It’s Incredible

In a recent television interview Dolly Parton referred (modestly) to her great popularity as her “credibility.” Credibility is the word of the year, and it has come to mean acceptance and achievement in public entertainment, just as it has in public office.

When did credibility become so big in public affairs that it spilled over into country and western singing?

The problem is not new. I have heard Lincoln’s homespun aphorism adapted to the 20th Century as: “You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, and that’s enough.”

Credibility’s new importance to our vocabulary is an affirmation of that; the word has replaced sentimental shibboleths like truth and integrity as tools of political debate. Implicit in saying that a public official has credibility is the suggestion that he could be deliberately lying. Or, if he’s found out, that he simply misspoke because of some small cerebral lapse. Misspeaking, which came to prominence during the Watergate era, has about it an ingenuous air, yet that is still somehow better than flat-out lying.

In any case we’d see a lot less of the word credibility if more people in high office felt freer to tell the truth about what they’re up to. Public credulity suffered such strains under the Nixon-Agnew Administration that voters eventually elected Jimmy Carter, whose sometimes-fretful style may have revealed more than his constituents wanted to know. But as big as credibility was during Carter’s time, it was dwarfed by standing tall , which came into fashion in 1980. Now credibility is back, standing taller than it was before the Libyan disinformation caper--even taller than in the old Watergate days.

Another old word has joined credibility in current vogue, perhaps reflecting the influences on the Washington work ethic of the KGB, the CIA and the spokesman.

It is the verb to distance.

Distancing dates back almost certainly to the plague years; it was not lost on Machiavelli, and it is now practiced most skillfully by people who might have been observed in the same room (rectangular or oval) with a colleague with a credibility problem.

In the sentimental old days there was a tendency to fix the blame for a major scandal and to let the chips fall where they might. Distancing puts loyalty on an equivocal footing. Because of its delicate and shadowy uncertainty, distancing creates professional opportunities for political wags and pundits. That might give distancing a credibility problem of its own. But it is less disruptive than abandoning ship.

On the whole it is more pleasant to contemplate the credibility of Dolly Parton, from whom few would be inclined to distance. That may be just what we need on Pennsylvania Avenue.