Dumbo Does Diplomacy: the Prequel

We earlier sketched Romney’s fumbling fiasco of foreign junketry in “Dumbo Does Diplomacy”, but without putting it into any perspective, thus leaving open the possibility that the footless performance was peculiar to Romney, with no larger political implications.   But he in a sense was following a precedent:   that of another handsome clueless politician, Ronald Reagan.   The fact that, after ample evidence of his ignorance (and senescence, harbinger of Alzheimer’s) in his first term,  he won a record landslide victory in his re-election bid, which sent the message:  the President doesn’t need to know anything, just make him photogenic, the gullible public will slurp down whatever we spoonfeed them.

Ronald Reagan had terrific stage presence, and was good at glad-handing, so long as nothing of substance had to be said, beyond what he -- an actor reciting lines written for him by others -- could read off  his ever-present index cards.  In his first term, Nixon sent him on goodwill trips  to cultivate our favorite right-wing rulers:  Marcos, Chiang, Yew and Franco.   Later, in preparation for his own future Presidential bid, he went on a whirlwind junket across Europe and Asia;  as former Washington Post political reporter Lou Cannon put it, “This enabled Reagan to deal with questions about his inexperience in world affairs  by rattling off a list of all the foreign leaders he had met (usually omitting Franco).”

So long as all the public learned was from the White House press release,  rather than seeing the often dismaying performances from up close, this scenario worked just swell.  Cannon  describes a 1982 state dinner in Brasília:

Reagan raised his wine glass in a toast to [the] Brazilian President … and “the people of Bolivia”, a gaffe which he attempted to correct, and instead compounded, by saying “That’s where I’m going next.”  Reagan’s next stop  was actually Colombia, and his faulty toast became big news in that country as well.  The double blooper so dismayed the White House press office  that it altered the public transcript and quoted Reagan as toasting “the people of Bogotá”.

On Air Force One  returning from the five-day trip … Reagan said … “I went down to find out from them and their views.  And you’d be surprised, yes, because, you know, they’re all individual countries.”

-- Lou Cannon, President Reagan:  the Role of a Lifetime (1991), p. 462

Each with its own individual and precious and special, but easily confusable name.

I mention the incident, not to rake up cold coals, but because of the striking parallelism with Romney, and the continuing success of the Reagan-derived “President-as-Ken-Doll” strategy.  Again:

[Reagan] was briefed before each meeting by the appropriate experts, and he dutifully read the requisite policy points from his cards, floundering only when he departed from the prepared script.  During a meeting with Indian Prime Minister Indira Ghandhi, the Indian delegates were pleased when Reagan lauded the “green revolution” that had vastly improved their nation’s agricultural yields.    But the Indians were also bothered that Reagan did not seem to realize that the Indian government had played an important role in this agricultural revolution, which he depicted as strictly a triumph of capitalism. 

Later, during a conference session on food production, Reagan was expounding on the accomplishments of free-enterprise farming in the United States, when Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere interrupted and said, “Let me tell you something.  U.S. agriculture is the most heavily subsidized in the world.”

-- Lou Cannon, President Reagan:  the Role of a Lifetime (1991), p. 469

That sound familiar?  Obama’s line, “You didn’t build that”, pithy and easily mocked, contains more wisdom in its four words  than many a press release or campaign speech;  in this it resembles Clinton’s wise and (except by legal professionals) widely misunderstood “It depends what the meaning of is is.”  The booboisie (to resurrect Mencken’s term, still applicable) do not feel obliged to even attempt to comprehend the things they snicker at.

So it’s not just Romney.   Buoyed by the success of The Great (when pre-scripted) Communicator, the Republican Party, and its easily-dazzled voters, has come to welcome leaders devoid of expertise or intellectual curiosity.  It worked before, it’ll work again, so long as you don’t flub in front of the cameras.  (Of couse, this has become more difficult to do in the age of the iPhone, since cameras may lurk even in invitation-only conclaves of fatcats, in the dens of Boca Raton.)

Ironically, the Potemkin-village approach to the marketing and micro-managing of candidates  was given a substantial boost by the case of an earlier Republican politician who, by contrast with the crop today, was unusually knowledgeable:  Richard Nixon.  But he wasn’t at all likeable (stiff in a Romney way, but additionally unsavory), so he had to be packaged:  consult the classic of Joe McGinniss, The Selling of the President.

So again -- Why even write?   No facts, no reasonings  will convince the Birthers and Voodoo-Economists and their kin.   Ours is the Society of the Spectacle, best symbolized by that empty and amiable actor.

And yet, a kind of bright side:  We have a system in which the evil of schemers is tempered by the stupidity of jurors and voters.   The result (to continue in the agrarian context above) is such costly tomfoolery as the farm programs;  but we avoid, say,  the famine and genocide of Lenin’s and Stalin’s collectivization of agriculture.  And while there have been plenty of boneheaded jury decisions, at least we are spared the likes of the Moscow show trials.  The voters are not rocket scientists (or, more relevantly: statisticians and epistemologists), but -- apart from the tinfoil-hat crowd -- they mostly have basic common sense, and respect for that wisely crafted document, the Constitution.

[Historical footnote on the theme of the perilous schemes of cabals and autocrats  being frustrated by the amiable indolence of their servants and subjects]

In 1894, Kaiser Wilhelm II’s choice of Reichskanzler, Prince Hohenlohe, had a

… reputation for stubbornness and evasiveness, which had led a member of his staff in Paris to say, “It is quite impossible to make him do anything of which he disapproves.  He flutters away like a little bird  when you try to catch him.”  These qualities served to baulk some of the Emperor’s more dangerous designs.

-- Gordon Craig, Germany 1866-1945 (1978), p. 262