Now They're All Ears

By ANDREW FERGUSON

It wasn't so long ago that politicians talked at us incessantly. They were scolds, know-it-alls, flatterers, braggarts, blowhards, loudmouths, balloon-juice merchants--choose your epithet. They were in love with the sound of their own voice. They wouldn't shut up. You could gag them with terry cloth, wrap them in cellophane, dump them in the Mariana Trench--you could plug your ears with a Walkman and crank up a Def Leppard CD to 10--and still you'd hear the little tinny yap-yap of some office seeker promising cleaner streets, safer subways, cavity-free teeth. There was no end to the talking. It was inescapable, depressing, mind numbing. Those were the days! Now it's worse, much worse. Now they listen.

The paragon of this new phase in political non-discourse is Hillary Clinton, the nation's most prominent office seeker. But let's be fair. After all, she is only one of many politicians who have recently--no, wait. Let's not be fair. Like her husband, Mrs. Clinton senses unerringly the trajectories of American politics and manages with supernatural ease to embody them. Thus as she begins her pursuit of office she declines to become a campaigner. She has become a listener.

The barnstorming circuit she is currently making in New York State is even called a listening tour. By all accounts it's an odd event indeed. An audience of citizens is selected and gathered before her. While she listens they share their concerns, speak from their experience, give vent to their grievances. "She wants to listen to New Yorkers in small groups," her spokesman has said, "and learn about the issues that matter to them most." In an amazing telepathy that even the great Kreskin would envy, these issues turn out to be the ones that matter most to Mrs. Clinton too.

It is all a sham, of course. But we can learn a lot from the con jobs our public servants deploy, and so it is with this new fad of listening. For Mrs. Clinton--and now we really are being fair--is not the only politician who is lending us her ears. "Listening" has become mandatory in a state-of-the-art campaign, regardless of the candidate's party or ideology. As he was preparing his campaign, George W. Bush made clear he wasn't going to be a chatterbox, either. "I need to go out and listen to what people have to say," he said, by way of explaining why he refuses to tell us what he has to say. At events in Iowa and New Hampshire, Bill Bradley enters the room and announces, "I'm here to listen. Tell me your stories." Bradley says he is a candidate of "big ideas," but he has been too busy listening to describe them to us. You can hear some variation from all the men (and one woman) who would be President. As she began her run for the presidency, Elizabeth Dole said, "I want to hear from people. Then we're going to be laying out positions on all these issues."

But isn't it supposed to work the other way around? Give the earlier gasbags their due: annoying as they were, the pontificating pols at least stuck to the traditional democratic format. They talked; we listened. They presented themselves and their ideas, such as they were, and then let the voters choose--in the blessed silence of the voting booth. The arrangement seemed to work rather well, and allowed for such democratic necessities as leadership, principle and the disinterested formulation of ideas.

Advocates of "listening" will of course defend it as a democratic advance--a sign that the politician has become an exquisitely tuned instrument, vibrating to every pulse that flutters up from his or her constituency. This might be nice if it were true, but again Mrs. Clinton's spokesman gave the game away. "The listening is the message," he said. What matters, in other words, isn't the listening. What matters is that people see you as you pretend to listen. This is not the good-faith tactic of a candidate in a democracy. In an illuminating coincidence, Hillary Clinton set off on her "listening tour" the same week that Queen Elizabeth decided to embark on a "meet the people" tour of her own. Like Mrs. Clinton, the Queen sipped tea with ordinary folk as her motorcade hummed outside, waiting to return her to her life of splendid isolation. Like Mrs. Clinton she got a taste of life as her subjects lead it. The Queen was doing what queens episodically do, but so was Mrs. Clinton. The difference, of course, is that the Queen is actually a queen.