He loses his thanks who promises and delays. – Proverb
It’s been a slow week in the political world.
I could talk about the G20 conference and say something to the effect of “Yay! G20 LOL!!” Or I could write for the umpteenth time about Republican hypocrisy. I could write about it being a good thing that the not-so-honorable Gov. Rod Blagojevich was indicted a few days ago on 16 felony charges. But we already know all this. Instead, I’ll take today to talk about something that’s been bugging me for a long time.
While it’s been around since 1890, only recently has the term “flip-flopper” become the nuclear option in political campaigns. John Kerry’s fate proved if you can get the term to stick to someone, you have won the war – no matter the issue he or she flip-flopped on, no matter how right he or she is about everything else – if this cursed two-word hyphenate fits the bill, the campaign is over.
What is it about “flip-flopper” that makes it such a powerful term? When I first heard the Republican party using it in the ’04 election, I thought it was a sign of desperation. The best they can come up with is “flip-flopper?” Little did I know the hidden power attributed to that label.
Once it became clear people responded to the phrase, you couldn’t escape it. The news media, as we are wont to do, latched onto the phrase and used it as a litmus test for every campaign action either candidate made. It was one of the few times President George W. Bush’s bull-headed stubbornness in sticking to his guns really benefitted him. If you never change your position on anything, at least you can’t be accused of being wishy washy.
Flip-flopping is a key part of an important element in our political process: the tradition of making promises we cannot keep. While not all campaign promises are destined to be broken, a majority of them will never see consideration past the podium. This, I believe, has fostered the belief that politics is all about posturing and too little about substance.
I can understand the want to weed out those who will say whatever it takes to get elected. Despite the fact that many would say that’s all a presidential election is, even the American people can spot a president who is lying through his teeth, or one who is just saying what people want to hear. Campaign promises are often greeted with a rolling of the eyes, as most assume they will never actually come to pass, and some are very obviously incapable of coming true, such as Obama’s claim of wanting U.S. soldiers out of Iraq within 16 months of his inauguration.
The difference is, rather than “sticking to his gunsProxy-Connection: keep-alive
Cache-Control: max-age=0
C” ObaProxy-Connection: keep-alive
Cache-Control: max-age=0
realized this was an untenable position and “refined” it to a more manageable timetable. Kerry, on the other hand, tried to hide his policy missteps behind excuses, when both his vice-presidential running mate and our current president have shown much more success by simply admitting they screwed up.
The fact of the matter is, it is nearly impossible to go through a political career without making some kind of reversal on a position. The problem is that all a political rival has to do is make it seem like that is a flip-flop and the game is over. It’s the political equivalent of starting a rumor you know to be false just to damage someone’s reputation.
There are two things we can take away from this. The first is that, while politics is all about expectations, we have to make sure we don’t get ahead of ourselves. Obama sort of shot himself in the foot by running such a successful campaign under the banner of “rebuilding America”; by getting everyone so excited about the potential our country has, it made it disappointing when all we got in his first few months was a massive drop in the Dow. In a nation whose motto has become “I want it now” instead of “E pluribus unum,” the last thing you should do is promise a utopia under your administration.
Above all, our politicians, candidates and office-holders alike are human, albeit humans with responsibilities that far outweigh our own. To that end, they should be held to a higher standard, yes, but not to the point that we expect them to be superhuman. They make promises they cannot keep. They change positions. When’s the last time you did any of these things?
Perhaps if we remembered that, difficult thought it may be among all the grandstanding and pomposity that is intrinsic to American politics, we would not only be less disillusioned with politics, we would be better able to tell a “flip-flop” from a simple changing of one’s mind after new evidence is considered.
[email protected]