The sameness of the reporting represents lost opportunities for the candidates and the American public, both of whom need to come to terms with choices that await those who will govern.
I must have been about eight when the Army tried to teach me to swim. It is not a pleasant memory, mostly because the gray cavern of its hospital pool near Denver was a sensory horror show. The method of instruction then was fairly simple: swim or drown. A large metal hook attached to a long pole stood at the ready to help fish out the small bodies that weren’t doing well in the deep end. Aside from the cold water and the indifferent Army instructors, my principal memory of the place was its continuous and shrill echo. Old indoor pools were built out of the same materials as industrial plants, with lots of sound-reflective gray tile. No wonder so many kids raised on the high plains viewed H2O as best used in limited amounts with Coke syrup.
Now we all live in a kind of dank echo chamber. To the extent we allow it, news comes to us in endless discuss and repeat cycles. After a few short breaks we get more repetition of the same candidate accusations against each other followed by the same empty punditry.
I’m thinking of cable news here. But this constant echo is similar for the principle stories covered by most national news sites. This is because campaigns tend or organize each day around a principle talking event and a carefully considered photo opportunity. The “message of the day” is meant to be represented in both, triggering a 24/7 news cycle that tracks the same uninteresting event endlessly.
Campaigns have a way of leaving us with the impression that we’ve heard way too much about too little.
On April 7, for example, Bernie and Hillary got into a dust-up over whether either was “qualified” to be president. Over two news cycles that was the major story that reverberated in the nation’s ears. It turns out that it was mostly triggered by a Washington Post headline that misrepresented Hillary’s more carefully worded doubts about Bernie. The details hardly matter, other than to note that most news organizations could not pull themselves away from this insubstantial campaign overstatement. A plan for addressing America’s chronic underemployment? No time. Getting clear about ISIS and whether we have the national capacity to subdue it? Maybe tomorrow. Ways to help stabilize the European Union? The candidates haven’t been asked. Campaigns have a way of leaving us with the impression that we’ve heard way too much about too little.
There’s also another feature of campaign news that also has the quality of an echo chamber. The formal name for it is meta-journalism, but a simple description is clearer: a pattern where journalists ostensibly covering a campaign actually spend most of their time talking to each other. Exhibit A is surely the daily appearance of two reasonably good political reporters, John Heilemann and Mark Halperin. Their hour long program With All Due Respect (carried by Bloomberg Television and repeated on MSNBC) mostly features them in a studio interviewing each other on the day’s events. The same pattern holds for most of cable television’s major anchors, who save surprisingly little time in their lineups to interview candidates, voters, policy stakeholders (i.e. women who use Planned Parenthood services), and the rest of us who have a lot riding on 2016’s electoral outcome.
To be sure, the slow-motion train wreck of the GOP campaign is hard not to follow. It’s as if we’ve turned over the running of Amtrak to a single grade school class. The impulse is to get out of the way and just watch. But of course that would not be safe or fair. And so it is with the campaign. The sameness of the reporting represents lost opportunities for both the candidates and the American public to come to terms with the sometimes lethal choices that await those who will govern. At this point we don’t even know what most of those difficult choices are.
Neither poetic nor profound, these dozen words still capture the exasperation of trying to reach a person whose view of the world cannot accommodate the truth.
Sometimes a perfect response will stick for a lifetime. A person captures in a few words all of the intangibles that seem to be in play when an encounter ends with an impasse. So it was with a former British Prime Minister who spent his share of time facing questions from the opposition in the weekly parliamentary ritual known as Question Time. Questions to the Prime Minister give members of the opposing party a chance to query the leader of the government they would like to replace. Policies are challenged. Priorities are questioned. That’s the parliamentary system, making the Wednesday session with questions the high point of Britain’s political week. The meeting of the two party leaders–fueled by an impatient Prime Minister in waiting—is often better than what is running in any given week on Broadway.
And so it was when Prime Minister James Callaghan rose to answer questions from his opposite just two swords length away, each standing in front of separate little podiums known in the House of Commons as Dispatch Boxes. It was 1976 and the beginning of his three stormy years as leader of the government. His interrogator at the time was the formidable Margaret Thatcher, who would eventually win the general election when Labour party unity collapsed a few years later. But in 1976 his Government was ready for all comers.
Callaghan uttered a simple phrase of exasperation that I have never forgotten. Neither poetic nor profound on it own, somehow its dozen words managed to capture the angst that comes when trying to reach people who have locked themselves into a belief that cannot accommodate what you have said.
Better than most, Callaghan understood the impossibility of moving a rock that has no intention of being budged. I have a hunch his response had long been a part of his rhetorical repertoire.
After an exasperating exchange over the state of the economy where he was challenged on some basic numbers, these perfect words were spoken in a tone of regret and gentle rebuke.
“I can tell you the truth,” he said, “but I can’t make you accept it.”
It’s a perfect comeback to other members of the species who cannot free themselves to acknowledge the facts on the ground.
Several reasons make the response apt. It affirms the speaker’s belief that some statements cannot be negotiated away as mere opinion. At the same time it judges the intransigence of the listener more in regret than in anger. And that’s the right note to strike when others in the room need to be reminded that an interlocutor is incapable of dealing with the obvious.
Perhaps the closest American parallel is in the famous courtroom showdown is in A Few Good Men, Rob Reiner’s 1992 legal drama. Young military attorneys press a career commander played by Jack Nicholson to reveal more of what he knows about the death of a Marine at the Guantanamo base in Cuba. “I want the truth Colonial Jessup!” demands the young and callow lawyer. After a few beats the older man works up a full head of steam, and he rages back with the line that defines the film: “You can’t handle the truth!” Jessup has heard all he can stand from the young Lieutenant whose military experience has been confined to a few months in the Judge Advocate General Corps. “Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who’s gonna do it? You? You, Lieutenant Weinberg? I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom.”
The whole scene with its line about handling the truth is a great movie moment. But Callaghan’s rebuke is the more elegant of the two. It can be said in a whisper and be just as effective. It bites more completely with its tone of dismay for the inability of the receiver to accept the world as it is. If Colonel Jessup’s comment is a chainsaw in full throttle, Callaghan’s words more quietly cut through resistance like an industrial laser.
