Pivots and Frames

For those that have missed it, there's been a dust-up between Obama and Clinton over some comments he made about Reagan. Dick Polman explains it here:

The ad features an Obama sound bite, a partial sentence of something that he said to a Reno newspaper back on Jan. 14: "The Republicans were the party of ideas for a pretty long chunk of time there over the last 10, 15 years." After his voice fades, a snide narrator says to the listener, "Really? Aren't those the ideas that got us into the economic mess we're in today?....Are those the ideas Barack Obama's talking about?" Then the music swells and the narrator says, "Hillary Clinton thinks this election's about replacing disastrous ideas with new ones." (A link to the radio ad is here.)

The ad's message: Obama, by stating that the GOP had been "the party of ideas," was obviously endorsing those ideas.

Factual reality: Obama did not endorse those ideas.

In political war, context is often the first casualty. Here's the context of what Obama said to the Reno paper (the italics are mine): "I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that, you know, Richard Nixon did not, and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path, because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like, you know, with all the excesses of the '60s and the '70s, you know government had grown and grown, but there wasn’t much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating, and I think people just tapped into – he tapped into what people were already feeling, which is we want clarity, we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism, and, and, you know, entrepreneurship that had been missing.

"I think Kennedy, 20 years earlier, moved the country in a fundamentally different direction. So I think a lot of it just has to do with the times. I think we’re in one of those times right now, where people feels like things as they are going right now aren’t working, that we’re bogged down in the same arguments that we’ve been having, and they’re not useful. And the Republican approach, I think, has played itself out. I think it’s fair to say that the Republicans were the party of ideas for a pretty long chunk of time there over the last 10, 15 years, in the sense that they were challenging conventional wisdom."

Obama was simply stating that Reagan was in sync with the mood of his era - can any rational human, of whatever ideological persuasion, really argue with that? - just as Kennedy, on the Democratic side, was in sync with the mood of an earlier era. An acknowledgement is hardly an endorsement.

So, in the debates and a radio ad, Obama goes full out against this. He, accurately, argues that they are distorting the record... and then he pivots the whole discussion and frames it in terms of Hillary's main weakness, perceived honesty. If the primary race boils down to who do you feel is more honest, Obama wins solidly.

Now, it seems, the Clintons are trying to pivot the conversation again. From Ben Smith's Politico blog:

Clinton advisers Mark Penn, Howard Wolfson, and Steve Ricchetti (an old hand who seems to have returned) called an unusual conference call this afternoon to make their side of the "party of ideas" argument — that Democrats were the "party of ideas" in the 1990s.

"That is Sen. Obama and his campaign rendering judgment on the Clinton era," Wolfson said of Obama's view that the GOP has been the party of ideas in recent years,. The advisers then defended a series of 1990s policies — in combination with the new radio ad featuring Bill, a clear sign that they think the argument about the 1990s is one they can win.

This is quite clever of them. By terming their argument in the same words that Obama used, that the "GOP was the party of ideas", and not directly charging that he endorsed those ideas they can avoid the charge of dishonesty. However, they put him in an uncomfortable spot.

If he sits backs and agrees (or ignores) them they can claim that the 90's Dems was the party of ideas and if everything was good under Bill, then why not Hillary? On the other side, he could push back on his original point, that Republican ideas gained more traction in the general public because of Reagan's recognition of the times. But if he does this he'll be treading an awfully thin line trying to avoid being seen as praising those ideas. The more he talks about why tax-cuts and smaller government were sucessfull in grabbing the electorate, the more he gets associated with them. But if he doesn't challenge them he's forced to eat crow on his previous words and accept the frame of the great 90's Dems, which clearly works to Hillary's benefit.

Like I said, very clever.

I'll be curious to see how he responds, for now the Clintons are returning to their all out 90's love fest. They're pushing hard on the economy and trying to contrast that to the economic prosperity of the 90's.