Huffington Just Doesn't Get It Right

Barnes & Noble owners around the country must be suffering from sensory overload. Each week, they open a new shipment to find political hardbacks positively yelling at them.

“If Democrats Had Any Brains, They’d Be Republicans.” “The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder.” And more recently, “Right is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe,” by Huffington Post editor Arianna Huffington.

It’s a form of political intellectual masturbation, a primal scream meant to release the pent-up frustrations of the supposedly civilized Beltway society. Like all fetishes, it has its origins in some formative event: the rise and fall of Clintonian politics.

In 1992, a newly aggressive stance in Democratic campaigning made the party’s future seem rosy. Bill Clinton’s electoral victory had begun to transcend the political map of the post-Civil Rights South. After 12 years of Republican rule and alongside a solidly Democratic Congress, the new administration promised something resembling a new consensus, one that would finally recapture the ideal of an active and charitable government, delivering on healthcare, union rights, and equal pay.

Then came Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and Hillarycare. Then the Contract with America and the ’94 midterms. Then two government shutdowns. Then Monica Lewinsky. And then, and then, and then.

By 1999, Democrats had been out-bullied by a Republican political machine capitalizing on the very same Culture War issues that led Reagan and Bush to victory in ’84 and ’88. Even worse, the GOP had pummeled into submission a man who handled those Culture War arguments so well in the ’92 campaign, ushering in “war room” tactics that stayed with the Democrats for more than a decade. And worst of all, with Al Gore as the party’s new standard-bearer, it seemed like the GOP might be able to win the ultimate contest this time around.

For many Democrats, the logical conclusion was that only bullying could answer bullying: substance is great, the thought went, but bite is best. Since then, Dems have gone through two losing presidential campaigns and one Swift Boat political ad disaster, all of which seemed to hammer the point home: Democrats just weren’t being tough enough. The advice keeps cropping up this election cycle.

This week’s New York Times op-ed page proves the point, featuring an encounter between fictional President Josiah Bartlet of “The West Wing” and Barack Obama. The take-away message from this fresh batch of political onanism, in which Obama begs Bartlet for advice? “GET ANGRIER!”

Reformed Reagan-era conservative Arianna Huffington takes Bartlet’s advice to heart in “Right is Wrong.” In her disdain for namby-pamby liberalism, Huffington almost dismisses Democrats’ recapture of the House and Senate in ’06 as happenstance, chanced upon because “the positions they campaigned on are in line with mainstream America.” Instead of counting their blessings for what went right, she says, Democrats should focus on what could have gone wrong and brace for the struggle the ’08 race is likely to be. “So far,” Huffington writes, liberals “have shown little stomach for that fight.”

So Huffington “goes on the offensive” for them. And oh, what an offensive. Within the first chapter, she invokes Orwell, dubs the George W. Bush administration a “Murderers’ Row of lethal bat-swingers,” and speaks of an enduring Dick Cheney fantasy involving nuclear terrorism against civilian targets. She describes waterboarding as “drowning rational thought.” She gives Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) the title of “Dumbest Senator” and harps on the “crotch-hugging flight suit” Bush wore during his “Mission Accomplished speech.” She prints page after page of bolded names and events from the Bush years in block capitals, underscored by the words, “Had Enough Yet?”

The catty invective suffuses every point Huffington makes; it’s a variety of relentless character assassination that, as Hillary Clinton reminded America this year, is a signature of Clintonian politics. But the problem is, that’s all it is: character assassination. Despite its best efforts, it doesn’t emphasize the horrors of the past eight years, from torture to rampant war to widespread mismanagement and the gutting of civil liberties. Instead, it caricatures the people who put those policies in place and neglects the arguments—some of them convincing—that made those policies possible.

This is the reality Clintonian politics never understood: many on the other side of the political divide aren’t rabid partisans. They’re citizens genuinely concerned about the best way to run the country, and they find plausible answers coming from both political parties. When deciding on their vote, they’re loth to listen to demagoguery. When they err, they’re likely to turn away from those who belittle their error.

To Huffington, it may be clear that the issues of the day “simply do not have two sides.” To that fraction of the electorate that has swung Republican in the last two presidential elections, things aren’t so certain. Mocking or ignoring that uncertainty—rather than arguing forcefully against it, as Bill Clinton did 16 years ago—is usually neither a winning strategy nor an honorable one, and those who use it are as likely to drive voters from the polls as earn their votes. Candy for the partisan base draws readers to The Huffington Post, but it is not, on its own, an electoral strategy.

As Bartlet said in one “West Wing” episode, the President of the United States is not just “the President of the people who agree with me.” And if you’re not one of those people off the bat, then, as Bill Clinton put it, “you better vote for the person who wants you to think and hope.”

—Staff writer Nicholas K. Tabor can be reached at ntabor@fas.harvard.edu.