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The Week has a summary of the reaction to President Obama filling out a bracket for the NCAA basketball tournament, and notes that, predictably, the Republicans think it’s just awful that he would do such a thing with the terrible disaster in Japan and the unrest in the Middle East going on.

It’s similar to the situation back in June, when people were upset at Obama for playing golf and BP CEO Tony Hayward for attending a yacht race when the oil spill was going on. At the time, I wrote:

“The fact is, there is nothing that either Hayward or Obama need to do that they cannot do from a yacht race or a golf course. I suspect that at their level, almost all of their “oversight” can be done using cell phones.”

Same logic applies here. There’s probably not much Obama can do about these things other than put the right people in charge of those areas and perhaps make some calls.

But, as we all know, it is as much how they are perceived as what they actually do that matters for a President–or any high-ranking leader. (Republican strategist Lee Atwater supposedly said that “perception is reality”, though I think that quote–and I know that sentiment–predate him by quite a bit.)

I suspect, of course, that a politician’s charisma is what really determines the contemporary consensus on whether whatever they choose to do in a crisis is judged “good crisis handling” or “bad crisis handling’. But it might just be differences in skill between different political “spin” people.

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A new Gallup poll puts Ronald Reagan as the nation’s greatest President. Then it’s Lincoln, Clinton, Kennedy, Washington and FDR.

Yes, in that order.

My opinion: Lincoln, Washington and FDR are the only ones out of that crowd who could conceivably have any claim to the title of “greatest President”. And where is Eisenhower? I mean, maybe he wasn’t the greatest President ever, but he ought to have been in the running.

Also, George H. W. Bush should have gotten more votes than George W. Bush, in my opinion. Finally, I think President Obama shouldn’t even be eligible for this poll yet, since he’s currently President and we have yet to see what he’ll do the rest of his term and if he’ll win re-election.

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[Although I know it will make no difference to anybody, I feel oddly compelled to write about this.]

The late President Ronald Reagan’s son Michael claims his father was “better” for African-Americans than President Obama is. He reasons:

“Under Obama, black unemployment rose from 12.6 percent in January 2009 to 16.0 percent today. This means that black unemployment has increased by more than one-fourth since Obama took office.

And the Reagan record? African-American columnist Joseph Perkins has studied the effects of Reaganomics on black America. He found that, after the Reagan tax cuts gained traction, African-American unemployment fell from 19.5 percent in 1983 to 11.4 percent in 1989.”

Alright, this practically refutes itself. He is comparing two years of a deep downturn in the business cycle (a recession) under Obama and from which we only started recovering in summer 2009 to six years of a recovery from a (milder) recession which ended in late 1982. (He could have at least started from the beginning of Reagan’s term for a better comparison.)

It seems to me fairly obvious that these statistics regarding African-American employment are nothing more than the products of broad economic trends, rather than the outcome of a particular policy on the part of either President.

It’s a pet peeve of mine that the President, whoever he happens to be, always gets undue credit or blame for the fluctuations in the business cycle which he cannot come even close to fully controlling.

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Speaking of conspiracy theories, I see that a Texas Republican is filing a bill that would require Presidential candidates to show their birth certificates, saying: “”This bill is necessary because we have a president whom the American people don’t know whether he was born in Kenya or some other place.”

Alright, dear readers. I know I’m over my allotment of Gilbert and Sullivan references this week, but I just cannot resist posting this that I wrote awhile ago:

(Sung to the tune of “He is an Englishman” from H.M.S. Pinafore.)

He is American!
    For he himself hath said it,
    And it’s greatly to his credit
That he is American!
    (Though he might well be a Kenyan
     In the ill-informed opinion
Of ev’ry third Republican.)
     But, despite the protestation
     Of the Fox News Corporation,
He remains American!

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Andrew Sullivan has an interesting article about Conservative intellectuals’ claim that Obama does not believe in American Exceptionalism, as allegedly demonstrated by this now-famous quote from him:

“I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” 

Sullivan believes this is merely a Conservative smear campaign. I am not so sure. I think it illustrates a fundamental philosophical difference between the Conservatives and Obama.

I’ve blogged about this issue a lot, and I guess the easiest way to sum it up is to say that Obama is a Patriot, but he is not a Nationalist. The Conservatives are Nationalists. As George Orwell wrote:

“By ‘patriotism’ I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.” 

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There’s an old story, probably apocryphal, that’s often told about Adlai Stevenson. Supposedly, at one of Stevenson’s campaign stops, a woman yelled to him “You have the vote of every thinking person!” To which, the story goes, Stevenson replied “That’s not enough, madam, we need a majority!“

It’s the sort of story that resonates with any one who has any interest whatsoever in politics, at least now that Stevenson is so far back in history that he has ceased to have any power to divide people politically. Everyone always feels like their side–right though it undoubtedly is–is also an oppressed minority, overwhelmed by hordes of uninformed imbeciles motivated only by the propaganda of shadowy elites.

This is the view that is held both by the members of the Tea Party and by most of the people who oppose them. And I suppose this is so because it is partially correct–and necessarily so, given the way politics works in this country.

The Tea-Party is, as I have said before, a re-branding of the Republican party to make it seem more fresh and exciting, but most of all to dissociate it from the unpopular George W. Bush and his administration.

Now, this does not mean the Tea Party is quite the same thing as the Republican Party; obviously, from day one they have sought to purge anyone who shows any signs of compromising with the Democrats from the party’s ranks. They appear to be insistent on ideological purity.

Many Democrats have tried to label the Tea Party as an “astroturf” (fake grass-roots) operation, citing Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks organization and the work of the Koch Brothers. And they are to some extent correct, though I suspect every large movement and every mass demonstration has some wealthy backers, if anyone cares to check.

But what does the Tea Party, as an organization, want? Most people who are sympathetic to them have said they are a sort of Libertarian movement, which claims to want smaller government. Those who oppose them say that they are racists. The Tea Partiers deny this, saying they only oppose “Big Government”.

Data about what the members of the Tea Party think about certain issues are at odds with the slogans they yell. As I noted earlier, a majority of Tea Partiers think free trade is bad for the country. This is not exactly a Libertarian position. Yet they continue to argue for capitalism, and despise governmental attempts at economic intervention.

So from all this we are to gather that they are clamoring for a free market, nothing more. Yet so often they are found not talking about this stuff at all, but about “restoring honor to the country” and “American exceptionalism” and “taking their country back”. They are always dressed in super-patriotic garb, always waving the flag and talking of the wisdom of the Founding Fathers. This is all complemented by a dose of fundamentalist Christianity–often with the implication that the Christian God blessed America specifically as the “greatest nation”.

This is, as I’ve said many times, nationalism. Not necessarily ethnic nationalism, as so many will infer. It may well be a completely non-racist, non-ethnically prejudiced nationalism, but nationalism it is nevertheless. The “Restoring Honor” rally held by the Tea Party’s much-beloved Glenn Beck was a cry for a return to National Greatness. The American exceptionalism talk means just what it says.

And the hatred of Obama? I think that much of it is not racially motivated. If you listen to the Tea Partiers, a chief complaint of theirs about Obama is that he supposedly “apologizes for America”. They want a President who will speak only of the greatness of America, a view which focuses solely on the positive things it has done. (At this point, they usually make some reference to the phrase “Shining City upon a Hill“.)

I believe Obama damned himself completely in the eyes of these Nationalists when he said, in response to being asked if he believed in American exceptionalism: “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” This type of subjective thinking is wholly, dare I say it, foreign to the religious nationalist’s worldview.

In his otherwise excellent article on the Tea Party, Matt Taibbi wrote:

“It’s a mistake to cast the Tea Party as anything like a unified, cohesive movement — which makes them easy prey for the very people they should be aiming their pitchforks at. A loose definition of the Tea Party might be millions of pissed-off white people sent chasing after Mexicans on Medicaid by the handful of banks and investment firms who advertise on Fox and CNBC.” 

The second sentence is accurate to an extent–though some would couch it differently–but the first part seems blind to the fact that virtually everything the Tea Party movement does is filled with symbols of Americanism and references to American history–not necessarily accurate history, of course, but some romanticized version of it. The underlying theme of it all is a longing for National Pride and National Greatness.

So, the rank-and-file Tea Partiers are nationalists. They want to protect American jobs through protectionist measures, punish illegal immigrants, deny any mistakes made by America through history, and above all restore “National Greatness”. This is the will of the majority of Tea Party participants.

But, it must be remembered, these are only the foot soldiers, not the generals. “Theirs not to reason why“, they simply are carrying out the strategy laid out by the other aspect of the Tea Party: the businessmen who finance the whole thing.

This is where the Libertarian strain comes from. The people who fund the Tea Party have no interest in “National Greatness” either for the United States or for any other nation. They just want to be able to make deals to do business with China, or to keep costs down by not having too many environmental standards to comply with at their factories.

This is not the sort of thing most people would get on board with–largely because, as often as not, capitalism works in opposition to nationalism. (For example: sending American jobs over to China? No American nationalist could ever sign off on that, even if an economist justified it with Ricardian comparative advantage.) 

Hence, the need to on the one hand spread the Capitalist system while on the other giving the Nationalistic streak in the party something to distract it from the details of how the system works. Much better that the Nationalists should be told the government that is regulating the capitalists is “anti-American” than to try to defend the decidedly non-nationalistic behaviors of capitalism itself.

The late Conservative political scientist Samuel P. Huntington wrote of the “Davos Man“. Named for the site of the World Economic Forum, Huntington said such people “have little need for national loyalty, view national boundaries as obstacles that thankfully are vanishing, and see national governments as residues from the past whose only useful function is to facilitate the élite’s global operations”.

This is, of course, exactly the sort of thing that Glenn Beck and his followers are always talking about, hinting at dark conspiracies to destroy the American way of life by international socialism. And, I suppose there is a kind of truth to it; though it isn’t really a secret conspiracy. (If it were, we wouldn’t hear about it.) The point, though, is that there are also international capitalists who have just as little interest in national loyalty, but who are willing to exploit it for their own sake.

This conclusion is somewhat unsatisfying, mostly because, as I said at the beginning of this post, it is precisely the kind of thing that everyone concludes about the opposing side, no matter who they are. And furthermore, it is because this is the sort of thing that naturally arises in our system of politics. The same sort of dynamic exists in the Democratic Party; and I’m sure if one looked one could find contradictions between the intellectuals at the top and the working-class rank-and-file.

If one is sympathetic to the overall goals of a party, one calls it a “compromise”, and hails the miraculous union of these viewpoints. But if one is unsympathetic, it is a “contradiction”, and a bizarre cabal with one side pulling the others’ strings.

In any case, however, this is my conclusion as to the structure and philosophy of the Tea Party. Feel free to critique it.

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Via Andrew Sullivan, a brutally good review of Dinesh D’Souza’s book The Roots of Obama’s Rage, by Andrew Ferguson, who writes:

“Throughout the nineties I heard mainstream Republicans describe the president as a shameless womanizer and a closeted homosexual, a cokehead and a drunk, a wife beater and a wimp, a hick and a Machiavel, a committed pacifist and a reckless militarist who launched unnecessary airstrikes in faraway lands to distract the public’s attention from all of the above. 

How did the left-wing, coke-snorting Manchurian candidate become the fondly remembered Democrat-you-could-do-business-with—“good old Bill,” in Sean Hannity’s phrase?

Barack Obama is what happened. The partisan mind—left-wing or right-wing, Republican or Democrat—is incapable of maintaining more than one oversized object of irrational contempt at a time…. 

We should probably be grateful for this psychological limitation. Without it the negativity of our politics would be relentless. Like Ronald Reagan before him, George W. Bush was reviled for eight years by Democrats driven mad by a sputtering rage—the “most right-wing president in history”!—but it’s only a matter of time until they rediscover him…” 

It’s worth reading his review in full, but this passage is the most illuminating.

I do have to disagree with his assertion that “we should be grateful for this”, though. The phenomenon makes it incredibly difficult to tell what the hell the actual truth is.

I am sure that some liberals have experienced a little bit of nostalgia for George W. Bush and his crew, not as President, of course, but as leader of the Republican party. I myself feel that Bush was much less hostile to liberal values than, say, Sarah Palin. And I can recall Bush making many statements which the current GOP leaders would no doubt condemn in a heartbeat were they uttered by President Obama. So, I don’t think it’s entirely partisan rage.

I would also argue, therefore, that this is, at least partially, strategically sound thinking. Bush is retired; he’s not going to screw things up any more for liberals. Similarly, Clinton may make a few speeches, but he’s not going to do anything substantive to fight the Republicans agenda again. (Some would argue that he never did)

Nevertheless, Ferguson has touched on a disturbing truth in modern politics.

One of the most fascinating ideas in George Orwell’s novel 1984 was the Two Minutes’ Hate, which is an activity where all the Party members go every day to vent their fury at the enemies of the Party. Orwell describes it as “a hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness…turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.”

In 1984, when the Two Minutes’ Hate is over, everyone goes back to their duties. The fact that it is so readily turned on and off, and so easily transfered, is what is really insidious about it; it demonstrates the way that people are manipulated by the totalitarian government of Orwell’s novel.

Therefore, I  think that the temporary nature of this fury that Ferguson describes is what is most disturbing about it–it suggests that people are being manipulated to feel it.

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Former Vice-President Walter Mondale said that President Obama “uses these idiot boards [Teleprompters] to read speeches on television and I think he loses the connection that he needs emotionally with American voters.”

Look, I’ve got nothing against Mondale. I don’t know enough about the guy to have an opinion on his ideas or most of what he did during what I assume was a distinguished career. But I would be inclined to ignore advice from him on connecting with the American people, given his track record.

Anyway, I’m pretty sure Obama’s problem connecting with the American people stems more from the bad economy. Having no money makes people a touch irritable. I don’t think anyone complained about this with all of the other Presidents who have used Teleprompters.

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Like I said, I don’t have lots of time to blog right now,  but there are two points I want to get clear before anything else happens. First:

In his article “How Obama Thinks“, Dinesh D’Souza writes: “In his own writings Obama stresses the centrality of his father not only to his beliefs and values but to his very identity. “

By way of proof, he quotes this from Obama’s book Dreams from My Father: “It was into my father’s image, the black man, son of Africa, that I’d packed all the attributes I sought in myself.”

This is out of context. This is in fact the part of the book where Obama is becoming disillusioned with his father. The next paragraph in Dreams is: 

 “Now, as I sat in the glow of a single light bulb, rocking slightly on a hard-backed chair, that image had suddenly vanished. Replaced by…what? A bitter drunk? An abusive husband? A defeated, lonely bureaucrat? To think that all my life I had been wrestling with nothing more than a ghost!”   


 Second thing: If there’s anything to be learned from the victory of Christine O’Donnell, it’s that whatever the Tea Party is about, it’s not just a tax revolt, or demands for a balanced budget. That much seems clear. O’Donnell’s credentials are far more in the area of religious conservatism, not fiscal conservatism. (Admittedly, most people knew the Tea Party wasn’t just about taxes, but this makes it more clear than ever.) Andrew Sullivan put it best: “She’s to the religious right of Jerry Falwell – and we keep being told the tea-party is just about economics.”

Sadly, I don’t have time to do in-depth posting or research on either of these matters, so if anyone reading this cares to look into these things, I’d appreciate it. If I got something wrong because I was in a hurry, I’d like to correct it.

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“Pilate saith unto him, ‘What is truth?’…”–John 18:38 

Most people probably believe that of the two major political parties in the United States, it is the Democrats who are more prone to relativism. There are two main reasons for this. The first is that there are more intellectuals, who are always given over to questioning traditions, in the Democratic party. The second is that many years of conservative propaganda has told everyone so.

Most of this is the work of the religious Right, though the Atheist philosophy of Ayn Rand also rejects the idea of anything other than absolute Truth, and it is certainly more widely heard in “conservative”,or–if we must use the term–“right-wing” circles. And there is some truth to all this; after all, does not the word “Conservative” itself suggest a certain intellectual and philosophical rigidity?

But, of late, there have been signs of a creeping relativism among conservatives. For example, this column from paleo-conservative writer Patrick J. Buchanan. An excerpt:

““Naked reason,” pure rationalism… ignores that vast realm of sentiments, such as patriotism and love, that reside in the terrain between thought and feeling.” 

Buchanan, admittedly, is far from one of the major players in the Republican party, having been effectively ostracized years ago. But there is altogether something very “post-modern”, as Andrew Sullivan often says, about the behavior of the conservatives of late. Recall the odd incident early this year when Rudy Giuliani and other prominent conservatives appeared to have forgotten about the 9/11 attacks.

(As Henry Leland says to Mike Thorton in Alpha Protocol: “There are only so many coincidences that can happen before they stop being coincidences.”)

Of course, one could easily explain away such things by pointing out that it is merely the inevitable result of competing–nearly warring–political parties. A strategy, nothing more. Indeed, I suspect a credible case could be made that changes in the media and the education system have produced a general increase in the relativistic outlook, and we only notice it with conservatives because they are, historically, less susceptible to it.

Nevertheless, the fact remains that strategically speaking, the Republicans are moving more and more towards a relativistic approach to reporting and analyzing every issue. Much of their criticism of Obama is based on how he makes them feel, or the image he projects.

Perhaps Lee Atwater had some part in it. (On some sites, I have seen the phrase “Perception is reality” attributed to Atwater. I doubt he originated it, but it does encapsulate his worldview.) Still, from at least Edward Bernays onward, propagandists, strategists and ad men, or whatever name, must have at least a touch of relativism to carry out their duty.

Now, I cannot stress enough that it is mostly the conservative intellectuals and strategists who seem to think this way. All the examples I gave, with the partial exception of Giuliani, were very much the behind-the-scenes tactician sort, not the leaders, and not the rank and file. I don’t think we will ever see Sarah Palin, for example, engaging in anything other than black-and-white moral reasoning. (“We win, they lose…”)

That’s part of what’s so odd about it, in fact. On the one hand we have the traditional non-relativist view of the world characterized by most of the Republican politicians, but pull away the curtain and we find men like Karl Rove–heir to Atwater–and other such strategists. Buchanan, let us not forget, was a strategist for Richard M. Nixon. (Nixon, by the way, was interested in the works of Nietzsche.) Even Dick Cheney, in his role as an adviser to Gerald Ford, famously said: “Principle is OK up to a certain point, but principle doesn’t do any good if you lose.”

It is pointless to counter by saying that the same is true of Democrats. Of course it is. Carville, Axelrod, Rahm Emanuel and the rest are all doubtless cut from the same cloth. But the Democrats as a whole are already supposed to be the party of relativists, to hear the Republicans tell it, and they’re kind of correct. Nothing reveals this more than the fact that Democrats in general will tend to attack Republicans for being too absolutist. Whereas, the Republicans pride themselves on seeing through the moral haziness in which the liberal intellectuals lose themselves by understanding the absolute, God-given differences between True and False, Right and Wrong.

Let me, as Obama would say, be clear:  the majority of the Republican party believes in a rigid, absolutist, traditional Christian morality–or wants to, anyway.  But many of their strategists are willing to do almost anything to achieve victory, and are more than happy to bend the truth in order to get what they want. And they are fairly open about it.

In short, their strategists appear to be using moral and factual relativism in order to justify the rank-and-file and their leaders behaving like moral and factual absolutists.

All comments are welcome, and disagreement is encouraged.