http://www.nationalreview.com/node/389542/print NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE
October 4, 2014 4:00 AM
Hillary Clinton: Dukakis in a Pantsuit?
Her new messaging strategy is taken straight from the 1988 presidential candidate’s playbook.
By Jonah Goldberg
Dukakis in a Pantsuit?
For those of you old enough to remember, George H. W. Bush wanted to be president in 1988. Despite Reagan’s popularity, this was still a heavy lift. No sitting vice president had been elected straight to the Oval Office since Martin Van Buren. So, away from the cameras off at Kennebunkport, he sacrificed over 1,000 oxen, bulls, and gnus to Zeus, Crom, Baal, Thor, Moloch, M. C. Hammer and any other deity he could think of. The gods were well-pleased. As a reward for his sacrifice they delivered unto him a golem-homunculus named Michael Dukakis. (Dukakis in Greek means “Please give me a wedgie.”) Dukakis proved to be exactly the kind of opponent Bush needed.
For instance, in the very first question of a presidential debate, CNN’s Bernie Shaw asked Dukakis a hypothetical question: Would he favor the death penalty for the man who brutally raped and murdered his wife, Kitty? The golem-homunculus responded with all of the passion, empathy, and humanity you’d expect from a tiny little fake human or maybe — when he really got worked up — a Speak-&-Spell. And then he rode a tank while wearing a helmet that made him look like a really, really, serious Playmobil action figure.
Good times.
But that’s all ancient history. I bring up Michael Dukakis because Hillary Clinton seems to think he was on to something. I’m not referring to the fact that Dukakis famously got his nutrition from lichens, certain mosses, and by eating about 35 pounds of Skittles every day. (Fun fact: Michael Dukakis never went to the bathroom. Ever.) Rather, I’m referring to his declaration that “this election isn’t about ideology. It’s about competence.”
Now normally, I would use this moment to pound my spoon on my highchair about the bogusness (“bogiosity”?) of liberalism’s non-ideological pretensions so I could once again flog my book. Let’s just assume we did that already. Clinton seems to be crafting a campaign message that is straight out of the Dukakis playbook.
From a Wall Street Journal story about Clinton’s new messaging strategy of focusing on the issues and “data, data, data” (Which sounds like something a disappointed Noonian Soong would say after catching the future Lt. Commander in the recharging bay with a stack of Popular Mechanics):
NEW YORK—When he first ran for president, Barack Obama’s themes were “hope” and “change.” Hillary Clinton, appearing at a conference last week, trumpeted what she called “evidence-based optimism.”
That isn’t a phrase that lends itself to a campaign slogan, but these days it captures the unsentimental approach Mrs. Clinton is bringing to policy debates ahead of the 2016 presidential contest. . .
. . . If the material is distinctly dry and unsexy, Mrs. Clinton doesn’t seem to mind. Mr. Obama defeated her in the 2008 Democratic primary in part because voters found his message and life story inspiring. But Mrs. Clinton doesn’t seem to be betting that charisma will decide things in 2016. She is bemoaning what she calls the “evidence-free zone” in American politics while celebrating “data” as the indispensable tool in choosing the best options.
“Data, data, data,” she said at a Clinton Global Initiative panel discussion—another phrase not likely to find its way onto a bumper sticker.
She talked about brain “hardware” and “neural connections” during one panel about childhood development and mused about new ways to measure gross domestic product during another appearance. “We obsess over metrics, get excited about data,” Mrs. Clinton said in a closing speech at the conference.
According to the Journal story, Clinton says what America needs is “evidence-based optimism.” This line cost me 20 bucks — I bet that nobody could ever come up with a less stirring cri de coeur than Al Gore’s “practical idealism.”
Anyway, I have no doubt that Clinton likes data. When she was working on Hillarycare in the early 1990s she assembled hundreds of wonks collecting literally millions of pieces of data, filling filing cabinets like the warehouse in Indiana Jones. When a journalist asked her if she needed anything else, Clinton replied something like “just a little more data.” As if her entire Rube Goldberg machine would click into place and hum with perfection if she just got a few more columns of numbers on heart-bypass rates in Missoula.
But just because Clinton likes data doesn’t mean this isn’t a crock. Oh, it’s savvy. But if her husband taught us anything, it’s that bullsh*tters can be savvy. First, all of this data talk is a brilliant way to exploit the “Big Data” fad in elite circles these days and subtly play lip-service to the liberal conceit that “facts have a liberal bias.” If she were running in the late 19th century she’d be talking about canals on Mars. If she were running in the 1920s, she’d be saying “Engineering, Engineering, Engineering.” In the 1960s, she’d be saying “Plastics, Plastics, Plastics.” If she were running in 50,000 B.C. she’d be going around saying “Fire, Fire, Fire.” I talked about this a bit in my review of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century:
Marx tapped into the language and concepts of Darwinian evolution and the Industrial Revolution to give his idea of dialectical materialism a plausibility it didn’t deserve. Similarly, Croly drew from the turn-of-the-century vogue for (heavily German-influenced) social science and the cult of the expert (in Croly’s day “social engineer” wasn’t a pejorative term, but an exciting career). In much the same way, Piketty’s argument taps into the current cultural and intellectual fad for “big data.” The idea that all the answers to all our problems can be solved with enough data is deeply seductive and wildly popular among journalists and intellectuals. (Just consider the popularity of the Freakonomics franchise or the cult-like popularity of the self-taught statistician Nate Silver.) Indeed, Piketty himself insists that what sets his work apart from that of Marx, Ricardo, Keynes, and others is that he has the data to settle questions previous generations of economists could only guess at. Data is the Way and the Light to the eternal verities long entombed in cant ideology and darkness. (This reminds me of the philosopher Eric Voegelin’s quip that, under Marxism, “Christ the Redeemer is replaced by the steam engine as the promise of the realm to come.”)
But the more important point is that Clinton’s messaging gambit is an entirely obvious indictment of Barack Obama. The need for “evidence-based optimism” isn’t a shot at Republicans. It’s a shot at the guy who beat her out for the nomination in 2008 by running as the Pope of Hope. Back then, she and Obama had an argument about the nature of political progress — MLK vs. LBJ, inspiration vs. perspiration. Clinton lost that argument in 2008. But Obama went on to prove her right. It is only thanks to his failures that “evidence-based optimism” could be a winning slogan.
She is betting — rightly — that after eight years of ideologically driven incompetence, Democrats cannot win without assuring voters that we won’t get a replay if we reelect a Democrat. Like Roy Scheider in Jaws 2 telling the town council, “As God is my witness, I’m not going through that Hell again,” voters are already clear that they don’t want another eight years of this.
