A Century of Political Spin

David Greenberg: “We gripe about the suffocating presence of ‘spin’: the policies tested by pollsters and focus groups, the slogans and laugh lines penned by speechwriters, the staged photo ops and town-hall meetings… But the spin that we find so pervasive today is nothing new. It actually goes back more than a century. In fact, all those revered past presidents were pioneers in honing the modern methods of image-making and message-craft that we now so often denounce.”

“Since Theodore Roosevelt’s day, when candidates began campaigning for votes and presidents started regularly courting the public, politicians have been refining the tools and techniques of what we now call spin. Spin turns out to be woven into the fabric of American politics, and though it is hardly an unmixed good, it is inseparable from many of the signature achievements of our greatest leaders.”