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Dramatis Personae

Donald Trump: President-Elect
Barack Obama: Outgoing President
John Roberts: Chief Justice of the Supreme Court (And a good judge too!)
Bill Clinton: A former President
Hillary Clinton: A former Secretary of State
Al Gore: A former Vice-President
Chorus of Senators, Representatives, and Townspeople.

Act I. Scene: Washington D.C. A frigid winter day. The familiar landmarks seen in the background. TRUMP discovered standing at podium.

TRUMP: Well, well, at long last the fruits of my eighteen months’ labor are to be crowned with inestimable glory. At noon today, I shall finally achieve the august rank of President, defying all the many baleful prophecies set forth by the ignorant laymen and avowed antagonists of my singular quest. The prospect is Elysian–big league!

(Enter BARACK OBAMA, BILL and HILLARY CLINTON, AL GORE and Chorus. Chorus seen begging OBAMA in a furious state of agitation.)

OBAMA: There’s no getting out of it. The law is the law. At 12 o’ clock today, I relinquish control of the office to my elected successor.

(Chorus much dejected)

OBAMA (aside): Never mind my misgivings about his personality, or his total contempt for my liberal policy agenda; not to mention his hiring investigators to find evidence that I am not a legitimate president. I’m a constitutional lawyer–it’s built into my, er, constitution– and respect for the law, unpleasant as it may be, is paramount! (aloud, to TRUMP) Well look, Donald, I certainly wish you the best with your efforts to undo everything I have done. I have heard it said that you wish to, er, how does it go? “Make America Great Again” by “draining the swamp” is that right?

TRUMP: Yes, that sounds like something I would say.

OBAMA: I know we have had our differences over the years, but I do hope we can put those behind us, and work together in a spirit of mutual bipartisan cooperation for the betterment of the country.

TRUMP (aside): This fellow still thinks I listen to people. Sad! (aloud) Beautiful, very very beautiful! I’ll have my people look into it.

(Enter CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS, looking harried and nervous)

TRUMP: What’s the matter with you?

OBAMA (checking his watch): The inauguration does not occur for another half-hour yet.

ROBERTS (frenzied): Stop–stop, both of you! There is a problem here.

TRUMP: Problem? What do you mean? Explain!

ROBERTS: Mr. Trump’s investigators have just completed their report on President Obama’s birth certificate and by extension, eligibility to hold office!

(OBAMA and TRUMP both much affected)

OBAMA: What!

TRUMP: I had forgotten all about that!

ROBERTS: Yes, well it seems that Mr. Obama’s birth certificate really was a forgery! They fabricated it using someone else’s birth certificate.

(OBAMA staggers in disbelief.)

TRUMP (Triumphantly): I knew it all along!

ROBERTS: But there’s more to it than that–it seems that the certificate they used was yours, Mr. Trump! They simply wrote “Hawaii” over “New York”.

TRUMP: So?

ROBERTS: So, technically you’ve already served two terms–

OBAMA (clapping TRUMP on the back) –and a fine two terms they were, if I may say so myself.

ROBERTS: –and you can’t serve a third.

TRUMP: This is ridiculous–then who is going to be President?

ROBERTS: I’ve checked into that–the results of the last three elections are all invalid, and so we can’t use those. And the winner of the two before that is obviously ineligible to serve as well. As such, I have taken the liberty of convening the court to overturn the results of Bush v. Gore.

(All gasp. ROBERTS motions GORE to step forward.)

ROBERTS: I give you: the Next President of the United States!

ALL except TRUMP: Hurrah!

GORE: Fallacy somewhere, I fancy.

All except TRUMP exeunt in jubilation. TRUMP lowers his head dejectedly.

CURTAIN

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I only watched President Obama’s speech and part of Senator Ernst’s response; I didn’t see any of the other many response speeches various Republicans gave.

Overall, I thought Obama’s speech was good, and Ernst’s was pathetic. And I’m not even commenting on content here; since what politicians say frequently has hardly any bearing on what they do.  I am strictly reviewing them both in terms of their rhetorical skill here.

There was one thing both of them did that I found annoying, although it’s incredibly common in political speeches, so I guess it’s unfair of me to pick on these two for it.  But I’m going to.  Politics isn’t fair.

First, in Obama’s speech, he said:

It begins with our economy.  Seven years ago, Rebekah and Ben Erler of Minneapolis were newlyweds.    She waited tables.  He worked construction…  “If only we had known,” Rebekah wrote to me last spring, “what was about to happen to the housing and construction market.”

As the crisis worsened, Ben’s business dried up, so he took what jobs he could find, even if they kept him on the road for long stretches of time… They sacrificed for each other.  And slowly, it paid off.

Now, I get what Obama’s trying to do here, rhetorically. He’s trying to take a macro point (“the economy was bad, but it is getting better”) and illustrate it using a micro-instance of two particular people.  He explicitly said this later on: “America, Rebekah and Ben’s story is our story.”

This isn’t a bad technique.  In fact, it can be a very good technique.  But it’s overused.  I think Obama uses it almost every speech he gives.  And it’s getting to be just too much of a cliche.  This isn’t a criticism of the couple’s story, by the way; I’m happy for them.  But Obama’s use of telling these stories has crossed from being a good way of making things “relate-able” to being something the audience can start tuning out, because we’ve heard this before.

Watching the State of the Union, I felt like I’ve seen this speech before. Like it’s the same speech every year. And part of it is due to that same “John Smith did XYZ, and that’s what makes America great” style.  It gets to feel like it’s formulaic.

Then we have Ernst’s speech, in which she said early on:

You see, growing up, I had only one good pair of shoes. So on rainy school days, my mom would slip plastic bread bags over them to keep them dry.

But I was never embarrassed. Because the school bus would be filled with rows and rows of young Iowans with bread bags slipped over their feet.

Again, she’s going with the same technique, although she did a much worse job than Obama of explaining the relevance of this to her point. Even if she had though, it would really make for compelling imagery. As it was, she reminded me of Governor Bobby Jindal’s awful State of the Union response from a few years ago.
I’m sure this technique of telling these little stories to illustrate the point was useful, back in the days when politicians would give dry speeches full of numbers and such.  It made your speech stand out.  But now, it’s such a common thing that it’s gotten to be overused, and when something is overused, people don’t pay attention to it.  I suspect a drier, more statistics-filled speech would get more attention (not to mention being better suited to Ernst’s speaking style).

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Last year, there was an online service that was in very high-demand.  It was hyped, but its rollout was very rocky. When it was released to the public, it tended to crash a lot.  It couldn’t handle the number of users it was getting.

People criticized the organization that created it for being unprepared for the number of users, and for designing the system poorly.  It was quite embarrassing, especially since the organization behind it has always been a lightning rod for controversy.

You probably think I’m talking about the Health Care website.  But I’m not. I’m talking about the video game SimCity 4. It’s not the only game that had this kind of problem, though.  Same thing happened with Diablo III in 2012.

The game companies got flak for it, too–gamers hate Electronic Arts about as much as Republicans hate President Obama, but with the additional problem that they aren’t allowed to filibuster EA’s products and demand they come back with new ones.  It’s the equivalent of if Republicans had to pass and endorse all Obama’s pet projects or else leave politics entirely.

But at what point does this sort of thing start to constitute a pattern?  When the U.S. Government and two separate large electronics companies cannot roll out a satisfactory online service, you have to wonder if anyone knows what they are doing as far as building online services.

One argument might be that in all cases, the people making the service thought so many would have to use it–because of the law in the one case, and because of the gaming industry hype machine in the others–that they felt no reason to do a good job on the service in question.

But I don’t buy that for the Health Care case, because it’s one of the major political issues of the time, and even if you are so cynical as to believe the architects don’t care about the people, many of them will find their careers riding on the success or failure of the program.  So they had good reason to make sure the product worked from the get-go.

I don’t have any real explanations for this myself.  I just think it is interesting that wealthy organizations, who ought to have enough resources to understand what they can and can’t make, keep failing at debuting web products like this.

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Now then, as I was saying, charisma is what wins Presidential elections.  The first debate proved this point quite conclusively; as Mitt Romney won it in the opinion of almost everyone simply because he seemed more energetic than the President did.  Naturally, I was shocked that Obama did so poorly, but nonetheless the general principle that charisma wins elections was upheld.

Obama returned to form, though, in the second debate and I think won it despite Romney’s best efforts to weird him out by stealing his material.  Obama is more likeable than Romney in general; so I really cannot think what happened in the first debate.  I still believe that Obama will win because of his charm, and leave the awkward, sometimes nervous looking former Governor wondering what happened.

Of course, in the matter of what they proposed to do things were very different.  Mitt Romney threw almost all conservative ideas out, and simply mimicked Obama to a great extent.  He talked about how rich people  do not need help; the middle class does, and spoke fondly of the need for government regulations.  In the second debate, he came out in favor of affirmative action, albeit awkwardly.  In the upcoming foreign policy debate, he will probably quote Howard Zinn approvingly.

Romney won the first debate, but in so doing he essentially promised to be super moderate–to out-Obama Obama, as it were.  Maybe Romney will just say whatever he thinks is likely to be popular at any given moment.  Or maybe there is a conscious and deliberate plan whereby Romney talks like the consummate “centrist” and then governs like a supply-side Republican.  But either way, the Etch-A-Sketch strategy worked like a charm.

In a way, I think these debates have been the culmination of what I talked about in this post.  There are two Rockefeller Republicans in these debates; one of them simply happens to be a Democrat.  There are differences in their personal style, in their manner, and in degrees of Rockefeller Republicanism, but that is what they both are campaigning as.

Obama is (usually) more charismatic, and so he gets the advantage among swing voters.  Of the remaining votes, I assume that most will be cast based on party loyalty.  The Democrats will vote for Obama and hope he will adhere more closely to their platform, even though he will still face opposition in Congress.  The Republicans will vote Romney because they want Obama out, and will vote automatically for the GOP candidate whoever he happens to be.

It bears repeating that Romney is probably not actually a Rockefeller Republican; he just plays one on TV.  He played a much more socially conservative kind of Republican in the primaries, and then relied on the public’s short attention span to affect his metamorphosis.   Most likely, he is a George W. Bush Republican: almost all of his policies suggest that he supports the same tax cuts and military interventionism that the last Republican did.  But saying that won’t win him any allies.

I think that Obama, meanwhile, would like to be more liberal on government spending, raising taxes, and so on.  He probably wants to be an FDR Democrat on the economy, but the political terrain is such that he can’t find a way to do that.  For one thing, I think he is more interested in achieving bipartisanship than FDR was.

Ultimately, I think Obama wins this on personal appeal.  Romney, outside of one fluky debate, seems rather arrogant and condescending.  Even in the debate he “won”, he seemed arrogant with the way he talked over the moderator.

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The New York Times has a bizarre fluff article about Paul Ryan’s fashion sense.  This isn’t really my area of expertise–he wears dark suits, like every other male politician–but the article does raise a lot of interesting questions about attractiveness and its relevance to politics.

I think that politicians in general are better looking now than they were before the advent of television and high-quality photographs.  You can’t go around looking like  Martin Van Buren and expect to be President anymore.

Martin Van Buren (Image via Wikipedia.)

Admittedly, not everyone in politics nowadays is pin-up material.  Actually, even people like Ryan, Obama, Palin and all the other supposedly attractive pols are just slightly above-average-looking people.  None of them would turn heads on the street.  But by the standards of the political arena, they look like movie stars.  I suspect this is because to be a major figure in politics, you usually have to be fairly old and spend a lot of time sitting around indoors.  This lifestyle isn’t conducive to getting on People magazine’s “Most Beautiful” list.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that two consecutive Republican Vice-Presidential nominees have been relatively young and physically fit people.  They know how much looks matter in politics.  The NYT article referenced above makes it sound like only the Republicans do this, however.  Not true.  Why, the Democrats were perhaps the first beneficiaries of the attractiveness bias, in that it provided JFK the critical edge he needed in a close race against the haggard-looking Richard Nixon.

It’s not the same thing as the “charisma” that I write about so much–both Romney and Ryan are good-looking, but not at all charismatic–but it’s related.  And if you can’t get a charismatic politician to run for your side, getting a nice-looking one is probably the next best thing.

It’s been said that “Washington is Hollywood for ugly people”.  Well, now it’s coming to be Hollywood for slightly above-average looking people.  Eventually, political strategists will decide the best thing to do is put forth incredibly telegenic puppet candidates, and having the real nitty-gritty work of running the country done behind the scenes by people who look like Karl Rove or James Carville.  Or maybe that’s already going on.

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A new poll has come out showing that only 49% of Americans think President Obama is Christian.  17% think he’s Muslim.  James Rainey writes:

The lingering questions about Obama’s faith likely come from people of two mind-sets. One is those who have an intense dislike of the president and find confirmation of all their fears in a fever swamp of conspiracy websites. Where a birth certificate is not accepted as proof of someone’s place of birth, forget about verifying something as intangible as a statement of faith.

The second factor driving up Obama’s “Muslim number” is doubtless the urge of some respondents to stick it in the pollsters’ ear — to commit a small act of defiance by giving an answer the voter knows is untrue. When the interloper in the Oval Office is deeply loathed, why credit him with anything, least that he is a Christian?

Rainey focuses his attention largely on 17% who think he is Muslim.  Probably this is because it really is incredible that anyone could honestly believe he is a devout Muslim, as so many of his actions are inconsistent with that faith.

What I wonder about is the people who answered “don’t know” or “other” in the poll.  Is there also a conspiracy theory that Obama is secretly Buddhist?  Actually, most of the people I’ve talked to who doubt Obama on this suspect that he’s an atheist, not a Muslim.  Not sure why those people would answer “don’t know”, though.

As for the results on Romney’s religion, I was surprised how many didn’t know it.  It’s one of the most notable facts about an otherwise fairly dull politician.

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World War I propaganda poster depicting Britannia and Uncle Sam. Image via Wikipedia.

An anonymous Romney adviser has allegedly told the Daily Telegraph that Romney would improve relations with Britain because:

“We are part of an Anglo-Saxon heritage, and he feels that the special relationship is special,” the adviser said of Mr Romney, adding: “The White House didn’t fully appreciate the shared history we have”.

What a lot of people are talking about is the racial angle (pardon the pun) of this alleged quote.  One thing to keep in mind is that Obama is in fact partly English on the side of his mother, Ann Dunham.  (Dunham is an English name, for one thing.) But people are thinking this is a not-too-veiled racial attack.  I’d have to say I don’t what else the point of such quote could be, although it should be noted that the Romney campaign is saying this quote is inaccurate.  Well, if so, they should sue the Telegraph for libel.  If they don’t, it might seem like their guy actually said that, and they’re lying to cover it up.

What I really want to talk about, though, is this “special relationship” stuff.  I remember there was a big dust-up back in 2009 about the “special  relationship”, when Obama gave then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown a set of DVDs as a gift.  The Prime Minister had given him a pen-holder made from the HMS Gannet.  This upset a lot of people, but from what I can tell, Brown was treated like this by virtually everyone.  He had that anti-charismatic thing (a lot like Al Gore) that made people dislike him instinctively.  So I don’t think this means Obama doesn’t like Britain.

In practice, the “special relationship” seems to work like this: the British give us their culture–actors and actresses, authors, musicians–and we give them help whenever there’s a world war.  It’s not a bad system, all told.

Seriously, though: the “special relationship” seems to have been heavily emphasized by Winston Churchill, presumably for the purpose of convincing the U.S. to intervene in World War II.  And certainly, since America was founded people who had been British, there’s no doubt the two countries have a lot in common.  However, I don’t know that it is really that “special”.  Diplomatic relationships are usually forged and dismantled based on financial or military interests, not sentimentality.  If–Heaven forbid!–the United States’ relationship with Britain deteriorated, we would no doubt start saying “well, the whole country was founded because of a war with them, after all.”

That’s really the point: a lot of this is contrived stuff for people to argue about that ultimately doesn’t mean very much.  Example:  Romney says he’ll put a bust of Winston Churchill back in the Oval Office if elected.  Big deal.  I admire Churchill, but that really doesn’t matter very much in the scheme of things.  This is all a lot of pointless fighting over symbolism, as far as I’m concerned.

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People are lauding Chief Justice Roberts for his decision.  It seems like he doesn’t like the law, but decided against overturning it because he felt there was not much of an argument for doing so.  Which is what Judges are supposed to do.  Don’t take my word for it, though.  Take this guy’s:

Anyway, it is rather funny that what saved the law was interpreting it as a “tax”.  The Democrats tried to desperately not to call it that, because people hate taxes, but in the end that is what it needed to be to stand.

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You know that “charisma” stuff I go on about all the time on here?  The quality that is more important than any other to winning elections?

Romney doesn’t have it.

I know, that’s not news.  But it never ceases to amaze me how singularly lacking he is in this quality.

I was listening to a snippet of some speech of his on the radio.  It bored me.  That’s a bad sign for him; if he were a half-way charismatic fellow, he’d have had me outraged.  All the charismatic people on the Republican side can make do that.  But Romney is just dull.

You don’t even have to consider the content of their speeches–and Heaven knows, too many voters probably don’t–to see the difference.  Obama sounds passionate and fired up when he speaks, whereas Romney’s voice sort of cracks whenever he tries to raise his voice to a powerful crescendo.

Sure, tons of people will vote for Romney because they hate Obama.  People are either going to vote for Obama or against him, but nobody is going to vote for Mitt Romney.  He is just hoping that enough people will hate the incumbent to vote him in.  That was the strategy for the last uncharismatic guy from Massachusetts, too.

And now there are rumors that his campaign plans to “avoid John McCain’s mistake”–to wit, make a dull pick, without any charisma, the opposite of Sarah Palin.  This is also a terrible idea, though speaking as one who hopes Romney does not get elected, it pleases me greatly.

I suspect that, in the end, Palin helped McCain’s 2008 campaign.  Yes, you read that right.  It is true that she made a fool of herself in her interviews, but what of that?   The Republican base does not believe anything in the mainstream press, and consequently explained that away as “media bias”.

You say: “but she alienated the moderates”.  No, she didn’t.  The moderates were already alienated, because they were going to vote for Obama no matter what.  No one except a die-hard Republican was going to vote for John McCain, and even they didn’t like him much.  Palin served to energize the only group which would even consider voting for John McCain.  From a purely strategic point of view, she was a good pick.  A rotten candidate, but a good pick.  Curious how that can happen.

Anyway, if the Romney people do decide to double down on dullness, I think it will signify that the people running his campaign are basically counting on a massive economic disaster to make Obama unpopular.  And I suppose that could happen.  Kind of sad, though, if your entire campaign depends on something like that.

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So, I was reading an article about the late George Romney’s eligibility for the Presidency when I made an interesting discovery. According to the Reuters article:

[T]he Congressional Research Service declared that the practical, legal meaning of “natural born citizen” would “most likely include” not only anyone born on U.S. soil but anyone born overseas of at least one parent who was a U.S. citizen. [Emphasis mine.]

So, I looked into it. Here is the only paper I could find by the Congressional Research Service on the matter. And it quotes from the case United States v. Carlos Jesus Marguet-Pillado, in which a Court said:

No one disputes that Marguet-Pillado’s requested instruction was “an accurate statement of the law,” in that it correctly stated the two circumstances in which an individual born in 1968 is a natural born United States citizen: (1) that the person was born in the United States or (2) born outside the United States to a biologically-related United States citizen parent who met certain residency requirements. [Emphasis mine, again.]

So, let’s review: Obama’s mother was born in Wichita, Kansas. She was therefore a U.S. Citizen. Consequently, by this definition, Obama is a natural born citizen no matter where he was born. So there, conspiracy theorists: even if your “born-in-Kenya” idea proved to be entirely true, it doesn’t automatically make him ineligible.

Incidentally, I would have thought someone in the mainstream press would have pointed this out to Donald Trump and that crowd, instead of merely stringing them along to generate a farcical diversion from serious matters.