All wired up

Sarah Palin has taken no shortage of abuse for her inarticulate remarks last year when she first rose to national prominence as McCain's running mate. Everyone who followed the campaign remembers the notorious moments from the Couric interviews, particularly when she tried to explain why being governor of Alaska enhanced her foreign policy credentials:

Well, it certainly does because our -- our next door neighbors are foreign countries. They're in the state that I am the executive of. And there in Russia ... We have trade missions back and forth. We-- we do-- it's very important when you consider even national security issues with Russia as Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where-- where do they go? It's Alaska. It's just right over the border. It is-- from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right there. They are right next to-- to our state.

Contrary to popular belief, Palin never said "I can see Russia from my house." That was SNL's parody of a remark she made during an interview with Charlie Gibson for ABC News, when she said, "you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska." The whole argument about her state's proximity to Russia giving her foreign policy experience started as a bit of campaign bluster by McCain, and she unwisely stuck with it through several interviews.

I believe that ultimately candidates should be judged by the smartest things they have said, not the dumbest things. Our political culture obsesses on these gotcha moments, which can happen to anyone. I know I've made stupid remarks in my life, and been in situations where I've done nothing but sputter. I was just lucky never to be in front of a news camera when it happened.

That's why I decided to ask around the Internet for Palin fans to show me smart, eloquent things she has said on public policy. As it turns out, several users were kind enough to provide me with a series of quotes they believe reveal her penetrating insight. Here is one example, from a November interview with Greta Van Susteren:

Fundamentally, America's economy was built on free market enterprise. It was built on these principles that allowed the private sector to grow and to thrive and prosper and for our families to keep more of what we earn. Where we are right now in America in about the last 11 months is seeing this reversal of those principles that were applied to build up our economy.

All of a sudden, we're thinking it's OK to grow debt in our country. It's OK to borrow money from countries that we will soon be so beholden to. It's OK to print money out of thin air and think, again, that everything's just going to magically work out.

Fundamentally, everybody is equal in America. Everyone has equal opportunity to earn and produce and build. And the fundamentals of a strong economy have got to be applied again, as they were, like I just said, back in the '80s, when Reagan faced a worse recession than what we're facing today. Let's learn from that piece of American history and apply the same solutions.

Okay, where do I begin? Her premise--that the U.S. was a bastion of fiscal restraint until the day Obama took office--is quite sensible to anyone with the political literacy of a third-grade hall monitor, but to few else. Reagan added more money to the national debt than any other president in history, until Dubya shattered the record. (See here for the details.) Furthermore, economists of all political stripes agree that the government should spend during a recession.

As for the claim that everyone in America has equal opportunities for success--well, let's just say if I took the time to refute that assertion with data, it would put me in mind of the proverbial machine gun for killing a fly. Instead, I'll go back to the words of Mr. Reagan himself, in a 1985 address on tax reform:

My goal is an America bursting with opportunity, an America that celebrates freedom every day by giving every citizen an equal chance, an America that is once again the youngest nation on Earth--her spirit unleashed and breaking free.

Notice that he identifies equal opportunity as a goal, not a reality. And he argues that limiting government and stimulating business will help us move toward that goal. That's conservatism in a nutshell. Palin, in contrast, is saying everyone already has equal opportunity. If that's the case, why bother changing anything? Her rhetoric may aim for Ronald Reagan, but it ends up at Stephen Colbert.

But let's put all that aside for the moment and consider her verbal abilities. At least she's worlds more coherent than she was during the Couric interview. Whether she's more eloquent, more facile, more persuasive than the average college term paper is another matter. If I had to grade her, I'd give her a C on style and a D on content. And this is supposedly one of her better moments.

On a similar note, consider the following gem:

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for being part of this quest in working with us to restore the American dream. The commonsense Republican proposals are the first step in restoring the American dream because Republicans care about America. But there is no greater dream than the dreams parents have for their children to be happy and to share God's blessings.

That last sentence, I must admit, rings nice on the ears. Unfortunately, I was being a little tricky in leading you to think this was a Sarah Palin quote. It's a real quote, but it wasn't uttered by Sarah Palin. It wasn't even uttered by a human being.

Rather, it came from a computer program that produces automatic summaries of text. In 1996, linguist Geoffrey Nunberg punched in the combined texts of the speeches from the first two nights of the Republican Convention, and the quote above is part of what the program returned. He then tried the same thing with the Democratic Convention. "In this case, though," he reports, "the summarizer software returned pure word salad--maybe because Democrats have more trouble staying on message than Republicans do, maybe because they just go on longer." (This anecdote comes from Nunberg's book The Way We Talk Now and is recounted later in his Talking Right.)

Palin is that summarizer software. At her worst, she speaks "word salad." At her best, she speaks at about the level of that last quote, a comfortable summation of stump-speech rhetoric. If this is the model of a rising political star in our age, we seriously ought to rethink our notions of what it takes to reach that position. All you need is the face of Tina Fey and the syntax of a Pentium, and you're good to go. Bill Gates's influence reaches yet new heights.

The walking America

Toward the end of his inaugural address, President Obama said, "This is the meaning of our liberty and our creed....why a man whose father less than sixty years ago might not have been served at a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath."

This is one of the only times I have ever heard Obama even allude to his race. Throughout the entire campaign, he remained remarkably silent on the subject. The only time his race was mentioned at either of the conventions was in one gracious line by Mike Huckabee at the Republican Convention. If you think that's easy, contrast it with how often Joe Lieberman referred to his Jewishness during the 2000 campaign. For example, Lieberman's acceptance speech contained the line, "I cannot express with words the gratitude that I feel in my heart today as the first Jewish-American to be honored to be a major party candidate for the Vice Presidency." Find me one moment where Obama talks about feeling honored as an African American. He not only rarely brings up the subject, but when he does, it is usually indirect, as in his quip last summer about not looking like the men on the coins.

That's why I'm astounded whenever I hear people say his candidacy was entirely about race. How did that perception come about? Well, for starters, his 1995 memoir Dreams from My Father that first brought him to public attention is largely about the struggles of a biracial man to find his identity in a racially polarized world. Another reason is that his "race speech" in the wake of the Rev. Wright controversy became perhaps the most memorable moment of the entire campaign.

More significantly, though, the pundits couldn't shut up about the subject. And no matter what Obama did, there was undeniably a symbolic aura surrounding his candidacy. People were intrigued by him, who he was, and not just what he said. They found his life story, while not as heroic as John McCain's, equally fascinating.

His mantra of "change" resonated in different ways, because on one level it highlighted a substantive program to reverse the destructive policies of the Bush Administration, but on another it was a call to remake the image of the American government before the entire world. Outside the United States, Bush has always evoked the worst stereotypes of Americans--the country bumpkin, the frat-boy, the privileged son of rich whites, the member of an elite class with a callous disregard for the plight of the weak. (If any of those stereotypes seem to conflict with one another, that is partly a reflection of Bush's image-making, which cast this Ivy Leaguer as a rural American.) It may not be fair, but Obama overturns those stereotypes all at once, simply because of who he is: a walking America.

Before Obama appeared on the national stage, anyone would have predicted that the first black president would have a name like Harold Williams, or even George Washington. Obama isn't just the first black president, he's the first president with a funny name. His biological father was Kenyan, but he was raised partly in Indonesia by an Asian man, and the rest of the time on American soil by whites. I don't mean to imply that his background is unusual. On the contrary, it speaks to the greatness of America in a way that the office of the presidency has tended to conceal.

Even though he doesn't talk about his own race very often, one of his central messages has always been bringing people of different backgrounds together. That was much the thrust of his keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention ("There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America"), which propelled him to national attention and convinced many people, including yours truly, that he was potential presidential material.

It isn't just rhetoric; he seems to have accomplished some of this goal in the diverse coalition he built. He didn't just attract a higher percentage of blacks than usual, he also received a larger proportion of the white vote than any Democrat since Carter. He also won every region of the country except the South, and even there, he won three of the eleven states from the Old Confederacy: Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida. A black candidate could have won the presidency with a narrower band of support.

That America would eventually elect a black man as president was probably inevitable; that it would be someone like Obama is unexpected. He didn't just win, he smoothed out a range of demographics that most people considered to be deep, insuperable divisions. In this scheme, he doesn't need to talk about his racial identity because it so clearly informs how he has approached the task of trying to unite America.

Opinions with results

On August 11, 2008, writing for the ironically named conservative publication The American Thinker, Steven M. Warshawsky proclaimed, "As I wrote last December, '[t]he pundits can talk until they are blue in the face about Obama's charisma and eloquence and cross-racial appeal. The fact of the matter is that Obama has no chance of being elected president in 2008.' I am more convinced of this conclusion than ever."

On October 9, shortly after the second presidential debate, Warshawsky wrote, "I have received numerous emails from Republicans and Democrats alike, asking whether I still think Obama will lose the election. Yes, I do. But what about the polls, they ask? The polls show that Obama is winning. No, they don't, as I will explain." And he did.

Even by October 25, he did not back down: "In a few more weeks, the political environment in this country is likely to become a heckuva lot nastier. For there are real signs pointing to a McCain victory this year, whether or not the mainstream media wants to acknowledge them."

Needless to say, after Election Day he was shocked: "I cannot understand how a man like Obama became president. It contradicts everything I know, or thought I knew, about American history, culture, and politics." But he didn't conclude that his own thinking was at fault. He acted as if the country had pulled a fast one on him. He even made a whole new set of predictions about the damage that Obama and the Democratic Congress would do, and he ended by saying, "I hope that the Democrats will prove me wrong again." Judging from his track record, his hopes will likely be fulfilled!

He is hardly the only commentator to have underestimated Obama. But unlike any mainstream pundit I'm aware of, he continued to predict Obama's demise after primary season, and with firm conviction ("no chance of being elected"). To suggest as late as August that Obama might lose was reasonable, but to suggest that he definitely would lose was insane.

The sheer insularity is striking. Not surprisingly, The American Thinker has also been a repository for wild conspiracy theories about Obama, from the birth certificate business to the claim that William Ayers ghostwrote Dreams from My Father. I have no doubt that the people who believe these things will continue to believe them in the years to come. That's the beauty of having opinions: nothing can shake your belief in them, as long as you choose to consider them true. Making a specific, concrete prediction about the near future is another matter. Once you expose yourself to objective reality, you can't hide from it.

The fallacies in Warshawsky's analysis weren't hard to spot. His most telling statement was, "Why am I so confident that John McCain is going to win the election? In short, because Barack Obama is not an acceptable choice to lead the country." It didn't seem to occur to him that the American public might not share his standards of what is acceptable.

His refusal to believe the polls was also notable. The success of polls at predicting presidential winners has increased dramatically since the days of "Dewey Defeats Truman." In a very close race, there may be uncertainty. But by mid-October this year, McCain was consistently trailing Obama by at least five points, and the electoral map looked even worse for him. It was conceivable that public opinion might change before Election Day, but there was no reason to believe he was already in the lead.

Warshawsky may be an extreme case, but the punditocracy is littered with erroneous forecasts, and the pundits are rarely taken to task for them. I believe that the quality of prognostications can be a gauge of a commentator's analytical skill. We should pay more attention to them.

Let's consider some of the factors that inspire bad political predictions. One is wishful thinking. Another is projecting one's own outlook on the public. A notorious example of the latter was the title of conservative columnist Shelby Steele's early-2008 book A Bound Man: Why We are Excited about Obama and Why He Can't Win. Steele later apologized for the "stupid, silly subtitle that was slapped on to the book" and claimed it did not represent what the book was arguing. Not having read the book, I'll take his word for it.

Some people will predict a candidate's victory in the hopes of creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. That's why candidates themselves rarely admit they're losing even when it's obvious they are. The final nail in the coffin of Fred Thompson's candidacy may have been when he admitted to the press that he wasn't likely to get the nomination. For a politician in those circumstances to lie is understandable, but we expect more honesty from commentators, who should always tell at least what they believe to be the truth.

None of the aforementioned factors explain why many Democrats doubted Obama would win, even days before the election when he seemed practically unbeatable. The crucial factor here was paranoia, inspired by past defeats. They felt their own party had a knack for "snatching defeat from the jaws of victory," and they believed that Republicans might steal the election again. (To this day, there are liberals who think even the 2004 election was stolen.) They also worried about the Bradley Effect, the alleged phenomenon that public opinion polls overestimate a black candidate's support because some respondents are afraid of revealing racist motivations.

One Democrat whose predictions were spectacularly vindicated was Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com. A baseball statistician by trade, Silver developed a unique method of averaging together the presidential polls to determine the winner. His final estimate had Obama beating McCain by 52.3% to 46.2%. The initial results on Election Night were 52.4% to 46.3%--within a tenth of a percent of Silver's predictions. (Subsequent counting, however, has widened Obama's lead by a whole percentage point, making Silver's estimate less accurate.) He also correctly predicted the winner in every state except Indiana, which Obama won narrowly. It's worth asking whether Silver would have been as accurate in a year that was bad for Democrats. My impression is that he doesn't let his biases interfere with his mathematical estimates.

Sometimes good predictions come from unexpected quarters. During the 1996 primary campaign, liberal comedian Al Franken correctly predicted that Dole's running mate would be Jack Kemp. He based his conclusion on a quip by Newt Gingrich that Kemp (a former NFL player) has showered with more blacks than most Republicans have shaken hands with. Franken followed this quote with a list of "Politicians Who Have Showered With Blacks," consisting of former athletes who went into politics.

In 1999, Franken released a book describing a bizarro version of the upcoming 2000 election in which Franken himself becomes the Democratic nominee, with an all-Jewish staff. And guess who his running mate is? Why, Joe Lieberman, of course. His stated reason is that he wants to balance the ticket because "I'm Reform and he's Orthodox."

After these two episodes, I began to pay more attention to Franken's musings. Maybe buried beneath the comedy was some sound insight, I figured. That's why I was puzzled when his 2005 book hinted that the next president would be Barack Obama. At the time, Obama had told the press "unequivocally" that he would not run in 2008. I thought to myself, "I guess Franken is finally wrong about something." Hmmmph. (To be fair, I should mention that the book also predicted that the Republican nominee for 2008 would be Bill Frist.)

What's Franken's secret? Good instincts, or dumb luck? You be the judge. Nobody can know with certainty what the future holds. But I value predictions, because they are opinions with results. They test a person's capacity to think objectively, without letting wishes or fears get in the way. They also tell us something about the quality of the person's reasoning. And they help us weed out the shills.

Tea/No Tea '08

The Republican race this year has begun to remind me of a point in the old Infocom text adventure Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

In that game, you are making your way through a spaceship when you find an object called tea on the ground. You can pick it up by typing "TAKE TEA." There is also an object called no tea which you can pick up: "TAKE NO TEA." But you cannot pick up one while holding the other, since you cannot be simultaneously holding tea and no tea.

The problem is, you have to do just that in order to access the ship's computer. To make this seemingly illogical act possible, you must temporarily become a microscopic entity inside your own brain and remove the Common Sense Particle. Once it is removed, you are free to hold tea and no tea at the same time.

After campaigning on experience and deriding his opponent for a lack of it, John McCain has now selected an inexperienced running mate. She not only lacks foreign policy experience, she has virtually no record of even expressing foreign policy views. In an interview from last month, she didn't even recognize that we have an exit plan for Iraq!

The hypocrisy was so transparent it even caught the attention of many conservatives, including David Frum, Charles Krauthammer, George Will, Ben Stein (who called her "the most peculiar vice-presidential choice there has ever been"), and former McCain strategist Mike Murphy. Others did 180-degree turns on things they had said, prompting a great bit on The Daily Show.

But those who thought McCain could no longer invoke the experience argument were quickly rebuffed by the RNC, which flaunted McCain's experience and Palin's non-Washington status. Somewhere along the line, he removed the Common Sense Particle, figuring he could convince voters to elect tea and no tea at the same time. The odd thing is, he may be right.

While I'm too much of a wimp to make any definitive predictions, I see Democrats falling into a trap. It's the same trap they fell into with Bush in 2000, setting the expectations so low that very little was needed to exceed expectations. You know something's seriously out-of-whack when all a candidate must do to quell many people's doubts about her readiness is capably deliver a speech she didn't write.

I won't go into a detailed refutation of the RNC's attempts to puff up Palin's record while tearing down Obama's. Many other sites have already taken up the task. What's telling is the unstated assumption that her experience must be measured against Obama's. Obama never ran on experience; McCain did. Had Palin been a presidential candidate earlier this year, McCain would almost certainly have assailed her lack of experience, as he in fact did against Romney, Giuliani, and Thompson, all of whom have considerably more experience than Palin.

"We don't have time or opportunity for on-the-job training, and the other candidates for president I don't believe have the qualifications that I do to hit the ground running and immediately address these serious challenges," the four-term Arizona senator and Vietnam veteran told reporters following a speech on the military.

"The country would be safer with me as its leader," McCain added. He said that while he respects his opponents, "this is all about who is best equipped to take on the challenge of radical Islamic extremism."

The selection of a running mate is important not just because of who gets picked, but because it tells us something about how the person at the top of the ticket makes decisions. Obama made a pragmatic if unexciting choice. McCain made a political choice. If experience matters to him as much as he has claimed, what does his selection tell us about his commitment to putting "country first"?

At the convention, Republicans adopted the Lloyd Bentsen strategy. Their message was, "We know Sarah Palin. Sarah Palin is a friend of ours. Senator Obama, you're no Sarah Palin." The trouble is, that first sentence is a lie, and anyone who's been paying attention realizes it.

The Macho Right

Cross-posted at DovBear's blog

In his book The Conservative Soul, bleeding-heart conservative Andrew Sullivan writes, "Even the most passionate of the [Bush] Administration's defenders cannot argue that [waterboarding] is not 'cruel, degrading and inhuman' treatment.... The notion that 'waterboarding' is not torture under the plain meaning of the word as well as its legal meaning is preposterous" (p. 169).

I contrast that with Rudy Giuliani's statement about being unsure whether waterboarding is torture. How do you possibly resolve a disagreement like this? Unless you go to the extreme of testing waterboarding on yourself, as Daniel Levin did, it's basically one person's opinion against another's. Frankly, I doubt the former New York mayor, who built his reputation on dogged machismo, is likely to be swayed by, let's face it, a prissy gay Englishman.

Sullivan attributes the Bush view of torture to "the fundamentalist psyche," which holds that "what matters is his intent, not the empirical analysis" (p. 170). This forms part of Sullivan's larger theory that the world is divided into two types of people, fundamentalists and...well, everyone else, I guess. Into the first category he includes various Evangelicals, Catholics, Mormons, Zionists, Islamists, Nazis, and Communists. He characterizes fundamentalism as hostile toward reason, and among the unreasonable qualities he lists are, oh, a black-and-white "us vs. them" mentality. Hmmmmmmm.

The chip in his theory is that Giuliani is no fundamentalist, by the plain meaning of the word as well as its legal meaning. I therefore propose an alternative theory that is equally simplistic, but at least it knows it is. The assault on reason here is coming not from the Religious Right, but from the Macho Right.

Contrary to popular belief, members of the Religious Right are quite capable of reasoned thought, at least when it suits their purposes. Reason is absolutely irrelevant to members of the Macho Right, who are driven not by reason, but by testosterone.

Even if you've never heard the term, you surely are familiar with the right-wingers who seem to build their whole outlook on machismo. "We gotta be tough on crime. We gotta bomb the commies/Muslims/insert-your-own-enemy back to the Stone Age. We gotta stop the liberals who want to take guns away from the real men who own them."

It's no wonder all those tough-guy movie stars, at least the ones who aren't into martial arts, vote Republican: Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Eastwood, and Willis.

Schwarzenegger, who has never clearly explained why he's a Republican, is a perfect example. You remember when he characterized his Democratic opponents as "economic girlie men" (never mind that he supports universal health care). Then some gay rights organizations, eager to play Charlie Brown to Lucy's football, complained that his remarks were insulting to homosexuals. Uh-huh.

To qualify for the Macho Right, you don't have to be religious. You don't even have to be conservative in a traditional sense. You certainly don't have to be genuinely tough. As we have seen, right-wingers are more than willing to paint true American heroes like John McCain and John Kerry as spineless sissies.

Some notable examples of Macho Rightists in the media are Michael Savage, Ann Coulter, and Bill O'Reilly. You remember Savage. He's the guy who got kicked off of MSNBC because he referred to a caller as a "sodomite" and told him to "get AIDS and die."

Savage, an irreligious Jew, can hardly be accused of Bible-thumping. Macho Rightists aren't fueled by the Bible, which may even provide them with some distractions, such as the admonition to love the sinner. They're the types of people who are given to saying things like, "Get your hands off me, you faggot!!!!"

When Hillary Clinton called Ann Coulter "heartless," referencing her book Godless, Coulter replied, "Oh, lighten up, girl." Apparently realizing the flaw in Hillary's approach, Joe Maguire titled his anti-Coulter book Brainless. That of course has more bite, but it still misses the point. Macho Rightists don't care about brains. They care about cojones.

After all, who else is the emblem of the Macho Right today than President George W. Bush, that tough, macho cowboy who's just like...well, certainly not like the folks from Brokeback Mountain. Those are just sissies who herd cows.

I was once listening to a Macho Right acquaintance of mine rail against bicycle helmets. He wasn't talking about government regulation. He simply hated seeing kids wear them, claiming that today's parents are raising a generation of wimps who can't handle the world.

I had a nasty bicycle spill when I was fifteen. I was wearing no helmet or kneepads. Luckily, I didn't land on my head, but what if I had? I might not be here now to talk about the incident.

The experience gives me a slight advantage when arguing with Macho Rightists. I wouldn't stand a chance against them if all I had were statistics and reasoned arguments. When a Macho Rightist talks, there is absolutely nothing you say, no reasoned argument, that can possibly sway them. On the contrary, the slightest appeal to reason makes you sound like the wuss they know you are. The only way to combat their rhetoric is through more macho rhetoric.

Bill O'Reilly has actually used Macho Right logic to argue against the death penalty. He says that we should give the convicts life in prison so that they can suffer more.

It's hard to say how many Macho Rightists there are, but you know them when you hear them. If you ask any of them whether they belong to the Macho Right, they aren't likely to admit it. The term probably reminds them too much of the Village People.