AP Photo Fourth Estate Hillary’s Weapon of Mass Distraction

Jack Shafer is POLITICO's senior media writer.

Last week, Hillary Clinton broke her silence on the Keystone XL pipeline and announced—to little surprise—her opposition. Dusting her fingers with her favorite rhetorical rosin, she described the pipeline as a “distraction from important work we have to do on climate change … one that interferes with our ability to move forward with all the other issues.”

Was the pipeline the distraction? Or was the distraction the press corps’ insistence, after five years of Clinton waffling, that Clinton express a conclusive position on the pipeline’s future? Either way, by invoking the D-word, Madame Secretary swept the entire issue from the agenda. It’s time now to move forward!


Declaring a subject or a question a distraction has become Clinton’s favorite way of dodging questions. Those persistent questions about the private email server and the private emails she sent as secretary of state? Those are “distractions,” she said earlier this month. What do they distract from? Her campaign, she said. But the questions, while being distracting, aren’t actually distracting her, as she also said, “It hasn’t in any way affected the plan for our campaign, the efforts we’re making to organize here in Iowa and elsewhere in the country.”

While touring New Hampshire on April, Clinton was asked twice in one day about Clinton Cash, Peter Schweizer’s muckraking book about foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation. “You know, those issues are, in my view, distractions from what this campaign should be about, what I’m going to make this campaign about and I’ll let other people decide what they want to talk about," Clinton told WMUR-TV. An ABC News correspondent served a similar query, to which Clinton said, “Well, we’re back into the political season, and therefore we will be subjected to all kinds of distractions and attacks.” (Clinton considers any critical story about her an “attack.” But that’s another column.) She then voiced her hope that the race would soon progress to questions about the “issues.”

Talk about distractions! Since when is a presidential candidate’s money and the method by which he or she earned it a “distraction” and not an “issue”? Mitt Romney’s cash stash and his collection techniques were certainly issues in the last presidential campaign. Her tactics may discourage timid reporters from re-asking the pipeline, emails and Clinton Foundation questions, but most journalists will keep coming at Clinton. The point of labeling valid questions as distractions is to make her look like a put-upon victim of the press, a victim who is worthy of voter sympathy. Calling a question a distraction also serves as Clinton-code that no matter how reporters rephrase the question, she won’t answer it.

Clinton has been going on about the “politics of distraction” since the 1992 presidential campaign, when she used the phrase to describe the Republicans attention on Bill Clinton’s sex life. As did Bill. He went to decry the “failed policies of distraction” on the stump. When the womanizing stories returned in 1993, senior adviser George Stephanopoulos told USA Today (12/22/1993), “People can make up their own mind; the president is not going to be distracted by this stuff.” In August 1993, an unnamed Clinton aide told the Boston Globe that a Clinton weekend trip had been a success because no news had broken. “No stories means no distractions,” the aide said. “Distraction” became such a Bill Clinton byword that in 1997, he told USA Today he had learned to compartmentalize such “distractions” as Whitewater. While covering up his sex scandal in January 1998, Clinton denied having had an affair and expressed his fury about all the questions. “Anything that’s a distraction, I dislike,” Clinton said.

The Clintons aren’t the only politicians who rely on the distraction dodge. As POLITICO contributor Rich Lowry noted in a 2008 column, Barack Obama knows his way around the side-step too. In his column, Lowry urged the Oxford English Dictionary to update its definition of “distraction” to include the “diversion of the mind, attention, etc., from any object or course that tends to advance the political interests of Barack Obama.” In a May 2008 speech cited by Lowry, Obama dismissed from political discussion whole categories of issues. Obama said the media’s willingness to “play along” with the Republicans' strategy to stick Democrats with political labels, “fake” controversies, and gaffes were really “efforts to distract us from the issues that affect our lives.” [Emphasis added.] Obama went on, natch, to call for an end of “the politics of distraction.”

Recently, Republicans have seemed to mostly use the D-word as an excuse for their resignations. Earlier this year, Rep. Aaron Schock (R-IL), voluntarily left Congress following allegations that he had misused public funds, saying questions about his conduct had “proven a great distraction.” Quitting the Senate in 2007 after being captured in an airport restroom sex sting, Sen. Larry Craig (R-ID), said that fighting the case “would be an unwanted and unfair distraction” for his Senate colleagues.

Genuine political distractions must exist, although I’ll be damned if I can find a good example. Most times “distractions” are cited it seems in the pursuit of a legitimate question. Instead of complaining about prying queries, politicians would be better off if they confronted questions they don’t like head-on with honest, definitive answers. Politicians like Hillary Clinton might also profit from examining their own verbiage for evidence that they might be guilty of the very transgressions they spend so much time accusing others of. In his 2008 presidential endorsement of Obama, Rolling Stone Editor and Publisher Jann S. Wenner charged Hillary Clinton with running “the kind of campaign that reminds us of what makes us so discouraged about our politics.”

Hillary, the ultraliberal Wenner charged, was a practitioner of “the politics of distraction.”

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For another take on “The Politics of Distraction,” see Mark Leibovich’s recent piece. I will not be distracted by emails sent to [email protected]. My email alerts, Twitter feed, RSS feed will, however, provide hours of distraction.