Selecting the right type of hypocrite

Remember Hillary Clinton? The woman whom staunch Barack Obama supporters dislike intensely? As her husband likes to point out, possibly no other senator (not on the ticket) has ever campaigned so prominently, on a nationwide basis, for a Presidential candidate. But for Mr Obama's supporters, this is simply further evidence of her hypocrisy.

She is doing just enough to escape blame should Mr Obama, by some last-minute twist, lose the election. Just enough, should he lose, to be able to prop up her juggernaut campaign for the Democratic nomination in 2012. For Mrs Clinton's detractors, her disguise of her true feelings is a measure of the cynicism that makes them distrust her.

But in democratic politics, hypocrisy is a more complicated game than that. In the primaries, Mrs Clinton tried to play it to her advantage. Her speeches, then, disappointed some of her own staunch champions, who wanted more radical promises.

But this is just what Mrs Clinton could not afford to make. They would have complicated her Presidential campaign as they would have been used against her by the Republican candidate who would have tarred her as an extreme liberal (or a "socialist").

So Mrs Clinton had more or less to signal to her supporters, in public speeches, that, on the one hand, they really could not expect her to speak her mind; on the other, she intimated that she was still the Hillary Clinton they knew and loved.

In other words, she was for all practical purposes campaigning on the subliminal message: "Trust me, I'm a hypocrite".

Why go into all this now? We are a few days away from the Presidential election and Mrs Clinton is not in the running. But the Cambridge-based political theorist David Runciman has recently argued, in his book Political Hypocrisy (Princeton), that hypocrisy is not a quirk of the Clintons. It is endemic to democracy. So it pays us to think more about it.

Why is it inescapable? Partly because the practice of power, to be successful, requires secrecy and keeping secrets sometimes requires dissimulation.

One may have entered politics to defend and promote certain ideals (transparency, straight talk) but achieving that goal may require compromising those very ideals.

A politician may find himself (or herself) in the position of speaking straight and losing an election - thereby perhaps compromising the best opportunity to bring about a more honest system (if only because the lesson drawn by his peers is that honesty is not the best policy). Or, he may compromise on his principles and ideals in order to safeguard the larger goal.

When historians come to judge John McCain, this dilemma may well be the one they choose as key to the twilight of his career - even if he pulls off a miracle next Tuesday. The last six weeks have wrecked his reputation for straight talk and putting "country first". But this is not necessarily because, like Mrs Clinton, he has disguised his true feelings.

He may be another kind of hypocrite, who Mr Runciman says, is becoming more common in our biography and (reality show) confessional obsessed age. This is the hypocrite as the sincere liar: the man whose magic tricks with truth lead him on to deceive himself.

In this respect, Mr McCain may be more like Bill Clinton, rather than Mrs Clinton. And more like Tony Blair and David Cameron, than Gordon Brown.

There is another possibility. Mr McCain may resemble a man he seems to have genuine contempt for: Mr Obama. Analysing this figure, Mr Runciman recalls Mr Obama's admiration for Abraham Lincoln, the President renowned for drawing a distinction between compromising on one's principles and compromising on the means one uses to further the realisation of those principles.

Getting the balance right may produce another Lincoln. But it may also produce, as it did in Victorian England, politicians who deceive themselves that their wretched compromises do not reflect badly on them.

The book has something in it about us as well. If we pretend that practical politics makes another choice available - the never-hypocritical politician - then we would be hypocrites ourselves, contributing to the cant of democracy and possibly our self-deception.

Moreover, by insisting that we have a choice on this matter, we would deny ourselves a choice that we do have: Which hypocrite would we rather live with? The sincere liar who manages to deceive even himself? Or the man who technically speaks the truth but only by choosing a careful formula that disguises his true feelings?

Making that choice would serve to shape the political system that we get. It is a lesson that we should reflect on whether we are trying to understand US politics or our own.

ranierfsadni@europe.com