Campaign 2016 Blog: Eleven Days and Counting The Post Reality Campaign: the Wages of Spin?
Linda Peek Schacht |
Posted Oct. 28. 2016 at noon
— By Linda Peek Schacht, leader-in-residence in the College of Leadership & Public Service and veteran political communicator in White House, the Congress and presidential campaigns
It seems a quaint notion now. I began my political career working for a man who promised the American people “I will never lie to you.” He was running in the wake of the Watergate scandal and a president’s resignation, and the people elected Jimmy Carter. He was the last “unspun” President because of his commitment to fact, reason, and telling the unvarnished truth.
He lost his presidency after one term to Ronald Reagan, the great communicator. The media coined the word “spin” for the Reagan White House. Michael Deaver, called the “vicar of visual,” and David Gergen, master of telling the “best truth,” showcased their President in the best light.
Twenty years later, Karl Rove, political guru in the George W. Bush White House, told journalist Ron Suskind that the problem with reporters was that they were in the “reality-based community” while political actors like himself “create our own reality.” He may or may not have been aware that he was echoing the postmodern theory that power creates “truth.”
Political “spin” has devolved from the fact-based “best truth” of the Reagan White House to Karl Rove ‘s “creating reality” to this 2016 post-reality campaign where American voters seems divided into two separate universes.
At the end of that almost 40-year slide, reality television had given us a billionaire presidential candidate, who operates outside the norm of American political discourse and began his political career by advancing a debunked conspiracy theory, which a majority of his supporters still believe. For over a year, he has deftly challenged the media to ignore at their own peril the high ratings his rallies’ entertainment value produced, even as he had the lowest trust numbers in presidential campaign history.
His opponent has the second lowest trust numbers in presidential campaign history. She is battered by the steady drip of private emails stolen through a hack by a foreign power, now affecting a U.S. presidential campaign and reinforcing her lack of transparency, penchant for secrecy and parsing language. The “great right wing conspiracy” she blamed in the 1990s is now fueled by the Brietbart alt right “news” site once led by her opponent’s campaign CEO.
You can’t make this stuff up. Such are the wages of spin.
We should have seen it coming. Give a shot of steroids to Mark Twain’s comment that “a lie gets halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes” and you get truth in the age of the Internet, social media and cable networks that allow citizens to choose to hear only what they agree with.
It’s not just blue “truth” and red “truth.”
It’s a press corps unable to figure out how to deal with an interview when the person sitting across from them gives fact-free answers, denying comments they are shown making on videotape. You can’t help but think of Groucho Marx’s “Are you going to believe me or your lying eyes?”
It’s a campaign where a major focus is whether or not the debate moderator will fact check. It’s the sad fact that fact checking doesn’t shut down the lie.
And most important and most disturbing: supporters don’t seem to care.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously told a fellow senator “You are entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts.” Many Americans apparently feel otherwise. They have their own “facts “and are making a decision on the next leader of the free world based on them.
And where do they get their “facts”? In the age of Twitter, conspiracy theories go mainstream. In the age of the Internet, no copy editors insure fact above fiction. In the age of emails, a foreign power can hack and deliver to Wikileaks emails that show how the sausage is made and staff conflict that reinforces issues of transparency and trustworthiness.
Yes, citizens are right to be skeptical and confused in the wake of these two candidates. Both of these candidates are flawed. The candidates and their supporters can blame the media. But we as citizens have to take some of the blame. If informed, engaged citizens are the lifeblood of democracy; we are anemic.
The scholar and author Howard Gardner argues the 21st century citizen must develop a synthesizing mind--casting a wide net to get multiple sources and ideas, deliberately seeking out all sides of an issue, and assessing sources we trust and don’t trust to make decisions. In other words, he suggests we become that “reality-based community” Karl Rove described with disdain, one that “believes solutions emerge from judicious study of discernible reality.” And that takes us back to Jimmy Carter’s arguments based in fact, reason and unvarnished truth.
That’s a challenge the media, parents and educators should take for the next generation of voters.
It is the challenge for the next president on how he or she will lead. Maybe the winner begins the hard work of winning the trust of the American people by surprising us with truth and transparency. We can take it; this time we might even reward it.