| Politics Letter to a Young Scandalmonger If you want to harm an administration, don't mention Watergate. By John Dickerson
Posted Monday, May 20, 2013, at 05:44 PM ET  My Dear Protégé: I note in your most recent correspondence that you have used the term "Watergate" in connection with the recent troubles facing The Administration. You take a view popular among our kind that raising the specter of this famous scandal will convince your prey to turn against The One. I would like to counsel you against walking this path. First, your instincts are sound. There is much to recommend using Watergate in your work. For 40 years we have relied on it faithfully, hinting at it successfully to bedevil both Democrats and Republicans. Watergate is powerful because it lies at the intersection of ignorance and resonance, like many of our most keen weapons. If I may speak mathematically for a moment, for most people Watergate simply equals bad and they've forgotten (if they ever knew) the collection of facts that led mankind to that conclusion. They know the sum, but not the equation that produced it. Lock the number five in the public mind and you can convince them that the addition of any two numbers equals it. You also face the mounting problem of gaining public attention. Our colleagues in the Twitter, cable news, and reality television branches have succeeded in shredding the modern mind. We see proof in the statistics. Measures of morality, right thinking, posture, and empathy have fallen precipitously. Donald Trump, for example, is still popular. There is nothing but glory in this, but it makes it harder for an aspiring scandalmonger ... To continue reading, click here.
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