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.

Michael Goldfarb confirms my omnicient demigod status

Close followers of this blog (ha ha) will note the following interview with Goldfarb was posted 1 day after my spirited defense of John McCain's honor with respect to the issue of Jeremiah Wright.

Goldfarb:

We were prevented from mentioning it and that was very frustrating to a lot of people on the campaign.

[snip]

Everybody wanted to go in that direction, besides John McCain, I think.

Now obviously, there is a potential argument to be made that the decision was less about McCain's personal honor and was simply good political tactics, if one takes the belief that the blowback would have been worse than any potential benefit of whacking Wright around like a pinata all campaign season long.

Chris Bodenner takes this tack on a guest-post titled "Pragmatism, Not Honor" on Sullivan's site:

John McCain's top pollster, Bill McInturff, said this evening that attacking Barack Obama over his relationship with Rev. Jeremiah Wright would not have helped McCain's campaign and could have destroyed his presidency, had he been elected.

Some Republicans were angry during the campaign that McCain had -- reportedly for reasons of principle, and out of concern that he'd be viewed as racist -- refused to air ads with Wright's inflammatory sermons.... "I said 'Look, if we do win we’ll win with about 273 electoral votes and we’ll lose the popular vote by 3 million,'" recalled McInturff of the internal discussions about cutting attack ads with Wright. "If [McCain] had used that issue that way, you’d already be delegitimized as a president. You couldn’t function as government."

Ultimately, for me, I think there is too much evidence in McCain's own life and political career that highlights his deep sense of honor, his war-service chief among them, to think that he is nothing more than the most cynical self-serving politician (see Blagojevich, Rod). One of the most humanizing things about him is the various confessional moments he has had where he publically regrets and recants things he has said or done in pursuit of political goals. Every politician is forced to compromise his/her principles to a degree, but McCain seems to struggle with it much more than most.

Yet, somewhat oddly, it was his seeming commitment to national honor (a national greatness conservative in the Teddy Roosevelt strain) that made me even less disposed to him than I may have been otherwise. His frequent appeals to "bring our troops home with honor" from Iraq (while I acknowledge this was simply a campaign talking point) reflected in my mind McCain's belief that this was an objective that was worth fighting for, literally.

From some of his statements, I get the sense that he would have been willing to sacrifice another 58,000+ American lives in Vietnam if that would have guaranteed an "honorable" victory. But, for me, I think there is a muddy line between adherence to principles and blind dogmatism.

The "domino theory" that underpinned the strategic necessity for the Vietnam war turned out to be incorrect. Vietnam fell and all of Southeast Asia, and shortly thereafter the world, did not fall under the grip of Communism. And, those in power that clung blindly to the belief that we could not afford to show any weakness protracted the conflict at great cost.

In short, I don't think countries have honor. People do. Soldiers do. But, countries only have interests. And it is the firm commitment to the maintenance of abstractions such as "national honor" that leads to hubristic over-reaching, especially in the area of military affairs.

Thus, fast forward to our case in Iraq. I am most concerned that we get as many of our soldiers out alive as possible and that we leave the place in as peaceable a state as possible given the severe trauma that society has experienced both before and after our invasion. And, I don't much care (rhetorically speaking, of course) whether we do it by honorable or dishonorable means.

It is the ends (and lives it takes to reach them) that we should be worried about.