What Barak Really Meant: More Gotcha Politics

Bob Hertzog — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 10:06:07 -0700

A standard ploy in politics today is to search your opponents words, excerpt just the ones that make the speaker look stupid, indecisive, prejudiced or just silly, then repeat those words over and over until they seem to be exactly what the person intended to say. This strategy is so common that it has been given a name. Writers Thomas Cathcart and Daniel klein, in their book Aristotle and an Aardvark to to Washington, call this political strategy "contestomy." In the 2004 presidential campaign, John Kerry was the victim of this sort of gotcha politics, when he was quoted over and over saying “I voted for funding for the war, before I voted against it.” Kerry was expressing some frustration over the way in which the bill was worded, saying he was for it with certain wording but against it when it was rewritten. The manner in which he was quoted made Kerry look indecisive and confused. However, when what he as said was quoted completely, it was easy to see exactly what Kerry meant.

Several days ago, John McCain said that American troops might be in Iraq for the next 100 years. McCain, responding to a question he was asked, meant his remark in the context of American’s international interest around the world, since WWII. He was not thinking of America continuing the war for the next 100 years, as the excerpt so often quoted makes it seem.

The latest victim of contextomy is Barak Obama. Both Hillary Clinton and John McCain have criticized a remark Obama made about small-town Pennsylvanians, during a campaign stop in Pennsylvania. The portion of his comments quoted and then characterized by Obama opponents go something like this: “It's not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

The excerpt here makes it seem as if Obama is making a condescending and stereotypical remark about rural Pennsylvanians. Below is the entire quote as Obama spoke it. If you read his entire message, you can easily see that Obama is remarking on the failure of previous governments (both Democratic and Republican) to respond to the needs of these people and arguing that an Obama administration would be different.

“You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Um, now these are in some communities, you know. I think what you’ll find is, is that people of every background — there are gonna be a mix of people, you can go in the toughest neighborhoods, you know working-class lunch-pail folks, you’ll find Obama enthusiasts. And you can go into places where you think I’d be very strong and people will just be skeptical. The important thing is that you show up and you’re doing what you’re doing.”

News media, both national and local, for their own reasons, have joined hands with Obama’s opponents to mischaracterize his comment in a most negative manner. The media does not necessarily want to help Obama’s opponents, they just want to abet a little more controversy. They even more than our politicians should know better.