Ron Klain: The Last Fixer : Dan Henninger
http://online.wsj.com/articles/dan-henningerron-klain-the-last-fixer-1414018077
The political spin doctors can no longer compete with a simple set of facts.
In “Pulp Fiction,” a movie about crime, there is a character named The Wolf. The Wolf is known as a “cleaner.” His line of work is cleaning up the mess made by incompetent criminals. As played by Harvey Keitel, the cleaner is a man of focus, competence and authority. I thought of the cleaner when President Obama called in Ron Klain.
Mr. Obama said Mr. Klain would be the Ebola czar. But the rest of the Beltway political community said he was something else. Some said Mr. Klain was a famous political operative. Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, called him an “implementation expert.” Those who have been around politics too long said Mr. Klain was a fixer.
Political fixer is not an entirely dishonorable profession. Presidents, governors, mayors—nearly all at some point need someone who can hose down the blood, do the laundry and get the boys back to doing business as usual.
Or used to.
Ron Klain may be the last fixer.
No more revered idea exists in politics than “message control.” A political idea is brought forth, and its originators are expected to control how the public thinks about that idea. This half-fake, half-real protocol has worked well. Then came ObamaCare.
A vast chasm opened in 2010 between ObamaCare the Promise and ObamaCare the Program. More interesting was how long team Obama stuck with the playbook for message control. As the Affordable Care Act’s rollout imploded in slow motion, Kathleen Sebelius , Jay Carney and Nancy Pelosi stood amid the rubble (“glitches”) and said it was all going really quite well.
President Obama in September contributed his own close harmony: “Most of the stories you’ll hear about how ObamaCare just can’t work is just not based on facts. Every time they have predicted something not working, it’s worked.”
A mere four years ago, there was no reason for the Obama operatives to believe political spin wouldn’t succeed. It had for decades.
Spin as a formal term of the political arts was born in the Reagan-Mondale presidential debates of 1984. After the debate, reporters gathered in what came to be called the spin room, where politically articulate spokesmen, or “spin doctors,” would “clarify” what the candidates had said.
Originally, the press ridiculed spin as obvious propaganda. But over the years, somehow, the press came to rely on nameless people, such as Ron Klain, to explain the meaning of political events. “What’s the spin on this?” essentially meant, how are we supposed to think about it? The media would transcribe and transmit the official “narrative,” which more or less became what most of the public believed.
Until one day the public stopped believing that Washington was the Land of Oz.
The force now dooming the ability of fixers like Mr. Klain to succeed at bending reality is the Web.
The political Web is today a nonstop exercise in skepticism and cynicism. True, on the outskirts of the political Web lie the fever swamps. But compulsive Web skepticism about official narratives seems to be reviving the get-the-story instincts of traditional reporting, or what used to be known as assembling a simple set of facts.
The original Ebola story lines from the White House, the CDC and the hospital treating Thomas Duncan in Dallas collapsed almost immediately. Local newspapers documented the daily failure of the software behind the ObamaCare insurance exchanges. Veterans Affairs hospitals were not admitting sick patients on time. The reported breakdowns of Secret Service discipline turned the testimony of its director into a travesty of failed spin.
Political and ideological spin still flows like the Big Muddy through the media. And campaign teams will toss up more candidate fantasies, as in 2008. But manipulated messaging is losing potency. Incumbent Senate Democrats this fall dialed in the six-year-old GOP “war on women.” That strategy is buckling beneath the weight of heavy, unspinnable reality: ISIS, Ukraine, economic angst, the assault on Ottawa, Ebola.
Thus we return to Ron Klain, the Democratic Op.
Whatever his past political jobs as chief of staff for Janet Reno, Al Gore and Joe Biden , and most recently the Obama Solyndra handler, Mr. Klain knows his party has presided over a historic collapse in the voting public’s belief in the competence of government.
This column has noted previously that Mr. Klain preceded Barack Obama by several years at Harvard Law School, where Mr. Klain won a prize for having his class’s highest grade average. In a prescient remark to the New York Times in early 2007 about Mr. Obama’s reputation at Harvard, Mr. Klain said, “The interesting caveat is, that is a style of leadership more effective running a law review than running a country.”
Ron Klain, who reported for duty Wednesday, is the first adult hire of the second Obama term. Once the results of the midterm elections wash over the White House, Mr. Klain may have enough political standing to argue, starting with Ebola, that what’s needed is not another fix, but the reality of performance.
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