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."

The President Was Assimilated

A few days ago Michael Tomasky pondered why President Obama ran what seemed to be a brilliant election campaign, but has been so ineffective at getting his message across since taking office. He provides a number of possible explanations, concluding that the most likely answer is that Obama's campaign wasn't that brilliant, and seemed so only in comparison to the inept campaigns of his opponents.

I have a different theory. Candidate Obama ran for office from the outside, and was effective in the use of the Internet to build a significant, personal following and a substantial flow of campaign donations. It was easy for him to get the word out to his followers - type out an email or instant message, press send, and... that was it.

When he was elected he turned his organization and email list over to the DNC.

The White House also faces legal limitations in terms of what it can do. Perhaps most notably, it cannot use a 13-million-person e-mail list that Mr. Obama’s team developed because it was compiled for political purposes. That is an important reason Mr. Obama has decided to build a new organization within the Democratic Party, which does not have similar restrictions.

I believe that, as compared to the campaign, the Administration has not been as successful in getting its message out for two reasons. First, the President and the DNC have different goals. He cannot count on that organization to help him pressure members of his own party to act against what they (and the DNC) believe to be their electoral best interests. Second, he understands the need to work from within the party. If he were to try to bypass the party structure by rebuilding his network from the White House, he would upset a lot of powerful Members of Congress who benefit from the status quo. The type of narcissistic twerps who would snipe at a President with a line like, "This is our town". Perhaps Obama could win such a fight, given enough time and energy, but I suspect that it would be at the cost of advancing his agenda.

I would like to see both the White House and DNC do more to get their narrative out to the public, using the Internet. But not by putting out a video of a talking head, even if it's the President's. Have you seen any of the videos produced by RSA? Heck, have you seen the Annoying Orange? I think the DNC, and (although with a bit more caution) the White House should be working on simple, entertaining presentations that have the potential to go viral, because the appeal of the talking head stuff is limited - it's little more than "preaching to the choir".

A final note: if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, the manner in which Sarah Palin is now using the Internet to build her fame and celebrity pays a high compliment to President Obama, the man she once attempted to smear as a "celebrity".

For Many Environmental Groups, Cash Is The New Green

Jonathan Adler, commenting on BP's slipshod approach to safety and environmental issues, states,

BP’s lax operations and corporate culture contributed to the series of events that caused the spill. (See, e.g., this WSJ article.) What’s ironic about this is it was not so long ago that environmentalists were lauding the oil giant for its “progressive” approach to environmental issues (and substantial financial contributions to environmental causes). One CEO even sought to rebrand BP as “Beyond Petroleum” to reflect its commitment to alternative energy sources. Yet it’s becoming increasingly clear that BP’s commitment to the environment was just window dressing.

One of the barely kept secrets of the modern environmental movement is the introduction of corporate money. What better way, after all, to get an environmental organization on your side than to lavish it with funds that could be taken away the moment it dares to criticize you.

[Jay Hair – the president of the National Wildlife Federation from 1981 to 1995] found that the big oil and gas companies were happy to give money to conservation groups. Yes, they were destroying many of the world's pristine places. Yes, by the late 1980s, it had become clear that they were dramatically destabilising the climate – the very basis of life itself. But for Hair, that didn't make them the enemy; he said they sincerely wanted to right their wrongs and pay to preserve the environment. He began to suck millions from them, and his organisation and others gave them awards for "environmental stewardship". Companies such as Shell and BP were delighted. They saw it as valuable "reputation insurance": every time they are criticised for their massive emissions of warming gases, or for events such as the massive oil spill that has just turned the Gulf of Mexico into the "Gulf of Texaco", they wheel out their shiny green awards to ward off the prospect of government regulation and to reassure the public that they Really Care.

At first, this behaviour scandalised the environmental community. Hair was vehemently condemned as a sell-out and a charlatan. But slowly, the other groups saw themselves shrink while the corporate-fattened groups swelled – so they, too, started to take the cheques. Christine MacDonald, an idealistic young environmentalist, discovered how deeply this cash had transformed these institutions when she started to work for CI in 2006. She told me: "About a week or two after I started, I went to the big planning meeting of all the organisation's media teams, and they started talking about this supposedly great new project they were running with BP. But I had read in the newspaper the day before that the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] had condemned BP for running the most polluting plant in the whole country... But nobody in that meeting, or anywhere else in the organisation, wanted to talk about it. It was a taboo. You weren't supposed to ask if BP was really green. They were 'helping' us, and that was it."

What is the consequence of the dependence on corporate case? I expect you already know.

On its website, the Sierra Club says: "If the level stays higher than 350ppm for a prolonged period of time, it will spell disaster for humanity as we know it."

But behind closed doors, they tried to stop this becoming law. In 2009, the EPA moved to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, which requires the agency to ensure that the levels of pollutants in the air are "compatible with human safety" – a change the Sierra Club supported. But the Center for Biological Diversity – an independent group that doesn't take polluter cash – petitioned the EPA to take this commitment seriously and do what the climate science says really is "compatible with human safety": restore us to 350ppm. Kieran Suckling, the executive director of the centre, explains: "I was amazed to discover the Sierra Club opposed us bitterly. They said it should not be done. In fact, they said that if we filed a lawsuit to make EPA do it, they would probably intervene on EPA's side. They threw climate science out the window."

It isn't that environmental groups can't do good work while taking corporate money - it's just that they will bend to the will of their corporate masters, muting criticism of companies like BP and shifting their focus to environmental issues that their corporate sponsors don't care about - those that don't affect corporate profits - while in the worst case scenario lobbying against needed environmental reforms that might imperil the flow of corporate cash.

The Oil Spill Shell Game

Look who's coming to the defense of BP: The former President of Shell Oil. We're assured that BP will survive the oil spill, this is really our fault for wanting oil, and that we're "greedy consumers" for wanting it to be produced in a manner that allows us to avoid the "taste, touch, see or smell it or its production". Perhaps Shell could fix that by lightly spraying consumers with a mist of crude oil at its gas stations - teach us some appreciation.

In the fullness of time the Gulf incident will be an anomaly: deadly, expensive and unfortunate, unprecedented in 40 years of offshore operations. The industry knows what it is doing.

We can hope that this spill is an anomaly. But the spill belies the argument that "the industry knows what it is doing", at least once you move past the question of how to remove deep sea oil from the ground. From the moment of the accident, the cleverest minds in the industry have been scrambling to find a way to slow or stop the gusher. (Was it those same minds, or the captains of the industry, who preferred to save money by blocking a requirement for potentially effective, but extremely expensive, untested technology that might have already stopped the spill?) The author complains, in the form of a non sequitur,

Shell and the other US oil majors have known all this for a century. They're unlikely to share their knowledge. They'd face an anti-trust charge.

Exactly what is it that the major oil companies can't share without facing an anti-trust charge? The auto industry has shared patented safety technologies (such as Audi's patented automatic shift lock) without problem. If Shell is sitting on technology that would enable BP to stop the leak, or would allow for deep sea drilling with a much lower chance of accident, color me skeptical that they would get anything but praise for sharing their discoveries.

But you know, the author has a point. The citizens of Bhopal, India didn't complain when they were earning wages producing chemicals at the local Union Carbide plant, but release a few tons of poison gas into the air and they never forgive you. Even though it's been twenty-five years and we haven't had a recurrence on that scale. Or, in the similar context of this oil spill:

In addition they have recruited 13,000 people to clean up, opened their website and telephone lines to every offer of help and damning complaint from the public, kept the media well informed, met with sceptical federal officials from an array of agencies, organised for legal recriminations – and kept their head while running the rest of their company. This takes capacity and competence.

You know what would have demonstrated BP's capacity and competence even better than a prompt effort to control the public debate, lobby politicians, point fingers at the other companies involved in the disaster, attempt to develop repair technology after-the-fact, and hiring even large numbers people to clean up a continuing, major oil spill? I'll give you one guess.

Maybe it's boring or unexciting to live the life of a competent executive who prevents disasters, as opposed to one who handles the post-disaster P.R. game with aplomb. But we greedy consumers want so much - like seeing the latest incarnation of "Brownie" do a "heckuva job" before we lavish him with praise.

A Teach for America Ambush Interview

At an Easter gathering, having read this exchange and seeing a Teach for America corps member across the room, somebody I know initiated a brief interrogation:

Q. Are you allowed to criticize Teach for America?

A. You mean, to you, here in this room? Sure.

Q. What about if you make critical blog posts about it, or similar public statements?

A. Somebody I know got kicked out of the program for doing that.

Q. A TFA spokesperson said that they want corps members to speak out about the program and talk about their experiences, and that they even support a blogging platform for that. She said that no organization encourages criticism of itself, but....

A. [Eyeroll]

I wasn't seeking out confirmation of my skeptical views; somebody else did that for me. I sympathize with Lysia's assertion that no company has a policy that "Public criticism of our company is encouraged and welcome", but I think a healthy organization should be able to deal with criticism in a constructive manner when it (inevitably) happens.