On Debates and Disappointments

Every season on American Idol, one of the heavy favorites goes home way too early. Chris Daughtry, for example, was sent packing even though he was apparently far more popular than the three contestants who survived him (including the winner, and subsequent flop, Taylor Hicks). So shocking have the departures been that the show instituted a “judges save” to allow the judges to overrule the numb idiots in the electorate (nobody says outright that they’re numb idiots, but the message is palpable). Additionally, the Idol judges regularly repeat the obvious message that “you have to get out and vote for your favorites if you don’t want them to go home.” The Idol example, silly though it may seem, is instructive for thinking about last night’s presidential debate.

For anyone listening to the debate analysis, Romney wiped the floor with President Obama. I’ve heard commentators announce that Romney “destroyed,” “obliterated,” and “dominated” Obama. On the Diane Rehm Show, the three guests, ostensibly representing the entire spectrum of American political belief, agree that “this format isn’t really Obama’s strong suit.” On MSNBC, Obama’s liberal supporters are like howler monkeys, shrieking about the President’s failure to “show up” and “get the job done.” As on the teevee, there is widespread disbelief and dismay across the liberal social media landscape. And as if that all wasn’t enough, Obama and his team are apparently so demoralized that his handlers barely showed up to spin the debate last night (one Twitter commenter noted 17 Romney surrogates to only 5 Obamanites talking to the press after the debate), and the Obama campaign has been all but silent this morning. Surely, it seems, last night’s debate was a catastrophic blow to the Obama campaign. But, I think we forget too quickly the American Idol lesson.

For the past several weeks, Obama has looked insurmountable following a series of devastating gaffes on Romney’s part. The most prominent one, of course, is the secretly recorded video of Romney calling 47% of the country leeches and victims that has been making the rounds for the past few weeks. The election forecasters InTrade and FiveThirtyEight blog have had Obama at a huge advantage to win both the electoral and popular votes (not much has changed since last night as that’s concerned, by the way—FiveThirtyEight still gives Obama better than an 80% chance of winning the election.). While this seems like a good thing for the President’s chance at a second term, Chris Daughtry can tell you that there’s nothing worse for turning out voters than a sure thing. In fact, the more certain the President’s chances are, the more he has to worry that voters will lose their motivation to turn out on November 6th.

This put(s) the President in a tough position as a debater. Does he, as Chris Matthews and Ed Shultz suggested, crush his opponent on stage to show that he’s the big man on campus? Or does he soft-pedal into the debate, hoping to convince his supporters that the race is still a tight one and he needs their energy, their fervor, or at least their begrudging support come election day? I think we got a pretty good idea of which path Obama decided was the smarter one. It was no surprise, then, when Senior Advisor to the Obama campaign, David Plouffe, said in an interview on MSNBC that Obama thinks that “in the long run” voters will recognize who the best leader is. Anyone who watched Al Gore’s dominating performance against George W. Bush in 2000, and then watched the electorate revolt against the incumbent because mean old Mr. Gore hurt poor Bushie Wushie’s feelings might recognize the genius of this strategy. I assume it was strategic, for what it’s worth, because, while debates might not be Obama’s greatest platform, there is no evidence that I can see that he or his advisors have ever been anything but masterful at campaigning (whether or not you agree that he’s been great at actually governing). The absence of “messaging” or “spin” following the debates reinforced my sense that Obama’s team made a strategic choice that was far removed from winning last night’s debacle.

As I’ve watched the debate analysis over the past 12 hours or so, it appears the strategy is working. Liberals and Democrats (which are not, by the way, always the same thing) have spent lots of hours and energy rehashing and reasserting Obama’s accomplishments as Commander-in-Chief. Obama’s weakness last night has provided an impetus for renewed energy and commitment on the part of his voting base, in no small part because they’re being reminded (ad nauseum) of his accomplishments over the past four years. On the other hand, conservatives and Republicans (again, not necessarily coterminous) have spent much of the same time lauding Romney’s debate bona fides. For Romney, I can’t help but wonder about whether his push to the middle on things like tax cuts, Medicare, and even Dodd-Frank and the Affordable Care Act (“I’ll get rid of Obamacare and replace it with Romney Care on a state-by-state basis?) will re-energize his voting base or de-energize them. I doubt they’ll be rushing to change teams, but there wasn’t a lot of what the pundits call “red meat” for his supporters to get them excited about casting a ballot in his favor. For people whose minds were made up prior to the debates, nothing that happened last night is likely to change their minds, but much happened that might have changed their motivation. For those who have yet to make up their minds, I imagine this event (and all the energy surrounding it) will inform their eventual decision, but only mildly given the inevitable intensity of the next 5 weeks of campaigning.

Which brings me to my final thought, only tangentially related to what I’ve already said. As I surfed Fizzborg, the Twitter, and other haunts of the political commentariat last night and this morning, a theme kept surfacing: these debates were nothing but political theater, and therefore a waste of time. I find this assertion somewhat distressing for a number of reasons, but I will restrain my observation to just two of them here. First, a large number of people claiming the irrelevance of last night’s debates are also, in other circumstances, wont to claim that they’re troubled by Americans’ widespread disconnection from politics and aversion to democratic civic engagement. This is especially the case among academics, and yet, the sort of abdication I saw repeatedly in regards to the debate made me wonder: If we, the people who are supposed to be professionally critically engaged in this type of civic event, can’t get invested, how can be surprised when our fellow Americans don’t engage either? In tuning out, it seems to me, we risk performing the failure of our own beliefs.

 Which leads to my second point. The fact is, a lot happened last night, and the baying of the pundit class was as much a part of what happened as were the lunge-and-parry onstage. The debaters said little and meant even less, but to dismiss it as meaningless theater is a tremendous mistake. This is the political environment in which we live—strategy, messaging, and manipulation are (and have always been) fundamental parts of the process. We act surprised and dismayed, but that’s because we’re playing at being willfully naïve, not because there’s anything so surprising. In fact, there was nothing, and I mean nothing that was truly surprising last night. In the absence of some astonishing revelation, it is easy to dismiss the debates as meaningless. But it is exactly the absence of revelation that invites us, and every potential voter along with us, to consider more deeply the “meaning” of a series of debates that seem absent of any meaning. A tremendous amount of time, energy, and emotion was invested in last night’s event, and to pretend that it was wasted because (1) the debaters weren’t honest or forthcoming enough or (2) the exchange didn’t provide enough revelatory fireworks, is to become the numb, mindless sheep that each party is fond of accusing the other party of catering to.

Conservatives: Hanging Tough?

In the last few years, at least in the 8 years between 2000 and 2008, Americans got a good look at many forms of conservatism. One fundamental tenet of modern conservatism, especially if you recognize the views of people like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and Joe the Plumber as representative of modern conservatism, is that conservatives are tough. They're tough on crime, tough on terrorism, tough on foreign policy. They support rugged individualism, hard work, and making tough choices. They supported the war in Iraq, war in Afghanistan, and the war on terror. They support a strong military, tough border policies, and guns for everyone. Conservatives  would have you believe that they are the only people standing between Americans and those that would massacre them.

In contrast, liberals are supposedly soft, weak-willed naifs. If Republicans are the party of strong national security, Democrats are the party of cut-and-run and surrender. According to conservatives, liberals only care about making everyone feel good with politically correct language, affirmative action policies, and massive government spending. As Limbaugh, Hannity, O'Reilly and Beck are all too happy to announce, liberalism (also called "socialism," "fascism," and "communism" by voices of the conservative movement) is going to result in America's fall from grace.

If all you listened to was the way the two sides talked about themselves, it would be easy to fall into the trap of believing that conservatives are hardened, realistic defenders of American values and liberals are gentle, vulnerable, sentimental weenies.

And yet, conservatism is, at least in its current incarnation, nothing less than the fear of nearly everything. American conservatives' entire platform is based on the fear of something: terrorist attacks, government bankruptcy, higher taxes, divine retribution, the weakening of traditional marriages, feminists, the siege of illegal immigrants, Muslim infiltration, watering down of the 2nd Amendment, and on and on and on. I'm not saying they're wrong to be worried about some of these things, but for tough guys, they spend a lot of time cowering in fear of every shadow on the wall and breath of wind in the trees. On the other hand, those sad-sack, weakling libruls are getting pepper sprayed for protesting Wall Street abuse and getting their asses kicked in support of free speech.

Just as I'm not saying all conservative fears are misguided, I'm not saying all liberal demonstrations are justified. I'm simply pointing out that from where I'm standing, the "tough guys" look like a bunch of fraidy cats, and the supposed fraidy cats are standing tough for what they believe.

So I'm left wondering, how did conservatives get the reputation for toughness, again?

What Really Scares Me About Evil, Deranged Lunatics

In the last 36 hours or so, Americans have been collectively weighing the shooting of 71 people in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. There are already volumes of commentary on the pertinent issues, a healthy dose of which I’ve wallowed in since I saw the first headline yesterday morning. Although there are many troubling aspects of this event, I’ve been struck by the insistence of most people to brand the shooter “evil” (Mitt Romney and Barack Obama), “deranged” (Anderson Cooper), and “a lunatic” (EJ Dionne). One thing people across political, religious, and news network lines agree on is that the man was crazy. I understand, and even agree, that these characterizations of the shooter may be true, but I’m troubled by what they seem to me to imply about where responsibility lies.

Certainly, the lion’s share of responsibility must be laid at the shooter’s door—hell, he shot 71 unsuspecting people. It’s both inconceivable and horrific, and there’s no excusing his actions.

What concerns me, however, is that the characterizations of the shooter as evil, crazy, deranged, disturbed, unbalanced, etc. leave ALL responsibility on his doorstep. He was solely, individually, and unstoppably responsible for his actions. You can’t stop evil, after all, you simply must resist it where possible and heal when evil manifests. I heard one commentator, David Brooks, make this point on the radio yesterday—he essentially said, you’ll never be able to prevent a psycho from wounding innocent people if they’re determined to do so. He implied, "So why even try?" The commonplace acceptance of the shooter’s “insanity” reflects our real understanding of what makes a person randomly open fire on a crowd of strangers, but it also indicates that we believe his craziness made us helpless to stop him. We have no responsibility because you can't prevent evil, so why even try?

 If we’re talking about stopping him once he made the decision to arm himself and rampage, I suppose I agree. But to a significant degree, I think that dismissing this shooter (and all the others, at least since Charles Whitman shot up UT Austin in 1966) as “crazy” is a cop out that allows the rest of us—the "normal" people—to excuse ourselves from thinking or worrying about our own involvement in this kind of violence. Calling the shooter "crazy" and "evil" excuses his actions by pretending they couldn’t have been prevented with better mental health care in America, stronger gun control laws, less general romance attached to violence, more social support for students, and on and on. If the perpetrator was "evil," we don't have to bother talking about these things—not really, not for any longer than it takes for the news cycle to pick up something else worth repeating over and over again. Because again, there's nothing we can do.

I’m not, necessarily, advocating better mental health care, gun control, etc., though it shouldn’t be hard to see where I stand on these issues. What I am advocating is a realization that Americans' naïve idealization of individualism, personal responsibility, and social insularity are intimately involved in this shooter’s actions. We are, at least partly, responsible for his actions because we are, at least partly, responsible for the conditions that allowed him to act. The political, religious, and cultural decisions we make collectively create the conditions for these kinds of horrific mass shootings. This should be clear in the shooter's actions—he didn't set out to hurt an individual; he set out to hurt society, presumably because he felt that society hurt him. There's no other reason to attack a theater full of strangers.

While a good deal of time is being and will be spent on determining who's to "blame" for the shooting in Colorado, I submit that we all are in some way because of decisions we make collectively. When we vote to defund mental health institutions in order to save ourselves the tax burden, as was done in California in the 1980s and in several places since, we collectively accept the responsibility for turning people with mental health challenges out of hospitals and into the streets, prisons, and our neighborhoods. When we devise and accept movie ratings that punish moviemakers with strict ratings for sexual content but don’t punish moviemakers with equally strict ratings for violent content, we accept that we will be continually exposed to depictions of graphic violence, as will our children. When we advocate education systems that equate “rigor” to over-working and under-supporting students—where students earn their stripes by surviving the gauntlet—we accept that students' mental and physical health will be tested, and sometimes broken, in the service of “weeding out the weak.” (Incidentally, this happens at every level of the education system, not just at the highest levels of graduate education.) When we claim, as Texas Representative Louis Gohmert and others have, that mass shootings are some sort of divine retribution, we reaffirm the attitude that only "good" people who think like us and believe what we believe deserve our support and care. We also reaffirm the romanticized American attitude that tells people they’re on their own because no one cares about anyone else unless they’re legally or economically obligated to be.

Defining the "evil" people in the world lets us imagine they're not us, and we therefore have no responsibility to them or for them. When we spend our time defining who the good people are, who the bad people are, and who the people are that just aren’t worth our time and money, we accept that some people will be left to struggle and suffer on their own. We accept that some of them will be estranged, and we ultimately accept that some of them will become violent against "us" because we've cast them aside. Perhaps that’s inevitable in a world shared by 7 billion people, but it’s something I think we should do better to try to prevent because it ultimately ends up hurting us all.

To reiterate, the political, religious, and cultural choices that we make collectively create the conditions for the evil, deranged, lunatic actions of people like the shooter in Colorado. If we genuinely want to stop them, we need to collectively decide that “every man for himself” is not the best way to live together. But such decisions take serious dialogue, and they take the realization that “evil” isn’t something that exists beyond the responsibility of “normal people.” Maybe if we’d collectively take more responsibility, instead of writing these kinds of horrific acts off as “crazy,” we’d be better able to have conversations that reach beyond what's good for everybody individually. We'd be able to talk about what we can and should do for ourselves as a collective—a group of people who live together and need to be responsible to and for everyone else, not just the people who agree with us. Or to put it another way, instead of waiting for an evil, deranged lunatic to shoot up a movie theater, college campus, or summer camp to bring us all closer together, maybe we try and get our collective goals together before tragedy happens. Maybe, if we take a little more responsibility for one another, we even end up preventing it.