BETWEEN Tuesday’s State of the Union address and Thursday’s Republican debate, and with the primary season around the corner, this week may well mark “peak spin” for the 2016 campaign. President Obama is making the case for his legacy, congressional Republicans are making the case against it, the candidates are puffing themselves up and tearing one another down, and the hired opinion mongers are blanketing us with spin of their own.
For many, this blizzard of January spin prompts a yearning for a more authentic politics, free of Washington cant. Yet all the distortion involved in modern spin, the thrust and parry of competing arguments are vital to democracy, and a big part of what gets us interested and engaged in the first place.
It’s worth recalling that the term “spin” is relatively new. Back in 1960, when the Kennedy-Nixon debates first aired, the campaigns didn’t trot out any smooth-talking spokesmen afterward to explain why their man had won. But in the years that followed — the era of Lyndon B. Johnson’s “credibility gap” — the press began to chafe at passively relaying the president’s messages. Journalists began insisting on offering readers and viewers more analysis, to the frustration of presidents like Richard M. Nixon who preferred to control the narrative.
Politicians learned that they had to get their own surrogates on the air, be they partisan journalists, hired flacks or abject toadies. With the Ford-Carter debates in 1976, the networks began showcasing these handpicked spokesmen. “It’s a clear-cut victory for the president,” Ron Nessen, Gerald Ford’s press secretary, told an NBC reporter after one debate. Robert S. Strauss, the Democratic Party chairman, called the same event “a good night for the American people and a great night for Jimmy Carter.” No one was fooled.
In 1984, the artificiality of these efforts had grown so transparent that the hired talkers were called “spin doctors.” By 1988 these cheerleaders were so numerous that journalists christened the corridor where they congregated Spin Alley (later upgraded to the Spin Room). One surrogate that fall for the Democratic nominee, Michael S. Dukakis, was a vanquished rival from the spring primaries; after a debate at the University of California, Los Angeles, Student Union, he gamely embraced his thankless sales job with uncommon zeal (or admirable self-awareness), donning a white hospital coat and a name tag to proclaim himself “Senator Albert Gore Jr.: Spin Doctor.”
The concept of spin quickly became a part of the culture. The next years produced the rock band the Spin Doctors, the political sitcom “Spin City” and the dryly comic documentary “Spin,” assembled from satellite feeds that captured politicians behind the scenes, unguarded, honing their messages for public consumption.
The word “spin” connotes something a little different from older names for persuasive speech. In the early 20th century, the term of choice, “propaganda,” implied a passive citizenry manipulated by powerful politicians. In the 1950s and 1960s, “news management,” an ungainly shard of Cold War bureaucratese, evoked presidents tightly controlling the spigot of information.
Spin, on the other hand, has an impish quality; it doesn’t take itself too seriously. Spin winks at its own truth stretching. It signals to the journalists who report it and the audiences who consume it that they’re getting a partial, even insincere, version of events. But it also suggests that this grazing of the truth is no grounds for alarm, because, after all, politics has never been the realm of dispassionate truth-telling.
The fact is, many of us enjoy the post-debate commentary. Confident that we can see through self-serving claims of the hacks and flacks, we question them, and even applaud those who voice our own sentiments. When politicians we like are foundering, we want them to be more skilled and aggressive with their spin, not less.
The whirlwind of spin this week also shows that, in a democracy, spin is almost always met with abundant counterspin. A lot of it may be vacuous, but we’re not — despite our frustrations — in a totalitarian society of Orwellian Newspeak. When the president makes a glib argument, a host of conservative tweeters are ready to pounce; when the G.O.P. candidates harrumph windily, liberal critics delight in highlighting their evasions. Citizens intuitively grasp that we’re not helpless dupes in the face of clever arguments or high-tech ads, though we may suspect our neighbors are.
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In a time of cynicism, audiences need to find ways to take pleasure in politics. Democracy requires objective information for voters to make informed judgments. But it also needs lively argument. Spin, even when we’re fully aware of its partisan nature and strategic purposes, leads us to argue and think about what’s at stake in our politics.
The theatricality and combativeness on display in the Spin Room — and the animated chatter ricocheting across the TV studios and Twitter feeds — are more likely to pique citizens’ political interest than are antiseptic or Olympian declarations that purport to tell us all we need to know.
Instead of trying to banish spin from the kingdom of politics, we’d be better off nurturing in ourselves and our neighbors the critical sense that allows us to question and evaluate spin — and maybe, just once in a while, to know when to enjoy it.
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