Political Applications: The "Art" of Going Meta

When Judge Clarence Thomas cast himself as the victim of a "high-tech lynching," he reflexively reframed the hearings in two important respects. First, by the very act of "stepping outside the circle" of question and reply, he broke from the frame of business as usual. Second, by his "lynching" metaphor, he placed a particular stamp on that business, a particular way of seeing it. The effect of Thomas' meta-moves was to displace attention from his own guilt or innocence to that of the Judiciary Committee's. Now it was the Democratic majority's turn to shift in their seats as Senator Heflin sought in vain to recapture control of the situation. Arguably, the Democrats could have so bolstered Anita Hill's case against Clarence Thomas in the course of the hearings that Thomas's later repudiation of the process would have seemed shrill, unfair, self-serving, and hypocritical. Perhaps someone among the members of the Democratic majority could have gone meta to Thomas' meta-moves, effectively calling them into question. Surely Thomas and his Republican handlers had to know that going meta in so confrontational a way was a risky undertaking.

But the Thomas forces also knew that the Democratic majority's legitimacy had been significantly eroded in the course of the regular hearings on Judge Thomas' nomination, during the period of the negotiations leading up to the Hill-Thomas hearings, and at the Hill-Thomas hearings themselves.(10) Having observed, for example, the failure of the Democrats to come to Anita Hill's aid in the face of withering questioning by Republican Arlen Spector, they concluded that they could attack with impunity. Said reporter Jack Nelson (1991, p. 5-A), "On the Democratic side, the reluctance to make an all-out defense of Hill or to attack Thomas, especially after he presented himself as the victim of a `high-tech lynching,' gave committee Republicans almost a free hand in carrying out the White House strategy."

This is not to say that Thomas' success was foreordained. On the face of it, after all, the metaphor of a high-tech lynching hardly suited a Congressional hearing peopled by supporters and not just opponents, at which the principal accuser of a conservative appellate judge was another African-American. But Thomas managed rhetorically to deflect attention from the questionable logic of the metaphor, providing what television critic Walter Goodman (1991:30) saw as having all the earmarks of a theatrical performance. Said Goodman, "He was innocent and hurt, indignant and outraged. His frequent references to family and his language -- `a living hell' -- seemed to have been influenced by television melodrama."