Obama’s Q&A with House Republicans
We haven’t had a lot of posts about politics here over the past year, in part because that was always a bit more of A’s territory and he hasn’t been writing much, and in part because I feel more relaxed about things with Obama in the White House. I don’t feel like I have to hang on every shred of news out of Washington anymore because I agree with the basic principles on which Obama operates, and I feel like I can trust him to make well-considered decisions based on his own ability to reason, as well as on the information and expert advice he has available to him (a much vaster quantity than what I know). It’s obvious, when I listen to Obama speak, that he knows what his positions are and exactly why he has taken them. It sounds like such a little thing to ask from a president, but after eight years of Bush, it feels like a breath of fresh air.
A perfect example of what I’m talking about is Obama’s meeting with House Republicans at their retreat in Baltimore last week. If you’re the sort of person who reads this blog regularly, you’ve probably at least heard about this if not seen it. I finally sat down and watched the video all the way through, and I’m still in awe — of Obama especially, but really of everyone. It was an awesome thing to do. Everyone was very civil — the Republicans had time to explain their questions fully and did so in a way that was earnest and not belligerent, Obama answered with real details and arguments rather than talking points and catchphrases. This is a great example what a real political dialogue can look like. Could we please have more? Lots more?
If you haven’t watched it yet, I’ll make it easy for you. Here’s the meatiest part, the Q&A session (via C-SPAN).
Volcano monitoring
I finally got around to watching Obama’s speech and Jindal’s response. (Thanks, C-SPAN.) I thought Obama made some bold promises while staying on the whole realistic. I’ll always wince at the stories of regular folks doing great things, though… it sounds so forced, even if they really did do great things.
What I really want to talk about is this moment in Jindal’s speech where he calls out Congress for passing a stimulus bill that includes this silly, silly earmark for “something called volcano monitoring.” Oh, those nutty Congressmen and their pet projects!
I agree that earmarks are to be avoided, and I understand the strategy of naming ridiculous earmark spending in order to embarrass legislators. It’s effective when you point out millions of dollars going to a nonexistent Grape Research Center, or half a million for the Sparta Teapot Museum. But you have to make sure it sounds really silly. It seems that Republicans, in their fervor to criticize legislative pork, have been gradually forgetting how to determine this. At least as it was starting, they were calling reasonable projects by silly-sounding names — which made them sound uninformed, but at least worked on uniformed voters. It would have been unreasonable for a planetarium to spend that much an an “overhead projector,” but that’s not really what it was. It could sound like “fruit fly research” was a waste of time, if you didn’t know that work on Drosophila melanogaster laid the foundation for modern genetic research and is still extremely relevant today.
Tacking on the words “something called” helps when you’re talking about the World Toilet Summit (yes, that’s another real one, apparently) but it doesn’t work when everyone knows why the thing is called that. Something called volcano monitoring? Well, Bobby Jindal, probably that involves monitoring volcanos. You know, like keeping an eye on them. To predict when they’re going to erupt. For someone familiar with the US government’s previous lack of response to national disasters, I’d think you’d want people to be on the lookout for future ones so everyone could be prepared.
President Obama
The long-anticipated inauguration ceremony went very well, I think. I found Obama’s speech to be gracious while still pointed. I don’t want to say much more about it, because every blogger who’s ever discussed American politics is posting something like this today, and I don’t really have anything new to add. I just want to say congratulations to President Obama and Vice President Biden. Here’s hoping that we were right to have hope.
Speaking of which, I want to point you to the Obameter, maintained by PolitiFact.com, if you haven’t seen it already. They’re keeping track of the 500+ promises that Obama made during his campaign, and marking each one with their status (kept, broken, in the works, etc.). I saw it mentioned first on the Reason Hit & Run blog yesterday, and at a few other places since then. I’ve generally seen it discussed with a sort of sore-loser snark (at H&R, not so much in the post itself as in the comments) but I think it’s something we should all be celebrating, even if we’re happy that Obama won the election. It’s a fantastic example of how technology can bring us better government, increase transparency and promote accountability through availability of information.
Politicians have been making campaign promises all over the place for as long as there have been politicians. Everyone gripes about how they don’t follow through. Oh, politicians, those dishonest, lying crooks! (Insert melodramatic fist-shake here.) But seriously, I think a lot of things just get forgotten. We’re talking about many hundreds of statements made. It’s not malice on the part of the politician, but simply things getting hectic and other issues taking the forefront, displacing that half a sentence in a speech to the crowd outside the Piggly-Wiggly in Tuscaloosa. If the public is really invested in that promise being carried out, a website like this one can serve as a reminder to the politician that he or she did make it. On the other hand, the website might reveal to citizens that the “big” promises do get the follow-through, while smaller and less important daydreams and wishes don’t get a politician’s priority. Either way, it’s a valuable reality check for everyone.
I also want to caution against becoming too obsessed with these records. Some of these promises hinge on Congress going along with what Obama wants, and while the president ought to work with the legislature to get his agenda through, he doesn’t have 100% control over the outcome. Additionally, some things have changed over the past year, and the president ought to reconsider his positions when the relevant information has changed. (I mean, really, if we’ve learned anything from the last eight years…!) Finally, we need to get real and understand that saying “I will work for x” is not the same as “I promise, x will definitely happen immediately when I take office.”
As happy as I am to be able to say “President Obama,” I won’t give him a free pass. We should all hold our elected officials accountable, which is why I’m glad the Obameter is up and running on inauguration day. Still, guys, remember he’s only been president for three hours. Give him a little more time to get started on the tax code.
Invoke nothing
Everyone’s been talking about Obama’s choice of Rick Warren to give the invocation at his inauguration. My initial response was something like, “Ugh — fine. I’ve got to pick my battles.” It’s troubling, but there are bigger problems out there, even if we just limit ourselves to church-state separation issues, and I can’t get that riled up about this one. To be honest, it sounds to me like a little bit of gloating (remember how the Saddleback debate looked like a giveaway to McCain?) as well as a visible yet ultimately meaningless concession to the Christian Right. It doesn’t set any policy, just allows them to feel a little special. Not so bad.
My real issue is with the idea of an inaugural invocation in the first place. I agree that there’s plenty to be upset about regarding Rick Warren himself, but as has also been pointed out before, this “tradition” didn’t start until 1937 and isn’t an essential part of the inauguration. It’s pretty clearly an inclusion of specific religious statements and viewpoints into state functions, which is supposed to be forbidden. It seems like the only reason we still use it is that, once FDR did it (three times in a row), Truman didn’t look like he was some kind of a godless heathen, and naturally Eisenhower had to show he loved God too, and so on and so forth.
It’s just like the phrase “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance. People act like there’s something magical about that set of words, but don’t seem to realize they weren’t even written until the 1890s (by a Socialist! gasp!) and that God wasn’t mentioned in it until the 1950s. Some tradition!
The appeal to tradition is a blatantly fallacious argument. If “we’ve always done it” was a good enough reason to do something and never change, we would still be living in caves and gnawing on hunks of raw meat. Worse, proponents of religion in public ceremony aren’t even applying this fallacy well! The older tradition is not to have an invocation, not to mention God in the pledge. (The even older tradition is not to have a pledge at all… or not to have an inauguration at all. Why not go back to the Articles of Confederation, or even to being a British colony? Perhaps we should all pack up and leave the country to whatever Native Americans are left, since the older tradition is for this continent to be undiscovered by Europeans! Or maybe you’d rather the tribes go really old-school and find their way back across the Bering Strait?)
What we ought to do is not to look at what is superficially older (stopping at whatever arbitrary point in time we don’t care to look beyond), but to look at what course of action is best. An inaugural invocation is certainly against the spirit of the First Amendment, and though I’m no lawyer, I think there’s a good argument to be made that it’s against the letter of the text as well. “Invoking” any particular God or gods as part of an official swearing of oaths “[respects] an establishment of religion” unless they have a representative from every existent belief system including atheism, which strikes me as rather difficult as well as time-consuming. It’s better to invoke nothing and no one but the people of this country and the Constitution. Unfortunately, the groupthink of the democratic process is not extremely logical or detail-oriented. As long as people care whether candidates share their religious beliefs, the electoral process is not going to change this practice, and unless Michael Newdow et al. are sucessful in their suit, the judicial branch won’t be much help either.
Who can be my president?
I’ve been mulling over the proposal, from our friend Progressive Conservative, that we all take and publicize the Wendell Wilkie Pledge. He’s named it for the Republican presidential candidate who lost to Franklin Roosevelt in 1940. Wilkie’s “Loyal Opposition Speech” is a reminder that politics is about choosing the best policies rather than about personality clashes, and that one can continue to oppose a party’s or politician’s ideas while respecting the rule of law and authority of the office held. In his explanation of the pledge, he writes:
When we vote we are making a promise. A promise to honor the results. A promise to honor the office. A promise to claim the president as our own, even when we disagree with him most. That is the oath I ask you all to take. I urge you to accept the results of this election. Regardless of who you vote for in November, our country can only go forward if we give our new president our loyal support, though I am not asking anyone to blindly follow this President.
I like this idea very much, and I wish that I was writing this post to affirm my support for the pledge and call on others to join me. However, I think the circumstances of this election make that impossible for me to do. I personally support the Obama-Biden ticket, and I would of course honor the results even if the McCain-Palin ticket were to win instead, but I don’t think I could wholeheartedly refer to McCain as “my president” when he and his campaign have gone so far out of their way to specify that they are absolutely no such thing.
I confess: I’ve finished college, and I’m a graduate student. In physics. I don’t live in a tiny town in a landlocked state; I live in a big city, near a coast. (Horror of horrors — the one on the east!) I’m not a Christian. I don’t even believe in a god. Because I’m an educated, metropolitan, “East-coast liberal” atheist, John McCain and Sarah Palin are willing to demonize me and others like me in an attempt to win the votes of everyone else. Why should I pledge my loyal support to a ticket that charges me with the problems of our time?
This hateful rhetoric is not new to Palin, though she did recently refer explicitly to “real America” and “the pro-America parts” of the country. Her speech at the RNC was all about how small-town people are good people (and not-so-subtle implications that if you don’t meet the Mayberry R.F.D. stereotype, you don’t really love your country). I’m sure I don’t need to remind you of the irony meter-breaking RNC speech delivered by Mitt Romney, who ripped on “Eastern elites” despite being one himself. Just recently, McCain campaign adviser Nancy Pfotenauer dismissed northern Virginia as not “real Virginia,” but merely infiltrated and contaminated by “Democrats [who] have just come in from the District of Columbia.” North Carolina representative Robin Hayes told a McCain rally that “liberals hate real Americans that work and accomplish and achieve and believe in God.” Today, McCain explained to NBC’s Brian Williams that the “elitists” live “in our nation’s capital and New York City.” (In the same interview, Palin pointed out that an elitist is anyone “who [thinks] that they’re better than anyone else,” which puts an interesting new twist on the concept of a political campaign.)
Can you imagine what would happen if Obama and Biden were campaigning in the same way? What if they repeatedly warned of what “conservatives from fly-over states” would do to the government? What if they promised to rid Washington of “Texas bigotry,” or “backwater Mississippi racism,” or “evangelical Christian ignorance?” What if when Republicans derisively referred to Obama’s Ivy League education, Democrats countered by pointing out that McCain graduated 894th of 899 in his college class, and that the best of the four colleges Palin transferred around between was the University of Idaho? I’d love to see each use of the adjective “latte-drinking” as an insult followed by a reminder that the McCain-Palin ticket is instead targeting the alcoholic demographic. Imagine if they argued, as Adam Cadre did not too long ago, that “Republican political ads spew insults — or at least epithets that Republicans think are insults — while Democrats hold out their hands and coo that ‘There is no them — there is only us.’ There’s a reason the guy who said that moved to New York after his presidency instead of back to Arkansas: New York is better than Arkansas.”
Of course, this would be outrageous. The media wouldn’t let the Democrats get away with a presidential campaign with that kind of language in it, and neither would the voters. Even though many of us do believe, deep down, that there’s something seriously wrong with states where creationism is taught in science classes, or where racial segregation is still the norm, or where everything from terrorism to hurricanes gets blamed on “the gays,” we believe that it would be both rude and unproductive to accuse everyone in an entire region of being blindingly ignorant or racist or bigoted as part of a campaign. A candidate willing to make such sweeping and divisive generalizations would be difficult to vote for, even if there were some truth behind them.
It feels like many eons ago now, but there was this time back in April when Obama, at a closed fundraiser event in California, commented that some Pennsylvanians were “bitter” about the government and the economy and as a result “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” It’s a reasonable characterization of what’s going on, and while it’s not something anyone would be happy to hear said about themselves, it doesn’t seem particularly vicious. I could even see it as sympathetic. But when his comments got out, the only words anyone remembered were “cling to guns and religion” which was interpreted to mean that Obama wants to repeal the Second Amendment and ban God. Obama backtracked, calling his statement “boneheaded.”
So then, why is it acceptable, even encouraged, for Republicans to make much worse comments in the opposite direction? I’ll set aside the obvious fallacy of assuming that everyone in New England is a liberal or that everyone in the Deep South is conservative. While that is insulting to our intelligence, it’s at least statistically likely to be true. My bigger problem here is with the divide between the supposedly good Americans and supposedly bad Americans. Republicans seem to think that the good Americans live in the small towns, with limited education, limited exposure to other countries or cultures or ways of life, and limited sobriety. They all work in manufacturing or construction or farming, and this is good, honest work. They all live in “real America,” the states or districts that are colored red on electoral maps. On the other hand, there are the bad Americans, who live in cities big enough to have more traffic lights than you can count on your fingers, tend to go to college and occasionally travel abroad, and have a wide variety of ethnic background and religious traditions. As a result of their college education, they have bad jobs in fields like law, journalism, or scientific research, which means they live in an elite Ivory Tower where they scheme about ways to ruin the lives of good Americans. Naturally, they do not live in “real America,” because their states or districts get colored in blue.
I wish I was making all this up. I wish I could honestly say that we can all get along, but I didn’t make this divide — I usually speak out against it. But when the demonization has gone so far that we appear to have a new Joe McCarthy in Congress, I think it’s gone beyond what I can handle in personal conversations. Republicans need to stop talking about who’s “pro-America” or “anti-America,” who lives in “real America” and who doesn’t. We all love our country; we just have different ideas on how to keep it great and make it better. If Republicans continue to characterize any and all opposing viewpoints as “anti-American,” I don’t see why anyone should be willing to be their “loyal opposition” providing respectful and reasoned debate. Unless John McCain and Sarah Palin suddenly decide to vehemently denounce this kind of rhetoric and seriously apologize for the tone of their campaign and the direction in which they’ve led their party, I just can’t see being able to call McCain “my president.”
First debate: a tie
The presidential debate this evening was interesting, but dense. A lot of important points were raised, but I’m unsure about how much the average viewer could take away from it, especially if they haven’t been following the details of the campaign in depth for as long as I have.
Of course, the big question after all debates is who won. I don’t think there was a clear winner (especially if you emphasize clarity in addition to simply having better arguments). Both candidates gave many answers in which they seemed to be listing handfuls of different ideas they wanted to cram in somewhere, rather than directly and succinctly answering the questions posed. Obama definitely came out ahead in terms of appearance and mannerisms, using the format of the debate to directly challenge McCain, while McCain looked down or away from Obama more often and seemed less comfortable. (Also, that tie… stripes were maybe not the best for TV?) It was nice to see the whole event stay civil and focused on issues (even if maybe not on one specific issue at a time).
In the end, I doubt this debate will change many people’s minds. However, both candidates have shown themselves to be skillful at speaking extemporaneously and with expertise on their policies, so I’m definitely looking forward to the next one.
What’s up with the polls?
Electoral projection website FiveThirtyEight is showing McCain at 289.1 electoral votes to Obama’s 248.9. They have him at 56% odds to win the presidency. This is a big change from a couple weeks ago. Before both conventions, Obama had about 60% odds of winning, and at the height of his post-convention bounce was at 75% (though no one expected that to last). Now that a bit of time has passed since both conventions and the transient effects are starting to decay, McCain is ahead. It may still be effects from the Republican convention, or it may be that he’s gaining a solid toehold.
What changed? Two major things. Sarah Palin has been announced as the GOP VP candidate, and the McCain campaign has been airing many negative ads. I can see how both of those things would change a few marginal minds, but I’m surprised that they would have this large of an effect. Then again, all the people who voted to reelect Bush in 2004 are still around and registered, so I shouldn’t write off voter stupidity as a possible factor.
And it is about stupidity. Sarah Palin has repeated so many lies about herself so many times and so blatantly, even after it’s been reported everywhere that they are false, that it’s hard to imagine she’s successfully winning over “values voters.” (It just underscores exactly which values matter, and exactly which ones don’t matter the slightest bit.) The smear ads also contain blatant lies and misrepresentations which, as Paul Krugman points out, “anyone with an Internet connection can disprove in a minute.” The message that’s really sent by all this, as David Ignatius and Steve Chapman both argue, is that McCain will stop at nothing to win even if it means sacrificing the ideals he once stood for. Thomas Friedman believes that this trend of misrepresenting and oversimplifying the facts in order to turn everything partisan is ultimately making America stupid, and I’m inclined to agree.
As someone who prefers rational decisions to purely emotional ones, it’s hard for me to figure out how to argue with people swayed by these clearly false appeals. It seems to me that seeing the facts should make anyone’s decision clear. However, FiveThirtyEight has some great suggestions for the Obama campaign regarding Palin enthusiasts: acknowledge that she’s likable, and then point out that not every likable person would make a good vice president. Maybe a similar approach can be followed for the smear ads — explicitly agreeing that it would be bad for someone to do or believe the things Obama is accused of doing or believing, then explaining the truth. The concern, of course, is that this gives too much air time to the rumors, and denying something often just helps people to remember the something instead of the denial. However, doing nothing doesn’t appear to be working.
Standing up for the Constitution
This is exactly the kind of attitude I was hoping to see from a former constitutional law professor.
Referring to Obama at the RNC, Sarah Palin said, “Al-Qaeda terrorists still plot to inflict catastrophic harm on America and he’s worried that someone won’t read them their rights.” It gave me chills and made me have to step away from the TV, but Obama has responded like the educated and intelligent person he is.
Calling it “the foundation of Anglo-American law,” he said the principle “says very simply: If the government grabs you, then you have the right to at least ask, ‘Why was I grabbed?’ And say, ‘Maybe you’ve got the wrong person.’”
The safeguard is essential, Obama continued, “because we don’t always have the right person.”
“We don’t always catch the right person,” he said. “We may think it’s Mohammed the terrorist, but it might be Mohammed the cab driver. You might think it’s Barack the bomb-thrower, but it might be Barack the guy running for president.”
It might defy our instincts. It might be a bit nuanced. It might require us to read something — and for a few of us, require the assistance of a dictionary. (Who would have expected a presidential candidate to throw around Latin phrases like habeas corpus as though he knows what they mean?!) But it’s exactly those qualities that make me proud of this speech. Rather than play to our fears and herd mentality, Obama is inviting us to think about why our laws say what they say, and why laws shouldn’t be disregarded whenever we feel hysterical. I think he deserves a lot of praise and attention for taking the intellectual stance in a time when “intellectual” is almost as dirty a word as “liberal.”
I like the dash of self-deprecating humor as well. It nicely underscores the ridiculousness of those smears.
Gambling on Palin
I’m not going to do a full post on the Obama speech because I largely agree with the conventional wisdom that everyone started spouting the minute it was done. It was a very good speech, and it was excellent political theater. I was particularly excited to see the counterattacks on McCain. I say counterattacks rather than “attacks” or “defense,” and I think the distinction is important. He defended himself against McCain, but he did so by attacking McCain for even making the attacks in the first place. (Perfect example: attacking McCain for suggesting that Obama didn’t put his country first.) Attacking the partisan attacks is a very good way to go on the offensive without totally ruining the bipartisan, new politics feel of the campaign.
Now, for the news of the day: McCain picks Sarah Palin for VP. This is, as far as I’m concerned, a huge gamble in more ways than one. There are some obvious upsides, though most of them are political/tactical rather than about good governance. She has very good anti-corruption credentials. That should definitely help get the McCain as reformer image back. She’s also young, which helps, though it also might highlight McCain’s age. Most importantly, of course, she’s female. This is obviously an attempt to win over Hillary voters, and it’s one that has a meaningful chance of working. It obviously won’t get nearly a majority (I mean, she’s vehemently pro-life, for starters) but getting a sizable minority would be plenty to do massive damage. She also has a nice, conservative-friendly biography.
The downsides, though, are blatantly obvious. The first one is her utter lack of any experience whatsoever. She has two years as governor of Alaska, a state with fewer people living in it than most major cities. She hasn’t touched a foreign policy decision in her life. This is particularly noteworthy because of McCain’s attacks on Obama. It’s not insane to claim Obama is short on experience. At the very least, he has far less than McCain, but you can’t claim Obama is too inexperienced and then claim Palin is ready to jump into the presidency at a moment’s notice. Being a prominent senator is clearly more experience than Palin has, even if it’s still your first term. Moreover, Obama has all sorts of other resume items — community activism, a distinguished academic career, time in the state legislature. Palin was mayor of a town of under 10,000 people. That puts her somewhere in between high school principals and university chancellors in level of responsibility. She definitely doesn’t have a distinguished early life either (second-place Miss Alaska followed by University of Idaho and no post-grad degree) or any other non-political credentials. She doesn’t have anything like Obama’s early Iraq speech to show that despite not being in office she was making good policy decisions. Choosing someone like Lieberman would have allowed McCain to continue the experience-based criticism. Picking someone like Jindal or Pawlenty would have made it hard to criticize Obama. You have to go pretty far into the land of the neophytes before Obama would feel comfortable going on the offensive on experience, but McCain has managed to do it.
Palin’s issue profile is also about as far the right as you could possibly fine. She’s very fiscally conservative, which is something that, while I disagree with it, I can respect — there’s a legitimate argument to be made for it. She is also, however, conservative in some ways that make no sense. Reason has a good post about this. There’s this great gem on global warming, for example:
Q. What is your take on global warming and how is it affecting our country?
A. A changing environment will affect Alaska more than any other state, because of our location. I’m not one though who would attribute it to being man-made.
You’d think that the governor of Alaska of all places would be clear on this one by now. My favorite, though, is this one, where she comes out in favor of teaching creationism in public schools. Now, as much as we like to point out that intelligent design and creationism are in fact the same thing, it’s a little comforting to me that most proponents of teaching creationism at least feel the need to pretend they’re not advocating teaching a religious belief in a public school, or at least have enough deference to the Supreme Court to try to work around it. Here, though, she goes against decades of established law and practice and actually calls what she’s supporting creationism. It’s nice that she’s honest, but I really thought that phase of the debate was over by now.
“Teach both. You know, don’t be afraid of information….Healthy debate is so important and it’s so valuable in our schools. I am a proponent of teaching both. And you know, I say this too as the daughter of a science teacher. Growing up with being so privileged and blessed to be given a lot of information on, on both sides of the subject — creationism and evolution. It’s been a healthy foundation for me. But don’t be afraid of information and let kids debate both sides.”
She’s also, of course, massively pro-oil. Anyone from Alaska has to be. Lots of states have their own self-interested idiotic policies. In Iowa it’s ethanol, and in Alaska it’s oil. I’m not particularly extreme on environmental issues. I can definitely see the argument for drilling offshore or in ANWR, though I still come down on the other side. What I can’t stand, though, is the implication that those decisions, which are pretty low-impact, could possibly take the place of strong efforts on alternative energy sources and other kids of research (electric cars, actually clean coal, etc.). Nevertheless, here she goes right off the deep end:
I beg to disagree with any candidate who would say we can’t drill our way out of our problem…
The outcome of this choice is going to be a wonderful experiment in the intelligence of the average voter. If voters are rational, she should be loved by the Republican base, but hated by independents. She should win over very few Hillary voters. She’s massively opposite Clinton on the issues. If people though Obama was too inexperienced (the only rational reason I’ve seen for voting for Clinton but then choosing McCain over Obama), then Palin should seem much worse, and should hurt. The only reason left for the Clinton-to-McCain switch is to literally say you are such a feminist that you will vote for a female regardless of the issues. That’s a bizarre form of feminism, choosing the affirmative-action type voting motivation over things like abortion rights and equal pay. I would have respect for someone who was honest about that motivation, but I think it’s so obviously idiotic that no one consciously believes that it’s the reason for their vote. In general, Palin should hurt McCain’s appeal to anyone other than the far right wing.
If, however, voters are irrational (and they probably are), the outcome of this decision is unclear. The youth and vitality and reform will help the brand. She might make McCain look old, and the inexperience will definitely get some traction. She’ll get some female support, and in a way being female might make it harder to get the far-right policy stuff to really stick. It’ll be interesting. There’s definitely no way anyone can criticize McCain for making a boring choice, at least.
Tired of campaign ads
I wish the political discourse accessible to the majority of the population came in chunks longer than 30 seconds. You can’t make or refute an argument in that short a span of time, and the result is that no one wins. We’ve stopped expecting political dialogue to involve arguments and answers in the first place – it’s all about the quick sell. I could point you to a dozen videos of campaign ads as proof of this, but if you know how to search on YouTube or really even turn on a television, I trust you can find plenty of examples for yourself.
There are lots of times when politicians should naturally want to explain themselves. Many of the sound bites and other tidbits easily turned into attack ads started out as decently reasonable things but were taken out of context. Not all started out as genuinely good things, but they’re usually not as bad as they’re made out to sound. You can tell because the voiceovers in the ads sound like they’re in a trailer for some dystopian sci-fi movie. In a world where nothing is quite like it seems… If they really had a thoroughly compelling case to make, they wouldn’t need to explain it in an ominous voice with scary sound effects. Surely there’s another side to the story… why aren’t politicians eager to refute these weak attacks?
The biggest example of this lately is all the hubbub about who said what about whom before the US Presidential nominations were secured. The Clintons and Joe Biden said Obama didn’t have enough experience, particularly in foreign policy. Romney criticized McCain on a million different things. McCain’s using clips of Hillary Clinton and Biden in ads now. How could McCain even consider Romney, commentators are saying, since he said such nasty things about McCain during the campaign?
This baffles me, especially after having watched both the Clintons’ and Biden’s speeches at the Democratic National Convention, in which they gave full support to Obama and his ability to lead the country. There’s such an easy response! Why isn’t it being made explicitly? It would work equally well for Romney, should the need arise. It goes like this: “Last year I thought [fill in name] had [fill in shortcoming]. but over the past months, as I’ve watched him campaign and heard his opinions on [cite a few key issues or events], I’ve come to realize the depth of his [strength in area of supposed shortcoming] and I’m now entirely sure that he is a well-qualified candidate.” There, was that so hard? We can admit that we changed our minds because we had actual reason to do so.
I could imagine acceptable explanations of lots of other seeming grounds for attack. Voted before some legislation before you voted against it? Explain how bills are usually hundreds and hundreds of pages long, and get amended at different times in complicated ways, so it’s possible to have the “same” bill with very different policy outcomes at two different times. Told a bunch of evangelical Christians that deciding when life begins is “above your pay grade”? Point out that the nature of life is a complex philosophical, theological, and scientific question, and that while any group of people might think it has the answer, it’s not the place of the president to decree that there’s one right perspective when there’s so much debate still going on. Unable to remember how many houses you own? Explain that they’re in your wife’s name, and she buys and sells them without really involving you at all. And maybe confess to the fact that almost all nationally well-known politicians are very wealthy, and seriously, we all knew that, it’s not a crime.
The thing about McCain’s houses really interests me. I just searched on JohnMcCain.com for anything about that mini-scandal, and couldn’t find anything except for a bunch of old articles about the subprime mortgage crisis. I can understand not making a big shiny featured link on your front page to your refutation of Obama’s attacks, but I can’t understand not taking the time to clear them up at all.
On the other hand, Barack Obama has a section of his web site called Fight the Smears. That’s a good start, but it doesn’t cover the more nuanced stuff, and even for what it does cover a lot of people aren’t looking there or don’t even realize the site exists.
I’d like to see the mainstream media stop reporting on what misconceptions the public might hold about incendiary campaign ads, and start reporting on the truth behind the accusations. I’d like to see politicians unafraid to admit they’ve changed their mind and happy to explain the reasons why. When they just let oversimplified, out-of-context attacks go unresponded to, they’re tacitly admitting that the attacks have merit. We should be trying to raise public discourse to a higher level by expecting that politicians explain their actions, and demanding that they criticize each other only when they have more evidence than a sound bite.