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TALKING and CHEWING GUM at the SAME TIME: THE WAYANG OF US POLITICS
It occurs to me again what an easy ride leading politicians get in the US. I refer particularly to the President who, as far as I can see, never has to answer a hostile question in an uncontrolled environment.
Of course, politicians everywhere are risk-averse in this regard and surround themselves with media specialists and try to insulate themselves against the unguarded moment. I remember, for instance, seeing a doco in Britain in which a well-known BBC reporter recounted having
Margaret Thatcher on a television talkback program during the Falkland's war. During the show, she was asked an embarrassing question by a caller about the sinking of the Belgrano. The journalist concluded that what politicians feared most was an unscripted question from a member of the actual public. I think he was right, but I would like to have asked him why more journalists didn't assume the same role and use their access to ask similar unscripted questions. (The answer is obvious, I know: too many tough questions and you lose access, particularly true under Britain's system of "lobby" accreditation.)
In Australia, I can remember the fuss made when former PM,
Paul Keating, instigated the use of those bank-like rope cordons and a lectern at the back of Parliament House from which to have press conferences. John Howard was one of the biggest complainers, though he now uses them too. Still, at least it is the actual Prime Minister that comes out and answers the questions, not some
Ari Fleischer type skilled in the
art of professional bullshitting. And at least politicians in most other democracies do things like doorstops interviews (is the expression "doorstop" in the American political vocabulary?) and take live questions on talkback radio and answer question one-on-one on TV. They bullshit too, but at least it's them doing it. When does George W. ever do any of this, including his own unscripted bullshitting? I don't reckon he could.
What it leads to is the sort of spininsanity that is currently occurring over the issue of Iraq.
Josh Marshall gives a great account of a recent incident in this game, but consider his opening paragraph to see how far removed the President is from actual democratic accountability:
The new administration line is that Vice-President Dick Cheney was off the reservation last week when he said that inspections in Iraq were an irrelevancy. Andy Card apparently told Howard Fineman on the record that Cheney was freelancing when he ruled out inspections.
This he said/she said approach is what journalist routinely work with here, to a much greater extent than in Australia or even Britain. I saw Fineman on Hardball last night (imagine GWB after two minutes with Chris Matthews!) and the spin was unbelieveable. Fineman wrote
an article for Newsweek in which he explains "what it all really means", the gist of which you can get from
his discussion (soothsaying) with Matthews:
MATTHEWS: So, Howard Fineman, it looks like Dick Cheney, the vice president, says we’re going to war because there’s no option in terms of inspections.
And the secretary of state again this week in the B.B.C. and in another place I read it says we’re still going to hope for options of inspections and hope to avoid war.
That’s a big difference.
HOWARD FINEMAN, “NEWSWEEK”: It’s a total difference, and I think what we have now is not the fog of war, it’s the fog of pre-war.
I think it’s a deliberate effort on the part of the Bush administration and on the part of Bush, George Bush himself to let his top advisors argue with each other in public while he decides exactly how to do what he clearly wants to do, which is to get rid of Saddam Hussein.
MATTHEWS: That said, you’ve reported in this week’s magazine in “Newsweek,” that the president did not give the OK to the vice president to basically say that there’s no other option but war at this point.
FINEMAN: Sure. They had to do.
What happened was last Monday, George Bush and Dick Cheney said the other side, meaning Jim Baker and Lawrence Eagleberger, all those guys, the peaceniks of the old Bush crowd, had been occupying the stage too long and it was necessary, Bush and Cheney thought, for Cheney to go out there and give the other side of the arguments. Bush ticked off a number of things he wanted Cheney to say, but he did not specifically tell Cheney to go as far as Cheney did. Because by saying there’s no assurance whatsoever that the inspections would do any good, you’re basically saying let’s roll....When I asked Andy Carr, the chief of staff about this a few days later, Carr very unusually came out on the record and said the president didn’t authorize Cheney to go that far. In other words, they want things to remain confusing and noncommittal while Bush decides exactly how to proceed. Bush has to go to the U.N. and give a speech next week. They want to go to Congress. They’re not near what they want to do in the end. They’re keeping their options open.
MATTHEWS: Well, who’s the boss? Because the vice president comes out, he doesn’t check, as you point out in your report. He doesn’t run his speech by the State Department. He doesn’t check for facts by the CIA and he doesn’t get political permission from the president.
So he doesn’t run (UNINTELLIGIBLE) the politics, the facts and the diplomacy. He’s just out there giving his speech, saying forget inspections, we’re going to war. How does he get the chutzpah to do that?
FINEMAN: Because he’s Dick Cheney and he is allied with Donald Rumsfeld, who has enormous clout in the administration and with the hawkish wing inside this administration and Bush, I think, has deliberately allowed this confusion to go on. I think at considerable diplomatic cost, because around the world, that Cheney speech caused an absolute uproar, which is what caused Andy Carr to have to come out and say what he said on the record to us.
Then they balance it out with Colin Powell’s interview with the B.B.C. I think it’s a sort of semi freelance job here where people are being allowed to say what they want while Bush decides exactly how to go after Saddam Hussein.
Josh Marshall is quite right to point out that none of this can be relied on:
"Because it's pretty clearly not true. I can't tell you what was authorized or who said what to whom. Maybe the president didn't 'authorize' Cheney's remarks, whatever that might mean. But the premise of Card's remarks is bogus. Cheney didn't break any new ground in his remarks on inspectors. On the contrary, the irrelevance and insufficiency of weapons inspections has been administration policy for some time. The point has been stated repeatedly by Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, and various other administration appointees."
But I'd like to make another point, namely that the "free press", so often derided here as "liberal" is neither free nor liberal. It is not free because it has blindly accepted a situation where the sort of entrails reading evidenced in the above transcript passes for serious political debate
absent any of the major players. They are simply not accountable, and instead the likes of Fleischer and Card and even journalists like Fineman and Matthews bat speculation back and forth between them leaving us all none-the-wiser, though perhaps entertained. To the extent that I'm interested in the question of "liberal bias" it is doesn't hold up in this case. Fineman presents George Bush as some sort of wise overseer, giving his troops lots of democratic space within which to argue amongst themselves, while he benignly and patiently "takes advice" and ultimately, as the buck stops with him, will seek his own counsel, will be seen to pray, and will tell us it's time to bomb the crap out of Iraq.
What in fact will happen is that this non-debate will go on for a while, polls will be watched and results will be spun, the rightwing think tanks and shock jocks will present their cases, each carefully targetted for their particular demographics, behind the scenes pressure will be brought to bear on allies, whoever actually makes the decision to invade Iraq will make it, someone else--or a team of someone elses--will write the President a speech which he will deliver glove-puppet like during a special network broadcast, and Congress and the media will fall into line because now we're at war and he's the commander in chief, and we will bomb the crap out of Iraq.
I'm not absolving Australia from these undemocratic practices but I think it is fair to say that we haven't quite reached the stage where the actual politicians have been as totally removed from public debate as they have here in the US.
