Cynical or Clinical?

Of all the things I learned as a psychology major in college, possibly the most memorable -- and widely applicable -- was a joke. It goes like this:

A woman shows up at a psychiatrist's office. "How can I help you?" the psychiatrist asks.

"I'm dead," the woman tells him.

"Of course you're not dead," the psychiatrist assures her. "You're right here, talking to me."

"No, I'm dead," she insists.

So the psychiatrist ushers her into his office and spends hours trying to convince her that she's not dead. Finally, he gets her to accept that dead people don't bleed. Whereupon, he whips out a pin and stabs her in the back of the hand. The woman grabs her injured hand and watches in amazement as blood wells from the wound.

"Son of a bitch," she says. "Dead people do bleed!"

If this sounds familiar to you, it's because it's a perfect encapsulation of Republican ideology.

Ideology means a way of interpreting the world -- that is, a worldview. The concept is related to, but distinct from, policy. Policies are the means you choose to achieve a desired outcome, and the policies you favor will be driven by your ideology. For example, a CEO whose ideology is that people are best motivated by fear will implement a policy of screaming at his subordinates. A parent whose ideology is that experience is the best teacher will let his child make mistakes. "Money makes the world go round" is an ideology. Ditto, "All you need is love." In politics, "People are driven primarily by a desire for freedom" is an ideology. So is, "People are driven primarily by a desire for security."

Normal people develop their ideologies by interaction with the world. We learn from other people's ideologies (most of all, from our parents'), observe connections, make assumptions about cause and effect, test those assumptions, keep what is useful, reject what is useless. This process is both inevitable and desirable: the world is too big and complex to deal with in the absence of some sort of organizing framework.

But because we invest so much in the development of our ideology, it takes on a value independent of the facts the ideology is supposed to help us interpret. The best way to mitigate this danger is to be aware of it, and to continue to adjust our ideology to new data. People who are unable or unwilling to recognize the danger of an ossified ideology tend to be ineffective, and, in certain positions, dangerous. Facts, after all, are stubborn things. A deeply held belief that you can fly does nothing to suspend the operation of gravity.

I know plenty of people whose ideology differs from my own. Yet I can still engage them, and respect them, because they've arrived at their ideology by applying it to the facts of the real world (it's not a coincidence that the people I'm describing believe in science). Though our ideologies (and the policies that grow out of them) differ in various particulars, they are alike at the foundation: we believe in enlightenment values such as logic, empiricism, and rationality. In other words, our ideology is built on the assumed primacy of reason.

Which is why I feel so alienated from what the Republican party has become. It's not that I disagree with professed Republican policies; in fact, if I were willing to swallow Republican platitudes about small government and the like without first chewing, I might believe the party's ideology was a close enough match for my own. The problem is, the disparity between Republican platitudes and Republican practices has become so stark that the only way to make sense of the schism is to accept that the Republican party has abandoned reason as a fundamental organizing principle.

There's so much evidence of the Republican flight from reason that it's hard to know where to start. But al Qaeda's recent endorsement of John McCain is as good a place as any. I wrote about this development last week, and the angry responses I've been receiving have been in line with Republican talking points. What it comes down to is this: when a terrorist organization (Hamas) endorses Obama, it means the organization favors Obama. When a terrorist organization (al Qaeda) endorses McCain, it means the organization favors Obama.

A person whose worldview is predicated on reason will recognize that such a conclusion is "an argument that proves too much" -- that is, that they have structured their beliefs so as to arrive at the same conclusion whether the data is X or the opposite of X. A reasoning person will understand something is wrong here, and reexamine her premises. But Republicans are unwilling, or unable, to grasp the contradiction inherent in their position. Their worldview demands an outcome: "terrorists favor Obama" -- and they then fit the facts to conform to that worldview, ignoring elementary problems of logic along the way.

The McCain campaign's most recent set of talking points provides another fascinating example. You can argue that Obama is a socialist. But you can't argue that Obama is a socialist but that McCain -- who also just voted for a $700 billion financial sector bailout, including $250 billion to nationalize banks -- is not. Nor can you argue that Obama is a socialist, but that McCain's hero, Teddy Roosevelt, was not.



Although really, could any of the people who are fulminating about Obama being a communist, Marxist, or socialist actually define these terms if pressed? If you're one of the people who's been shouting that "Obama is a socialist," try this test at home: explain to yourself what socialism means. Name three countries that you would define as socialist, and explain how their system of government differs from that of the US in such a way that their system is socialist and ours is not. And if, after performing this test, you realize you don't have a good understanding of the term, ask yourself why you're so comfortable using it to justify your position. By the way, these private tests -- you don't even need to share the results -- are part of what it means to adhere to an enlightenment ideology.

Speaking of the "Socialist!" charge, part of what disturbs me about modern Republicanism is the way its adherents use labels, cliches, and other shorthand as substitutes for thought. Think about the following Republican talking points. Do they foster understanding? Or prevent it?

Terrorist. Communist. Marxist. Socialist. Arab. Muslim. Spreading the wealth around. ACORN. We're all Georgians now. I'll follow Osama bin Laden to the gates of hell. I'll be Hamas' worst nightmare.

If you haven't had a chance to read Robert Draper's "The Making (and Remaking) of McCain" in yesterday's New York Times Magazine, I highly recommend it. Here's the way a participant described the campaign's efforts to decide how McCain should respond to the news in September of impending financial calamity:

“We presented McCain with three options. Continue offering principles from afar. A middle ground of engaging while still campaigning. Then the third option, of going all in. The consensus was that we could stay out or go in — but that if we’re going in, we should go in all the way. So the thinking was, do you man up and try to affect the outcome, or do you hold it at arm’s length? And no, it was not an easy call.”

The lack of thought behind all those cliches is stunning. No wonder the campaign wound up bungling McCain's response to the crisis -- their verbiage buffered them so effectively from actual thought. If this is the way they engage with reality during the campaign, how might we expect them to govern?

The millimeter-deep labels are also part of what helps Republicans justify their hatred and bigotry. "Liberals hate real Americans that work and achieve and believe in God." (What's a liberal? What kind of hatred? Who are the real Americans? Etc). "Obama and liberals are anti-American." (What's a liberal? What does it mean to be anti-American? How are the two connected?). "Western Pennsylvania is the most patriotic, most God-loving part of America." (What does it mean to be patriotic? How is that quality found more in western Pennsylvania than anywhere else, and where, specifically, is it found less?)





"Who is Barack Obama?" is also a frequent refrain from McCain and Palin themselves and from their supporters. But how can you claim not to know a man who's been on the national stage for two years; who was vetted by both the press and the opposition research arm of the Clinton machine during a long, brutal primary campaign; who has written two books, one a memoir, the other an examination of his political philosophy; and who has given countless interviews, while simultaneously feeling you do know Sarah Palin, who almost no one outside Alaska had heard of until just two months ago, and who since then has refused to do a single press conference? A reasoning person would examine this "I don't know him, but I do know her" contradiction and seek to discover its true cause. A Republican, apparently, would not.

There's more. A reasoning person would recognize the contradiction in attempts to mock Obama for being a celebrity and for the "cult-like atmosphere" that surrounds him, on the one hand, and rightwing gushing over Palin's "starbursts" and "star power" and the like on the other. Ditto for the "Obama is The One" attacks, and the belief expressed by Palin supporters that she has been ordained as the Republican VP candidate by God, in part because God wants Alaska to be a refuge for survivors from the lower 48 during the End Days.

Then of course there's the right's spluttering rage about William Ayers and Jeremiah right. You can't argue that these relationships doom Obama by guilt by association while simultaneously ignoring the Palins' relationship with the Alaskan Independence Party.

Gay rights and marriage equality is another key area that exposes the Republican flight from reason. There isn't a single principled argument that can be leveled against letting gays marry as straights do, and Republican attempts to distinguish between anti-miscegenation laws of the Jim Crow era and anti-gay laws of today are incoherent. Recognizing that logic will not be an ally in their arguments against gay marriage, many rightists fall back on religion. But even here, there is no principled application. Recently on my discussion board, a poster opined that homosexuality was a sin because the bible says so. He was referring to Leviticus 18:22: "Do not lie with a man as one lies with a woman; that is detestable."

Citing an episode of The West Wing, someone asked him about Exodus 35:2, which provides, "For six days, work is to be done, but the seventh day shall be your holy day, a Sabbath of rest to the LORD. Whoever does any work on it must be put to death." The poster's response? You have to be a biblical scholar to understand such matters, you can't cite a television show. In other words: facts don't count when they come from other than my preferred sources, and logic is suspended when its application would indicate an uncomfortable result. (I've received similar responses when I post clips from Comedy Central: rightists ignore the facts cited and profess shock that I would cite a comedy show to make a point).

True, I'm no biblical scholar. But I do know that if you articulate the principle that the bible is literally true and infallible, then you must be willing to apply that principle consistently, and forgo the right to cherry-pick the provisions you like and eschew the ones you don't. You don't need to be a scholar to understand this. You only need to adhere to the primacy of reason.

Some of the Republicans who've been responding to my posts have claimed polls showing the race breaking toward Obama are lies or don't matter. This is precisely the mentality I'm talking about. You can argue that the polls are somehow inaccurate, or that because of various fundamentals the polls will ultimately swing the other way. But saying without more that the polls are irrelevant (as, indeed, Palin herself has done) is a perfect example of a belief system so calcified that it's become impervious to facts. (Admittedly, I'm getting less of this now, with Obama's lead expanding, than I was a couple weeks ago. Which is encouraging: it suggests denial isn't necessarily an absolute condition, but rather something that's merely relatively impervious to facts.)

Probably the most telling litmus test of the Republican flight from reason is McCain's selection of Sarah Palin. You can argue that Obama lacks sufficient experience to be president. But you can't also argue that Palin's experience is adequate. I know, I know... all that Wasilla executive experience is what makes the difference. But how can time spent in Wasilla city hall count for something, and time spent in the Illinois senate count for nothing? Both of these things cannot be true, and a reasoning person will reexamine his premises rather than accept a contradiction. Reexamining premises, by the way, means inquiring more deeply into the nature of the jobs in question. Comedy Central did exactly that, and here's what they found:



By experience, by the way, I'm not only referring to Palin's scant time in government (that could arguably be an advantage), but to her lack of curiosity, and even, apparently, thought. Everything Palin knows about Iraq, she's had crammed into her during the last few weeks, and yet she's convinced that Obama's policy is a "white flag of surrender" (another one of the those substitutes for thought again). There's a term for people who adhere so confidently to an ideology in the absence of or in contravention of facts: true believer. I don't see how anyone who believes an ideology should be forged against facts can want another one of those in the White House.

I might feel sorry for Palin, but though her performance has been pitiful, she doesn't deserve pity. By her own admission, she didn't blink when McCain asked her to join the ticket. What level of narcissistic hubris is involved when someone (especially someone this inexperienced) doesn't even blink before accepting a responsibility like the vice presidency? If she were a layman who had without blinking agreed to perform heart surgery, or to repair a nuclear reactor, or to step into an air traffic control booth to direct landing planes, I wouldn't feel sorry for her -- I'd be outraged at the risk she imposed on my country, my family, and me, all in the name of her own blind narcissism.

There are so many more:

Palin accuses the mainstream media of wanting her to "shut up," while refusing to do a single press conference.

The right fulminates about The Angry Left, in the face of innumerable videos like these:



Cindy McCain claims that Obama is running the "dirtiest campaign in history." 'Nuf said.

John McCain claims to be running an honorable campaign even as his robocalls are being done by the same company that did the ones George Bush used in South Carolina in 2000 to make people believe McCain had fathered a black child out of wedlock -- a campaign McCain denounced as deeply dishonorable.

McCain claims to be able to reach across the aisle, yet can't even look at Obama during a debate -- in fact, can't even bring himself to say Obama's name.

McCain and the rightwing echo chamber rant about ACORN and registration fraud "destroying the fabric of democracy," while ignoring actual voter suppression.

I'll save what might be the most obvious example of the Republican loss of its faculty to reason for last: the party that currently presides over a half-trillion dollar deficit and a ten-trillion dollar debt continues to claim to be the party of small government. Small government used to be the centerpiece of Republican ideology; today, it's a pathetic mantra, more akin to whistling past the graveyard than any species of coherent principle.

There are many more examples of the Republican flight from reason, and I'd welcome them from readers. Particularly from rightists, whose points, I expect, will unintentionally prove my own.

I disagree with many Democratic policies and with many aspects of Democratic ideology. But these differences are nothing compared to my alienation from a party composed of people who have rejected logic and reason as organizing principles of life. My primary concern in this election is to eject from government politicians who favor faith over facts. Once that goal is accomplished, I'll look forward to doing whatever I can to hold Democrats accountable (as I've already done with Obama and his betrayal of campaign promises on FISA). And I'll continue to encourage principled Republicans to purge the party of enlightenment-rejectionists and to return to the small government, balanced budgets, modest foreign policy, individual freedom ideology that characterized the party before it was hijacked by the current crew of flat-earthers, who have more in common with a religious cult than they do with a modern political party.

Al Qaeda Endorses McCain

Now that al Qaeda has endorsed John McCain, it'll be fascinating to hear McCain and his allies explain why America's #1 enemy has thrown its support to him. In case you don't remember, back in May McCain argued that Hamas had endorsed Obama, took these "endorsements" at face value, and concluded that McCain was therefore the better candidate.

The "Hamas endorses Obama" cry was taken up in many other rightist quarters, including the Wall Street Journal, and was a coordinated part of the McCain campaign narrative.

So I'm now looking forward to hearing McCain and his supporters explain how we should interpret the support McCain is receiving from al Qaeda. Whatever the explanation is, I'm sure it will be just the same as it would have been had al Qaeda endorsed Obama instead (where's an extreme sarcasm emoticon when you need one?).

My take on all the Hamas/Obama bullshit, BTW, is here. And, aside from its usefulness in exposing yet more stunning rightwing cynicism and hypocrisy, I'd say this latest "endorsement," of McCain this time, is -- and should be -- equally irrelevant.

But that's why I can't vote for today's Republican party. I try to apply my principles equally, and recoil from people who don't do the same.

Care about the Republican party? Want Republicans to return to principle? Then give them the shock therapy they need. Vote Democratic on November 4.

Thoughts on the Third Presidential Debate

Well, the snap polls are going heavily to Obama. This is not surprising. As I've argued before, the only definition of who "won" that matters is, who garnered more undecideds by virtue of his performance? By this measure, once again, Obama succeeded in his primary objective, which was to seem "presidential." And once again, McCain failed to create doubts about Obama, while managing, through his sarcasm, visible anger and disgust, and overall lack of graciousness, to look distinctly unpresidential himself. Obama's performance reassured undecideds; McCain's caused doubts. As went the first two debates, so went the third.

A few things struck me. First, how tactically inept McCain's team is. They loaded him up with a line they must have thought would be a real zinger: "I'm not President Bush. If you wanted to run against President Bush, you should have run four years ago." But all the line did was invite the obvious, much more powerful counterpunch, which has been the center of Obama's campaign narrative: "No, you're not Bush, but what you're proposing is eight years of the same old policies." They also fed him this: "Congressman Lewis hurt my feelings by comparing me to George Wallace, and Senator Obama should disown those remarks." First, who cares about the candidates' feelings? Second, Obama's campaign had already repudiated the remarks. Most importantly, more than anything else, McCain's introduction created an opening for Obama to discuss the negativity of McCain's campaign and the calls to violence his campaign has been inciting. Polls show that personal attacks (along with Sarah Palin) are killing McCain's chances, so why would McCain's people want to feed Obama a perfect segue into that very subject? I can only surmise that when they come up with these "zingers," they don't bother to think even one move beyond. They just want to throw that haymaker, heedless of how easy it is to duck and how badly it exposes their candidate to a straight right to the face in response.

By contrast, I can't help but admire how skillfully Obama and Biden goaded McCain into bringing up William Ayers directly. By repeatedly suggesting that McCain didn't have the cajones to say it to Obama's face, they forced him to either stay mum on Ayers, thus bolstering the "no cajones" narrative, or to bring Ayers up, thereby introducing a topic polls show is blowing up in McCain's face. Amusing, when you consider how many times in the first debate McCain accused Obama of not understanding the difference between a strategy and a tactic. Oh, I think Obama knows. Did you see how well-prepared he was to brush off the Ayers nonsense? He knew exactly what was coming because he manipulated his opponent into bringing it with him.

It was interesting to see how deeply moderator Bob Schieffer has drunk from the cup of false equivalency. "Senator Obama, you've said McCain is erratic and losing his bearings... Senator McCain, you've said Obama is disrespectful, dishonorable etc. Why are you both so negative?" As I've argued before, this "equivalency" is a chimera. First, and without even considering follow-on effects (we'll consider those effects in a moment), attacks on your opponent's patriotism and barely veiled accusations of treason ("Senator Obama would rather lose a war than lose an election," "Senator Obama's blind ambition always puts himself ahead of his country," etc.) are far worse than suggestions that your opponent is, for example, "erratic." Second, there's the question of the accuracy of the charges in question. Is "erratic" really an inapt way to describe the behavior of a man who "suspended" his campaign, whatever that meant in fact, and pledged not to show up for the first debate until Congress had passed bailout legislation, then de-suspended his campaign and showed up for the debate when Congress had made no progress? Under the circumstances, I'd call "erratic" charitable. Third, there's the danger of violence. Suggesting McCain is "losing his bearings" is unlikely to encourage anyone to take a shot at him. By comparison, suggesting that Obama pals around with terrorists... that he doesn't see America the way you and I do... that he's a radical who was taught and ghost-written by terrorists... is playing with fire. Meaning that fourth, McCain and Palin are complicit in the hateful calls to violence their campaign rallies produce. I see no such complicity in anything coming from Obama or Biden.

I guess it's all how you define "attack," though. Because at one point, McCain accused Obama of launching attack ads against McCain's health care plan. Presumably this hurt McCain's feelings as much as Congressman Lewis's condemnation of his campaign tactics. Presumably McCain was factoring in ads critical of his policies when he claimed Obama has spent unprecedented amounts on negative ads.

(Memo to McCain camp: when voters get turned off by attack ads, they're not thinking of attacks on the candidates' policies. They're thinking of attacks on the candidates' character. And rightly so.)

I couldn't help laughing when McCain blamed his negativity on Obama's refusal to do a series of townhall meetings. "If my opponent had only agreed to a format favorable to me [actually, I'd argue the second debate proved McCain was mistaken in this assessment], I wouldn't have had to resort to distortions and demagoguery!" I suppose this is the current Republican notion of personal responsibility.

For me, the most interesting aspect of the debate was McCain's inability to hide his anger, disgust, and sarcasm. The references to how "I admire Senator Obama's eloquence." The gratuitous, repeated mention that Obama hasn't traveled to South America: "Maybe if you'd go there, you'd understand better." The "I'm sure you're aware Senator Obama...". The constant mugging for the camera.



As I mentioned above, polls show that McCain's negativity is killing him. So either his people are in denial about what the polls show, or McCain simply can't help himself. Neither explanation makes me comfortable with the notion of a President McCain. Do you want in the Oval Office someone in denial, surrounded by others in denial (does that sound a bit... deja vu?). Do you want someone who can't stop himself from engaging in behavior that he knows is bad for him, who has that little control over himself? I don't.

At one point, Obama said the health of the economy is critical because never in history has there been a country whose economy declined and who maintained its military primacy. Fair enough, but I find troubling the notion that our economic health is important primarily because we need a healthy economy to retain military superiority. Surely there are more important reasons for a healthy economy than the maintenance of military strength? On the issue of Imperial America, Obama doesn't strike me as about Change at all.

Part of what consistently hurts McCain in these campaigns is how obviously nervous he is. Look how much he blinks. Blinking is a classic sign of nervousness, and is also associated with lying. Whether viewers are consciously aware of it or not, over the course of three debates and innumerable interviews, McCain comes across as either afraid of Obama or deceptive or both. Neither quality is something many people want to see in a president.



As a novelist, I can't help my fascination between the campaigns' respective grasp of effective communication, of text and subtext. When you're writing dialogue, "text" means what's actually said, which in art as in life is largely discounted; "subtext" means what's meant and actually communicated. Obama's people understand the distinction. Obama's text consisted of many things: discussion of his health care plan, his plans for the economy, etc. It was all in the service of his subtext, which was what he really wanted to communicate: "I'm serious. I'm presidential. I'm not a radical. You can trust me in the White House."

By comparison, McCain seems to believe text and subtext are the same. He believes that when he expresses contempt for Obama, viewers will be encouraged to feel contempt, too. In fact, the contempt text reveals an unhelpful subtext: angry, thin-skinned, insecure, cranky old man. Three debates, and McCain never once demonstrated that he or the people around him understand the distinction. If you think effective communication is an important skill in a president, McCain offers few grounds for confidence.

It'll be interesting to see whether Obama's lead will grow wider over the next twenty days. It'll be even more interesting -- and productive -- to see whether a crushing loss will result in a reformed Republican party. I see two general possibilities. First, enough Republicans will be persuaded by the results of the election to honestly grapple what's gone wrong with the party and to return to Republican principles, in which case the Republicans will be able to mount a worthy and capable challenge to President Obama in 2012. Second, a rump coalition will remain in denial, with Sarah Palin as their standard bearer. They'll come up with all manner of excuses for their loss, mostly having to do with the liberal media, voter fraud, and other such transparently lame excuses (with today's Republicans, personal responsibility is always for someone else). They'll nominate Sarah Palin in 2012, which I expect will produce another stunning Republican defeat. At that point, some portion of the denialists will begin to grapple with reality, in which case the Republicans will again have a chance to return to being a worthwhile political party, only in 2016 rather than in 2012. Either way, the longer they wait to honestly face their shortcomings, the worse off they will be, and the worse off America.

Amerika

Here are some videos of recent McCain/Palin rallies. Look at the kind of hatred and anger they're appealing to and fomenting. Look at the kind of know-nothing, us vs. them, violent passions they stoke. Even as their supporters rant "traitor!" and "socialist!" and "terrorist!" and "off with his head!" and "kill him!" and other such slander and exhortations to violence, neither McCain nor Palin ever once admonishes anyone to cool down, these are *Americans* we're denouncing and threatening to murder.

Think about that for a moment. Not just the calumny of "terrorist" and "traitor" and the rest, but death threats, as well. Against a sitting United States senator and candidate for president. A fellow American. And not a word of protest from McCain or Palin.

A few questions:

What does it say about a party when it is attracts supporters like these?

What does it say about a candidate when he or she repeatedly encourages supporters like these?

Can McCain and Palin control the passions they're stoking? Or is it more likely that such passions, stoked, will lead to real violence?

If fascism comes to America, how will it sound? What will it look like? What will be its slogans?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjxzmaXAg9E



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qT8OFncxEkc



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itEucdhf4Us

Why Do the Palins Hate America?

Imagine the reaction if Michelle Obama had belonged to a political party that advocated secession from America, a party whose founder ranted, "The fires of hell are frozen glaciers compared to my hatred for the American government... And I won't be buried under their damn flag... I'm not an American... I've got no use for America or her damned institutions." And imagine if Barack Obama had attended that party's conventions, even after swearing his oath of office to uphold the Constitution.

But wait, this has nothing to do with the Obamas -- it's all about the Palins! For seven years, Todd Palin was a member of this party -- the "Alaska Independence Party" -- and Sarah Palin repeatedly attended its annual conventions, even after she had been sworn in as Alaska's governor. The quotes above are from the party's founder, Joe Vogler. So where are Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, and Peggy Noonan, the ardent defenders of America from the radicals who hate our freedoms and attack our values?

Maybe these patriotic pundits just haven't heard about the Palins and their connection to the Alaska Independence Party? Because if they knew, I'm sure they'd be upset. I hope someone will tell them so they can expose the Palins for the America-hating radicals they are -- terrorist appeasers who pal around with people who despise our country and hate our freedoms!

Please cut and paste or otherwise forward this message to every patriotic, country-first, red-blooded American you know -- I'm sure they'd want to know that the Palins have been palling around with people who hate America so much they want Alaska to be a separate country.

http://tpmelectioncentral.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/10/palins_attack_on_obamas_patrio.php

The VP Debate

Okay, just got done watching the vice presidential debate. A few thoughts.

As with last week's presidential debate, the main thing to remember in determining who won and who lost is that this whole thing was aimed at that small proportion of voters who are still undecided. Anyone who wasn't going to be swayed one way or the other (and that includes me) was, or at least should have been, irrelevant to the two campaigns. Keeping that in mind, we need to ask: What were the candidates' objectives for the evening? Were those objectives the right ones? And to what extent did the candidates achieve their objectives?

Let's start with Governor Palin. Given her recent disastrous interviews with Charlie Gibson and especially Katie Couric, and accompanying calls from prominent conservatives that she is embarrassingly unqualified and should step aside for the good of the party, Palin's primary objective was simply to come across as coherent and minimally credible. By the extraordinarily low standards set by her recent performances, I think she achieved this objective. But scrambling merely to avoid disaster doesn't leave much room to get anything positive done (does this sound familiar? Think treasury bailout...).

To put it another way: another "When Putin rears his head" moment, and the McCain campaign would have been dead and buried (as things stand, as I've argued before, I think the McCain campaign is merely dead). She didn't have one of those, and so managed to avoid catastrophe. So far, so good.

(Here are all the recent interview highlights, BTW, courtesy of TPM)



Her second, related objective, was to seem "presidential." That is, if you were undecided, would you come away from the debate believing Palin is ready to be president? Could you comfortably imagine her as president? Palin's objective was to get undecideds to answer these questions "yes." Did she?

I don't think so. Here's why.

When Palin went out of her way to correctly pronounce the names of foreign leaders like Achmadinejad and Kim Jung Il, it was in support of the "win undecideds by seeming presidential" objective, and was smart. But she spent far more time saying things like "Darn right, Joe six pack, soccer moms, I'm gonna speak directly to the voters, kinda, you may not like the way I answer questions, I'm from Wasilla, you know, bless their hearts, and I've been campaigning for like five weeks, doggonit, talkin' and wantin' and doin,' I want to speak to the American people without the filter of the mainstream media," and other such folksie, awe shucks, down-home, regular-girl verbal mannerisms and anti-condescending liberal elitist asides. None of which was in the least presidential. So what was it all about?

The "awe shucks" stuff was intended to fire up the base. And I imagine it did. The problem is, the base already believes she's their kind of gal and is going to vote for her because of it. So this second objective -- fire up the base -- was at best wasteful, because the base is already in the bag. They were baiting a hook for a fish that's already caught. The only thing that matters then, again, is how did "awe shucks" play to the undecideds?

Of course I could be wrong or I could be projecting, but I don't think the regular-girl schtick brings in the undecideds. Here, the low expectations she had created with her recent interview disasters worked against her. The essential problem is that Palin has set expectations so low that even if she exceeds them, people will still recognize it's not enough. Acting like a regular gal doesn't change that dynamic; it worsens it.

My sense is that at this point, outside the base, people don't believe Palin knows anything about foreign policy, the economy, or other national issues. I doubt they believe she's even given such outside-Alaska issues any thought. All of which made even her successful answers seem like well-executed rote recitations. As for the balance of her oratory, it was mostly repeated invocations of the evils of greed and corruption, promises to put the American people first, and lots of "John McCain is a maverick, a maverick, a maverick, the consummate maverick, we're a team of mavericks, John McCain takes on his own party, he does what's right for the American people, he'll take on his own party, he's ruffled feathers, John McCain knows how to win a war, he will know how to win a war, he will, he will...". In the absence of any substance, in the context of the expectations she's set, combined with the awe-shucks schtick and what felt to me like an overly chirpy, slightly manic persona, I think undecideds will come away feeling she was evasive, unclear, and unready. All of which is ultimately testimony to John McCain's judgment, or lack of it, in picking her to begin with.

Along these lines, her claim that "your plan for Iraq is a white flag of surrender" was red meat for the base. But did undecideds buy it? It also sounded a lot like the worst of George Bush, which played to the Obama campaign's objective of making McCain "more of the same." Were there any undecideds who felt that Palin even has the basis for such an opinion? Before being invited to be next in line for the presidency, Palin claimed only to have heard about the "surge" in Iraq on the news. Everything else she knows, she's learned in the last few weeks. Given the recency of her familiarity with these issues, Palin's chirpy confidence carries the whiff of a true believer. Again, I think undecideds will come away deciding the country has endured quite enough of that.

Also, "government isn't the solution, government is the problem" is the wrong message when the economy is cratering. It's dissonant with the galactic bailout her running mate supposedly suspended his campaign to try to support. People uninterested in such subtleties are already voting for McCain/Palin. People who distrust slogans unsupported by facts will now be more inclined to vote otherwise.

So again, Palin was given two mutually inconsistent objectives: bring in the undecideds, fire up the base. Worse, the McCain campaign clearly gave greater weight to the second one. You could see this in their choice of summation, which essentially came down to "freedom isn't free" and "the mainstream media is in the tank for the liberals." Who was that aimed at? Who found it persuasive?

Okay, now Senator Biden. His objective was simply to seem more presidential than Palin. Doing so required only that he demonstrate a greater command of substance and more gravitas, and avoid seeming to talk down to Palin lest he alienate women or otherwise win Palin a sympathy vote. For voters who've heard Biden can be a gasbag, he would get bonus points by being brief and down to earth. These weren't difficult objectives to achieve, and I'd say he achieved them handily through his command of the subject matter and calm, confident manner. The Obama campaign made a very smart move in directing Biden to go after McCain the way Biden did: doing so was calculated to diminish the top of the McCain/Palin ticket, of course, but more importantly, it implicitly emphasized that Biden is McCain's peer and equal. By contrast, again, when Palin delivered her "white flag of surrender" line, I can't imagine anyone outside the base felt she had any basis for her opinion.

There were a few small slips. Biden referred to himself as Joe Biden three times. To me, people who refer to themselves in the third person are as weird as people who whistle in public, and his doing so did tend to reinforce the gasbag hypothesis. He also had a tendency to use too many numbers and percentages. Doing so demonstrated a mastery of detail, I suppose, but sometimes the blizzard of numbers seemed to obscure the more fundamental point he was trying to make. My biggest disappointment was his failure to respond when Palin pointed out he once said he'd be honored to run with John McCain. This was a perfect opening for what I've argued should be one of the central narratives of the Obama campaign: What's happened to John McCain? Biden could have said, "I did say that, and I meant it. But something's happened to John since then. He's not the same man we all knew and admired in the senate." But in hindsight and from the sidelines, it's easy to come up with minor points like these. For purposes of analyzing whether Biden achieved his objectives, they're barely relevant.

I liked it when Biden attacked back on Palin's "maverick" perseveration. It exposed one of the key differences between them: Palin (like McCain) seems to believe that claims without evidence are credible. Outside the base, they're not. Biden responded with evidence. Doing so demonstrated his command of substance, and exposed her as a millimeter-deep lightweight glued to catch-phrases and talking points.

Needless to say, all of this is snap-judgment stuff. I think when the pundits weigh in and start dissecting Palin's various lies, mistakes, and distortions (Obama voted 93 times to raise taxes, voted against funding the troops, etc.), the initial sense that she's not ready will harden.

A thought about the moderator and rules of debate: would anything have been different if instead of Gwen Ifill, they had used a computer to flash the questions on a screen? If the answer is "no different" (and I think it is) -- that is, if the moderator's value-add is no more than reading questions off a pile of cards -- we might conclude that the rules were lame, or the moderator was useless, or both.

Overall, I think the best anyone could say for Palin is that she exceeded the stunningly low expectations her recent performances have established. I can't imagine that a material number of undecideds watched this debate and decided based on it to vote for McCain/Palin (I can, however, easily imagine it picking up some undecideds for Obama/Biden). So the best you can say is that Palin avoided making things much worse for her ticket. Which is another way of saying that in November, Barack Obama will be elected president.

The Debate

Thanks for all the messages asking me what I thought of the debate. There's a ton of excellent coverage out there already, and I don't want to repeat the commentary you can find at The Daily Dish, Talking Points Memo, Eunomia, and lots of other places. So I'll offer just a few thoughts on matters I haven't seen touched on elsewhere.

I guess the first thing everyone wonders is, "Who won?" I'd have to give the evening to Obama, though not by a lot. My reasoning: Obama had to show that he was "presidential." I think he did. McCain, especially after the preceding week of bizarre drama queen antics, had to show he wasn't having some sort of a meltdown. I think he did. So both achieved their objectives, but Obama's objective was the weightier of the two because it's more likely to move the undecided middle, which at this point is all that really matters. McCain also had to demonstrate that he was vastly superior to Obama on foreign policy. Personally, I think Obama did better here, but even if you think McCain had the edge, foreign policy is supposed to be McCain's bread and butter, so an edge isn't enough.

I think McCain's refusal, or inability to make eye contact with Obama even once is going to hurt him a lot. Mostly people are interpreting his refusal to look at his opponent as contempt. That's a charitable interpretation, and regardless, not one that would attract undecideds to the candidate engaging in it. In fact, my take is that McCain was afraid to look at Obama -- afraid that if he did so, his emotions (fear, anger, whatever) would kick in and knock him off his game. However you want to interpret McCain's failure to make eye contact (or even to glance left at where Obama was standing), it's not going to bring undecideds his way, and will likely alienate many. Similarly, his constant "What Senator Obama doesn't understand" and related refrains must have felt good to him and will please people who plan to vote for him anyway, but likely came across at best as undignified and arrogant to undecideds.

McCain also had a tendency to say, "Trust me, I'll..." or "I promise, I'll...". After eight years of George Bush and in midst of an economic crisis, "Trust me" is a terrible way, indeed, a terrible phrase, to try to move the middle.

Substantively, I would have been disappointed if my expectations weren't already so low. If you think about the substantive differences that were aired, they were tiny compared to the possibilities. Both candidates seem to agree that Georgia and other former satellite countries should be admitted to NATO. Their differences over how and when are important, but not as important as the whole question of what NATO is for at this point, and the costs and benefits of admitting a country like Georgia. Similarly, they both agree that we should be free to make incursions into Pakistan, presumably without any word from Congress, and differ only on whether it's okay to say so out loud. Take a step back and you'll see that this is a hell of a small policy difference compared to, say, should the president be able to direct secret, unauthorized wars in the first place? And can clandestine wars not backed by overt policy even succeed regardless? Etc.

At one point Jim Lehrer asked the candidates if the current economic crisis would affect the way they would "rule" the country once elected. Given the Bush Administration's creeping monarchism, I would have liked one of the candidates to correct Lehrer on his odd diction. Neither did.

The biggest reason I think the evening was Obama's rather than McCain's comes back to brand. McCain was clearly at pains to bolster his Experience brand by emphasizing how long he's been around, how many foreign leaders he's known, how many countries he's visited, how many issues he's been involved with. All of which is fine and under the right circumstances could be advantageous. But as I've written before with regard to Hillary Clinton, this is the wrong marketplace into which to try to introduce a product branded as "Experience." McCain's people realize this, and as I wrote a few days ago, they're trying to respond to marketplace conditions by changing McCain's brand to "Change/Reform." But Change/Reform and Experience are dissonant brand claims, and McCain's own debate efforts undercut his effort to modify the brand. In this regard and in others, McCain is faced with the same conundrum, and making the same mistakes, that Clinton made during the primary. Here's what I wrote about Clinton's branding efforts back in January. The whole post applies equally to McCain today, but here's the main idea:

Part of what makes a brand powerful is internal consistency -- that is, consistency between the elements of the message, and between the message and the underlying product. Inconsistency, that is, dissonance, weakens a brand. In other words, for a brand to have power, its various elements must organically cohere. Volvo stands for safety. How would Volvo fare if the company attempted to include in its brand the idea of speed, handling, and thrills? Not well, because thrills and safety don't easily fit together in the consumer's mind. Reliability, on the other hand, is something that does cohere with safety, and therefore, conceptually, Volvo would have little trouble expanding its brand to make it mean reliability along with safety. But because Volvos are not, in fact, reliable, the extension wouldn't work -- there would be a disconnect between the brand and the underlying product...

But other things aren't equal, and experience isn't always the better brand to run on even when the claim to it is strong (note that George Bush Sr., the candidate of experience, was defeated by the young, inexperienced Bill Clinton in 1992). There's also the question of the suitability of "experience" and "change" as brands in the current market. And here, even if Clinton were the very embodiment of experience, she has the wrong brand for 2008.

"Experience" connotes establishment, status quo, the past -- not concepts likely to be favored in a market that has seen five years of catastrophic war in Iraq; the epic incompetence of the response to Katrina; a plummeting dollar; a nine trillion dollar national debt; etc. "Experience" suggests you might be part of the problems people now want fixed. By contrast, all the associations of "change" as embodied by Obama -- freshness, excitement, the new, the future -- suggest the product in question, rather than being part of the problems of the past, will instead be the agent for solving them.

Clinton has realized her "experience" brand is not nearly as well suited for the current market as Obama's "change" brand, and has therefore been attempting to make "change" a part of her brand, as well. You can see the results in her final pre-caucus Iowa television commercial. Note how many times she talks about how she'll be "ready on day one" -- to make "a new beginning." The message (which Bill Clinton has been broadcasting, as well), is that only the candidate with experience can bring about change. Logically, there's nothing wrong with this argument. But brands aren't driven by logic. They're driven by emotion, by unconscious associations, and the implicit question in the mind of voters ("if she's so experienced, why is she only getting around to changing things now?") cannot be satisfactorily answered by logic. In other words, "experience" and "change" are not elements that cohere under a unified, powerful brand. (For a hilarious take on the ultimate in Clinton rebranding, click here.)

At the same time, McCain's primary, and original, brand claim -- experience -- has been badly damaged by his choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate. Here's just one of her recent performances:


Watch CBS Videos Online

(BTW, that claim about trade missions? Another... let's call it another falsehood.)

True, Obama has undercut his own core brand of Change by selecting Joe Biden, a six-term senator whose brand -- longevity, insider, experience -- is dissonant with Obama's. But my sense is that it's easier to yoke "experience" in the service of "change" than it is to do the reverse. Also, no matter who he adds to the ticket, Obama just looks and sounds like change (whether he actually represents such a thing is of course a separate matter). McCain, no matter who he adds, looks as though he's been around forever. Once again, in this marketplace, even if McCain hadn't done so much to dilute and distort his brand, he'd have the tougher sell. I think his debate strategy has made it tougher.

Brain Dead

"It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt."

--Mark Twain

If you're part of the McCain team, here's what you're thinking.

You didn't know anything substantive about Palin before she was selected (why would you? She wasn't vetted). You meet her. You quickly realize she's bereft of even minimal acquaintance with defense, foreign policy, the economy, climate issues, domestic concerns, or any other area in which a president needs a firm grounding. You realize you can't let her out in public unscripted because she's so unready that a disaster is certain.

Your first response, therefore, is Oh, shit.

(Before denying anything in the above paragraph, you need to explain why, if Palin could exceed or even barely meet the press's and public's increasingly modest expectations, McCain's people won't take off the gag. That they're willing to pay a price for gagging her demonstrates they know removing the gag would be worse. Watch the Letterman clip below. He asks the eminently common sense question: even if McCain himself can't multitask and it made sense for him to suspend his campaign in response to the current economic crisis as he claims, why can't his vice presidential running mate campaign in his stead? If the quarterback can't play, where's the second string?).

You fight panic. You force yourself to think... think, damn it! And you realize -- hey, you don't need to make her an actual expert on any of those tough presidential subjects (and thank God for that, because true expertise in any, let alone all of these areas would be impossible in the time and circumstances available). What you need to do instead is just train her to seem like an expert. Sure, sure, you think, feeling better now, feeling like there's hope. It's like the difference between being a real martial artist, and being able to realistically bust out a few moves in front of the cameras on a movie set. Not that the second one is easy, but it's nothing compared to the first. That's the way to look at it -- she doesn't have to be an expert; she just has to play one on TV.

You're nodding now. Positive self talk. You can do this. This can be done. It's not like you have to pull it off for two years or anything. The election's on November 4, for God's sake... that's right around the corner. Look how long Bush and company kept the war in Iraq going by continually announcing new six-month milestones. If they can do that for six years, surely you can do this for six weeks.

But you're going to have to let her out at some point. No getting around that. Eventually, people are going to start asking what you're hiding, what you're afraid of. Whether you're running a campaign worthy of Vladimir Putin, whether this mystery candidate is really the Manchurian Candidate.

Panic starts to rise again. You beat it back. You grab a pencil and paper. Write it down, come up with a method. Plan the work, work the plan. Don't panic. Think. You can do it. The plan looks like this:

1. Push back "eventually" as long as possible. Inject as many smears about Obama's patriotism and as much bullshit about lipstick and kindergarten sex education as you can to obscure what you're really up to. Sure, McCain will take heat for turning the "Straight Talk Express" into the Bullshit Express, for sullying his alleged honor and integrity, but better that be the campaign narrative than incontrovertible proof that he selected a cipher to be a 72-year-old heartbeat away from the presidency.

2. Hide her. Force feed her everything she needs to know to avoid making a catastrophic mistake when she's finally allowed to open her mouth. Remember, you don't have to turn her into an expert, just someone who plays one on TV. Just enough to avoid that catastrophic mistake.

3. The preceding two points reinforce each other. The longer you hide her, the more you can improve her acting skills and the less the public expects. When "eventually" finally happens, you push her out in front of the press and public. At this point, you've been hiding her so long everyone's expecting her to be as vacuous as the icy void of space. Instead, she gets through her talking points without a major gaffe. The narrative then becomes, "She's not as clueless as we were expecting." You shrug and say, "What was the big deal? Told you we had nothing to hide."

Lower expectations dramatically, bone up her acting skills... with a whole lot of luck, you can get the two to cross on a graph. In the meantime, it's the political high-wire act of the century. But hey, they don't pay you the big bucks for nothing.

For a variety of reasons, it won't work.

First, there's the difficulty, noted above, of bringing someone like Palin up to speed even as a pretend-expert.

Second, there's the hostility the McCain camp is engendering even in the supine mainstream media. When you've been in the tank for your buddy John McCain as long as the MSM has, and he then repeatedly ignores your gentle hints that his statements are, shall we say, at odds with the factual record, making you look like co-opted, unappreciated fools, and he then turns on his erstwhile best buds and accuses them of not even being journalists, the backlash from the erstwhile best buds is going to get downright personal. And without the press to enable it, the narrative you're desperately trying to create -- "she's better than you thought!" -- won't take root outside the rightwing blogosphere.

Then there's the economy, the wars, Katrina, the whole Republican brand...

But wait, there's still more. Choosing Palin destroyed one of the ventricles of McCain's brand: his claim to experience. You can't build a brand on experience and then select a neophyte like Palin to be your understudy. So what McCain and Palin are now trying to do, fundamentally, is build a new brand, about Change and Reform, in under two months. This is a hell of a hard thing to do -- dot bombs in Silicon Valley spent millions on just such efforts, and I'm not aware of any that succeeded. And here, the task is particularly daunting because the packaging in which McCain and Palin are attempting to wrap themselves is so at odds with the facts of the underlying product (more on political brand dissonance here). John McCain not only looks like the establishment, this son and grandson of admirals and quarter-century-in-congress-and-the-senate politician is the establishment. Meanwhile, every one of Palin's claim to be a reformer, from "thanks, but no thanks" to the Bridge to Nowhere to selling the plane on eBay to firing the governor's cook to taking a paycut to believing in transparency in government has been proven false.

So abruptly changing the McCain brand from Experience to Change/Reform is as difficult a maneuver as Volvo suddenly abandoning "safety" in favor of "speed." A change like that is damn near impossible under any circumstances. When the underlying product doesn't support -- and in fact contradicts -- the new brand direction, sales will be a disaster. As the writing on the wall becomes increasingly clear, you might even see management begin to indulge in increasingly bizarre and desperate gambits: contradicting themselves again and again on the health of the company (or of the economy); more lying, even on trivial matters; lashing out at shareholders who criticize their plans (or at the press); trying to postpone or cancel shareholder meetings (or to hide from reporters); or suspend a campaign; or cancel debates; or run from TV appearances). Anything to avoid, or just delay, the inevitable rendezvous with reality.

Speculation: what we're seeing now is not just the wheels coming off the McCain campaign following serial collisions with the real world. McCain's recent pleas to suspend the campaign and cancel debates are evidence that the candidate's age is showing. Members of the media (before concluding McCain was just using them) used to laud McCain's remarkable vigor. But even if he was vigorous during the primary, at some point the relentless pace and grinding duration of a presidential campaign will take their toll. McCain's people know if he has even one senior moment, or one of the intemperate outbursts for which he's known, during a debate, all hope will be lost. I think they've been seeing more of such moments in private, and are now trying to find a way to get him some rest before he gets lost in public. And I'm not the only one wondering. Here's George Will and company; here's David Letterman's scathing mockery.





A significant percentage of the country will vote for McCain and Palin no matter what. Likewise, a significant percentage for Obama and Biden. The independent middle only needs to move a little one way or the other to swing the election. By definition, that middle is considerate. The more time they have to consider the monumental bullshitter that John McCain has become, and how frighteningly unready his understudy is, the more independents will break for Obama.

As with Obama's race with Clinton, when the general election ends in November, people will look back and realize it had been over for a long time already. What we're seeing now is the McCain campaign's fingers continuing to twitch long after the brain has died.

The Palin Doctrine

Sarah Palin's ignorance of foreign policy is remarkable not just in itself, but also for the way, along with her candidacy, it continues to expose the naked hypocrisy that characterizes so much of what the Republican party has allowed itself to become.

If you've watched the single interview the McCain team has dared to let her give in the two weeks since she was nominated, you've seen the following exchange:

Gibson: Do you agree with the Bush Doctrine?
Palin: In what respect, Charlie?
Gibson: What do you interpret it to be?
Palin: His worldview?

Palin has been justifiably slammed for not knowing what the Bush Doctrine is, and the unprincipled right has rallied to her defense by claiming there's so much ambiguity in the Bush Doctrine, so many versions, so many interpretations and elements and addenda and visions and revisions, that obviously Palin was just giving a careful, thoughtful response. It's all bullshit, of course, and Glenn Greenwald has a great series of videos and transcripts of the people who just before being blinded by the impenetrable opaqueness of the Bush Doctrine all agreed on exactly what it meant.

(By the way, what could be said about a doctrine so ambiguous that even its cheerleaders profess not to understand what it means? You'd think a latent sense of personal dignity would prevent Republicans from advancing excuses as lame as their latest, but you would be mistaken.)

Now, admittedly, doctrines are simply policies. But if you call it a policy, it won't get named after you or your political heroes (who would remember The Monroe Policy?), so self-important presidents and their sycophantic cheerleaders in the press like to puff ordinary policies up into heroically grand Doctrines. Okay, fine. But this is what makes Palin's interview the more appalling: it's clear that not only does she not know what the Bush Doctrine is, she doesn't know what a presidential doctrine is, period.

Think about it. Yes, if it were true that Palin were an expert on the Bush Doctrine who was just giving a careful, nuanced response, she would have asked something like, "Which aspect, Charlie?" (with a few specifics thrown in to alleviate any suspicions that she's a foreign policy neophyte, alleviating such ridiculous suspicions being one of the key objectives of the interview). But even if she didn't know diddly about the Bush Doctrine, a nodding acquaintance with the concept of presidential concepts generally would have steered her away from her non-sequitur of a fishing expedition. After all, no one with even a clue about what a presidential doctrine is would respond to a question like Gibson's with a query about the worldview of the president in question.

Imagine this exchange:

Gibson: Do you agree with the Monroe Doctrine?
Palin: In what respect, Charlie?
Gibson: What do you interpret it to be?
Palin: His worldview?

Right, Palin's question makes no sense there, either. Nor would it have made sense had Gibson asked her about the Carter Doctrine, the Reagan Doctrine, or about whether she thought it was silly and self-important for presidents to have "doctrines" named after them in the first place. It wouldn't have made sense because Palin doesn't know anything about the entire subject.

So maybe instead of being tutored by Joe Lieberman and company, Palin should be watching Monty Python and the Holy Grail:



Of course, none of this will matter to the people who are packaging Palin as a foreign policy expert because Alaska is near Russia, and it won't matter to the people who want to believe in the "Sarah is Experienced" myth. We used to call this kind of attitude willful ignorance. I think we can now just call it the Palin Doctrine.

P.S. I've received several emails from people complaining about my use of the word "bullshit" because they find it offensive. I understand your point and appreciate the feedback, but I think on this issue reasonable people can differ. It's true there are many other words that also describe the McCain/Palin campaign: lies, deception, distortion, dishonesty, untruth, etc., but nothing quite captures the heart of their campaign like bullshit, so I'll go on using the term. And while I commend these commenters for caring enough to share their thoughts with me, I can't help but wonder: have you expressed some outrage too at the purveyors of the bullshit, and not just at the people who are reporting it?

Obama Eats Special Needs Children!

James Taranto has an article in today's Wall Street Journal in which he professes outrage at anyone who would suggest John McCain picked Sarah Palin because she was walked the pro-life walk (as, indeed, she has). The article is worth a read: Taranto distorts the meaning of some of the quotes he uses in a way that's reminiscent of the recent McCain camp excrescences on lipstick and sex education, then whips himself into a fit of righteous indignity:

This is worse than tasteless or even unhinged. It is depraved. It represents an inversion of any reasonable conception of right and wrong, including liberal conceptions.

Holy hyperbole, Batman! But is it really so outlandish and offensive to suggest that McCain picked Palin because of her pro-life credentials?

This is a candidate who has barely set foot outside the country, who has never met a foreign leader, who had never evinced even a rudimentary understanding of or even interest in foreign policy. Her national security credentials are so lacking that her supporters have had to resort to novel theories about the sources of her expertise, such as that she is a national security expert because Alaska is near Russia, or that she has learned foreign policy "by osmosis" because Russian missiles would pass over Alaska on their way to the continental United States. Even McCain can't come up with a coherent defense of his candidate's foreign policy or national security credentials (although he does manage to come up with two #1 issues facing America. For John McCain, nothing is impossible). Watch this painful video and see.



And here's Governor Palin's first interview since being nominated, where, after two weeks of cramming on national security issues, she doesn't even know what The Bush Doctrine is.



(If you're a principled conservative, if you care about national security, how can you accept this? Seriously.)

The humiliating attempts of Palin's supporters notwithstanding, it's simply impossible to believe that McCain chose Palin for her national security credentials. We know he didn't pick her for that.

How about executive experience? The McCain team has tried to focus more on this one because the national security case is so laughable. And it's true that Palin has been a mayor and is now a governor, so she is not entirely lacking in executive experience. But even if you believe that being mayor of a town of 9000 and serving for a year and half as governor of a state of 600,000 is adequate experience to prepare you to be President of the United States, can you really argue it's enough to outweigh the total lack of foreign policy or national security credibility? If McCain wanted meaningful executive experience -- especially the kind that would outweigh the foreign policy deficit -- he had an almost limitless list of candidates who have far more executive experience than Palin.

So we know McCain didn't pick Palin for her national security acumen, which is nonexistent, or for her executive experience, which is slight. And those seem like two pretty key categories to check off for a potential Commander-in-Chief.

So... why did he pick her?

As I've argued before, there are two reasons: (i) to attract disaffected Hillary supporters and women for whom gender is a key consideration in a candidate; and (ii) to fire up the base. Palin's gender was calculated to achieve objective #1. Objective #2 is achieved by Palin's pro-life stance, the integrity of which is proven by her decision to bear a Down's Syndrome child (to her credit -- on this, she seems no hypocrite. Pork barrel spending and reform, not so much).

So of course McCain chose Palin in large part because of her decision to have her Down's Syndrome baby. Her decision served the substantive objective of firing up the base, and even better, today Republicans are able to use the baby, as Taranto does, to inject another dose of bullshit into the news cycle and make sure everyone is talking about the baby, rather than about Governor Palin's utter lack of qualifications to be Commander-in-Chief. The strategy is: "We'll talk about the baby by saying it's outrageous and offensive to talk about the baby."

So get ready for the next wave of McCain accusations, calculated to dominate two or three more days of news and drown out McCain's and Palin's dreadful recent performances. It'll go something like this: "Obama Slimes Trig Palin and Other Special Needs Children!" And rather than press this obvious -- and winning -- point, that of course McCain picked her because of the baby, she's substantively embarrassingly unqualified, Democrats will apologize, as indeed they already, reflexively, are.

Republicans are very good at this game. Democrats, it seems, just aren't. Some thoughts on why in another post.

McCain's Honor

What's that quote, sometimes attributed to Twain, other times to Churchill? "A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on." Well, it looks like the truth is belatedly catching up to McCain and Palin on their nonstop "she stopped the bridge to nowhere, she sold the plane on eBay, she fired the governor's mansion cook" attempts to create a hockey mom, reformer, just-folks persona that rests on a tissue of lies.

No, she didn't kill the bridge to nowhere; no, she didn't return the money for the bridge -- she kept it; no, she didn't sell the plane on eBay, and took a loss when she sold it otherwise; no, she didn't fire the governor mansion cook, just let him go during the summer, when she wasn't there anyway; no, she didn't put Wasilla's fiscal house in order, she increased the town's debt; no, she didn't oppose earmarks, she took in more earmark money per capita than any other governor in the United States.

It'll be interesting to see whether the facts carry the day. So often, people will just go on believing what they want to. What's that other Churchill line? "Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened."

Here are a few links to the facts:

http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh090808.shtml

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/215092.php

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3DZZNZFxeI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfLDjmKfigw





Many more articles and links on Talking Points Memo.

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/

-- Barry

Suicide by Palin

On November 5, when the votes are in and Obama has won, pundits will look back and see what all the bizarreness and hysteria are occluding now: John McCain lost the election when he selected Sarah Palin as his running mate.

McCain's strategists hoped choosing Palin would accomplish two objectives: bring in more women, and fire up the theocrat base. The first objective will fail. The second will succeed, but only in a "the operation was a success but the patient died" sense.

Objective 1: bring in more women. The number of women who would vote for someone with Palin's views on reproductive rights (let alone her scant experience) -- that is, who, as The Daily Show put it, who would put gynecology over ideology -- is small. To suggest otherwise, as the McCain campaign implicitly has in making its pick, presupposes that there are significant numbers of women who are even more gullible than men. There aren't.



Also, the few women who might vote for McCain only because his running mate is female have to be balanced against the voters McCain will have lost by his choice. Among the lost will be voters (many of them women) appalled by the cynicism of the move, by Palin's obvious lack of readiness for the job, and by the recklessness McCain has demonstrated in his failure to vet his pick.

Objective 2: fire up the Christianist base. From what I've read in the news and judging from some of the mail I've been receiving, I think this objective will probably be achieved. But again, you have to balance the gains you make in firing up the base against the potential voters you drive to Obama by adopting this strategy. The rally-the-base strategy worked in the last two elections. After eight years of disastrous Republican incompetence, the base won't be enough. You need the independents, too -- that is, the very voters who are thoughtful enough to correctly evaluate a choice like this for what it really is.

If this is all so obvious, you might ask, why did McCain's team adopt a strategy that's sure to fail?

Two reasons, I would say: inertia, and the fear of looking stupid.

When I was competing in wrestling and judo, I learned that you have to be careful about relying too much on a particular money move (there are exceptions, like Japanese Olympic judo heavyweight Gold Medalist Yasuhiro Yamashita, but even there Yamashita had three money moves, each of which complemented the other two, and countering one would by design set you up for one of the others. Plus, Yamashita was abnormally talented. But I digress). If you get known for a signature move, your opponents will work hard to figure out a way to counter it. Then, when you go up against such an opponent and your money move doesn't work, it takes a while for your brain to accept that the surefire thing isn't working anymore and you have to do something else. Eventually, you'll catch on, but there's resistance, and in the meantime you'll probably lose the match.

Now, multiply that resistance across an entire entrenched bureaucracy, and you start to get an idea of how hard it is for an organization to abandon techniques that have worked in the past, even when all the signs indicate that the current contest is different.

Compounding the inertia factor is the fear of looking stupid. I think fear of looking stupid is one of the most powerful motivators in human behavior. It explains why people are willing to do conventional things even in the face of plentiful evidence that the thing in question is a mistake. Because if you buy gold at $1000 an ounce and it tanks, you can always hide behind the fig leaf of, "Well gosh, everyone was doing it! So sure it was a mistake, but at least it wasn't a stupid one!" Whereas if you fail doing something original or otherwise daring, you'll be open to charges of, "What were you thinking? No one's ever done that -- why didn't you do what's tried and trued? What are you, stupid?"

Fear of looking stupid has two components. The first, described above, is largely unconscious and emotional. The second is conscious and calculated. If you're a McCain or RNC staffer and you know the tried-and-true approach is going to fail this time, what are your incentives for trying to adapt? You're apt to lose against the higher-ups, anyway, who are gripped by inertia. And even if you prevail organizationally but your daring new strategy doesn't win the election (highly probable, given the fundamentals of this race), people will hit you with the, "What are you, stupid?" charge, which will damage your career prospects. Whereas, if you lose the election doing what's always worked before, you won't look stupid, you can blame the brutal 2008 election fundamentals, and you'll have a job working for the Republican nominee in 2012.

So the Republicans have by reflex adopted a fire-up-the-theocrat-base; spiced it up with an attempt to lure women sufficiently gullible or gender-obsessed to vote against their ideological and common sense interests; and undergirded it with the usual tribalist, culture war appeals we saw in most of the Republican convention speeches. I almost can't blame them -- not just because, after all, the bullshit has worked before, but because the Democrats are still so inept in combating it. At least the Dems can rely on outsiders like The New Yorker.

For me, probably the most fascinating aspect of McCain's pick (aside from watching Republican heads explode as they try to defend it) has been watching the way the glandular right has fallen in love with her. In fact, I received an email from a guy the other day who proclaimed, "I love Sarah Palin!" I wrote back that it must be love at first sight. And these are the same people who accuse the left of surrendering their judgment on Obama, of falling in love, of believing Obama is The One, blah blah blah...



Let's assume too that Sarah Palin, because of her looks, her religious views, her personality, or whatever, seems like your kind of person and you really, really like her, or even love her. I don't understand how you get from there to "and therefore she should be next-in-line for the presidency." In what other field do people make decisions this way? "...and therefore she should operate on my child." "...and therefore he should run a billion-dollar company." "...and therefore she should repair my car."

"and therefore she should be next-in-line for the presidency." And the people saying it call themselves "conservative!" It amazes me.

The good news is, she won't be.

Rebranding McCain

Apologies to all for being away so long. If you haven't heard, back in May, my family and I made a sudden decision to move to Tokyo for the year, which led to a distracting three months of preparations. We've been here now for two weeks, are mostly settled in, and are loving life in this overwhelming, crazy, wonderful city.

I've been meaning to offer some thoughts on where John McCain is most vulnerable to being rebranded, but I think that exercise might have been rendered academic now that McCain has chosen to commit Suicide By Palin. Still, branding and politics are two subjects that interest me mightily, and their intersection even more so. So here are a few observations.

I've finally finished watching the major speeches from the Democratic convention. I think the Dems mostly did a good job. Like Glenn Greenwald, I would have liked to see more about the current administration's radicalism and contempt for the Constitution. I also would have liked to see a more subtle and systematic attempt to rebrand McCain.

For me, a brand is the emotional connection a consumer feels with a product or service (for some earlier thoughts on the subject with regard to Clinton and Obama, check out Brand, Market Adoption, and President Obama). Brand is what the product stands for; it's why a consumer wants to be associated with the product.

What's McCain's brand? I think you can sum it up in a few phrases. War hero. National security expert. Straight-talking maverick. (Bear in mind that for the moment we're talking about brand, and not the extent to which the brand is supported or contradicted by the underlying product). Given that McCain's marketing team wants consumers to buy their product for the presidency, I'd call McCain's brand strong and appropriate to the task at hand. The challenge for the Democrats, therefore, is to change the brand. The question is, how.

Once a brand is established in the consumer's mind, it's difficult to change it in the absence of a change in the underlying product. Some brands can be extended in certain directions; the trick lies in knowing which brands can be extended and in what ways. As a general matter, you can't turn a brand into something entirely new. You have to build on, and subtly shift, something you already have. Even a relatively logical change -- and one supported by the product's name -- like Amazon's shift from online bookseller to online general merchandise shopping mall, was difficult and took a lot of time and effort.

So the Democrats would be ill-advised to try to take on McCain's brand head-on. What they need to do instead is to work with the brand as it currently exists in consumers' minds and then subtly reshape it. Republicans are generally good at this game. Look at what they've tried to do in rebranding Obama as a "celebrity." Obama's brand involves a rare kind of political charisma, and rather than deny that charisma, the Republican marketing machine has tried to shift the way consumers look at it. The pitch isn't, "He's not charismatic," which no one would accept; it's "Sure, he's charismatic -- he's a celebrity,after all, like Paris Hilton, who BTW isn't qualified to be president" (although I have to say, Paris is a lot more articulate than McCain, and marketing-savvy, too).

I think the way to rebrand McCain is first to not argue about the current brand. People who believe McCain is a national security expert because he can keep a straight face while uttering helium-filled platitudes like "I'll follow Osama bin Laden to the gates of Hell" and "I'll be Hamas's worst nightmare" and "We are all Georgians now," while ignoring his belief that even in retrospect invading Iraq was a good idea, along with his proven inability, for example, to distinguish Shia from Sunni, or locate the borders of Pakistan or Iraq, or know that Czechoslovakia hasn't been a country since 1992, won't be persuaded by the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Similarly, people who believe McCain is a straight-talking maverick despite his reversals on Iraq, torture, abortion, tax cuts, offshore drilling, the religious right -- in fact, can you come up with a topic on which McCain has been consistent? -- are already letting the brand blind them to the facts, so pointing out the facts will be of limited utility. Nor is there any reason to hope that people who believe being shot down and held as a POW in itself qualifies a candidate to be Commander-in-Chief and insulates that candidate from questions about his qualifications are amenable to an alteration in their underlying worldview.

(On the convincibility continuum, people who continue to believe McCain is serious about national security -- that he puts "Country First" -- even in the face of his pick for vice president, are near clinical. The Wall Street Journal's attempts to justify the choice were particularly entertaining. They praised it as "a daring pick because Mrs. Palin has never faced national scrutiny and hasn't had to deal with foreign policy." Hasn't had to deal with it! Meaning, she might be an absolute expert on the subject; she just hasn't had the opportunity to demonstrate her awesome abilities. It's like calling a used car "pre-owned" -- sure it was owned, but maybe it wasn't ever driven? And this was great, too: "We suspect her record of fighting the status quo was uppermost in John McCain's decision." The woman part? Total accident! Fox and Cindy McCain have argued for Palin's foreign policy credibility because "Alaska is close to Russia," and no, I am not making this up. And here's a hilarious parody of right-wing attempts to justify this unjustifiable choice.).

What the Democrats need to do is accept all the premises of McCain's brand -- but then to ask, "What happened? McCain was all those things, and we loved him for it. But he's changed. He's not the man he once was."

Notice how small is the disagreement inherent in this pitch. It doesn't deny adherents to McCain's brand their fundamental belief; instead, it accepts and agrees with that belief. It's therefore able to get past defenses and open up a small question, a question which comes across as fair and reasonable given the overall broad agreement on which the question rests. "What happened to him?"

The only Democrat I saw do anything like this at the convention was John Kerry, who repeatedly contrasted Senator McCain and Candidate McCain. The contrast was useful, but I think it could have been more effective. It needed to be hammered home by more speakers, and consistently employed in service of the question: "What happened to John McCain?"

Once McCain brand loyalists accept that something has changed, they can start to see him more for what he really is (or, if you think I'm being too partisan, they can see him in the way the Democrats want him to be seen rather than in the way he wants to be seen). The emotional distance for such changed perceptions is short. It's not, "I was all wrong about McCain;" it's, "I was right about McCain... but he's changed." And that small shift would be enough. What matters for an election (or for the success of any product) isn't what the brand was; what matters is what the brand is on the day people are making up their minds about buying it.

"He's not the man he once was" is also obvious code for, "At 72 -- and 76, if he serves a full term -- McCain is too old." Democrats will be called on their use of this code. This would be desirable. It would be a backdoor way of creating nonstop coverage of McCain's age, in the guise of "Are Democrats playing the age card?":

Television Pseudo-Journalist: "You said, 'What's happened to John McCain? He's not the man he was.' Isn't this code for 'McCain is too old?'"

Democratic Spokesman: "No, it's not. Whether a man who would be 76 if he serves one full term is too old for the job is for the American people to decide. It's a comment instead on what happened to a once-principled politician. After all, John McCain was against torture before he was for it, he was against tax cuts for the rich before he was for them, he called theocrats 'agents of intolerance' before embracing them, etc. John McCain has made more misstatements, leveled more outright falsehoods, and changed his positions on more issues in less time than any politician in recent memory, and the American people have a right to know why. Is he just pandering? What does he really believe? What could we expect of him if he were to become president?"

In the midst of this kind of coverage, McCain's ongoing misstatements would have a framework in which they could be understood: "He's a national security expert, so if he's making mistakes on such fundamental points, it can only mean that he's slipping. Can we risk putting someone of such declining capacity in the White House?"

No, we can't.

I'm not a Democrat, and I'm not otherwise comfortable with the notion of the Democrats gaining a simultaneous lock on Congress, the Senate, and the Presidency. But if they're going to become a serious party again, the Republicans need a near-death experience. If you care about the party -- and about the country -- help provide that experience in November.

Safety First; The Constitution Second

If you're a regular reader of HOTM, you know where I stand on the recently enacted FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which grants the government broad new domestic eavesdropping powers and immunizes telecoms from previous felonies (wouldn't it be great if retroactive immunity from felonies were available to all of us? Tragically, you and I don't donate enough to politicians to qualify. But we can always hope).

Reading the transcript of the signing ceremony, I was struck by some of President Bush's rhetoric. The president said, "The bill I sign today will help us meet our most solemn responsibility: to stop new attacks and to protect our people." And he reiterated: "Protecting America from another attack is the most important responsibility of the federal government -- the most solemn obligation that a President undertakes."

What's odd about these statements is that they're at odds with the Constitution itself. Article 2, Section 1 provides, "Before he enter on the Execution of his Office, [the President] shall take the following Oath or Affirmation:--'I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.'" Apparently, the framers thought the one thing so in need of protection that they required it to be called out explicitly in an oath is the Constitution. They didn't see fit to have the president swear an oath to defend the country, the currency, or anything else -- just the Constitution. For someone who purports to be a "judicial conservative", Bush's reordering of Constitutional priorities are odd.

True, Article 4, Section 4 provides, "The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened), against domestic Violence." But there's nothing in the language of the Constitution providing that any of these responsibilities is "most solemn" or "most important." Those priorities are external inventions, and certainly not in keeping with a notion that we ought to interpret the Constitution based on its own clear language.

So we're left with a question: why would a president who purports to be a judicial conservative claim his most solemn obligation is to prevent attacks on the nation, when the Constitution itself clearly provides otherwise? If the president's reordering of priorities is correct, does it not follow that he might be impelled to protect America at the cost of the Constitution? Do we really want to empower any president, Democrat or Republican, with such a convenient rationalization?

The right is fond of pointing out that freedom isn't free. And certainly it isn't: likely it can only exist and be preserved in the presence of certain dangers (then-Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld himself pointed out that "Freedom is untidy.") Many of these dangers could be eliminated by a totalitarian government, just as we could dramatically reduce crime by eliminating Due Process and the burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Would the trade-off be worth it?

What concerns me most is that President Bush's stated priorities -- Safety First, the Constitution Second -- might accurately reflect the current priorities of a significant number of Americans. If our culture comes to prize safety above all else, we'll gradually cash in our freedoms attempting to buy our safety. If that's really the way we've come to view the world, maybe McCain advisor Phil Graham had a point when he recently described Americans as "whiners" and victims."

Liberty is our precious inheritance. We can marshal it wisely, or we can place it in blind trust, where, predictably, it will be lost.

Obama Caves on Warrantless Surveillance and Telecom Amnesty

As an Obama supporter, I have to say the Senator massively disappointed me today with his craven capitulation on warrantless surveillance and amnesty for law-breaking telecoms. His vote was a betrayal of numerous campaign promises. I had thought more of him and feel naive now for having believed him earlier.

If you value the Fourth Amendment more than Senator Obama seems to, here's a link to Strange Bedfellows, a new organization dedicated to preventing unchecked government power and preserving the Fourth Amendment. I've already signed up.