When no great issues divide the political tribes, aspirants are defined by their mishaps — and how they bounce back, writes Simon Jenkins
The American presidential campaign has become a stumble along the Via Dolorosa. As the mob howls from the sidewalk, the candidates seem in a daze, falling to the ground every few steps. Mistakes, gaffes, leaks and ”misspeakings” form themselves into the Stations of the Cross, gradually defining the contest.
Hillary Clinton’s stumbles have been, successively, her Bosnian ”sniper fire” fib, her claims of ”roles” in Kosovo and Northern Ireland, the Colombian conflict of interest of her sacked aide Mark Penn and her cringe-making jibe at Barack Obama as being ”not a Muslim, as far as I know”.
Obama, ostensibly the smoothest performer imaginable, has been no less prone to mishap. His ”narrative” has staggered from the ”bone-headed” acceptance of a land gift from a party donor to his wife’s being ”never proud of my country until now” and the ”pastor disaster” of his association with the radical Chicago preacher, Jeremiah Wright. Then last week came the casual reference to the ”bitterness” of small-town Americans ”taking refuge in guns and religion”, a reference that allegedly cost him dear in Pennsylvania.
John McCain, whose own Via Dolorosa has hardly begun, has had to survive a sweetheart story in The New York Times, mind-numbing mistakes about capital taxes and a reckless claim that the Iranians were ”taking al-Qaeda into Iran, training them and sending them back”. This is about the only thing that the (Shia) Iranians are almost certainly not doing in the Sunni parts of Iraq.
No story about the campaign fails to mention some or all of these incidents, referred to generically as ”misspeaking”. The campaign has become a composite of them, a positive defined by its negatives.
The reason is not hard to discern. A modern campaign, not just in the United States, is so fine-tuned, so honed and platitudinised, that mistakes are the only way of bringing it into focus. In the New Yorker, Hendrik Hertzberg describes it as a syndrome. ”While the politician’s perfectly functioning brain has dispatched the correct signals, the mouth has somehow received and transmitted them in altered form.” They are thus distanced from the speaker and become nobody’s fault, like a child putting its misbehaviour down to genetics. ”She misspoke” means she lied, but permissibly so.
The word, originating in Chaucer, is traceable to Nixon’s ”misspeakings” to explain away palpable falsities. It is a sort of intellectual halitosis, deplored as another instance of the brainless inadequacy of modern democracy.
I welcome it. A campaign composed of serial course correction is no bad proxy for modern government and no bad test of leadership. The mishaps also reveal latent truths. The accusation of ”congenital lying” has long stuck to the Clintons, and Hillary Clinton’s misspeakings add substance to the charge. Obama’s casual remark about small-town Americans — by implication poor whites — may have been at a private gathering in California, but it displayed an aspect of the man that contains a grain of truth. Behind the down-to-earth Chicago community activist is that most elitist American, the well-heeled and aloof Harvard lawyer.
Candidates customarily declare that a misspeaking has been misreported or misinterpreted, but a clever one turns it to advantage. Criticism of Clinton for the negativity of her attacks on Obama — ”the Clintons will do anything to win” — is converted into a symbol of herself as a ”fighting underdog”, as ”not a quitter”. Even as she loses on points, she taunts Obama for his inability ”to close this thing down”, to knock her out. It is her strongest suit, even when she has clearly failed to knock him out.
Obama’s handling of his membership of Wright’s congregation was no less deft. This wild card champion of black consciousness should have been on the avoid list from the start. Obama used the Wright affair as occasion for one of his most thoughtful speeches on race. He considered Wright ”not only wrong but divisive”. He carefully refused to disown him (and offend black people) but instead treated him as a biblical text.
Wright’s fault, he said, was to identify black people as a static class ”irrevocably bound to a tragic past”. For his part, Obama had ”brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles, cousins of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible”.
Obama pointed out the significance of a black leader demanding that black people stop pleading for handouts from (white) government and ”take full responsibility for our own lives”. What could be more ”conservative”? Although the words may have passed over many Americans, the poison was drawn. Exegesis of Obama’s speech has been a high point of the campaign and indeed of American race relations. The historian Garry Wills has ranked it with Lincoln’s Cooper Union speech in 1860.
No great issues divide political tribes in most democracies these days. This is why so many election results are near dead-heats. When citizens are relatively prosperous they do not need politicians to advance their cause. Instead they want their leaders to be icons of the public realm, like them but more so. Hence such apparently idiot polls as: who would you most like to meet in … a barbecue, elevator, subway? In a moment of revelation, Obama recently remarked on the impossibility of distinguishing candidates by policies and programmes. ”Everybody has got a 10-point plan on everything,” he said. ”You go to Senator Clinton’s website and my website and they look identical. The problem is not the lack of proposals.” The problem was how to break Washington’s notorious legislative logjam of lobbies and interest groups — to which, by implication, Clinton was beholden.
The campaign comes alive when seen through the prism of a mishap count. There is no debate on the credit crisis and little on the war. Health care and terrorism barely feature. But modern political leadership is no longer programme-driven. It is composed of responses to unpredictable crises, to wars, terror attacks, financial crashes and oil-price shocks. The qualities required are those of accident management.
The genius of the primary campaign is to test the ability of candidates to respond to such accidents, to explain frequent course corrections and apologise for the gaffes and infelicities inevitable in the age of 24/7 coverage. It is a strength of the drawn-out Democratic primaries that they are testing such ability to destruction. The media has barely started on the Republicans and McCain. — Â