President Obama’s answer on Wednesday to a question about his running mate claiming Republicans are going to put “y’all back in chains” was a classic bit of soothing presidential palaver.
“I don’t think you or anybody who’s been watching the campaign would say that in any way we have tried to divide the country,” he said about a moment in which Joe Biden had done precisely that.
The president’s answer has the quality of the adulterer caught in bed with another woman who says to his wife, “Who you gonna believe? Me or your lying eyes?”
Biden was suggesting, off the cuff or not, that Republicans want to restart slavery (apparently through deregulation of the banking system).
Now, remember that exit polls after the 2010 midterms showed Democrats with 35 percent of the electorate and Republicans with 35 percent of the electorate.
Voila. There you have a divide. A perfect divide. Between 35 percent who want slavery reinstated and 35 percent who want to keep black people free.
To assert blithely that this wasn’t divisive (as the president did) or to defend the president’s words by pointing out Obama didn’t say what Biden said (as the liberal commentariat has done) is to endorse what might be called the J.J. Hunsecker approach to politics.
J.J. Hunsecker is the Machiavellian gossip columnist played by Burt Lancaster in the great 1957 movie “Sweet Smell of Success.” Hunsecker’s trick is having hungry young press agents desperate to plant items in his column do his dirty work for him. “My right hand hasn’t seen my left hand in 30 years,” he explains.
This has always been the way of presidential politics. The president rises above the fray while his surrogates go on the attack. They throw the spears and fling the mud; he sits upon the throne.
It was generally thought beneath the office to engage in direct attack — especially if the candidate in question were running for re-election from the Oval Office.
Look at the speeches presidents gave at the party conventions at which they were nominated for a second time. In 1972, Richard Nixon didn’t mention George McGovern by name. Jimmy Carter only referred to Ronald Reagan once, and that was to tie his last name to those of Jack Kemp and Bill Roth, the authors of the supply-side tax bill Carter thought would sink Reagan.
Ronald Reagan never mentioned Walter Mondale. George Bush referred three times in a single paragraph to Bill Clinton in 1992; Bill Clinton once (and nicely) to Bob Dole in 1996; George W. Bush only once to John Kerry in 2004.
The thinking, in part, was that for the president to attack his rival directly was to elevate that rival to his august level, and thereby make him seem an equal rather than someone struggling to reach the heights. They would call their rivals “my opponent,” “the opposition,” “the other fellow.”
The aggressiveness of the campaigns waged on behalf of candidates may have meant that such an attitude was either hypocritical or simply an exercise in elevating the presidential “brand” above politics. But this was still a distinction between presidents and other supplicants for office, preserved over more than centuries.
It was also rare or unheard-of for a president to speak in specifically partisan terms — to characterize the other party in hostile or unfavorable terms. He might talk about the misbehavior of the majority in Congress when Congress was in the other party’s hands, but not about Democrats or Republicans. He was, after all, president of all Americans.
That distinctive presidential conduct is now gone forever, banished to the snows of yesteryear by Barack Obama. From the beginning of his presidency to the present, he has spoken specifically and in unprecedented fashion of Republicans as his rivals, his stumbling blocks, the primary cause of his troubles.
And since March, in an entirely unprecedented manner, he has attacked Mitt Romney by name, sometimes rather vociferously.
Perhaps he deserves points for honesty, or for refusing to play an outmoded rhetorical game. But then President Obama can’t turn around and expect the nation not to laugh aloud when he says, “I don’t think you or anybody who’s been watching the campaign would say that in any way we have tried to divide the country.”
His left hand knows what his right hand is doing. And so does everybody else.