The Politician Who 'Hears' Us? It's Just Hype.

Barton Swaim, The Washington Post

Many political candidates, if we’re to believe what they say about themselves, spend most of their time traveling around listening to people. “I’ve traveled all around the country, Anderson,” former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley told CNN’s Anderson Cooper at one of last year’s Democratic presidential debates, “and there’s two phrases I keep hearing again and again and again. And they’re the phrases ‘new leadership’ and ‘getting things done.’ “

O’Malley’s opponent Hillary Clinton, though, would not be outdone. The former secretary of state has long been a prodigious traveler and listener. “I’ve traveled across our country over the last months listening and learning,” she told Cooper, “and I’ve put forward specific plans about how we’re going to create more good-paying jobs.” Candidate Clinton is known, in fact, for her “listening tours” of key primary states. She is also adept at deflecting difficult questions by citing her many travels and listening interactions with the citizenry. At a news conference in which she was repeatedly questioned about allegations that she used a private email server for official business, Clinton remarked that “it’s not anything that people talk to me about as I travel around the country.”

So Clinton’s travels are mainly about learning, and one of the things she has learned is that people don’t care about media reports that reflect poorly on her.

The traveling-and-listening line will appear in some form in any U.S. political campaign. It’s a convenient way to invest the candidate’s views with an aura of popular support. And although the line implies that a great majority of the electorate agrees with whatever the candidate allegedly keeps hearing on his or her travels - if everybody’s saying it, it must have widespread support - the view said to be on everybody’s lips rarely sounds like the sort of thing lots of people would actually say. “As I’ve traveled to all of Wisconsin’s 72 counties this year,” wrote Russ Feingold, a Democrat running to reclaim his old Senate seat in Wisconsin, “I’ve heard over and over that while the economic recovery has already benefited the wealthiest Americans, today’s economy still isn’t working well enough for the families in Wisconsin who work the hardest.” Maybe he really has heard this “over and over,” but it sounds to me very much like something Feingold himself would say.

Then again, politicians often find themselves surrounded by people who tell them to do what they, the politicians, already intend to do. “As I travel the state,” Gov. Pete Ricketts, R-Nebraska, recently said about an attempt by the legislature to raise the gas tax, “Nebraskans tell me that they want to see tax relief, not tax increases.” People probably do tell the governor they want tax cuts. But that is because he supports tax cuts, not because Nebraska is full of people demanding lower taxes. There may be only 10 of them, but all 10 have found their way to Ricketts.

I used to work for a governor who routinely claimed that, as he traveled the state, the top concern he heard from people was the legislature’s out-of-control spending. Now, it was true that he had traveled the state, and it was true that in his travels many people buttonholed him about improvident state budgets. But the implication he meant to convey - that concern with government spending was widespread - was, unfortunately, untrue. He attracted the sort of people who cared deeply about the issue; they elbowed their way to him at confabs and party events specifically to talk about irresponsible state spending. But their raw numbers were tiny.

Did he really believe that large numbers of people cared about the dangers of government profligacy, or did he merely use their comments to strengthen the credibility of his own insufficiently popular view? I think the latter was more often the case - and I found it hard to blame him for it, agreeing with him as I did on policy grounds.

Still, I wish more of our politicians would simply admit when they take unpopular positions and stop talking about what they’ve learned on their journeys. We know they haven’t derived their views from the masses - and we would think less of them if we thought they did. Sure, occasionally they alter their views in response to popular pressure, but in those cases they pretend they haven’t changed at all.

Politicians are not conduits of the popular will; they may fashion that will or pander to it, but they do not channel it. They do what they want to do, whatever people tell them on their travels.

Barton Swaim is author of “The Speechwriter: A Brief Education in Politics.”