Scamming: A Great American Tradition

I don't actually know if the U.S. is particularly susceptible to con artists but they feature prominently in our high culture, popular culture, and actual history. From Melville's lightning rod salesman to The Music Man to Elmer Gantry they're a familiar literary character. Snake oil salesmen are still alive and well, they're mass marketing their wares through  GNC and CVS. WorldCom, Enron, Bernie Madoff - and of course the current Resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW, whose entire life has been a scam.

The new HBO documentary about Elizabeth Holmes has prompted a lot of talk about grand con games. What is perhaps most interesting about her story is that she took in so many people who seemingly should have known better. This includes not only the investors who blew $9 billion (yep, that's right) but physician-scientists and biologists who sat on the board of directors, who presumably are trained to ask for actual evidence of her claims.

The main lesson, as Melanie McFarland sees it in the linked review, is that style triumphed over substance. Holmes had the right look and the right technobabble, and that seduced people who wanted to believe.

Unfortunately it works the same way in politics, to a large extent. As political scientists Richard Reeves says:

"It's a painful truth to recognize that policy is less important than we like to think it is," Reeves said. "We are increasingly seeing that political brands matter more than policy platforms."

Following the 2016 election, Reeves published an essay for Brookings, "The real loser of the 2016 campaign is policy," in which he argued that Trump "offered the most vivid example of the sundering of policy from politics."

"What Donald Trump did during the campaign was to paint in a very broad brush," Reeves said. "Rather than having a debate about immigration policy in the round, [Trump asked], 'Are you for or against the wall? Are you for or against the Muslim ban?'

Reeves gives [Elizabeth] Warren credit for her deep work on policy. But he says there is a lot of evidence that voters often decide first who they like before they consider which policies they support. For Warren, that means a big challenge could come from someone like O'Rourke, the former Texas congressman, whose policy positions remain vague and unformed, but who is able to ride (literally) his brand.

"There's that famous video of him kind of skateboarding onto a stage before speaking," Reeves said. "It's really difficult to imagine Elizabeth Warren doing that, and I'm not recommending that she tries."

Of course, it doesn't help that the corporate media is more interested in style (Oh no, he isn't wearing a flag lapel pin! He put mustard on a hamburger!) and horse race coverage than they are in policy. I don't know what we can do about this.