Spin Spun Too Far
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
So is Hillary Clinton really saying that, when you get right down to it, Martin Luther King Jr. is just a footnote in the history of civil rights?
Oh come on.
And yet, that’s what the issue of the week has become, thanks to that great American political pastime: Taking one remark — maybe even a particularly stupid one — and trying to turn it into the candidate’s defining, defeating moment.
Problem is … sometimes it works.
Hear the “Lenore Galore” podcast:
What brought this latest iteration on, as you have no doubt heard by now, is a statement made by the New York Senator last Monday. Speaking just before the New Hampshire primary, Mrs. Clinton said, “Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It took a president to get it done.”
That’s both literally true and remarkably dismissive. Yes, it’s true: legislation does not get passed without elected officials passing it. On the other hand, everyone — including Mrs. Clinton (and a federal holiday) — credits King with galvanizing the movement that brought that legislation to bear.
So, you have a choice. You could take her remark as a cloddish way to point out how necessary it is to have proactive lawmakers. You could take it as one of the least felicitous sentences Mrs. Clinton has uttered out of about a billion others over the course of this campaign. Or, if you wanted to make it into a talking point, you could take it as a major diss.
A diss it has become. “Sen. Clinton made an unfortunate remark, an ill-advised remark about King and Lyndon Johnson. I didn’t make the statement. I haven’t remarked on it and she, I think, offended some folks who felt that somehow diminished King’s role in bringing about the Civil Rights Act … ” That’s what Senator Obama had to say about it, and so now the buzz is whether Mrs. Clinton is really David Duke in a dress. Or pantsuit. Whatever.
The thing about plucking issues like this out of the swirling waters of a campaign is that they turn whole platforms — and whole people — into caricatures. Suddenly we are not talking about Mrs. Clinton’s past votes on civil rights issues, or future plans, but on whether she thinks King was a nobody — which we all know she doesn’t.
This kind of distraction is, alas, all too common in the political realm. We saw it in the 2000 election when Al Gore’s 1999 comment about how he helped facilitate the creation of the Internet was misquoted as, “I created the Internet” and repackaged as proof of his laughable hubris. We saw it on the Republican side a decade earlier when Dan Quayle spelled potato the way a lot of us spell it — wrong — and was reduced to a punch line. And believe it or not, a professor of government at the College of the Atlantic, Jamie McKown, says: Abe Lincoln himself was not above this kind of dirty politics.
“In December of 1857, Kansas was deciding whether it would become a slave state or not, and in a speech in the Senate, Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas said he didn’t care what Kansas decided since, according to the law, it was their own business to decide,” Professor McKown said. After that, whenever he was giving a speech, Lincoln claimed over and over that Douglas had said he didn’t care about slavery — which wasn’t exactly the truth.
“This is the classic way this is done in American politics,” Mr. McKown said. “You take a line which may, when stripped of the context, seem very damaging to the opponent. But it can’t be so completely out of context that you could be attacked as a liar.”
For the record, that’s an election that Lincoln lost.
I’d like to think that this kind of spinning will prove to be a losing tactic again. For Mrs. Clinton’s part, she already appears to be taking a route that’s very different from it — so different it could almost be called Barackian. Except that she’s actually taking a page from her own playbook.
In Nevada this past Thursday night, Mrs. Clinton ended up in a Mexican restaurant with some locals who told her they are terrified of losing their homes. Then she held a televised roundtable about this again on Saturday. Both times she listened, she looked like she cared, and — being Mrs. Clinton — she then told about all sorts of legislation she’s got in mind to ease the subprime mess.
You could describe this as a listening tour, the same kind of tour that got her elected to the New York Senate in 2000. Or you could describe it as the kind of politics we all want to see. Positive. Human. Ears straining to hear the public’s concerns and not the next gaffe.
Hear the “Lenore Galore” podcast:
Ms. Skenazy can be reached at lskenazy@yahoo.com.
