A soundbite is a quote, usually from a politician, that encapsulates said politician's central point and lasts no more than 7 seconds. Since most politicians have cultivated the art of using the maximum number of words to convey the minimum amount of information, the punditocracy, media and "chattering classes" do us ordinary voters a sizeable favor by condensing down long-winded circumlocutions into these short and simple phrases. Where we have problems is when we assume that this simplification is being done objectively, or when it is simply not possible to reduce a complex issue to such a simple statement. To draw an analogy, a soundbite is like a cowbell's clang-- a very good and simple thing if you are looking for your cow in the deep weeds, but a noisy and annoying distraction otherwise.
Do you remember how we were told what doofuses we were because John Kerry's issue positions were more "nuanced" than us poor rubes could grasp? I have always thought it was because he not only did not speak in soundbites, but that nothing of what he said actually HAD a central point that could be extracted. The problem is different today. Our left-leaning major media and our conservative alternative media seem to have teamed up to do this sound-biting in such a way that not only is the nuance being lost, but we're sometimes getting an impression entirely at odds with what the candidate may be trying to say. Especially if you are a Republican, never trust your political enemies to tell the public what you really mean.
The case in point is Newt Gingrich. He is a prime example of a politician that says lots and lots of things, differing from most others only in that there are lots and lots of ideas behind much of it. So when I hear an otherwise-solid conservative blogger opine that "Newt is not a conservative" I think that I and the conservative cause are being done a disservice, because it cannot possibly be true. If, however, one hears only of some small quote or action from Mr. Gingrich's lengthy public record and assumes it represents the total of his thinking on the matter, you can easily draw the wrong conclusion, which is what Newt's political enemies no doubt intend. I would like to believe that Republican voters are smarter than Democrats and capable of sorting through at least a little bit of the nuance, thus realizing that these tiny excerpts are NOT proper abstracts of Newt's detailed positions. For that, we are going to need to listen for more nuance and less cowbell.
