I rather like much of what Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal writes. But in some ways, I think he missed an important point in his column today. He agonizes a bit over the way the internet is changing political campaigns, recognizing the good parts but also fearing some of what is happening. He starts out by noting the high body count of campaign workers who have been cut free after making particularly nasty, damaging or harsh points about other candidates. Then he philosophizes a bit.
A clue to what's going on was in The Wall Street Journal's account this week of the instant dismissal of a fundraiser for the Clinton campaign named Mehmet Celebi. Mr. Celebi is a Chicago businessman whose heretofore obscure name had been bumping about the Internet as the producer and backer of a movie that is both anti-American and anti-Semitic. There is more to this story, including a defense of Mr. Celebi's personal sentiments. You can look it up, but we'll cut to the summary execution, as described to the Journal by Hillary Clinton's campaign spokesman Howard Wolfson: "[W]e made the decision that he would no longer be fund-raising for us."
The problem for the campaigns, and this is new to our politics, is that these incidents — no matter how petty (Samantha Power), or how large (Jeremiah Wright) — will never go away. Once they enter the bitstreams of the Internet, they circulate without end — on blogs, on political talk shows, in print.
One can argue that the campaigns shouldn't be so pusillanimous, that they ought to show more fiber in the face of intimidation from the left or the right. Keep in mind, though, that the ratio of response from the campaigns and output from the media storm is about 1-to-infinity. An apology is just a peep. Reprimands are too private. The Screaming won't end until the campaign silences the source of the problem. Damage control for dummies: Terminate them.
One result is that political speech will be self-censored, from the candidate on down. However high the stakes, speech by the candidates themselves has become increasingly bland. The primary debates for the most part were artificially civil. When a Romney, Clinton or McCain said something with bite, they got hammered. Why be real? It's too dangerous.
With the campaigns intimidated into verbal mush, they are offshoring what they really think into the mouths of surrogates who can't be fired. Everyone in the game knows that under the new rules, Ferraro-like remarks on the unique status of the Obama candidacy are a firing offense. So when Bill Richardson, whom Bill Clinton made both U.N. ambassador and secretary of energy, endorsed Barack Obama last week, super surrogate James Carville called him "Judas." Sounded to me like the perfect metaphor, an expression of what virtually every living Clintonite still onboard must have been thinking. But had the Clinton campaign's strategist Mark Penn said it, the blog-driven media Scream would have roared til he was tossed from the train.
Henninger fears for the future of political discourse in the unforgetting eye of the internet age. What he misses, I think, is that any new technology tends to be self-correcting. A balance will come about eventually. Yes, the unforgetting internet will change things, making candidates think hard about what they are saying. In time, the use of sockpuppets to make surrogate attacks will also become unattractive, because that unforgetting eye will not allow a candidate to avoid responsibility. In a way, Henninger sees that by invoking the old television show The Prisoner. But he sees that as a threat. It could also be an opportunity. Maybe the same old politics won't work anymore in the internet age. Maybe we'll start seeing more genuine politicians in the future.
One can hope.
Geek Stuff | Gaius Thursday, 27 March , 2008 | 
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