From the Mind of Meegs

Reading the newspaper this weekend, I came across a brief column about the Obama/Clinton experience debate, most recently crystallized in the "who do you want taking the 3 AM 'bomb their asses back to the stone age' phone call?" ads that Clinton ran. The writer points out that Obama has spent more years in elected office that the allegedly more experienced Clinton, and Obama has more foreign policy experience than first-black-president Bill had when he was elected back in 1992. Oh, and the great state of Arkansas is not noted for its large or diverse constituency, as Illinois is--and, to be fair, New York as well.

One would be safe in assuming that Clinton saw the old experience card as much less important when she supported her husband's candidacy. A cynic would say that political expediency has a strange way of adjusting convictions. A less cynical person might point out that the early 90s were different, pre-9/11 times. But maybe that is exactly the point. Maybe a more experienced president wouldn't have let the Osama bin Laden problem fester until it reached its crescendo in 9/11. But I digress and anyway, I think only a moron would claim that one person alone is responsible for 9/11, or that one person alone could have prevented it.

Even though the stats on Clinton's experience vs. Obama's experience are plain, obvious facts, I couldn't recall ever seeing any number of them collected in such a concise, pointed statement. But honestly, I don't know if the real problem is misinformation, so much as that misinformation is a symptom of the problem. And Obama obviously doesn't need my advice on how to run a presidential campaign. Baring a miraculous comeback--though, as talking heads are wont to remind us, the Clintons are the king and queen of miraculous comebacks--Obama will defeat Clinton. The delegate math (this year's cryptic but catchy election phrase, a la "hanging chad") just doesn't add up for her.

So this is where it gets odd to me. They say history is written by the victors. So why does it seem, even when Obama is winning, that Clinton is writing the narrative for this campaign? At this point, the actual content of the narrative (the facts about who's really for change and who really has the experience) is less bothersome to me than who is writing it. Obama can and should and does answer the bell admirably, but the problem is that someone else is ringing that bell. Clinton is dictating what story will be told about this campaign, even if the ending isn't going to be the one she wants. It's puzzling.

If I may be so bold, I will suggest a reason why Clinton is being allowed to write the narrative. Drawing on her boatloads of campaigning experience, she has proved much more adept than Obama at "nuggetizing" (if that's a word) things. That is, she is much better at seizing upon issues and boiling them down to an easily digestible shorthand, which often takes the form of _______ vs._______. And in our current culture, particularly in our current media climate, easily digestible shorthand is exactly what we're after. The media likes things they can package up into a 3-minute report to be aired in the midst of a 30-minute program (22 minutes if you subtract out the commercials) that purports to give you all the news affecting our world today. The media likes things that can easily be turned into pithy statements by their talking heads, who have all of about 20 seconds to make their point before the person on the other side of the split-screen shouts them down. The media likes things tied up nice and neat, no loose ends. And Clinton is doing more than tying it up nice and neat for them. She's giftwrapping it. And so her story gets repeated over and over and over again. After a while, after hearing enough people say it enough times, we start to believe it all.

I'm not blaming the media for this. I believe that the media is a reflection of society, which is a reflection of the media, which is a reflection of society, which is...you get the idea. We're all in on this thing. Nor am I blaming Clinton. The candidates don't always have unlimited time to expound on things, nor do people always have the time to listen to hours-long debates. You do what you have to in order to be successful and give yourself the best shot of winning. If you honestly believe you have the best ideas for our country (and if you don't, why are you running in the first place?), I can't blame you for doing whatever you can to get yourself in the position to execute these ideas. This is not about blame-laying.

But it is about lamenting the fact that, in our culture, we want the boil-it-down-to-the-lowest-common-denominator answer, substance be damned. Whatever shades of meaning have to be sacrificed in the service of a sound bite--that doesn't trouble us one bit. Remember four years ago. Articles were written about John Kerry, and how he used to give lengthy, detailed, occasionally rambling, often unresolved responses to questions, leaving the listener perplexed. He seemed out of touch. What the listener really wanted was a 30-second answer filled with overheated rhetoric so we could cheer (or boo) when it was all done. Bush, by contrast, was the plain-spoken Texan who didn't have time for all that babble. He was master of the rhetoric we craved, malapropisms and all.

And, quelle surprise, who wrote the narrative for the 2004 election? Bush did. It was all about flip-flopping vs. steadiness. Kerry was less adept than Obama at answering his opponent's charges, but would it have mattered? Or would it have mattered if he pointed out that, in many circumstances, a flip-flop is exactly what is needed? Nope. It wouldn't have. Kerry wasn't writing the story. When we say "History is written by the victors," we usually mean, "They are the victors and thus get to write history." But I think the reverse is also true as well. "History is written by the victors" can also mean "Those who seize the opportunity to write history will emerge the victors."

But again, Clinton is probably going to lose to Obama. So maybe it's a sign that we're finally rising above all this. Or, maybe it's a sign that the universe is messing with my theory. Truthfully, I'm not sure.