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By David Fisher

There has been much recent debate about whether the 2003 Iraq War was legal, with both Tony Blair and his Attorney General summoned before the Chilcot enquiry to give evidence on this. But a more fundamental question is whether the war was moral.

On this question the Chilcot enquiry has been silent, perhaps reflecting a more general scepticism in society about whether moral questions can have objective answers. But there is a way of thinking going back to Aquinas, Aristotle and beyond that insists that there are rationally based ways to answer moral questions.

A key contribution to this is furnished by the just war tradition. This sets a number of tests which have to be met if a war is to be just. It has to be undertaken: for a just cause, with right intention, with competent authority, as a last resort, and the harm judged likely to result should not outweigh the good achieved, taking into account the probability of success; while in its conduct the principles of proportion and non-combatant immunity have to met; and the war end in a just peace.

This may appear over-prescriptive: erecting so many hurdles that war would become impossible. But the just war tradition recognises that wars can be just and may sometimes be necessary. What the tradition insists on are two fundamental requirements, as simple as they are rationally compelling: is there a just cause and will the harm likely to be caused by military action outweigh the good to be achieved by that cause? In other words, is war likely to bring about more good than harm?

So how does the Iraq War fare against these criteria?

Different reasons were adduced at different times for the war. But the declared grounds common to both the US and UK Governments was to rid Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction, so enforcing UN Security Council Resolutions.

We now know that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction. But even that startling disclosure by the Iraq Survey Group would not necessarily invalidate the coalition’s disarmament objective as just cause if there had been strong grounds for believing that Saddam had such weapons.

The problem is that the evidence for such weapons was ‘sporadic and patchy’ in the words of the official Butler report. The Governments’ claim that they were acting on behalf of the UN was also weakened by the lack of substantial international support for military operations, evidenced by the reluctance of the Security Council explicitly to endorse such action through a second resolution. This, in turn, reflected concern that military action was not being undertaken as a last resort: that Saddam should have been given more time to convince the inspectors he had abandoned WMD.  Doubt over whether each of these just war conditions was met did not amount to a knock-down argument against war. But the doubts taken together mutually reinforced each other and so strengthened concern that there was not a sufficient just cause. 

It is, moreover, the single most serious charge against those who planned the Iraq War that they massively under-estimated the harm that would be likely to be caused by military action. Coalition leaders could not reasonably be expected to have forecast the precise casualty levels that would follow military action. But the coalition leaders can be criticised for failing to give sufficient consideration to what would be the effects of regime change and for not formulating robust plans promptly to re-establish civil governance in its wake and ensure a peaceful transition to democracy. They thus acted with a degree of recklessness. Just as they had undertaken worst case assessments of Saddam’s WMD capability, so they had undertaken best case assessments of what would happen after the regime had been changed.

The Iraq War was, like most wars, fought from a mixture of

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In recognition of the US midterm elections, I decided to have a browse through Lend Me Your Ears: The Oxford Dictionary of Political Quotations and share with you a few entries that have come from the American political world. Enjoy…

“I will seek the presidency with nothing to fall back on but the judgment of the people and with nowhere to go but the White House or home.”
Robert Dole 1923-, American Republican politician, announcing his decision to relinquish his Senate seat and step down as majority leader.

“One of the uses of history is to free us of a falsely imagined past. The less we know of how ideas actually took root and grew, the more apt we are to accept them unquestioningly, as inevitable features of the world in which we move.”
Robert H. Bork 1927-, American judge and educationalist, from The Antitrust Paradox (1978)

“The American people have spoken – but it’s going to take a little while to determine exactly what they said.”
Bill Clinton 1946-, 42nd President of the United States 1993-2001, on the US presidential election of 2000.

“We are a nation of communities, of tens and tens of thousands of ethnic, religious, social, business, labour union, neighbourhood, regional and other organizations, all of them varied, voluntary, and unique… a brilliant diversity spread like stars, like a thousand points of light in a broad and peaceful sky.”
George Bush Sr. 1924-, 41st President of the United States, acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, 18 August 1988.

“No sane local official who has hung up an empty stocking over the municipal fireplace, is going to shoot Santa Claus just before a hard Christmas.”
Alfred Emanuel Smith 1873-1944, American politician, comment on the New Deal in New Outlook, Dec 1933

“I suggested [in 1966] that we use the panther as our symbol and call our political vehicle the Black Panther Party. The panther is a fierce animal, but he will not attack until he is backed into a corner; then he will strike out.”
Huey Newton 1942-1989, American political activist, from Revolutionary Suicide (1973)

“Although we weren’t able to shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling this time, thanks to you, it has about 18 million cracks in it.”
Hillary Rodham Clinton 1947-, American lawyer and Democratic politician, speech to her supporters, conceding the Democratic party presidential nomination to Barack Obama, 7 June 2008.

“The oldest, wisest politician grows not more human so, but is merely a grey wharf-rat at last.”
Henry David Thoreau 1817-1862, American writer, from Journal (1853)

“On my arrival in the United States I was struck by the degree of ability among the governed and the lack of it among the governing.”
Alexis de Tocqueville 1805-1859, French historian and politician, from Democracy in America (1835-40) vol. 1

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John Ehrenberg and J. Patrice McSherry are Professors of Political Science at Long Island University, Brooklyn Campus.  Jose Ramon Sanchez is Associate Professor of Political Science at Long Island University. Caroleen Marji Sayej is Assistant Professor of Government and International Relations at Connecticut College. Together they wrote The Iraq Papers, which offers a compelling documentary narrative and interpretation of this momentous conflict. In the post below we learn about last Friday’s Department of Justice report.

On February 20, 2010, two Bush administration lawyers, former Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee and his deputy John Yoo, were cleared of professional misconduct charges by the Justice Department. As senior advisors in the Office of Legal Counsel–the executive office that provides authoritative legal advice to the president and the executive branch–they wrote legal opinions later known as “the torture memos” in the early years of the Bush administration. The opinions essentially redefined and authorized torture through contorted readings of the Convention Against Torture, domestic anti-torture statutes, and the Geneva Conventions. Yoo wrote in one 2003 memo to the Pentagon: “…as long as the interrogators do not intend to murder the detainee, they will not have run afoul of section 113(a)(l)…the intent to torture appears to be the most relevant…the interrogator would have to intend to cause other severe physical pain or suffering or to cause prolonged mental harm. Absent such intent, the interrogator would not have committed assault with intent to torture…Section 2340 makes plain that the infliction of pain or suffering per se, whether it is physical or mental, is insufficient to amount to torture. Instead, the pain or suffering must be ‘severe.’ The statute does not, however, define the term ‘severe.’”

Yoo and Bybee also argued that the president’s powers were virtually unlimited in a time of war and that Congress, the courts, or established law could not check or balance him—even if he decided to use torture. Indeed, when a law professor asked John Yoo whether the president could legally “crush the testicles of a person’s child,” Yoo responded that no treaty forbid it and that it depended on “why the President thinks he needs to do that.” Even though ethics investigators in the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility had called for disciplinary action against Bybee and Yoo—including possible disbarment–the Deputy Attorney General rejected their recommendations.

In 2001 and 2002 the Vice President’s Office and the CIA were pushing for legal opinions that would protect agents from culpability for methods such as near-suffocation and drowning of detainees, putting them in painful stress positions, subjecting them to weeks of sleep deprivation, slamming them against walls, and shutting them in claustrophobic boxes. Consider the cold, clinical language of this December 2004 CIA fax to the Office of Legal Counsel, titled “Background Paper on CIA’s Combined Use of Interrogation Techniques”: “Current OMS [the CIA’s Office of Medical Services] guidance on the duration of cramped confinement limits conf

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By Edward Zelinsky

When President Bush nominated my law school classmate Circuit Judge Samuel A. Alito, Jr., to the U.S. Supreme Court, I supported Judge Alito’s confirmation to the high court. Now that President Obama has nominated Circuit Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, I favor her confirmation as well. To those who view the Supreme Court primarily as a forum for partisan struggle, this conclusion will seem anomalous. To those concerned about the rule of law, this conclusion will seem compelling.

In earlier times, Presidents reached across party lines in making Supreme Court appointments. President Truman, for example, appointed to the Court Senator Harold H. Burton of Ohio, a Republican. President Eisenhower similarly crossed party lines to nominate to the Supreme Court Judge William J. Brennan, Jr., a New Jersey Democrat. In today’s environment, such bi-partisan appointments are inconceivable.

When President Bush, with a Republican-controlled Senate, confronted a vacancy on the Court in 2005, the realistic expectation was that he would appoint a professionally qualified Republican. Judge Alito easily met that criterion and was properly confirmed by the Senate.

I supported Justice Alito’s confirmation not because I concur with every decision he has made or is likely to make. Indeed, I have disagreed with several of (now) Justice Alito’s decisions, most recently, District of Columbia v. Heller in which the Court read the Second Amendment as invalidating a gun control law of the District of Columbia. I supported Justice Alito’s confirmation because of his professional distinction, not because of his political ideology.

Similar observations apply to Judge Sotomayor. I will not agree with every decision she will make on the high court. Indeed, I disagreed with her participation as an appellate judge in Ricci v. DeStefano, which invalidated New Haven’s promotional examination for firefighters because too many white males passed the test. Recently, a five justice majority of the Supreme Court concluded that, indeed, Ricci was wrongly decided.

However, the relevant question is, given the pool from which Barack Obama will appoint Supreme Court justices, did the President pick a lawyer who is professionally qualified to sit on the nation’s highest court? By that criterion, Judge Sotomayor passes muster.

There are commentators, many quite distinguished, who find naive an emphasis upon a judge’s professional credentials. From their vantage, the Supreme Court has been and will continue to be nothing more than a cockpit of partisan struggle. Concern about professional qualifications is, from this vantage, at best unsophisticated, at worst a smokescreen for other agendas.

I respectfully suggest that it is those commentators who are indulging in naivete. President Bush in 2005 was going to place a conservative Republican on the Supreme Court. Similarly, in 2009, President Obama will place a liberal Democrat on the Supreme Court. Given those political realities, the question becomes whether the President, in satisfying his political imperatives, has nominated to the Court a professionally qualified appointee.

The professional qualifications of judges matter because of the role the courts play in our national life. Courts are where Americans go for the fair, principled application of law administered by a judge who is guided, not by the identity of the parties, but by legal norms and standards. All too often, the reality falls short of this ideal. Nevertheless, this ideal is an important part of America’s self-image and of our success as a nation: We believe in the rule of law. Our judges should thus be more than partisans. They should be legal professionals in the best sense of that term, knowledgeable, hardworking craftsmen who seek to administer the law in a fair and principled fashion. This commitment to professionalism should start with the judges at the pinnacle of the legal system.

To be sure, judges, particularly Supreme Court justices, are also policymakers. Many of the cases reaching the U.S. Supreme Court are there because conventional legal reasoning does not resolve them. Consequently, much of what the Supreme Court does entails choices of policy and political philosophy.

It is accordingly appropriate for Judge Sotomayor’s confirmation hearing to focus, not just on her professional credentials, but upon the substantive issues she will address on the Supreme Court. Supreme Court confirmation hearings (a relatively recent innovation in our constitutional history) have become an important and legitimate part of our national conversation – though I would urge the Republicans to approach this hearing with greater civility than many of his Democratic interlocutors brought to Justice Alito’s confirmation process. Judge Sotomayor’s hearing should be a dialogue befitting constitutional principles, not a partisan slugfest.

In short, I was for Sam and now, for the same reasons, I’m for Sonia.

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Edward A. Zelinsky is the Morris and Annie Trachman Professor of Law at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law of Yeshiva University. He is the author of The Origins of the Ownership Society: How The Defined Contribution Paradigm Changed America.

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Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he reflects on Presidents Obama and Bush. See his previous OUPblogs here.

Presidents array themselves along a continuum with two extremes: either they are crusaders for their cause or merely defenders of the faith. Either they attempt to transform the landscape of America politics, or they attempt to modify it in incremental steps. To cite the titles of the autobiographies of the current and last presidents: either presidents declare the “audacity of hope” or they affirm a “charge to keep.” If President Obama is the liberal crusader, President George Bush was the conservative defender.

The strategies of presidential leadership differ for the crusader and the defender, but President Obama appears to be misreading the nature of his mandate. Conciliation works for the defender; it can be ruinous to the would-be crusader.

The crusader must have his base with him, all fired up and ready to go. For to go to places unseen, the crusader must have the visionaries, even the crazy ones, on his side. The defender, conversely, must pay homage to partisans on the other side of the aisle because incremental change requires assistance from people, including political rivals, invested in the status quo. Moderate politics require moderate friends.

The irony is that President George Bush, a self-proclaimed defender - spent too much time pandering to his right-wing base, and Barack Obama - a self-proclaimed crusader, is spending a lot of time appeasing his political rivals. Their political strategies were out of sync, and perhaps even inconsistent with their political goals.

Take the issue of gay rights for President Obama. The President is trying so hard to prove to his socially conservative political rivals that he is no liberal wacko that he has reversed his previous support for a full repeal of The Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). What he may not have realized is that it may be politically efficacious for a defender to ignore his base, but the costs to the crusader for alienating his base are far graver. Bipartisanship is not symmetrically rewarding in all leadership contexts.

Consider the example of President Bill Clinton, a “third-way” Democrat. He ended welfare as we knew it, and on affirmative action he said “mend it, don’t end it.” Much to Labor’s chagrin, he even passed NAFTA. Bill Clinton was no crusader. And if the Democratic base wanted a deal-making, favor-swapping politico, they would have nominated a second Clinton last year.
The crusader rides on a cloud of ideological purity. Without the zealotry and idolatry of the base, the crusader is nothing; his magic extinguished. And this is happening right now to Barack Obama.

The people who gave the man his luster are also uniquely enpowered to take it away. (It is a mistake to think that Sean Hannity or Michael Steele have this power.) Obama campaigned on changing the world, and his base can and will crush him for failing to deliver on his audacity. The Justice Department’s clumsy defense of DOMA via the case law recourse of incest and pedophilia may be a small matter in the administration’s scheme of things, but it is a big and repugnant deal to the base - the people who matter for a crusading president.

This is a pattern in the Obama administration: for the promise to pull troops out of Iraq there was the concomitant promise of more in Afghanistan, for the release of the OLC “torture memos,” operatives of harsh interrogation techniques were also offered immunity, in return for the administration’s defense of DOMA, Obama promised to extend benefits to same-sex partners of federal employees. This is incremental, transactional, and defensive leadership. Defenders balance; but crusaders are mandated to press on. Incremental leadership works for presidents mandated to keep a charge, but not for one who flaunted his audacity. There are distinct and higher expectations for a crusader-to-be; and if President Obama is to live up to his hype, then bear the crusader’s cross he must.

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Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at presidents and church. Read his previous OUPblogs here.

Americans do impose a religious litmus test on our presidents, and there is a tradition that proves it. President Obama and his family attended Easter service at St John’s Episcopal Church. Just across from the White House, it is known as the “Church of the Presidents,” the unofficial White House Chapel. Almost every president since James Madison has found occasion to worship in this church and in particular at pew 54, the presidential pew.

The selective presidential need to prove a religious point proves my point. Consider the case of President Eisenhower, who was raised a Jehovah’s Witness and whose home served as the local meeting hall for Witnesses for 19 years. Twelve days after his first inauguration, Eisenhower was baptized, confirmed, and became a communicant in the Presbyterian Church. No president before or after him has ever had to perform such rites while in office. The religious litmus test was so powerful in this case that it was voluntarily taken by a president who had already been endorsed by the people and sworn to protect and defend the Constitution.

Contrast Eisenhower to President Reagan or Bush, neither of whom belonged to a congregation or attended church regularly (or even sporadically) while in Washington, justifying their decision on the basis that the security requirements would be too onerous and disruptive to the congregations they joined. Faith is a personal thing only if the public already believes that a president possesses it. If not, no security arrangement is too onerous to trump the need to publicize it. This is true of President Clinton when he attended Foundry United Methodist Church while in Washington (one of the candidates for the Obamas’ new home church by the way), and it is also true of presidential candidate John Kerry when he made much public display of his Sunday church attendances.

The speculation about which church the Obamas will ultimately settle on as a home church in DC has been fueled, in part, by his past association with the controversial Jeremiah Wright and his membership in the Trinity United Church of Christ. The speculation about where the Obamas will end up has taken on more than normal political significance because there is a greater need for this president, unless others who didn’t even have to attend church, to demonstrate that his religious views are squarely in the mainstream.

So on this Easter weekend, to those who bemoan the secularization of America, take heart, because presidents who appear godless know that they will be judged on earth before they are judged in heaven; to those who believe the separation of church and state is not yet complete, take stock, because where and whether or not President Obama ends up worshiping every Sunday has become a topic of paramount political importance to the administration. So much so that White House aides reportedly considered over a dozen churches before deciding on St John’s as the safest place for a president to go to observe Easter Sunday.

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Stephen Spector, chairman of the English Department at Stony Brook University, is the author of Evangelicals and Israel: The Story of American Christian Zionism which delves into the Christian Zionist movement, mining information from original interviews, websites, publications, news reports, survey research, worship services, and interfaith conferences, to provide a surprising look at the sources of evangelical support for Israel. In the original post below Specter looks at the contrast between Bush and Obama’s views on Israel and Islamic extremists.

President Obama’s staff recently removed a stern-looking bust of Winston Churchill that George W. Bush had kept in the Oval Office, replacing it with a bust of Lincoln. There could hardly have been a more compelling symbolic gesture to mark the change in presidential worldviews.

As Obama notes in The Audacity of Hope, Lincoln believed that there are times when we must pursue our own absolute truths, even if there is a terrible price to pay. But Obama also knows that Lincoln had a complicated view of world affairs: Lincoln knew that we must reach for common understandings and resist the temptation to demonize, since we’re all imperfect and can’t know with certainty that God is on our side.

Bush’s impulse, by contrast, is to value moral clarity. As a result, he took Churchill as his model in advocating an unambiguous and aggressive response to Iranian and Arab extremists. He did take pains to note that the battle is not with the “great religion” of Islam, which he called a religion of peace, but with terrorists. Yet in describing the goals of radical Islamists, Bush repeatedly evoked the fascist aggression in World War II. In 2005, for example, he warned that militants practicing a clear and focused ideology of Islamofascism seek to establish “a radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to Indonesia.” Today’s terrorists, he said in 2006, are “successors to Fascists, to Nazis, to Communists and other totalitarians of the twentieth century.” They have a common ideology and vision for the world, Bush said, and against such an enemy the West can never accept anything less than complete victory. That echoed Churchill’s words rallying the British people against Hitler: “You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.”

Religious and political conservatives who made up much of Bush’s electoral base often view the world as he does. They particularly admire Churchill’s dogged determination in warning of the approaching Nazi danger in the 1930s. Like him, they name what they see as the coming fascist threat and they disdain attempts at appeasement. Many of them warn, as Bush did, that World War III has already begun.

Discussing a foiled terrorist plot in 2006, Gary Bauer, a leading conservative Christian, quoted one of Churchill’s classic lines: “An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.” (A few days later, then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld used the same quip, which was surely more than a coincidence.) And Bauer is far from the only evangelical who reveres Churchill. The devotion of James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, is so great that the largest painting in his Colorado Springs office is not of Christ, but of Sir Winston. (According to Dan Gilgoff in The Jesus Machine, Dobson’s wife didn’t want him to buy it because she was afraid that he would put it in their bedroom!)

John Hagee, the founder of the pro-Zionist evangelical lobbying group Christians United for Israel, is one of those who considers the Islamist threat today to be equivalent to the danger posed by the Nazis in the 1930s, and equally impossible to appease through compromise. In 2007 he received standing ovations at AIPAC’s annual policy conference in Washington when he said, “It is 1938; Iran is Germany and Ahmadinejad is the new Hitler.” Hagee warned that the “misguided souls of Europe…the political brothel that is now the United Nations, and sadly even our own State Department will try once again to turn Israel into crocodile food.”

Some Israeli and American officials and commentators also evoke the Nazi threat in describing the present conflict with Islamic radicals. Benjamin Netanyahu, the new Israeli prime minister, says that, in Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Israel is confronted by an enemy of the sort that the Jewish people have not faced since Hitler. The conflict is not about territory, but about Islam’s goal of eradicating the Jewish state, Netanyahu says, a statement that agrees perfectly with the warnings of Michael Evans and other Christian Zionists.
Jihadist Muslims intend to perpetrate a second Holocaust, says Netanyahu. He adds that Ahmadinejad presents an even more serious threat than Hitler did: Hitler lost the war because he could not develop nuclear weapons, but Ahmadinejad is on the verge of accomplishing that. General Moshe Ya’alon, a former Israeli Defense Forces chief of staff, adds that when Ahmadinejad threatens to wipe Israel off of the map, he means to destroy the West, a charge that echoes those made by American Christian Zionists.

The Obama administration is hoping to achieve through diplomacy what confrontation against a supposed unified enemy did not. They’ve even dropped Bush’s signature phrase, the “War on Terror.” Meanwhile, Christian Zionist leaders are sending newsletters and prayer updates to hundreds of thousands of readers pointing out that Netanyahu called Iran’s leaders a messianic apocalyptic cult who must never be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons. For them and many other religious and political conservatives, negotiation with Islamic fundamentalists is nothing other than the folly of appeasement, the same catastrophic mistake that Neville Chamberlain made in 1938.

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Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he reflects Obama’s speaking style. Read his previous OUPblogs here.

President Barack Obama’s first press conference was serious, measured, and according to Mark Nikolas (Politicalbase.com), three grade levels more complex than President George W. Bush’s first press conference.

A cursory glance at readers’ comments to Nikolas’ post reveals sharp disagreements about both the empirical claim and its implications. Since I have used the Flesch readability scale to score the rhetoric of every president since George Washington, I will venture to offer some observations to suggest that George Bush and Barack Obama aren’t all that different.

Superficially, they couldn’t be more different. While the former president is a self-styled cowboy who has rejected his northeastern roots in favor of a Texan down-home speaking style, the current one is a former professor of constitutional law who (if one recalls his speech on race in Philadelphia at the height of the Jeremiah Wright fiasco) will not demure from pontificating on things complex and controversial. I doubt many people will argue that Bush was a more sophisticated speaker, but people disagree about whether or not his simple sentences were delivered at the expense of complex thoughts.

Complex thoughts can be simply expressed, his defenders contend. But Einstein also said that “things should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” Consider John Robert’s question to President Bush in his first press conference in 2001: “I’m wondering what message he (the Secretary of State) will take from this administration to leaders of the Middle East in the area of sanctions that matter, sanctions that are effective on the regime?”

President Bush answered in his inimitable style: “I have said that the sanction regime is like Swiss cheese. That meant that they weren’t very effective. And we’re going to review the current sanction policy and review options as to how to make the sanctions work. But the primary goal is to make it clear to Saddam that we expect him to be a peaceful neighbor in the region, and we expect him not to develop weapons of mass destruction; and if we find him doing so, there will be a consequence.”

President Bush dedicated little time to “review options” on improving the efficacy of sanctions on Saddam’s regime. And the conditional clause “if we find him (Saddam) doing so” (developing WMDs) was far from satisfied before the President rushed to war. The fact is it was by our president’s slovenly words that we were led to do rather foolish things, as George Orwell warned.

Yes, we need a president who connects with the people. Simple words can conceal complex thoughts. But that is exactly the problem. If we allow presidents to sweet talk us with simple platitudes, and assume that complex negotiations and deliberations are going on behind the scenes and outside of public earshot, we abdicate our role as citizens to adjudicate the direction of public policy. A seduced citizenry cannot hold their executive accountable. Eloquent platitudes generate applause, not reflection. As a component of democratic discourse, they are, like Swiss cheese, utterly inadequate.

Lest this may sound like a partisan post, let me say that Obama is not immune to the draw of anti-intellectualism. The President’s and Secretary Geitner’s messages on the economic stimulus package and especially TARP 2 have thus far been woefully lacking in detail. The President is back to being the Poet-in-Chief, taking his message on road as if he never left the campaign trail. The stock market takes no partisan sides, and it has not taken kindly to the president’s eloquent generalities.

Life is like a box of chocolates, Mama Gump once told Forrest. Profound truths can be simply said, but what we need now are concrete solutions, not quotable verses. President Obama may be speaking at a higher grade level than President Bush, but so far, he appears no more adept at offering us precise answers. The President can use his words – simple or complex – to educate or to obfuscate. The choice is his.

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President Bush has had his last press conference.
I almost (almost) feel sorry for the guy. Just a little.

In other news, there really isn't any.

The weather continues to be bizarrely Springlike here in sunny California. Lawns are turning brown, and yesterday I saw the guy across the street outside with no shirt on. (While yesterday in Hibbing, Minnesota, it was 45 below. I can't even imagine how cold that is.)

Water rationing is not far off I fear. Remember that from years past? How much fun that was? Taking "stop and start" showers; hauling 'grey water' (rinse water) from the laundry out to water the yard; feeling sheepish having to ask for a glass of water in a restaurant. Good times.

I finished some art I shouldn't really show (a job). It was a study in greys, and architecture, and in colored pencil. I do love my Prismacolor French Greys, but still love my Polychromos better.


I was googling images for an art idea I have. These are both paintings of Catherine of Aragon, at different ages and by different artists.



There are a whole bunch more than these as well. It got me thinking about having your portrait painted instead of relying on photos. There are no spontaneous or out of focus or bad hair day paintings, are there? No I cropped your head off or that centerpiece was in the way or any of that.
I don't know where I'm going with this. Its just the kind of thing I was pondering today, as I sat out on my back porch, sipping my coffee and listening to the birdies madly chirping.

Weird weather will do that I guess.

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Charles O. Jones is Non-Resident Senior Fellow at The Brookings Institution and the author of many books including Passages to the Presidency and Preparing to be President: The Memos of Richard E. Neustadt. In his most recent book, The American Presidency: A Very Short Introduction, Jones has written a marvelously concise survey that is packed with information about the presidency, some of it quite surprising. We learn, for example, that the Founders adopted the word “president” over “governor” and other alternatives because it suggested a light hand, as in one who presides, rather than rules.  In the original article below Jones analyzes Obama’s term as President-Elect.

Following his victory, President-Elect Barack Obama conducted a model transition, one suited to the standards set by successful transitions in the post-World War II era, most notably those of John F. Kennedy in 1960 and Ronald W. Reagan in 1980. Obama played it by the book, revealing that “change you can believe in” is to be achieved by governing methods he can trust.

During the 1960 campaign Kennedy reportedly said: “If I am elected, I don’t want to wake up on November 9 [the morning after the election] and ask myself ‘What in the world do I do now?’” The answer to that question was then, and remains, fairly simple. You prepare to be president. Arrangements begin with clear notions of who you have become, what the job entails, and who can be of help.

Obama became a presidential candidate in the 2008 campaign. That assertion is less trite than it appears. John McCain remained a maverick senator running for president, Hillary Clinton was an heir apparent First Lady, John Kerry a backbench senator in 2004, Al Gore an heir apparent Vice President in 2000. No one of these aspirants fully adopted the role of presidential candidate. Obama did.

Not having become an in-house senator in his brief service or been in a position to imagine himself an heir apparent, Obama was free to acquaint himself with the style and demands of a national campaign. He learned the role well enough to hire a compatible supporting cast and to script a message absent allusions to the past. “Change: That’s what you want? That’s what I will give you.”

The October surprise on Wall Street illustrated his differences with McCain. Obama remained the presidential candidate he had become. McCain suspended his campaign to resume his familiar role as the maverick senator. Yet the complex financial issues involved required neither a campaigner nor a nonconformist. Obama understood and stayed out of it; McCain rushed in where he was not needed or welcome.

On November 5, Obama became president-elect. That role too requires an understanding of how to behave. The most important guideline: There is a president, you’re not him. Corollaries: Remind the staff not to jump the gun—their time as big shots will come. Follow the book in making appointments and organizing White House staff. Don’t promise more in the first 100 days than can be delivered. Stay out of the way, preferably away from Washington, but be accessible and nice to the press. Find out how the White House works—inside the building itself and outside in the government. Accept the help offered by the incumbent administration in learning about departments, agencies, and budgets. Visit, but don’t invade, the workaday government. Be nice to Congressional leaders but wary of their advice. Find friends in the opposition party—you will need them. Can the arrogance of a victor—that goes even more for staff.

These rules are in accord with the Law of Commonsense. Yet President Elect Bill Clinton and his staff ignored most, if not all, these advisories. Obama and his aides paid heed to all, thereby winning praise and favorable comparisons to the Kennedy and Reagan transitions.

Knowing who you have become should aid immeasurably in learning what the job entails. The rules cited here provide orientation for the most important role—President of he United States. It all starts with understanding the separation of powers. The three branches, plus the bureaucracy, share and compete for powers permitting them to get into each other’s business. For example, Congress spent the last two years curbing executive powers the new president may wish he had.

Two facts are relevant to understanding the new job: 1. The president is not the government. 2. A new president joins a government already at work. The new Congress is mostly populated by members from the last Congress; judges serve life terms; and the bureaucracy is forever. What is new is a President Obama, his staff, and appointees, all charged to make what is already there work effectively under new leadership. One other fact: The choices presidents make today have an effect on persuasive power in the future. One need only review President Bush’s decision to invade Iraq, relying on bad intelligence, for a contemporary illustration. Support for his leadership never recovered.

It is too early to know the depth of Obama’s savvy in serving as chief executive. He has no record and it is impossible to “game” the presidential experience. But there are positive clues from the campaign and the transition that the president-elect recognizes what is coming. The campaign showed he knows how to hire and keep good help. He understands the need, recognizes talent, communicates purposes, and commands loyalty. Furthermore, lacking experience himself, he has demonstrated strength of character and resolve in hiring those who do have the knowledge and skills he requires as president.

The process of selecting staff and cabinet positions was impressive. He assigned the major White House staff positions early, thus reducing job anxiety among his campaign operatives and allowing them to settle in during the transition to aid him and connect with establishment figures. The cabinet and ancillary selections were announced in policy clusters, thus showcasing “teams” rather than drawing attention to a single appointment. Further, the sequence revealed policy priorities, as with the early selections of the economic and national security teams. The president-elect himself made the announcements, his physical presence leaving little doubt as to who was in charge. And whereas diversity was the result, emphasis in each case was on the capability and experience of those chosen. One notable effect of this orderly process was to project an aura of leadership.

There was a casualty. Bill Richardson withdrew prior to a confirmation hearing. One case is par for the course and can have the effect of increased scrutiny of the rest.

Does this positive start ensure a successful Obama presidency? Hardly. Unscheduled events occur and unwelcome change happens, as with Israel’s assault in Gaza. Expect more agenda-bending events to interfere with the new president’s plans, hopefully not as dramatic as 9/11 for his predecessor.
The record as I read it, however, indicates that as a candidate and president-elect Barack Obama has verified an aptitude for leadership and for knowing who can best help him lead. Less clear is whether he understands that neither he nor Congress can quickly fix much of what is wrong in the nation and the world. In a separated powers government, confidence in knowing what to do is only part of getting it done.

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Yesterday General Colin Powell endorsed Barack Obama for President and then firmly chastised John McCain’s hate-mongering ads and robocalls as “nonsense” and “over the top” for political campaigning. General Powell is a statesman. John McCain and Sarah Palin are moral meltdowns.

In the past few weeks, the deplorable duo have descended into the political sewer, belching out the same kind of gaseous slurs and lies that George Bush and Karl Rove used to defeat McCain’s Presidential bid in 2000. Remember? The smears reached peak stridency in South Carolina. McCain was accused of being homosexual, fathering a “black” child out of wedlock, and having a “dope-addict” wife. All lies. Now, after his commitment to run a “clean” campaign, McCain is indulging in even more vicious smears against Barack Obama. Fear-mongering robocalls accusing Obama of being a terrorist are clogging people’s phones in Virginia and other states. Racist TV ads that begin with Obama’s face in dark shadow visually suggest that the black man is dangerous. In every way possible, McCain is trying to make people afraid to vote for Obama.

Sarah Palin’s major function in the McCain campaign seems to be as the mindless attack dog and she acts as if she relishes the role. Forget any attempt at eloquence or intelligence. Palin follows a script filled with lies casting Obama as un-American and in league with terrorists. But who cares about lies? Following Karl Rove’s script, George Bush and Dick Cheney have conducted their entire administration based on lies. Who needs facts or evidence? Reality can be a hindrance. McCain and Palin are no different. After all, isn’t the lesson that if you repeat lies often enough, people will believe they’re true? Bush/Cheney started a war based on lies. Surely the same technique can be used to elect a president. It worked in 2004, defeating John Kerry.

Thankfully, increasing numbers of Americans are smarter this time. They see that John McCain and Sarah Palin’s lies are inciting hate and fear. At their rallies, people have shouted “kill him” when Obama’s name was mentioned. John McCain even had to take the microphone from a supporter who said she was afraid of Obama because “he’s a Muslim.” McCain was forced to defend Obama from the hate and fear his own campaign has stirred up. It’s more than a sorry spectacle from two adults in public office who should know better. It’s offensive and dangerous – the kind of inflammatory rhetoric that once incited mobs to lynch black men and burn women as witches.

But if we can believe the polls, the McCain/ Palin lies are backfiring. In trying to paint Barack Obama as someone voters should fear, McCain has painted himself as the scary candidate, too angry, unfocused and impulsive to be President. In ignoring the economic and social issues that are the real threats to people’s lives, McCain is sinking his campaign ship in the slop of his own making.

I have never been a McCain supporter, but even I find it sad to see a man who heroically served the United States demeaning himself for political gain. In stooping to such sleaze, McCain shows his willingness to put his political ambition ahead of the country that he says he loves.

Then there is the matter of McCain’s judgment. In addition to condoning what may be the nastiest presidential campaign in American history, McCain’s selection of the pitifully unqualified Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate, demonstrates extraordinarily poor judgment. I find it hard to believe that a man who truly loves his country could jeopardize it by selecting a running mate as ignorant as Sarah Palin. Should McCain become President and suffer a health crisis – or worse – elevating Palin to the Presidency would be like putting a not-terribly-bright high-school student in the Oval Office!

Finally, in the last debate, McCain betrayed a shocking contempt for women. With huffing and puffing and much head and shoulder jerking, he mocked Obama’s support of a woman’s right to abortion to protect the health of the mother. Using air quotes, McCain dismissed women’s health as the “extreme pro-abortion position.” In that exchange, McCain In effect, was saying that women don’t count. Like George W. Bush and the Republican right-wing, McCain wants to undo all the hard-fought victories women have won for their dignity, their privacy, and their right to control their own bodies. McCain, like Bush, would take women backwards to a time when there was no birth control, no reproductive options. McCain, like Bush, would overturn Roe v. Wade, have government invade the womb, usurp women’s bodies as state property, and deny women’s most intimate and fundamental right to exercise reproductive choice. This position should be unacceptable to every woman and every enlightened man. Returning Americans to the pre-contraceptive tyranny of the gonads is not a tolerable platform of a 21st-century president.

And that’s the biggest problem. McCain hasn’t moved into the 21st-century and he seems incapable of doing so. It’s not just his age; it’s his attitude, one which the younger Palin shares. McCain is hopelessly locked in the past and his presidency would drag us all back with him. Yesterday, General Powell spoke of America’s need for “a generational change.” McCain represents a past generation. Obama has the vision, the world outlook, the understanding of complexity, and what Powell called “the intellectual vigor” to address the wretched problems left by Bush/Cheney. It’s Obama who presents the possibility for change you can believe in.

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Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com.  In the article below he reflects on the rehabilitation of liberalism. Read his previous OUPblogs here.

Whatever happens at the polls in two weeks, the pendulum has swung back in Liberalism’s direction. Economically, culturally, and ideologically, liberal answers are regaining legitimacy.

After all, even though the Democratic party nominated a liberal anti-war candidate over a more moderate establishment candidate this year, and the Republicans turned to a maverick with a reputation for bi-partisanship, the Democratic candidate is ahead in practically every battleground state that George Bush won in 2004.

How quickly times have changed. Whereas John Kerry was swiftboated in 2004, Obama (like Reagan) is developing Teflon powers as he continues to ride his surge in the polls despite stories about Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, and ACORN. When terrorism was issue number one, people preferred a Republican president; but when the economy becomes issue number one, people prefer a Democratic president.

This is why Sarah Palin’s charge that “‘spreading the wealth‘ sounds a little like socialism” isn’t getting much traction. Spreading the wealth sounds like sharing the wealth, and these days such thoughts aren’t all that unpopular. After all, the Bush administration’s decision to obtain equity stakes in several private banks in return for a liquidity injection isn’t exactly laissez faire.

Culturally, the country appears to have moved on from those culture wars we heard so much about just four years ago. Just this year, the California and Connecticut Supreme Courts’ decisions to legalize same-sex marriage and the lackluster response from the conservative community indicates the shifting cultural tectonics. Abortion isn’t such a hot button issue this year either. Anti-abortion Catholics have endorsed Obama in significant numbers. If anything, McCain’s selection of a running mate who will not make an exception to her pro-life position for rape and incest reveals a campaign completely in illusion about where the country is culturally. McCain’s contempt for the “health” exception for women will seriously damage his chances with women.

We also see the ideological shift in cross-party endorsements for Obama. Breaking a century and a half year old tradition, the Chicago Tribune has endorsed Barack Obama. Christopher Buckley’s defection is both substantially and symbolically powerful, as were the endorsements of Chuck Hagel and Richard Lugar. And now Colin Powell has joined the bandwagon, characterizing Obama as a “transformational” leader. The last time we saw such language being used to describe a potential president was during the landslide and realigning elections of 1932 and 1980.

In the days to come, Republicans will push back to insist that this is still a “center-right” country - as Karl Rove and Charles Krauthhammer have done - and they will try to remind Americans that Democratic control of all branches of government may not be a good idea. But if the result of the White House race is still unclear, no one doubts that the Democrats will strengthen their majorities in both the House and the Senate. Average Joe, the median independent voter has moved to the Left of Plumber Joe, the median Republican voter. It may be time to excavate “liberal” and “liberalism” from the dictionary of political incorrectness.

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Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com.  In the article below he reflects on last Friday’s debate. Read his previous OUPblogs here.

In the first presidential debate on Friday night, Senator McCain tried repeatedly to cast Senator Obama as a naive lightweight who does not understand foreign policy. Seven times, McCain laid the charge that Obama just doesn’t get it.

-”Senator Obama doesn’t understand the difference between a tactic and a strategy.”
-”And, yes, Senator Obama calls for more troops, but what he doesn’t understand, it’s got to be a new strategy…”
-”What Senator Obama doesn’t seem to understand is that if without precondition you sit down across the table from someone …”
-”I don’t think that Senator Obama understands that there was a failed state in Pakistan when Musharraf came to power.”
-”If we adopted Senator Obama’s set date for withdrawal, then that will have a calamitous effect in Afghanistan and American national security interests in the region. Senator Obama doesn’t seem to understand there is a connection between the two.”
-”Again, a little bit of naivete there. He doesn’t understand that Russia committed serious aggression against Georgia.”
-”Senator Obama still doesn’t quite understand – or doesn’t get it — that if we fail in Iraq, it encourages al Qaeda.”

In schools, in the boardroom, even around the kitchen table, people tend to prove their knowledge by proving what they think to be true rather than by attacking their interlocutors for their failure to understand. McCain was deploying a peculiar form of persuasion that we see often in our politics: he was trying to make a self-referential claim by an other-referential jab. By calling Obama naive he was trying to imply that he was not. Since it is bad taste in politics (as in real life) to be a self-professed know-it-all, it was, McCain probably thought, a classier act to simply dismiss Obama as naive and allow the conclusion that he understood foreign policy better to follow.

Yet this was exactly the failed strategy that Al Gore used against George Bush in their presidential debates in 2000. Although some pundits thought that Al Gore was scoring debate points, many viewers came away thinking that he was a condescending know-it-all.

Even the most artful rhetorician of our time, President Ronald Reagan, had to strike the right balance of tone and humor to successfully get away with his “there you go again” rejoinder. This well executed line in his debate with President Carter in 1980 was one of the defining moments of that campaign. But it gained traction only because there was a growing consensus in the electorate that the decades-long liberal formula for solving the country’s economic woes was obsolete and in need of overhaul. “Do you still not get it” only works when the audience has already gotten it and moved on to newer solutions, leaving one’s interlocutor alone in the dustheap of history.

The problem is that in 2008, Obama is not alone in his views. There are significantly more voters tired of George Bush’s unilateralism, his hard-headed focus on the war on terrorism in Iraq, and his refusal to negotiate with rogue nations than there are voters who would prefer to stay his course. Unlike in 1980 when the country was moving to the political right, this year, many Independents will be apt to wonder if it is McCain who still doesn’t get it.

Senator McCain would do well to remember that the primary season is over and he needs to stop speaking only to his base if he wants to narrow Obama’s lead in the polls. The strategy of calling one’s debate partner naive (a euphemism for a fool) does not often get one extra points from neutral bystanders, independent voters. If Republicans were, like McCain, exasperated on Friday night with their perception that Obama just wouldn’t see the obvious, McCain probably appeared condescending to Independents with the forced grins by which he greeted Obama’s alleged displays of naivete. McCain needs to stop harping on the charge that Obama doesn’t get it but start proving that HE gets it - that many Independents and Democrats are looking to restore the country’s relationship with the rest of the world, that there are many Americans who see the war in Iraq as a foreign policy tangent to the brewing problems in Afghanistan. Maybe Senator Obama doesn’t get it. But do you, Senator McCain?

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For close to eight years I have watched George Bush piss away a comfortable surplus and plunge us into a huge deficit; fritter away decades of goodwill overseas; use outright lies to launch an endless war; display callous disregard to fellow Americans during natural disasters; play cowboy while our economy sank into the mud; and exude contempt and disinterest for those concerned about this small planet we call home.

All the while he has argued for a smaller role for government — at least, in his own country. He’s more than happy to meddle in other countries, especially where oil is involved. (Darfur? He can’t be bothered with that.) He’s a typical fortunate son — and don’t let that down-home-folksy posturing or fake-Southern-accent fool you; he was born in (then) oh-so-wealthy New Haven (CT, not TX) and as a young man attended Andover (MA, not TX), followed by Yale and Harvard, plus a cushy detour in the Guard.

Oh, and for those of you unfamiliar with the military-industrial complex, what we have overseas is not just a few tent cities with troops heating up cans of beanie-weenie over an open fire. We’ve set up a second country in Iraq — a massive, contractor-run world — and you’re paying for it, endlessly. (I am of the belief that we can’t just depart overnight — what we break can’t be that easily repaired — meaning that we’re going to keep paying for it.)

Now we’re being told to sign off on a huge blank check to Wall Street, hurry-hurry-hurry! (Jon Stewart did a brilliant play-by-play comparing the rush into Iraq with the rush to sign this package.) Oh, and of course, it’s a plan that the GOP insists has a “smaller role for government” than the one originally proposed, which at least injected some adult supervision and sanity into a government bailout.

I understand people who are miffed at the unfairness of the government bailing out homeowners who got in over their head. I don’t feel that level of anger, maybe because more than once I’ve been tempted to spend beyond my means.  The money was easy, and besides, everyone was doing it. What saved me was first, a partner who shares my values and encourages us to make wise choices, and second, a book, Your Money or Your Life, that rescued me from a period of poor financial management in my late 20s and early 30s.

I live a life where Starbucks is a treat when I’m traveling, lunch in a restaurant is the exception, and I am allergic to paying full-price for clothes. I don’t live entirely debt-free, but when I suddenly had to buy a car this summer, I was able to pay for half of it right on the spot (and you all know I wrestled with the devil — I actually filled out the paperwork for a far more expensive car, and then drove to another lot and made a very sensible purchase). I have a small student loan from my MFA I am paying down with double-payments every month.

I could go on — our idea of an adventure is to lunch on the free snacks at CostCo — but you get the drill. The key here is that it’s not like my income prevented me from going wild (even though it should have). When we house-shopped, we — a minister and a librarian — “qualified” for a house far above our means, and it took strong personal discipline to buy a house that made sense for us, rather than what we saw people buying. It wasn’t just mortgage credit; today I could buy a vacation home with the combined limits of my (paid-off-monthly) credit cards.

I had bad house-envy in this area for a while — I kept wondering how so many people could afford those fancy homes. O.k., now I know the answer: they couldn’t. We’ve been living in the real world, and they have not. Our house may be on the small side, but it’s beautiful and comfortable and in a wonderful neighborhood (and we put a significant “down” on it). If it ends up we can’t sell it for a while (though prices in Tallahassee have not plunged the way they have in the rest of Florida), someone at FAM or in the legislature or working at FSU will enjoy it as a rental. If it stayed empty for a while, we could tighten our belts yet more and survive.

I got an uneasy feeling other people don’t live like us some time ago, when someone at another Place Of Work commented that due to an odd pay schedule, some of his co-workers would be tightening their belts while they waited for paychecks. He didn’t mean entry-level support staff; he meant middle-class workers driving late-model cars, living in commodious homes, and lunching out daily. I thought, are these people living paycheck-to-paycheck?

But my point here is that regardless if bailing out homeowners is “unfair,” if it saves the economy from a complete crash, so be it. I would strongly recommend we make it hard for people to buy beyond their means in the future, and there need to be some cold splashes of reality for a few folks. Yet what we cannot afford to do is give unfettered rein to the jokers who got us in this pickle in the first place.  Nor can we make their exit from financial management comfortable and easy while the Americans they exploited are struggling to cope with reentry into the real world.

Since Reagan was president, Americans have absorbed the muddled message that less government means more money in their pockets. That has been true — for the very wealthy, and for the profligate Wall Street pirates making merry with our money (q.v. this YouTube clip of the Keating 5 — remember the S&L scandal? Remember McCain’s complicity?).  For the rest of us, this radical deregulation has led to a severe financial crisis where people believe they have more money in their pockets — only instead of the financiers complict in this folie a deux teetering on office ledges, they’re negotiating posh exit packages.

It’s time common sense prevailed in Washington.  We need calm, poised leadership, not hucksterish posturing. (Don’t even get me started on McCain canceling the debate — have you seen him side-by-side with Obama? Of course he’s avoiding the debate!) We need to take action, and it should be sooner than later, but what we don’t need is for Bush’s going-away gift to be a blank check for his moneyed cronies. We need to help America, not put a stake in its heart.

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Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com.  In the article below he looks at Senator Barack Obama. Read his previous OUPblogs here.

The talk of town these days is that Senator Barack Obama is either just too cerebral, or refreshingly so.

Assessing the Senator’s weak performance at the Saddleback Faith Forum, Michael Gerson wrote in the Washington Post, “Obama was fluent, cool and cerebral — the qualities that made Adlai Stevenson interesting but did not make him president. ” Yet to others, cerebral is good. “Obama’s cool, cerebral style may be just what we need,” wrote Eleanor Clift of Newsweek.

It has occurred to me that people who agree or disagree with my thesis about The Anti-intellectual Presidency have tended to be divided on the question of whether or not a president’s political judgment should be based on intellection or intuition. This division may appear to some to map crudely along partisan lines: some liberals and Democrats tend to value reliance on the intellect; some conservatives and Republicans prioritize instinct. I think there is more agreement than meets the eye.

Insofar as there is a partisan disagreement, populist Republicans are probably right that as a general political rule, visceral trumps cerebral. The Obama campaign is starting to recognize this, with their choice of vice-presidential candidate Joe Biden, someone who speaks with passion and sometimes, apparently, without much prior thought.

But I don’t think many people are against intellection as a method for decision-making. It is surely a strawman argument that President Bush does no thinking and that Karl Rove was the brain behind his decisions. The key is that Bush pulls off the semblance of intellectual diffidence, even though he must do a lot of thinking behind the scenes. Like others have said of President Dwight Eisenhower, President Bush has mastered the highest political art that conceals art itself.

Now, there is still an argument to be made for judgment to be based on intuition rather than intellection, but it is a weak one. “Go with your gut” may be a familiar refrain, but even if intuition is less error-prone than intellection, there is one reason that recommends against its excessive use. Intuition is non-falsifiable. No one can prove what he feels in his or her gut. So when President Bush told us that he looked into Vladamir Putin’s eyes and saw a soul, we could only take his word for it that he saw what he saw. We couldn’t test the claim; we couldn’t even debate it. This can’t be what democracy is about, because democracy is conducted with the deliberation of public reasons, not the unilateral assertion of private emotions.

If I am correct, then no one disagrees with the importance of intellection as a decision-making method, even as there is disagreement on the political utility of projecting or hiding such intellection. The disagreement is about the image, but we can scarcely deny the importance of the process of intellection. Because they have failed to make this distinction between image and process, those who disagree with the appearance of intellection have also wrongly concluded that the process of intellection should have no place in leadership.

Anti-intellectualism is politically powerful, but it is in the end self-defeating. Suppose I feel in my gut that intellection is key to decision-making. How will someone who disagrees with my gut instinct prove my intuition wrong? Only by argument, debate, intellection.

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Evil Monkeys...

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This is how I feel about politicians who don't do their job and spend all their time on the campaign trail pandering, pandering and pandering... How about some new way to do this?

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In the April 28 issue of People, Barbara Bush talks about the new kid’s book she collaborated on with her daughter, Jenna. “One day, Jenna started writing while Barbara and went for a walk,” says the First Lady. “When we came back, it was pretty much done.”

Just in case you are wondering, that is EXACTLY how it works for the rest of us.

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We take our politics seriously here at Summer Friend. The best president ever was Dana Carvey's George Bush, as seen in this historic moment:


I also like Phil Hartman's Clinton and his Reagan.

Darrell Hammond's Clinton is a write-in candidate. (I couldn't find any clips.)

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 "Before there is peace, blood will spill blood, and the lake will run red."  Leafpool, the medicine cat for ThunderClan, receives this prophetic warning from the ancestors.  Leafpool struggles to interpret this message, even

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