That Old Flack Magic

A few weeks ago, The Washington Post carried a front-page article that filled me with weariness and despair. It ran under the headline eric cantor attempts to remake the house gop brand, and his own. Eric Cantor is the House majority leader. The story reported, “In recent days, Cantor (Va.) has begun laying out a far more centrist agenda. . . . Putting aside his past emphasis on broad cuts to federal programs, he has become an advocate for research on pediatric cancer [and] has begun talking about urban poverty . . . and has sought alliances with African American lawmakers, traveling to Mississippi to appear at a civil rights event and honor Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.).”

I mean, what’s the point? Nobody needs an Eric Cantor who loves little children and honors civil-rights heroes. Cantor’s job is to scare the children. Several children of my acquaintance claim to have gone trick-or-treating a few years ago costumed as Cantor, who was the scariest character they could think of. At the time, nobody knew from Darrell Issa or Ted Cruz.

The conservative journalist Tom Bethell used to call this sort of thing “strange new respect.” A former ideological firebrand starts talking moderation and reason and The Washington Post or The New York Times runs an article declaring that a “strange new respect” for this person is growing around town. Next thing you know, he’s being invited to the Brookings Institution to deliver one of its High Tea series of late-afternoon talks, on “Budgetary Realism: The Prospects for Common Sense.”

Bethell attributed “strange new respect” to a liberal bias in the media. I think it has more to do with a universal principle of journalism: the story has to change. How often can you write “Cantor is a jerk” (or, if you are a reporter, who is supposed to be objective, “Cantor is a jerk, sources say”) before someone writes “Cantor not a jerk” (or “Cantor not a jerk, sources say”)?

“Branding” as a general term for the way you present yourself to the world has become a popular usage. It implies that, if people see you for what you really are, that’s a failure on your part. Success is when people see you as what you wish you were. Or as what you need to be, or seem to be, or need to seem to be, to suit the exigencies of the moment.

The concept of “branding” accurately captures the artificiality and self-consciousness of the process. It doesn’t have to be that way. There is such a thing as a genuine conversion. Saint Paul (no relation to the Republican senator from Kentucky) wasn’t rebranding himself on the road to Damascus. From a branding point of view, sincerity of this sort may not be a good thing. A politician who actually changes his mind is unreliable. What if he changes it again?

If Eric Cantor’s newfound interest in pediatric cancer lasts for more than, say, two years—and if he’s willing to back it up with money—then the cynics will owe him an apology. Rebranding itself is widely tolerated, but the word “rebranding” is still something a politician would not choose to have attached to his name on the front page of the paper. Bad for the brand.

Of course Washington and the media didn’t invent branding or rebranding. The term is imported from the commercial world, where there is nothing wrong or inauthentic about it. In developing a commercial product, entrepreneurs are likely to start with the branding and reverse-engineer back to the actual product. In the case of certain luxury goods, the brand is the product. Parfum Eau de Moola sells for mucho moola because it’s Eau de Moola, not because it’s parfum.

As The Washington Post would have it, Cantor isn’t exposing himself as a phony when he suddenly starts talking like the Make-a-Wish Foundation. Not at all: he’s “rebranding.” You might think that Cantor’s sudden passion for John Lewis, the saint-like Democratic congressman and civil-rights hero, would stir just a bit of skepticism, and adding pediatric cancer to the mix would push Cantor beyond the range of rebranding and into territory better known as “faking,” or even “lying.” But no. “Rebranding” it is.

Cantor isn’t the only Republican bullyboy who is rebranding. Jonathan Chait, the politics blogger for New York magazine, reported recently that Paul Ryan is rebranding, too. Ryan is chairman of the House Budget Committee (and was the Republican vice-presidential candidate on the Mitt Romney ticket in 2012). According to Chait, “Paul Ryan’s flamboyantly low-key campaign to rebrand himself from an Ayn Rand miser to Jack Kemp-esque lover of the poor” will not work, because the budget numbers don’t add up. Ah, yes. The obstacle Ryan has encountered sometimes goes by the name “reality.” Reality is the enemy of branding and rebranding because it limits their reach. But not by much.

(“It’s so easy, darling,” says Web philosopher Arianna Huffington, in a quote I just made up. “You just say you’re on the right for a while, and then when that gets too boring you just disappear, come back, and announce that Americans are sick of partisan bickering. Then you turn left for a week or two; then it’s back to moderation. You can do it again and again. They always believe you. I’m flipping again next week. Would you like to come along? We can have dinner after with some friends. Have you met Vladimir Putin? No? Darling, you must, you must. He’s charming. I’ll arrange it. Where is my cell phone?”)

Congress, as we know, is held in little esteem, with poll numbers so low they’ve moved into negative figures. By my calculation, Cantor, for example, scores a minus 23, which means that more voters dislike him than there are voters. (Can that be right? Well. Something like that.) The question is: How does he—how do all the politicians whom voters claim to dislike so much—manage to get re-elected time after time? The conventional explanation is that, while people dislike Congress as a whole and politicians in general, they like their own representatives because they bring home the bacon, or the pork.

There’s another explanation, though, contained in the punch line of that famous joke about an unappealing politician: you should see his constituents. Politicians lie because the voters like being lied to. Or, at least, they like the lies more than they would like the truth. There’s nothing in it for anyone to have an honest debate. That would be a debate where you could not carry on about out-of-control government spending and yet, by the way, favor more money for pediatric-cancer research. And it would be a debate that would exclude phony issues, where the dishonesty is the pretense that the supposed issue matters at all.

In the 2010 election, Republicans tried to make an issue of the fact that Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid lived in a fancy apartment building in Washington. From this they wove video fantasies about wild parties. The parties were imaginary, but the core charge was factually correct. Reid owned an apartment in a very nice building. (Confession: I live there, too, though if there are wild parties, I’ve never been invited.) You might call this “attack branding.” What made it sublime was that it took only 10 minutes of research to determine that Republican senators—including Reid’s counterpart across the aisle, Mitch McConnell—maintain grander domestic establishments in Washington than Reid. (Why be a Republican if you have to live in a small one-bedroom apartment?)

It apparently hadn’t occurred to anybody to check where Reid’s counterparts lived before using this information against him. That reveals an indifference to the truth that makes mere lying pale in comparison.

The Washington establishment of lawyers, lobbyists, journalists, campaign consultants, and politicians doesn’t merely tolerate rebranding. It demands rebranding. In fact, its members practice it themselves. The professionalization of politics—with lavishly paid consultants replacing volunteers, and corporations or even foreign countries creating huge Potemkin villages of alleged popular concern over their narrow legislative agendas—creates professional standards. By the professional standards of Washington, successful “rebranding” is a good thing. It shows professionalism. And the proper response to “But what you say now goes completely against what you were saying last Thursday” is “Thank you.”