<u+2018>a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.<u+201d> so wrote ralph waldo emerson in his essay <u+201c>self-reliance.<u+201d> since emerson himself was perhaps the least consistent of writers, often saying one thing in one place and its opposite in another, the remark bears the unmistakable stamp of self-justification. i haven<u+2019>t for a long while wandered through the journals, letters, sermons and other writing of this most overrated of american scribblers, but i shouldn<u+2019>t be in the least surprised to discover that somewhere emerson also wrote that consistency is the hallmark of large minds. i have been thinking of that emerson sentence a fair amount of late when watching television political reporters, anchors, commentators<u+2014>chuck todd, bret baier, john dickerson and others<u+2014>interview politicians, their managers and so-called party strategists. increasingly these interviews center on the search for inconsistencies (more precisely, contradictions). how do the politicians<u+2019> current views compare with the views they held earlier in their careers? or, in the case of our current presidential candidates, the views they held as recently as two or three days ago? by this ploy, television reporters attempt to demonstrate that politicians, like rubber sandals, flip-flop. but to what avail? the law of contradiction, after all, is not enforceable; if it were the jails would overflow. in the instances of donald trump and hillary clinton, it is scarcely surprising that contradictions pop up with the regularity of fleas on a junkyard dog. both are what i should call kentucky-windage politicians: without genuine beliefs, each always checks which way the wind<u+2014>that is, voter sentiment<u+2014>is blowing before firing away. it is naive to expect consistency from politicians, to say nothing of devotion to principles, and more than naive to think that catching their contradictions will slow them down in any significant way. with votes at stake, with polls changing almost hourly, it is only natural that politicians and their close supporters provide a nearly endless stream of pronunciamento s rife with contradictions. what does a reporter gain in confronting politicians with their inconsistencies? pointing out to a politician that he claimed to be for this or that program in 2009 and now he claims to be against it is roughly as telling a criticism as informing a streetwalker that her hem is perhaps a touch too high. do political commentators truly expect politicians, when confronted with evidence of their contradictions, to respond, <u+201c>you<u+2019>re right. you know, i never thought of that.<u+201d> i<u+2019>ve long held that the world<u+2019>s dumbest question, asked repeatedly by female reporters on the sidelines after sporting events, is <u+201c>what was on your mind when . . . [fill in the event]?<u+201d> a truthful answer is probably that the athlete knew once the game ended he would have to face the inanity of the question of what was on his mind and have an answer ready. catching out a politician in a contradiction may be an even more empty exercise. politicians never admit it. instead, they waffle, they wobble, they claim to have been misunderstood, they bob and weave and artfully dodge the charge. donald trump and the dreary birther question is a case in point. yes, the trump camp avers, he may have doubted barack obama <u+2019>s birth. but they add that the lubricious sidney blumenthal started the rumor that the president wasn<u+2019>t born in this country when mrs. clinton ran against mr. obama in 2008. even if politicians could be got to admit the contradictory nature of their current with their former views, would it really matter? who knows: in their defense they might even cite the stale emerson quotation. rather than cite contradictions, which abound without ultimate significance, television reporters would be much more useful if they put politicians<u+2019> and candidates<u+2019> feet to the fire on views they currently claim to hold. they might ask mr. trump how, precisely, he plans to restore american military might and at what cost, or by what means he thinks he can defeat isis. he has been claiming for months now that he can easily do both without anyone pressing him on these matters. they might ask mrs. clinton, who is keen on aligning herself with the black lives matter movement, for her thoughts on the vast number of black-on-black killings that now number in the tens of thousands in the black ghetto neighborhoods, and whether black lives matter doesn<u+2019>t actually deflect attention from this much more serious problem. they might ask politicians who have served more than two terms in the senate or six in the house how they happen to have become multimillionaires on their relatively modest political salaries. there is no want of good questions to ask politicians<u+2014>none of which begin, <u+201c>in 2011 you said . . .<u+201d> mr. epstein<u+2019>s books include <u+201c>frozen in time: twenty stories<u+201d> and <u+201c>wind sprints: shorter essays.<u+201d>
political reporters<u+2019> hobgoblin - wsj
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