Opinion: The art of spin

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

DES MOINES -- One of the more vexing, and simultaneously entertaining, aspects of political campaigns is the ‘spin,’ when candidates or their surrogates try to persuade you that you didn’t see what you just saw, or that you saw something that didn’t really happen. Take this morning’s e-mailed ‘Hubdate’ from Hillary Clinton’s Hillary Hub, her campaign-controlled news aggregator site.

The e-mail includes a link to this 45-second video, which it describes as ‘the moment of the debate.’

The problem is, just about everybody else thought this was the ‘moment of the debate.’

Of course, Rene Magritte anticipated all of this some 80 years ago. (The French translates to ‘This is not a pipe.’)

-- Scott Martelle