Remember, as you read it, that it’s an editorial, not a column by a single person.
Ann Althouse…
Unsurprising; she’s been very hard on Obama for most of his administration. But since Althouse can be quite quirky, you never can be sure what she’s going to do.
You might ask: who cares? Well, for one thing, Althouse lives in Wisconsin, a swing state. For another, although she is her own very unique self, she also probably represents a political trajectory shared by others who voted for Obama in 2008 and are not doing so in 2012. If so, that’s a good thing—I’d like to see a lot more changers, all around the country but especially in swing states.
It’s also of great interest (to me, anyway) what turned the tide (or, as she writes, closed the door) for Althouse against Obama in a definitive way in 2012: Benghazi.
As a blogger, Althouse follows that sort of thing much more closely than most people. I think, though, that Benghazi is finally beginning to percolate into the non-blogosphere consciousness. I don’t know; I’ve not done a survey—but the fact that some of the mainstream news outlets are now offering tentative forays into Benghazi coverup coverage territory is an indication that they don’t want to be excoriated for their failure when the facts finally are forced out by Republicans, bloggers on the right, and lonely Fox News. The MSM is trying to carefully calibrate its information flow on Benghazi, though, dribbling out just enough pre-election coverage in an attempt to immunize itself against charges of collusion with Obama but not enough to harm him unduly.
So they think, anyway. Have you spoken to any low information voters to see what they know about Benghazi at this point? I’m curious.
[ADDENDUM: Here’s a WaPo piece that attempts to answer the question of how many 2008 Obama voters have changed their minds in 2012. The answer? Thirteen per cent. If I’m doing the math right, wouldn’t that mean a victory for Romney?]
Sandy aftermath
Obama had a nice lovefest with Christie, but now it’s hard to turn on the news without seeing continuing scenes of devastation in New York and New Jersey, Obama country. It underscores the very considerable difference between reality and photo-ops. It also reminds people—if they’re thinking it through—that disasters happen, and the resultant destruction is not so easy to fix even with the best of will.
George Bush was excoriated for Katrina because he was—well, George Bush. Obama has been praised re Sandy because he is—well, Barack Obama. ‘Twas ever thus. But neither can wave a magic wand and make the ravages of nature on modern life all better.
People who lost relatives, homes, possessions, and power (in descending order of importance) need a lot of help. But most of the assistance will come from relief agencies, local responders, and the good citizens around them.
[ADDENDUM: Ace has more.]
Wordsmiths for Obama: redux
[NOTE: Some of the comments on today’s earlier post about Noonan, Obama, and narcissism made me remember the following piece. I wrote it back in June of 2008 to explain the phenomenon of why so many wordsmiths were so taken with Obama, and how it is that being a good writer is hardly the same as being a good thinker—or a good policy-maker, for that matter, although some writers seem to think that because they’re so good with words they would be awfully good at setting policy, too. The post still seems to be making some very relevant points, so I thought I’d republish it.
And for the sake of argument let’s assume that Obama wrote his own books without ghostwriters, because the point is that most people thnk he did, and that affects them.]
In trying to understand what about Obama appeals so powerfully to his supporters, I’ve decided that some—perhaps even much—of it is style.
He gives a good speech. He has a deep voice. He’s tall. He’s slender. He knows what a dap is. And he can turn a literary phrase.
The latter is the reason some literary folk like him, anyway, by their own report—that’s according to at least two examples of the genre, fiction writer Michael Chabon, and Sam Anderson, who appears to be a book reviewer at New York Magazine, and is the author of the article from which the following excerpts are taken:
Michael Chabon, arguably America’s best line-by-line literary stylist, says he became a proselytizing Obama supporter after reading a particularly impressive turn of phrase in the senator’s second book—a conversion experience that seems, on first glance, inexcusably silly, but on fifth glance might be slightly profound.
No, even on fifth glance, it’s not even slightly profound. It’s profoundly slight.
How much can you tell about a candidate’s fitness to lead a country based on a single clause?
Nothing.
The substance/style debate has been around for centuries””and, like all the other venerable binaries, is probably best considered as a symbiosis. Too often, style is dismissed as merely a sauce on the nutritious bread of substance, when in fact it’s inevitably a form of substance itself. This goes double for the presidency, where brilliant policy requires brilliant public discourse.
Policy can certainly be assisted in being sold to the public by brilliant public discourse, and that can be important—witness the failure of George Bush to do so. The masters were Lincoln and Winston Churchill, and to a lesser degree FDR and Reagan, and Tony Blair in our time. But if the substance isn’t there, the style not only does not substitute for it, but can be dangerously misleading because it can seductively mask the lack of substance with its captivating siren song.
If you can think your way through a sentence, through the algorithms involved in condensing information verbally and pitching it to an audience, through the complexities of animating historical details into narrative, then you can think your way through a policy paper, or a diplomatic discussion, or a 3 A.M. phone call.
Isn’t it pretty to think so? Wordsmiths fancy they could govern quite well, if only they cared to. Neither the skills nor the knowledge base of oration or of writing—especially fiction, although it’s also true of writing in general—are readily transferable to forming and implementing policy, although they’re not necessarily mutually exclusive.
Did Anderson ever watch a tape of Truman giving a speech? He makes McCain look like Churchill. Truman was not good at oration—but he is now thought of as having been a good president although his popularity, like Bush’s, was very low when he left office. Perhaps the latter fact is an indication that good speechmaking is helpful for selling one’s policies and bad speechmaking handicaps a president who is involved in a complex and difficult war, such as the Korean or the Iraq wars.
Style tells us, in a second, what substance couldn’t tell us in a year.
It tells us a lot, indeed—but only about style. It tells us nothing about substance.
Hillary Clinton—not especially known for her oratorical skills—had a much better way of putting it. You might even call her words eloquent—because they happen to have both style and substance:
You campaign in poetry, but you govern in prose.
Peggy Noonan needs to read an article on narcissism
Then maybe she will figure out the answer to what’s puzzling her so about Obama:
Why did the president make such mistakes? Why did he make decisions that seemed so unknowing, and not only in retrospect?
Because he had so much confidence, he thought whatever he did would work. He thought he had “a gift,” as he is said to have told Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. He thought he had a special ability to sway the American people, or so he suggested to House Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor.
But whenever he went over the the heads of the media and Congress and went to the people, in prime-time addresses, it didn’t really work. He did not have a magical ability to sway. And””oddly””he didn’t seem to notice.
It is one thing to think you’re Lebron. Its another thing to keep missing the basket and losing games and still think you’re Lebron.
And that really was the problem: He had the confidence without the full capability. And he gathered around him friends and associates who adored him, who were themselves talented but maybe not quite big enough for the game they were in. They understood the Democratic Party, its facts and assumptions. But they weren’t America-sized. They didn’t get the country so well.
It is a mystery why the president didn’t second-guess himself more, doubt himself. Instead he kept going forward as if it were working.
No, Peggy. It’s no mystery at all.
[NOTE: In the Wiki article about narcissism, here are some ideas about the possible causes [emphasis mine]:
The cause of this disorder is unknown, according to Groopman and Cooper. However, they list the following factors identified by various researchers as possibilities:
An oversensitive temperament at birth
Excessive admiration that is never balanced with realistic feedback
Excessive praise for good behaviors or excessive criticism for bad behaviors in childhood
Overindulgence and overvaluation by parents, other family members, or peers
Being praised for perceived exceptional looks or abilities by adults
Severe emotional abuse in childhood
Unpredictable or unreliable caregiving from parents
Valued by parents as a means to regulate their own self-esteem
See also splitting [emphasis mine]:
People who are diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder use splitting as a central defense mechanism. According to psychoanalyst Kernberg, “the normal tension between actual self on the one hand, and ideal self and ideal object on the other, is eliminated by the building up of an inflated self-concept within which the actual self and the ideal self and ideal object are confused. At the same time, the remnants of the unacceptable images are repressed and projected onto external objects, which are devalued.”
The merging of the “inflated self-concept” and the “actual self” is seen in the inherent grandiosity of narcissistic personality disorder. Also inherent in this process are the defense mechanisms of devaluation, idealization and denial. Other people are either manipulated as an extension of one’s own self, who serve the sole role of giving “admiration and approval” or they are seen as worthless (because they cannot collude with the narcissist’s grandiosity).]
Should Northeast power lines be buried?
And the answer is: maybe.
[Hat tip: Instapundit.]
Why Leon Panetta?
In following the Benghazi debacle I am reminded of what an exceptionally poor choice Leon Panetta was, first for CIA head and then for Defense.
That’s not a new thought. I said as much when he was first appointed as CIA head in 2009 by Obama (as did almost everyone, including Diane Feinstein and the New Yorker—that lets you know what a rotten choice it was thought to be). The following is from my post about how and why Panetta was chosen to head the CIA; it’s instructive to go back and read it in light of what happened on September 11, 2012 in Benghazi:
To say Panetta is inexperienced in intelligence would be an understatement. He is profoundly inexperienced, even more so than other previous CIA chiefs who came from a basically non-intelligence background. His main qualification appears to be that he was President Clinton’s chief of staff, and yet nevertheless supported Obama in his campaign against Hillary.
The real problem that seems to have led to the appointment of such a complete outsider was that everyone with any sort of background in intelligence was considered tainted by ties to the supposedly nefarious Bush-era CIA, which approved controversial techniques such as waterboarding.
So Obama decided to throw out the baby (intelligence) with the bathwater (coercive interrogation techniques). To find a CIA head with the properly squeaky clean hands, Obama had to find one with no hands-on experience at all. Panetta fit the bill, since he not only had the requisite lack of background, but he had also been outspoken in his condemnation of all CIA practices that could conjure up any suggestion that they might arguably represent torture. Therefore he was doubleplusgood.
Panetta is worse than incompetent; that’s why Obama picked him, and named him to Defense later (the latter appointment was to oversee budget cuts). It has been a pattern for the president to tend to nominate people who lack actual expertise and who are political operatives loyal to Obama (Petraeus, head of the CIA since 2011, is an exception). That way they would not be as likely to challenge him, since Obama is smarter than anyone else could possibly be, so he really only needs people who don’t get in the way of his superb decisions.
So then comes 9/11/2012, and although we don’t know exactly who made what decision and why, we know that both Obama and Panetta would (or should) have been deeply involved in the process. So is it any wonder the ambassador and his defenders were left hanging? And that the decisions made around the incident, both at that time and subsequently, seem to have been almost entirely politically motivated?
And then there’s Obama’s National Security Adviser Thomas Donilon, a completely political animal with virtually no experience in foreign policy, although he was a successful lobbyist for Fannie Mae. A distubing portrait of the Obama administration’s foreign policy and military decisions, and the basic players, was painted in Bob Woodward’s 2010 book Obama’s Wars, which describes a president obsessed with exit strategy rather than victory in Afghanistan, and contemptuous of his generals:
According to Woodward’s meeting-by-meeting, memo-by-memo account of the 2009 Afghan strategy review, the president avoided talk of victory as he described his objectives…”Everything we’re doing has to be focused on how we’re going to get to the point where we can reduce our footprint. It’s in our national security interest. There cannot be any wiggle room.”..
Woodward’s book portrays Obama and the White House as barraged by warnings about the threat of terrorist attacks on U.S. soil and confronted with the difficulty in preventing them. During an interview with Woodward in July, the president said, “We can absorb a terrorist attack. We’ll do everything we can to prevent it, but even a 9/11, even the biggest attack ever . . . we absorbed it and we are stronger.”…
Tensions often turned personal. National security adviser James L. Jones privately referred to Obama’s political aides as “the water bugs,” the “Politburo,” the “Mafia,” or the “campaign set.” Petraeus, who felt shut out by the new administration, told an aide that he considered the president’s senior adviser David Axelrod to be “a complete spin doctor.”
It’s really all of a piece with the picture in Benghazi, isn’t it? Politics before security seems to be the motto.
It’s hard to believe that Obama might be elected to another term as president despite all of this. And yet that is exactly the possibility we face.
In closing, I bring you the following:
Puzzling polls
Two pundits have noted a puzzling discrepancy between the national polls and those in the battleground states.
First, Jay Cost:
On the one hand, Mitt Romney has built a narrow but durable lead in the national polls, averaging around a 1 percent advantage over the last three weeks. This has cheered the hearts of conservatives everywhere.
Yet, liberals retort, Obama has a lead in enough swing states to add up to 270 electoral votes, and that is really what matters.
What to make of this?
For starters, they cannot both be right. If Mitt Romney wins the popular vote by 1 percent or more on Election Day, the odds that he will lose the Electoral College are quite small.
Next, Sean Trende:
Put simply, the national surveys point to a Romney win, while the state polls collectively point to an Obama win. Both can’t be correct.
Both men then go on to number-crunch in order to underline why either the national polls or the state polls are almost certainly wrong. And they both conclude they haven’t a clue which it is. No wonder so many people on both sides are tearing out their hair!
Why are the polls so strange this year? I think it’s because we’re in the midst of a of polling transition. For years the response rate—the number of people who answer polls—has been shrinking, and it may have reached a point where it’s mattering more and more in creating poll variation of some sort. If only 9% of respondents cooperate, versus over 25% just a decade ago, we should become less and less sanguine about whether the respondents can be said to be a random sample.
It is often said that if a sample is large enough, randomness matters less and less. But that’s only true if the sample is truly jumungous, which does not occur with polls. Otherwise, even a very large sample is garbage in/garbage out if it isn’t representative of the group’s composition.
That’s why I think there’s so much weirdness going on with the polls this year. I would love to know if state polls generally have a different methodology than national ones, because such differences could go a long way to explaining the disparities between the two. For example, does one type of poll generally include cell phone users while the other type does not? Does one type of poll use recorded questions and the other type live questioners? Does one type of poll occur at a different time of day than the other type? I don’t even know what some other differences might be, but my guess is that they exist, and they could matter.
I know I get nervous when, in order to think my guy is winning, I have to invalidate the results of too many polls. “That one doesn’t count because the Democratic sample is too large.” That one doesn’t count because the poll is too small.” “That one doesn’t count because the pollster is biased.” And on and on and on. It’s been my experience that the losing side is the one that has to make more of these excuses prior to the election.
This year, though, both sides are making a lot of excuses—just about different things. That’s why my teeth are slowly grinding down.
The Benghazi ooze
Is it happening, slowly but surely? And will it be fast enough to affect the election on Tuesday?
There are a couple of signs that the Benghazi furor may have reached enough critical mass to actually enter mainstream consciousness. The first is that Jay Leno made a joke about it. The second is that the WaPo published a David Ignatius column dealing with it.
Pretty small potatoes compared to what ought to be happening. But it’s an indication that the dam might not be holding, even if only a trickle of water is coming through right now. And although Ignatius’ column does refer to the Fox reporting on the subject, he spends quite a bit of time making excuses for the administration and leaving out important facts that would tend to implicate Obama and company. Nevertheless, Ignatius is at least asking some hard questions, too, and refusing to ignore the story entirely.
It’s a sad thing when weak tea such as Ignatius’ column becomes praiseworthy, but that’s the way it is with the MSM these days—the propaganda wing of the Obama campaign. As big as the Benghazi story is (or should be), at the moment the story of the press coverage (or lack thereof) of it is bigger.
Tired?
She is, too (hat tip: BenK at Ace’s). And who could blame her?:
How to peel eggs
I love deviled eggs. They’re easy to make except for one thing: you have to peel them successfully for them to look right. If that pesky little membrane adheres to the white, you’ll get a pock-marked egg that is completely unpresentable.
I’ve read all the instructions about how to insure that the membrane will separate nicely; for example they can’t be super-fresh, but that’s not ordinarily a problem since I buy them at the supermarket and not the farm, and don’t cook them right away.
But every now and then I get a batch that just will not cooperate no matter what. This has always puzzled me until I read this, which explains that a certain percentage of eggs are processed in a manner that means their membranes will never be free.
By the way, when I make deviled eggs I don’t use one of those fancy implements to make the yolks all swirly:
No, the old-fashioned stuff-with-a-spoon method is good enough for me:
So, why was I making deviled eggs the other day? I figured it was good power-outage food—an already-cooked protein source that doesn’t have to be heated up. And who needs an excuse, anyway?
The watershed election
I think Stanley Kurtz is spot-on:
…Obama and his advisors never abandoned their quest to shape a permanent leftist majority, a coalition that would forever put an end to Clintonian triangulation and usher in unfettered leftist Obamaism instead. Obama’s frantic efforts to gin up the women’s vote and the youth vote aren’t only desperate attempts to secure his base. They flow from a deliberate decision not to fight for the center, but to build an independent majority on what is supposedly the “demographically ascendent” left.
Kurtz goes on to analyze Obama’s campaign decisions, some of which have seemed so dumb and could be summed up as “going small.” Dumb like a fox. As I’ve indicated before, Obama is smart (or, if you prefer, clever) about elections. The fact that he may lose this one doesn’t mean he hasn’t played it about as well as it could have been played with the material at hand, and the proof of this is that the election is still very close and he might pull it out after all.
So many of us (including me) have been asking: why does Obama still have so much support? Kurtz’s article spells it out: Obama has carefully appealed to a coalition of special interest groups who, together, might even form the majority. If so, they would liberate the left from ever having to cater to anyone in a flyover state of mind again.
If that works out, Obama could drop the pretense of moderation. I’ve long felt that is what would happen in an Obama second term. It is one of the many reasons this election is of such vital importance.
But my nervousness come next Tuesday will not be just about the prospect of four more years of Obama. Even if Romney wins, if his margin of victory is of anything less than landslide proportions I will be only somewhat placated; I think we will only have bought a bit of time. This is because of the Gramscian march through our institutions—especially education—the takeover that already occurred while most of us were looking the other way.
Obama is merely the person who benefited from that march, the One who came to the fore because of the long and careful preparation. If the ground had not been properly laid, someone so far to the left (with his voting record, community organizing/Alinsky background, Ayers and Wright connections, and plans to “spread the wealth” and “bankrupt” coal plants) could never have been elected in the first place. Furthermore, someone who had presided over such troubled years as the last four—featuring a stagnant economy, Obamacare and the way it was passed, Benghazi, Honduras (remember that?), and the smallness, nastiness, and class warfare of his campaign—would never have come so close to re-election without an MSM hopelessly compromised and in the tank, a school system dedicated to leftist indoctrination, and arts so degraded and propagandist.
We will have our work cut out for us no matter what.