Politics and the U-Turn

A post on Politico yesterday detailed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s recent deployment of a “media backlash” strategy.  This is a fairly simple but (the Clinton campaign hopes) effective antidote to the “mathematically there’s no way she can win” refrain now common among the stars of the political talk show circuit. It works like this: Clinton’s campaign releases an ad in Oregon that shows several (male) pundits (Russert, Stephanopoulos, et al) counting her out. A narrator then contrasts the values of “Washington” with the values of Oregon: the former cares about “who’s up and who’s down,” while the latter cares about “what’s right and what’s wrong” (no word yet on how Oregonians, who generally think of neighboring Washington state when they hear “Washington,” have responded to the ad).  Translation: Clinton is the one politician in the presidential race who isn’t participating in a glorified popularity contest. Wait, scratch that. Make it “the one politician in the history of the world,” or at least the only one who has both held to high principles and achieved any real power. More on this later.

The idea is to push voters’ indignation buttons (particularly older women’s…note the “bad” pundits in the ad) and call out the “we’ll-show-them-a-thing-or-two” troops in numbers large enough to at least dent Obama’s apparent commanding lead in Oregon.  This strategy, according to Politico, seems to have worked in West Virginia and seems to have influenced the New Hampshire vote, in which Clinton went from being several points behind in pre-election polls to beating her nearest rival (Barack Obama) 39% to 37%.

What intrigues me here is the way in which a politician can control (or attempt to control) public discourse simply by defining who the “enemy” or “Other” is. George W. Bush managed to do it for several years simply by appealing to the abstract notion of Terror and to its incarnation, Osama bin Laden. John McCain has attemped to do it by equating a pledge to talk to groups like Hamas with “appeasement,” a dirty word because of its association with the Nazi takeovers of Austria, Czechoslovakia, et al.  Obama has done it by blaming the country’s problems on partisan hacks.  Clinton has done it in New Hampshire by insinuating unfair treatment by condescending males, in Ohio and Pennsylvania (where both she and Obama competed for the “Most Anti-NAFTA” award) by blaming job losses on the Fat Cats who engineered NAFTA (not including, apparently, her former president husband) , and just about everywhere by pointing out how Bush’s policies have taken the country in the wrong direction, a strategy so obvious I’m surprised at how well it seems to have worked.  And now that the pundit class here in DC is counting her out for the nomination, they have become the symbol of all that is wrong with America, all those who have an interest in not having every vote count.

This is an odd position for Hillary to take, because, as the Politico article notes, her campaign began with encouragment for “media characterizations of her as the inevitable nominee.” Now that the pundits are going against her, they have suddenly become more interested in up and down than in right and wrong.  It’s not that the U-turn is uncommon in politics (John McCain recently gave a conciliaory speech to the NRA, whose political influence he helped to curb with his campaign finance reform bill, and Obama has had to distance himself from spiritual mentor Jeremiah Wright), but with Clinton’s focus-grouped campaign, the maneuver is perhaps more noticeable than usual.