Spin Spun Too Far

Hooray for the Hillary/Barack truce.

If it holds.

The idea that Sen. Clinton was painting Martin Luther King as but a footnote in the history of civil rights was such baloney it made me cringe. And yet it did illuminate one great truth: America's political campaigns have a nasty habit of taking one remark — maybe even a particularly stupid one — and trying to turn it into the candidate's defining, defeating moment.

Problem is … sometimes it works.

What brought this latest iteration on, as you are probably sick of hearing, was the statement Clinton made just before the New Hampshire primary. "Dr. King's dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964," she said. "It took a president to get it done."

That's both literally true and remarkably dismissive. Yes, it's true: Legislation does not get passed without elected officials passing it. On the other hand, everyone — including Clinton and a federal holiday! — credits King with galvanizing the movement that brought that legislation to bear.

So, you had a choice: You could take her remark as a cloddish way of pointing out how necessary it is to have proactive lawmakers. Or if you wanted to make it into a talking point, you could take it as a major diss.

A diss it became. "She, I think, offended some folks who felt that (she) somehow diminished King's role in bringing about the Civil Rights Act," said Sen. Obama. Immediately, the buzz became whether Clinton is really David Duke in a dress. Pantsuit. Whatever.

The thing about plucking issues such as this out of the swirling waters of a campaign is that they turn whole platforms — and whole people — into caricatures.

Suddenly we are not talking about Clinton's past votes on civil rights issues, or future plans, but on whether she thinks King was a nobody — which we all know she doesn't.

This kind of distraction is, alas, all too common in the political realm. We saw it in the 2000 election when Al Gore's 1999 comment about how he helped facilitate the creation of the Internet was misquoted as, "I created the Internet" and repackaged as proof of his laughable hubris. We saw it on the Republican side a decade earlier when Dan Quayle spelled potato the way a lot of us spell it — wrong — and was reduced to a punch line.

And believe it or not, said Jamie McKown, a professor of government at the College of the Atlantic: Abe Lincoln himself was not above this kind of dirty politics. "In December of 1857, Kansas was deciding whether it would become a slave state or not, and in a speech in the Senate, Illinois Sen. Stephen Douglas said he didn't care what Kansas decided since, according to the law, it was their own business to decide," the professor said. After that, Lincoln claimed over and over that Douglas had said he didn't care about slavery — which wasn't exactly the truth.

"This is the classic way this is done in American politics," McKown said. "You take a line which may, when stripped of the context, seem very damaging to the opponent. But it can't be so completely out of context that you could be attacked as a liar."

For the record, that's an election Honest Abe lost.

I'd like to think that this kind of spinning will prove to be a losing tactic again.

Lenore Skenazy is a columnist at The New York Sun and Advertising Age. To find out more about Lenore Skenazy (lskenazy@yahoo.com) and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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