Pwn'd by Technology!

Seventy-six years before Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th president of the United States, Americans elected a man who also happened to be a member of a historically marginalized group.  Like Obama, Franklin Delano Roosevelt came into office at a time of economic desperation and today he is regarded as one of the greatest presidents in history for the way he managed to completely reverse the economic tides.  One thing that makes Roosevelt’s achievement particularly impressive to me is the fact that his did it all while completely paralyzed from the waste down.

However, FDR enjoyed one advantage that today’s politicians don’t.  At the time of his presidential campaign, televisions were unheard of in virtually all American households and the internet was decades away from being invented.  Instead, citizens accessed information about their politicians through radio and newspapers.  This allowed FDR to effectively conceal the extent of his disability.  Careful to maintain his image as a strong and robust leader, during speeches and other public appearances FDR would prop himself up to a standing position at the podium using heavy leg braces.  These braces also allowed him to walk for several paces with the aid of a cane, so that the public never saw him in the wheelchair he relied on as his primary means of locomotion.

Unfortunately for some politicians, the technological landscape has changed considerably since then.  The current context, in which a candidate can scarcely hide the identity of his mistress, is a far cry from the relative privacy enjoyed by the politicos of the 1930’s.  It used to be the case that when addressing small gatherings such as fundraising dinners, a politician could tailor his or her positions on the issues or exaggerate certain aspects of his or her resume to maximize traction with a particular audience.  And if someone came forward with a conflicting account, even if it was a reputable journalist, the politician could always maintain plausible deniability.  But in the age of cellphone cameras and youtube, it seems that those day are squarely behind us.  Nowadays these technologies act like a spotlight illuminating the lies and hypocrisy of all those who seek to mislead to public.

Just ask Connecticut state attorney general and Democratic senate candidate Richard Blumenthal.  During his tenure as AG, Blumenthal was seen as a vocal advocate for veterans issues.  Blumenthal often touted the fact that he had volunteered to serve in the Marine Corp Reserves during the Vietnam war, but he was usually careful to point out that he had never actually been deployed to Vietnam.  However, last week the New York Times published a grainy video of Blumenthal telling an audience of supporters that he had “served in Vietnam.”  The article that accompanied the video accused Blumenthal of repeatedly and intentionally misrepresenting his record as a soldier.  Since then his campaign has been in damage control mode trying to clean up the political fallout that has resulted from the report.

In a slightly more embarrassing example, last Friday Indiana congressman Mark Souder was forced to resign after it was discovered that he had been having an affair with one of his female staffers.  The kicker is that Souder is a right wing conservative and a proponent of abstinence-only education.  So shortly after news of the scandal broke, this video uploaded to youtube.  The video shows Souder on what appears to be a public access television show, extolling the virtues of abstinence-only to the same woman with whom he was presently having an affair.

In yet another example of youtube pwnage, just this week Vaughn Ward, a Republican candidate for Idaho’s 1st congressional seat, found himself at the centre of this campaign season’s most recent controversy.  Some Tea Party activists, apparently concerned that Ward wasn’t conservative enough, put together this video, which demonstrates conclusively that he lifted entire passages of his campaign launch speech from the famous speech given by Barack Obama at the 2004 Democratic convention.  Ward went on to lose the primary to his main Republican challenger Raul Labrador.

But by far, this year’s (and possibly this decade’s) most entertaining example of a public figure getting exposed is that of gay conversion advocate, George Alan Rekers.  Although not technically a politician, Rekers was certainly a prominent public figure and political actor as a founding board member of James Dobson’s Family Research Council, an ultra conservative Christian lobby group.  That’s why his followers were so shocked and his detractors were so delighted when a vigilant traveler snapped this photo of Rekers at the airport in Miami with a male escort he hired from the website rentboy.com to accompany him on a 10-day vacation to Europe.  Although Rekers admitted to having connected with his male companion through the rentboy.com website, he initially tried to explain the photo by saying that he had hired the young man to help carry his luggage since he was recovering from major surgery at the time of the trip.  Rekers further claimed that he had no idea that his travelling partner was a male escort.  However, even if one were so naïve as to think this explanation was plausible, a quick glance at the rentboy website and the profile of the escort Rekers ended up hiring, shows that there was no mistaking what kind of services were being offered.  As a result of the scandal, Rekers was ultimately forced to resign from his post at the Family Research Council

These instances of public figures being caught red-handed are not unique to this election season.  In an oldie-but-goody (and one of my personal favourites), during her 2008 bid to earn the Democratic nomination for the presidency, Hillary Clinton made a miscalculation that I’m sure she regrets to this day.  The race between Clinton and Obama was extremely intense and Clinton was using her foreign policy experience to differentiate herself from her relatively inexperienced rival.  It was with this backdrop that, during a routine campaign speech, Clinton recounted the story of her 1996 visit to war-torn Bosnia as the First Lady.  For no apparent reason, Clinton fabricated almost every detail about her arrival in Bosnia, claiming that her plane had landed under sniper fire and that she and her entourage were forced to skip their scheduled greeting ceremony and run with their heads down to get from the plane to the safety of their vehicles.  She even claimed that the airplane had to perform an evasive maneuver while landing to avoid being shot down.

Unfortunately for Clinton, CBS had covered that trip in 1996 and they quickly dug up the footage which showed that Clinton’s version of events was pure fantasy.  Not only was there no sniper fire, but the video showed the then-First Lady and her teenaged daughter Chelsea walking cheerfully along the tarmac toward the greeting ceremony, which took place as planned.  When challenged about the veracity of her claims, Clinton doubled down on her lies and insisted that what she said was true.  It wasn’t until several days later when the youtube clip of what actually happened went viral and had been viewed by hundreds of thousands of people, that Clinton issued a half-hearted confession in which she claimed to have “misspoken.”  But the damage was done and the incident provided further evidence that Clinton’s long-standing aversion to the truth was indeed pathological.

Either because of their own unchecked hubris, or their woeful failure to grasp the new technological reality, politicians continue to believe they can get away with these blatant distortions.  These examples should serve as lessons that hammer home the fact that technology has permanently altered the electoral landscape they must now navigate.  In my opinion not all politicians should fear these changes.  Those who still retain some modicum of residual integrity form their pre-public lives should welcome these new media that allow the electorate to get a more complete picture of the candidates they’re putting into office.

In the same way that technology can be good for the voters, it can also be good for the candidates.  For example, the internet was instrumental in propelling Obama to the presidency, as he used a technically-savvy yet grassroots approach to reach out to a young and energized block of supporters.  This is all despite that fact that he had to weather a few storms of his own due to leaked recordings and viral video.  I guess the lesson to be gleaned from this is that technology giveth and technology taketh away.