Spin
Take, for instance, the performance of LBJ in the 1964 election. Throughout the summer of 1964, Democratic operatives worried about the “backlash”—Southern (and northern ethnic) whites abandoning the party to vote for Barry Goldwater, following passage of the Civil Rights Act, which Johnson championed and Goldwater opposed. The President, however, seized on the idea of the “frontlash,” a term used by pollster Oliver Quayle to describe the liberal and moderate Republicans abandoning Goldwater over issues ranging from civil rights to nuclear war. In the conversation below with aides Bill Moyers (at the Atlantic City convention) and Dick Nelson (at the White House), the President laid out how he wanted to “stampede” the convention with the “frontlash” concept.
Johnson's spin effort worked. From Atlantic City, David Broder (then with the Washington Star) reported that the “‘frontlash’ idea” was the talk of political strategists; the L.A. Times’ Richard Wilson found Democrats unconcerned about the backlash. “Instead,” he observed, “they confidently say they hear what they call the much larger crack of a moderate Republican ‘frontlash’ against Barry Goldwater.”
Johnson, in the end, proved unable to keep the “frontlash” constituency permanently in the Democratic Party (a major theme of my book on the contest). But he succeeded in both winning frontlash voters in November and getting the press to pay attention to the issue.
Compare Johnson’s spin—a self-serving challenge to conventional wisdom, to be sure, but one with a factual basis—to what we’ve seen from the all of the campaigns, but especially that of Hillary Clinton, over the past few months. Because I’ve been in Israel for most of the campaign, I’ve followed political events almost exclusively through the print media—whether newspaper sites or blogs—and have missed most of the “talking head” debates on cable news. We expect “spin” from such exchanges. But I’ve been struck at the extent to which—unlike with LBJ and the “frontlash” effort—outright factual inaccuracies have appeared unchallenged in print reports on the race.
For the most recent example, consider the victory statement offered last night by Clinton spokesperson Mo Elleithee: “We’re pumped. Senator Obama called this the tie-breaker, and it’s looking very strong for us. We started way behind in both states and made up significant ground tonight.
Obama had offered the “tie-breaker” remark, so Elleithee’s second sentence rang true. But his first sentence was absurd and his third simply wrong. He was “pumped”? Bill and Chelsea Clinton certainly didn’t look that way on the stage; Politico’s Ben Smith, who had been on the road with the candidate, said that in her post-Indiana remarks, her recent “energy has really, strikingly vanished.”
What about Elleithee’s third sentence—that “we started way behind in both states and made up significant ground tonight”? The candidate herself repeated the claim last night; many of her senior staff have made a similar point over the last several days.
It’s quite true Clinton trailed substantially several weeks back in North Carolina—although she led in every poll taken in the state during 2007—and her 14-point loss closed the gap from some of these polls. That said, her chief state surrogate, Governor Mike Easley,
Regarding Indiana, the statement was simply wrong. According to the Real Clear Politics index of polls, Clinton didn’t start “way behind” in Indiana—she led in the earliest reported polls. Obama then briefly surged in mid-April, only to fall behind again in polls conducted by nine of the last ten pollsters to gauge opinion in the state. (Zogby was the outlier.) Moreover, Clinton had the aggressive support of the state’s most powerful Democrat (Evan Bayh) and the chair of the state Democratic Party (Dean Parker), raising further doubts about her claim to underdog status.
In the end, Clinton’s 1.9 percent win fell below her level in every poll except for Zogby. In other words, she started out as the slight favorite--not"way behind"--in the state, and lost--not"made up significant"--ground.
Even though the Clinton camp has repeatedly made this claim about coming from behind in Indiana, I can’t recall one article on the race that’s pointed out the claim is untrue. This isn’t “spin” in the sense undertaken by LBJ with the “frontlash”—it’s simply the stating, over and over again, of an unsupported assertion. Newspaper or blog readers could, of course, go to RCP and look up the poll chart, but how many readers have done so?
More broadly, of course, the transformation of spin will affect how future historians interpret politics of the last 15 years. The presumption that no statement by U.S. political leaders or their advisors can be accepted at anything resembling face value is a depressing development indeed.