Planting questions

The unfolding news about the planting of questions by HRC -- I guess we are to call her "Hilary" now -- or her campaign has two interesting aspects:

First, we want to believe that there is in fact a material and philosophical difference between the dems and the Bush administration. Staging town hall meetings, holding fake press conferences, planting reporters and planting questions: these are the theatrical tools of the Bush administration. Dems, we believe, have a greater authenticity; their convictions are sincere and even pure; they mean well; they're earnest; and, going back a few decades, they want to change the world for good, etc. We have to believe Dems would never succumb to the recent tactics of the right. We love a show much as anyone or any political party -- Clinton was nothing if not good political theater and of course there is Obama '04 -- but these performances are real, staged, perhaps in the case of the latter, but didn't they somehow reflect a core integrity and sense of conviction? Oratory and rhetoric, in our credo, always works to the good, for the greater good. (My pronoun shifts from "they" to "we" reflects an ambivalence of identification of course.) Dems put on a show but our shows are authentic. Or at least this is what we want to believe, a belief that these recent revelations puncture. That's why it's not interesting to protest the coverage by saying, 'after Jeff Gannon, you expect us to get upset about staged questions'? The shock is that perhaps there is in the end no difference between the sides: we're not as pure as we would like to think.

Second, the planted questions in the case of this particular campaign -- Hilary's instead of Obama's or another's -- does reinforce the contrast between Hilary and Bill and is in fact doing her no favors. We're already told she's stiff, essentially wooden; we know she's moralizing from her past alignments with Lieberman et al on the issue of video games and violence; and the contrast between her and Bill in dual appearances is quite dramatic. (Note the Coretta Scott King funeral.) If she has to have questions planted, her being is going to seem all the more false because of the imaginary of Bill and crowds that we all seem to have. I would think that her campaign in particular would go out of its way to make her seriousness into a virtue and would explicitly avoid the faux folksiness that these questions in particular tried to convey.