THE DISAVOWAL GAME. It’s a well-established practice in the Washington media. Take a partisan, outrageous, or otherwise controversial statement by a political figure and press members of his or her party to disavow it. This is an unscientific conclusion, but the disavowal game appears to be more often targeted toward Republicans than Democrats because many in the press, Democrats at heart, are more attuned to outrages coming from Republicans than from Democrats.
The latest unwilling player in the game is Sen. Tom Cotton. The Arkansas Republican and 2024 presidential aspirant appeared on ABC’s This Week on Sunday. The interview with moderator George Stephanopoulos began reasonably enough. The questions concerned Ukraine, on which Cotton, a member of the Senate Intelligence and Armed Services committees, has been pushing the Biden administration for more decisive action.
Then Stephanopoulos changed the subject to Donald Trump. The former president has been talking a lot about Ukraine in the last week. Some of his statements were intemperate, others were open to interpretation (with many media organizations opting invariably for the most negative interpretation), and all were, as always, Trump-centered. Stephanopoulos tried and tried and tried to push Cotton to condemn Trump.
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He began by praising Cotton as “stalwart in your opposition to Vladimir Putin.” Then came the turn: “The same cannot be said for the leader of your party, Donald Trump. Last night, [Trump] finally condemned the invasion, but he also repeated his praise of Putin, calling him ‘smart.’ Earlier in the week, he called him ‘pretty smart.’ He called him ‘savvy.’ He says NATO and the U.S. are ‘dumb.’ Are you prepared to condemn that kind of rhetoric from the leader of your party?”
No, Cotton was not prepared to condemn Trump, but he was prepared for the question. “George, you heard what I had to say about Vladimir Putin, that he is a ruthless dictator who has launched a naked, unprovoked war of aggression,” Cotton began. “Thankfully, the Ukrainian army has anti-tank missiles that President Obama would not supply, that we did supply the last time Republicans were in charge in Washington. That’s why it’s so urgent that we continue to supply those weapons to Ukraine.”
Stephanopoulos wasn’t interested. He asked again: “Why can’t you condemn Donald Trump for those comments?”
“George, if you want to know what Donald Trump thinks about Vladimir Putin or any other topic, I’d encourage you to invite him on your show,” Cotton replied. “I don’t speak on behalf of other politicians. They can speak for themselves.” Cotton went on to say that, rather than speaking for Trump, he represents his constituents in Arkansas, “who are appalled at what they saw in Ukraine.”
Stephanopoulos would not leave it at that. He noted that Trump had been asked what message he would send to Putin and answered that he had no message. “Why can’t you condemn that?” Stephanopoulos asked Cotton.
Cotton repeated his answer: If Stephanopoulos wants to talk to Trump, he can ask Trump to appear. In the meantime, Cotton said, “My message to Vladimir Putin is clear. He needs to leave Ukraine unless he wants to face moms and teenagers with Molotov cocktails and grandmothers and grandfathers with AK-47s for years to come.”
How much clearer could Cotton be? Yet Stephanopoulos would still not leave it. “I simply don’t understand why you can’t condemn [Trump’s] praise of Vladimir Putin,” he said.
“George,” an exasperated Cotton answered, “Again, I don’t speak on behalf of other politicians. They can all speak for themselves.” At that point, finally, Stephanopoulos gave up.
What took place between Stephanopoulos and Cotton was a particularly protracted version of the disavowal game. But it was one with an interesting twist. The inquisitor, Stephanopoulos, has his own history as a partisan — a hard-nosed partisan who would never, ever get sucked into the disavowal game. If there was anyone who would never let some Sunday show host rope him into the game, it was George Stephanopoulos.
In the 1992 presidential campaign, Stephanopoulos was a top aide to Democratic candidate Bill Clinton. Clinton had a reputation as a philanderer, and there were rumors that he had had a longtime affair with a woman named Gennifer Flowers. Stephanopoulos, on Clinton’s behalf, denied it many times. Then Flowers released an audio recording of a conversation with Clinton in which the two seemed very familiar with each other. Stephanopoulos was shocked. “He lied,” Stephanopoulos wrote in his memoir, All Too Human. Clinton never said a word “while I swore to reporters the story was false.”
Did Stephanopoulos condemn Clinton’s lies? Absolutely not. Soon, his anger passed, and it was time to stick with his team. Stephanopoulos told journalists the tape was a fake, it was doctored, it was selectively edited. And guess what? The reporters bought it! The controversy faded. And Stephanopoulos came away more determined to do whatever it took to elect Clinton. “I didn’t want our enemies to win,” he wrote. “They’d stop at nothing to defeat him, so nothing would stop me from defending him.”
Stephanopoulos left the White House after Clinton was reelected in 1996. ABC News hired him immediately, despite a few protests that he was a strong partisan. In early 1998, with his old boss still in the White House, Stephanopoulos had an opportunity to show that he had moved beyond his partisanship, that he could condemn behavior by those on his team as much as those on the other team. He didn’t do it.
On Jan. 18, 1998, Stephanopoulos appeared on ABC’s This Week. The Monica Lewinsky story was breaking — it had been on the Drudge Report the day before. Panelist Bill Kristol mentioned it. Stephanopoulos quickly moved to shut down the talk. “When my colleague Bill Kristol aired the intern rumor, I jumped down his throat and accused him of bottom-feeding from the internet gossip columnist Matt Drudge,” Stephanopoulos wrote in his memoir. “We quickly moved on to other topics.”
So Stephanopoulos, as a journalist, had an opportunity to condemn his old party. He didn’t take it. Later, when Clinton had safely survived the scandals of his presidency, and Stephanopoulos was a bit farther out of politics, he was more critical, both of Clinton and of himself. He wrote a somewhat introspective memoir. But when he was in the arena — good luck asking him to play the disavowal game. It would not happen.
Now, Stephanopoulos pushes politicians such as Cotton, in the prime of their careers with many political battles ahead of them, to do the disavowing. Some go along. Cotton didn’t. And why should he? When it comes to the disavowal game, the lesson of Stephanopoulos’s political career is: Don’t do it.
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