Spooky: Mark Penn's book the cause of "Snipergate"?
Tue Apr 08, 2008 at 11:43:48 PM PDT
Okay, so this is spooky.
I was reading Ezra Klein's excellent thumbs-down review of Mark Penn's Microtrends, to better understand why this man ever has a job. And Ezra quotes an amazing passage that could explain where Hillary Clinton got the idea for Snipergate (not to mention impressively ... perhaps too impressively ... predicting Wright-gate).
Here's the quote:
Ask anyone in politics and they will agree—they face "snipers" every day who are trying to find one flinch, one out-of-place word to put on Drudge or YouTube.
More below the break.
Ezra provides context for this quote:
This isn’t an isolated example. In a chapter called "Aspiring Snipers," Penn explains, "It’s the rare moment when a poll stops me in my tracks and reorients my understanding of things." One such poll was conducted last fall, when Bendixen and Associates asked 601 young Californians what they’d be doing in 10 years. About 1 percent—so, a handful—said they’d be snipers. Certainly, that’s an odd reply. But Penn never mentions that the Bendixen poll had a margin of error of plus-or-minus 4 percent—four being a larger number than one. Additionally, it’s meaningless without further study. Anyone in the age bracket would attribute it to video games, or snipers being, let’s admit it, quite cool. Yet Penn, based on no follow-up interviews, detects a "new patriotism," and a desire "to master complex mathematical formulas like how distance or wind might affect the path of the bullet." This simply isn’t professional work. (It is bitter, though. Penn concludes the chapter by complaining, "Ask anyone in politics and they will agree—they face ‘snipers’ every day who are trying to find one flinch, one out-of-place word to put on Drudge or YouTube." It takes a special sort of self-regard to compare the danger of being embedded on YouTube to being hunted down in urban warfare.)
Okay, so follow this. Penn writes a book in which, in part, he bemoans "gotcha" politics of the sort that seemed to threaten Obama's candidacy after the Wright video came out. (We still don't know who, exactly, edited the video such that it removed all context from the good Reverend's sermons - I personally doubt it was Brian Ross. But nobody, to my knowledge, has asked him.)
To illustrate his point, he brings up some random stat about six kids who want to be, of all things ... SNIPERS!
Now, this guy is the message guy for Hillary Clinton. It's not unlikely that, following the Wright brouhaha and Obama's speech decrying just this sort of "gotcha"/YouTube experience, perhaps Penn and possibly the candidate herself referred back to his short chapter, "Aspiring Snipers," to try to contextualize the incident and similar ones over the long death march that is this primary season.
Do you think ... is it possible ... that THIS is where Hillary got her false memory from? I know it's a stretch, but come on -- it's just too much of a coincidence.
Perhaps -- and I'm not excusing the Senator from the Empire State -- but perhaps instead of being a flat-out lie, this was more of a Reaganesque flight of fantasy.
See, back in the 80s, Reagan told stories that, it turns out, were not so much true. In one case, he claimed to Jewish leaders to have photographed the death camps in Eastern Europe during their liberation. (Actually, he was in Hollywood, but had recently seen a movie about it.)
And then there was the tale he told in 1983 to the National Convention of the Congressional Medal of Honor Societye:
And I found my memory going back to those things that I had read during the war, any one of them a thrilling story of heroism above and beyond the call of duty. But one in particular seemed appropriate at that time. A B - 17 coming back across the channel from a raid over Europe, badly shot up by antiaircraft, the ball turret that hung underneath the belly of the plane had taken a hit. The young ball-turret gunner was wounded, and they couldn't get him out of the turret there while flying.
But over the channel, the plane began to lose altitude, and the commander had to order bail out. And as the men started to leave the plane, the last one to leave -- the boy, understandably, knowing he was left behind to go down with the plane, cried out in terror -- the last man to leave the plane saw the commander sit down on the floor. He took the boy's hand and said, ``Never mind, son, we'll ride it down together.'' Congressional Medal of Honor, posthumously awarded.
They in another society give their highest honor to a political assassin. We gave ours to a man who would sacrifice his life simply to bring comfort to a boy who had to die.
Problem was, this story too was from a movie.
My guess is that, like Reagan, Hillary isn't at heart a liar (well, she is, but not in this case or hospitalgate). Rather, she's an unconscious fabulist, who hears buzzwords and then uses them to create in her mind more interesting stories or more provocative memories. Nice traits to have if you're a crazy uncle; unfortunate ones to have for a presidential candidate in this new YouTube world.
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