Creatures of Politics: Media, Message, and the American Presidency

5. Unflipping the Flop

144 Five Unflipping the Flop cheryl otis: Senator Kerry, after talking with several co-workers and family and friends, I asked the ones who said they were not voting for you, “Why?” They said that you were too wishy-washy. Do you have a reply for them? john kerry: Yes, I certainly do. (laughter) —8 October 2004. Second presidential debate, held at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri Reminiscing Kerry On 30 October 2007, more than two months before the primaries began, the Democratic Party held a televised debate in Philadelphia for seven of its presidential hopefuls, which included then front-runner New York senator Hillary Clinton (New York Times 2007). At a certain moment, as recounted in chapter 3, Clinton was pressed about her view on governor of New York Eliot Spitzer’s beleaguered proposal to issue driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants. “It makes a lot of sense,” she was quoted as saying of hisplaninNewHampshire.Inresponsetothedebate’sco-moderatorTim Russert, her answer this time around seemed more measured: two parts sympathy (“what Governor Spitzer is trying to do is to fill the vacuum”) and one part disapproval (“we need to get back to comprehensive immigration reform because no state, no matter how well-intentioned, can fill Unflipping the Flop | 145 this gap”). Sen. Chris Dodd, one of the seven candidates on stage, read Clinton’s sympathy as tacit agreement with Spitzer’s position, and she swiftly corrected him: “I just want to add, I did not say that it should be done, but I certainly recognize why Governor Spitzer is trying to do it.” WiththisJohnEdwardsandBarackObamaresumedtheevening’sgrating refrain: that Clinton was inconsistent, that her inconsistency bespoke a lack of conviction. This was arguably what people in the industry call a “moment,” a turning point in a candidate’s fortunes. In post-debate coverage on the political talk show Hardball, Joe Trippi, senior strategist for the Edwards campaign, ratcheted up the criticism, attributing Clinton’s shifting positions to whether she was in “primary mode or general election mode” and predicting that her position would change again once she spoke with her consultants (MSNBC 2007a). It was left to the commentariat to name the charge against Clinton, as editorialist Michael Graham(2007)of the Boston Herald did inan uncharitable opinionpiece published two days after the debate: Hillary Rodham Clinton may have achieved the politically impossible: She has managed to out-Kerry John Kerry himself. Sen. Flip-Flop, you recall, famously claimed that, on the issue of funding U.S. troops, he voted “for the $87 billion before I voted against it.” Clinton, on the other hand, managed to declare herself both for and against driver’s licenses for illegal aliens at the same time. When it comes to illegal immigration, Hillary is forgainst! Likenedtotheunsuccessful2004presidentialcandidateJohnKerry,Clinton was cast as the grotesque “flip-flopper.” In the weeks that followed, the trade in accusations of flip-flopping quickened, enough for New York Times commentator Jim Rutenberg (2007) to call this the “season of the ‘flip-flop’” on 4 November, or as Reuter’s Steve Holland (2007) augured back in June, “It’s the year of the flip-flop in U.S. politics.” A few observations: a candidate’s infelicitous stance-taking on an Issue (from dysfluencies to excessive qualification to the extreme of selfcontradiction ) is read in terms of addressivity, indicating the speaker’s alleged efforts to reach certain absent others (segments of the electorate being courted, as Trippi suggested); addressivity, in turn, reveals morally inflected attributes of the speaker (lack of conviction); and having such attributes classifies the candidate as a social type (flip-flopper). 146 | Creatures of Politics Observe how fluidly this post-debate commentary moves from the interpretation of speech, to addressivity, to characterological attributes, to full-blown political persona. Why should a speaker’s fumbling around the Issues be attributed to machinations involving campaign strategy and spectral publics? Why should these misfires be read characterologically , as if they betrayed what qualities and kind of person, and politician , speaks? While we have touched on some of the assumptions about electoral politics that seem to condition these interpretive reflexes, let us now see how candidates try to manage—even harness—these reflexes, how they try to use signs to get “on message” in discursive events like debate. How, in particular, might one get back on Message after a charge as grave as flip-flopping, where suspicion has been leveled at the...