Out Loud

There is a saying in American politics that a gaffe is when a politician (or a candidate for political office) says what they actually think. There's something telling in that, not about politicians, but about the public, and its need to have the political class see them in a particular way.

With the flap over Senator J. D. Vance's "childless cat ladies" comment yet to die down completely, I decided to take a look back at the big comments that have come out of other recent presidential campaigns, and see how it compares. In 2008, then-Senator Barack Obama made his "guns and religion" comment that people saw as insulting to rural Americans. In 2012, Mitt Romney's "makers and takers" comments, secretly recorded at a fundraiser, were taken as disdain for nearly half of the country. And in 2016, Hillary Clinton caused an uproar with her "basket of deplorables" remarks.

What I found interesting about Mr. Obama's and Mrs. Clinton's remarks is that the focus was on one specific phrase in their remarks; "they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them" and "you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? They're racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic – you name it," but their broader context was about empathy. Mr. Obama was making the point that these were people who had been left behind by policies of previous administrations. And while it was the Clinton campaign that slammed then-Senator Obama for his comments, when Hillary Clinton effectively made the same point in 2016, she was noting that the other half of Trump's base felt let down and abandoned, and were desperate for change. In effect, each of them were calling upon the American Left to see past its visceral dislike of Right-leaning voters, and understand that they had problems that needed to be solved, as well.

When Mitt Romney made his comments, we wasn't speaking to the public, but to wealthy donors, and as a result, his comments lack the call for understanding and compassion that Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton had been making. He was speaking to a group of people unlike the people he was speaking about, and, as a result, his remarks came across as much more disdainful. In part. I suspect, because he was laying out reasons why his candidacy wasn't more popular than it was. Apparently, "hey, I'm running against a popular incumbent, and things are going well under his watch," wasn't going to be good enough to mollify them.

Likewise, J. D. Vance was speaking to Tucker Carlson, and the Fox News audience. While this was a public forum, Mr. Vance likely understood that the audience for Mr. Carlson's show was highly partisan. And, at least for a time, he was right. It took Hillary Clinton surfacing his remarks for them to become newsworthy. Mr. Vance was speaking to a partisan audience, in a venue that was all about negative partisanship. Like Mitt Romney, he was speaking to people who expected him to be hostile to, and critical of, opposing partisans.

What makes all of this interesting is this interplay between the audience and their partisanship. Hillary Clinton was also addressing one of the unspoken realities of politics; that "deplorable" or not, people are allowed to vote, and their votes can be the difference between winning, and having a chance a favorable policies, and losing. Democratic politicians have a challenge in speaking to their supporters about Republican voters, because while rank-and-file Democrats may be angry at them, the broader Democratic message is that government can work for people. And that includes people who are angry, even perhaps unreasonably so, that it hasn't worked them in the past.

Republicanism, at least as I have experienced it, makes no such concession, being much more comfortable with the idea that the conservative ideals it espouses (or simply pays lip service to) are self-evidently the Right Way To Do Things, and opposition to them is often born of deliberate perversity and bad faith. But that's not a good public-facing message, hence why the statements that landed Messrs. Romney and Vance in the public hotseat weren't made on the stump, but to friendly audiences.

And maybe that makes it worse. Sure, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton said unflattering things about Republicans, but they said it to their faces, as it were. Mitt Romney and J. D. Vance were speaking about Democrats, but not in venues where they expected Democrats to be listening.