There is an old crusty political tale that I first heard more than 40 years ago while covering one of Walter Mondale’s senate campaigns in Minnesota. It may well have been apocryphal, except for the fact it was about Lyndon Johnson, whose biography is far more colorful than most fiction. Here’s Mondale’s story: “Lyndon was in a tight race for Congress and he called his staff together and told them to leak word that his opponent fucks pigs. ‘But, sir, we don’t know that to be true,’ complained a staffer. ‘Okay,’ said Johnson, ‘then, let’s get out a report that he doesn’t fuck pigs. Either way, voters will associate him with pig fucking.’”
That story immediately came to mind this morning as I grabbed the Washington Post off the front step and glanced at the banner headline: “FBI won’t pursue charges against Clinton”. In the Lyndon Johnson’s Texas School of Campaign Pragmatics, there is no difference between “FBI may pursue charges against Clinton” and “FBI won’t pursue charges against Clinton”. Forget about the choice of a modal verb – may or won’t – all that matters are the words “FBI”, “charges” and “Clinton”. Either way, it’s still pig fucking.
So can we now please place a moratorium on any more nauseating stories or op-ed pieces about how much integrity James Comey has, or how he was caught in an untenable position? None of it survives a basic smell test. Based on his own account, the head of the FBI, in a letter to Congressional leaders, publically announced 11 days before the election that the agency was going to investigate emails it had never seen that might, once they were seen, implicate Hillary Clinton in criminal activity. Then, 36 hours before the polls open, Congress’ favorite pen pal strikes again, plagiarizing by paraphrase Gertrude Stein’s declaration that “there is no there there.” Lo and behold, Director Comey announces that criminal charges will not be pursued against the Democratic presidential nominee. And so voters trot off to the polls associating Clinton with dishonesty, corruption and criminal charges.
Sadly and completely unjustifiably, that false narrative feeds Hillary Clinton’s single largest negative character trait with voters. In the major polls released this weekend, Clinton significantly topped Trump in all aspects of the presidency, save for one: trustworthiness. By sizable margins, voters prefer her over him when it comes to personality and temperament, general qualifications, moral character and someone who has an understanding of “problems of people like you.” But when asked which candidate is the most honest and trustworthy, Trump beats Clinton by 44 to 40.
Of course winning a contest where only 44 percent of the people rate you as honest is not exactly something for Trump to slap in his trophy case, perhaps where the Emmy Award he never won would have gone. It is, however, a significant measure of one of the many perception-to-reality gaps in this despicable campaign. Construing the facts in the most unfavorable light from Clinton’s perspective, she was guilty of carelessness and bad judgment in using her private email server while in the State Department and, true to form from a lifetime of right wing persecution, she was slow to own up to the mistake. But none of that even begins to rise to the level of the kind of throw-her-in-jail frenzy Trump and his disciples whip up at their rallies.
Therein lies one of the biggest paradoxes of this campaign. Hillary Clinton loses the honesty vote to Trump only on the basis that he has repeatedly, in a thoroughly dishonest manner, characterized his opponent as corrupt, even threatening to throw her in jail if he is elected. He has never once laid out a set of specific facts constituting evidence of corruption. That’s not the way this guy rolls. He simply constructs his own reality out of thin air. As Lyndon Johnson knew so well, if you say false stuff enough, people begin to believe it. One of the amazing facts of this election season has been that the candidate seen as the most honest is the one who fact checkers say tells the truth only 9 percent of the time, a record low never before seen or approached in the history of political fact checking. Unfortunately, Trump’s campaign of lies had way too many enablers and co-conspirators, including parts of the news media and, of course, James Comey.
The only mitigation in the FBI Director’s deplorable and grossly negligent conduct may come from the fact that this campaign has been conducted so deep inside Lewis Carroll’s rabbit hole that it may well make no discernable difference in the election’s outcome. So far, most polling activity has given credence to that proposition. If, on the other hand, the final results repudiate the pollsters and Clinton loses, Comey needs to be severely punished for his sins. Forcing him to serve four years in a Trump administration ought to be enough to make him deeply regret his inexcusable misdeeds and wish like hell he had become a Texas pig farmer.