I Rise in Praise of James Fallows

What is the value of opinion journalism, especially in the age of Internet blogging when it is so easy publish one’s own?

To me, there are two benefits to the time I spend reading blogs about current events:

1. Leveraging the experience and insight of others to be able to peer through the hazy mist of the future with some accuracy. Having the ability to reliably judge the pros/cons of alternate courses of action is the most critical aspect of decision making, because any decision of consequence is going to be taken in cases where the outcome is not definitively knowable in advance. And, one can use the insights of others as proxies for one's own if the journalist proves reliable.
2. To help hone one’s own thoughts on a given topic by writing about it in a clarifying and edifying manner. I can often better understand my own thinking once I recognize it written in the hand of another more clearly than it would be in my own muddled prose.

On both fronts I come in praise of James Fallows, a writer for the Atlantic Monthly.

Here is what he wrote 1 hour (Nostradamus, eat my dust!!) after the announcement of Sarah Palin as McCain’s running mate:

Let's assume that Sarah Palin is exactly as smart and disciplined as Barack Obama. But instead of the year and a half of nonstop campaigning he has behind him, and Joe Biden's even longer toughening-up process, she comes into the most intense period of the highest stakes campaign with absolutely zero warmup or preparation.

If she has ever addressed an international issue, there's no evidence of it in internet-land. The smartest person in the world could not prepare quickly enough to know the pitfalls, and to sound confident while doing so, on all the issues she will be forced to address.

So the prediction is: unavoidable gaffes. The challenge for the McCain-Palin campaign is to find some way to defuse them ahead of time, since Socrates, Machiavelli, and Clausewitz reincarnated would themselves make errors in her situation. [em: mine]

Then, once Palin falls flat in her Gibson/Couric interviews, he captures the nature of the problem that Palin's performance exposed in a manner that rises well-beyond simply heckling her as a know-nothing red-neck.

Each of us has areas we care about, and areas we don't. If we are interested in a topic, we follow its development over the years. And because we have followed its development, we're able to talk and think about it in a "rounded" way. We can say: Most people think X, but I really think Y. Or: most people used to think P, but now they think Q. Or: the point most people miss is Z. Or: the question I'd really like to hear answered is A.

Here's the most obvious example in daily life: Sports Talk radio.

Mention a name or theme -- Brett Favre, the Patriots under Belichick, Lance Armstrong's comeback, Venus and Serena -- and anyone who cares about sports can have a very sophisticated discussion about the ins and outs and myth and realities and arguments and rebuttals.

People who don't like sports can't do that. It's not so much that they can't identify the names -- they've heard of Armstrong -- but they've never bothered to follow the flow of debate. I like sports -- and politics and tech and other topics -- so I like joining these debates. On a wide range of other topics -- fashion, antique furniture, the world of restaurants and fine dining, or (blush) opera -- I have not been interested enough to learn anything I can add to the discussion. So I embarrass myself if I have to express a view.

Or, to put a finer and less charitable point on it (though I don't think gratuitously so):

After thirty years of meeting and interviewing politicians, I can think of exactly three people who sounded as uninformed and vacant as this. All are now out of office. One was a chronic drunk.

[snip]

More than that, it suggests a person whose previous two decades of adult life have not equipped her to absorb the briefings she is no doubt receiving about the big, obvious issues in the campaign: the market crash, health care proposals, tax plans. [em: mine]

And, that was really the point for me about Palin. It is not about flubbed syntax or clumsy regurgitation of campaign talking points or even her raw intelligence per se, it is about having an existing mental framework and philosophical grounding for evaluating public and international policy problems such that one can actually think in a clear and reasoned manner about them.

In the end, this is the greatest source of my own attraction to Obama. It is his obvious intelligence and capacity to deal with complex issues with a degree of suppleness of thought that let's us know there is actually a competent mind at work behind the curtain.

On the one hand, I struggle at times to condemn those who gravitate to Bush or Palin on cultural affinity issues. Since, one can dismiss the attachment to cultural signals as things that "don't matter" and should be superfluous to hard policy positions formulated by experts beavering away in political think-tanks and debated with great earnestness throughout the campaign season.

But, my own gravitation to Obama is simply the inverse of that which I might otherwise denigrate. I am simply seeking different markers of affinity of thought and perspective.

Obama appeals because he demonstrates that he thinks like me and thus I hope he will make judicious decisions about the correct course of action in my stead. Because, as we are now finding with the financial crisis and with 9/11 in the case of Bush, the actual course of a Presidency is only tangentially related to specific campaign promises or party platform statements.

And, for my money, the most troubling aspects about McCain had little (directly speaking) to do with his stated domestic or foreign policy concerns and was instead what I judged to be characteristics of his decision-making process:

1. Impulsiveness - As quintessentially summarized by the Palin selection, but also by his well-reputed outbursts of temper.
2. Reliance on black/white formulations - With McCain taking on the role of sanctimonious crusader with a willingness to hold political grudges.

And, I have had more than enough exposure to those two leadership traits over the past eight years to last me quite a loooooong while.

And, so while there is little conceivable chance I would have ended up in any different place, I can thank James Fallows for helping me understand why I believe what I do.

Mad props to a journalism OG, as the kids say.