My loathing for the way Hillary has run her campaign is second to none. I have supported Obama from the beginning, in part because he reminded me so much of Bobby Kennedy, in whose campaign I was a young volunteer. Having said that, I think the current flap regarding her comments about Bobby’s assassination is much ado about nothing. I don't for a minute believe she was insinuating she should stay in just in case Barack is assassinated. I think it simply was a reference - albeit awkward and inaccurate- to extended campaigns. This is nothing more than the media engaging in gotcha journalism, as it did with Barack's "bitter" comment. The lesson to politicians is don't think while speaking and certainly don't express your thoughts before they have been thoroughly vetted and polished free of any - God forbid - spontaneity.
I have been a political junkie since watching JFK at the 1956 Democratic convention when I was 8 years old. I know how the game is played and that comments, no matter how innocent or qualified, contextual or tentative, can often be used against the speaker for political gain. Fair enough. What I think we are seeing in this campaign goes well beyond that. The spinmeisters in the campaigns – all of them – and the vultures in the media seize on every opportunity, no matter how trivial, to denigrate the opposition candidate. They treat the campaign as one giant game of whack- a mole, that old carnival attraction where you use a hammer to hit the mole on the head, only to have it pop up somewhere else where you joyfully get to whack it again. Substance is irrelevant. Nuance is a crime. Thinking through a position while discussing it is a felony. What matters is the ability to pounce, to shred the opponent for some supposed offense against the interest group or cause du jour.
Much of this is driven by the cable news networks’ insatiable desire for the political equivalent of junk food. To function, they require something that is fast, cheap, requires no preparation or thought, and fills space without providing any intellectual nourishment.
It is not entirely the networks’ fault. The attention span of the American people is very short and the demand for entertainment without effort very great. We want to feel much but think little. Passion is preferable to reason, and subtlety is suspect if not downright effete.
How else to explain the phony fight over alleged elitism on the part of one candidate or the other? They all maneuver to prove they are “just plain folks” when they patently are not. If they were, they would not be running for president! It is an absurd notion that we want the president to be “one of us.” Call me a snob but I, for one, would like my president to be far smarter, wiser, thoughtful, considerate, and forward thinking than average. It makes no difference whether the president knows how to bowl or knock back a bourbon and beer. It makes a great deal of difference whether the president knows how to achieve peace, balance a budget, and defend the Constitution.
Our country faces huge challenges and complicated problems, many of our own making. Mastering these challenges and solving these problems will be complicated and difficult, requiring shared sacrifice and an abiding sense of unity, that we are all in this together. Unfortunately, the current campaign has degenerated into a search for the simplistic and the divisive. For a number of years both Democratic and Republican politicians have sought to win and retain power by slicing and dicing the electorate to get to 51% in elections. Karl Rove and the Clintons – about as far apart as possible ideologically – are equally masterful at this particular political strategy. As a philosophy for winning, it is arguably successful. As a philosophy for governing, it is a disaster.
We are more concerned with proving that the other guy is not “one of us” than with what exactly it means to be us at this point in history. We segment ourselves by gender, race, income, faith, and education and in so doing divide rather than unite. We delight in going for the jugular and decry thoughtful analysis as somehow being “out of touch with the people.” We make our political opponents our enemies and therefore create a government in gridlock because compromise is seen as surrender to the “forces of evil” rather than a way of getting things done. This has been the case for at least the last 16 years with disastrous results for the country. And we keep doing it, somehow thinking it will be better if only our side prevails. In Alcoholics Anonymous, there is a word for doing the same thing over and over again yet somehow expecting different results. That word is insanity.
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