Patrick Semansky/AP Photo
Warren and Sanders raise their hands while Biden pauses during last week's debate in Iowa.
After watching the political world gripped for a week by the vital question of what Bernie Sanders said to Elizabeth Warren in a private conversation in 2018, one can’t help but ask: Are we really going to keep doing this?
It’s not that the issue of sexism’s impact on our politics isn’t important, or even that there wasn’t some extremely insightful commentary occasioned by the dispute over whether Sanders told Warren that a woman couldn’t win in 2020. But we may once again be headed for a general election that is little more than a string of micro-controversies, each one of which comes down to, “The Candidate Said Something, Then People Got Mad.”
If that’s what the campaign turns out to be, there will be only one person who benefits: Donald Trump.
It’s not that his obvious lies and appalling utterances don’t still get media attention and the attendant condemnation, because they do. But he is uniquely able to remain undamaged by the fallout from the horrors that emanate from his mouth. Which might suggest to the rest of us (especially those of us in the media) that perhaps the latest “gaffe” or spat isn’t really all that meaningful and we shouldn’t treat it as such.
It’s difficult for us to do that, unfortunately. First, the vast majority of what candidates do is talk, so we report on what they say. In Washington, they might pass laws or navigate crises, but the campaign is about talking. To fashion that talking into news, reporters are constantly on the lookout for statements that are novel or controversial, and can be weaved into a narrative full of drama. Fights between candidates are dramatic, as are dire threats to a candidate’s survival. The umpteenth recitation of her health care plan is rather less so.
But when we spend so much time worrying about gaffes, we delude ourselves into thinking that we’re actually learning more about the candidates than we already knew. Have you ever heard a gaffe that made you say, “Wow, I now think about that candidate in a completely different way”? Instead, gaffes are the statements that validate and reinforce what people already thought about the candidate, preferably in the most embarrassing way possible.
Can you think of a gaffe that actually revealed something that challenged everyone’s view of a candidate? When Mitt Romney was caught on tape in 2012 disparaging the 47 percent of Americans who he said “are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims” and would therefore vote for Barack Obama, it wasn’t as though people suddenly realized he was a plutocrat who wasn’t particularly concerned with the less fortunate. When Bill Clinton said he got passed a joint once or twice and took a puff but “I didn’t inhale,” it wasn’t the first time people saw he could perform a complex pas de deux with the truth.
Those moments appeal to reporters so much because they operate from a (usually) unspoken presumption that all politicians are liars and all campaigning is artifice, and therefore the job of the journalist is to tear off the masks and reveal the “true” person the candidate is laboring to conceal. When they can do it with the candidate’s own words, there’s no need to editorialize. “This candidate is a big phony” is a violation of objectivity, but “controversy has erupted over the candidate’s comments” isn’t, even if the two statements communicate the same idea.
But you might think that the experience of the four and a half years since Donald Trump declared himself a candidate for the presidency would lead to some rethinking of the way we approach the things candidates say. Given that the president has told well over 15,000 lies since he took office and on a daily basis says things that are offensive and shocking, does it even matter anymore if one of the Democrats said something they wish they could take back?
That may be the key to finding a way forward. Especially when we’re comparing them with the president, it’s impossible to justify raking a Democratic candidate over the coals for something they blurted out but would phrase differently if they had a chance to clarify.
Yet at this point we know them in large part by their words. So at the very least we should deciede that if they say something troubling multiple times, then we can worry about what it reveals about them. Now and then we all make slips of the tongue or find that others have heard something we didn’t intend to communicate (fortunately, the rest of us don’t have twenty people following us around all day recording everything that comes out of our mouths). We can forgive them when that happens; what matters more is the ideas they’ll stick to.
In the end, none of us should care what words Bernie Sanders used when he mused to Elizabeth Warren about the challenges faced by women candidates; we should care about what both of them would do to promote gender equity. But it isn’t hard to imagine a general election in which every week or so there’s some new statement by the Democratic nominee that the president mocks at one of his frenzied rallies, leading to a hundred “Trump attacks Dem’s gaffe!” stories, allowing Trump to set the agenda and pulling us further away from discussion of the things that actually matter.
It would be naïve to hope that the 2020 election will be an exercise in seriousness and sobriety in which vital issues will be discussed and analyzed only in the most edifying of ways. But maybe the next time a controversy erupts over something one of the candidates said, we can pause for a moment and ask how much it really matters.
