Political pandering on the trail
I SUPPOSE all politicians pander to what they think the voters want at one time or another, but this year it seems more blatant than usual.
I define pandering as promising something to the voters that is either unobtainable, or saying something that you don't believe, just to get elected.
It has a harsher definition. Pandarus first appears in Homer's "Iliad," but is transmogrified by Chaucer, and then Shakespeare in "Troilus and Cressida", into a debauched letch who furthers illicit love affairs, and thus enters the language as a pimp.
John McCain and Hillary Clinton's advocacy of a gas-tax holiday certainly fits the definition of furthering America's illicit, and now unrequited, love affair with cheap gasoline. It is a suggestion that has little prospect of becoming law, makes no sense either environmentally or economically, but might win over a few voters.
Barack Obama and Clinton, vying for the title of free trade hater-in-chief, presented a sad example of destructive pandering. NAFTA has been a net gain for this country, and was, incidentally, one of the successes of Bill Clinton's administration. The workers who lost their jobs in Ohio are understandably bitter, but it is easier to blame free-trade for America's industrial decline than face the unpleasant truths. The free fall of the American automobile industry has more to do with building cars that people don't want than anything that is happening in Mexico.
And speaking of bitter, condescension is a form of pandering, too, as Obama found to his sorrow in San Francisco. But what could be more condescending than Clinton of Wellesley and Yale pretending to be the blue-collar queen, throwing back shots, and riding around in pick-ups?
McCain has called for throwing Russia out of the G-8 club of industrial countries, another bit of irresponsible pandering that could hurt this country. The United States is going to need a positive relationship with Russia no matter who is elected in the fall. Excluding Russia would only embitter Russians and make it more difficult for the United States to achieve its goals.
Far worse was McCain shamefully saying that if Hamas prefers Obama, "I think people can make judgments accordingly," just because someone in Gaza said something nice about Obama. Trying to brand a rival as the candidate of terrorists is, or should be, beneath contempt. Actually, Hamas gains as long as America keeps the Iraq war going and does little to bring peace to Palestine.
In the Iliad, Homer's Pandarus wounds the Spartan king, Menelaus, thus sabotaging a truce that might have ended the Trojan War peacefully. However, Pandarus was not entirely a free agent. The gods of Olympus were actively involved. And so the war continued until Pandarus's Trojans were defeated and all was lost. Are the Republican gods pushing Hillary Clinton toward the destruction of her party, thus making the necessary truce between warring Democratic factions all the more difficult to achieve? Her hometown paper, The
To bring up the obliteration of Iran in a presidential debate, in an answer to a hypothetical question, is the most irresponsible pandering imaginable. It plays on the nation's post Sept. 11 fears, in order to come across as fierce on national security. Perhaps Clinton thought that, being a woman, she needed to over compensate by being rougher than any of her rivals. But does this country, after eight years of the most counterproductive and extreme belligerence imaginable, need another bellicose administration?
Of course national security trumps everything, when all is said and done, but has this country's security been enhanced by George W. Bush's solutions? Or might it be time to take a different approach toward the world?
Given Clinton's many changes of personality over the years, it is hard to know whether she is pandering or what she really believes. But Clinton does seem to have a bottomless need for enemies and vast conspiracies. It is one thing to play by the Karl Rove playbook during the primaries, and quite another to run the country according to the Dick Cheney playbook.
H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe. 