Looking for Proof of Intelligent Life in the Political World....

Sometimes political events bring to mind the classic Ronald Reagan SNL sketch, in which whenever cameras were rolling or members of the public were around he would play the part of an affable grandfather, but the moment they were gone he turned into an energetic, detail-driven dynamo. There was probably some truth to it, that we never got to see the "real" Ronald Reagan who was concealed by a carefully contrived cowboy persona. Whatever his actual behind-the-scenes persona, Reagan was comfortable with his public image.

A few decades later, G.W. Bush offered the public a similarly contrived public persona, that of a Texas rancher who liked to drive around in a pickup truck and clear brush in his spare time. No pictures of G.W. on horseback - to put it mildly, he was not that much of a rancher. And never mind that the ranch was purchased as a campaign prop and sold pretty much the minute G.W. retired from the White House. But the public image worked... to a degree.

Bush apparently chafed at the public's perception that he was not very bright. So, during his presidency he arranged for some meetings with authors and other prominent individuals in which he would attempt to wow them with his deep understanding of their work, before ushering them out to share the news of how brilliant he was. The principal tool appears to have been flattery - convince the participant in the meeting that the President had read their work, thought about it, compared it to other ideas, and found it compelling. Flattery will get you... a lot of places.

I suspect that the campaign didn't succeed - at least, not to the degree the White House had hoped. That is, although I do recall hearing a number of people, some of whom were unquestionably intelligent, claim that the President was very impressive in their meetings, the formula was pretty obvious. But more to the point, it raised the question of why a man who is so impressive in a controlled meeting behind closed doors demonstrated none of the same brilliance and insight in any other context.

All presidents have aspects of their personality that they would prefer to hide from the public, and often they are quite successful in managing their public images. No matter how it is created, once a public persona is firmly established it can be difficult to overcome. John McCain seemed like something of a maverick until he fully embraced G.W., and some who scrutinize his record question the extent to which the label ever truly fit, but the image was strong enough to carry him through his presidential campaign. At the time, the public would have been shocked by some of the behavior attributed to Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, and while we now view Watergate as consistent with Nixon's personality, the Nixon you hear on tape is not the Nixon people thought they elected.

Negative images can stick, as well, which is no small part of the reason why political campaigns work so hard to tar opponents before they're known to the public. "Dukakis in a tank". Gerald Ford was probably less clumsy than the average president, but a few prominent incidents led to him being regarded as somewhat accident prone. Al Gore was not the dissembler that his detractors claim, but any number of myths persist about supposed false claims or exaggerations that made for good headlines but turned out to be misrepresentations of what Gore had actually said.

In G.W.'s case, it's difficult to believe that we were simply talking about stage management. That is, once his team made the decision to play up his intellect, it should have been possible to modify his public persona to better display his intellect. Once the decision was made to push his intellect, it should have been possible to demonstrate publicly what was reportedly being demonstrated in private. The fact that G.W.'s P.R. team failed in that effort suggests that the public persona was more genuine than what was going on in controlled, private meetings.

Here's the thing: Yes, the President and his team have enormous power to craft a public image and push that image forward. If it resonates with the public, it can be difficult to overcome, even with facts. By virtue of his intellectual incuriosity and desired "blue collar, man of the people", Bush was able to convince people that he was less intelligent than he actually was. But when he became uncomfortable with that persona, the public simply knew too much about him for him to take it to the other extreme. Had he settled for the middle, where by all appearances the truth most likely would have been found, he might have achieved at least that much.

In contrast with G.W. or Reagan, some candidates want to be seen as intelligent, even brilliant, and work to advance that perception. Sometimes they don't have to work very hard at it - our nation loves dynasties, business and political, and it also associates wealth with intelligence. So if you're rich and have a strong family name, you are 90% of the way to selling yourself as brilliant.

Even if you turn out to be Donald Trump, crass, boorish, prone to making absurd claims and statements, you are likely to maintain your reputation as a business genius simply by virtue of your claimed wealth, no matter how many failed ventures, bankruptcies and dubious licensing schemes you leave in your wake. Frankly, you can see why somebody like Trump would seethe at the "you didn't build that" misquote, because at this point there's little left to the myth behind his fortune - he looks like a narcissist of middling intelligence who learned the building trade (and got some very important connections) through his father, then got very lucky gambling with his inherited fortune.

But the fact is, when somebody is brilliant you can usually find evidence of that. Not in nebulous, Chauncey Gardener-type statements that require you to either defer to the speaker's brilliance or invite you to read into the statement the "brilliant" insight you are hoping to hear (yes, I'm talking about Alan Greenspan). But in documented, public actions, statements and writings that demonstrate the claimed level of intellect. When somebody tells you, in essence, "Trust me, when he's alone in private he says smart things," tell them, "I'll believe you when I hear the tape."

"Fed Up"

Idiots in an echo chamber.

Thomas Friedman's Bipartisan Utopia - Where Everybody Agrees With Him

It seems fair to wonder, sometimes, if Thomas Friedman reads anything but his own columns. He seems oblivious to any opinion other than his own, and recycles his subject matter as often as Richard Cohen. Today's offering is a lazy column in which Friedman once again proposes that the solution to all of the nation's significant problems lies in a "grand bargain", involving the full cooperation of both political parties, that focuses on balancing the budget. He advances the idea by imagining John Boehner and President Obama making statements about how they have made mistakes in the name of their respective ideologies but are going to set aside their differences and find a way to both balance the budget and raise money to invest in the future. Friedman argues,

What’s sad is how much this is a fantasy and how easily — with just a little political will — it could be a reality.

Which, as usual, means that Friedman finds it to be a tragedy that the nation doesn't set aside its differences, appoint him "Philosopher King", and implement his personal agenda for what's best for the country? Jobs? Economic security for individuals and families? Not quite. King Friedman wants to serve you up a giant helping of entitlement cuts:

Let me say publicly what I committed to you privately: I have asked Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson to revive their deficit commission and to use their recommendations for how to cut spending and raise revenues as the starting point for our negotiations. But it will now be called ‘The National Commission for American Renewal.’ Because in addition to the original Bowles-Simpson members, it will include Senator McConnell, Speaker Boehner, Senator Reid and Congresswoman Pelosi, and its goal will indeed be a comprehensive plan for American renewal.

Those of you who are familiar with Bowles-Simpson may remember that, contrary to Friedman's curious assertion that the President abandoned its recommendations due to "tactical political considerations", the commission failed to achieve consensus. Those of you who are also familiar with Thomas Friedman will be able to read between the lines of his column to understand that, although Friedman doesn't even mention Social Security and Medicare, its cuts to those programs that excite him. Yes, in Friedman's enlightened, bipartisan future, the guy who portrays Social Security as being "like a milk cow with 310 million tits" will head up the reform commission.

So we'll revive the commission that failed to endorse, under its rules, its own blueprint for reform. But we'll make it work better by adding Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid to the panel, and charging them with both balancing the budget "" while simultaneously finding hundreds of billions of dollars to spend, each year, on "infrastructure, education and scientific research". Because Friedman, putting his own fantasies into President Obama's mouth, is "confident that real tax and entitlement reform will unleash billions of dollars in investments". Best of all, by making Obama his sock puppet Friedman gets to avoid taking any ownership of that assertion - he doesn't have to share with us the location of the magic money tree, with hundreds of billions of dollars ripe for the plucking even in a seriously troubled economy.

Friedman represents the worst of the beltway's monomania about "bipartisan solutions." Friedman knows that the closest thing we've had to a "grand bargain" was a proposal made by the President during the debt ceiling debacle - a proposal that was not only rejected out-of-hand by the Republicans, but which they have used to demagogue against the President for suggesting that such a deal include cuts to Medicare and Social Security. The President suggested a deal that largely echoed Friedman's beloved Simpson-Bowles report, and the Republicans said "no". Even David Brooks was able to look at that and say, in essence, "My party is nuts". To Friedman, though, there's always blame to spread around - if the Republicans say no it can only mean that the Democrats were somehow too partisan and weren't trying hard enough. (Under the rules of this game, the same criticism applies to both parties: If Democrats say no it can also only mean that the Democrats are somehow being too partisan and aren't trying hard enough.)

What about boosting the economy? Job creation? Is it sensible to follow Friedman's approach of slashing entitlements and government spending in a jobless recovery - even if we pretend that the cuts can be "integrated and timed to minimize pain and maximize job creation" or that money will be found to spend on research and infrastructure? Is it credible that the magic money tree, wherever it is hidden, will produce the enormous crop of money Friedman predicts? Wouldn't it be better, from any rational, economic standpoint, to say, "We're right to worry about the deficit and debt, and we're going to work toward a grand solution that will take us there over the longer term, but right now we're going to stop the demagoguery and chest-thumping over budget deficits and focus on getting the economy up and running and spurring job growth, even if that means a couple more years of big deficits leading into our balancing of the budget in a more robust economy. Keep in mind, interest rates are so low right now we would pay virtually no interest on the money we borrow - this is the time to borrow and invest in our futures."

When Friedman proposes a "long-term budget deal", does he truly believe that it is possible to create and pass such a deal? By what mechanism does he propose that this Congress will tie the hands of future Congresses, who may have different taxing and spending preferences, policies and priorities? If his answer is, "Once the seed of bipartisanship is sown by my 'National Commission for American Renewal', it will grow and flourish right alongside the magic money tree, and we'll all live happily ever after," he will be making as much economic sense and he usually does - but I'm not buying it.

I favor balanced budgets and reducing the nation's debt. I thought Greenspan was full of [partisan nonsense] when he suggested that it would have been a horrible thing to reduce the deficit in lieu of offering massive tax cuts to the rich. I thought Cheney was full of [partisan nonsense] when he took the position that deficits don't matter. I thought G.W. was full of [partisan nonsense] when he made his "trifecta" joke about his out-of-control spending habits. But when I say I favor balanced budgets and reducing the debt I don't mean "Let's slash spending when times are bad" - I mean, "Let's act responsibly when times are good, so that we can afford to spend what we need to spend in the face of a crisis or emergency." Friedman finds it easy to complain that we're not slashing entitlements in the midst of a jobless recovery, but he does not appear to have any appreciation of how tax cuts and war spending factor in, and it does not appear to have occurred to him that the party he fantasizes can be a responsible and reasonable participant in working out his desired "grand bargain" has not been fiscally responsible in word or action for well over a decade. (To say "The Democrats have acted more responsibly" is, for the most part, to damn them with faint praise - but right now they're the the closest thing we have to grown-ups in Washington.)

The only place we're going to resolve the nation's problems through principled bipartisanship is in Friedman's pipe dreams. But if bipartisanship means foisting Friedman's personal beliefs on the nation, unless the rest of us also get a Freidman-style mansion, luxury hybrid SUV and Rolex, maybe partisanship isn't so bad after all.