CE Week #12: “Political flimflam steps up”
Leonard Pitts Jr.
November 15, 2007
“People say believe half of what you see and none of what you hear.” – Gladys Knight & the Pips, “I Heard It Through The Grapevine,” 1967
“Trust none of what you hear and less of what you see.” – Bruce Springsteen, “Magic,” 2007
It’s what you’d expect from George W. Bush.
He is, after all, the fellow whose spokesman once fielded questions from a GOP stooge pretending to be a reporter, whose deputy FEMA chief was caught conducting a fake press conference, whose functionaries routinely screen the crowds and pre-select the questioners at public events lest, God forbid, some ordinary citizen ask the president of the United States a tough question.
So yeah, this was precisely what you’d expect W. to do. Thing is, he didn’t do it.
Rather, it was Hillary Clinton whose campaign admitted last week that it planted a question at a campaign stop in Iowa. It seems a college student was approached by a Clinton staffer and asked to ask the candidate about global warming. The young woman asked the requested question, but she also told people about it and the news, as news is wont to do, got out.
Clinton’s rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination clucked pious reproach, but campaign reporters tell us it is actually standard procedure nowadays for campaigns to plant friendly questions.
And surely the cheap plastic artificiality of the age is established beyond question when even the run for the nation’s highest office becomes a CGI effect. The acronym is for computer generated imagery, the digital wizardry in the movies that allows Spider-Man to swing convincingly through the canyons of New York City and Titanic to sink realistically in ice bound seas.
“Forrest Gump” was a groundbreaker in the use of CGI, what with rendering Lt. Dan a double amputee and putting Forrest in the Oval Office, complaining to John F. Kennedy that he had to pee. But many of its effects were less obvious: birds flying out of a cornfield; a reflection in a lake; the lighting of the sky. There, CGI was invisible; you didn’t know sleight of hand was involved unless the filmmakers chose to tell you.
Politics has become much the same. Yes, it was always a con job: the candidate always backlit against the American flag, gazing soulfully into the distance, his opponent always a greasy sleaze who would, if elected, bulldoze the senior center and put up a Hooters in its place. But it was once easier for a reasonably intelligent observer to know when he or she was being conned. As fakery becomes more sophisticated and ubiquitous, knowing becomes more difficult. Maybe even impossible.
The quotes juxtaposed above describe the arc some of us have traveled as a result: from healthy skepticism to whatever lies beyond skepticism. It is telling that the most potent political insurgencies of recent years – H. Ross Perot in 1992, John McCain in 2000, Barack Obama, now – have all had in common one trait: perceived authenticity, a sense that they spoke not from polls and position papers, but from conviction. Maybe it’s also telling that Perot and McCain lost and that Obama trails Clinton in national polls.
Maybe we like being fooled. Maybe we are, at some level, complicit in our own conning. If people can be dazzled and duped into choosing a given soft drink or antacid, maybe it’s no surprise they can be induced to choose a future in much the same way. (Bold Italics mine – Kautzman)
The problem is, next year’s election will be the most crucial in a generation. The next president will have to repair the massive damage – social, environmental, geopolitical – wrought by the current one. So we need and deserve to know how these would-be presidents propose to do this. Instead we get flimflam, the old okey-doke, carnival barkers and special effects. Politics as CGI.
But the danger is real. God help us if the next president is not.
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The subject of this article frustrates me. Is it too much to ask for our presidential candidates to campaign honestly? Especially seeing this sort of behavior from Hillary Clinton – the candidate who seems to be afraid of her own shadow let alone her responses to controversial issues – makes me nervous that we could possibly get a president that swindles the public and tries to pull a bag over our eyes. I know that politicking is sticky business but still… I would like to see some honesty. Planting easy questions among the crowd at a “rally” of some sort seems rather childish to me. I want to see is Hillary Clinton can handle the hard questions. She doesn’t necessarily have to do it gracefully but at least be able to hold her composure. In the article it said that, in fact, it is standard procedure for many candidates to stage friendly questions. I think that this “tactic” should be wiped out completely. It’s not really doing any good! We want to hear answers that haven’t been swimming around in their brains for 12 hours when they first formulated them. Shouldn’t we want a president who can think soundly and firmly on their feet?
I agree somewhat with Leslie. I wish that all candidate could just answer questions honestly. The only problem witht hat is so many candidates would be more moderate than democratic or republican that winners would become less and less clear and there could be controversy over which candidate won the nomination.
Anyways, I agree with this article that this is a very important election. Some of our generation will be paying taxes in the next 4-8 years. We will be driving, and some enlisting. It affects all of us maybe more than it affects the rest of the population. Hopefully change will be dramatic to fix the mess that Bush made. Also it would be great if Bush got a bad rap as president in all the history books, because some bad presidents are often credited later as being good when the people absolutely hated them.
Running for president is all about saying the right things in the right way to win votes. That’s all it is, policy gridlock takes care of all your proposals when you do become president anyways. All these candidates are living, breathing eating polls, asking what a majority of us want asked, telling us what a majority of us want to be told.
That’s why I like the campaign of Obama. He has vowed to run an honest campaign which I think is great, even if it’s still a little dishonest it is probably a more moral campaign than anyone elses and hopefully people will figure out that honesty is a good value and vote for him, even if their views don’t quite match up.
We already have that kind of president, Leslie. The problem is figuring out why we reelected him, and avoiding the collective amnesia that would allow us to elect another dishonest leader. Please don’t mistake that for a comparison between Hillary Clinton and George W. Bush. They are very different politicians. However, the fact that political success has become synonymous with dodging the truth disheartens me. A politician who presents himself authentically asks voters to be discerning and mature. He asks his constituents to step back from the soundbytes and polls we are all so used to judging, weigh the points of the candidate’s platform against our own values, and determine his net worth based on that comparison. His honesty poses a challenge, and I am eager to take it, because I appreciate the respect for my intellect it demonstrates. I truly wonder if our media and political leaders treated us, the American public, as mature, capable human beings, we might behave as such.
–grace
I think what “Hillary did” was not necessarily a bad thing. One of her staffers decided to try to give her a question on global warming because she wanted the opportunity to talk about it. I do this in “Student Congress” all the time. I will have additional information I wish to provide to the congress and will have someone ask me a question to set myself up for it. I also will answer other questions but, it’s nice to be able to say everything I want to say because sometimes time does not allow me to speak for as long as I would like.
The idea of fake candidates on the other hand is strange. The reason I am attracted to Obama, Ron Paul, and even a bit McCain is because they are very real in what they say and do. McCain opposes torture and water boarding because he has been tortured and water boarded. Obama worked with Republicans in the Illinois Senate to reform a death penalty system that executed five innocent people. He now calls for bipartisanship. Ron Paul delivered over 1000 babies as a doctor, he is against abortion. What they say adds up they give reasons for what they say. I cant speak for the rest of the American public but I want the candidate that is real the one that inspires. What happened to the JFK’s and FDR’s were they just illusions to?