Former President Bill Clinton is considered by many to be one of the best politicians of the 20th Century. His intelligence and command of facts and figures are something to behold. But check out this recent interview regarding the debt ceiling debate, where Clinton’s skills fall short in the face of a barrage of right wing talking points in the form of questions to Clinton by CNN‘s Wolf Blitzer:
- “President Obama at that news conference this week, he really went after Republicans on, it was almost class warfare as they like to say. Does that help or hurt this effort to resolve this crisis right now when you get into that bitter kind of rhetoric?”
- “‘Cause the President’s accused of being anti-business.”
- “But the argument is, you know, the top 2% of income earners in America pay, what, 30 or 40% of the federal income tax, and half of the people in America pay no income tax.”
Clinton answers that the media need to be careful about calling President Obama’s call for shared sacrifice “class warfare”, which is a good response as far as it goes. But then Clinton embarks on long, fact-based answers that are likely to cause most viewers (and, apparently, Blitzer himself) to tune out. Such lengthy recitations, while no doubt accurate, are no match for the visceral buzz words like “class warfare” and “bitter” contained in Blitzer’s questions. That’s exactly why those words are a key part of Republican talking points. It appears in this case that Blitzer simply read the latest fax or email from the Republican National Committee and, like a stenographer taking dictation, spit them back to Clinton. That’s not real journalism, and both Blitzer and CNN should be taken to task for it.
However, Clinton could have done a better job in disputing the premise of the questions and calling out Blitzer for repeating right wing talking points. Instead, he’s mostly reduced to saying “no it isn’t”: “it isn’t class warfare”, “it’s not anti-business.” As explained in Messaging Maxim #1: Go On Offense,
If you’re fighting a political battle on the other side’s rhetorical turf, you’ve already lost. This includes defensively responding to attacks from your opponents, where the Democrats’ typical ‘no it isn’t’/’no I’m not’ rational rebuttal gets them nowhere.
Clinton should have taken back the frame of the questions from Blitzer. Clinton could have said, for example:
- “Wolf, do you guys even write your own questions? Yours sound like they’re coming straight from the Republicans’ talking points.”
- “You want to talk about class warfare? Republicans want middle income seniors to pay more than $ 6,000 a year for the Bush tax cuts to the rich. That’s class warfare.”
- “Anti-business? The policies the Democrats had in the 1990s, with top tax rates just a few points above what they are now, unleashed a wave of productivity, economic growth, and increases in wealth in the stock market and elsewhere that this country had not seen for decades. It was the Bush administration’s tax cuts and two wars, all put on the nation’s credit card, that were truly anti-business.”
Clinton also admits about Democratic messaging on the debt ceiling, “maybe the words should be different.” That’s certainly true. But perhaps Clinton can’t be blamed for failing to come up with such frame-grabbing on the spot. After all, he probably expected serious questions and serious journalism, not right-wing talking points, from CNN’s Wolf Blitzer.
