Sooner or later, every American incumbent is eventually called “out of touch” — just as all flowers are eventually called pretty and all Cal Poly professors are eventually accused of inflating their own PolyRatings.
When elected politicians are accused of this crime, it is usually the case that some appeal to populism was originally intended, a wedge meant to be driven between the smiling likenesses on the campaign posters and the reality of the candidate himself. The attack itself is a relic of 1920s populism, mired in the cynicism of 1970s postmodernity and, finally stranded in the strange times of today, when an ever-growing centrist movement voices its frustration with partisan politics despite the number of electable figures remaining an implacable two.
Continuing a centuries-old debate among the likes of Russell and Frege, the Out-Of-Touch Attack (OOTA, henceforth) goes after the inherent difference between sense and reference; it seeks to paint a caricature of a person, to expose the widening gap between this caricature and the person, and to congratulate those under its rhetorical spell on the efficacy of their suspicions, the truth-revealing powers of their skepticism.
The OOTA is inherently tautological, valid no matter what when used on President Obama, Governor Romney, Senator Franken, Donald Trump, George Clooney, yourself, myself or anybody. It relies on a straw-man fallacy, at least two post-hoc ergo propter-hocs, a slew of ad hominems and very often a circulus probando — or begging the question — when the direct takeaway of your opponent’s out-of-touchness is the perceived increase in your own in-touchness. But no matter.
OOTAs seem poised to persist in our politics for the conceivable future, watering down robocalls and stump speeches for years to come.
“Years of flying around on Air Force One, surrounded by an adoring staff of true believers telling you what to do,” Mittworth Willard Romney said to a group of Wisconsinites last Tuesday. “Well, that might be enough to make you a little out of touch.”
The rhetorical chastity climbed to utter silliness on Sunday, when Romney speculated in Pennsylvania that Obama had perhaps “spent too much time at Harvard.”
Aside from the comic shamelessness of a candidate for the president of the United States, in possession of two Harvard degrees himself, broadcasting such banter into national air waves with a straight face, the omnipresence of out-of-touch attacks in our rhetoric expresses some ugly truths about our politics.
Time Magazine’s Michael Crowley, a dependable centrist, theorizes a two-fold explanation for this phenomenon. First is that, though the office of the Presidency offers numerous political perks, “it does trap its occupant in a bubble of prestige which is impossible to avoid.” The Romney campaign seems to have realized that it need only attract attention to the President’s inherently elite status, no matter what cost to credibility or consistency of message, to somehow alter Obama’s personal character from whatever it was beforehand.
Secondly is the sad truth that “stereotypes die hard in politics, and certain attacks are more effective against one party than against the other.” Despite the tendency of the facts to suggest their candidates are far more elite than their opposing Democrats, the GOP has touted for decades the zeitgeist of liberals as bookish academics unfit to lead something as quotidian as the federal government.
Not only are OOTAs innately misleading, I believe they deal considerable damage to our national rhetoric — far more than meets the eye — and further casts Americans in a shameful light around the world. The hypocrisy is certainly one thing; now that everyone’s message seems to be one of anti-cynicism, the claim that each of our elected officials is masquerading as a misreading of their surroundings is childishly paradoxical.
But I also dislike how these attacks condition us to look at each other. How much longer will it be before the belief disappears that politicians even have a personality behind the mask? Before voters, whether they agree with you or not, are immediately discounted as ideological slaves or else fraudulent phantasms? The OOTA is metaphysically egocentric; I make myself feel realer and more perceptive the more and more jaded I become about the faces on the television.
But this, of course, is mere self-aggrandizing fantasy — nor will it matter in the scope of things. As the Central Coast poet Robinson Jeffers once wrote, “Imagine what delusions of grandeur, what suspicion-agonized eyes, what jellies of arrogance and terror this earth has absorbed.”