It makes me sad to see Matthew Yglesias and Ezra Klein — two of the best young liberal pundits out there — soft-pedaling the dishonesty of Hillary Clinton’s recent attacks on Barack Obama.
On January 14, Yglesias wrote that “the idea that Clinton would use dishonest political tactics to beat the GOP is, in my view, probably the most appealing thing about her.” While this statement may have been tongue in cheek, he added the following last week:
Paul Waldman says Hillary Clinton is going after Barack Obama just like a Republican would — without a lot of honesty or conscience. Frankly, I don’t have a big problem with that. As Ezra Klein says “The winner of the Democratic primary, after all, will have to run against a Republican.”
Here’s what Klein wrote on the same subject:
I’m a bit conflicted over this Paul Waldman column. On the one hand, Hillary Clinton is running a bare-knuckled, often unfair campaign, and pundits should mention that. On the other, the sort of attacks she’s levying — misrepresenting Obama’s payroll tax plan, or exaggerating his comments about Reagan — are pretty much par for the course. We’re not hitting some sort of new low in politics, here. And the overarching theme of Waldman’s column — that Clinton is “running like a Republican” — almost pushes me to her side on the issue. The winner of the Democratic primary, after all, will have to run against a Republican.
This is part of the general trend toward liberals embracing dishonest spin tactics that we discussed in the conclusion of All the President’s Spin as a response to the success of the spin tactics of the Bush administration. It’s the reason we’ve seen the rise of framing gurus like George Lakoff and Drew Westen and organizations like the Center for American Progress.
Clinton’s campaign also seems to be following Bush’s lead in its approach to the press. Michael Crowley’s description in TNR of the way the Clintonites interact with the press will sound familiar to anyone who has read about the struggle to report on the current administration:
Reporters who have covered the hyper-vigilant campaign say that no detail or editorial spin is too minor to draw a rebuke. Even seasoned political journalists describe reporting on Hillary as a torturous experience. Though few dare offer specifics for the record–“They’re too smart,” one furtively confides. “They’ll figure out who I am”–privately, they recount excruciating battles to secure basic facts. Innocent queries are met with deep suspicion. Only surgically precise questioning yields relevant answers. Hillary’s aides don’t hesitate to use access as a blunt instrument… Reporters’ jabs and errors are long remembered, and no hour is too odd for an angry phone call. Clinton aides are especially swift to bypass reporters and complain to top editors. “They’re frightening!” says one reporter who has covered Clinton. “They don’t see [reporting] as a healthy part of the process. They view this as a ruthless kill-or-be-killed game.”
Here’s a similar excerpt from Ken Auletta’s 2004 New Yorker story on the Bush administration’s approach to the press:
What seems new with the Bush White House is the unusual skill that it has shown in keeping much of the press at a distance while controlling the news agenda. And for perhaps the first time the White House has come to see reporters as special pleaders—pleaders for more access and better headlines—as if the press were simply another interest group, and, moreover, an interest group that’s not nearly as powerful as it once was.
…Dana Milbank, one of three reporters whom the Post assigns to the White House, says that the Administration speaks with one voice partly because officials have “talking points that they e-mail to friends and everyone says exactly the same thing. You go through the effort of getting Karl Rove on the phone and he’ll say exactly the same thing as Scott McClellan”—the White House press secretary. NBC’s David Gregory says, “My biggest frustration is that this White House has chosen an approach with the White House press corps, generally speaking, to engage us as little as possible.”
…The White House was enraged by an article by Dana Milbank, which appeared on October 22, 2002, under the headline “For Bush, Facts are Malleable”… According to Maralee Schwartz, the Post’s national political editor, Fleischer, Hughes, and Rove each complained to her about him, and suggested that he might be the wrong person for the job. The White House now says that it does not “believe that anybody has ever asked for his removal.”
The White House, Milbank says, tried to freeze him out, and for a time stopped returning his calls.
(Howard Kurtz reported yesterday that the Obama campaign is also keeping reporters at arm’s length, though it’s not clear that their animus against the press is as great as the Clinton campaign’s is.)
Sadly, our prediction in ATPS that the next president will follow Bush’s lead is likely to come true:
Some citizens might hope that things will get better when Bush leaves office. But the problem is unlikely to disappear regardless of who occupies the White House. Bush’s presidency has changed the rules of the game, accelerating a larger trend toward PR-driven deception. By altering the incentives for other politicians and political organizations, Bush has fueled an ongoing arms race in which both sides employ ever more sophisticated tactics to manipulate the public and the press.
Yglesias and Klein should talk to Andrew Sullivan, who praised the “rhetorical smoke screen” of the Bush administration’s campaign for tax cuts back in 2001 but has since come to recognize the corrosive effects of the administration’s dishonesty. Let’s hope they see the light a little sooner.
(Meta-comment: Isn’t it strange that Yglesias and Klein are declaring their comfort with Clinton’s dishonesty? The conservatives whose tactics Yglesias and Klein think liberals should copy don’t advocate dishonesty in public. In fact, they’ll swear up and down that Al Gore said he invented the Internet, that the claims of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth were all accurate, etc.)