A "Bush v. Gore" What If....

Courtesy of Sandra Day O'Connor, Scott Lemiuex shares his memories of a horrible series of Supreme Court decisions.

And, again, it’s not just that justices notably unsympathetic to broad equal protection claims claimed to accept an innovative equal protection argument. Where Bush v. Gore immediately falls apart and becomes a historic disgrace is that the completely lawless remedy left an election count with all of the alleged equal protection defects of the court-ordered recount (and the “mess up” job of the Florida authorities) in place.

Here's a thought experiment: What if, rather than tampering in a poorly conducted state election the Supreme Court had let the result stand. Even in the worst of circumstances the Constitution provides a remedy, specifically that the House of Representatives would elect the President.

The Electors shall meet in their respective States, and vote by Ballot for two Persons, of whom one at least shall not be an Inhabitant of the same State with themselves. And they shall make a List of all the Persons voted for, and of the Number of Votes for each; which List they shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the Seat of the Government of the United States, directed to the President of the Senate. The President of the Senate shall, in the Presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the Certificates, and the Votes shall then be counted. The Person having the greatest Number of Votes shall be the President, if such Number be a Majority of the whole Number of Electors appointed; and if there be more than one who have such Majority, and have an equal Number of Votes, then the House of Representatives shall immediately chuse by Ballot one of them for President; and if no Person have a Majority, then from the five highest on the List the said House shall in like Manner chuse the President. But in chusing the President, the Votes shall be taken by States, the Representation from each State having one Vote; A quorum for this purpose shall consist of a Member or Members from two thirds of the States, and a Majority of all the States shall be necessary to a Choice. In every Case, after the Choice of the President, the Person having the greatest Number of Votes of the Electors shall be the Vice President. But if there should remain two or more who have equal Votes, the Senate shall chuse from them by Ballot the Vice President.

Had the election come down to that, we might as a nation have taken a hard look at how elections are conducted, inconsistent approaches to taking and tallying votes, and similar flaws and set about fixing them. Instead the Supreme Court allowed the nation to bypass that type of difficult work, and subsequent concerns about election technology, fairness and potential for actual fraud have largely been either ignored or have gained attention based not on the genuine flaws reveled by Florida, but based upon demagoguery about largely imaginary allegations of voter fraud. Rather than having remedies directed at improving elections, legislatures have largely focused on making it difficult for certain classes of voter to reach the polls and vote.

Maybe it wouldn't have made a difference. But....

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."

Fools, Frauds and Politicians

Paul Krugman summarizes his "Fools and Frauds" theory of politicians, and its effect on the present Republican primaries:

I view the primary race through the lens of the FOF theory — that’s for “fools and frauds”. It goes as follows: to be a good Republican right now, you have to affirm your belief in things that any halfway intelligent politician can see are plainly false. This leaves room for only two kinds of candidates: those who just aren’t smart and/or rational enough to understand the problem, and those who are completely cynical, willing to say anything to get ahead.

FOF is a close cousin to the "stupid or lying" debate that has at times come up in comments to this blog - when politicians say things that are patently untrue is it because they're stupid (fools) or because they're frauds (lying). The fraud assumes either that you're uninformed, and not likely to become informed, or that you're too stupid to see the facts that are right in front of your face.

But here's the thing: even if it is a fine illustration of the phenomenon at work, FOF is not unique to the present primary campaign. In fairness, if that's the word, every politician is a little bit of a fool (asked to comment on issues that he doesn't fully understand, and bluffing his way through at risk of being accused of making a "gaffe") and a little bit of a fraud (making representations or campaign promises that he knows won't bear fruit, or that he knows are at best partial truths, because part of the problem is that the public often doesn't want the whole truth). To some degree, FoF stands as an illustration of the maxim that people get the government that they deserve.

One thing is certain, though, as long as fact checkers approach the issue of facts with fear of being accused of partisanship if they don't balance out their truth-telling between the sides, as long as the news media chooses not to "take sides" even when the truth is objectively determinable, and as long as the primary focus of "news analysis" is either partisan commentary or a battle between pundits who are often, themselves, fools and frauds, people will continue to have difficulty getting accurate information or separating the truth from fraud and fiction. And that's before we get into the foibles of the human mind, and how we tend to dismiss or diminish facts that get in the way of our beliefs, even when our beliefs are wrong or irrational.

I've recently commented on the bizarre impact that FOF is having on the Republican primary process, but I don't think it's so much the Republican candidates that are the problem. It's that they are dealing with a base of voters that has been trained and empowered to demand that candidates pass certain litmus tests, and that modern campaigns are driven by polls. The Democrats benefit, if you can call it that, from having a less cohesive base and thus far fewer "make or break" litmus tests, but the downside is that, at least historically, it's harder to unite the base behind a candidate.

It may be that polls are now so central to campaigns that we'll increasingly see candidates distinguishing themselves from each other in the manner of the present Republican campaign (or in the manner that Gore failed to distinguish himself from Bush during his campaign, lending credence to the myth that there was no significant difference between them).

That opponent is plain, ordinary supermarket vanilla. The candidate over there may taste like vanilla but he's vanillin, only pretending to be vanilla. The candidate in that other corner is Mexican vanilla. You may thing he tastes better than the supermarket brand, but don't be fooled. Oh, and my other rival? Vanilla bean paste - he's a little bit thick, if you know what I mean.

Me? I'm Tahitian vanilla. Strong, flavorful, aromatic (in a good way), and just what we need to bake a perfect Republic.

To the degree that this election is different from those that came before it, it's only a matter of degree.

The Limits of Yelling "Hypocrite!"

One of the easiest accusations to throw at a political figure is that of hypocrisy, because... they so often are hypocritical. But our acceptance of hypocrisy in the context of politics also makes it easy to make unfair accusations of hypocrisy, for example, "Back in the 80's the liberals in Congress did this, now they say they oppose the same thing." Never mind that the term "liberal" is subjective, we're talking about two completely different groups of people, and even if the issue truly is the same it's possible for somebody over the space of thirty years to find cause to change his mind. Sometimes the accusations are absurd, such as "Ayn Rand collected Social Security even though she opposed it," or "President Obama wants to raise taxes on the rich even though he isn't voluntarily paying taxes beyond the present tax rate." Its not hypocrisy to advance change while following the present laws, or accepting the quid pro quo benefit of paying your Social Security taxes even if you believe its implementation was a mistake.

One of the forms of hypocrisy that a politician's political opponents tend to see as a particular point of vulnerability, or find particularly annoying, is when a candidate lives his life in a manner that seems partially, largely, or completely at odds with the political positions he holds (or, in some cases, pretends to hold). So when Newt Gingrich argues that gay marriage will harm the traditional institution of marriage, it's pointed out that he has a long personal history of infidelity and is presently in his third marriage. And when Al Gore argues that strong action is needed to limit the effects of climate change, it's pointed out that he lives an incredibly wasteful lifestyle.

These accusations are not entirely unfair. Gingrich has no explanation for how gay marriage will supposedly undermine traditional marriage, and it's reasonable to point out that he has no personal problem with weakening the institution of marriage or ignoring his vows to his spouse, and yet the institution of marriage survives. The wasteful, self-indulgent lifestyles of people like Thomas Friedman and Al Gore arguably represent the tragedy of the commons - it's true that individual action, even at the scale of an individual whose carbon footprint approaches that of a typical neighborhood or small town, is not going to have any measurable impact on climate change. But that doesn't make it any more pleasant to hear such a person lecture you, Friedman-style, that if only gas were more expensive and ordinary people (like you) could not afford to drive as much, we would all be better off. It may be true, but why is it that the proposed changes seem to affect only the lifestyles of others? It's also reasonable to point out that you can build yourself a lavish mansion and live in the highest of styles while taking steps to minimize your carbon footprint, perhaps you should do so before lecturing others about waste.

Walter Russell Mead has attempted to explain the differences between acceptable hypocrisy and unacceptable hypocrisy. First he distinguishes character flaws from hypocrisy:

Not all character flaws are inconsistent with positions of great dignity. General Grant’s fondness for whiskey did not make him unfit for command. Other statesmen have combined great public achievement with failure in their personal lives. Franklin Roosevelt was neither a good father nor a good husband; Edward VII was a better monarch than man.

Given that everybody has character flaws, it should go without saying that it's possible to be a great leader in one field while being deeply flawed in another. Shifting back to the topic of actual hypocrisy, Mead tells us,

A television preacher ... cannot indulge in drug fueled trysts with male prostitutes while preaching conservative Christian doctrine. The head of Mothers Against Drunk Driving cannot be convicted of driving while under the influence. The head of the IRS cannot be a tax cheat. The most visible leader of the world’s green movement cannot live a life of conspicuous consumption, spewing far more carbon into the atmosphere than almost all of those he castigates for their wasteful ways. Mr. Top Green can’t also be a carbon pig.

I should first point out, "Yes, they can." The television minister will do just fine until his actions become public. The head of MADD could come back with some appropriate mea culpas and perhaps even improve the message of her organization. (I know Mead has a specific case in mind, but he's arguing a general rule - one anecdote does not prove a rule.) And yes, though it's annoying, it is very possible for somebody to be the biggest "carbon pig" in the world and still argue forcefully and accurately about the need for collective action on climate change.

Mead carries on about how you can have any range of character flaws as an environmental activist (which, again, have nothing to do with hypocrisy), but that you can't have big houses, a personal jet, or even invest in firms that could turn a profit if their green energy technologies are adopted on a wide scale. Perhaps Mead is correct to a point, because obviously you will annoy somme listeners - even sympathetic listeners - by living a lifestyle that's so at odds with your message. And obviously people like Mead will come out of the woodwork with a tu quoque argument. And Mead's demands on Gore are plainly absurd:

Surely, skeptics reason, if the peril were as great as he says and he cares about it as much as he claims, Gore’s sense of civic duty would call him to set an example of conspicuous non-consumption. This general sleeps in a mansion, and lectures the soldiers because they want tents.

Bad example. Exactly when in history was it that generals didn't sleep in mansions while lecturing their troops to make do with far less? I don't recall G.W. pitching a pup tent in the Rose Garden, or even so much as ordering that the White House air conditioning be set to a higher temperature, when he ordered the invasion of Iraq or Afghanistan. A more apt expression might be that it's not possible to be rich and advocate for the poor - but that serves only to highlight how ridiculous Mead's argument is. If you're wealthy, have access to the media and have political influence, you can advocate very effectively for change. You won't have a bigger impact on the public debate by giving away your wealth and living in a homeless shelter.

Although the tu quoque argument is inherently about hypocrisy, Mead states that he doesn't believe Gore is a hypocrite:

I am not one of those who thinks him a hypocrite; I think rather that he shares an illusion common amongst the narcissistic glitterati of our time: that politically fashionable virtue cancels private vice. The drug addled Hollywood celeb whose personal life is a long record of broken promises and failed relationships and whose serial bouts with drug and alcohol abuse and revolving door rehab adventures are notorious can redeem all by “standing up” for some exotic, stylish cause. These moral poseurs and dilettantes of virtue are modern versions of those guilt-plagued medieval nobles who built churches and monasteries to ‘atone’ for their careers of bloodshed, oppression and scandal.

Mr. Gore is sincere, as the fur-fighting actresses are sincere, as so many ’causey’ plutocrats and moguls are sincere. It is perhaps also true that the fundraisers who absolve them of their guilt in exchange for the donations and the publicity are at least as sincere as the indulgence sellers in Martin Luther’s Germany.

I don’t judge, dear reader, and neither should you.

He doesn't judge, "dear reader" but my goodness does he patronize.

The average citizen is all too likely to conclude that if Mr. Gore can keep his lifestyle, the average American family can keep its SUV and incandescent bulbs. If Gore can take a charter flight, I don’t have to take the bus. If Gore can have many mansions, I can use the old fashioned kind of shower heads that actually clean and toilets that actually flush. Al Gore looks to the average American the way American greens look to poor people in the third world: hypocritically demanding that others accept permanently lower standards of living than those the activists propose for themselves.

In Mead's eyes the average citizen (that's you), it appears, is quite stupid. I suspect that many average people would find it annoying to be lectured by Gore that they should made lifestyle changes, when Gore himself has done so little to minimize his own sizable carbon footprint. But contrary to what Mead implies I also suspect that, if asked, the average voter would recognize the difference between an individual and a collective effect, and that it is physically impossible for the world to support close to seven billion people if the average person lived like Gore.

Is Mead attempting to argue to the contrary? That we can all live like Gore? That, on the whole, people in the developing world do not have to accept lower standards of living than are enjoyed in the developed world? (Is that even Gore's message - or is it more that if corrective action is not taken the situation in much of the developing world will grow worse?) If Mead accepts that the world's resources are limited and that it's impossible to lift the average lifestyle of every inhabitant of this planet to that of the American middle class, and if he truly believes that people in the developing world need somebody to tell them that fact, who is it that he believes would be an appropriate spokesperson? Bill Gates?

Does Mead imagine that it would be easier to hear the message from a wealthy, privileged westerner who makes no argument that he, or anybody he knows, should live a less profligate and wasteful lifestyle? Also, why does it matter how the average person in the developing world perceives Al Gore? Most don't even have the capacity to "unfriend" him on Facebook, let alone influence the policy of their governments. That may not be fair, but it's reality. (If it makes you feel better, even with our entrenched democracy and comparative wealth, the average American voter has only slightly more influence on government and policy.)

The short version of Mead's argument is that Al Gore shouldn't be taken seriously on environmental issues because he lives a lifestyle that is wasteful, and is too narcissistic to even see the conflict between what he says and what he does. What's missing? Any substantive argument. Any indication that Al Gore is wrong. That says to me that the problem is with Mead - as I stated up front, it's easy to accuse politicians of hypocrisy. But what matters is whether they're right or wrong. If Mead believes that Gore is wrong, he should make his case. If not, he should stop rambling about why Gore should not be taken seriously and start explaining why any inconsistency between Gore's lifestyle and his environmental advocacy is irrelevant - a distraction from the truth.

The Price of the Iraq War

I don't know whether to praise Anne Applebaum for acknowledging the huge price that the U.S. has paid (and continues to pay) for the Iraq War, or chide her for continuing to insist that it could turn out to be sunshine and lollipops. I do think it's fair to observe that nowhere among the prices she has listed will you actually find a dollar figure. The war has drained trillions from the treasury, and the bills keep coming. To quickly hit Applebaum's points, she believes that among the casualties of the war are,

1. America's reputation for effectiveness;
2. America's ability to organize a coalition;
3. America's ability to influence the Middle East;
4. America's ability to think like a global power; and
5. America's ability to care for its wounded veterans.

As with the dollar cost of the war, the impact of the war on Iraqis goes unmentioned.

I find many of Applebaum's points to be unpersuasive. In terms of America's reputation for military effectiveness, the initial war was a success. The mistake was embracing the notion that it would be quick and easy (not to mention free) to occupy Iraq and reinvent it as a right-wing utopia and corporate grab-bag. Tyrants may not be trembling that the U.S. will attempt such a project in their nations after they are deposed, but they know that we can depose them.

In terms of the impact on coalition-building, the war can't be said to have had any appreciable effect. The war was unpopular with most of our allies, and coalition-building was difficult even before the war began. To the extent that the war "", that's his own fault, he managed to serve as Prime Minister for another four years (considerably beyond the term he negotiated with Gordon Brown when he became party leader), and if he's crying on the way to the bank his tears are so small as to be invisible to the naked eye.

In terms of Georgia, if the lesson to a nominal coalition member (and by that I mean no offense to Georgia, a nation that lacked the capacity to contribute more substantially to the war effort) is that their participation won't inspire the U.S. to militarily back them if they provoke a war with Russia, I would have to call that a good thing. Truly, if building a coalition is nothing more than promising a return greater than the investment - in Applebaum's words, "economic or diplomatic benefits" and "special American favors" in exchange for a small commitment of troops - we are going about it the wrong way. When Applebaum complains, "'Iraq' is part of the reason there is so little enthusiasm for Afghanistan", she displays amnesia - the Afghanistan war started first. To the extent that the effort to maintain a coalition in Afghanistan has suffered due to Iraq, it is much more because of the Bush Administration's change of priorities and diversion of resources from the Afghan war.

As for "why it is so difficult to put organized pressure on Iran", sure, having launched a war in Iraq on the basis of its possession of WMD's and coming up empty, it's harder to convince other nations to follow us into a potential war with Iran over WMD's we concede that it does not possess. At best that has to do with having demonstrated the limits of our nation's intelligence on the state of other countries' weapons programs, and at worst it's because the exaggeration of the threat of Iraq has damaged our credibility - but either way, the outcome was avoidable. If Applebaum is speaking not just of an initial war but of a prolonged occupation, even as the effort to democratize Iraq continues to wobble, few are eager at repeating the experiment in a nation with about twice the population and four times the land mass.

In terms of influencing the Middle East, the Bush Administration made no serious effort to end the Israel-Palestine conflict. It instead tightened the U.S. embrace of Israel. I'm not sure if Applebaum believes that to be good or bad, but it was foreseeable. She claims that the war increased the price of oil, and snipes at war opponents, "this was supposed to be a 'war for oil,' remember", but she misses the boat there as well. Even if we assume that she has never heard of the Carter Doctrine, and even if we view the war proponents who believed that the war would significantly reduce the price of oil and undermine the finances of the Arab oil states, she surely can't have missed that the war in Iraq did remove a potential threat to the world's oil supply. (Memories of the first Iraq war.) It would be naive to have imagined that launching a war in Iraq would flood the world with cheap oil, but it's no less naive to pretend that oil played no role in the decision to invade and occupy Iraq.

Applebaum refuses to reconsider her support of the war and, although she concedes a high price with no basis to yet declare victory, she offers a defense of her stance by way of anecdote,

Before speaking on Tuesday, Obama might ponder the words of former Chinese leader Zhou Enlai - who, when asked to assess the long-term impact of the French Revolution, allegedly told Richard Nixon that "it's too soon to tell."

If we were to assume that the anecdote occurred, our interpretation of the comment perhaps tells us more about us than about the speaker. Had, for example, G.W. made that comment during a debate, it would have been framed as a gaffe, a mistake, a reflection of ignorance. Had Al Gore done the same, it would have been equivocation, pointy-headedness, waffling. But when framed through the idea of a Chinese leader who is presumed to take an exceptionally long view of history, the statement is viewed as deep and meaningful.

Odds are if it actually occurred it was because of a translation error, Zhou Enlai's misunderstanding the question, or his providing a murky answer because he didn't know enough French history to know that the revolution had occurred almost two centuries before. But under any interpretation, it won't take two centuries for us to learn the impact of the Iraq war or, as Applebaum's own column reflects, its impact on the United States.

Don't Say Anything Bad About the Magic Man!

Throughout recorded history there have been people who, whether self-declared or declared by others, are deemed indispensable - they're magic men, without whom a business, a nation, perhaps the world is doomed. Occasionally there's a kernel of truth to the claim, and a business can falter when a skilled leader quits or dies. But even then in most cases the business carries on and, when it doesn't, the fault is usually because the "magic man" neglects to engage in succession planning. Beyond that, death remains a constant. "Magic," indispensable men have always died, and yet the Earth continues to spin on its axis.

It's not particularly surprising that somebody like David Brooks romanticizes our nation's political leaders as various incarnations of magic men, and even less so that he does the same for military leaders. But I still found his argument in defense of media self-censorship to be surprising. Not that Brooks would believe in or endorse self-censorship in the name of protecting the rich and powerful, but that he would so readily admit that to be his estimation of what constitutes good, responsible journalism.

The reticent ethos [in which journalists didn't report facts harmful to the rich and powerful] had its flaws. But the exposure ethos, with its relentless emphasis on destroying privacy and exposing impurities, has chased good people from public life, undermined public faith in institutions and elevated the trivial over the important.

Another scalp is on the wall. Government officials will erect even higher walls between themselves and the outside world. The honest and freewheeling will continue to flee public life, and the cautious and calculating will remain.

David Brooks seems to personify what he views as a "good journalist" - eager to please those in power, and the first to censor out of his column anything that might embarrass or jeopardize future access to one of his sources. Never mind that he's putting himself in a category of journalist that is happy to repeat without attribution attacks and innuendo about others obtained from their carefully cultivated, flattered and protected stable of "insiders".

Brooks is also eager to brand General McChrystal as an irreplaceable magic man, never mind that he has already been replaced. The offense is not that the general displayed contempt for the civilian leaders working in Iraq and of the Vice President, and reportedly spoke poorly of the President while on the record with a reporter from Rolling Stone. That's forgivable as "kvetching" or "venting". The place to find offense is that a reporter, having observed military officers making unprofessional comments while on duty and on the record would dare to report the facts.

But McChrystal, like everyone else, kvetched. And having apparently missed the last 50 years of cultural history, he did so on the record, in front of a reporter. And this reporter, being a product of the culture of exposure, made the kvetching the center of his magazine profile.

By putting the kvetching in the magazine, the reporter essentially took run-of-the-mill complaining and turned it into a direct challenge to presidential authority. He took a successful general and made it impossible for President Obama to retain him.

From what I have heard about General McChrystal, including his carefully calculated leaks to force the Obama Administration's hand on its Afghanistan war policy, it seems reasonable to infer that he's a very competent soldier and officer. The position of general is highly political, and for McChrystal to reach his rank despite his tendency toward the impolitic suggests that he must be good at his job - otherwise I suspect he would still be a colonel. But at the same time he's not a magic man, his policy has not been playing out as he had projected, and he is responsible for his lapses in judgment and for failing to squelch similar lapses of judgment by his staff.

Brooks appears to believe that the sin is on the part of the reporter - that it was perfectly reasonable for the general to assume that the reporter would act as Brooks would prefer, treating him as a magic man whose words should never see print lest they derail a glorious career (not to mention cutting off a high level source). Brooks admits that McChrystal would have to be blind to fifty years of history to have assumed that his remarks would not be reported, so as defenses go it's a weak one. But it comes through, loud and clear, that Brooks himself would prefer his romanticized era of media self-censorship and believes that he, personally, would have killed any part of the story that reflected badly on McChrystal.

Brooks isn't particularly careful with his facts. He claims, "[McChrystal] had outstanding relations with the White House and entirely proper relationships with his various civilian partners in the State Department and beyond," despite the fact that McChrystal's own comments suggest a poor working relationship with pretty much every civilian leader save for Hillary Clinton - and insofar as there is evidence, whether you call it "venting" or "kvetching", the facts suggest that McChyrstal's comments reflect reality. Brooks also accuses the reporter who broke the story of making "the kvetching the center of his magazine profile," suggesting at best that he hasn't read the article and at worst that he doesn't care about the facts when he's defending a powerful figure. The "kvetching" would better be described as the addition of colorful anecdotes to a long article with a much broader focus. It was not the Rolling Stone article that led to McChrystal's resignation, but the manner in which mainstream commentators and pundits responded to the "kvetching".

I haven't been following the commentary very closely, but I have yet to find commentary by a retired military officer who either defends McChrystal's conduct or dismisses it as "no big deal." Brooks may not be comfortable with the fact that the U.S. military has civilian leadership, but some people actually do regard respect for the constitutional role of the Commander in Chief to be relevant to both military discipline and our system of government. It was not a reporter who "took a successful general and made it impossible for President Obama to retain him" - McChrystal is responsible for his own fate.

Going back in time to the period of journalism that Brooks romanticizes,

During World War II and the years just after, a culture of reticence prevailed. The basic view was that human beings are sinful, flawed and fallen. What mattered most was whether people could overcome their flaws and do their duty as soldiers, politicians and public servants. Reporters suppressed private information and reported mostly — and maybe too gently — on public duties.

The culture of reticence, of course, worked to protect the rich and powerful. The not-so-rich and not-so-powerful did not enjoy similar immunity. A political figure might have a health problem that could cause many to question whether he could properly serve in elected office, and reporters would leave the story alone. But if a less powerful rival were to have a similar affliction, or were caught in a scandal, it was fair game. B-list actors were called out and blacklisted for drug use and affairs, while A-list actors largely enjoyed media immunity.

Brooks may believe that the politicians protected by that system were, for the most part, in government "because they sincerely want to do good", but there's no reason to think differently of the less powerful people who were regarded as fair game for the media. We're still not working on a level playing field - the mainstream media sat on inflammatory stories about GW's military service (or lack thereof), of Clinton's affairs, of Edwards' love child, and now we find of Al Gore's supposed mistreatment of a masseuse. There are reasons for that reticence, good and bad, but less public figures get a lot less benefit of the doubt, and a lot less media worry about fallout from the publication of possibly false, inflammatory stories to their careers.

No, nobody wants to be raked over the coals by the media. Yes, that's a factor that keeps some people out of public life - even if they don't have skeletons in their closets, some people are put off by the idea that the media will nonetheless be poking through their closets for skeletons, real and imagined. But sometimes the public really does have a right to know, and it's not better to go back to an era that was even more skewed in favor of the rich and powerful than what presently passes for media analysis. We may lose a magic man from time to time, but in hindsight the magic will usually be revealed as an illusion and the world will keep on turning.

The Foibles Of Memory

Hillary Clinton is taking some pretty hard hits over her faulty memory of a trip to Bosnia. Many have been willing to accuse her of making up a story to augment her claims to be a foreign policy expert and Commander in Chief. While I understand the concept that people should have perfect memories, should be able to recount personal experiences as if they are describing videotape, and should never make mistakes of memory this significant, that's not how memory works.

In psychology, there's a famous example of a faulty memory reconstructed from the stories of others, provided by Jean Piaget.

I can still see, most clearly, the following scene, in which I believed until I was about fifteen. I was sitting in my pram, which my nurse was pushing in the Champs Elysees, when a man tried to kidnap me. I was held in by the strap fastened round me while my nurse bravely tried to stand between me and the thief. She received various scratches and I can still see vaguely those on her face. Then a crowd gathered, a policeman with a cloak and a white baton came up, and the man took to his heels. I can still see the whole scene, and can even place it near the tube station. [Piaget, J., Play, Dreams and Imitation in Childhood, (1951), p. 188]

The problem? Piaget's nanny had fabricated the story in order to try to collect a reward. He learned that the story was false when he was fifteen, but he nonetheless continued to have vivid memories of something that never happened.

What does this have to do with adult memories? Well, our memories are faulty as well. One famous example?

In the 1980 presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan repeatedly told a heartbreaking story of a World War II bomber pilot who ordered his crew to bail out after his plane had been seriously damaged by an enemy hit. His young belly gunner was wounded so seriously that he was unable to evacuate the bomber. Reagan could barely hold back his tears as he uttered the pilot's heroic response: "Never mind. We'll ride it down together." ...this story was an almost exact duplicate of a scene in the 1944 film "A Wing and a Prayer." Reagan had apparently retained the facts but forgotten their source [Schacter, Daniel L., Searching for Memory: The Brain, The Mind, and The Past (New York: Basic Books, 1996), 287).

It now appears that Clinton's memory was contaminated by accounts of a trip to Bosnia, albeit one taken by others six months prior to her trip. It's possible to see how the memory may have been constructed. As Clinton is preparing for her trip, she hears tales of the trip that preceded her. She's traveling with Chelsea, so this worries her. As they fly in, due to concerns about danger, she and Chelsea really are moved to the cockpit and the plane makes a fast descent. What followed? A landing strip greeting probably indistinguishable in any meaningful detail from hundreds of other such greetings she experienced as First Lady. Over time, the mundane details of the trip are forgotten. Meanwhile, she confuses the story of the prior, more harrowing trip with that of her own trip. This didn't happen immediately, but occurred over a period of years. During that time as she retold and built upon her story, nobody stopped to correct her - the memory became historically inaccurate but was real to her.

Everybody's head contains distorted memories; most of us are fortunate enough that nobody cares what we remember, and it's not a media story when our distortions come to light. Here's one of Joe Scarborough's:

…[T]his Bosnia story smacks of gotcha politics. If [Hillary Clinton] had the reputation of being an exaggerator-in-chief, like Al Gore, it would matter. If she had said I invented the Internet, it sticks. One of these gaffes sticks when it compounds an existing problem…

Do you, like Joe Scarborough, remember Al Gore saying that he 'invented the Internet'? If so, you're remembering something that never actually occurred.

No, What He Said Was....

Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, the host is relentless in his flyspecking of Slate's Bushisms. (I have no real interest in reading the Bushisms themselves, let alone Prof. Volokh's dissections.) Perhaps, though, Prof. Volokh should stop worrying about what is happening in other online publications, and start looking at his own. As Prof. Volokh often notes, the Bushisms are meant as humor. This post by the relentlessly partisan Jonathan Adler was not:

How should one interpret Gore's statement that it is "appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is." Is this a call for environmental activists to exaggerate or stretch the truth? Or merely an argument for emphasizing certain facts? I'd be curious what readers think.

How about the possibility that he meant exactly what he said - that it is appropriate to keep hammering the facts because the issue is so important?

Adler defends his motives,

UPDATE: Some commenters below speculate about my motives for this post. Contrary to the suggestion of Kieran and some of the others, this was not an effort to ridicule or disparage Gore — various selections from his book or earlier interviews would have better served that purpose. I was pointed to the quote by someone who thought that it was quite damning. Unconvinced, I was curious to see what readers of this blog made of the quote when presented in context.

That's the sort of defense that, in my opinion, should be annotated with "[Bats eyes innocently]". (Crediting mythago for her many amusing uses of that particular annotation.)