Okay! Now that I have your attention, here it is. The “F” word that once was believed to be an acronym derived from “fornication under carnal knowledge” is NOT what I am talking about. I am talking about the term flip-flop. In a colloquial sense, it means a reversal of position. In political-talk, it means a position taken significantly contrary to an earlier stated position. In terms of recent U.S. presidential elections, no other flip-flop generated as much heat for the candidate than the Democratic nominee John Kerry’s “being against it before he was for it” when it came to the Congress authorizing the president to wage war. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/kerrys-top-ten-flip-flops/.

Thanks to the advent of fast archival storage and retrieval technologies, opposition research and Gotcha! journalism have become rather adept at digging up instances of a candidate’s past positions that do not conform with what they more recently have stated on the campaign trail. The on-the-ready availability of the audio or video recording of a prior inconsistent statement makes it all the more difficult for a candidate to deny or fudge the authorship of the statement. So, when confronted with the evidence of departure from an earlier position, the candidate’s binary choices are (a) to deny that there is a reversal or departure from prior position (which in not very believable), or (b) to accept that there has been a change (which could be an admission against self-interest f not explained).

We do not live in binary-choice world, however. We live in a world that is mostly gray. In this kind of a world, the candidate’s answer to a flip-flop question can be either (a) a nuanced or subtle answer (which often goes over the audience’s head), or (b) be one that is an obfuscation, muddled, or misdirected (non-responsive).

In a recent interview the Democratic nomine for U.S. president Kamala Harris sat down for an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash. The first question about Harris’s prior inconsistent statements had to do with another “F” word: Fracking! Hydraulic fracturing is a way to extract oil or gas from the deep by injecting high-pressure mixture of water, sand and chemicals to break up the rock structures in which the oil and gas are trapped. 

Harris is on the record to have asked for a ban on fracking, before saying that she is not for banning the practice. When questioned on this issue, she said that her values have not changed about clean  energy and that we can have clean energy without banning fracking. Frankly, Dana Bash blew it! The question should have been: "What specifically informed your call to ban fracking?” The follow-up questioned should have been: “What has changed in the interim that has led you to your current position?” Since examples of Harris’s flip-flops were known already before the interview, she should have been prepared to restate Bash’s question as a 'why then and not now." Iteration of political considerations of convenience then and now aside, she could have said that she had decided against fracking back then because of the harm that fracking can do to the environment and human health. Especially, as a Californian, she had been mindful of the possibility of a connection between fracking and earthquakes generally.  https://insideclimatenews.org/news/20102023/new-evidence-pennsylvania-fracking-public-health-harms/?gad_source=1&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI4ZC1zZGiiAMVM2BHAR11iAMrEAAYASAAEgJb4PD_BwE

So, why an indifferent stance about fracking now? One would expect that a presidential candidate running to command the second largest consumer of primary energy in the world would have some rudimentary understanding of energy economics. If she has this knowledge, it did not come across to an audience who had to satisfy themselves with an answer about her unchanged values without much else in a way of explanation for the change of heart. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the cost of a kW of electricity from coal (without the cost of carbon capture) is about $4,074, from natural gas between $922–2,630, and from wind $1,462. So, just as coal is being replaced by natural gas, fracking too will go by the way of the dinosaur because of the economic and environmental cost associated with it. https://www.btlliners.com/economics-of-fracking-in-oil-and-gas-production

There are many GOOD reasons that can explain a position, but is any of them the REAL reason? Honesty, as they say, is the best policy and that speaking the truth has a liberating effect. So, when confronted with the evidence of a prior inconsistent statement, the candidate should admit the fact of the inconsistency and then explain the reason for the statement when it was made. In so answering the question, the candidate should not shy away from admitting that she has evolved overtime, has learned otherwise, and has now the benefit of the experience not available to her back then.