Tuesday, April 21, 2009
About the Japan posts...
Now that I've moved to Japan to work in schools, it occurs to me that blogging in public about the experience might be a tad unprofessional. So I'm afraid the Japan blogs will only be appearing on Facebook.
If you'd like to receive email copies though, let me know and I'll add you to the list! Just drop me an email.
Any more general blog posts will doubtless end up on here as well.
If you'd like to receive email copies though, let me know and I'll add you to the list! Just drop me an email.
Any more general blog posts will doubtless end up on here as well.
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Why charities are businesses – and should act like it
I finished my internship at Intelligent Giving last week, and one of the more interesting debates (of many) that came up was on the subject of precisely how much organisations in the charity sector can learn from for-profit businesses. The answer I would tend towards – “a lot” – actually resolved itself in my mind into a more controversial conclusion: that charities are, effectively, businesses themselves.
Is a charity a business? At first blush, the question seems obvious: of course a charity isn’t a business. Businesses are out to make money. Charities are out to help people. They’re entirely different concepts.
But look closer, and the differences blur away. There are commercial organisations which don’t set out to make profits – according to the Guardian, Aravind Eye Hospitals in India does around two-thirds of its cataract operations for free, and still manages to comfortably cover its costs. Meanwhile, there are charities which run up large annual surpluses - ORBIS Charitable Trust only spent about three-quarters of its income in 2007, equivalent to a massive 24% profit margin. Some businesses run loss-making divisions with charitable purposes, such as the pro bono work done by large law firms and consultancies. Some charities run large commercial subsidiaries which set out to profit-maximise in a classically businesslike way.
The key factor in deciding whether a given organisation is a charity or a business seems to be how it sees itself: pretty much any given organisation will define itself in one way or the other. To the extent that you can tell charities and businesses apart simply by asking them how they define themselves, the distinction seems to be safe.
But the distinction is overrated. Businesses and charities are both formal organisations. Many charities are registered companies. And a charity with its own legal personality has a formal responsibility to use its resources for a specific purpose. It therefore needs to organise itself in such a way as to effectively raise the money to carry out its work and to effectively spend that money to achieve its result.
In this regard, at least, there is no difference whatsoever between a charity and a business. Charities have their charitable objectives; businesses simply have a responsibility to maximise their profits while behaving in a manner acceptable to their owners. Both organisations need to manage themselves internally in order to achieve their objectives.
And the simple truth is that a lot of the organisational activities that charities carry out are identical to those carried out by businesses, as are many of the organisational problems that they face. How do you attract, retain, and train the best people? How do you structure your organisation’s workforce? How do you use technology so as to be most effective? How do you make sure that you have adequate controls over your spending, and how do you make sure that it’s all properly accounted for? All of these questions are faced by both charities and businesses.
Even in the crucial activities which form the core of any given organisation’s work, the differences are smaller than you think. The main difference is that charities don’t expect their customers to pay for the goods or services rendered. The difference between Oxfam’s famine relief and companies selling food? Oxfam’s food is paid for by people who don’t eat it. The difference between ORBIS and local ophthalmologists? Patients have to pay for their cataract operations at local ophthalmologists. Sometimes, companies which donate goods or services are essentially behaving like charities: when a law firm does pro bono work, it’s doing the exact same thing as charities are: providing help to people who can’t afford to help themselves. And charities which derive income from their charitable activities are essentially behaving like businesses.
In short, the provision of goods or services, whatever they may be, is done both by charities and by businesses. The only difference lies in the revenue model. Generally speaking, with businesses, customers pay for goods. With charities, donors do.
It’s even possible to overstate the importance of the profit motive as a crucial difference. Businesses certainly do work to maximise their net income, but as a great many people in the non-profit sector would tell you, the work that a charity does is rewarding in a different way. People working for charities are still being rewarded – they just derive their reward from the knowledge that they’re helping others, rather than from the prospect of a fat paycheck at the end of each month.
The implication from this is not only that charities are, essentially, just businesses which have a specific type of goal. It’s also that charities have a lot to learn from commercial businesses because of the implications of their different revenue structures. A business whose “beneficiary” is also its “donor” will tend to behave differently to a charity where the two roles are separated.
Consider a private individual buying a car: after getting as much information as possible about which car is best, the individual will then find out for themselves exactly how good a car is simply by driving it after the purchase. The car dealership therefore has an incentive to make sure that the cars it sells are of as high a quality as possible, and will engage in a number of activities to make sure that it does this as well as it can. If the car it sells is of a bad quality, the customer won’t return.
Compare this to a (totally made-up) charity which operates a car dealership where donors buy cars for poor people. The donor can still come to the dealership and get as much information as possible about the car, but after they pay for it, they have no idea if it turns out to have been a good car or not. Only the beneficiary can tell you that. But if the only way that the donor can find out about the quality of what they’ve paid for is by asking the dealership, then the easiest path for the car dealership is to just tell the donor that all the cars it sold were fantastic and that all the beneficiaries were really happy with them. This charity car dealership wouldn’t really have an incentive to be completely transparent to the donor about the quality of the cars it sells. It could get away with selling rubbish cars, and would still keep its income so long as it told a good story to its donors. And if beneficiaries can’t get a car anywhere else, they’ll keep accepting cars from the charity dealership no matter how bad their cars are.
Which is why charities can learn a lot from business. If a charity genuinely wants to operate responsibly, it doesn’t just need to be completely honest with its donors – which is what Intelligent Giving works to encourage – it also needs to strive to be as effective as possible. The organisations which have an incentive to be the most effective are the profit-making ones. Charities should therefore take a strong interest in how commercial businesses delivering similar goods or services operate. The charity car dealership, for example, has the potential to greatly improve the quality of its service by copying the activities that the commercial car dealership carries out to maximise its own quality standards.
This applies to pretty much anything that a charity can do, especially if it’s a large one. Medical charities can learn from private clinics. Famine relief charities can learn from private supply chains. Grant givers can learn from venture capitalists. There will, of course, be many things that commercial businesses do that charities would not wish to emulate: in our example, if the commercial car dealership puts mahogany panelling and surround sound speakers in its cars, the charity could reasonably decide that it has no reason to emulate that. But there will be many things that the commercial business does that the charity could usefully copy, for example advanced methods of quality control in relation to the car parts it uses. And commercial organisations which have figured out methods for cutting costs can often be copied wholesale.
(Naturally, charities can sometimes be more efficient than for-profit organisations. This is particularly true when it comes to reducing waste: charity workers do face certain incentives of their own, particularly the moral incentive not to waste money on non-charitable activities. Where this is the case, for-profit organisations can learn from the ways in which charities do things. The learnings need to go both ways.)
None of this should really be controversial. Many charities are already working hard at making sure that they hold themselves accountable to their beneficiaries, precisely because of the disconnect between donor and beneficiary as discussed above. (This follows critiques such as William Easterly’s 2006 book The White Man’s Burden.) But attitudes towards the commercial sector which continue to caricature it as grasping, greedy and faintly immoral need to change. Charities and businesses often do similar things, and can learn from each other. Charities are finding that commercial standards of organisation, career models, branding and customer service can make a big difference to their effectiveness. Businesses are finding that employees who can take part in ethical or charitable activities through their work will be better motivated, happier and more loyal. In both cases, the eventual winners are the people who the organisations serve and the people working at those organisations.
The difference between a charity and a business, in short, is mostly in our minds. That doesn’t mean that it’s not real: as I mentioned above, we can distinguish between the two pretty easily just by asking organisations what they consider themselves to be. But it does mean that people working for charities shouldn’t be closed to ideas from business. After all, if we’re doing similar things, maybe we have things to learn from each other.
Saturday, February 14, 2009
Another set of quotes from Facebook
I've run out of space again. Here's the latest selection!
"And to all those watching tonight from beyond our shores, from parliaments and palaces to those who are huddled around radios in the forgotten corners of the world, our stories are singular, but our destiny is shared, and a new dawn of American leadership is at hand. To those who would tear the world down: we will defeat you. To those who seek peace and security: we support you. And to all those who have wondered if America's beacon still burns as bright: tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals -- democracy, liberty, opportunity and unyielding hope." - Barack Obama
"People the world over have always been more impressed by the power of our example than by the example of our power." - Bill Clinton
"Russia has found little support for its actions. A pat on the back from Daniel Ortega and Hamas is not a diplomatic triumph." - Condoleezza Rice
"Just remember: the best thing about this town is me." - Helen on her hometown
"I prefer the ones with jam in them. You know, so that it squirts out all over your face when you bite into it." - Helen on doughnuts
"...and I'll have two shots of sambuca as well, please." - Helen, making the most of a civilised lunch in a country pub
"On only two scores can The Economist hope to outdo its rivals consistently. One is the quality of its analysis; the other is the quality of its writing." - The Economist Style Guide, modestly
"We humans are now playing lead electric guitar in Mother Nature's symphony orchestra." - Heidi Cullen, quoted in Thomas Friedman's latest (Hot, Flat & Crowded)
"They are badly dressed, badly equipped, and many of them are drunk. There are just a lot of them." - Mikheil Saakashvili on the Russians invading his country
Nat: "Where *is* all the culture in America?
"Una: "It must be in New York."
"There's a French version of bullfighting, but instead of fighting the bull, they just run away." - Chris
"I often think it odd that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention." - Jane Austen on History
"I do begin to perceive that I am made an ass." - Sir John Falstaff
"We sent our DS off to Nintendo to get the screen fixed, and we left the Nintendogs cartridge in it by accident. When it came back, all of our puppies had been washed and fed."
"I really love being here in the gym, where you can just work out without anyone talking to you, you know? I FUCKING LOVE IT" - Fat man on the exercise bike next to mine, to me, apparently without irony
"First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you." - F. Scott Fitzgerald
"The stone age didn't end because they ran out of stones"
"Karma's going to get the guy who did this, but our attorney's going to get him first."
"Big Cheese"
"Teflon Shoulders"
"Do the needful"
"And to all those watching tonight from beyond our shores, from parliaments and palaces to those who are huddled around radios in the forgotten corners of the world, our stories are singular, but our destiny is shared, and a new dawn of American leadership is at hand. To those who would tear the world down: we will defeat you. To those who seek peace and security: we support you. And to all those who have wondered if America's beacon still burns as bright: tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals -- democracy, liberty, opportunity and unyielding hope." - Barack Obama
"People the world over have always been more impressed by the power of our example than by the example of our power." - Bill Clinton
"Russia has found little support for its actions. A pat on the back from Daniel Ortega and Hamas is not a diplomatic triumph." - Condoleezza Rice
"Just remember: the best thing about this town is me." - Helen on her hometown
"I prefer the ones with jam in them. You know, so that it squirts out all over your face when you bite into it." - Helen on doughnuts
"...and I'll have two shots of sambuca as well, please." - Helen, making the most of a civilised lunch in a country pub
"On only two scores can The Economist hope to outdo its rivals consistently. One is the quality of its analysis; the other is the quality of its writing." - The Economist Style Guide, modestly
"We humans are now playing lead electric guitar in Mother Nature's symphony orchestra." - Heidi Cullen, quoted in Thomas Friedman's latest (Hot, Flat & Crowded)
"They are badly dressed, badly equipped, and many of them are drunk. There are just a lot of them." - Mikheil Saakashvili on the Russians invading his country
Nat: "Where *is* all the culture in America?
"Una: "It must be in New York."
"There's a French version of bullfighting, but instead of fighting the bull, they just run away." - Chris
"I often think it odd that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention." - Jane Austen on History
"I do begin to perceive that I am made an ass." - Sir John Falstaff
"We sent our DS off to Nintendo to get the screen fixed, and we left the Nintendogs cartridge in it by accident. When it came back, all of our puppies had been washed and fed."
"I really love being here in the gym, where you can just work out without anyone talking to you, you know? I FUCKING LOVE IT" - Fat man on the exercise bike next to mine, to me, apparently without irony
"First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you." - F. Scott Fitzgerald
"The stone age didn't end because they ran out of stones"
"Karma's going to get the guy who did this, but our attorney's going to get him first."
"Big Cheese"
"Teflon Shoulders"
"Do the needful"
Sunday, February 01, 2009
The Guardian Guide to making Dubya look good
So, his time in office is up; we've all been watching the new president wander around for over a week now, and it certainly has been fun. Articulate speeches! Sensible policy decisions! Politicians being courteous with each other! Yes, it certainly is wonderful. But we've also seen one last swansong for the old guy, in the form of the inevitable crowing over the long-awaited departure of George "Dubya" Bush.
"The gaffes, the gibberish, the gurning. Admit it: there's a part of him you're going to miss." So says Oliver Burkeman in The Guardian's G2 supplement on January 8th. (I know, I'm a little behind.) Miss him? Really? As it happens, I can tell you one group of people who sure as heck are going to miss him: everyone who works on the Guardian's G2 supplement. Why, you may ask? It's right there in the title: "the gaffes, the gibberish, the gurning". Everything that you need for a successful piece of political analysis in the British media, right there in that sentence. How on earth will Britain's political journalists get by with someone intelligent in the White House?
The answer: it doesn't make the slightest bit of difference who's in the White House. Our political hacks have brought this travesty of reporting upon themselves. The schtick is so tired that they don't even feel like they have to try any more. "You can, of course, call him a warmonger, or a liar, or a stooge of the super-rich, or someone with reckless disregard for his compatriots faced with natural disaster. But these are labels, not descriptions of his internal life. Despite countless bioraphies and speculative newspaper and magazine articles, we're barely any closer to answering the question that seemed pertinent back before Florida, before 9/11, before Iraq or Katrina: what, exactly is going on in there?" Very well said, Mr Journalist. And whose fault is that? Yours. Eight years on, and you - along with EVERY SINGLE OTHER PERSON in the British media - still haven't figured out how the guy thinks? How he makes his decisions? What his priorities are? What his value system is? It's not as if there hasn't been plenty of information around about it. Books have been written. Lengthy profiles have been penned in quality American journals. The man has made speech after speech in which he has articulated his policy goals and their rationales perfectly clearly. And members of his administration have circled the world explaining themselves. Hell, there are tens of millions of Americans who are - or at any rate, were - on his wavelength. And you're telling me that you still can't comprehend how he thinks? There's only one reason for that, buster, that it's that you haven't been trying. Not that you haven't been trying hard enough; just that you haven't been trying. That's incompetence, and relative to the size of the responsibilities that you shoulder, Mr Journalist, that makes you more incompetent than dear ol' Dubya by a pretty damn long margin.
And that's before we even get into the Guardian's own sneaky meta-Bushisms, which can be defined as careless journalists mangling perfectly good misstatements. I'm not just talking about the complete failure to distinguish between genuine manglings and the amusing moments in which he sends up his own tendency to mangle. For crying out loud - how can you possibly manage to get wrong the title of My Pet Goat? That was immortal. And you mangled it. But the real scandal doesn't have to do with the fact that he keeps saying things wrong. It has to do with the fact that journalists in this country seem to be unable to comprehend the difference between the way in which the statement is articulated and the content of the statement itself. "You forgot Poland!", apparently, is funny: it was blurted out in a 2004 debate with John Kerry to refute Kerry's false accusation that America's only coalition partners in Iraq were Britain and Australia. "'He forgot Poland!', the incumbent president crows, as if that made all the difference." Well, as it happened, America had dozens of allies going into Iraq: not just the four countries mentioned, but also Spain, Italy, Japan, South Korea, the Czech Republic, the Baltic states, Georgia, and several dozen more. Bush is dead-on, and Kerry is wrong; but who cares, right? The stupid man made a funny! The truth is, the fact that he was right DOES make a difference.
The Guardian is like a monkey sitting in a tree, pointing and jumping up and down because it's seen something amusing below that it doesn't really understand. Rather than get down there and try to figure it out, it prefers to just chatter away with the other monkeys and smugly rest on its haunches. Meanwhile, Bush has spent the last eight years getting on with the task of being the most powerful man in the world. Now, I would be the first to argue the case for the prosecution in an honest debate about the Bush Administration's failings: the incompetence, the espousal of the most divisive sort of religiosity, the 50%+1 politics, the ideological dismissal of science, the cronyism. The list goes on. But to assume from all this that Bush is stupid is lazy. To assume that he got nothing right is wrong. To refuse to engage seriously with him on his own terms, and to attempt to explain how he reached the conclusions that he did, is exceptionally poor journalism. And to waste column inches pointing your fingers and laughing at a man who suffers from being inarticulate is, frankly, not just insensitive but incredibly foolish: if you conflate being articulate with being intelligent, then you damn well are "misunderestimating" the man.
Worst of all, if you do all those things, you're as bad as he is. One of the reasons Obama is so beloved is that he promises to reach across the aisle and restore civility to American politics; it's easy to forget that before Sarah Palin came along, Obama and McCain were (mostly) having a very grown-up and respectful dialogue. One of the reasons why so many people dislike Bush is that he came to office promising to do the same thing after the hyper-partisanship of the Clinton years, and then reneged. But standing on the other side of the aisle shouting at him and refusing to show any interest in how he thinks is EXACTLY the same strategy that he took. All these jibes at Bush, then, are a part of the problem. It seemed to me that it was with considerable relief that Bush welcomed Barack Obama into his White House to help coordinate what is possibly the smoothest transition in history (coming hot on the heels of possibly the most efficiently-run White House that America has ever seen): the sight of the two of them graciously discussing the nation's future was gratifying and pleasant. This is the promise, and this is hopefully the future; the undisciplined carping at Bush is part of the past, and good riddance.
As it happens, the journalistic sneers at Bush's frequent misstatements are just the tip of the iceberg, and you could forgive them if they were humourous asides in the context of a rather more nuanced analysis elsewhere. Some hope. The Guardian on the 17th of January carried a retrospective on "The Bush Years" that managed the rare feat of making the Bush Administration look smooth, sophisticated and sympathetic in the face of the sheer brutish ignorance being hurled in their direction. Professionalism is thrown out the window. "So, we're left here at the bitter, congested end of the long Bush calamity", begins one profile of Bush. "Eight years in the White House have the ability to turn any man into a narcissistic monster", starts another one. "Were she not complicit in so much destruction..." starts the piece on Condoleezza Rice. Another: "The question of which member of the Bush administration will be held in lowest repute by history will not be easily settled, so vigorous is the competition. Permit me, though, to make the case for Donald Henry Rumsfeld". Sure, Douglas Hurd does his valiant best to redeem Colin Powell, but the telling quote that is pulled out and blown up is, naturally, the most critical one in the entire piece. Cheney, Ashcroft, Rove: I don't need to tell you how they go. That a supposedly quality newspaper can produce such vile hatchet jobs ought to be scandalous, but in reality we're so inured to this lowering of standards that it doesn't even make the reader lift an eyebrow.
Where is the objectivity? Where is the acknowledgement that a man who got degrees from Yale and Harvard Business School, who ran a series of businesses spectacularly well, who was a hugely successful governor of Texas and who crafted a new political order might just not be a dunce? Where is the realisation that the same ideological impulses that led to the Iraq War and the abortion gag rule also led to an immense foreign aid programmes and the establishment of vast swathes of new natural parks? Where is the scepticism of the all-too-easy blame game that falsely attributes all of America's economic woes to the Bush Administration? Where is the discussion of the controversies swirling around No Child Left Behind (part good, part bad) and the reflection on a second term legislative agenda that included a brave attempt at Social Security reform (partly good and very necessary) and immigration reform (very good indeed), both of which were foiled not just by Bush Administration failings but by the venality and populism of Congress? How do we reconcile the gap between the perception of Bush as a blundering oaf on the world stage and the fact that he drew up a foreign policy doctrine of penetrating insight which grasped the strategic imperatives of the "war on terror" and melded them with firm and attractive ideological underpinnings to produce America's first genuine joined up foreign policy doctrine since Reagan?
And it's not just Bush. How can we let journalists get away with slapping up Rumsfeld over the occupation in Iraq without mentioning his successes in modernising and reorganising the US armed forces, or the huge achievements of the initial military victories in Afghanistan and Iraq which he masterminded? How can we dismiss Condoleezza Rice out of hand when her foreign policy speeches and vision are actually a fairly close match for Obama's in plenty of important ways? Why do we call Karl Rove by his frat-boy epithet "boy genius" and not by the adjective that he actually deserves, however much we dislike him: plain old genius? Dick Cheney is a two-term Vice President of the United States of America, and you write for the New Yorker. Much as it pains me to say this - I am rather partial to the New Yorker - this makes you smarter than him why?
The thing that nags, the thing that bugs, isn't that these writers are wrong. This has been one of the most incompetent administrations in history, and for every success there have been a great many failures, some of them so large as to overshadow anything else. The thing that gets me is that these writers don't even try to explain. If all they do is condemn, then no-one learns anything: readers who already agree with their assessment will nod smugly, feeling vindicated; readers who disagree with their assessment will shake their heads sagely, their belief in the irredeemable bias of the Guardian confirmed. The best journalism seeks to explain what's going on, and explanation is in short supply in Britain. All the condemnation in the world will be of limited benefit if we fail to enquire into how it is that honourable men with the best intentions of their country at heart made the poor decisions that they did; all of the derision poured at Dubya misses its mark if its aim is off. You can't beat something that you don't understand. There is plenty to understand about George W. Bush. His value system and his way of working should not be dismissed out of hand; his policymaking process should not be ridiculed unless it is genuinely understood. Like everything else in this world, the 43rd president is not a caricature in black and white, and the journalists at the Guardian do a disservice to themselves, to their employer, and to their profession when such puerile, shallow trash is allowed to roam free.
But the best is yet to come. For just there on the same page as Alan Greenspan - apparently responsible for ruining the world economy - we find not one, but two profiles of Osama Bin Laden: soft, respectful, contemplative, exculpatory, understanding, and restrained. It is at this point, dear readers, that I sign off, before I have the opportunity to descend into a torrent of obscenities whose level of discourse might just be at an appropriate level to have a shot at appearing in the Guardian itself.
"The gaffes, the gibberish, the gurning. Admit it: there's a part of him you're going to miss." So says Oliver Burkeman in The Guardian's G2 supplement on January 8th. (I know, I'm a little behind.) Miss him? Really? As it happens, I can tell you one group of people who sure as heck are going to miss him: everyone who works on the Guardian's G2 supplement. Why, you may ask? It's right there in the title: "the gaffes, the gibberish, the gurning". Everything that you need for a successful piece of political analysis in the British media, right there in that sentence. How on earth will Britain's political journalists get by with someone intelligent in the White House?
The answer: it doesn't make the slightest bit of difference who's in the White House. Our political hacks have brought this travesty of reporting upon themselves. The schtick is so tired that they don't even feel like they have to try any more. "You can, of course, call him a warmonger, or a liar, or a stooge of the super-rich, or someone with reckless disregard for his compatriots faced with natural disaster. But these are labels, not descriptions of his internal life. Despite countless bioraphies and speculative newspaper and magazine articles, we're barely any closer to answering the question that seemed pertinent back before Florida, before 9/11, before Iraq or Katrina: what, exactly is going on in there?" Very well said, Mr Journalist. And whose fault is that? Yours. Eight years on, and you - along with EVERY SINGLE OTHER PERSON in the British media - still haven't figured out how the guy thinks? How he makes his decisions? What his priorities are? What his value system is? It's not as if there hasn't been plenty of information around about it. Books have been written. Lengthy profiles have been penned in quality American journals. The man has made speech after speech in which he has articulated his policy goals and their rationales perfectly clearly. And members of his administration have circled the world explaining themselves. Hell, there are tens of millions of Americans who are - or at any rate, were - on his wavelength. And you're telling me that you still can't comprehend how he thinks? There's only one reason for that, buster, that it's that you haven't been trying. Not that you haven't been trying hard enough; just that you haven't been trying. That's incompetence, and relative to the size of the responsibilities that you shoulder, Mr Journalist, that makes you more incompetent than dear ol' Dubya by a pretty damn long margin.
And that's before we even get into the Guardian's own sneaky meta-Bushisms, which can be defined as careless journalists mangling perfectly good misstatements. I'm not just talking about the complete failure to distinguish between genuine manglings and the amusing moments in which he sends up his own tendency to mangle. For crying out loud - how can you possibly manage to get wrong the title of My Pet Goat? That was immortal. And you mangled it. But the real scandal doesn't have to do with the fact that he keeps saying things wrong. It has to do with the fact that journalists in this country seem to be unable to comprehend the difference between the way in which the statement is articulated and the content of the statement itself. "You forgot Poland!", apparently, is funny: it was blurted out in a 2004 debate with John Kerry to refute Kerry's false accusation that America's only coalition partners in Iraq were Britain and Australia. "'He forgot Poland!', the incumbent president crows, as if that made all the difference." Well, as it happened, America had dozens of allies going into Iraq: not just the four countries mentioned, but also Spain, Italy, Japan, South Korea, the Czech Republic, the Baltic states, Georgia, and several dozen more. Bush is dead-on, and Kerry is wrong; but who cares, right? The stupid man made a funny! The truth is, the fact that he was right DOES make a difference.
The Guardian is like a monkey sitting in a tree, pointing and jumping up and down because it's seen something amusing below that it doesn't really understand. Rather than get down there and try to figure it out, it prefers to just chatter away with the other monkeys and smugly rest on its haunches. Meanwhile, Bush has spent the last eight years getting on with the task of being the most powerful man in the world. Now, I would be the first to argue the case for the prosecution in an honest debate about the Bush Administration's failings: the incompetence, the espousal of the most divisive sort of religiosity, the 50%+1 politics, the ideological dismissal of science, the cronyism. The list goes on. But to assume from all this that Bush is stupid is lazy. To assume that he got nothing right is wrong. To refuse to engage seriously with him on his own terms, and to attempt to explain how he reached the conclusions that he did, is exceptionally poor journalism. And to waste column inches pointing your fingers and laughing at a man who suffers from being inarticulate is, frankly, not just insensitive but incredibly foolish: if you conflate being articulate with being intelligent, then you damn well are "misunderestimating" the man.
Worst of all, if you do all those things, you're as bad as he is. One of the reasons Obama is so beloved is that he promises to reach across the aisle and restore civility to American politics; it's easy to forget that before Sarah Palin came along, Obama and McCain were (mostly) having a very grown-up and respectful dialogue. One of the reasons why so many people dislike Bush is that he came to office promising to do the same thing after the hyper-partisanship of the Clinton years, and then reneged. But standing on the other side of the aisle shouting at him and refusing to show any interest in how he thinks is EXACTLY the same strategy that he took. All these jibes at Bush, then, are a part of the problem. It seemed to me that it was with considerable relief that Bush welcomed Barack Obama into his White House to help coordinate what is possibly the smoothest transition in history (coming hot on the heels of possibly the most efficiently-run White House that America has ever seen): the sight of the two of them graciously discussing the nation's future was gratifying and pleasant. This is the promise, and this is hopefully the future; the undisciplined carping at Bush is part of the past, and good riddance.
As it happens, the journalistic sneers at Bush's frequent misstatements are just the tip of the iceberg, and you could forgive them if they were humourous asides in the context of a rather more nuanced analysis elsewhere. Some hope. The Guardian on the 17th of January carried a retrospective on "The Bush Years" that managed the rare feat of making the Bush Administration look smooth, sophisticated and sympathetic in the face of the sheer brutish ignorance being hurled in their direction. Professionalism is thrown out the window. "So, we're left here at the bitter, congested end of the long Bush calamity", begins one profile of Bush. "Eight years in the White House have the ability to turn any man into a narcissistic monster", starts another one. "Were she not complicit in so much destruction..." starts the piece on Condoleezza Rice. Another: "The question of which member of the Bush administration will be held in lowest repute by history will not be easily settled, so vigorous is the competition. Permit me, though, to make the case for Donald Henry Rumsfeld". Sure, Douglas Hurd does his valiant best to redeem Colin Powell, but the telling quote that is pulled out and blown up is, naturally, the most critical one in the entire piece. Cheney, Ashcroft, Rove: I don't need to tell you how they go. That a supposedly quality newspaper can produce such vile hatchet jobs ought to be scandalous, but in reality we're so inured to this lowering of standards that it doesn't even make the reader lift an eyebrow.
Where is the objectivity? Where is the acknowledgement that a man who got degrees from Yale and Harvard Business School, who ran a series of businesses spectacularly well, who was a hugely successful governor of Texas and who crafted a new political order might just not be a dunce? Where is the realisation that the same ideological impulses that led to the Iraq War and the abortion gag rule also led to an immense foreign aid programmes and the establishment of vast swathes of new natural parks? Where is the scepticism of the all-too-easy blame game that falsely attributes all of America's economic woes to the Bush Administration? Where is the discussion of the controversies swirling around No Child Left Behind (part good, part bad) and the reflection on a second term legislative agenda that included a brave attempt at Social Security reform (partly good and very necessary) and immigration reform (very good indeed), both of which were foiled not just by Bush Administration failings but by the venality and populism of Congress? How do we reconcile the gap between the perception of Bush as a blundering oaf on the world stage and the fact that he drew up a foreign policy doctrine of penetrating insight which grasped the strategic imperatives of the "war on terror" and melded them with firm and attractive ideological underpinnings to produce America's first genuine joined up foreign policy doctrine since Reagan?
And it's not just Bush. How can we let journalists get away with slapping up Rumsfeld over the occupation in Iraq without mentioning his successes in modernising and reorganising the US armed forces, or the huge achievements of the initial military victories in Afghanistan and Iraq which he masterminded? How can we dismiss Condoleezza Rice out of hand when her foreign policy speeches and vision are actually a fairly close match for Obama's in plenty of important ways? Why do we call Karl Rove by his frat-boy epithet "boy genius" and not by the adjective that he actually deserves, however much we dislike him: plain old genius? Dick Cheney is a two-term Vice President of the United States of America, and you write for the New Yorker. Much as it pains me to say this - I am rather partial to the New Yorker - this makes you smarter than him why?
The thing that nags, the thing that bugs, isn't that these writers are wrong. This has been one of the most incompetent administrations in history, and for every success there have been a great many failures, some of them so large as to overshadow anything else. The thing that gets me is that these writers don't even try to explain. If all they do is condemn, then no-one learns anything: readers who already agree with their assessment will nod smugly, feeling vindicated; readers who disagree with their assessment will shake their heads sagely, their belief in the irredeemable bias of the Guardian confirmed. The best journalism seeks to explain what's going on, and explanation is in short supply in Britain. All the condemnation in the world will be of limited benefit if we fail to enquire into how it is that honourable men with the best intentions of their country at heart made the poor decisions that they did; all of the derision poured at Dubya misses its mark if its aim is off. You can't beat something that you don't understand. There is plenty to understand about George W. Bush. His value system and his way of working should not be dismissed out of hand; his policymaking process should not be ridiculed unless it is genuinely understood. Like everything else in this world, the 43rd president is not a caricature in black and white, and the journalists at the Guardian do a disservice to themselves, to their employer, and to their profession when such puerile, shallow trash is allowed to roam free.
But the best is yet to come. For just there on the same page as Alan Greenspan - apparently responsible for ruining the world economy - we find not one, but two profiles of Osama Bin Laden: soft, respectful, contemplative, exculpatory, understanding, and restrained. It is at this point, dear readers, that I sign off, before I have the opportunity to descend into a torrent of obscenities whose level of discourse might just be at an appropriate level to have a shot at appearing in the Guardian itself.
Saturday, November 08, 2008
Reflections on the Campaign
After all that's happened in the campaign, it seems hard to believe that it’s all over. Following this election has been fascinating and entertaining in equal measure, and I very much doubt that another one will come close for many years to come in terms of excitement. The real work, of course, actually starts now.
But to make the most of the slightly dazed feeling, a retrospective seems in order. I’ve been writing about the campaign from the time of the first primary, and going back to the beginning means going back over ten months. There are a great many highlights from the campaign which stand out in my memory. You'll find them below, in roughly chronological order.
- Rudy Giuliani’s daft strategy of sitting out all the primaries until Florida, hoping that “momentum” didn’t exist. It did. At least he prompted Joe Biden’s famous remark that “There's only three things [Giuliani] mentions in a sentence -- a noun, a verb, and 9/11.”
- Barack Obama’s victory speech after the Iowa caucuses. Suddenly, the rest of the country understood that this was a powerful new voice in politics who really could go on to win – and started to understand why maybe that would be a good thing.
- Hillary Clinton’s rebound in New Hampshire. Although she couldn’t hold her campaign together with a consistent style, her “that hurts my feelings” response to a hostile question about why she was so unlikable, and her refreshingly honest moment of choking up suddenly put her back in the running.
- At the same time, Obama’s amazing speech after his New Hampshire loss showed what the qualities were that would propel him to victory. “We have been told we cannot do this, by a chorus of cynics. They will only grow louder and more dissonant in the weeks and months to come. We’ve been asked to pause for a reality check; we’ve been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope. But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope. For when we have faced down impossible odds, we’ve been told that we’re not ready; or that we shouldn’t try; or that we can’t. Generations of Americans have responded with a simple creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes We Can. Yes we can. Yes, we can.” Still sends shivers down my spine.
- John McCain’s win in New Hampshire: the honest, independent guy won. It was awesome.
- Mitt Romney’s win in Michigan. Momentum be damned – here was a candidate who would spend his way to victory as far as he could! Not to last, though.
- Mitt Romney’s nasty negative tactics. Not great in themselves, but they did produce a great quote. "Never get into a wrestling match with a pig", said John McCain, in an earlier life, about his opponent. "You both get dirty, and the pig likes it."
- The rush of Obamamania. Will.i.am’s “Yes We Can”, Obama Girl, and all the rest.
- The febrile response to Obamamania, which somehow didn’t quite work: the spiky Hillary Boy, the unsettling McCain Girls, the perhaps slightly insincere Giuliani Girl, and even some of the mash-ups that followed.
- Hillary Clinton’s negative turn in South Carolina. Not so much taking the gloves off as revealing her nasty side, it suddenly became apparent to lots of her fans that the lady was perhaps not above stooping to be horrible. Another nail in the political coffin, and a thoroughly deserved one. Obama’s South Carolina victory speech rose above it.
- The McCain win in Florida which knocked Giuliani out of the campaign. The Republicans, too, were looking for change, and one by one the ineffective (Thompson), the nasty (Giuliani), the loony (Huckabee) and the hardcore conservative (Romney) dropped by the wayside, one by one, and it suddenly came to seem like the autumn contest would be one between two worthy candidates for the first time since 1992.
- Hillary Clinton’s Super Tuesday non-win. The strategy was simple: get through to Super Tuesday, then hoover up delegates from winning massive states, enough to knock out Obama once and for all. Clinton was so confident about this that she didn’t even have significant teams in place in the states that followed February 5th. And she did indeed win all the big states, as predicted. The problem? She somehow missed that the Democrats this year were dividing delegates proportionally. Her increase in the delegate count was thus pathetic, and as a result she was stuck for the next six weeks as Obama gathered delegates and momentum in states that he had been preparing for all along. This was the point where her inevitability disappeared and Obama became the leading candidate.
- Hillary Clinton’s March 4th victory. Bill Clinton said that she needed to win Ohio and Texas on that day to stay in the campaign. The Obama campaign gleefully announced that "three weeks ago, when they led polls in Texas and Ohio by 20 points, the Clinton campaign set their own test for today’s primaries." So it did. And it passed it. Clinton’s big win on that day pushed her onwards towards the very end.
- The Reverend Wright controversy and Obama’s speech on race. In a tight spot, did Obama resort to tried and tested political tactics to control damage and make a problem go away? He did not. His response to the controversy over his former pastor was a decision to treat the American people as grown-ups and to give a speech articulating the complexity surrounding the issue, and the result was a speech that was complex, thoughtful, empathetic, and extremely moving – a speech that recognized black concerns and white concerns alike, putting them into the context in which they are properly understood and reaching beyond that, soaring away from the mundane denunciations characteristic of the subject into the realm where his own candidacy and the turmoil it has occasionally created is seen as a necessary stepping stone towards a more perfect union. This was the moment when the rhetoric of change came together with the intelligence of his books, and Obama the statesman left his competitors comprehensively in the dust. Maturity, intelligence and respect one the day.
- John McCain’s natural-born-citizen controversy. He came into this world in Panama, when his parents were stationed there with the US military. Did that make him a natural born citizen for the purposes of the presidential election? A group of lawyers was interested to find out. What did Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton do? Did they jump on the opportunity to hobble their opponent? No – they co-sponsored a non-binding Senate resolution reaffirming their opponent’s eligibility to run. It’s easy to forget after the nastiness of the McCain campaign in the autumn, but for much of the year the campaign distinguished itself through how noble and nice it all was.
- Hillary Clinton’s Pennsylvania win. This was remarkable as an abject lesson in how perseverance could pay off. A lengthy campaign in which Obama distinguished himself mainly through gaffe and scandal ended in a resounding Clinton victory. Naturally, she had already lost the nomination by this point; but as an exercise in politicking – wow.
- Obama’s speech on winning the Democratic nomination on June 3rd. It’s another speech, but again, boy, what a good one.
- Hillary Clinton’s concession speech four days later. She waited long enough to give it, and she talked about herself rather a lot, but when she got around to making her endorsement it was about as forceful as Obama could have wanted.
- Obama’s overseas trip. Not been to Afghanistan, Iraq, or European allies enough, you say? Fine, let’s visit. McCain then found himself being pictured in a golf cart with George H.W. Bush while Obama took helicopter rides over Baghdad with General Petraeus and gave a speech before 200,000 cheering people in Berlin. Never in my lifetime has an American president been well-liked enough to command those sorts of numbers overseas; more usually they have commanded vast hordes of angry protestors shouting at them. This transformation is one of the most inspiring things about the new president.
- Paris Hilton’s contribution. Obama a celebrity, eh? Unfortunately for “that wrinkly white-haired guy”, the real celebrities sometimes fight back.
- The usual Jib-Jab contribution, set appropriately enough to the tune of “The Times, They Are a’Changin”.
- The Biden VP pick. Inspiring? Let’s be honest – not really. But a sound, solid choice that would establish Obama as a candidate serious about governing.
- Obama gets nominated. Another great speech. Looking back, it seems remarkable quite how many great speeches there actually were in this campaign.
- McCain picks Palin. Initial reaction: who? But the great stagecraft of the announcement, the thrill of finding out about her, and the spectacular speech that she gave to the Republican convention quickly marked her out as a rising star that would boost McCain’s ticket and let him overtake Obama in the polls…
- …until her drawbacks became so obvious as to hobble the McCain campaign permanently. These were best embodied by Tina Fey’s Saturday Night Live routine, meaning that Palin now lives on in our minds for her initial announcement, for her debate performance against Joe Biden, and for her interview with Katie Couric more in the form of the resulting parody than of the original (although this may in fact be because the original verged on parody in any case). (Unfortunately, since the election it appears to be impossible to get hold of these clips outside the US. Talk about annoying. Seek them out on YouTube or elsewhere.)
- The Daily Show. Jon Stewart provided a great many funny moments during the campaign and was a regular highlight. My favourite has to be the examination of sexism in American society following the Palin pick.
- American cartoons weigh in. Both The Simpsons and Family Guy had something amusing to say about the election.
- The nasty autumn campaign. Whether it was misrepresenting Obama’s plans on just about everything or accusing him of “palling around” with terrorists, McCain’s campaign in the autumn was dishonorable and often revolting. Why was this a highlight? Because it made clear the difference between the two campaigns and made clear that one of the candidates – McCain – was willing to suspend his principles and unable to lead his campaign well enough to keep in full control of its tactics and narrative. The choice became clear.
- McCain suspends his campaign. It was the moment he lost his credibility: deciding that the magnitude of the financial crisis demanded a serious gesture, McCain decided to suspend his campaign and rush back to Washington to fix things. Unfortunately, not only did he not really suspend his campaign (prompting an entertaining diatribe from Letterman), couldn’t contribute to any sort of resolution, and ended up looking foolish and economically illiterate.
- The Al Smith fundraiser. Both McCain and Obama being funny? Well worth a watch.
- Election night. So exciting. The anticipation was immense as the results started coming in and it began to appear that Obama would win Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida. When Ohio was called, it was a bit of a crazy feeling.
- John McCain’s concession speech. It’s as if suddenly, the old McCain was back. Shame he didn’t show his face between the nomination and the election.
- Obama’s victory speech. Sums it all up.
- Feeling dazed when it was all over. Wow. Hard to adjust.
- America suddenly becoming cool again internationally, with a President that non-Americans might actually like. Proof?
- The 2012 race starts hotting up. The Democrats already know their candidate. On the Republican side, Mike Huckabee has booked dates in Iowa for his book tour and Mitt Romney has reopened his presidential fundraising committee. Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal is sounding out support for a run, and Florida governor Charlie Crist will most likely follow suit; Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty may as well after the amount that his name was bandied around for McCain’s VP pick. And the evangelical juggernaut that is Sarah Palin will now return to Alaska, most likely to spend the next four years producing policies that thrill the Republican base (including sorting out the troubled new pipeline that she’s always boasting about), writing a bestselling book about herself, and, naturally, catching up on some of those pesky policy areas (like foreign policy and economics) that she tripped up on this time around. It’s going to be a fun race. Let’s get started.
But to make the most of the slightly dazed feeling, a retrospective seems in order. I’ve been writing about the campaign from the time of the first primary, and going back to the beginning means going back over ten months. There are a great many highlights from the campaign which stand out in my memory. You'll find them below, in roughly chronological order.
- Rudy Giuliani’s daft strategy of sitting out all the primaries until Florida, hoping that “momentum” didn’t exist. It did. At least he prompted Joe Biden’s famous remark that “There's only three things [Giuliani] mentions in a sentence -- a noun, a verb, and 9/11.”
- Barack Obama’s victory speech after the Iowa caucuses. Suddenly, the rest of the country understood that this was a powerful new voice in politics who really could go on to win – and started to understand why maybe that would be a good thing.
- Hillary Clinton’s rebound in New Hampshire. Although she couldn’t hold her campaign together with a consistent style, her “that hurts my feelings” response to a hostile question about why she was so unlikable, and her refreshingly honest moment of choking up suddenly put her back in the running.
- At the same time, Obama’s amazing speech after his New Hampshire loss showed what the qualities were that would propel him to victory. “We have been told we cannot do this, by a chorus of cynics. They will only grow louder and more dissonant in the weeks and months to come. We’ve been asked to pause for a reality check; we’ve been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope. But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope. For when we have faced down impossible odds, we’ve been told that we’re not ready; or that we shouldn’t try; or that we can’t. Generations of Americans have responded with a simple creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes We Can. Yes we can. Yes, we can.” Still sends shivers down my spine.
- John McCain’s win in New Hampshire: the honest, independent guy won. It was awesome.
- Mitt Romney’s win in Michigan. Momentum be damned – here was a candidate who would spend his way to victory as far as he could! Not to last, though.
- Mitt Romney’s nasty negative tactics. Not great in themselves, but they did produce a great quote. "Never get into a wrestling match with a pig", said John McCain, in an earlier life, about his opponent. "You both get dirty, and the pig likes it."
- The rush of Obamamania. Will.i.am’s “Yes We Can”, Obama Girl, and all the rest.
- The febrile response to Obamamania, which somehow didn’t quite work: the spiky Hillary Boy, the unsettling McCain Girls, the perhaps slightly insincere Giuliani Girl, and even some of the mash-ups that followed.
- Hillary Clinton’s negative turn in South Carolina. Not so much taking the gloves off as revealing her nasty side, it suddenly became apparent to lots of her fans that the lady was perhaps not above stooping to be horrible. Another nail in the political coffin, and a thoroughly deserved one. Obama’s South Carolina victory speech rose above it.
- The McCain win in Florida which knocked Giuliani out of the campaign. The Republicans, too, were looking for change, and one by one the ineffective (Thompson), the nasty (Giuliani), the loony (Huckabee) and the hardcore conservative (Romney) dropped by the wayside, one by one, and it suddenly came to seem like the autumn contest would be one between two worthy candidates for the first time since 1992.
- Hillary Clinton’s Super Tuesday non-win. The strategy was simple: get through to Super Tuesday, then hoover up delegates from winning massive states, enough to knock out Obama once and for all. Clinton was so confident about this that she didn’t even have significant teams in place in the states that followed February 5th. And she did indeed win all the big states, as predicted. The problem? She somehow missed that the Democrats this year were dividing delegates proportionally. Her increase in the delegate count was thus pathetic, and as a result she was stuck for the next six weeks as Obama gathered delegates and momentum in states that he had been preparing for all along. This was the point where her inevitability disappeared and Obama became the leading candidate.
- Hillary Clinton’s March 4th victory. Bill Clinton said that she needed to win Ohio and Texas on that day to stay in the campaign. The Obama campaign gleefully announced that "three weeks ago, when they led polls in Texas and Ohio by 20 points, the Clinton campaign set their own test for today’s primaries." So it did. And it passed it. Clinton’s big win on that day pushed her onwards towards the very end.
- The Reverend Wright controversy and Obama’s speech on race. In a tight spot, did Obama resort to tried and tested political tactics to control damage and make a problem go away? He did not. His response to the controversy over his former pastor was a decision to treat the American people as grown-ups and to give a speech articulating the complexity surrounding the issue, and the result was a speech that was complex, thoughtful, empathetic, and extremely moving – a speech that recognized black concerns and white concerns alike, putting them into the context in which they are properly understood and reaching beyond that, soaring away from the mundane denunciations characteristic of the subject into the realm where his own candidacy and the turmoil it has occasionally created is seen as a necessary stepping stone towards a more perfect union. This was the moment when the rhetoric of change came together with the intelligence of his books, and Obama the statesman left his competitors comprehensively in the dust. Maturity, intelligence and respect one the day.
- John McCain’s natural-born-citizen controversy. He came into this world in Panama, when his parents were stationed there with the US military. Did that make him a natural born citizen for the purposes of the presidential election? A group of lawyers was interested to find out. What did Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton do? Did they jump on the opportunity to hobble their opponent? No – they co-sponsored a non-binding Senate resolution reaffirming their opponent’s eligibility to run. It’s easy to forget after the nastiness of the McCain campaign in the autumn, but for much of the year the campaign distinguished itself through how noble and nice it all was.
- Hillary Clinton’s Pennsylvania win. This was remarkable as an abject lesson in how perseverance could pay off. A lengthy campaign in which Obama distinguished himself mainly through gaffe and scandal ended in a resounding Clinton victory. Naturally, she had already lost the nomination by this point; but as an exercise in politicking – wow.
- Obama’s speech on winning the Democratic nomination on June 3rd. It’s another speech, but again, boy, what a good one.
- Hillary Clinton’s concession speech four days later. She waited long enough to give it, and she talked about herself rather a lot, but when she got around to making her endorsement it was about as forceful as Obama could have wanted.
- Obama’s overseas trip. Not been to Afghanistan, Iraq, or European allies enough, you say? Fine, let’s visit. McCain then found himself being pictured in a golf cart with George H.W. Bush while Obama took helicopter rides over Baghdad with General Petraeus and gave a speech before 200,000 cheering people in Berlin. Never in my lifetime has an American president been well-liked enough to command those sorts of numbers overseas; more usually they have commanded vast hordes of angry protestors shouting at them. This transformation is one of the most inspiring things about the new president.
- Paris Hilton’s contribution. Obama a celebrity, eh? Unfortunately for “that wrinkly white-haired guy”, the real celebrities sometimes fight back.
- The usual Jib-Jab contribution, set appropriately enough to the tune of “The Times, They Are a’Changin”.
- The Biden VP pick. Inspiring? Let’s be honest – not really. But a sound, solid choice that would establish Obama as a candidate serious about governing.
- Obama gets nominated. Another great speech. Looking back, it seems remarkable quite how many great speeches there actually were in this campaign.
- McCain picks Palin. Initial reaction: who? But the great stagecraft of the announcement, the thrill of finding out about her, and the spectacular speech that she gave to the Republican convention quickly marked her out as a rising star that would boost McCain’s ticket and let him overtake Obama in the polls…
- …until her drawbacks became so obvious as to hobble the McCain campaign permanently. These were best embodied by Tina Fey’s Saturday Night Live routine, meaning that Palin now lives on in our minds for her initial announcement, for her debate performance against Joe Biden, and for her interview with Katie Couric more in the form of the resulting parody than of the original (although this may in fact be because the original verged on parody in any case). (Unfortunately, since the election it appears to be impossible to get hold of these clips outside the US. Talk about annoying. Seek them out on YouTube or elsewhere.)
- The Daily Show. Jon Stewart provided a great many funny moments during the campaign and was a regular highlight. My favourite has to be the examination of sexism in American society following the Palin pick.
- American cartoons weigh in. Both The Simpsons and Family Guy had something amusing to say about the election.
- The nasty autumn campaign. Whether it was misrepresenting Obama’s plans on just about everything or accusing him of “palling around” with terrorists, McCain’s campaign in the autumn was dishonorable and often revolting. Why was this a highlight? Because it made clear the difference between the two campaigns and made clear that one of the candidates – McCain – was willing to suspend his principles and unable to lead his campaign well enough to keep in full control of its tactics and narrative. The choice became clear.
- McCain suspends his campaign. It was the moment he lost his credibility: deciding that the magnitude of the financial crisis demanded a serious gesture, McCain decided to suspend his campaign and rush back to Washington to fix things. Unfortunately, not only did he not really suspend his campaign (prompting an entertaining diatribe from Letterman), couldn’t contribute to any sort of resolution, and ended up looking foolish and economically illiterate.
- The Al Smith fundraiser. Both McCain and Obama being funny? Well worth a watch.
- Election night. So exciting. The anticipation was immense as the results started coming in and it began to appear that Obama would win Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida. When Ohio was called, it was a bit of a crazy feeling.
- John McCain’s concession speech. It’s as if suddenly, the old McCain was back. Shame he didn’t show his face between the nomination and the election.
- Obama’s victory speech. Sums it all up.
- Feeling dazed when it was all over. Wow. Hard to adjust.
- America suddenly becoming cool again internationally, with a President that non-Americans might actually like. Proof?
- The 2012 race starts hotting up. The Democrats already know their candidate. On the Republican side, Mike Huckabee has booked dates in Iowa for his book tour and Mitt Romney has reopened his presidential fundraising committee. Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal is sounding out support for a run, and Florida governor Charlie Crist will most likely follow suit; Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty may as well after the amount that his name was bandied around for McCain’s VP pick. And the evangelical juggernaut that is Sarah Palin will now return to Alaska, most likely to spend the next four years producing policies that thrill the Republican base (including sorting out the troubled new pipeline that she’s always boasting about), writing a bestselling book about herself, and, naturally, catching up on some of those pesky policy areas (like foreign policy and economics) that she tripped up on this time around. It’s going to be a fun race. Let’s get started.
Sunday, October 26, 2008
A Time to Endorse
Endorsements from the press are one of the signs that a campaign is reaching its final stages. There is a good reason for journalists, unlike politicians, to leave this until the last minute. Who would trust the impartiality of a reporter who had publicly declared who they support? And in any case, it can be highly unwise to come down on one side or another when there is still a lot of campaigning left to go. Who knows what might happen?
It goes without saying that I am not a journalist. But, as is my wont, I have tried to be evenhanded in all of my various bits of writing about this campaign. I firmly believe that the responsibility of any voter (or, as in my case, purportedly objective observer) is to allow themselves to be open to persuasion on matters of policy and character. It is the place of the campaigns to argue the issues, and, through their conduct, to demonstrate what sort of man or woman their candidate is and what style they would adopt in governing. It is the place of the voter to observe and to listen, and to weigh the candidates’ positions and personalities on their merits. For a political order to be optimistic and forward-looking, we the masses must banish our cynicism and be prepared to show respect to any person who is clever and hard-working enough to reach the pinnacle of their careers nearly at the top of the greasy pole; we must assume that they are in possession of impressive quantities of intelligence, pluck and charisma. Furthermore, we must be willing to give those people who we do not agree with the benefit of the doubt. It is possible for someone to be highly principled – and loyal to their principles – without professing policies that we personally would agree with. In a world where more and more we are able to choose our sources of information, and in a world where we increasingly only choose sources of information which profess views that we already agree with, it is easy to lose sight of this.
In light of this approach, I continue to see strengths and weaknesses in both candidates. But the race is drawing to a close, and it is time to make a decision. Objective or not, I doubt that my decision will surprise anybody. But nevertheless, it remains to be stated: on both policy and character, one candidate clearly deserves to win this race, and the other clearly does not. I rather doubt that I will be able to match the eloquence of the editors of the New Yorker in reaching a conclusion, but at the end of the day, this is where I stand.
John McCain won his primary battle as a man of principle who was unafraid to take on his party establishment when he thought it was wrong. Not for nothing does he call himself a maverick, and it is a label which is deserved. In his long and distinguished career, he has demonstrated courage and determination, standing up for his principles on issues such as torture, clearly breaking with his party when it was wrong on issues such as global warming and the Bush tax cuts, reaching across the aisle to forge productive compromises on issues such as the confirmation of judges, and seeing the bigger picture by calling for a surge of troops to prevent failure in Iraq long before it became administration policy. Crucially, he had sworn to conduct his campaign in an honorable way and had, by and large, always been a man who delivered when it came to treating his opponents with respect. On all of those points, and on many others besides, his judgment was sound. Here was a man above the fray of interest groups, it was thought; here was a man who could be counted on to do the right thing when it counted.
I have no doubt that John McCain is still the same man that he always was. But what has become clear over the past few months is that John McCain is not a man who is able to run a campaign, let alone a country. He has surrounded himself with advisors who don’t get along with each other, and he has allowed them to persuade him of the wrong things and to dominate his campaign’s substance and style in ways that John McCain the Senator would never have countenanced. John McCain the presidential candidate has lost control of his message and his overall narrative; he has pandered shamelessly; and he has made extremely poor decisions.
As a New York Times magazine piece made clear this week, no-one is really sure what John McCain’s central campaign theme is about. Was he the man of determination who kept on going when he knew he was right, even when he was left all alone with his principles? Was he a post-partisan proponent of good policy who was willing to break with his party whenever it was necessary? Was he a staunch conservative who was a champion of small government, tax cuts and balanced budgets? Was he a genuine American hero who survived unimaginable torment through his love for his country? Was he an honorable man who would fight an honorable campaign? Was he a fighter who would do what it takes to win? Was he the paragon of experience who knew how to get things done? Was he the agent of change who would sweep the corrupt old ways out of Washington? His campaign has attempted to be all of these things and more. Even when these various different narratives do not contradict each other, his campaign tactics have undermined them. His opponent, on the other hand, has had a single main message – change – and has stuck to it.
His decisions and stances throughout the campaign have done much to undermine his credibility. Is the man who spoke out so forthrightly against torture really the same man who condemned in the most outraged terms a Supreme Court ruling that was hostile to the set-up in Guantanamo Bay, and who now seems to think that it’s fine for US government employees to engage in acts of torture as long as they’re in the intelligence services and not in the military? Is the man who has opposed President Bush – and, crucially, his operating style and his mode of governing – so openly and proudly really the same man who picked Sarah Palin to be his running mate – a VP nominee whose social conservatism and contempt of limitations to her power resembles nothing so much as an even more extreme version of the sitting President? Is this man of such sound judgment really the same man who decided he was willing to put the grossly inexperienced Palin a heartbeat away from the Presidency and who bounced around in a panicky and impotent way when trying to demonstrate his statesman-like stature in the face of financial crisis?
This chaotic, counterproductive and entirely badly organized campaign has been hurt the most, perhaps, by the style by which it has put itself across. McCain’s original formulation was that he was a man of experience who would bring a change to Washington through his demonstrated commitment to a more enlightened mode of political discourse. Respect for your opponent and a focus on policy not personality were the McCain hallmarks. His decision to pick Palin as his running mate completely undercut his “experience” argument, and his decision to run a hideously negative campaign against his opponent undercut his argument that he would bring a new way of working to Washington. Attack ads like the “Celebrity” spot, comparing Obama to Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, are par for the course (and may have had a point). But it is his policy-related ads that have done the most damage to his reputation. The infamous spot saying that Obama favored comprehensive sex education for six-year-olds fell at the extreme end of this spectrum, as did his repeated invocation of a mostly non-existent relationship between Obama and Bill Ayers, a former domestic terrorist. But most insidious were the repeated and knowing misstatements about Obama’s core policies. Repeatedly pronouncing that Obama wants to “raise your taxes” and introduce “socialized medicine” were demonstrably untrue, and McCain’s statistics were repeatedly and comprehensively debunked. Yet he kept using them and continues to plug away at them, meaning that his campaign has knowingly pressed on in spreading what are, effectively, lies about his opponent. Such a strategy can charitably be called mendacious, and for a self-professed man of honor to engage in such behavior is very sad indeed. There are no two ways about it: John McCain has run a dishonorable campaign and ought to be ashamed of himself. So much for bringing civility back to political discourse, and indeed, so much for running a campaign based on policy.
And it is policy that is the final straw. McCain has not been a policy-oriented candidate. He has promised solutions to problems that will not work (such as drilling for oil offshore to alleviate high petrol prices), and he has made impossible promises (such as his pledge to eliminate a $600bn federal deficit through controlling discretionary spending which only totals $18bn). His health care plan is of dubious utility. His tax cuts would mostly benefit the wealthy. And most importantly, his economic packages (which at one point seemed to change every couple of days) demonstrate a genuine lack of understanding of economic issues. He is not a candidate who is able to engage in meaningful conversations about economics or about the current crisis, and he certainly is not a candidate who has offered constructive solutions. Even his main strength, foreign policy, has become a liability. He is unable to offer any strategy for Iraq apart from keeping troops there until they achieve “victory”, a poorly-defined word that David Petraeus refuses to use and that even the Bush Administration has backed away from. He has called for an unworkable “League of Democracies” to confront tomorrow’s challenges, a concept that would be immensely counter-productive. Worst of all, he has blundered and gaffed his way through the campaign – hardly the sign of a candidate who is clearly on top of the issues, and a particular problem considering his age.
There is no doubt that McCain does understand foreign policy issues at a great level of depth and with considerable ability. But he has failed to put this across. And there are considerable doubts about his understanding of domestic issues, and even about the extent to which he would prioritize the difficult choices and domestic challenges that the next president will have a unique opportunity to address. His stumbling performance in debates and on the campaign trail, his inability to manage his campaign properly, his failure to behave in a statesmanlike manner, his willingness to employ the most distasteful tactics; all these things and more show that John McCain, a distinguished man of intelligence and integrity, is out of his depth and, quite possibly, just too old. Even after all of this, his record suggests that he might not be too bad as President, especially given the extent to which his powers would be constrained by a Democratic Congress. But after the campaign that he has run, he does not deserve to be given the chance.
Barack Obama, in the meantime, was not ready to be President in 2007 when he started running for it. The soaring rhetoric of his 2004 speech at the Democratic National Convention was not replicated in the surprisingly plodding stump speeches that he made on the campaign trail. His policy prescriptions were slight and shallow. His legislative achievements were minimal. By putting himself up against the formidable machine of Hillary Clinton’s campaign after just four years in the Senate, he seemed presumptuous and unready.
It is possible to argue that Obama did not so much beat Clinton as manage to stay in the game long enough for her to defeat herself; her campaign was marked by disorganization and waste. A formidable campaigner, she showed in places like New Hampshire and Pennsylvania that she had what it took to win when it counted. But to suggest that the election was hers to lose and she lost it through her own mistakes would be a grave mistake that discounts the organizational brilliance and strategic insight of the Obama campaign. This starts with the candidate himself.
Barack Obama is a breath of fresh air in politics, his past in Illinois as a local politician on the up notwithstanding. The reason why he inspires is not because he is a black man, nor is it because his policy prescriptions are particularly original or brilliant. The reason why he inspires is that he is that rare politician who seems utterly genuine, who opens up about how he feels and what he is thinking, who is not afraid to be intelligent and who is willing to treat voters as adults rather than fobbing them off with tried and tested political tricks and canned soundbites. His public persona is decent and open, and he is able to transcend his unusual upbringing by connecting to ordinary voters through his intelligence and openness. Capping this off is a gift for soaring rhetoric that puts one in mind of the great orators of the past: if elected, he is sure to join John F. Kennedy and Winston Churchill on mugs, calendars and inscriptions on walls where great quotes lurk forevermore. He is young and somehow apart from the political scene that envelops most Senators, though opponents will forget that he is indeed a politician at their peril.
The greatest thing about Obama in this campaign, however, has been his response to adversity. His solution to unreadiness has not been the Sarah Palin approach of floundering around and being pictured next to great people, but rather a determined effort to turn weakness into strength. When his stump speeches were deficient, he overhauled them and created the reliably inspiring style that we are familiar with today. When his campaign was up against most of the Democratic party machine which Hillary Clinton had locked up in her favor right after the 2004 election, he came up with an approach to organizing a campaign that relied on young people, new technologies of social networking and broad-based fundraising, and determined outreach to specific people that he needed onside. When the thinness of his policies was clearly a liability, he bolstered his campaign staff with a new generation of policy thinkers and a framework for getting them to produce excellent plans that were politically workable. In short, when he didn’t know something or couldn’t do something, he learned about it and made it happen. By the time his primary campaign was over, he had a much more detailed policy platform than John McCain, and a much better thought-through one. His policies eschewed easy solutions in favor of complicated realities – no gas tax holidays here – while proposing a fundamental realignment of American political discourse away from the increasingly discredited conservative policies of the Reagan revolution on healthcare, education, social policy and taxation and a move towards a more caring, equitable society. By preparing with such meticulous detail, he has somehow managed to become the candidate of competency, with joined up policies and a command of the detail that have allowed him to calmly bat away the McCain campaign’s misleading allegations and respond with confidence and authority. When John McCain, in the debates, attacked Obama’s policies, it was astonishing that Obama could so calmly explain why McCain’s premise was unsound, what his policies actually were, and then pivot to what McCain’s policies were and how they were deficient – a remarkably effortless success in painting his opponent’s platform in his own terms. Far from coming away knowing that Obama would raise taxes, for example, most viewers will have come away knowing that Obama’s economic plan would lower taxes for 95% of taxpayers, even if this statistic has some caveats of its own.
He has responded well in other situations, too, demonstrating a calm and level-headed ability to respond to crises. When the Reverend Wright controversy kicked up in the spring, Obama’s idea of damage control was to make a major speech on race that defused the issue in political circles through its empathy and intelligence. As he explained later, he made a choice to treat voters as grown-ups rather than patronizing them with the usual political tactics of distancing and repudiation (although those, too, came later). When cornered in the primaries, for example after Clinton’s wins in Pennsylvania and Ohio, he calmly stuck to the game plan instead of panicking and changing course; similarly, when McCain enjoyed a post-convention, post-Palin bounce, Democrats screamed for Obama to go on the offensive and he refused, sticking again to the game plan and calmly waiting out the end of McCain’s unsustainable lead. His refusal to panic even when Republicans attacked him on the most outrageous basis or in the face of major shocks to the country’s situation, has marked him out as being above the fray and statesmanlike. While McCain has seen his approval ratings fall as a result of his negative attacks and his flailing around helplessly in the face of a financial crisis that he did not understand, Obama has been cautious and constructive and has appeared more in-control, more mature, and – crucially – more presidential. Slow but steady has put him in command of a race that just a month ago was looking very close indeed.
All of this steadiness has extended to his longer-term preparations too. His selection of Joe Biden as running mate, who has been of little use on the campaign trail and occasionally a liability, has given him a wise old Washington hand to advise him closely if he wins. He has been cultivating senior figures in both parties to join his cabinet. His detailed policies will form the basis for negotiations with Congress and are intended to actually solve problems in a sustainable way, not just to grandstand prior to the election. He has kept crucial flexibility even in areas such as his much-vaunted timeline for withdrawing from Iraq. And he has weighed in intelligently on current policy questions such as how best to implement America’s financial rescue package. His maturity, intelligence and understanding of the issues shows every sign of continuing unhesitatingly into a post-election world – should he manage to win. This is not presumptuousness, as the McCain campaign claims: it is simply good practice. If John McCain is not doing the exact same thing, then voters have another reason to hesitate before voting for him.
The icing on the cake of all of this is the value of Obama as an individual who would bring together a nation that has been tearing itself apart for 8 years and who would restore America’s stature in the world. There is great value in symbolism, and an America which succeeded in electing anyone other than a white male would be an America that was looking forward and putting its past inequalities behind it. Obama is not a “black” candidate, but rather a post-racial candidate, one who understands division and prejudice and has chosen to rise above it, choosing to believe that people can get along and that America can improve. It is not simply racial reconciliation that he would deliver, however, but cultural reconciliation as well. Obama is too young to have participated in the culture wars of the 1960s and 1970s, too young to have been either one of the hippies who protested against Vietnam or one of the stern conservatives who reviled drugs and loose morals and supported the war. He speaks to a generation that was not divided into those who served in uniform and those who didn’t, that is relaxed about drug use and sexual mores, and understands modern technologies and their many uses. He is the counterpart on the left of those Christian conservatives who choose to focus more on creation care and loving thy neighbor than they do on abortion and intelligent design. He represents a post-ideological generation that is intelligent, practical and results-oriented, and this appeal enables him – when he wants to – to transcend politics in a way that few politicians before him have been able to do. In short, a victory for Obama would redefine the terms of reference for American politics and herald a real change in political methods and values that would be important and long-lasting. This election is an epoch-making moment, much as the 1968 election could have been and the 1980 election was. A President Obama would catapult America into the sorts of political discourse that the rest of the world takes for granted, and could potentially change the game for good. And this is all before even considering the impact of America having a President that the rest of the world could look up to, an effect which would restore American stature to heights that it has comprehensively lost over the last two decades.
Now, I am conscious that it is easy to be taken in by hyberbole, and it may well be that much of the breathless optimism that characterizes much of the conversation about Obama (my previous paragraph included) will not come true. No President can ever implement the policy platform that they run on owing to the dominance of Congress. Idealism is inevitably tempered by the realities of governing, which involves considerable horse trading and many messy compromises. And America will never return to the levels of global leadership that it enjoyed during the Cold War, when it was the leader and protector of the free world and emerging economies had yet to begin emerging.
But the choice that faces the American people this November 4th is between a candidate who has a shot at pushing America in a forward-looking, optimistic, dynamic direction, and a candidate who does not. It is a choice between a candidate who has an excellently prepared set of policy proposals that might just be workable and would promote equity and economic dynamism, and a candidate who does not. It is a choice between a calm, clear-minded and detail-oriented candidate who understands the world in which we live and how it works, and a candidate who, regrettably, does not seem to. And it is a choice between a candidate who has the good judgment and organizational acumen to turn America’s polarized and unpleasant politics into something better – and one who does not.
The candidate who can do these things is Barack Obama, and the candidate who cannot is John McCain. McCain has run a poor campaign, and Obama has run an excellent one; McCain does not have the policies, the understanding or (apparently) the good judgment to turn the current situation around, and Obama does. Most of all, McCain is a candidate of the past, and Obama is a candidate of the future. For the sake of America and the world, when Americans make their decision about who should lead them for the next four years, they should choose Barack Obama, and I will join the hundreds of millions of people in America and around the world in hoping fervently that they make the right choice.
It goes without saying that I am not a journalist. But, as is my wont, I have tried to be evenhanded in all of my various bits of writing about this campaign. I firmly believe that the responsibility of any voter (or, as in my case, purportedly objective observer) is to allow themselves to be open to persuasion on matters of policy and character. It is the place of the campaigns to argue the issues, and, through their conduct, to demonstrate what sort of man or woman their candidate is and what style they would adopt in governing. It is the place of the voter to observe and to listen, and to weigh the candidates’ positions and personalities on their merits. For a political order to be optimistic and forward-looking, we the masses must banish our cynicism and be prepared to show respect to any person who is clever and hard-working enough to reach the pinnacle of their careers nearly at the top of the greasy pole; we must assume that they are in possession of impressive quantities of intelligence, pluck and charisma. Furthermore, we must be willing to give those people who we do not agree with the benefit of the doubt. It is possible for someone to be highly principled – and loyal to their principles – without professing policies that we personally would agree with. In a world where more and more we are able to choose our sources of information, and in a world where we increasingly only choose sources of information which profess views that we already agree with, it is easy to lose sight of this.
In light of this approach, I continue to see strengths and weaknesses in both candidates. But the race is drawing to a close, and it is time to make a decision. Objective or not, I doubt that my decision will surprise anybody. But nevertheless, it remains to be stated: on both policy and character, one candidate clearly deserves to win this race, and the other clearly does not. I rather doubt that I will be able to match the eloquence of the editors of the New Yorker in reaching a conclusion, but at the end of the day, this is where I stand.
John McCain won his primary battle as a man of principle who was unafraid to take on his party establishment when he thought it was wrong. Not for nothing does he call himself a maverick, and it is a label which is deserved. In his long and distinguished career, he has demonstrated courage and determination, standing up for his principles on issues such as torture, clearly breaking with his party when it was wrong on issues such as global warming and the Bush tax cuts, reaching across the aisle to forge productive compromises on issues such as the confirmation of judges, and seeing the bigger picture by calling for a surge of troops to prevent failure in Iraq long before it became administration policy. Crucially, he had sworn to conduct his campaign in an honorable way and had, by and large, always been a man who delivered when it came to treating his opponents with respect. On all of those points, and on many others besides, his judgment was sound. Here was a man above the fray of interest groups, it was thought; here was a man who could be counted on to do the right thing when it counted.
I have no doubt that John McCain is still the same man that he always was. But what has become clear over the past few months is that John McCain is not a man who is able to run a campaign, let alone a country. He has surrounded himself with advisors who don’t get along with each other, and he has allowed them to persuade him of the wrong things and to dominate his campaign’s substance and style in ways that John McCain the Senator would never have countenanced. John McCain the presidential candidate has lost control of his message and his overall narrative; he has pandered shamelessly; and he has made extremely poor decisions.
As a New York Times magazine piece made clear this week, no-one is really sure what John McCain’s central campaign theme is about. Was he the man of determination who kept on going when he knew he was right, even when he was left all alone with his principles? Was he a post-partisan proponent of good policy who was willing to break with his party whenever it was necessary? Was he a staunch conservative who was a champion of small government, tax cuts and balanced budgets? Was he a genuine American hero who survived unimaginable torment through his love for his country? Was he an honorable man who would fight an honorable campaign? Was he a fighter who would do what it takes to win? Was he the paragon of experience who knew how to get things done? Was he the agent of change who would sweep the corrupt old ways out of Washington? His campaign has attempted to be all of these things and more. Even when these various different narratives do not contradict each other, his campaign tactics have undermined them. His opponent, on the other hand, has had a single main message – change – and has stuck to it.
His decisions and stances throughout the campaign have done much to undermine his credibility. Is the man who spoke out so forthrightly against torture really the same man who condemned in the most outraged terms a Supreme Court ruling that was hostile to the set-up in Guantanamo Bay, and who now seems to think that it’s fine for US government employees to engage in acts of torture as long as they’re in the intelligence services and not in the military? Is the man who has opposed President Bush – and, crucially, his operating style and his mode of governing – so openly and proudly really the same man who picked Sarah Palin to be his running mate – a VP nominee whose social conservatism and contempt of limitations to her power resembles nothing so much as an even more extreme version of the sitting President? Is this man of such sound judgment really the same man who decided he was willing to put the grossly inexperienced Palin a heartbeat away from the Presidency and who bounced around in a panicky and impotent way when trying to demonstrate his statesman-like stature in the face of financial crisis?
This chaotic, counterproductive and entirely badly organized campaign has been hurt the most, perhaps, by the style by which it has put itself across. McCain’s original formulation was that he was a man of experience who would bring a change to Washington through his demonstrated commitment to a more enlightened mode of political discourse. Respect for your opponent and a focus on policy not personality were the McCain hallmarks. His decision to pick Palin as his running mate completely undercut his “experience” argument, and his decision to run a hideously negative campaign against his opponent undercut his argument that he would bring a new way of working to Washington. Attack ads like the “Celebrity” spot, comparing Obama to Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, are par for the course (and may have had a point). But it is his policy-related ads that have done the most damage to his reputation. The infamous spot saying that Obama favored comprehensive sex education for six-year-olds fell at the extreme end of this spectrum, as did his repeated invocation of a mostly non-existent relationship between Obama and Bill Ayers, a former domestic terrorist. But most insidious were the repeated and knowing misstatements about Obama’s core policies. Repeatedly pronouncing that Obama wants to “raise your taxes” and introduce “socialized medicine” were demonstrably untrue, and McCain’s statistics were repeatedly and comprehensively debunked. Yet he kept using them and continues to plug away at them, meaning that his campaign has knowingly pressed on in spreading what are, effectively, lies about his opponent. Such a strategy can charitably be called mendacious, and for a self-professed man of honor to engage in such behavior is very sad indeed. There are no two ways about it: John McCain has run a dishonorable campaign and ought to be ashamed of himself. So much for bringing civility back to political discourse, and indeed, so much for running a campaign based on policy.
And it is policy that is the final straw. McCain has not been a policy-oriented candidate. He has promised solutions to problems that will not work (such as drilling for oil offshore to alleviate high petrol prices), and he has made impossible promises (such as his pledge to eliminate a $600bn federal deficit through controlling discretionary spending which only totals $18bn). His health care plan is of dubious utility. His tax cuts would mostly benefit the wealthy. And most importantly, his economic packages (which at one point seemed to change every couple of days) demonstrate a genuine lack of understanding of economic issues. He is not a candidate who is able to engage in meaningful conversations about economics or about the current crisis, and he certainly is not a candidate who has offered constructive solutions. Even his main strength, foreign policy, has become a liability. He is unable to offer any strategy for Iraq apart from keeping troops there until they achieve “victory”, a poorly-defined word that David Petraeus refuses to use and that even the Bush Administration has backed away from. He has called for an unworkable “League of Democracies” to confront tomorrow’s challenges, a concept that would be immensely counter-productive. Worst of all, he has blundered and gaffed his way through the campaign – hardly the sign of a candidate who is clearly on top of the issues, and a particular problem considering his age.
There is no doubt that McCain does understand foreign policy issues at a great level of depth and with considerable ability. But he has failed to put this across. And there are considerable doubts about his understanding of domestic issues, and even about the extent to which he would prioritize the difficult choices and domestic challenges that the next president will have a unique opportunity to address. His stumbling performance in debates and on the campaign trail, his inability to manage his campaign properly, his failure to behave in a statesmanlike manner, his willingness to employ the most distasteful tactics; all these things and more show that John McCain, a distinguished man of intelligence and integrity, is out of his depth and, quite possibly, just too old. Even after all of this, his record suggests that he might not be too bad as President, especially given the extent to which his powers would be constrained by a Democratic Congress. But after the campaign that he has run, he does not deserve to be given the chance.
Barack Obama, in the meantime, was not ready to be President in 2007 when he started running for it. The soaring rhetoric of his 2004 speech at the Democratic National Convention was not replicated in the surprisingly plodding stump speeches that he made on the campaign trail. His policy prescriptions were slight and shallow. His legislative achievements were minimal. By putting himself up against the formidable machine of Hillary Clinton’s campaign after just four years in the Senate, he seemed presumptuous and unready.
It is possible to argue that Obama did not so much beat Clinton as manage to stay in the game long enough for her to defeat herself; her campaign was marked by disorganization and waste. A formidable campaigner, she showed in places like New Hampshire and Pennsylvania that she had what it took to win when it counted. But to suggest that the election was hers to lose and she lost it through her own mistakes would be a grave mistake that discounts the organizational brilliance and strategic insight of the Obama campaign. This starts with the candidate himself.
Barack Obama is a breath of fresh air in politics, his past in Illinois as a local politician on the up notwithstanding. The reason why he inspires is not because he is a black man, nor is it because his policy prescriptions are particularly original or brilliant. The reason why he inspires is that he is that rare politician who seems utterly genuine, who opens up about how he feels and what he is thinking, who is not afraid to be intelligent and who is willing to treat voters as adults rather than fobbing them off with tried and tested political tricks and canned soundbites. His public persona is decent and open, and he is able to transcend his unusual upbringing by connecting to ordinary voters through his intelligence and openness. Capping this off is a gift for soaring rhetoric that puts one in mind of the great orators of the past: if elected, he is sure to join John F. Kennedy and Winston Churchill on mugs, calendars and inscriptions on walls where great quotes lurk forevermore. He is young and somehow apart from the political scene that envelops most Senators, though opponents will forget that he is indeed a politician at their peril.
The greatest thing about Obama in this campaign, however, has been his response to adversity. His solution to unreadiness has not been the Sarah Palin approach of floundering around and being pictured next to great people, but rather a determined effort to turn weakness into strength. When his stump speeches were deficient, he overhauled them and created the reliably inspiring style that we are familiar with today. When his campaign was up against most of the Democratic party machine which Hillary Clinton had locked up in her favor right after the 2004 election, he came up with an approach to organizing a campaign that relied on young people, new technologies of social networking and broad-based fundraising, and determined outreach to specific people that he needed onside. When the thinness of his policies was clearly a liability, he bolstered his campaign staff with a new generation of policy thinkers and a framework for getting them to produce excellent plans that were politically workable. In short, when he didn’t know something or couldn’t do something, he learned about it and made it happen. By the time his primary campaign was over, he had a much more detailed policy platform than John McCain, and a much better thought-through one. His policies eschewed easy solutions in favor of complicated realities – no gas tax holidays here – while proposing a fundamental realignment of American political discourse away from the increasingly discredited conservative policies of the Reagan revolution on healthcare, education, social policy and taxation and a move towards a more caring, equitable society. By preparing with such meticulous detail, he has somehow managed to become the candidate of competency, with joined up policies and a command of the detail that have allowed him to calmly bat away the McCain campaign’s misleading allegations and respond with confidence and authority. When John McCain, in the debates, attacked Obama’s policies, it was astonishing that Obama could so calmly explain why McCain’s premise was unsound, what his policies actually were, and then pivot to what McCain’s policies were and how they were deficient – a remarkably effortless success in painting his opponent’s platform in his own terms. Far from coming away knowing that Obama would raise taxes, for example, most viewers will have come away knowing that Obama’s economic plan would lower taxes for 95% of taxpayers, even if this statistic has some caveats of its own.
He has responded well in other situations, too, demonstrating a calm and level-headed ability to respond to crises. When the Reverend Wright controversy kicked up in the spring, Obama’s idea of damage control was to make a major speech on race that defused the issue in political circles through its empathy and intelligence. As he explained later, he made a choice to treat voters as grown-ups rather than patronizing them with the usual political tactics of distancing and repudiation (although those, too, came later). When cornered in the primaries, for example after Clinton’s wins in Pennsylvania and Ohio, he calmly stuck to the game plan instead of panicking and changing course; similarly, when McCain enjoyed a post-convention, post-Palin bounce, Democrats screamed for Obama to go on the offensive and he refused, sticking again to the game plan and calmly waiting out the end of McCain’s unsustainable lead. His refusal to panic even when Republicans attacked him on the most outrageous basis or in the face of major shocks to the country’s situation, has marked him out as being above the fray and statesmanlike. While McCain has seen his approval ratings fall as a result of his negative attacks and his flailing around helplessly in the face of a financial crisis that he did not understand, Obama has been cautious and constructive and has appeared more in-control, more mature, and – crucially – more presidential. Slow but steady has put him in command of a race that just a month ago was looking very close indeed.
All of this steadiness has extended to his longer-term preparations too. His selection of Joe Biden as running mate, who has been of little use on the campaign trail and occasionally a liability, has given him a wise old Washington hand to advise him closely if he wins. He has been cultivating senior figures in both parties to join his cabinet. His detailed policies will form the basis for negotiations with Congress and are intended to actually solve problems in a sustainable way, not just to grandstand prior to the election. He has kept crucial flexibility even in areas such as his much-vaunted timeline for withdrawing from Iraq. And he has weighed in intelligently on current policy questions such as how best to implement America’s financial rescue package. His maturity, intelligence and understanding of the issues shows every sign of continuing unhesitatingly into a post-election world – should he manage to win. This is not presumptuousness, as the McCain campaign claims: it is simply good practice. If John McCain is not doing the exact same thing, then voters have another reason to hesitate before voting for him.
The icing on the cake of all of this is the value of Obama as an individual who would bring together a nation that has been tearing itself apart for 8 years and who would restore America’s stature in the world. There is great value in symbolism, and an America which succeeded in electing anyone other than a white male would be an America that was looking forward and putting its past inequalities behind it. Obama is not a “black” candidate, but rather a post-racial candidate, one who understands division and prejudice and has chosen to rise above it, choosing to believe that people can get along and that America can improve. It is not simply racial reconciliation that he would deliver, however, but cultural reconciliation as well. Obama is too young to have participated in the culture wars of the 1960s and 1970s, too young to have been either one of the hippies who protested against Vietnam or one of the stern conservatives who reviled drugs and loose morals and supported the war. He speaks to a generation that was not divided into those who served in uniform and those who didn’t, that is relaxed about drug use and sexual mores, and understands modern technologies and their many uses. He is the counterpart on the left of those Christian conservatives who choose to focus more on creation care and loving thy neighbor than they do on abortion and intelligent design. He represents a post-ideological generation that is intelligent, practical and results-oriented, and this appeal enables him – when he wants to – to transcend politics in a way that few politicians before him have been able to do. In short, a victory for Obama would redefine the terms of reference for American politics and herald a real change in political methods and values that would be important and long-lasting. This election is an epoch-making moment, much as the 1968 election could have been and the 1980 election was. A President Obama would catapult America into the sorts of political discourse that the rest of the world takes for granted, and could potentially change the game for good. And this is all before even considering the impact of America having a President that the rest of the world could look up to, an effect which would restore American stature to heights that it has comprehensively lost over the last two decades.
Now, I am conscious that it is easy to be taken in by hyberbole, and it may well be that much of the breathless optimism that characterizes much of the conversation about Obama (my previous paragraph included) will not come true. No President can ever implement the policy platform that they run on owing to the dominance of Congress. Idealism is inevitably tempered by the realities of governing, which involves considerable horse trading and many messy compromises. And America will never return to the levels of global leadership that it enjoyed during the Cold War, when it was the leader and protector of the free world and emerging economies had yet to begin emerging.
But the choice that faces the American people this November 4th is between a candidate who has a shot at pushing America in a forward-looking, optimistic, dynamic direction, and a candidate who does not. It is a choice between a candidate who has an excellently prepared set of policy proposals that might just be workable and would promote equity and economic dynamism, and a candidate who does not. It is a choice between a calm, clear-minded and detail-oriented candidate who understands the world in which we live and how it works, and a candidate who, regrettably, does not seem to. And it is a choice between a candidate who has the good judgment and organizational acumen to turn America’s polarized and unpleasant politics into something better – and one who does not.
The candidate who can do these things is Barack Obama, and the candidate who cannot is John McCain. McCain has run a poor campaign, and Obama has run an excellent one; McCain does not have the policies, the understanding or (apparently) the good judgment to turn the current situation around, and Obama does. Most of all, McCain is a candidate of the past, and Obama is a candidate of the future. For the sake of America and the world, when Americans make their decision about who should lead them for the next four years, they should choose Barack Obama, and I will join the hundreds of millions of people in America and around the world in hoping fervently that they make the right choice.
Friday, September 26, 2008
Spotted in an Alice Munro story in the New Yorker
Away
by Walter de la Mare
There is no sorrow
Time heals never;
No loss, betrayal,
Beyond repair.
Balm for the soul, then,
Though grave shall sever
Lover from loved
And all they share.
See, the sweet sun shines,
The shower is over;
Flowers preen their beauty,
The day how fair!
Brood not too closely
On love or duty;
Friends long forgotten
May wait you where
Life with death
Brings all to an issue;
None will long mourn for you,
Pray for you, miss you,
Your place left vacant,
You not there.
by Walter de la Mare
There is no sorrow
Time heals never;
No loss, betrayal,
Beyond repair.
Balm for the soul, then,
Though grave shall sever
Lover from loved
And all they share.
See, the sweet sun shines,
The shower is over;
Flowers preen their beauty,
The day how fair!
Brood not too closely
On love or duty;
Friends long forgotten
May wait you where
Life with death
Brings all to an issue;
None will long mourn for you,
Pray for you, miss you,
Your place left vacant,
You not there.
