Paying For What You Say

In 1858, Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas held seven debates in Illinois to help determine which of them would be elected to the United States Senate. Each debate lasted three hours. The one who went first spoke for an hour, the other one for an hour and a half, with the first one then given a half hour for rebuttal. They did this without paying anyone to tell them what to say.

It is measure of how much we have changed as a country, and, some would say, declined as a civilization, that now, in the age of television, a leading candidate for the presidency has just dismissed from his role as chief strategist someone the campaign had paid more than ten million dollars for insisting that Hillary Clinton should emphasize "experience" instead of "change."

Ten million dollars seems a lot to pay someone to tell you what to say, but still, as both Lincoln and Douglas understood, elections often depend on how a candidate speaks and what the public wants to hear. The difference is that Lincoln and Douglas started with a position on the great question of what to do about the spread of slavery and tried through their speeches and debates to convince a majority of their fellow citizens that they were right. This now seems not just too risky, but on the whole, unnecessary, when with almost scientific precision you can, if you have the money, hire someone like Mark Penn to tell you the issues you need to stress, and the positions you need to take, if you are going to give yourself the best chance to win.

Bill Clinton and the people who ran his campaign for the presidency in l992 certainly thought so. They prided themselves on their ability to measure public reaction, often through focus groups, and within twenty-four hours have a commercial on television telling everyone what they wanted to hear. They were certain that it was the reason they won. On election day, James Carville wore a T-shirt that read, 'Speed killed - George Bush!'

Clinton was not the first candidate to use polling to tell him what to say and how to say it, but he was the first president to use that technique to tell him how to govern. It started right at the beginning. While millions of Americans watched on television as the president gave his first state of the union address to a joint session of Congress, a dozen people sat together watching a television set in a darkened room. Each of them held a dial which they turned one way when the president said something they liked, and the other way when he said something they did not. One of the things they liked the most was the president's promise to eliminate one hundred government programs as part of his plan to "reinvent" the federal government.

If the Clinton White House knew nothing else, it knew how to move quickly to get on the right side of public opinion. It was announced almost immediately that the president would give a speech devoted entirely to the cuts he intended to make. Two days before the speech was to be given, Clinton met privately with the vice-president. There was a slight problem, he told Al Gore. Though he had promised that a hundred programs were going to be eliminated, neither he nor anyone else in the administration had any idea which ones they might be.

Gore, who had been told that he would play a major part in public policy, had wanted to take the lead in reforming the nation's health care system, but Clinton had given that instead to his wife, Hillary. Gore had wanted to be put in charge of the effort to reform the welfare system, but Clinton had not given him that, either. Now, suddenly, two days before the president's speech, he was informed that he was in charge of the new administration's effort to "reinvent government," and that the first part of that was figuring out what to cut.

Gore did what he could, and two days later Clinton gave a speech on a subject that had become a priority of his administration for no other reason than because a dozen average people had the moment they heard it thought cutting a hundred federal programs a very good idea, though neither they, nor the president, could have named even one of those they thought should be ended.

That is what happened with people who, after they won the office, thought the best thing they could do was to act as if the only purpose in getting elected was to get elected again. Four years later, when he ran for re-election, Bill Clinton, still looking for someone to tell him what to say, hired Mark Penn.

Comments

[frustratedinohio]

Well, we the people must have been right. Remember peace, a roaring economy, zero deficit, projected surplus, millions of jobs created, respect from the rest of the world?

[DennyCrane]

This underscores the big problem with the Clintons. All they care about is getting elected and reelected. They may or may not have ideas of their own, but they worry more about what'll keep them popular than what's right. Hillary's vote for the war was a perfect example of that. At the time, the majority of Americans believed Bush's BS about WMDs. Hillary realized this and knew that if she voted against the war, she'd be going against the will of the people at the time and that would hurt her chances of becoming President. With that vote and every other major decision she's made, she's shown why she's unfit to be President. We need a leader, not a follower.

[jmpurser]

I remember the shock I felt when I finally realized that GHWB had no real beliefs aside from the fact that he believed he should be president. "Don't ask, Don't tell" was the watershed moment when I realized that Clinton was much the same.