I write this a morning after a day spent velcroed to the television watching the news as bombs dropped on Iraq and wag-the-dog grenades were lobbed at Clinton. I will not get into the Iraq issue. Count on that. I know there are MusePaper December 17th, 1998:
"It’s the Attack on Privacy, Stupid!"
What Republicans and Pundits Don’t Get
About Clinton’s SupportMickel Adzema, M.A.
good humanitarians who have qualms about the Iraqi issue. Yet there is the very real threat of the use of weapons of mass destruction– and I know there are human beings out there, Saddam Hussein having shown himself to be one – who are so damaged psychologically there’s actually nothing they wouldn’t resort to and their hate is boundless. History has shown us Hitler, Stalin, Atilla the Hun, Ghengis Khan. Now, give one of them weapons of mass destruction and see if anyone would sleep easily at night. Furthermore, wage a war against them in which they are humiliated, and then backed into a corner; and tell me that at their first opportunity, no matter how long afterwards, they won’t be just itching to take any action – no matter how apocalyptic – to save face or get their revenge. I know this sort of psychology, believe me. It is ugly. So I will not speak against good humanitarians who are lucky in that they probably have never found themselves in the hands of such tyrants or as children under the thumb of similarly charactered parents or siblings in their family. I envy them their innocence of such ugliness of human "character."
OK, ya’ got me. So I did get into it after all. But let me steer away now. I spent the day watching as the drumbeat of the Republicans and the pundits – the facts, once again, be dammed – rose louder and louder that the attack was another ploy by Clinton and another reason to hate and humiliate him. It began with Trent Lott, the majority leader in the Senate, questioning, even before the bombs dropped, the credibility of the timing of the strike. The commentators at the time – Jeff Greenfield being the first to point it out – noted the extraordinary character of such a statement at such a time. The rules applying to politics and partisanship ending at the water’s edge were so thoroughly flaunted with this and lesser early comments by Republicans that the commentators were practically beside themselves emotionally at first. Later these accusations of Republicans – once again publicly humiliating Clinton – became "institutionalized" into one of the "issues" of the day, placed on the agenda of each TV program, right there along with the attack story and the impeachment story.
Commentators were falling over themselves in exuding statements about the "historical" nature of the day’s events. And by this they meant that the confluence of developments were truly unprecedented in our history; as some people put it, was reality imitating art. But this is not the first time we have heard that things have truly changed in our country . . . are unprecedented.
I take you back to 1992 and the politics of the presidential campaign. In 1991, Jerry Brown, Pat Buchanan, and Ross Perot were written off as diversions from the real candidates. When in 1992, Jerry Brown and Pat Buchanan began winning or showing strong in primaries and Ross Perot was coming up mightily in polls, there was this same befuddlement by the commentators. How do you account for Captain Moonbeam (on the one hand), the reactionary Pat Buchanan, and a third-party candidate (of all things) stealing so much of the public’s attention. "Unprecedented" was the word bandied about. Later, pundits began digging deeper and talking about an "angry electorate," who – they put forth – were inexplicably furious and wanted to "throw the bums out" regardless of the consequences and who they voted in.
This angry electorate existed, for sure. But their pseudo-psychological analysis was superficial at best. What the pundits failed to point out, which I did point out in an article titled "Angry Man for President" – is that all three of these surprising contenders had one thing in common: they spoke angrily! It is not that the electorate simply wanted "anyone for president." The electorate identified (and note that word well, readers, for I will use it again shortly) with the candidates whose demeanor, persona, and speech reflected their own anger. Pundits and commentators don’t hire psychologists for help in their understanding of psychological events or realities in society. Color them like every one else, for practically no one in power hires psychologists as consultants. Respect for psychologists or for psychological insight runs about as high in contemporary society as does respect for Clinton among conservatives. Virtually everyone considers what psychologists say to be "psychobabble." Yet that does not stop pundits and commentators – who haven’t a shred of psychological expertise or background – from putting out pseudopsychological babble of their own when trying to explain the actions of the electorate or the moods of the country. Psychologists are such the Rodney Dangerfields of professionals that everyone with an idea thinks he is one!
Yet even the lowliest psychologist could have told pundits at the time – if only they had been asked – that people vote based upon factors other than "rational" ones. People have feelings coming from unconscious factors. And those feelings color their decisions, hence their affinities, proclivities, and votes. And when they vote, they vote for people who they identify with. Small wonder when we call these politicians our representatives in the government. People don’t just want politicians who represent or advance their issues . . . they want people who are like them psychologically, emotionally . . . or who at least give that appearance of being like them. So angry people will identify with angry candidates, and the fates of those candidates’ will become their own. People live vicariously through politicians and other people in power, not just through sports celebrities.
What the pundits don’t understand (see, we’re getting to that), first of all, is that life is too complex these days (and to some extent has always been) for ordinary folks to understand or follow all the issues that elections are about. Folks also know that their representatives in government will make decisions based upon information that they will never receive, nor would they want to hear it all. Politicians – like lawyers, doctors, accountants, plumbers, mechanics, computer techs, you name it – are paid to know things and to do something about things that people for the most part don’t want to know or hear about. Yet it is not that people don’t care what these people who act on their behalf do, any differently than their caring whether their accountant or mechanic acts on their behalf. Of course we want our mechanic to actually fix our car and we want our representative in government to fix whatever it is that they do, in the same way that we would if we knew all the facts!
But we don’t know all the facts. And the information about the issues is confusing. So folks chummy up to politicians who come across as being something like themselves, or more correctly, being something like their ideal of themselves when they are acting in their self-interest. They secretly hope, and expect, that folks they deem to be something like themselves will do what they would do, would decide what they would decide, in the same situation or given the same choices. Furthermore, people make these decisions of who is going to act and be like them (be, truly, their representative) not on rational grounds, predominantly, but based upon evidence such as the tone of a politician's rhetoric; the way she or he presents themselves, looks, and dresses; and the myriad of other things that one, without thinking, uses to "size up" another person.
Anyway, the pundits’ befuddlement on current events (and that is the main issue here) continued as Clinton received "the shortest honeymoon period in American history." The attack on Clinton began within weeks of his being sworn in and commentators called it – here it comes – unprecedented.
I won’t repeat the history that followed, which had to do with the unprecedented inquiry into the president’s affairs and the unprecedented attacks on him. We all know what led up to where we now are. My point has to do with the other unprecedented factor we have been hearing about this entire year. And this takes me back to my watching the reaction of the pundits and commentators to yesterday’s events. This unprecedented factor is the sixty-some percent approval rating that Clinton has enjoyed throughout this entire year, and even at the end of yesterday’s drumbeating by Republicans. The polls came in on CBS – after about seven hours of rhetorical pummeling of the public through the media about the supposedly strange timing of the attack – that seventy-four percent of the American public approved of the strike on Iraq versus only a measly fourteen percent that disapproved and that, most astonishingly (to the pundits), that sixty-two percent of the American public believed that the impeachment vote was not a factor in the timing of the strike versus only thirty percent who thought it was! This is the consistent pattern of two-to-one support for Clinton that we have seen throughout this entire year.
So let me say it: Americans, by a two-to-one margin identify with this president!
Which brings me to my second and most important issue in this musepaper: the issue of why folks identify with Bill Clinton.
I will not repeat my analyses of generational and psychological politics that are presented in other of my writings on this site (e.g., "Move Over, World War Two Generation, the Sixties Generation Has Arrived!"; "Drugs, Consciousnesses, and Generational Cultures"; and "What’s So Bad About Doing Good?"). Suffice it to say that I believe that Sixties-Generation President Bill Clinton has more support because more of his contemporaries – those of his age group and of his generation – are in the triumphant phases of their lives (i.e., in psychohistorical terms, the time in a psychoclass’s life when it takes over the reins of society); more of his contemporaries are in positions of power and influence or are simply alive and answering polls. Conversely, more of his staunchest opponents – who I have termed being of the World-War-Two Generation or being WWII-Generation–minded – have left the scene and as time goes on are leaving the scene more and more. Bluntly put, they are old and are dying off.
But I don’t need to repeat my analyses to make some obvious points about why folks would identify with a president who’s been hounded and humiliated from the get-go (yea, I know, I’m tipping my hand). And once again these points are obvious but overlooked only because pundits continually overlook the psychology of the folks in the society being polled. Like I said, the Rodney Dangerfield of professionals, psychologists, are not on any commentators’ or pundits’ (or, thankfully, Republican politicians’) payrolls. Nor do commentators look to the Rodney Dangerfield of sciences, psychology, for insight into events. So these most obvious of points are left unspoken.
To understand these points one only has to consider the ordinary experiences and feelings of someone living in these times (one only has to consider their "psychology"). And when we consider that, we come up with this: Folks today are overwhelmed with information; they are stressed out with complexities; they are confused about technological technicalities that swirl around them; they are tied up in "red tape"; they live a rat-race existence overburdened with things to do and responsibilities to attend to; and . . . in the midst of all this . . . they feel undefended, vulnerable, and unprotected in their private lives as their personal power is eroded by these events at the same time that they feel spied on and their privacy invaded by the same high tech environment that also seduces them. In psychological terms, they feel their "boundaries" to be collapsing; they feel unable to ward off both unwanted information coming in as well as to control the outflow of private information about themselves (and everyone who is human has some things that they want no one else to know). Feeling both seduced and invaded by technology, they long for a quiet place to just retreat and hide sometimes.
It’s Not At All About What He Did
With these feelings going on what do they see: A President of the United States, the supposedly most powerful man in the world, spied on, his privacy invaded, unable to ward off unprecedented humiliation and attacks on his character, and brought down to his knees, red-faced, shamed, and asking for forgiveness. Do you think this makes people feel any more secure about their own fates? Do you think that people who have thrust upon them the sight of the most powerful person being undefended from secret audiotaping and insidious prying into the most minute details of his life by an ominously powerful because limitlessly funded prosecutor sleep any better at night? They’ve even said it themselves: "I have things in my own life that I would not want anyone to know." "If an investigator with an unlimited bank account and all the time in the world were to look at me, or anyone, they would find something too"; and so on. It is only those who are so defended that they have repressed all the "negative" aspects of themselves and convinced themselves that they are "white as the driven snow," which is a major characteristic of the conservative personality type, who can feel comfortable around this kind of insidious prying into personal and intimate details of a person’s life. It’s not at all about what he did. That’s what Republicans and commentators don’t get. It’s about the fact that there seems to be absolutely nothing he can get away with (let alone get forgiveness for). And, yes, we do all have some thing(s) we want "to get away with" (or at least be forgiven for). Again, it is the human condition that we have flaws. That is why Clinton has received so much support from the clergy. They are aware of people’s "sins" and shortcomings.It is no surprise either that Clinton has received so much support from Blacks and minorities. For these groups understand what it is to be persecuted. As Blacks have put it in their comments about the Scandal, they have seen this pattern many times before, in their own lives and society. It is a pattern of a wealthy elite presuming guilt and then afterwards prying, with impunity, and throwing their weight around, with impunity, until something pops up for condemnation. It is bullying tactics, pure and simple. And Blacks, and women, are specially sensitive to this pattern. They know it when they see it.
Having looked at some of the reasons for Clinton’s support, how do we now perceive the unfolding of events? Color me gleeful as I watch the Republicans continue to embarrass themselves, walking in blindly and shooting wildly, targeting, unknowingly, not Clinton, but people’s senses of security and privacy . . . and thus afterwards wandering around confusedly like drugged chickens when "the people" do not support them in their aggressions. Republicans have gotten cocky because of the support they received during the Reagan era in their attacks against "liberals." They see this attack on Clinton as another sortie in that same aggression. They just don’t get it. It’s not liberals or even Clinton they are attacking and humiliating; it’s all of us. If the "most powerful man in the world" (at least psychologically we feel that his office represents this) is helpless and undefended, if the most powerful man is brought down and had his face rubbed in it, if the most powerful man is disrespected and shamed . . . well . . . then . . . we all are.
Related MusePaper: "Why We Needed Clinton to Lie"
Related MusePaper: "Move Over World War Two Generation, the Sixties Generation Has Arrived!"
Related MusePaper: "Drugs, Consciousnesses, and Generational Cultures"
Related MusePaper: "What's So Bad About Doing Good? An Essay Review of 'The Rainmaker'"
Comments? E-mail me by clicking on: mickel@primalspirit.com Mickel Adzema
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