Clinton, Obama And The Belief In The Magic Power Of Words
Posted February 25, 2008 | 02:49 PM (EST)
by Arianna Huffington
Along with her "ready to lead on Day One" mantra, Hillary Clinton's
favored line of attack against Barack Obama is the reincarnation of
Mondale's 1984 "Where's the beef?" attack on Gary Hart. In Clinton's
version, Obama is little more than a shallow speechifier -- he
believes that words are all you need to lead.
She made it explicit in a speech in Providence, Rhode Island on Sunday:
"I could stand up here and say 'Let's just get everybody together.
Let's get unified. The sky will open! The light will come down!
Celestial choirs will be singing! And everyone will know we should do
the right thing and the world will be perfect!' Maybe I've just lived
a little long, but I have no illusions about how hard this is going to
be. You are not going to wave a magic wand and have the special
interests disappear!"
Last week it was: "Speeches don't put food on the table. Speeches
don't fill up your tank, or fill your prescription, or do anything
about that stack of bills."
And her chief strategist, Mark Penn, summed up the "just words" meme
this way: "She is in the solutions business while Obama is in the
promises business."
Now, I agree with Clinton that it's important to look at how each of
the Democratic candidates uses words and how rhetoric fits into how
they've run their respective campaigns. And if you do, you'll see that
one candidate does believe that words are like a magic wand: you utter
them and reality changes. But it's not Barack Obama -- it's Hillary
Clinton.
Clinton's use of words is disturbingly reminiscent of the way the Bush
administration has used words: just saying something is true is
magically supposed to make it true. Call it Presto-change-o Politics.
The examples are so notorious they hardly bear repeating: "mission
accomplished," "heckuva job," "last throes," the endless "turning the
corner" in Iraq. They were all said with the arrogant belief that
merely saying these words was all that was needed: reality would
literally change to fit the rhetoric.
Now let's look at Hillary Clinton's rhetoric and what is says about
the campaign she's run. It started with her absurd claim that her vote
for the war was really a vote to send inspectors back in. The name of
the bill? "The Joint Resolution To Authorize The Use Of United States
Armed Forces Against Iraq." Saying it was about sending inspectors
back in doesn't mean that it is true that it was about sending
inspectors back in.
And then how about the endless spinning trying to diminish Obama
victory after Obama victory? Here was Penn: "Could we possibly have a
nominee who hasn't won any of the significant states -- outside of
Illinois? That raises some serious questions about Sen. Obama." Mark
Penn calling Virginia, Georgia, Missouri, and Colorado, among others,
not "significant" does not make them insignificant.
Or Clinton's "35 years of experience." She has had a distinguished
record of public service, but it's not in any way 35 years of
government experience, unless you want to include her time at Yale Law
school, or going door to door for George McGovern in Texas, or working
at the Rose law firm in Arkansas as government experience. But her
campaign seemed convinced that by repeating "35 years of experience"
at every stop she would magically acquire that 35 years of experience.
But as the Bush administration has shown, believing your own words and
not being able to see things as they are is not a good thing -- either
for a country or a campaign. The New York Times described some Clinton
aides as "baffled that a candidate who had been in the United States
Senate for only three years and was a state lawmaker in Illinois
before that was now outpacing a seasoned figure like Mrs. Clinton."
As Matt Yglesias says:
"Whether or not you think the more 'seasoned' candidate ought to
win presidential elections, it seems to me that any campaign staffer
who could be genuinely 'baffled' by experience not proving to be a
winning issue is demonstrating a scary ignorance of how things work.
Is her staff baffled that Joe Biden didn't win the nomination?"
Or how about the Clinton campaign's abracadabra rhetoric, designed to
make the reality of what they agreed to about Florida and Michigan --
poof! -- go away. They even set up a website that attempts to pull a
rabbit out of the electoral hat. The site list several "facts": "FACT:
Florida and Michigan should count, both in the interest of fundamental
fairness and honoring the spirit of the Democrats' 50-state strategy."
As Ezra Klein notes: "It's almost as if they thought putting it
after... the word 'FACT,' would be like a Jedi mind trick."
Meanwhile, as the Clinton campaign was busy trying to use words to
push the idea that losing is actually winning (you know, just like in
Iraq), the Obama campaign was actually winning votes. To the extent
that anything in a campaign is real, it doesn't get any more real than
actual votes.
And, no, he wasn't winning them just because of his "words." He backed
up his words with action: old-fashioned grassroots organizing. For
instance, as was widely noted in the blogosphere, the Clinton campaign
apparently found out only in February that the March 4th
primary/caucus in Texas was sort of complicated:
"Supporters of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton are worried that
convoluted delegate rules in Texas could water down the impact of
strong support for her among Hispanic voters there, creating a new
obstacle for her in the must-win presidential primary contest."
As publius at Obsidian Wings says:
"While they were busy 'discovering' the rules, however, the Obama
campaign had people on the ground in Texas explaining the system,
organizing precincts, and making PowerPoints. I know because I went to
one of these meetings a week ago. I should have invited Mark Penn I
suppose."
Repeat that kind of organizing throughout 23 "insignificant" states,
and it turns out you get a pretty healthy delegate lead.
So let's look at how Obama uses words. Contrary to Clinton's charges,
Obama never claims his words will somehow magically create change.
Instead, he uses his words to ask the American people to demand
change. Very little change for the better happens in Washington unless
it is demanded by the people. It's instructive that, back in New
Hampshire, Clinton discounted the work Martin Luther King did in
creating the political atmosphere that allowed LBJ to push though the
Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.
Which is why Obama's constant invocation is "Yes we can" -- not "Yes I
can." Obama uses words to persuade, to mobilize and to get people to
imagine that reality can be changed. And based on how his campaign has
been run, on the ground, in state after state, it's clear that he
knows changing reality is not done through magic -- it's done through
hard work.
It is Clinton who uses words to deny reality, and expects them to
magically change it. Haven't we had enough of that over the last seven
years?
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