I apologize for not posting this earlier
Jacob Levy’s latest TNR Online essay is about the art and politics of apologizing. The key paragraph: Apologies are a tricky business in politics. Bill Clinton was endlessly apologizing, both for his own misdeeds and for those of other people. He apologized so often, for so many things, and accompanied these apologies with so little ...
Jacob Levy's latest TNR Online essay is about the art and politics of apologizing. The key paragraph:
Jacob Levy’s latest TNR Online essay is about the art and politics of apologizing. The key paragraph:
Apologies are a tricky business in politics. Bill Clinton was endlessly apologizing, both for his own misdeeds and for those of other people. He apologized so often, for so many things, and accompanied these apologies with so little substantive action, that it led to a kind of apology inflation–a devaluation of the worth of any given apology in the political sphere. And yet, compared with the adamant refusal of Bush and his cabinet officials to take any responsibility at all for anything having to do with 9/11 or the Iraq war, Clinton’s substance-free brand of apology is beginning to look better and better. Even an acknowledgement that “mistakes were made”–a notorious passive-voice, bureaucratic quasi-evasion of responsibility–would be music to our ears just about now.
OK, sorry, but I lied — the whole piece is nothing but key paragraphs. Read the whole thing.
Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast. Twitter: @dandrezner
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