False Equivalency

Posted by Bob Lord

False equivalence bugs me, probably more than it should. It’s a tactic that intellectually dishonest politicians and pundits engage in freely, because they almost never can get in real trouble for it. And the public slurps it up.

I encountered two shining examples of false equivalence in the past few days, both, ironically, involving Sarah Palin. Today, I watched Steve Schmidt on Morning Joe discuss “Game Change,” which premiered over the weekend. For the most part, it was a remarkable mea culpa on Schmidt’s part. No doubt, he truly is regretful for his role in McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin. But then he went on to claim that both parties, blinded by the desire to win, select VP nominees who are unfit to be President and, as the Democratic example, referenced John Edwards. Andrea Mitchell then backed up Schmidt’s absurd comparison. And nobody on the show challenged the phony logic.

Think about it. Kerry picked Edwards in 2004. At the time, Edwards had won the hearts of millions of voters. Yes, he kind of lost his mind in his 2008 campaign. But at the time Kerry picked him, his affair, child and cover up were years away. To fault Kerry for picking Edwards is to fault Kerry for not being clairvoyant. To equate Kerry’s selection of Edwards with McCain’s selection of Palin is to equate Kerry's lack of clairvoyance with the cynical incompetence of the McCain campaign in picking Palin. All the vetting in the world would not have revealed Edward’s flaws. One or two substantive questions would have revealed Palin’s. And, if the movie was at all accurate, the McCain campaign became aware of Palin’s unreal lack of intellectual depth before the convention, when there still was time to make a change.

But none of that matters. The folks listening to Schmidt (and Mitchell) likely just nodded in agreement. Not many people engage in critical analysis of what they hear on Morning Joe when they’re getting ready for work. So, the false equivalencies spouted by pundits and pols tend to go viral.

I ran into this first-hand on Saturday, when a Republican friend confronted me with another Palin related false equivalence. Undoubtedly repeating what he’d heard from a conservative pundit or Pol, he equated Bill Maher’s crude reference to Sarah Palin with Rush Limbaugh’s attack of Sandra Fluke. The distinction here that places my friend’s comparison in the false equivalence category is that Palin is a public figure, while Fluke is not. But it’s a distinction that many folks don’t instinctively appreciate.

That’s too bad, because the distinction is enormous. For a short while, I was a public figure. From my experience, as a public figure, there is a huge difference in the way you look at the world and the way ridicule and insults do or don’t affect you. In my campaign, Shadegg’s goons launched websites to attack me. They ran ads essentially calling me a liar. Conservative bloggers and journalists raked me over the coals. But I couldn’t have been less affected personally by the attacks, and that has nothing to do with the thickness of my skin. When you intentionally make yourself a public figure, the way you look at what is said about you changes. That’s especially true if you’re a public political figure. You tend to see everything in terms of how it affects you politically. For whatever reason, if you’re a public figure, the unkind remarks don’t hurt the way they do when you’re a regular guy.

With that background, consider the difference between Limbaugh’s attack on Fluke and Maher’s name calling of Palin. Sandra Fluke was (and really still is) a private figure. She went from unknown to being called a slut to 20 million of Limbaugh’s listeners overnight. That’s devastating. Palin, by contrast, was a sitting governor and a vice-presidential candidate. She experienced ridicule by her political foes (and comedians) daily. Tina Fey made absolute mincemeat out of her in SNL skits on a weekly basis. So, Bill Maher calling her the “c” word couldn’t have been less of an event to her.

What bothers me so much about false equivalencies is that most listeners and readers of political punditry have neither the time nor the inclination to dissect them. False equivalencies tend not to be at the heart of the debate. Instead, they’re used to distract from the topic (Maher did the same thing as Limbaugh) or generalize the topic (our process in selecting VP candidates is flawed across the board). Perhaps for that reason, the intellectually dishonest pundit or pol rarely gets challenged on a false equivalency. They can make them with impunity, and they know it.

All of this will never change. But it’s still too bad.