Gotcha!
by digby
Earlier this week I wrote a piece for Salon about the history of the “gotcha” question and Scott Walker’s recent problems in dealing with them:
[T]here has probably never been a more clear-cut case of “gotcha” than the Gary Hart-Donna Rice episode. Hart was the presumptive front-runner for the presidential nomination and widely considered to be the intellectual leader of the new Democratic Party. As relayed in this fascinating recitation of the events, the press knew Hart was having a relationship with Rice and clumsily staked out his house, unwittingly revealing themselves to the candidate. Hart didn’t know they had been tipped off to the relationship with Rice and stepped outside to confront them:
Hart may have surprised the reporters by choosing the time and place for their confrontation, but it’s not as if they weren’t ready. They had conferred on a list of questions intended to back Hart up against a wall — which was now literally the situation.
McGee reminded Hart that he and the woman had walked right past McGee earlier that evening on the way to his car. “You passed me on the street,” McGee said.
“I may or may not have,” Hart replied.
McGee asked him what his relationship was with the woman.
“I’m not involved in any relationship,” Hart said carefully.
So why had they just seen Hart and the woman enter the townhouse together a few minutes earlier?
“The obvious reason is I’m being set up,” Hart said …
And so it went. A picture of Hart and Rice on the boat called “Monkey Business” was eventually published and the rest is gotcha history.
But as you can see, the definition of the gotcha has undergone a subtle change over the years. Where it was once thought to be a question about their personal life or history designed to embarrass the candidate with the mere insinuation, today’s gotcha is almost always a question rudely designed to test the candidate’s knowledge of the issues and skill in navigating treacherous political controversies. (They can thank George W. Bush and Sarah Palin for that — they made it obvious these tests were necessary.)
Walker is using all this to set himself up in opposition to the “liberal media” and that may carry him for a while with the hard core base. But he’s hurting himself badly with the establishment and probably with some of the donors for whom he’s competing with Bush, Rubio and Christie. He’s not quite as bad as Palin, but I think he might be as bad as W. Unfortunately we’ve proved that’s not a disqualifier for the office …