It’s every politician and journalist’s favourite phrase, it seems (googling ‘political blame game’ gave me “about 1,610,000″)…and also favourite occupation to indulge in, officially or not. Aside from the fact it’s a nice-sounding phrase (or was, until it became so clichéd it made me want to smash my TV to bits with a croquet mallet every time some suitably self-effacing politician came on the news and said “well, let’s not play the blame game”), it’s a convenient activity. By magnanimously declaring you’re above that kind of thing, you can appear noble, while all the while contradicting the assertion and engaging in a bit of underhand sniping at your opponent – albeit dressed-up in the language of diplomatic euphemism. These days, when voters increasingly see politicians as acting a bit too, well, politically (in the UK all three major party leaders have a negative likeability rating), it comes in handy. It seems to say, I’m human and I understand everyone makes mistakes – for that reason, dear enemy, I forgive you. It’s a shame you don’t have the compassion in your heart of stone to say the same about me, but oh well – I’ll say no more about it. It’s all water under the bridge now.

Apart from the startling two-facedness of this (is ‘two-facedness’ even a word?), it’s clear no-one else feels the same way. Living in a democracy, we claim, blame is our thing, our right, our privilege. Let’s dole it out left, right and centre – if anything goes wrong, forget looking for a solution. Let’s look for someone to blame.

That isn’t to say that politicians shouldn’t be held accountable for their actions; I firmly believe that’s important. But this isn’t about responsibility; it’s just another kind of spin.

Let’s take Hillary Clinton and the ongoing saga about her Iraq war vote as an example. While letting bygones be bygones is never going to happen in politics, this seems a particular ludicrous issue to still be talking about – after all, 76 other Senators voted the same way, including all the other Presidential contenders who were in the Senate at the time. Yes, the key point here is that others, like John Edwards, have said their vote was a mistake. Clinton is being blamed at the moment for refusing to show a suitable degree of human failing and apologising for hers. But (and I should stress here that I didn’t support the war in 2002 and haven’t supported it since) that isn’t the point. All the Senators knew (or at least thought they knew) what they were voting for. They were representing the views of the people – which is, after all, their job. And they were making a decision based on intelligence that they genuinely believed to be accurate. If Hillary Clinton makes an about-face now, not only is she pandering to the crowd like the rest of them, but she can then be blamed for not taking responsibility for her vote. This article in the New York Times shows (and yes, I know it comes from the Clinton campaign’s website, but this is because columns are part of TimesSelect and you’ll be saddened to know I don’t pay to subscribe to the NYT online) that Clinton wasn’t blindly following the Bush Administration’s rhetoric. She says if she’d been President then she wouldn’t have invaded. So what does it matter? Can we please all stop being naîve and forcing candidates to go down the easy route? We complain constantly about how we want candidates to represent who they are, rather than their focus group statistics, and there is one. Let’s not blame her for having some integrity – she’s focusing on the future, while everyone else is hanging blindly on to the past.

On a similar note comes the news that, surprise surprise, Tony Blair refuses to agree that it is his policy that is to blame for the state Iraq is in now. Well, duh. Of course he won’t do it. This is politics. He’ll leave office and write his memoirs, and in that he’ll state his deepest regret at taking the worst action of his premiership. Possibly. Or maybe he’ll stay as bull-headed as he is currently. But we know this isn’t about him deceiving himself. There is no possible way that Blair truly believes his foreign policy isn’t in some way responsible for the daily carnage in Iraq. All of us know this too. So why are we still waiting, day after day, for some admission of guilt that we won’t ever get? It’s high time we spent more time getting things done and less time sifting around looking for someone to condemn. Blame is a zero-sum game.

Filed under: election2008, iraq, uspolitics on February 24th, 2007