In an appearance on CNN in March, Mitt Romney spokesperson Eric Fehrnstrom was asked whether the far-right positions Romney took during the primaries would hurt his chances in the general election. Fehrnstrom was not concerned. “Well, I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign. Everything changes. It’s almost like an Etch-A-Sketch. You can kind of shake it up, and we start all over again,” he said.
At the time, some observers thought Fehrnstrom was deluding himself. UC Berkeley professor Robert Reich wrote, “Try as he might, Romney won’t be able to twist the knobs and create a brand new picture. There will be too many videos of him during the primary saying things that were designed to appeal to increasingly far-right, far-out GOP primary voters — but will strike most Americans as bizarre if not despicable.”
But since his first debate against Barack Obama, Romney has been shaking the Etch-A-Sketch vigorously — and it’s working. He has started claiming that his health care plan covers people with pre-existing conditions when it does no such thing. He renounced his statement describing 47 percent of Americans as parasitic moochers. During the primary campaign, he said “we’re going to cut taxes on everyone across the country by 20 percent, including the top 1 percent,” but now he promises not to cut taxes for high-income Americans. And we can expect to see Romney pivot to the center even further in tomorrow night’s debate.
What is striking about this development is not only the volume of reversals Romney has performed or the brazenness of his contortions but the fact that he has successfully pulled it off in the age of YouTube. Any curious voter could go to a computer and find videos of Romney endorsing the positions that he is now vigorously renouncing. Nonetheless, his poll numbers have surged since he took a more moderate tone. The race, which Obama was heavily favored to win before the first debate, is now neck and neck.
All of this suggests that the Internet doesn’t increase the political penalty for flip-flopping. Past statements and positions, even if they are immortalized on the Web, do very little to prevent candidates from reinventing themselves during campaigns. Reich was wrong: We still live in an Etch-A-Sketch political world.
However, when Romney decides to reinvent his political persona, as he does every so often, he just has a few YouTube videos to distance himself from and a handful of positions to renounce. Will candidates from my generation — who have had so much of their lives, viewpoints and affiliations plastered on Facebook, Twitter, online forums and other social media — be able to escape their pasts and remake themselves so they can win elections as easily as Romney has? Will we inherit Etch-A-Sketch politics?
The intuitive answer is no — most of us assume that the Internet will impose a measure of ideological consistency on the next generation of political leaders. Maybe that’s why Obama once told a group of ninth-graders that, if they want to be president, they should be careful what they post on Facebook.
But I think we tend to overestimate the degree to which viewpoints conveyed online will bind future politicians. The first member of our generation to run for president will have decades’ worth of social media activity available for the press and political opponents to scrutinize — tweets, Facebook “likes,” comments, photos, videos, LinkedIn pages, online group memberships and more. Any future candidate will simply have to disavow some positions and statements he or she expressed online; it will not be impossible for voters to expect as much consistency from candidates as they do now (though that isn’t saying much). Charges of flip-flopping are likely to lose their teeth.
There will be a dizzying quantity of information available about all the positions ever held by political candidates who grew up in the age of the Internet, but voters won’t have any more time to pay attention to politics. They are likely to cope with this tsunami of information by simply tuning it out and focusing on what seems most immediately relevant: candidates’ latest positions.
In other words, don’t expect the Internet to force future candidates to be consistent — it might even have the opposite effect by desensitizing voters to charges of inconsistency. Our generation is likely to inherit a political world where the Etch-A-Sketch works as well as ever.
But don’t worry: I would be surprised if any future flip-floppers are quite as shameless as Mitt Romney.
Contact Jason Willick at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter: @jawillick.
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I WEAR FRIP FROP EVERYWHERE!
Mitt Romney typically justifies his flip-flopping by doing a few things.
1) Questions that are answered personally are subject to radical change when it comes time to create policy. Just as VP Biden personally disapproves of abortion, he will not force that view on people. Romney claims that, after personal changes, his policy positions are then different.
What he leaves out is what happened between being Governor and running in the primaries that made him change his mind. What he also leaves out is what happened between the primaries and now that changed his mind.
2) Outright lying. These are statements, even practiced by Paul Ryan at the RNC, that do not coincide logically nor can be followed as a specific evolution of beliefs that were espoused previously by the candidate. Retracting something like the 47% comment isn’t necessary. That was Romney’s comment about the voter bloc he faces with students, elderly, veterans, and the poor. What he said is that he will be hard-pressed in getting their vote. He didn’t say he wouldn’t preside over them.
3) Specific policy changes. These are statements that change as new details emerge. If one had no foresight, and pre 1920s stock crash decided to buy a lot of the stock in fake pearls, flapper dresses, and feathered hats, and saw their value coming down in the next few weeks, one would say that was a poor decision retroactively but a risky decision in the moment. Without more information, there can be no real specific evaluation.
Romney claims in his book that he would have let the auto-industry die. Maybe he believes differently now. Obama claims to have been tough on China even though WTO suits are filed only in specific instances of particular markets and not the general currency.
4) Representative discrepancies. These aren’t even actual flip-flops by the candidates themselves, rather, they are the media describing contradictions in the administrating of the politician in particular. This is different from lying in that in these instances, politicians may actually have forgotten that they ever said something on the issue to the opposite, or are speaking about something whose intricacies are missed by the media and then propagated to the public in soundbites and misquotes. Even though a lot of politics is done in the fashion described previously, it is true that there is a margin of such actions notably far from typical actions of this nature.
Paul Ryan is portrayed as an intellectual even though the approval of fact-checkers often elude him. Obama is portrayed as cold and detached even though his foreign policy is aimed at promoting diplomatic relations with Russia, the Middle East, and countries around China.
For our generation, it will not be a question about flip-flopping so much as it will be a presumption of individuals to need to pay attention to the time and context of pieces of information as opposed to only noticing that they exist at all. Posting something about Avenged Sevenfold as a 13 year old should not reflect on one’s ability to run for office in the future. The problem comes when one takes the time to data mine and individual’s freely placed information from the web and assemble them in ways that destroy characters by intentionally leaving out some information. This is similar to a current situation where a woman running for the Maine State Assembly is having her forum quotes from World of Warcraft used to discredit her. Can such things be allowed? Of course, since it’s happening right now. If the information is readily accessible, and the questions of legitimacy of information or the veracity of claims promoted by the information gathered seem obvious, then such constructions of character may be fair. If the information is obtained illegitimately, then as a society who values freedom and privacy, the content seen must be viewed with an asterisk.
n3at aritkuhl br0hum heopz u b getin gud revoows @ WSJs n shit lulz
Jason is not much of a devil’s advocate when he is only pointing out the flip-flopping of one candidate. Unless the devil he is advocating for supports Obama. This article makes Jason look like he is just part of the machine instead of standing outside and really commenting on what is going on. The article would mean more if it pointed out that just about every politician flip-flops on the electorate including the one Jason is so obviously supporting but failing to take to task.
Obama is much more skillful with his flip-flops. He promised no taxes on the middle class, forces Obamacare through Congress, and then feigns surprise that the individual mandate taxes the middle class. After all, he claims, he is not raising taxes, the IRS is. He looked straight into the teleprompter and said everyone that wants to keep their health plan can do so, but then feigns surprise that Obamacare mandates are pushing premiums so high that many people can no longer afford their health plans. In 2008 he campaigned against the Bush tax cuts, and now he is for those cuts. He was against Guantanamo and now he’s for it. The liberal pundits typically don’t admit Obama makes flip-flops because if a progressive Yale Law School graduate can be a flip-flopper then that just shows highly educated politicians have no more integrity than less educated politicians.
Those plans will be replaced by new plans created under the structure of the mandate. This is mostly for people for whom a 2800 penalty will not matter much because they have private doctors or something else that demands a particular threshold of wealth not held by other Americans.
The law is funded through taxes that do no affect the middle class directly but all Americans. If there are any taxes that target the middle class specifically, you’d have to point them out. Worst one I can think of is the 3.8% tax on real estate sales – mostly a problem to developers or people who flip homes.
He’s for the Bush cuts which help the middle class. As a policy official whose concerned with not raising new taxes on the middle class, these might help balance the presumptive ‘tax increase’ on the rich.
Have you seen wikileaks? Closing gitmo ain’t easy. Obama was willing to withhold meeting with lower priority officials unless they were willing to take prisoners from gitmo and put them in their prisons. Even if we close a prison, those prisoners have to go somewhere. Not all of them are innocently imprisoned – some are actual terrorists.
People flip-flopping just means they learned something different and are saying something different. It doesn’t make them dumb. What they learned and what they then say make them dumb. Obama isn’t.
excellent analysis. as soon as there’s info saturation, the details get a lot less important.
Of course, “far right” to your typical Berkeley hack means not in lockstep support with gay marriage, free contraception, abortion on demand, subsidizing Big Birds multimillion dollar merchandising racket, and the usual pet causes of the left. In other words, the majority of the country.
Do you oppose marriage equality for same-sex couples? What a homophobe!
You clearly failed biology.
Tony, you clearly aren’t paying attention to science, which says same-sex relationships is NATURAL.
Dolphins are gay too. Even the Romans were banging dudes. All sex is risky. Sex to procreate is between a man and woman. Sex for sex depends on what you call sex, and when it’s like that, it should never be forced or deemed illegal (unless it’s forced or under duress, in which case it should be illegal).