Political Psyche Bites
November 7th, 2003This interview with Bill Clinton at The American Prospect not only reminded me that a president can communicate intelligently beyond a pre-written sound bite, it reveals an understanding of the liberal/conservative pyschology itself.
MICHAEL TOMASKY: […] I’ve been reading lately some scholars who talk about conservatism and liberalism not only as ideologies but as psychological belief systems. […] It says basically [that] conservatives believe in authority, they do see things in black and white, and that makes it easier for them to get their message out — it’s stark, it’s more reducible to the five-second sound bite. Liberals tend to see more nuance, tend to be more skeptical of authority, and it makes it harder, especially in this media climate, to get the message out.
BILL CLINTON: I think that’s right. And I think the psychological setting after 9-11 helped them. Because we all wanted to see things in black and white for a while. A grievous thing had been done to us, and we wanted to stand united against it.
But we think there are some things that are not open to debate. One is the historic mission of America, to form a more perfect union. What does that mean? It means widening the circle of opportunity, deepening the meaning of freedom and strengthening the bonds of community. And we feel passionately about that. We feel just as strongly as the Republicans do.
And we are not gonna demonize them the way they demonize us. We will never have the talk-show people saying things about them without regard to whether they’re true or not. That’s not who we are. But we do show up to fight. We think you’re worth fighting for. We think your future’s worth fighting for. And we need to use the rhetoric of passion, commitment and combat on behalf of ordinary people without ever slipping into the kind of vicious, personal, evidence-free — to use my wife’s phrase — assaults that they’re so good at.
We don’t have to do that. And it doesn’t really sell all that well with our crowd. But people have to believe that we wake up in the morning just as passionately committed to what we believe as they are. And in the process of conducting ourselves in that way, people get the sense intuitively that we’re strong enough to defend the country.
This is a contact sport. They’re supposed to try to beat us. Now, they do things by and large that we don’t think are legitimate. And lord knows they did while I was president.