be sure.
Posted by: Gary Farber | January 23, 2008 at 11:42 PM
I agree with Ken and Jay J.
Obama worked for a slum lord after learning to hide his Muslim identity in a Madrassa while plotting the assassination of Reagan, the very man he loved so deeply. When all is told, this politically divisive character, Barack Obama (scion of the famous Kenyan sheep herding family of the same name), will have destroyed the credibility of the democratic cause by insisting that one vote counts for five... all the while doing something 'in the neighborhood' that might or might not have been related to selling crack.
Posted by: Trips | January 24, 2008 at 01:13 AM
As a former Democrat who left the party when Bill Clinton moved it decisively rightward (welfare "reform" was the last straw), I keep getting the impression that both Obama's and Clinton's appeals to progressives consist of focusing obsessively on the other candidate and pointing out (correctly IMO) that s/he is a center-right, corporate Democrat who offers little to progressives. And progressive Democrats seem to have taken the bait.
Ultimately conversations about the race among progressives quickly turn into discussions of campaign tactics because there's little to separate Obama and Clinton on the issues. Neither candidate actually offers progressives much of anything more than being less bad than any of the possible Republican candidates (which of course both of them are).
Posted by: Incontinentia Buttocks | January 24, 2008 at 03:02 AM
It is slightly embarrassing to see ObWi degrade like this. This is not 'reasonably civil', it's coming closer to 'consistently abuse or vilify other posters for its own sake' and with the loads of childish snark comes close to 'disrupting or destroying meaningful conversation for its own sake'.
What I remember from 2004 is that by the time Kerry was the nominee people had worked so hard to reinforce his flaws that even a hugh majority of democrats couldn't be enthousiastic about him anymore. It's kind of hard to convince others that voting for that person is a good thing, if enough democrats state that they only do it while holding their nose. *If* Hillary becomes the nominee for the Democratic party that seems to happen again. In wich case the democrats vilifying her now are as much to blame when yet again a Republican becomes president.
A few months ago people wrote that they were glad the Democrats had such a strong field with three good candidates. Now, less than a year later, you've all done a lot of the rightwing's work for them in thrashing those candidates.
Ken made a reasonable point imho, where he says that Obama responded with a remark about Reagan when Clinton had only mentioned the ideas, not Reagan. I think in the original interview Obama expressed approval of the fact that the Republican *had* ideas and tried different things, but that he implied that those ideas didn't work out well. My impression was that people thought his reaching out to the Republicans by trying to find common ground was a good thing - and frankly I think he would have done a better job in the debate had he explained his comments instead of trying to get back at Clinton the same way.
The email Gromit received is much more postitive for both Obama and the Democrats imho. But unfortunately so far (as a reasonable impartial observer for whom Hillary would not be first choice if I could vote) I've not seen the same standards of scrutiny for both candidates - let alone a comparison of records, issues and experience.
Posted by: dutchmarbel | January 24, 2008 at 07:47 AM
It is slightly embarrassing to see ObWi degrade like this. This is not 'reasonably civil', it's coming closer to 'consistently abuse or vilify other posters for its own sake' and with the loads of childish snark comes close to 'disrupting or destroying meaningful conversation for its own sake'.
A lot of the commentary being snarked at is worthy of it, e.g. "I'm glad you agree with me" when no one's done any such thing, etc. I don't see this so much as lowering of the level of discourse as just responding in kind. The whole Madrassa thing, e.g., is so ridiculous that I've come to think that mockery is the best response -- I think it does those sorts of arguments too much credit to trete them seriously.
What I remember from 2004 is that by the time Kerry was the nominee people had worked so hard to reinforce his flaws that even a hugh majority of democrats couldn't be enthousiastic about him anymore.
Funny, my feeling from the very beginning was that I had to work like crazy to make myself enthusastic about him. Because he was boring. Really, really boring.
A few months ago people wrote that they were glad the Democrats had such a strong field with three good candidates. Now, less than a year later, you've all done a lot of the rightwing's work for them in thrashing those candidates.
Wait, I thought that the current consensus was that it's better to have gone through the crucible of criticism? I can't keep up with the spin anymore.
Regardless, this is all a matter of perspective -- my impression is that Obama was (and is) schooling Clinton in the campaign and she adopted this strategy intentionally to try and take the luster off of his persona. I don't think it's very fair to say that Obama started any of this -- e.g., his Reagan remarks certainly weren't targeted at Senator Clinton, though I bet they pissed off Bill pretty good.
I hate to get back to the "they started it" issues, but all else notwithstanding, it's pretty clear to me who started all this. Obama was running a very positive campaign, and it was working well -- too well -- so Senator Clinton put him in a lose-lose situation where he had to respond and look aggressive or stay quiet and look weak. (She tried this back in November, too, and it backfired like crazy.)
The fact that Obama's stayed as on-message as he has is actually really impressive to me -- I think he's certainly done a better job than Hillary, and far more than Bill. Obama's clearly gotten under their skin much more than they managed to get under his, and considering the Clintons' political acumen, that's saying something.
Ken made a reasonable point imho, where he says that Obama responded with a remark about Reagan when Clinton had only mentioned the ideas, not Reagan. I think in the original interview Obama expressed approval of the fact that the Republican *had* ideas and tried different things, but that he implied that those ideas didn't work out well. My impression was that people thought his reaching out to the Republicans by trying to find common ground was a good thing - and frankly I think he would have done a better job in the debate had he explained his comments instead of trying to get back at Clinton the same way.
Even if you buy the Reagan/Republicans parsing, it was Bill who made the Reagan comments, and Obama clarified that during the exchange during the debate -- that was the basis of the "I don't know who I'm running against" remark, and I thought it was a fair point in context. She was just playing semantics; the distinction wasn't relevant to her criticism.
At any rate, as far as I could tell he did exactly what you suggested he do in the debates -- he said outright that he thought that Reagan was a disaster for the Democratic Party and that the Republicans in the 1990s had "bad ideas," but that they managed to connect with voters in a way we didn't, and it hurt us. That's a really straightforward argument that a lot of Democrats have been making for two decades now -- including both Clintons, frequently -- and the fact that he even had to clarify it at all was pretty silly in the first place.
Posted by: Adam | January 25, 2008 at 12:57 AM
Of course I apologize for the snark, juvenile as it was. Did not mean to vilify posters or degrade the conversation, just voice a little exasperation with my reading of this thread, if in an exaggerated manner. I should face up to the fact I'm not very good at teh funny... so apologies to the Ken and Jay, and the community in general. This is pretty much the only blog I take time to read the comments on, so here's to an elevated discourse and less snark from me.
Posted by: Trips | January 25, 2008 at 01:42 AM
Trips: I thought it was funny...
Posted by: hilzoy | January 25, 2008 at 01:48 AM