August 11, 2009
Books of The Times
Presidential Horse Race, the 2008 Version By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
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THE BATTLE FOR AMERICA 2008 -The Story of an Extraordinary Election By Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson
415 pages. Viking. $29.95.
Nine months after the presidential election of 2008, is there anything new or revealing to say about that momentous event? Can a post-mortem on the marathon campaign preceding that vote shed any new light on the participants or the process?
Given the voluminous coverage of that race, it might seem as if the obvious answer to these questions were no. But “The Battle for America 2008,” a new book by Dan Balz, the lead political reporter for The Washington Post, and his former Post colleague Haynes Johnson, actually makes for engaging reading — for both politics addicts interested in small new details and the more casual reader interested in a broad, savvy overview of the run-up to a historic election.
Yes, many of the authors’ observations — about subjects as diverse as voters’ disillusion with George W. Bush and the politics of the primary calendar — have been made many times before. Yes, many of their accounts of the ups and downs of the campaign — Barack Obama’s surge in Iowa; Hillary Rodham Clinton’s comeback in New Hampshire; the long, hard slog through states like South Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania — are very, very familiar. And yes, their discussions of the issues at stake in campaign 2008, including racial politics, the Iraq war and a dangerously faltering economy, retrace well-trodden ground.
But if the authors fail to reframe the election in any significant new way, their retrospective does prove useful in reminding us — 200-plus days into the Obama presidency, as reporters point to declining approval numbers and stubborn obstacles to overhauling health care — of the daunting odds that Mr. Obama overcame to win the White House in the first place.
The authors quote Mr. Obama, then the junior senator from Illinois, as saying that he started out in 2006 giving himself “25 percent odds, you know, maybe 30” of winning it all, and the first glimpse they give us of the candidate is a snapshot of an underdog, still very much in the shadow of the front-runner, Mrs. Clinton. He is sitting aboard his modest six-seat chartered airplane on March 4, 2007, waiting to take off from Selma, Ala., after participating in ceremonies commemorating the 42nd anniversary of the voting rights march there.
As Mr. Obama’s plane waits, Mr. Balz and Mr. Johnson write, “two motorcades of black S.U.V.’s roll onto the tarmac” and stop by “two large, sleek Gulfstream jets.” Bill Clinton, accompanied by his Secret Service detail and his aides, gets into one and promptly takes off, while Mrs. Clinton and her entourage pile into the second jet.
Mr. Obama’s plane is scheduled to depart next, but the engine won’t start: “The battery is dead. Don’t worry, the pilot tells Obama, airport crews are searching for a long extension cord. They’ll plug it into a generator in the lobby and run it from the terminal back to the plane to jump-start the engine. Still, the plane won’t start. While Obama and his aides are cramped inside the plane, sweltering in a cabin without air-conditioning, they watch as Hillary’s Gulfstream takes off. Bemused, Obama tells his young aides, ‘I guess this really is a grass-roots campaign.’ ”
The authors of “The Battle for America” remind us that “for much of 2007, it looked as if Hillary Clinton would win it all,” that her advisers tried to promote an image of strength and inevitability because they “paid lip service to the fact that voters wanted change” but were “more concerned about voter resistance to electing the first woman president.”
Promoting Mrs. Clinton as a candidate of experience in a change election was only one of her advisers’ many miscalculations, along with the early squandering of money, the failure to get an efficient Iowa operation up and running early in the game and an inability or unwillingness to mount a credible fight for the caucus states in February.
As Mr. Balz and Mr. Johnson see it, Bill Clinton also played a substantial role in derailing Mrs. Clinton’s campaign. They argue that his vociferous attacks on Mr. Obama in South Carolina ignited talk of racial politics, “damaged his wife’s candidacy” and not only cost her heavily in that state but also “redrew the landscape heading into Super Tuesday.”
“It seemed for a time,” the authors write, “that his once certain political touch and instincts eluded him and the rest of the Clinton campaign.” In addition, they detail a series of phone calls between Mr. Clinton and Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts in which, they say, the former president tried to win an endorsement for his wife but seemed to further alienate Mr. Kennedy — who, they report, was concerned that “the campaign was sliding into divisiveness, and held the Clintons principally responsible.”
The vicious infighting and bureaucratic gridlock of the Clinton campaign have already been chronicled at length by other reporters — most notably, in articles by Joshua Green in The Atlantic and Gail Sheehy in Vanity Fair — but Mr. Johnson and Mr. Balz do a nimble job here of contrasting its often spectacular dysfunction with the agility and enthusiastic innovation of the Obama campaign.
Senator John McCain’s campaign also emerges in these pages as being “under severe stress internally,” suffering from early fund-raising problems and a bitter culture clash between McCain 2000 and Bush 2004 staff members.
In the course of this book the authors reveal that David Plouffe, who oversaw the blueprint for Mr. Obama’s winning Iowa strategy and who helped construct a game plan based around the building of a new electorate, told Mr. Obama in April 2008 that “he wanted to step down after the primaries”: he was, the authors say, “worn out, having managed the campaign from the first day and on through the most rigorous nomination battle ever,” and his wife was “due to deliver their second child days before the election.”
Mr. Balz and Mr. Johnson report that Mr. Obama “implored him to stay” and that Mr. Plouffe eventually decided he couldn’t leave because the campaign, after the long primary battle, was behind schedule in both the vice-presidential selection process and convention planning.
Given the outcome of the Democratic nomination battle and the general election, this book’s descriptions of each campaign’s initial strategies are illuminating. Perhaps fatefully, Mr. McCain — who had been savaged by the Bush machine in 2000 and who would suffer in 2008 from being linked to the unpopular president — would end up authorizing “a campaign apparatus patterned after Bush’s 2004 re-election committee, a huge operation that was in sharp contrast to the lean campaign he ran in 2000” and that was ill suited to his temperament and strengths as a candidate.
Whereas some of Mrs. Clinton’s advisers, the authors say, wanted to reintroduce her and refute some voters’ impression of her as chilly and distant, the strategist Mark Penn — who comes across in this volume as a pugnacious and highly divisive figure — argued that “former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher should be Hillary’s role model.” An 11-page memorandum he sent her shortly before Christmas 2006 played down the threat posed by Mr. Obama, while indulging in what the authors call “pure flattery” of his client.
“We have incredible image strengths,” the memo boasted, adding that “people don’t just like Hillary Clinton, they love her.”
In contrast, Mr. Balz and Mr. Johnson observe, a November 2006 memo sent to Mr. Obama by his chief adviser, David Axelrod, “was notable for its unsparing critique of his client.”
Mr. Axelrod warned Mr. Obama that if he decided to run for president, he would have to address his own “willingness and ability to put up with something” he had “never experienced on a sustained basis: criticism.” The memo went on: “I don’t know if you are Muhammad Ali or Floyd Patterson when it comes to taking a punch. You care far too much what is written and said about you. You don’t relish combat when it becomes personal and nasty.”
The Axelrod memo also pointed out that an outgoing president nearly always defines the next election, that people rarely seek someone in the mold of the outgoing executive (certainly not after the presidency of George W. Bush) and that in 2008 voters were going to be looking for an alternative to the qualities of stubbornness, hyper-partisanship and ideological certainty that Democrats, independents and disaffected Republicans associated with Mr. Bush.
Mr. Axelrod went on to argue, presciently it turned out, that Mr. Obama’s profile — his embodiment of change, along with his eagerness to challenge old dogmas of right and left — fit this historical moment better than Mrs. Clinton’s and that if he were right, Mr. Obama could catalyze a political movement and prevail against substantial odds.
“You will never be hotter than you are right now,” the memo concluded, adding that “there are many reasons to believe that if you are ever to run for the presidency, this is the time.”
Showing posts with label 2008 Election. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 2008 Election. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Friday, January 02, 2009
Obama and the cult of the new. John B. Judis, The New Republic Published: Wednesday, March 12, 2008
The New Republic
American Adam
Obama and the cult of the new. John B. Judis, The New Republic Published: Wednesday, March 12, 2008
When Barack Obama announced a year ago that he was running for president, I scoffed. How could a black man whose middle name is Hussein and who looks like he is 25 years old win the White House? To be sure, he was a U.S. senator, but he had been elected largely on a fluke when his toughest Democratic and Republican opponents were felled by scandals. "He'll fade by December," I assured anyone who would listen.
One year later, Obama is the front-runner for the Democratic nomination, having built a formidable coalition of whites and blacks, Democrats and independents, and even a few stray Republicans. As the only major candidate to oppose the Iraq war before it started, he appeals to the large number of Democrats who want the United States to withdraw. African Americans threw him their support after he demonstrated in Iowa that he could attract white votes. And college-educated whites have flocked to him en masse.
But Obama has done more than cobble together a political coalition. He has made himself into a political phenomenon, the likes of which the country has not seen since Ronald Reagan. He fills stadiums. His rallies--where he asks the crowd to "stand up for change" and it responds by shouting, "Yes we can!"--are like revival meetings. He has inspired thousands of volunteers and dramatically boosted turnout rates, particularly among young voters. Al Gore and John Kerry, the last two Democratic nominees, certainly never attracted this kind of following.
While I worry about Obama's inexperience, I haven't been immune to his charms. When I have gone to see him speak or watched him on television, he has invariably given more or less the same speech about "fundamental change" and "choos[ing] the future over the past." Yet, each time, I find myself listening raptly, even after the sixth or seventh reiteration of the same slogans and catchwords. It is partly his voice and his cadences, but there has to be more to it than that. And there is.
Obama is the candidate of the new--a "new generation," a "new leadership," a "new kind of politics," to borrow phrases he has used. But, in emphasizing newness, Obama is actually voicing a very old theme. When he speaks of change, hope, and choosing the future over the past, when he pledges to end racial divisions or attacks special interests, Obama is striking chords that resonate deeply in the American psyche. He is making a promise to voters that is as old as the country itself: to wipe clean the slate of history and begin again from scratch.
Looming over all of American history--but particularly the country's formative years--is the Biblical figure of Adam, the only person, according to the West's major religions, to have lived unburdened by what came before him. As literary critic R.W.B. Lewis wrote in 1955, in his wonderful book The American Adam, early generations of Americans became captivated by the idea that they could create a future without reference to the past. The revolutionaries who fought for America's independence saw themselves as breaking not only with the Old World but with history itself. "The case and circumstances of America present themselves as in the beginning of a world," Thomas Paine wrote in 1792. Thomas Jefferson believed the new nation should regularly renew itself, arguing that, if necessary, "[t]he tree of liberty must be refreshed ... with the blood of patriots and tyrants." But, as Lewis explains, it was after the War of 1812--after the United States had finally cut loose from Great Britain and other foreign entanglements--that the notion of a country unbound from the constraints of history really began to take root. Democratic Review--the magazine of a nineteenth-century progressive movement known as Young America--captured this sentiment in 1839, when it editorialized, "[O]ur national birth was the beginning of a new history ... which separates us from the past and connects us with the future only."
According to this line of thought, each generation of Americans could always start over and transform their country. In a lecture in Boston in 1841, Ralph Waldo Emerson described politics as a clash between "the party of Conservatism and that of Innovation" or between "a Conservative and a Radical." "It is the opposition of Past and Future, of Memory and Hope, of the Understanding and the Reason," Emerson explained. "Conservatism stands on man's confessed limitations; reform on his indisputable infinitude." At the time Emerson was giving his lecture, it was the Democratic Party that claimed the mantle of innovation and reform. The heirs of Andrew Jackson believed that, in expanding American democracy over the continent, they were creating a new world that would eventually eclipse the old. "The expansive future is our arena," wrote Democratic Review. "We are entering on its untrodden space ... with a clear conscience unsullied by the past."
In his Studies in Classic American Literature, which appeared in 1923, D.H. Lawrence identified the celebration of the new and the rejection of the old as "the true myth of America." According to this myth, Lawrence wrote, America "starts old, old, wrinkled and writhing in an old skin. And there is a gradual sloughing of the old skin, towards a new youth." The myth of America as Adam runs through our country's literature--from Walt Whitman's self-description as a "chanter of Adamic songs / Through the new garden the West," to Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn to F. Scott Fitzgerald's Jay Gatsby to Ralph Ellison's invisible man. And it reemerges periodically in American politics--usually during times of upheaval or discontent.
In the early 1960s, after three recessions in a decade and the apparent loss of America's lead in space, President John F. Kennedy sounded the tocsin of change: "Change is the law of life," he said. "And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future." Later, amid the growing unrest created by the Vietnam war, an Adamic culture took root among the revolutionaries of the New Left, who imagined revolution to be imminent. "The foundation of civilization is growing here," declared a spokesman for the Diggers, a San Francisco communal organization, adding, "Hope is ... the foundation of it."
Today, the conditions seem propitious for another Adamic moment: six years of fruitless war, the looming prospect of another recession, a political system paralyzed by partisanship. Enter Barack Obama, the latest representative of Emerson's party of innovation, radical reform, and hope. He has appropriated these older themes and translated them into the political rhetoric of the early twenty-first century: "Hope and change have been the causes of my life." "Hope is the bedrock of this nation: the belief that our destiny will not be written for us, but by us; by all those men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is, who have the courage to remake the world as it should be." "There is a moment in the life of every generation, if it is to make its mark on history, when its spirit has to come through, when it must choose the future over the past." "People want to turn the page. They want to write a new chapter in American history." And so on.
Obama's youthful unlined face, his exotic name, and his unusual upbringing in Hawaii and Indonesia by a white mother and grandparents, black father, and Indonesian stepfather contribute to the sense that he can give the United States a fresh start. He is like Herman Melville's Adamic hero, Billy Budd, a foundling who was "happily endowed with the gayety of high health, youth and a free heart" and "looked even younger than he really was."
Of course, as New York Times columnist Gail Collins has remarked, some voters are repelled by a promise of fundamental change. "Women--especially older women--are often politically risk-averse," she writes. But many voters, particularly among the young, have been enthralled by Obama's message. They flock to rallies festooned with banners trumpeting CHANGE WE CAN BELIEVE IN. In an article in the Suffolk University student newspaper, Andrew Favreau compared Obama's campaign to "the movement that my parents lived through back in the 60s, and that I had wished I had the opportunity to experience. ... What I'm interested in is that millions of people believe again. They believe in America, and they believe in one another, but more importantly they are filling themselves with hope."
Journalists and politicians appear drawn to the same qualities. Responding to the charge that Obama lacks experience, The New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg wrote that "experience is a problematic argument, especially when voters are hungry for a new beginning." Former Connecticut Senate candidate Ned Lamont said of Obama, "I've fallen for him. I like the fact that he brings a fresh perspective to Washington. I love the idea that he gives us a fresh start around the world." New beginning, fresh perspective, fresh start: These are sentiments that Americans of the post-1812 generation would have recognized as their own.
As it turned out, the idealism of the early nineteenth century would ultimately be thwarted by an issue that has bedeviled every generation of Americans before and since: race. Today, nearly two centuries later, there is probably no other topic on which Americans' need for a clean break with the past is so acute--no issue on which we crave an Adam figure quite so much. And many Americans believe they have found that figure in Obama.
While some white voters have rejected Obama because he is black, plenty of others have been more inclined to vote for him for the same reason. These are whites who grew up in the shadow of the '60s civil rights movement and who came to venerate Martin Luther King, observing his birthday as a national holiday. They yearn for racial reconciliation, and they see voting for Obama as a means to achieve that.
There are no polls to measure this sentiment, but it pops up repeatedly in interviews. One Obama supporter told The Washington Post at a campaign event in Tampa, Florida, that he hoped "someday we'll erase all this nonsense about race. " His support for Obama, he said, was "reverse prejudice. It's just about time that someone of color got some credibility in a race like this for president." Joe Lance, an independent, wrote on a Tennessee website that he was backing Obama "because he transcends the old divides between black and white Americans. ... It is thrilling to imagine that in electing this person to the highest office, we could see centuries' worth of animosity and despair start to melt."
Such ideas underlie enthusiastic newspaper endorsements of Obama. The Dallas Morning News wrote, "[I]t is undeniable that America has failed to heal its racial wounds, including here in Dallas. We need a motivated leader capable of confronting the problem, and no candidate is better equipped than Mr. Obama. His message isn't about anger and retribution. It's about moving forward." In its endorsement, the Los Angeles Times noted that "[a]n Obama presidency would present, as a distinctly American face, a man of African descent, born in the nation's youngest state, with a childhood spent partly in Asia, among Muslims."
Not any African American could have created such high hopes for racial reconciliation, but Obama's background has made him especially well-suited to capitalize on these sentiments. He is at once part of black America and also removed from it and from its political history--an Adam figure with respect to the country's oldest and most painful conflict.
Although born to a Kenyan father and white mother, Obama is a black American and a black American politician. In the United States, blackness has always been a social rather than an ethnic category, so that, if someone looks black and has some African blood, he is black, even if one of his parents was white. "If I'm outside your building trying to catch a cab," Obama told interviewer Charlie Rose, "they're not saying, 'Oh, there's a mixed race guy.'"
At the same time, Obama was brought up by white relatives, lived in Hawaii, and attended elite schools. His divergence from previous black politicians like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton comes out most clearly in his unwillingness to embrace race-specific remedies or any program that smacks of reparations. "An emphasis on universal, as opposed to race-specific, programs isn't just good policy; it's also good politics," Obama writes in The Audacity of Hope, which he published on the eve of the campaign. Obama also has little of the typical black politician's underlying outlook. Many black politicians descend from slaves brought from West Africa. That is part of their frame of reference when speaking about the United States. Jackson, for instance, reminded Michael Dukakis, his rival for the Democratic nomination in 1988, that his ancestors had come over on "slave ships" while Dukakis's had arrived on "immigrant ships. " Just before the Democratic convention that year, miffed that Dukakis had passed him over for the vice presidency, Jackson claimed that the Massachusetts governor wanted to use him as a "vote picker" to bring his followers to the "big house." Obama, by contrast, is the son of an East African whose ancestors were not shipped to the New World as slaves. He wouldn't simply shun these kind of metaphors; they probably wouldn't occur to him because they aren't part of his political heritage. To put it in Adamic terms, he is outside of America's racial history and conveys little resentment over his own racial past.
As he tells it, Obama's message is very much that of the successful immigrant who has miraculously transcended the racial divide. Speaking in the town in Kansas in which his maternal grandfather grew up, Obama said:
Our family's story is one that spans miles and generations, races and realities. It's the story of farmers and soldiers, city workers and single moms. It takes place in small towns and good schools, in Kansas and Kenya, on the shores of Hawaii and the streets of Chicago. It's a varied and unlikely journey, but one that's held together by the same simple dream. And that is why it's American. That's why I can stand here and talk about how this country is more than a collection of red states and blue states--because my story could only happen in the United States.
When white Americans hear these words, they don't feel guilt about past injustices, but rather hope for racial reconciliation.
Interestingly, should he make it to the general election, Obama will face someone who once had an analogous appeal to voters on a different issue. In the 2000 Republican primary, John McCain held out the prospect of ending the three-decade schism in American politics over the Vietnam war. As a former prisoner of war who also led the effort to restore diplomatic relations with Vietnam, McCain was an Adam figure in his own right--someone who could have, in theory, wiped the slate clean on a question that had haunted American politics for a generation. His fervent embrace of the Iraq war probably vitiates that appeal in 2008, but much of the enthusiasm Baby Boomers felt for McCain in 2000 stemmed from the promise of reconciliation over Vietnam that his campaign implicitly held out. This year, Obama's campaign offers a similar promise--but on a far more profound conflict that spans generations.
There is one last way in which Obama appeals to the American craving for an Adam figure: He has campaigned not just against the current occupant of the White House, but against Washington itself. Obama denounces the "dead zone that politics has become, in which narrow interests vie for advantage and ideological minorities seek to impose their own versions of absolute truth." He promises to "overcome the power of lobbyists and special interests." He criticizes Republicans and Democrats for excessive partisanship and vows to end the divide in Washington by bringing "Democrats, Republicans, and independents together." In short, he sets forth a vision of Washington shorn of special interests in which politicians pursue a nonpartisan agenda that reflects the public will.
These sentiments--a general distrust of government and a specific hostility to political parties--go back to America's founding. Paine wrote that government, "even in its best state, is but a necessary evil." Jefferson wrote of political parties, "If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all." The Jacksonians invented and celebrated the modern party system, but they shared Paine's disdain for government itself. During the years that followed, Americans' wariness toward both government and political parties would endure. And, as Alexis de Tocqueville pointed out in Democracy in America, this suspicion of lasting institutions is closely linked to Americans' dismissal of the past.
Obama is hardly the first politician in recent memory to place himself within this tradition. Jimmy Carter in 1976 (who promised a "government as good as its people"), John Anderson in 1980, Gary Hart in 1984, Jerry Brown in 1980 and 1992, Ross Perot in 1992 and 1996, and Bill Bradley in 2000 each attempted to highlight their opposition to government as usual, and sometimes to political parties as well. In the mid-'80s, the late political consultant Alan Baron and CNN analyst William Schneider characterized this single-minded focus on cleaning up government as "radical centrism" (a phrase that has since become a cliche) since many of its practitioners, epitomized by Anderson, were quite moderate in the substantive policies they proposed but radical in their general attitude toward government.
Radical centrism has now developed its own constituency within the electorate. Independents currently make up about one-third of all voters. Fifty years ago, they tended primarily to be younger voters who hadn't yet decided which party to support. That's still the case for some--but, for many independents, the label has become a political statement in its own right, on par with calling oneself a Democrat or a Republican.
In 1992, some of these voters flocked to Ross Perot. In 2000, a plurality of them supported George W. Bush, with his promise to be a "uniter, not a divider, " over the Washington-tainted Al Gore. But, in 2006, angered by Republican scandals, they came roaring back to the Democrats, whom they supported in congressional races by 57 to 39 percent. Obama is a perfect fit for these voters. Independents are well represented at Obama's rallies, and, in the primaries and caucuses where they have been allowed to vote, they have overwhelmingly supported him. He lost California, but carried independents by 58 to 34 percent. In states he has won, the margins were even larger--64 to 33 percent in Wisconsin and 67 to 30 percent in Missouri. One independent, writing on a Minnesota website, summed up Obama's Adamic appeal this way: "Obama is a true leader not spoiled by years in the beltway."
Like that last great Adamic Democrat, John Kennedy, Obama is running on the cusp of a new political movement. His campaign is very much a descendant of Howard Dean's primary effort in 2004 and of the political movement that preceded and grew up around it--including MoveOn.org, Dean for America (now Democracy for America), and the networks of bloggers that promote and raise money for Democratic campaigns. This movement has expanded during the last three years, but, if Obama were to win the nomination, it could burst forth in the way that the New Left of the '60s grew after Kennedy and in the way that a new conservatism spread after Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980. Call it progressive or liberal--whatever it is, this movement could provide a countervailing force to the Republican alliance of social conservatives and business that dominated Congress from 1994 to 2006. That is the underlying promise of Obama's campaign.
But not all candidates who promise a break with the past succeed. For every John Kennedy, there is a Jerry Brown or Ross Perot. Obama could still fail to win the nomination, or, if he wins the nomination, he could lose in the general election. He has yet to weather the kind of attacks on his character and associations that will come from Republicans. And the ranks of those who resist a call to "fundamental change" could certainly swell during a general election that would pit the party of youth against the party of experience--and a young black man with a Muslim-sounding middle name against an aged and revered war hero who has been in the Senate since 1986.
Even if Obama manages to win, he could very well fail as president. Just as the hopes of Jacksonian Democrats were shattered by the irrepressible conflict over slavery, Obama's dreams--and his movement--could founder in Iraq and the Middle East. Obama himself seems to be of two minds on Iraq. In The Audacity of Hope, he declares that America's "strategic goals" should be "achieving some semblance of stability in Iraq, ensuring that those in power in Iraq are not hostile to the United States, and preventing Iraq from becoming a base for terrorist activities." That would suggest a very cautious strategy for withdrawal. But, in his presidential campaign, he has wooed antiwar Democrats with a promise to start withdrawing from Iraq immediately. Once in office, he would have to weigh his strategic goals against his promise to withdraw--while very likely facing a military, with which he has had little experience, determined to continue the fight until it is won.
Obama's commitment to radical centrism could also be severely tested. Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, who enjoyed the support of popular movements, gave priority to getting their substantive legislative agendas adopted; and they succeeded by uniting their supporters and dividing their opponents. If they had focused first on uniting Democrats and Republicans behind common objectives, they probably would not have gotten their way. And, if they had initially turned their attention, as Obama has proposed, to "the most sweeping ethics reform in history," it is unlikely they would have passed public works spending (Roosevelt) or tax cuts (Reagan). Jimmy Carter, too, provides a cautionary tale: The last Democrat to take office on a radical centrist agenda, Carter failed to tame Congress or K Street and was defeated for reelection. He had campaigned for the presidency on the presumption that reformers could overturn the status quo in Washington. In the end, he turned out to be wrong.
The American instinct to continuously remake ourselves in the image of Adam--to achieve a decisive and final break with history--has periodically proven seductive to voters. And, sometimes, this instinct can produce important, transformative results. Yet the past--in the form of race or war or deeply held partisan animosities--has a way of lingering around. At the very least, it rarely recedes without a bitter fight. None of which is to say that Barack Obama will fail. He has already defied the expectations of wizened political journalists like me who believed he had no chance to win the nomination. If he becomes president, he will have a chance to prove me wrong again: to show that the party of youth and hope and change can govern effectively. No one will be more delighted than I will if he succeeds.
John B. Judis is a senior editor at The New Republic and a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
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American Adam
Obama and the cult of the new. John B. Judis, The New Republic Published: Wednesday, March 12, 2008
When Barack Obama announced a year ago that he was running for president, I scoffed. How could a black man whose middle name is Hussein and who looks like he is 25 years old win the White House? To be sure, he was a U.S. senator, but he had been elected largely on a fluke when his toughest Democratic and Republican opponents were felled by scandals. "He'll fade by December," I assured anyone who would listen.
One year later, Obama is the front-runner for the Democratic nomination, having built a formidable coalition of whites and blacks, Democrats and independents, and even a few stray Republicans. As the only major candidate to oppose the Iraq war before it started, he appeals to the large number of Democrats who want the United States to withdraw. African Americans threw him their support after he demonstrated in Iowa that he could attract white votes. And college-educated whites have flocked to him en masse.
But Obama has done more than cobble together a political coalition. He has made himself into a political phenomenon, the likes of which the country has not seen since Ronald Reagan. He fills stadiums. His rallies--where he asks the crowd to "stand up for change" and it responds by shouting, "Yes we can!"--are like revival meetings. He has inspired thousands of volunteers and dramatically boosted turnout rates, particularly among young voters. Al Gore and John Kerry, the last two Democratic nominees, certainly never attracted this kind of following.
While I worry about Obama's inexperience, I haven't been immune to his charms. When I have gone to see him speak or watched him on television, he has invariably given more or less the same speech about "fundamental change" and "choos[ing] the future over the past." Yet, each time, I find myself listening raptly, even after the sixth or seventh reiteration of the same slogans and catchwords. It is partly his voice and his cadences, but there has to be more to it than that. And there is.
Obama is the candidate of the new--a "new generation," a "new leadership," a "new kind of politics," to borrow phrases he has used. But, in emphasizing newness, Obama is actually voicing a very old theme. When he speaks of change, hope, and choosing the future over the past, when he pledges to end racial divisions or attacks special interests, Obama is striking chords that resonate deeply in the American psyche. He is making a promise to voters that is as old as the country itself: to wipe clean the slate of history and begin again from scratch.
Looming over all of American history--but particularly the country's formative years--is the Biblical figure of Adam, the only person, according to the West's major religions, to have lived unburdened by what came before him. As literary critic R.W.B. Lewis wrote in 1955, in his wonderful book The American Adam, early generations of Americans became captivated by the idea that they could create a future without reference to the past. The revolutionaries who fought for America's independence saw themselves as breaking not only with the Old World but with history itself. "The case and circumstances of America present themselves as in the beginning of a world," Thomas Paine wrote in 1792. Thomas Jefferson believed the new nation should regularly renew itself, arguing that, if necessary, "[t]he tree of liberty must be refreshed ... with the blood of patriots and tyrants." But, as Lewis explains, it was after the War of 1812--after the United States had finally cut loose from Great Britain and other foreign entanglements--that the notion of a country unbound from the constraints of history really began to take root. Democratic Review--the magazine of a nineteenth-century progressive movement known as Young America--captured this sentiment in 1839, when it editorialized, "[O]ur national birth was the beginning of a new history ... which separates us from the past and connects us with the future only."
According to this line of thought, each generation of Americans could always start over and transform their country. In a lecture in Boston in 1841, Ralph Waldo Emerson described politics as a clash between "the party of Conservatism and that of Innovation" or between "a Conservative and a Radical." "It is the opposition of Past and Future, of Memory and Hope, of the Understanding and the Reason," Emerson explained. "Conservatism stands on man's confessed limitations; reform on his indisputable infinitude." At the time Emerson was giving his lecture, it was the Democratic Party that claimed the mantle of innovation and reform. The heirs of Andrew Jackson believed that, in expanding American democracy over the continent, they were creating a new world that would eventually eclipse the old. "The expansive future is our arena," wrote Democratic Review. "We are entering on its untrodden space ... with a clear conscience unsullied by the past."
In his Studies in Classic American Literature, which appeared in 1923, D.H. Lawrence identified the celebration of the new and the rejection of the old as "the true myth of America." According to this myth, Lawrence wrote, America "starts old, old, wrinkled and writhing in an old skin. And there is a gradual sloughing of the old skin, towards a new youth." The myth of America as Adam runs through our country's literature--from Walt Whitman's self-description as a "chanter of Adamic songs / Through the new garden the West," to Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn to F. Scott Fitzgerald's Jay Gatsby to Ralph Ellison's invisible man. And it reemerges periodically in American politics--usually during times of upheaval or discontent.
In the early 1960s, after three recessions in a decade and the apparent loss of America's lead in space, President John F. Kennedy sounded the tocsin of change: "Change is the law of life," he said. "And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future." Later, amid the growing unrest created by the Vietnam war, an Adamic culture took root among the revolutionaries of the New Left, who imagined revolution to be imminent. "The foundation of civilization is growing here," declared a spokesman for the Diggers, a San Francisco communal organization, adding, "Hope is ... the foundation of it."
Today, the conditions seem propitious for another Adamic moment: six years of fruitless war, the looming prospect of another recession, a political system paralyzed by partisanship. Enter Barack Obama, the latest representative of Emerson's party of innovation, radical reform, and hope. He has appropriated these older themes and translated them into the political rhetoric of the early twenty-first century: "Hope and change have been the causes of my life." "Hope is the bedrock of this nation: the belief that our destiny will not be written for us, but by us; by all those men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is, who have the courage to remake the world as it should be." "There is a moment in the life of every generation, if it is to make its mark on history, when its spirit has to come through, when it must choose the future over the past." "People want to turn the page. They want to write a new chapter in American history." And so on.
Obama's youthful unlined face, his exotic name, and his unusual upbringing in Hawaii and Indonesia by a white mother and grandparents, black father, and Indonesian stepfather contribute to the sense that he can give the United States a fresh start. He is like Herman Melville's Adamic hero, Billy Budd, a foundling who was "happily endowed with the gayety of high health, youth and a free heart" and "looked even younger than he really was."
Of course, as New York Times columnist Gail Collins has remarked, some voters are repelled by a promise of fundamental change. "Women--especially older women--are often politically risk-averse," she writes. But many voters, particularly among the young, have been enthralled by Obama's message. They flock to rallies festooned with banners trumpeting CHANGE WE CAN BELIEVE IN. In an article in the Suffolk University student newspaper, Andrew Favreau compared Obama's campaign to "the movement that my parents lived through back in the 60s, and that I had wished I had the opportunity to experience. ... What I'm interested in is that millions of people believe again. They believe in America, and they believe in one another, but more importantly they are filling themselves with hope."
Journalists and politicians appear drawn to the same qualities. Responding to the charge that Obama lacks experience, The New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg wrote that "experience is a problematic argument, especially when voters are hungry for a new beginning." Former Connecticut Senate candidate Ned Lamont said of Obama, "I've fallen for him. I like the fact that he brings a fresh perspective to Washington. I love the idea that he gives us a fresh start around the world." New beginning, fresh perspective, fresh start: These are sentiments that Americans of the post-1812 generation would have recognized as their own.
As it turned out, the idealism of the early nineteenth century would ultimately be thwarted by an issue that has bedeviled every generation of Americans before and since: race. Today, nearly two centuries later, there is probably no other topic on which Americans' need for a clean break with the past is so acute--no issue on which we crave an Adam figure quite so much. And many Americans believe they have found that figure in Obama.
While some white voters have rejected Obama because he is black, plenty of others have been more inclined to vote for him for the same reason. These are whites who grew up in the shadow of the '60s civil rights movement and who came to venerate Martin Luther King, observing his birthday as a national holiday. They yearn for racial reconciliation, and they see voting for Obama as a means to achieve that.
There are no polls to measure this sentiment, but it pops up repeatedly in interviews. One Obama supporter told The Washington Post at a campaign event in Tampa, Florida, that he hoped "someday we'll erase all this nonsense about race. " His support for Obama, he said, was "reverse prejudice. It's just about time that someone of color got some credibility in a race like this for president." Joe Lance, an independent, wrote on a Tennessee website that he was backing Obama "because he transcends the old divides between black and white Americans. ... It is thrilling to imagine that in electing this person to the highest office, we could see centuries' worth of animosity and despair start to melt."
Such ideas underlie enthusiastic newspaper endorsements of Obama. The Dallas Morning News wrote, "[I]t is undeniable that America has failed to heal its racial wounds, including here in Dallas. We need a motivated leader capable of confronting the problem, and no candidate is better equipped than Mr. Obama. His message isn't about anger and retribution. It's about moving forward." In its endorsement, the Los Angeles Times noted that "[a]n Obama presidency would present, as a distinctly American face, a man of African descent, born in the nation's youngest state, with a childhood spent partly in Asia, among Muslims."
Not any African American could have created such high hopes for racial reconciliation, but Obama's background has made him especially well-suited to capitalize on these sentiments. He is at once part of black America and also removed from it and from its political history--an Adam figure with respect to the country's oldest and most painful conflict.
Although born to a Kenyan father and white mother, Obama is a black American and a black American politician. In the United States, blackness has always been a social rather than an ethnic category, so that, if someone looks black and has some African blood, he is black, even if one of his parents was white. "If I'm outside your building trying to catch a cab," Obama told interviewer Charlie Rose, "they're not saying, 'Oh, there's a mixed race guy.'"
At the same time, Obama was brought up by white relatives, lived in Hawaii, and attended elite schools. His divergence from previous black politicians like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton comes out most clearly in his unwillingness to embrace race-specific remedies or any program that smacks of reparations. "An emphasis on universal, as opposed to race-specific, programs isn't just good policy; it's also good politics," Obama writes in The Audacity of Hope, which he published on the eve of the campaign. Obama also has little of the typical black politician's underlying outlook. Many black politicians descend from slaves brought from West Africa. That is part of their frame of reference when speaking about the United States. Jackson, for instance, reminded Michael Dukakis, his rival for the Democratic nomination in 1988, that his ancestors had come over on "slave ships" while Dukakis's had arrived on "immigrant ships. " Just before the Democratic convention that year, miffed that Dukakis had passed him over for the vice presidency, Jackson claimed that the Massachusetts governor wanted to use him as a "vote picker" to bring his followers to the "big house." Obama, by contrast, is the son of an East African whose ancestors were not shipped to the New World as slaves. He wouldn't simply shun these kind of metaphors; they probably wouldn't occur to him because they aren't part of his political heritage. To put it in Adamic terms, he is outside of America's racial history and conveys little resentment over his own racial past.
As he tells it, Obama's message is very much that of the successful immigrant who has miraculously transcended the racial divide. Speaking in the town in Kansas in which his maternal grandfather grew up, Obama said:
Our family's story is one that spans miles and generations, races and realities. It's the story of farmers and soldiers, city workers and single moms. It takes place in small towns and good schools, in Kansas and Kenya, on the shores of Hawaii and the streets of Chicago. It's a varied and unlikely journey, but one that's held together by the same simple dream. And that is why it's American. That's why I can stand here and talk about how this country is more than a collection of red states and blue states--because my story could only happen in the United States.
When white Americans hear these words, they don't feel guilt about past injustices, but rather hope for racial reconciliation.
Interestingly, should he make it to the general election, Obama will face someone who once had an analogous appeal to voters on a different issue. In the 2000 Republican primary, John McCain held out the prospect of ending the three-decade schism in American politics over the Vietnam war. As a former prisoner of war who also led the effort to restore diplomatic relations with Vietnam, McCain was an Adam figure in his own right--someone who could have, in theory, wiped the slate clean on a question that had haunted American politics for a generation. His fervent embrace of the Iraq war probably vitiates that appeal in 2008, but much of the enthusiasm Baby Boomers felt for McCain in 2000 stemmed from the promise of reconciliation over Vietnam that his campaign implicitly held out. This year, Obama's campaign offers a similar promise--but on a far more profound conflict that spans generations.
There is one last way in which Obama appeals to the American craving for an Adam figure: He has campaigned not just against the current occupant of the White House, but against Washington itself. Obama denounces the "dead zone that politics has become, in which narrow interests vie for advantage and ideological minorities seek to impose their own versions of absolute truth." He promises to "overcome the power of lobbyists and special interests." He criticizes Republicans and Democrats for excessive partisanship and vows to end the divide in Washington by bringing "Democrats, Republicans, and independents together." In short, he sets forth a vision of Washington shorn of special interests in which politicians pursue a nonpartisan agenda that reflects the public will.
These sentiments--a general distrust of government and a specific hostility to political parties--go back to America's founding. Paine wrote that government, "even in its best state, is but a necessary evil." Jefferson wrote of political parties, "If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all." The Jacksonians invented and celebrated the modern party system, but they shared Paine's disdain for government itself. During the years that followed, Americans' wariness toward both government and political parties would endure. And, as Alexis de Tocqueville pointed out in Democracy in America, this suspicion of lasting institutions is closely linked to Americans' dismissal of the past.
Obama is hardly the first politician in recent memory to place himself within this tradition. Jimmy Carter in 1976 (who promised a "government as good as its people"), John Anderson in 1980, Gary Hart in 1984, Jerry Brown in 1980 and 1992, Ross Perot in 1992 and 1996, and Bill Bradley in 2000 each attempted to highlight their opposition to government as usual, and sometimes to political parties as well. In the mid-'80s, the late political consultant Alan Baron and CNN analyst William Schneider characterized this single-minded focus on cleaning up government as "radical centrism" (a phrase that has since become a cliche) since many of its practitioners, epitomized by Anderson, were quite moderate in the substantive policies they proposed but radical in their general attitude toward government.
Radical centrism has now developed its own constituency within the electorate. Independents currently make up about one-third of all voters. Fifty years ago, they tended primarily to be younger voters who hadn't yet decided which party to support. That's still the case for some--but, for many independents, the label has become a political statement in its own right, on par with calling oneself a Democrat or a Republican.
In 1992, some of these voters flocked to Ross Perot. In 2000, a plurality of them supported George W. Bush, with his promise to be a "uniter, not a divider, " over the Washington-tainted Al Gore. But, in 2006, angered by Republican scandals, they came roaring back to the Democrats, whom they supported in congressional races by 57 to 39 percent. Obama is a perfect fit for these voters. Independents are well represented at Obama's rallies, and, in the primaries and caucuses where they have been allowed to vote, they have overwhelmingly supported him. He lost California, but carried independents by 58 to 34 percent. In states he has won, the margins were even larger--64 to 33 percent in Wisconsin and 67 to 30 percent in Missouri. One independent, writing on a Minnesota website, summed up Obama's Adamic appeal this way: "Obama is a true leader not spoiled by years in the beltway."
Like that last great Adamic Democrat, John Kennedy, Obama is running on the cusp of a new political movement. His campaign is very much a descendant of Howard Dean's primary effort in 2004 and of the political movement that preceded and grew up around it--including MoveOn.org, Dean for America (now Democracy for America), and the networks of bloggers that promote and raise money for Democratic campaigns. This movement has expanded during the last three years, but, if Obama were to win the nomination, it could burst forth in the way that the New Left of the '60s grew after Kennedy and in the way that a new conservatism spread after Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980. Call it progressive or liberal--whatever it is, this movement could provide a countervailing force to the Republican alliance of social conservatives and business that dominated Congress from 1994 to 2006. That is the underlying promise of Obama's campaign.
But not all candidates who promise a break with the past succeed. For every John Kennedy, there is a Jerry Brown or Ross Perot. Obama could still fail to win the nomination, or, if he wins the nomination, he could lose in the general election. He has yet to weather the kind of attacks on his character and associations that will come from Republicans. And the ranks of those who resist a call to "fundamental change" could certainly swell during a general election that would pit the party of youth against the party of experience--and a young black man with a Muslim-sounding middle name against an aged and revered war hero who has been in the Senate since 1986.
Even if Obama manages to win, he could very well fail as president. Just as the hopes of Jacksonian Democrats were shattered by the irrepressible conflict over slavery, Obama's dreams--and his movement--could founder in Iraq and the Middle East. Obama himself seems to be of two minds on Iraq. In The Audacity of Hope, he declares that America's "strategic goals" should be "achieving some semblance of stability in Iraq, ensuring that those in power in Iraq are not hostile to the United States, and preventing Iraq from becoming a base for terrorist activities." That would suggest a very cautious strategy for withdrawal. But, in his presidential campaign, he has wooed antiwar Democrats with a promise to start withdrawing from Iraq immediately. Once in office, he would have to weigh his strategic goals against his promise to withdraw--while very likely facing a military, with which he has had little experience, determined to continue the fight until it is won.
Obama's commitment to radical centrism could also be severely tested. Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, who enjoyed the support of popular movements, gave priority to getting their substantive legislative agendas adopted; and they succeeded by uniting their supporters and dividing their opponents. If they had focused first on uniting Democrats and Republicans behind common objectives, they probably would not have gotten their way. And, if they had initially turned their attention, as Obama has proposed, to "the most sweeping ethics reform in history," it is unlikely they would have passed public works spending (Roosevelt) or tax cuts (Reagan). Jimmy Carter, too, provides a cautionary tale: The last Democrat to take office on a radical centrist agenda, Carter failed to tame Congress or K Street and was defeated for reelection. He had campaigned for the presidency on the presumption that reformers could overturn the status quo in Washington. In the end, he turned out to be wrong.
The American instinct to continuously remake ourselves in the image of Adam--to achieve a decisive and final break with history--has periodically proven seductive to voters. And, sometimes, this instinct can produce important, transformative results. Yet the past--in the form of race or war or deeply held partisan animosities--has a way of lingering around. At the very least, it rarely recedes without a bitter fight. None of which is to say that Barack Obama will fail. He has already defied the expectations of wizened political journalists like me who believed he had no chance to win the nomination. If he becomes president, he will have a chance to prove me wrong again: to show that the party of youth and hope and change can govern effectively. No one will be more delighted than I will if he succeeds.
John B. Judis is a senior editor at The New Republic and a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
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Tuesday, November 04, 2008
Turning Points, 2008 Edition By ANA MARIE COX, BOB KERREY, MICHAEL KINSLEY, KEVIN MADDEN, PAUL MASLIN, and HOWARD WOLFSON
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November 4, 2008
Turning Points, 2008 Edition By ANA MARIE COX, BOB KERREY, MICHAEL KINSLEY, KEVIN MADDEN, PAUL MASLIN, and HOWARD WOLFSON
Barring something really, really unforeseen, the presidential campaign ends today. Really. Op-Ed editors asked a group of experts to write about some of the undernoticed moments from the past 18 months.
What did Celine Dion do to Hillary Clinton?
Fleetwood Mac's "Don't Stop" set the modern standard for campaign songs when Bill Clinton adopted it as his own in 1992. Its admonition, "Don't stop thinking about tomorrow," dovetailed perfectly with the premise of Mr. Clinton's run.
Sixteen years later, Hillary Clinton's campaign spent a considerable amount of time deciding on its song. Those of us who worked for her knew from experience that music could define a campaign — for good and for bad.
Mrs. Clinton's Senate campaign kickoff in 1999 was initially judged a huge success until her opponent, Rudolph Giuliani, began to zero in on one of the warm-up songs played before Mrs. Clinton hit the stage: Billy Joel's "Captain Jack."
"Captain Jack," unfortunately, contains references to masturbation and drug use. Mr. Giuliani said we were sending a clear signal to America's youth: "Let's say yes to drugs. I think it's a very, very dangerous message." The story dominated the local news for days.
For the rest of her Senate campaign and for her presidential race, we instituted strict controls to ensure that every song at a Clinton event had been vetted, both lyrically and rhythmically. Fail-safe devices were put in place. Committees of jurisdiction and oversight formed. It got so that it would have been easier to start a nuclear war than to play an offensive song at a Hillary Clinton rally.
The selection of a presidential campaign song was deemed especially critical. A group was chosen, some for our musical tastes, others to act as censors.
Brainstorming sessions ensued. The Iowa caucuses could wait — this was serious business.
Ideas were put forward: Motown, disco, ballads. I pushed K T Tunstall's "Suddenly I See" because it seemed empowering and upbeat. It was immediately criticized. What about the singer's use of the word "hell"?
Everyone had favorites, and every favorite had its detractors. We studied lyrics and performer biographies. We downloaded possibilities and listened. Some of us danced, while others sat and frowned.
"Get Ready" by the Four Tops? Too sexual. "Rhythm Nation" by Janet Jackson? What about that unfortunate wardrobe malfunction?
To break the stalemate, we sponsored an online contest for supporters and gave them options to choose from. The votes and commentaries rolled in. Celine Dion's "You and I" was selected, a decision I jokingly predicted would signal the end of the campaign.
Sadly, my prediction proved correct.
— HOWARD WOLFSON, a strategist for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, blogs about music at GothamAcme.com
Was John McCain's fate within his control?
A professional colleague of mine told me at the beginning of this presidential campaign season that these contests are often shaped by "moments" — still frames from a whirring picture show.
He may have been right about the past, but not about this year. The 2008 race was defined by ocean-size events like the conflict in Iraq and the global credit crisis, phenomena beyond the control of the candidates. Campaigns and fortunes either crested upon these events, or were washed away by them.
John McCain emerged the victor from a crowded Republican primary field because of his vocal and principled alliance with the troop surge in Iraq, a position he arrived at with a practical realization that his political prospects were tied to a policy whose execution he ultimately would not control. Out of this decision, Mr. McCain earned his political salvation.
Then in the fall, Mr. McCain was engulfed by market forces in the economy and in politics; he was yoked to an administration and a party on the target end of a thundering volley of blame.
More than we like to admit, candidates are confronted, and often defeated, by the elusive element of fate.
— KEVIN MADDEN, the press secretary for Mitt Romney's presidential campaign
What medicine brought the Straight Talk Express to an end?
For months, Steve Schmidt, John McCain's chief strategist, tried to bring discipline to the campaign.
Though Mr. Schmidt shared Mr. McCain's affection for individual journalists, he also believed that the senator's rolling press conferences obscured the campaign's "message of the day." And he thought that some journalists — he referred to them as "the bloggers," even if they weren't — promoted the gaffe contests that played out on cable news and were amplified online.
But Mr. McCain had faith in his instincts and his charm, and so the "straight talk" continued against Mr. Schmidt's wishes.
Until the Viagra question. After a female McCain adviser complained about health insurance companies that covered pills for male impotence but not for birth control, a reporter asked Mr. McCain what he thought.
Mr. McCain made a face, expressing silent befuddlement. In the pool report, a TV reporter included the number of seconds that passed between the question and Mr. McCain's first tentative reply. Planned Parenthood put out a commercial. And Mr. McCain realized his love affair with the press was already over.
— ANA MARIE COX, the founding editor of Wonkette and a contributor to Time magazine
What political candidate delivered the finishing blow to the public financing system for presidential campaigns?
On June 19, Barack Obama announced he would opt out of the public financing system for presidential campaigns. He might still be the favorite to win today if he had said yes to $85 million of public money, but I doubt it. Obviously he doubted it, too, or he would have accepted the spending cap.
His charisma, talent, message and management skills enabled him to raise and spend an amount several times greater than the public money John McCain had available for television advertisements and paid staff in important states. (To be clear, if Senator McCain thought he could have matched Senator Obama's fund-raising efforts he would have opted out, too.)
For Senator Obama, the principle of doing what is essential to win trumped the principle of support for public financing. He made the right choice. I believe 2008 was the year that federal financing of presidential elections died. It was on life support coming into this election. The ability to raise millions of dollars from small donors over the Internet made the law unnecessary, and it also contributed to one of the most exciting, most watched and best understood campaigns in our nation's history.
— BOB KERREY, a former Democratic senator from Nebraska and the president of New School University
How did John Edwards frame the campaign?
In the John Edwards campaign, we viewed the Netroots Nation candidate forum, attended by many liberal bloggers, as a huge opportunity.
Starting with his first election, Mr. Edwards had refused to accept any contributions from Washington lobbyists or political action committees. At the forum in August 2007, he challenged his opponents to do the same. The moderator followed up by saying, "Senator Edwards has really a very straightforward question here, which is, will you continue to take money from lobbyists?"
"Yes I will," Hillary Clinton said. "A lot of those lobbyists, whether you like it or not, represent real Americans."
That moment was the beginning of the end of her candidacy. Without it, she might have become the nominee and now be on her way to the White House.
— JOE TRIPPI, the author of "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" and an adviser to John Edwards's presidential campaign
What primary or caucus clinched the Democratic nomination for Barack Obama?
Barack Obama's most decisive victory was his first, on Jan. 3 in Iowa. That win made him the presidential front-runner — a position he has never lost in the succeeding 10 months.
After Iowa, John Edwards was finished as a serious contender for the Democratic nomination. Hillary Clinton was badly wounded, too. A majority of black voters was convinced after the caucuses that Mr. Obama could win among white voters, and a crucial segment of Mrs. Clinton's base disappeared.
Iowa provided another intimation of change. Des Moines was where, almost exactly one year ago, two key advisers to Mrs. Clinton mocked the young Obama supporters. "Our people look like caucus-goers, and his people look like they are 18," one adviser told a reporter. The adviser added that they "look like Facebook."
Mr. Obama's voters didn't look like caucus-goers, but America in 2008 didn't look much like its past in lots of ways.
— PAUL MASLIN, the pollster for Bill Richardson's presidential campaign
When was the last American election with four white guys on the two major-party tickets?
We are surrounded by images of white men in suits. There might be 20 of them photographed sitting around a conference table (the board of directors in 1955) or just three (the founder of this auto dealership, his son-in-law who now runs it and his son who is supervisor of the parts department) or 500 (the class of 1940 at its 25th reunion). Oil paintings of forgotten committee chairmen line the corridors of power in Washington. Cigar boxes still feature illustrations of the Dutch Masters.
These images look quaint, even the ones from the 1950s and 1960s. The haircuts are bad, the smiles are too solemn, the lapels and the ties are too wide, or too narrow. But mainly, the men are all men, and all white. It strikes you immediately. These images don't "look like America," as Bill Clinton used to say.
If the annual portraits of a hospital's trustees are lined up along a hallway, you can see the changes as if through a flip book. Around 1970, a light-skinned, oldish African-American appears in the second row. Then a second black guy, darker and younger. Then a very young white woman, and a black woman, or a white guy in a wheelchair. In 2005, the first Asian-American appears. That guy who shows up the next year in the front row, far left, might or might not be Latino, or perhaps an Indian (of either variety). It's hard to tell. By last year the annual group shot still doesn't exactly look like America, but it looks more like America today than it did in 1955.
Meanwhile (yes, O.K., except for Geraldine Ferraro, chosen in 1984 to help Walter Mondale, a good and extremely white man, lose to Ronald Reagan) the world's most important group shot remained four white men in suits until Aug. 29, when John McCain picked Sarah Palin as his running mate. Since then, there have been hundreds of images of Mr. McCain and Ms. Palin, Barack Obama and Joe Biden, Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain, Ms. Palin and Mr. Biden, or collected shots of all four of them. As of that moment, it became hard to imagine that these pictures would ever again be of four white men. Fine for a cigar box, maybe, but America has moved on.
Thanks for this healthy development go to John McCain, for choosing Sarah Palin, and to Barack Obama, for choosing himself. Also for being himself — a one-man ethnic stew. If America looks like anyone, it looks like him. Sarah Palin deserves, if not credit, then a bit of sympathy. She wants America to keep looking like a small town in western Pennsylvania around 1966. She was the last, victorious shot in a revolution she doesn't support.
— MICHAEL KINSLEY, the founding editor of Slate and a columnist for Time magazine
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/04/opinion/04points.html?pagewanted=print
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November 4, 2008
Turning Points, 2008 Edition By ANA MARIE COX, BOB KERREY, MICHAEL KINSLEY, KEVIN MADDEN, PAUL MASLIN, and HOWARD WOLFSON
Barring something really, really unforeseen, the presidential campaign ends today. Really. Op-Ed editors asked a group of experts to write about some of the undernoticed moments from the past 18 months.
What did Celine Dion do to Hillary Clinton?
Fleetwood Mac's "Don't Stop" set the modern standard for campaign songs when Bill Clinton adopted it as his own in 1992. Its admonition, "Don't stop thinking about tomorrow," dovetailed perfectly with the premise of Mr. Clinton's run.
Sixteen years later, Hillary Clinton's campaign spent a considerable amount of time deciding on its song. Those of us who worked for her knew from experience that music could define a campaign — for good and for bad.
Mrs. Clinton's Senate campaign kickoff in 1999 was initially judged a huge success until her opponent, Rudolph Giuliani, began to zero in on one of the warm-up songs played before Mrs. Clinton hit the stage: Billy Joel's "Captain Jack."
"Captain Jack," unfortunately, contains references to masturbation and drug use. Mr. Giuliani said we were sending a clear signal to America's youth: "Let's say yes to drugs. I think it's a very, very dangerous message." The story dominated the local news for days.
For the rest of her Senate campaign and for her presidential race, we instituted strict controls to ensure that every song at a Clinton event had been vetted, both lyrically and rhythmically. Fail-safe devices were put in place. Committees of jurisdiction and oversight formed. It got so that it would have been easier to start a nuclear war than to play an offensive song at a Hillary Clinton rally.
The selection of a presidential campaign song was deemed especially critical. A group was chosen, some for our musical tastes, others to act as censors.
Brainstorming sessions ensued. The Iowa caucuses could wait — this was serious business.
Ideas were put forward: Motown, disco, ballads. I pushed K T Tunstall's "Suddenly I See" because it seemed empowering and upbeat. It was immediately criticized. What about the singer's use of the word "hell"?
Everyone had favorites, and every favorite had its detractors. We studied lyrics and performer biographies. We downloaded possibilities and listened. Some of us danced, while others sat and frowned.
"Get Ready" by the Four Tops? Too sexual. "Rhythm Nation" by Janet Jackson? What about that unfortunate wardrobe malfunction?
To break the stalemate, we sponsored an online contest for supporters and gave them options to choose from. The votes and commentaries rolled in. Celine Dion's "You and I" was selected, a decision I jokingly predicted would signal the end of the campaign.
Sadly, my prediction proved correct.
— HOWARD WOLFSON, a strategist for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, blogs about music at GothamAcme.com
Was John McCain's fate within his control?
A professional colleague of mine told me at the beginning of this presidential campaign season that these contests are often shaped by "moments" — still frames from a whirring picture show.
He may have been right about the past, but not about this year. The 2008 race was defined by ocean-size events like the conflict in Iraq and the global credit crisis, phenomena beyond the control of the candidates. Campaigns and fortunes either crested upon these events, or were washed away by them.
John McCain emerged the victor from a crowded Republican primary field because of his vocal and principled alliance with the troop surge in Iraq, a position he arrived at with a practical realization that his political prospects were tied to a policy whose execution he ultimately would not control. Out of this decision, Mr. McCain earned his political salvation.
Then in the fall, Mr. McCain was engulfed by market forces in the economy and in politics; he was yoked to an administration and a party on the target end of a thundering volley of blame.
More than we like to admit, candidates are confronted, and often defeated, by the elusive element of fate.
— KEVIN MADDEN, the press secretary for Mitt Romney's presidential campaign
What medicine brought the Straight Talk Express to an end?
For months, Steve Schmidt, John McCain's chief strategist, tried to bring discipline to the campaign.
Though Mr. Schmidt shared Mr. McCain's affection for individual journalists, he also believed that the senator's rolling press conferences obscured the campaign's "message of the day." And he thought that some journalists — he referred to them as "the bloggers," even if they weren't — promoted the gaffe contests that played out on cable news and were amplified online.
But Mr. McCain had faith in his instincts and his charm, and so the "straight talk" continued against Mr. Schmidt's wishes.
Until the Viagra question. After a female McCain adviser complained about health insurance companies that covered pills for male impotence but not for birth control, a reporter asked Mr. McCain what he thought.
Mr. McCain made a face, expressing silent befuddlement. In the pool report, a TV reporter included the number of seconds that passed between the question and Mr. McCain's first tentative reply. Planned Parenthood put out a commercial. And Mr. McCain realized his love affair with the press was already over.
— ANA MARIE COX, the founding editor of Wonkette and a contributor to Time magazine
What political candidate delivered the finishing blow to the public financing system for presidential campaigns?
On June 19, Barack Obama announced he would opt out of the public financing system for presidential campaigns. He might still be the favorite to win today if he had said yes to $85 million of public money, but I doubt it. Obviously he doubted it, too, or he would have accepted the spending cap.
His charisma, talent, message and management skills enabled him to raise and spend an amount several times greater than the public money John McCain had available for television advertisements and paid staff in important states. (To be clear, if Senator McCain thought he could have matched Senator Obama's fund-raising efforts he would have opted out, too.)
For Senator Obama, the principle of doing what is essential to win trumped the principle of support for public financing. He made the right choice. I believe 2008 was the year that federal financing of presidential elections died. It was on life support coming into this election. The ability to raise millions of dollars from small donors over the Internet made the law unnecessary, and it also contributed to one of the most exciting, most watched and best understood campaigns in our nation's history.
— BOB KERREY, a former Democratic senator from Nebraska and the president of New School University
How did John Edwards frame the campaign?
In the John Edwards campaign, we viewed the Netroots Nation candidate forum, attended by many liberal bloggers, as a huge opportunity.
Starting with his first election, Mr. Edwards had refused to accept any contributions from Washington lobbyists or political action committees. At the forum in August 2007, he challenged his opponents to do the same. The moderator followed up by saying, "Senator Edwards has really a very straightforward question here, which is, will you continue to take money from lobbyists?"
"Yes I will," Hillary Clinton said. "A lot of those lobbyists, whether you like it or not, represent real Americans."
That moment was the beginning of the end of her candidacy. Without it, she might have become the nominee and now be on her way to the White House.
— JOE TRIPPI, the author of "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" and an adviser to John Edwards's presidential campaign
What primary or caucus clinched the Democratic nomination for Barack Obama?
Barack Obama's most decisive victory was his first, on Jan. 3 in Iowa. That win made him the presidential front-runner — a position he has never lost in the succeeding 10 months.
After Iowa, John Edwards was finished as a serious contender for the Democratic nomination. Hillary Clinton was badly wounded, too. A majority of black voters was convinced after the caucuses that Mr. Obama could win among white voters, and a crucial segment of Mrs. Clinton's base disappeared.
Iowa provided another intimation of change. Des Moines was where, almost exactly one year ago, two key advisers to Mrs. Clinton mocked the young Obama supporters. "Our people look like caucus-goers, and his people look like they are 18," one adviser told a reporter. The adviser added that they "look like Facebook."
Mr. Obama's voters didn't look like caucus-goers, but America in 2008 didn't look much like its past in lots of ways.
— PAUL MASLIN, the pollster for Bill Richardson's presidential campaign
When was the last American election with four white guys on the two major-party tickets?
We are surrounded by images of white men in suits. There might be 20 of them photographed sitting around a conference table (the board of directors in 1955) or just three (the founder of this auto dealership, his son-in-law who now runs it and his son who is supervisor of the parts department) or 500 (the class of 1940 at its 25th reunion). Oil paintings of forgotten committee chairmen line the corridors of power in Washington. Cigar boxes still feature illustrations of the Dutch Masters.
These images look quaint, even the ones from the 1950s and 1960s. The haircuts are bad, the smiles are too solemn, the lapels and the ties are too wide, or too narrow. But mainly, the men are all men, and all white. It strikes you immediately. These images don't "look like America," as Bill Clinton used to say.
If the annual portraits of a hospital's trustees are lined up along a hallway, you can see the changes as if through a flip book. Around 1970, a light-skinned, oldish African-American appears in the second row. Then a second black guy, darker and younger. Then a very young white woman, and a black woman, or a white guy in a wheelchair. In 2005, the first Asian-American appears. That guy who shows up the next year in the front row, far left, might or might not be Latino, or perhaps an Indian (of either variety). It's hard to tell. By last year the annual group shot still doesn't exactly look like America, but it looks more like America today than it did in 1955.
Meanwhile (yes, O.K., except for Geraldine Ferraro, chosen in 1984 to help Walter Mondale, a good and extremely white man, lose to Ronald Reagan) the world's most important group shot remained four white men in suits until Aug. 29, when John McCain picked Sarah Palin as his running mate. Since then, there have been hundreds of images of Mr. McCain and Ms. Palin, Barack Obama and Joe Biden, Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain, Ms. Palin and Mr. Biden, or collected shots of all four of them. As of that moment, it became hard to imagine that these pictures would ever again be of four white men. Fine for a cigar box, maybe, but America has moved on.
Thanks for this healthy development go to John McCain, for choosing Sarah Palin, and to Barack Obama, for choosing himself. Also for being himself — a one-man ethnic stew. If America looks like anyone, it looks like him. Sarah Palin deserves, if not credit, then a bit of sympathy. She wants America to keep looking like a small town in western Pennsylvania around 1966. She was the last, victorious shot in a revolution she doesn't support.
— MICHAEL KINSLEY, the founding editor of Slate and a columnist for Time magazine
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/04/opinion/04points.html?pagewanted=print
http://snipurl.com/7shqh
A Date With Scarcity By DAVID BROOKS
The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By
November 4, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
A Date With Scarcity By DAVID BROOKS
Nov. 4, 2008, is a historic day because it marks the end of an economic era, a political era and a generational era all at once.
Economically, it marks the end of the Long Boom, which began in 1983. Politically, it probably marks the end of conservative dominance, which began in 1980. Generationally, it marks the end of baby boomer supremacy, which began in 1968. For the past 16 years, baby boomers, who were formed by the tumult of the 1960s, occupied the White House. By Tuesday night, if the polls are to be believed, a member of a new generation will become president-elect.
So today is not only a pivot, but a confluence of pivots.
When historians look back at the era that is now closing, they will see a time of private achievement and public disappointment. In the past two decades, the United States has become a much more interesting place. Companies like Starbucks, Apple, Crate & Barrel, Microsoft and many others enlivened daily life. Private citizens, especially young people, repaired the social fabric, dedicated themselves to community service and lowered drug addiction and teenage pregnancy.
Yet, at the same time, the public sphere has not flourished. Despite decades of affluence, longstanding issues like health care, education, energy and entitlement debt have not been adequately addressed. The baby boomers, who entered adulthood promising a lifetime of activism, have been a politically undistinguished generation. They produced two presidents, neither of whom lived up to his potential. They remained consumed by the culture war that divided their generation. They pass their political supremacy today having squandered the fat years and the golden opportunities.
Month by month, frustration has mounted. Americans are anxious about their private lives but absolutely disgusted by public leaders. So change is demanded.
Republicans nominated an old warrior with a record of making hard decisions and absorbing the blows that ensue. Many of us regard him — and always will — as one of the heroes of our time. But the public demand for change was total, and if the polls are right, voters will elect the man who breaks from the recent past in almost every way.
Barack Obama is a child of a child of the 1960s. His mother was born only five years earlier than Hillary Clinton. For people in Obama’s generation, the great disruption had already occurred by the time they hit adulthood. Theirs is a generation of consolidation and neo-traditionalism — a generation of sunscreen and bicycle helmets, more anxious about parenthood than anything else.
Obama is not only a member of this temperate generation, but of its most educated segment. He has lived nearly his entire adult life within a few miles of one or another of the country’s top 10 universities.
His upscale, post-boomer cohort has rallied behind him with unalloyed fervor. Major college newspapers have endorsed him at a rate of 63 to 1. The upscale educated class — from the universities, the media, the law and the financial centers — has financed his $600 million campaign (which relied on big-dollar donations even more heavily than George W. Bush’s 2004 effort). This cohort will soon become the ruling class.
And the irony is that they will be confronted by the problem for which they have the least experience and for which they are the least prepared: the problem of scarcity.
Raised in prosperity, favored by genetics, these young meritocrats will have to govern in a period when the demands on the nation’s wealth outstrip the supply. They will grapple with the growing burdens of an aging society, rising health care costs and high energy prices. They will have to make up for the trillion-plus dollars the government will spend to avoid a deep recession. They will have to struggle to keep their promises to cut taxes, create an energy revolution, pass an expensive health care plan and all the rest.
As Robert J. Samuelson writes in his forthcoming book, “The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath,” “Already, Americans face far more claims on their incomes than can be easily met.”
In the next few years, the nation’s wealth will either stagnate or shrink. The fiscal squeeze will grow severe. There will be fiercer struggles over scarce resources, starker divisions along factional lines. The challenge for the next president will be to cushion the pain of the current recession while at the same time trying to build a solid fiscal foundation so the country can thrive at some point in the future.
We’re probably entering a period, in other words, in which smart young liberals meet a stone-cold scarcity that they do not seem to recognize or have a plan for.
In an age of transition, the children are left to grapple with the burdens of their elders.
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By
November 4, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
A Date With Scarcity By DAVID BROOKS
Nov. 4, 2008, is a historic day because it marks the end of an economic era, a political era and a generational era all at once.
Economically, it marks the end of the Long Boom, which began in 1983. Politically, it probably marks the end of conservative dominance, which began in 1980. Generationally, it marks the end of baby boomer supremacy, which began in 1968. For the past 16 years, baby boomers, who were formed by the tumult of the 1960s, occupied the White House. By Tuesday night, if the polls are to be believed, a member of a new generation will become president-elect.
So today is not only a pivot, but a confluence of pivots.
When historians look back at the era that is now closing, they will see a time of private achievement and public disappointment. In the past two decades, the United States has become a much more interesting place. Companies like Starbucks, Apple, Crate & Barrel, Microsoft and many others enlivened daily life. Private citizens, especially young people, repaired the social fabric, dedicated themselves to community service and lowered drug addiction and teenage pregnancy.
Yet, at the same time, the public sphere has not flourished. Despite decades of affluence, longstanding issues like health care, education, energy and entitlement debt have not been adequately addressed. The baby boomers, who entered adulthood promising a lifetime of activism, have been a politically undistinguished generation. They produced two presidents, neither of whom lived up to his potential. They remained consumed by the culture war that divided their generation. They pass their political supremacy today having squandered the fat years and the golden opportunities.
Month by month, frustration has mounted. Americans are anxious about their private lives but absolutely disgusted by public leaders. So change is demanded.
Republicans nominated an old warrior with a record of making hard decisions and absorbing the blows that ensue. Many of us regard him — and always will — as one of the heroes of our time. But the public demand for change was total, and if the polls are right, voters will elect the man who breaks from the recent past in almost every way.
Barack Obama is a child of a child of the 1960s. His mother was born only five years earlier than Hillary Clinton. For people in Obama’s generation, the great disruption had already occurred by the time they hit adulthood. Theirs is a generation of consolidation and neo-traditionalism — a generation of sunscreen and bicycle helmets, more anxious about parenthood than anything else.
Obama is not only a member of this temperate generation, but of its most educated segment. He has lived nearly his entire adult life within a few miles of one or another of the country’s top 10 universities.
His upscale, post-boomer cohort has rallied behind him with unalloyed fervor. Major college newspapers have endorsed him at a rate of 63 to 1. The upscale educated class — from the universities, the media, the law and the financial centers — has financed his $600 million campaign (which relied on big-dollar donations even more heavily than George W. Bush’s 2004 effort). This cohort will soon become the ruling class.
And the irony is that they will be confronted by the problem for which they have the least experience and for which they are the least prepared: the problem of scarcity.
Raised in prosperity, favored by genetics, these young meritocrats will have to govern in a period when the demands on the nation’s wealth outstrip the supply. They will grapple with the growing burdens of an aging society, rising health care costs and high energy prices. They will have to make up for the trillion-plus dollars the government will spend to avoid a deep recession. They will have to struggle to keep their promises to cut taxes, create an energy revolution, pass an expensive health care plan and all the rest.
As Robert J. Samuelson writes in his forthcoming book, “The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath,” “Already, Americans face far more claims on their incomes than can be easily met.”
In the next few years, the nation’s wealth will either stagnate or shrink. The fiscal squeeze will grow severe. There will be fiercer struggles over scarce resources, starker divisions along factional lines. The challenge for the next president will be to cushion the pain of the current recession while at the same time trying to build a solid fiscal foundation so the country can thrive at some point in the future.
We’re probably entering a period, in other words, in which smart young liberals meet a stone-cold scarcity that they do not seem to recognize or have a plan for.
In an age of transition, the children are left to grapple with the burdens of their elders.
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
The Behavioral Revolution By DAVID BROOKS
October 28, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
The Behavioral Revolution By DAVID BROOKS
Roughly speaking, there are four steps to every decision. First, you perceive a situation. Then you think of possible courses of action. Then you calculate which course is in your best interest. Then you take the action.
Over the past few centuries, public policy analysts have assumed that step three is the most important. Economic models and entire social science disciplines are premised on the assumption that people are mostly engaged in rationally calculating and maximizing their self-interest.
But during this financial crisis, that way of thinking has failed spectacularly. As Alan Greenspan noted in his Congressional testimony last week, he was "shocked" that markets did not work as anticipated. "I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such as that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms."
So perhaps this will be the moment when we alter our view of decision-making. Perhaps this will be the moment when we shift our focus from step three, rational calculation, to step one, perception.
Perceiving a situation seems, at first glimpse, like a remarkably simple operation. You just look and see what's around. But the operation that seems most simple is actually the most complex, it's just that most of the action takes place below the level of awareness. Looking at and perceiving the world is an active process of meaning-making that shapes and biases the rest of the decision-making chain.
Economists and psychologists have been exploring our perceptual biases for four decades now, with the work of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, and also with work by people like Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, John Bargh and Dan Ariely.
My sense is that this financial crisis is going to amount to a coming-out party for behavioral economists and others who are bringing sophisticated psychology to the realm of public policy. At least these folks have plausible explanations for why so many people could have been so gigantically wrong about the risks they were taking.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb has been deeply influenced by this stream of research. Taleb not only has an explanation for what's happening, he saw it coming. His popular books "Fooled by Randomness" and "The Black Swan" were broadsides at the risk-management models used in the financial world and beyond.
In "The Black Swan," Taleb wrote, "The government-sponsored institution Fannie Mae, when I look at its risks, seems to be sitting on a barrel of dynamite, vulnerable to the slightest hiccup." Globalization, he noted, "creates interlocking fragility." He warned that while the growth of giant banks gives the appearance of stability, in reality, it raises the risk of a systemic collapse — "when one fails, they all fail."
Taleb believes that our brains evolved to suit a world much simpler than the one we now face. His writing is idiosyncratic, but he does touch on many of the perceptual biases that distort our thinking: our tendency to see data that confirm our prejudices more vividly than data that contradict them; our tendency to overvalue recent events when anticipating future possibilities; our tendency to spin concurring facts into a single causal narrative; our tendency to applaud our own supposed skill in circumstances when we've actually benefited from dumb luck.
And looking at the financial crisis, it is easy to see dozens of errors of perception. Traders misperceived the possibility of rare events. They got caught in social contagions and reinforced each other's risk assessments. They failed to perceive how tightly linked global networks can transform small events into big disasters.
Taleb is characteristically vituperative about the quantitative risk models, which try to model something that defies modelization. He subscribes to what he calls the tragic vision of humankind, which "believes in the existence of inherent limitations and flaws in the way we think and act and requires an acknowledgement of this fact as a basis for any individual and collective action." If recent events don't underline this worldview, nothing will.
If you start thinking about our faulty perceptions, the first thing you realize is that markets are not perfectly efficient, people are not always good guardians of their own self-interest and there might be limited circumstances when government could usefully slant the decision-making architecture (see "Nudge" by Thaler and Cass Sunstein for proposals). But the second thing you realize is that government officials are probably going to be even worse perceivers of reality than private business types. Their information feedback mechanism is more limited, and, being deeply politicized, they're even more likely to filter inconvenient facts.
This meltdown is not just a financial event, but also a cultural one. It's a big, whopping reminder that the human mind is continually trying to perceive things that aren't true, and not perceiving them takes enormous effort.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/28/opinion/28brooks.html?sq=Behavioral%20Revolution&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=print
http://snipurl.com/7sioj
Op-Ed Columnist
The Behavioral Revolution By DAVID BROOKS
Roughly speaking, there are four steps to every decision. First, you perceive a situation. Then you think of possible courses of action. Then you calculate which course is in your best interest. Then you take the action.
Over the past few centuries, public policy analysts have assumed that step three is the most important. Economic models and entire social science disciplines are premised on the assumption that people are mostly engaged in rationally calculating and maximizing their self-interest.
But during this financial crisis, that way of thinking has failed spectacularly. As Alan Greenspan noted in his Congressional testimony last week, he was "shocked" that markets did not work as anticipated. "I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such as that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms."
So perhaps this will be the moment when we alter our view of decision-making. Perhaps this will be the moment when we shift our focus from step three, rational calculation, to step one, perception.
Perceiving a situation seems, at first glimpse, like a remarkably simple operation. You just look and see what's around. But the operation that seems most simple is actually the most complex, it's just that most of the action takes place below the level of awareness. Looking at and perceiving the world is an active process of meaning-making that shapes and biases the rest of the decision-making chain.
Economists and psychologists have been exploring our perceptual biases for four decades now, with the work of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, and also with work by people like Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, John Bargh and Dan Ariely.
My sense is that this financial crisis is going to amount to a coming-out party for behavioral economists and others who are bringing sophisticated psychology to the realm of public policy. At least these folks have plausible explanations for why so many people could have been so gigantically wrong about the risks they were taking.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb has been deeply influenced by this stream of research. Taleb not only has an explanation for what's happening, he saw it coming. His popular books "Fooled by Randomness" and "The Black Swan" were broadsides at the risk-management models used in the financial world and beyond.
In "The Black Swan," Taleb wrote, "The government-sponsored institution Fannie Mae, when I look at its risks, seems to be sitting on a barrel of dynamite, vulnerable to the slightest hiccup." Globalization, he noted, "creates interlocking fragility." He warned that while the growth of giant banks gives the appearance of stability, in reality, it raises the risk of a systemic collapse — "when one fails, they all fail."
Taleb believes that our brains evolved to suit a world much simpler than the one we now face. His writing is idiosyncratic, but he does touch on many of the perceptual biases that distort our thinking: our tendency to see data that confirm our prejudices more vividly than data that contradict them; our tendency to overvalue recent events when anticipating future possibilities; our tendency to spin concurring facts into a single causal narrative; our tendency to applaud our own supposed skill in circumstances when we've actually benefited from dumb luck.
And looking at the financial crisis, it is easy to see dozens of errors of perception. Traders misperceived the possibility of rare events. They got caught in social contagions and reinforced each other's risk assessments. They failed to perceive how tightly linked global networks can transform small events into big disasters.
Taleb is characteristically vituperative about the quantitative risk models, which try to model something that defies modelization. He subscribes to what he calls the tragic vision of humankind, which "believes in the existence of inherent limitations and flaws in the way we think and act and requires an acknowledgement of this fact as a basis for any individual and collective action." If recent events don't underline this worldview, nothing will.
If you start thinking about our faulty perceptions, the first thing you realize is that markets are not perfectly efficient, people are not always good guardians of their own self-interest and there might be limited circumstances when government could usefully slant the decision-making architecture (see "Nudge" by Thaler and Cass Sunstein for proposals). But the second thing you realize is that government officials are probably going to be even worse perceivers of reality than private business types. Their information feedback mechanism is more limited, and, being deeply politicized, they're even more likely to filter inconvenient facts.
This meltdown is not just a financial event, but also a cultural one. It's a big, whopping reminder that the human mind is continually trying to perceive things that aren't true, and not perceiving them takes enormous effort.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/28/opinion/28brooks.html?sq=Behavioral%20Revolution&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=print
http://snipurl.com/7sioj
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