Will liberals embrace dishonesty post-Bush?

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.)

Comments

[Rob]

Is this a joke? Do you honestly believe that liberal dishonest tactics are something new, something they were driven to by George Bush?

Let's just hop into the Wayback Machine and revisit 1987. Quiet now, Teddy Kennedy, the liberal lion, is speaking: "Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the government, and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens."

[Brendan Nyhan]

No, I don't think such tactics are new. I think the embrace of them as a regular approach to politics has increased. Read the book for more...

[Argus]

You seem like a nice young man, so let me help you a bit here. Embracing liberal memes such as this...

...that the claims of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth were all (in)accurate...

...as gospel without personal research and knowledge is hazardous to your own credibility.

The Swiftvets did present documented facts as well as allegations...many of which were, self-admittedly, their "opinions" supported by plausible and credible evidence and argumentation.

Until you (and yours) can come to terms with this (perhaps not possible until Kerry leaves the political theater), your musings are less than reality based.

[Howard]

Argus -

How do you "come to terms" with innuendo ?

What are these "facts" that aren't even stated and are only based on "opinions" but are backed by "plausible and credible evidence and argumentation."?

What "personal research and knowledge" do you have or have you done ?

Why are you speaking in memes ?

[Howard]

Those comments from old Teddy do include some shocking sounding rhetoric. That rhetoric was extreme. It clearly should have been less hysterical.

I will add that Bork had, and still has, extreme opinions. That’s just the facts. You can look at each of those points and review the basis in fact for each comment.

He is still anti-abortion, anti separation of church and state, adamantly pro censorship and against extending many rights of due-process (even as they currently exist) to criminal defendants. He also believes homosexuality (or consensual homosexual acts between adults) should be outlawed. But I think he’s moderated a bit on civil rights.

In any case, we've already seen Johah Goldberg (and others before him) pull out that single sentence – 20 years old now - to prove how ugly and uncivil politicians (or liberals) can be (or have been).

This tit-for-tat style of argument is old and tired. I often see it used to make a point (or to deflect away from the subject at hand) on blogs. It goes like this - Libby lied but so did Clinton; Rove may be vicious but James Carville was vicious; etc.

Sam Fox (our current Ambassador to Belgium) told the Senate it was OK to fund a nationally televised smear campaign in a Presidential election because "the other side was doing the same thing". That’s how he justified it.

That doesn't work for me. First, I don't believe Ambassador Fox was right - the other side wasn't doing it. Second, even if they were, how does that make it right?

You can always go back 20 years to find something to help justify your own contemporary vile, if you want to. Maybe Fox was reading Goldberg.

Oh, Fox also said, "you should be proud of your military service, Senator. No one can take that away from you."