You Don't Know Jack
[2008-05-18 07:30]

On The Huffington Post, Erica Jong made the following statement:

The truth is we know about [Clinton] -- and we know very little about Obama.

This is an axiom that I've heard in the news media before: that Obama has a big question mark over his head whereas the other candidates do not. However, "the truth is" that notion is false.

While it might be true that people don't know much about Obama, what isn't true is that everyone knows everything about Hillary Clinton and John McCain.

To disprove something claimed to be universally true, all one has to do is provide an example where it is not true. So, to disprove this statement by Jong and others, let me introduce that example: me.

I've not been politically active for very long and really didn't pay much attention to politics until 2004 or so. I ignored much of the hoopla regarding the Clinton controversies (such as Whitewater), and similarly ignored Hillary Clinton's campaign for (and eventual election as) senator. So I really do not know that much about Hillary.

Until recently, I certainly didn't know about her stint in a radical law firm, or that she's a Methodist (at least, as far as I know she's a Methodist; I'll take her at her word), and I don't know how she feels about President Bill Clinton's commuting the sentences of two members of the Weather Underground (and, apparently, we'll never know). None of these things are really that big of a deal to me, but they disprove the notion that I know Hillary.

Also, people in the media often characterize Hillary Clinton as being very guarded. Some pundit once said that you can know everything Hillary says about an issue, know where she stands and her arguments for/against it, but you'll never know how she came to that decision. That doesn't sound like someone that we all know about. Even if most people don't agree with that characterization of Hillary, there is at least one person in the world who does: the person who said it (unfortunately, I don't remember who it was).

Moreover, there are a lot of people who are of voting age now who were not when Bill Clinton was president, or when Hillary Clinton ran for the US Senate. Someone who is 18 years old now would have been around 11 years old during Hillary's bid for senator, and 3 years old when Bill Clinton became president. In light of this, I think there are many people who do not know Hillary as well as the pundits think we do or think we should.

The same goes for John McCain. What do we really know of him? What we know tends to be the narrative that the news media relays to us: he's a war hero, he was a Prisoner of War for many years, he's a maverick, and so on. But how much of that is true, how much is false, and how much has been romanticized for mass consumption?

In light of the apparent changes in McCain's political views, how much of what we knew of McCain before was real? Did McCain really believe those things or did he back them because he likes to be a maverick? If he really did believe them, why has he changed his views now?

Look at something as simple as his opinion of Jerry Falwell. At one point, McCain expressed Falwell as being an "agent of intolerance", but now he says he no longer believes this. As far as I know, Falwell never changed his intolerant views (such as claiming that everyone "who have tried to secularize America"* helped to make the 9/11 terrorist attack happen), so why has McCain changed his opinion?

[* oddly, the separation of church and state links back to Thomas Jefferson, so... Jerry Falwell hated Thomas Jefferson. There, I said it.]

So, either John McCain has changed his opinion of Jerry Falwell (which means McCain is no longer the person we once knew or thought we knew), or he hasn't changed his opinion and lied about thinking Falwell was not an agent of intolerance (which means we can't believe what he's saying), or he hasn't changed his opinion because he never really did think Falwell was an agent of intolerance (which means he never was that guy the news media kept saying he was). All of these cases raise the question of what do we really know about McCain?

So, Obama doesn't own a monopoly on the question mark.

Oh, and Erica Jong's blurb on the Huffington Post is amazingly condescending, intolerant and elitist (apparently, only feminists of a certain age are capable of making sound, pragmatic decisions).