Fiddling With Spin While Iraq Burns

For politicians who aspire to higher office, climbing the political ladder involves spouting carefully planned rhetoric. The hopefuls strive to stay "on message" by coming up with a narrow play list of themes and repeating them.

As candidates look toward 2008, frequent questions about Iraq are unavoidable. So far, the answers seem to be much more about the campaigns in the United States than the realities in Iraq.

During her recent visits to Iowa and New Hampshire, the responses from Sen. Hillary Clinton have been a dispiriting wonder to behold. She refuses to say that her vote for an October 2002 pro-war resolution in the Senate was a mistake — even though it greenlighted an invasion of Iraq that led to a continuing disaster.

Obviously, Clinton has settled on a spin strategy about Iraq for her '08 presidential campaign — saying that she had no way of knowing President Bush was not straight with Congress and the American people about Iraq before the invasion. For good measure, she attributes much of the ensuing horrors to the Bush team's "arrogance and incompetence." That's Sen. Clinton's story, and she's sticking to it.

Already, it's easy to get the impression that tape-loops have been activated in the verbal repertoire of Clinton and many other candidates now busily campaigning. In a matter of seconds, a question about Iraq sparks a boilerplate response that already sounds too familiar — and will be oft-repeated in the months ahead.

The answers are carefully crafted and rehearsed after candidates and advisors have pored over data from focus groups and public opinion polls. Those answers, from different contenders, are not identical — various candidates are trying to thread varying rhetorical needles, depending on their tactical approach for gaining votes from particular segments of the electorate — but the sound-bite game makes for a dreary political atmosphere.

In the current political season, and for the foreseeable future, "Iraq" is apt to be discussed less as a country where real people are dying than as a rhetorical obstacle course to be run with maximum political skill.

You can almost see the gears spinning in the minds of American politicians as they choose their words oh-so-carefully.

Too carefully. The overly nuanced equivocal responses are seriously unsatisfactory on moral grounds — and even, ironically, in political terms — for many American voters who yearn for candidates willing to make statements that are forthright and to the point.

While none of the media-hyped "major" candidates for president are slouches when it comes to choosing words that provide more fog than clarification, Hillary Clinton is currently the Democratic frontrunner in obfuscation. It's as though she has been in training as a smooth talker her whole life, and now's her chance to really show what she can do.

The personalities involved in the current "spinfest" are almost beside the point. Given the way that the news media function — with huge attention to style and sound-nibbles and scant attention to substance — if the current crop of "spinetically engineered" candidates didn't exist, it would have to be invented.

There's a huge corporate-media market for presidential candidates who dodge such fundamental matters as the U.S. government's imperial presumptions, its rote assertions of legitimacy for Washington's illegitimate military interventions, and its overall use of Pentagon power to get the president's way. The spinning isn't random; it's in sync with a media atmosphere that touts boundary-respecting candidates as major contenders and dismisses strong antiwar leaders as political advocates of little significance.

So, I don't blame Hillary Clinton for her shameless pandering any more than I blame any other opportunist who is willing to let other people suffer for the virtues of his or her ambitions. At the expense of many people's lives, she has learned the ropes of pandering to the political sensibilities and worldviews promoted by major U.S. media outlets. Too bad they make it so easy.

Norman Solomon's latest book, "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death," is now available in paperback. To find out more about Norman Solomon and read his past columns, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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