Friday, March 18, 2016

FOR JOE KLEIN, LOVE (OF "AUTHENTICITY") IS BLIND

Joe Klein has written a column titled "To Take Out Trump, Hillary Clinton Must First Dispense With Her Inner Politician." I'm not going to critique the column in detail, though I'll give you the short version: Klein is "not at all certain that Clinton can beat Trump," mainly because Trump is, in Klein's words, "free-form and anarchic and silly and devastating," and Hillary is icky and phony and washed up. (Those aren't Klein's exact words, but I assure you I'm not distorting what he wrote in any way.)

As you know if you've read him over the years, Klein is a big fan of "authenticity." Although the word never appears in this column, it's clear that he thinks Hillary Clinton is inauthentic, while other 2016 candidates are less canned, more natural, less in thrall to obsolete political tropes. Klein writes:
Indeed, [Clinton's] real problem is that she’s too much of a politician. She still speaks like politicians did 20 years ago, when her husband was President. This year, the candidates who have seemed the most appealing -- Trump, Sanders, John Kasich -- don’t use the oratorical switchbacks that have been beaten to death since John F. Kennedy: “We need a uniter, not a divider.”
This is hilarious because Kasich, at least, uses that "uniter/divider" line all the time. In fact, last March, when he hadn't announced for president yet, this was the online headline for a Greta Van Susteren interview of Kasich:



Here's the clip. Kasich starts talking about the importance of "uniters" at about 3:25:



Here's a December 1 AP story about a Kasich campaign trip to Tennessee:
Kasich has been a vocal critic of Donald Trump, who has drawn thousands of supporters to campaign rallies in Knoxville, Nashville and Franklin this year.

"This is all about having a uniter and not a divider," Kasich said.
Here's an Ohio story from late December, in which Kasich talks about the qualities a Republican presidential nominee should have:
"I just hoping as we go forward he's going to be a unifier. Because I'm going to tell ya, you can't win the White House without winning Ohio," Kasich Says. "If we have a candidate that comes into Ohio who's a divider, no chance they're going to win it. People in Ohio want someone who's going to look at problems and solve them."
And here's something Kasich said in an interview with an Ohio TV station earlier this week:
We're rising all over the country. People are finally starting to hear me. And people don't want a yeller or a screamer or a divider. They want somebody who has a record and a vision to be able to help fix the problems in this country.
And here's are a couple of Kasich campaign tweets:





Klein is so blinded by his love for political "authenticity," which he and his fellow insider journalists ascribe to John Kasich, that he praises Kasich for avoiding a cliché Kasich actually uses repeatedly. But hey, why let the facts get in the way of a gut feeling?
Posted by Steve M. at 2:14 PM 0 Comments
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