Last week, to guests of Toronto’s distinguished Donner
Foundation, Mark Halperin, senior analyst for Time Magazine and MSNBC, provided a broad overview of the US
presidential election. To get things started, he asked them where they stood: By
show of hands, they broke roughly 20-1 for Obama. The audience was lopsided, as
“by-invitation” evenings often are in Canada. Nevertheless, for a good hour, they
applauded Halperin’s even-handedness.
They over-compensated.
As with his book Game Change, Halperin's saving the
“delicious” stuff for his next book. Americans will pick a president and then will
be able to read the “telling details” along with the rest of us.
That’s fair for an historian, but falls short for a political
journalist.
There was nothing intimidating about the audience; it was
partisan, but civilized and highly informed. Nobody flinched when he said he
liked Romney as well as Obama. No one laughed when he said that Mitt Romney was
also intelligent and, in private, very funny.
The problem was: He went no further, as if that weighty term
“in private” is evidence enough. This is manipulative. Halperin invited his
audience to conclude that Romney and Obama are similar and, next year, could
both be good presidents—by inference.
Romney reasonably asks Americans to judge Obama by his
record—by his public utterances and
actions. Halperin seems to suggest that Romney can be handicapped by favorable second-hand
reports about how he thinks and what he truly values.
That’s nothing less than giving the voter a license to
decide when to take Romney seriously. To sound even-handed, he’s saying: Relax,
whatever you think is all that
matters.
You’re a Keynesian. But, you can vote for Romney because you can decide that what he says publicly
about the deficit, tax cuts, and the debt ceiling is nothing more than tactical
pandering.
You believe in universal healthcare, a women’s privacy, and
better relations with Russia. Still, you can vote for Romney because he did say
many reasonable things before running for president and, in private, may even
chuckle about the excesses of the “Tea Party.”
Andrew Potter, in the latest Literary
Review of Canada, turned to Stephen Colbert in a review of artistic
fraud and authenticity .
When the satirist Stephen Colbert
coined the term “truthiness” to describe American political discourse, he
defined it as “‘what I say is right, and [nothing] anyone else says could
possibly be true.’ It’s not only that I feel it to be true, but that I
feel it to be true.” His point is that, by universal consensus, we no longer
care about the facts or the external truth of the matter. What we care about is
emotional truth and the politics of perception over reality. Not truth, but
truthiness.
Potter noted that the art fraud, Otto Wacker, wondered why he
was the one on the dock: “After all, a number of experts had authenticated his
paintings.”
Before we vote, we should be hard on the Halperins, as well as
on the spoken words of the candidates.
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