Speaking the Truth to Whom, Exactly?

Recently two statements—one political and the other commercial—achieved instant notoriety in the US. Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Inc, said “Phones aren’t perfect.” Robert Gibbs, Press Secretary to President Obama, said that “There’s no doubt that enough seats are in play [in the House of Representatives] that could cause Republicans to gain control.”

Reactions against these comments spanned the spectrum. Democrats were at least as outraged by Gibbs as were Republicans; quite a few Apple fans as well as competitors slammed Jobs for being disingenuous.

Why the outrage? Both remarks attempt to state facts. And neither was self-evidently “a slip of the tongue,” as the New York Times later commented in a forgiving way about Gibbs.

But both violated what has unfortunately become almost a fundamental premise of American public life: Only at your peril do you say anything you are not expected to say. The most important ingredient in that equation is 'who you are', not the truth (or for that matter the falsehood) of the statement you just made. Everyone knows perfectly well that mobile phones are not perfect. What matters is that Steve Jobs said it. And anyone who reads public opinion polls knows that the Democrats are at risk of losing control of Congress in November. What matters is that President Obama's spokesperson said it out loud.

The tsunami is coming. Cynicism about public rhetoric is as old as politics, but never out of date. In America the intensity of cynicism goes up dramatically as we approach the climax of an electoral cycle. And never more so than at present, for two interconnected reasons.

One is simply the extraordinary level of political polarisation that characterises the American public. Wishful thinkers saw in the 2008 election visions of an epochal re-alignment toward the Democratic party and particularly its progressive-liberal wing, along with a vast repudiation of its opposite on the right wing of the Republican party. It was just another fantasy, another 'end of history' myth. The evidence - even the voting data from the election itself - demonstrates clearly the fantastical nature of this view. The American electorate is split down the middle and remains so. Barack Obama decisively beat John McCain because he won a strong majority among independents - the swing voters who make up at most, depending on how you count, 10 per cent of the US electorate. Those swing voters are now abandoning Obama (at least that is what public opinion polls currently suggest). If they do so, the majority goes right back to the Republicans.

There's been no 'permanent' re-alignment or anything close to that in American politics. Obama's victory, and his subsequent legislative and policy successes (particularly in healthcare and just this week on financial reform, imperfect as both these bills are) have only turned up the heat of dissent in the opposition. In 2008, the Democrats were angry and motivated. In 2010, the Republicans are just as angry and nearly as motivated.

The second is the relentless pressure of the 24/7 news cycle that is now manifested in audio, video, and anyone's commentary. It's hard to overstate the intensity of exposure that the Internet has brought to US electoral politics. Every public statement can be and often is transmitted, re-transmitted, dissected, tweeted, re-tweeted, passed on via YouTube videos, analysed for verbal inflection, facial tics, a hint of a smile or a look downwards toward someone in the audience. Anything can matter, and almost anything does at one time or another. And if a public figure makes a 'mistake', it's there forever, for anyone to see.

This kind of radical transparency is unforgiving. It's not unreasonable to conclude that it's generally safest to say nothing, and to say it in a bland and expressionless way. Now the dilemma: Should a public figure ever go beyond that, and state a fact that everyone already knows to be true? It's the very ordinary-ness of the Jobs and Gibbs incidents that makes the point. We come perilously close to a place where sincerity is insincerity in our national discourse, and (because role-play is becoming everything) vice versa, as well. This can't be a good thing for democracy, but no one right now knows precisely how to avoid the drift in that direction.

Here are several truths that no public figure up for election in the United States will say out loud - at least not intentionally - over the next few months:

- barring a massive (and unpredictable, but always possible) economic surprise on the upside, the unemployment rate in America is going to stay uncomfortably high for several more years at best no matter what government does.

- no one really knows at what point America's creditors will begin to seriously lose confidence in dollar assets and demand much higher interest rates on US debt, but it could happen on any given day, and when it does, no one will be surprised but lots of people and companies will be hurt.

- the war in Afghanistan is being lost, perhaps rapidly and perhaps slowly. Unless something radically changes, the trajectory for America in Afghanistan is pointing one way: Towards defeat. The real uncertainty lies in how the rest of the world interprets and responds to that.

- much of the goodwill and hope for 'change' that the 2008 Presidential election brought to America's presence in the world has corroded away, and is not amenable to resurrection through the power of words and speeches no matter how emotionally compelling.

We say these things out loud here not because we enjoy the experience of pessimism. Rather, because each represents a fundamental 'problem' that political actors have to try to solve, or more realistically, confront and manage. But how can they do that if public opinion won't permit them even to acknowledge (in public) the existence of the challenge in its real form? We risk putting ourselves back in a place where politicians are forced, ironically, into private 'smoke-filled backrooms' where they have the 'real' conversations about what they are facing and are going to do -- and then come out with blandly reassuring public statements meant to silence or at least cover up a series of inconvenient truths.

We're sure that's not what the designers of American representative government had in mind. We don't think democracies do well by hiding from real controversy and disagreement. But when the possibility of disagreement and debate deteriorates into vehement blame-games where the goal is to score points not learn more about solving problems, the results are predictably nasty. There was a time when it was defensible and even slightly humorous to quote Winston Churchill, who quipped that democracy was the worst form of government he knew, except for all the others. That takes too much responsibility off the backs of politicians in democracies to do better. And at least during electoral season in America, it's not even remotely funny.

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