We Can't Handle the Truth
FERGUSON, ANDREW
We Can’t Handle the Truth The surest way to create a campaign controversy. BY ANDREW FERGUSON Former Texas senator Phil Gramm ran for president in 1996. He raised $20 million, spent nearly...
...True, true, all offensively true: but not as unmentionable as the truths that Geraldine Ferraro let slip...
...But she was doomed, and she probably knew it...
...Listen to this man...
...In this era of raging, vicious partisanship, Americans crave bipartisan misrepresentation...
...Political observers had long thought such a feat was impossible, and it remains astonishing even in hindsight...
...This is all true...
...Before his interview with the Times, it was assumed (by professional assumers) that Gramm would be offered a high-ranking economicpolicymaking job in a McCain administration, maybe even secretary of the Treasury...
...Gramm’s candidate John McCain said that he “didn’t agree” with the fact that Gramm had cited...
...He’s still emitting peeps, even though he made an abstract point about the campaign as unforgivably true as Shaheen’s...
...soil...
...Yet when reporters informed McCain of Black’s assertion, McCain disavowed it: “I strenuously disagree,” he said...
...You could look it up: A recession is two consecutive quarters of economic contraction, and the economy didn’t contract last quarter...
...Nobody, I’ll bet, understands this better than Geraldine Ferraro, the 1984 vice presidential candidate who committed the year’s most spectacular example of the truth offense...
...But Gramm was pilloried for his factual statement...
...Okay, said David Wright, the reporter who covered the story for ABC, maybe the “economic fundamentals are sound,” as Gramm asserted...
...Black’s transgression came in an interview with Fortune magazine, when he was asked about the political consequences of another terrorist attack on U.S...
...Recently we were reminded how he managed to pull it off...
...These include Austan Goolsbee, an economic adviser to Obama who was criticized for uttering the truth that his candidate will moderate his opposition to free trade once he’s in the White House, just as, historically, all antifree trade presidential candidates have done...
...But that’s no consolation to folks who worry about their mortgages and are paying these high prices at the pump...
...But McCain also knows how the life cycle of political controversy works: The surest way to quiet a controversy created by saying something true is to say something untrue...
...economy wasn’t in a recession...
...Geraldine Ferraro said it right,” said Johnson: Obama wouldn’t be leading the presidential race if he were a white politician from Illinois with four years’ experience in the U.S...
...He had stumbled into a zone of politics where you’re not supposed to say something true, and where you get punished if you do...
...How about the ones who got shot down but didn’t become POWs...
...The question itself was kind of tasteless, but Black answered anyway...
...McCain almost certainly knows that Black’s statement was correct, of course...
...The political landscape is littered with people who have been castigated, fi red, or forced to apologize for the gross infraction of saying something true...
...In a speech, Obama chose to rephrase Clark’s statement into a statement Clark hadn’t made, and then to disavow it boldly, courageously, forthrightly...
...Most news outlets reported the comment as news, even though it’s hard to imagine that any newsroom in the country employs a single reporter who doesn’t know that Black’s point was true...
...Where does the presidential qualifi cation lie—in getting shot down, in getting captured, or in just being a fi ghter pilot...
...Ferraro tops even Samantha Power, the Obama adviser who made the unmentionably true assertion that Obama, if elected, would “revisit” his campaign pledge to withdraw troops from Iraq in 16 months...
...The reaction was so hostile and immediate that Obama repudiated his supporter the next day...
...Ferraro beats out several competitors...
...It’s almost impossible for anybody to say anything...
...Obama called her statement “absurd” and an example of “slice and dice politics”— a charge that would have stung if anyone had known what “slice and dice politics” meant...
...In a television interview a few weeks ago, Clark called McCain “a hero to me” and then said this: “I don’t think riding in a fi ghter plane and getting shot down is a qualifi cation to be president...
...Last December the co-chairman of Hillary Clinton’s New Hampshire campaign, Bill Shaheen, suggested that Barack Obama’s admitted use of drugs as a young man might somehow—just maybe—be cited to Obama’s detriment by Republicans in the presidential campaign...
...Certainly it would be a big advantage to him,” Black said...
...People were too mad at Clark to take the time to ask such questions...
...Clark hadn’t devalued McCain’s service, of course...
...Senate...
...Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...He’d just spoken a truth—a truism, almost...
...Most of the media reports offered an even bolder response to Gramm...
...Charlie Black, an adviser to John McCain, was luckier...
...He’s black too...
...We are, however, in a “mental recession,” he said—a loss of consumer confi dence, stoked by hysterical media reports, that threatens to tip the economy into a real recession...
...For Obama, however, the repudiation of Clark was a two-fer: Not only did he misrepresent what Clark had said—thus pushing the political conversation back toward its usual falseness and misdirection— but he also got to look bipartisan...
...How about the ones who didn’t get shot down...
...In 1984,” Ferraro said a few months ago, “if my name was Gerard Ferraro instead of Geraldine Ferraro, I would not have been chosen as a vice presidential candidate...
...To which the general reaction was: So what...
...Double true...
...It’s hard to disagree with that—which is why no one does, not really...
...Then Johnson lamented the quality of talk in the presidential campaign...
...So you may not hear from him again till the campaign is over...
...Earlier this month, Gramm gave an interview to the Washington Times in which he asserted that the U.S...
...He speaks the truth...
...In other words: What Gramm said was true, but it didn’t matter...
...He was asked to resign for committing the truth offense, and not a peep, true or false, has been heard from him since...
...now assumers are assuming he’ll never get such a cool job—especially after he made matters worse by insisting a day later that the fact he had asserted was, in fact, a fact: “Every word I said was true...
...True...
...He wins on the merits—he said the economy wasn’t in a recession, and it wasn’t— but he deserves a reprimand anyway...
...Have you noticed how big this zone is getting...
...He raised $20 million, spent nearly all of it, and won zero delegates...
...BY ANDREW FERGUSON Former Texas senator Phil Gramm ran for president in 1996...
...This was the effect of Obama’s repudiation of his supporter Wesley Clark, the former general and a onetime presidential candidate of Gramm-like ineptitude...
...Clambering down from the high ground of the factual and the objective, McCain slipped himself into the slough of the subjective and the romantic, where politicians and voters now prefer to luxuriate...
...Ferraro flailed away in protest at the resulting controversy, growing so desperate that she even agreed to appear with Bill O’Reilly...
...One voice was raised in defense of her truth telling, though: that of Bob Johnson, founder of Black Entertainment Television...
...No one,” said Obama, eyes flashing, “should ever devalue [McCain’s] service, especially for the sake of a political campaign...
...Then the general air of insincerity is restored, and we can all calm down...
...I believe that the person here in [the absolutely crucial swing state of] Michigan who just lost his job isn’t suffering from a mental recession,” McCain said empathically...
...In the same way, Ferraro said, referring to Obama’s amazing rise in presidential politics, “If Obama were a white man, he would not be in this position...
...Is there anyone who thinks that every Vietnamera POW fi ghter pilot is qualifi ed to be president...
Vol. 13 • July 2008 • No. 43
