Jon Chait asks the question in the latest New Republic:
I have always believed that Ari Fleischer is a duplicitous genius. During his tenure as White House press secretary, he elevated the mundane practice of misleading reporters and avoiding their questions into an art form...
I'm not sure exactly what I expected from Fleischer's new book, Taking Heat. I hoped it would offer some insight into the mind of a brilliant con man. At the very least, I figured it would be interesting as propaganda. But it was maddeningly dull propaganda... This is the mastermind I had held in such awe?
While I was slogging through the book, I happened to be e-mailing with a conservative I know. My correspondent thought my Ari-as-virtuoso theory was silly: "When Ari worked on the Hill he was widely considered to be a moron even by other press secretaries, who are mostly a bunch of ignorant dolts themselves." But how, I asked, could he have run circles around the Washington press corps? "Ari is a genius like the [Peter] Sellers character in Being There," he replied. "He was too stupid and too ignorant to know he was telling lies."
He examines a press conference transcript of particular Fleischer genius, and concludes:
When I first saw it, I thought it was a tour de force of propaganda--a master dissembler effortlessly running circles around his bewildered and overmatched adversaries. But it's also consistent with the Chauncey Gardiner hypothesis. Perhaps Fleischer was simply spouting legislative jargon in a random, nonsensical fashion--foiling logical queries by utterly failing to grasp them. It's impossible to tell.
Dumb Fleischer and Genius Fleischer are observationally equivalent!
To me, this is like the question of whether Reagan was dumb. In some ways, he was very poorly informed for a president, but he was also a brilliant communicator, and his lack of knowledge often aided him in spinning more effectively. The true answer, then, is more subtle. I suspect the same is true with Fleischer.
(By the way, Chait's 2002 profile of Fleischer is a classic deconstruction of arguably the greatest spinner in modern Washington history. Unfortunately, it appears to be behind the TNR Digital firewall.)
AF may be dumb, but he had the best 5th grade teacher in the biznas. and he's nice to my grandmother.
Posted by: complexity | March 21, 2005 at 10:15 AM