3rd Debate: Mitt Romney Says Nothing, Repeatedly

I admit that I have a tendency to talk more about language than about substance when analyzing political speech, but then again there isn’t much substance to be had.  And besides, the little things matter.  Failing to take note of tricks of language and Orwellian efforts at branding can mean lowering your guard against political manipulation.  So I don’t feel bad about picking at nits, because I believe those nits have a tendency to grow and consume public dialogue if they aren’t gotten rid of.

There was one talking point in last night’s presidential debate that I found exceptionally aggravating.  It was the point that Mitt Romney made about the perilous situation that the United States faces in the world because Iran is now “four years closer” to having a nuclear weapon.  Considering that that was repeated four times over the course of the ninety minutes, it seemed to me that it relied upon the assumption of an audience that wasn’t really paying close attention.  It grabbed my attention as an utterly empty political slogan the first time it was uttered, and the rest of the audience had three additional opportunities to get that same impression.

There’s really no other impression to be had.  Saying that Iran is four years closer to a nuclear weapon is like saying that I’m four years closer to a Nobel Prize.  Chances are pretty good that I’m not going to get one of those.  I guess you could argue that even if I don’t, as long as I keep working towards a relevant goal – writing literature, for instance – I might be closer to having a Nobel Prize when I die than I am right now.  But speaking more colloquially, if a certain outcome is never going to happen, one doesn’t get closer to it over time.

Now, in the event that I am going to win a Nobel Prize, then the hypothetical statement is true.  I am four years close to that outcome than I was four years ago.  Similarly, if at any point in the future, under any circumstances, Iran develops and builds a nuclear weapon, then they are presently four years closer to that outcome than they were four years ago.  That’s the way time works.  Future events get closer every day.  Would a Mitt Romney presidency unlock some secret of the universe that would allow time to flow backwards within the borders of one country?  Or was this intended as a subtle metaphor for bombing nations back to the Stone Age?

At this point, I imagine a lot of people will narrow their eyes disdainfully at me and hiss, “Oh, you know what he meant.”  And in a vague sense, yes, of course I do.  Obviously he meant to suggest that President Obama’s first term allowed the Iranian regime to become materially closer to having the knowledge and resources required for building a nuclear weapon.  But I don’t know what Romney meant by “four years closer,” presumably because “four years closer” doesn’t mean anything.  It’s the vaguest and least substantive way he could have phrased what he was trying to say, and since it was repeated four times over, that must have been deliberate.

If Romney had had a substantive claim to make about a worsening Iranian threat resulting from an Obama presidency, he had ample opportunity to make it.  He didn’t.  That’s not to say that there’s no such argument to be made, but it does suggest that Romney’s claims relied on bullshit – a disregard for the truth value of what he was saying, in favor of whatever would serve his ends if it happened, incidentally, to be true.

That behavior is quite in keeping with Romney’s entire approach to his campaign.  Typically, he seems to accomplish this exploitation of politically convenient narratives by plainly reversing position, or by outright lying.  Now, with the third debate, he seems to have uncovered the perfect means of utilizing bullshit, which is by making claims that cannot be contradicted because they provide absolutely no information, even as they sound damning for the opposing party.  I suppose that in that way Romney has succeeded in emulating Reagan.

The public cannot allow such casual disregard for truth or rational argumentation to stand as a relevant political tactic.  We cannot allow politicians, corporations, or anyone else to believe that they can sway us by branding and rhetoric alone, without having to appeal to factual data or to be transparent about their own views.  Such dialogue will only improve if we hone our ability to parse it and separate it and call out the bullshit.  We’re failing in that responsibility if Mitt Romney believes he can say four times in the same debate that we’re four years closer to the future, and have that somehow count in his favor.

Endorsing Tribalism and Gay Rights

I submitted a brief editorial to AND Magazine regarding the liberal reaction to President Obama’s endorsement of marriage equality.  Hopefully it will go up tomorrow.  Having thought about the topic a little more, I feel I would like to use this space to post something of a supplement to my previous comments.  In my AND piece, I pointed out that there was a tumblr blog launched almost immediately after Obama’s television interview, which consists entirely of animated gifs emphasizing celebration of the newfound vocal support for gay marriage.

My first criticism of this sort of reaction is that it’s making a celebration out of something that doesn’t really warrant it.  It shouldn’t have taken this long to get President Obama to make a basic statement of support for the gay community, and even now that he did, that is now what they need; they need legislative and judicial action, which the President can push for and support.

But apart from the fact that their singing and dancing is an overzealous response by some liberals to a very modest change, what may actually be more significant is that it demonstrates a hideous tendency in private citizens’ engagement with the political process.  The people making the gifs for tumblr and otherwise celebrating yesterday’s announcement must be aware of the fact that nothing has substantially changed.  The celebration, then, isn’t about progress; it’s about popularity.  The sad fact is that in the modern political landscape, we are so caught up in the excitement of the process that we consider high-profile endorsements to be tantamount to actual political victories.

The most damnable feature of our typical approach to social issues and governmental procedure is the impulse towards tribalism.  There are few better examples of such tribalism than widespread rejoicing over the affirmation that our ideas have a place among the powerful and the popular.  That is something much different from cheering over the affirmation that our ideas are correct.  But the more we indulge this impulse to gloat over demographics rather than substance, the less clear that distinction will be to us.

I hope that as gay activists continue to express this misplaced pride in who is coming over to their side, they will approach a breaking point whereby they realize that the fallacies of appealing to popularity and authority only serve to make them more like their irrational political opponents.  Hell, anti-gay activists largely believe that they have Jehovah and most of human civilization on their side.  Even if that were true, it wouldn’t make them any more correct, and it wouldn’t prevent progress towards equality.  That kind of certitude provides nothing other than a sense of self-congratulations, which has no place in politics if politics is to be a rational, productive endeavor.

Of course, it is thoroughly at home amidst the sort of politics that we actually do have in this country.

My Contribution to the Obama Campaign

Last night, I donated three dollars to the Barack Obama campaign.  I didn’t do it because I believe in the transformative potential of a second term for the current president, or because I expect good things to come of an emphasis on small-donor contributions to political causes.  I didn’t even do it because I can afford it, because there’s some legitimate doubt about that, even at the three dollar level.

In fact, my donation wasn’t in answer to my conscience; it was in violation of it.  And given what three dollars might otherwise have bought, it was an irrational violation of my conscience.  That is characteristic of playing the lottery.  Yes, I donated three dollars to the Barack Obama campaign last night because that was the minimum amount and the deadline that allowed donors to be entered for a chance to win a trip to Los Angeles to have dinner with Barack Obama and George Clooney.

I put off the donation all the way to the last half-hour before the FEC fundraising deadline, because this involved a complex economic and ethical calculation for me.  It took until after 11:30 to hit that breaking point, but ultimately, I decided that even in the faces of virtually infinitesimal chances and the certainty of being left with a bad taste in my mouth, three dollars was well-worth the long shot of being chosen to be able to have a conversation with the president.  (I wouldn’t really care about meeting Clooney – I’d shake his hand and tell him I admire his body of work, but I want to talk to policymakers.)

The economic calculation was significantly influenced by what I know about the president.  The current occupant of the highest office in the land has an admirable sense of empathy, to the extent that he has been responsible for some instances of helping private citizens to get jobs when they had spoken to him of their difficulties.  He has also been known to occasionally write personal checks in response to letters detailing hardships which the president felt he had no other way of addressing in the moment.

I wrote about those facts in the past, and though they still impress me with regards to the kind of man that citizen Barack Obama is, as I expressed then, I don’t like what it says about him as an occupant of the presidential office.  And to be perfectly frank about my own motivations, I want to have dinner with President Barack Obama so I can exploit the ear of the man and criticize the actions and policies of the president.

Donating money to his campaign for the sake of a shot at dinner in L.A. constituted an ethical compromise for me, because I recognized that I was contributing to an unfortunate trend in American politics.  We complain a great deal about the influence of big money in campaigns and policy making, the quid pro quo involved.  But as with everything else, the broader tendencies, the impulses among the powerful, have their groundwork in private, on-the-ground attitudes.

Regardless of whether it relies on three dollar donations from across the country or one terrifyingly wealthy Super PAC, no campaign and no political apparatus should be set up to encourage people to contribute their resources to it in hopes that they will be delivered some personal reward in return.  And that’s exactly what I’ve done.

I didn’t donate my three dollars to the Barack Obama campaign because I believe that he represents my views and can be trusted to carry out the policies that I think would be legitimately best for the country as a whole; I did it in hopes of gaining access to the president so that I could try to influence his policies.  And more than that, I gave my money to the campaign in the interest of trying to influence a private individual to help me personally.

I want to have dinner with the president so that I can raise questions about his education policy, about the flawed common wisdom that government cannot create jobs, and about the victim-blaming rhetoric that dominates political explanations of joblessness, poverty, and loss.  But I want to have dinner with a man with a vast network of high-level connections so that I can impress upon him the desperation of my need for a decent job, the reality of my qualifications and talents, and the fact that nothing I do on my own can connect those thing to actual employment.

I know that there have been a handful of other people who have been in similar situations, found themselves in circumstances that allowed them to bend the ear of the president, and acquired job leads by virtue of his influence.  I think it’s wrong that anyone gets that chance, but the fact is that so long as someone does, I hope it’s me.

For the time being, money in politics is a reality that we have to work with.  But the money should follow the political causes, and the system that is accepted now by both parties and at all levels encourages money to precede politics and to demand that weakly malleable views on policy answer to purchased influence.  I doubt, though, that my three dollars will buy sufficient influence to demand that that system be questioned.

Poverty in Politics - Either Used or Forgotten

I originally wrote this piece to be posted elsewhere, so the comments and events it refers to are a week or so old now. I still thought it worthwhile to post it here.

I think it’s honest of me to identify myself as coming solidly from the left with all of my political writing. But I certainly don’t make a conscious effort to fit myself into a particular camp, so even while I acknowledge my liberal tendencies, I won’t hesitate to begin an editorial with my own criticisms of fellow liberals or the Democratic Party. One party obviously contradicts my ideals more often than the other, but I have no love for political parties in general. And there is plenty of common ground on which I think both Democrats and Republicans routinely fail to serve the country’s interests.

It’s cheap politics for the DNC to utilize Mitt Romney’s remark that he’s “not concerned about the very poor” and to make a campaign ad out of it. In that ad, the quotation is very conspicuously cut off, and anyone who views such things objectively ought to immediately recognize that it both mischaracterizes Romney’s remarks and allows the Democratic Party to dodge the need to present a clear distinction between their policies and his. Taken out of context, Mitt Romney’s comment sure does portray him as callously out of touch. And indeed, I believe he is just that. But he didn’t say what he’s being accused of saying.

What Mitt Romney really said was, “I’m not concerned about the very poor; we have a safety net there, and if it needs repair, I’ll fix it.” That’s quite different from simply declaring that you don’t care one bit about a particular segment of the population. Romney’s not saying that society has no responsibility for the poor; he’s saying that we already do enough for them. I don’t think one needs to twist that argument in order to criticize it. It would be cartoonishly villainous for a presidential candidate to say, “I don’t care if the poor starve to death,” but it’s not exactly saintly to say, “as long as the poor don’t starve to death, I’m satisfied.” It worries me that the Democratic Party feels the need to mischaracterize Romney’s remarks so they sound like the former statement, because that implies that they don’t see the latter as being sufficiently divergent from their more liberal views.

It says something about the alienation of liberalism in modern American society that commentators like Rush Limbaugh unabashedly deride Romney for defending the very existence of the social safety net while Democrats merely pretend that he doesn’t defend it and make that the focus of their criticism. If liberalism were genuinely at home in American politics, somebody would be quoting Romney’s words exactly as he said them and using them to express indignation at the idea that the poor are sufficiently taken care of. Not only is no prominent politician or commentator saying that in this case, no one ever says it.

After his misleadingly shocking sound bite, Romney went on to say, “We will hear from the Democrat Party: ‘the plight of the poor.’” But will we? Honestly, I can’t think of any Democrat who has reliably expressed lofty ideals about ending the epidemic of homelessness or providing assistance to the poor that goes beyond food stamps and unemployment insurance and that attacks the actual system that keeps people poor, by providing public works employment, for instance.

“You can choose where to focus,” Romney said, ostensibly differentiating his campaign from that of Democrats and other Republicans. “You can focus on the rich – that’s not my focus. You can focus on the very poor – that’s not my focus. My focus is on middle-income Americans.” I don’t believe him when he says that his focus isn’t on the rich, but that aside, I find that everyone in politics today pronounces their focus to be entirely on the middle class. And that’s easy to understand, since not many votes are found on either extreme of the income scale. In fact, given how broad and flexible different people’s conceptions are of “middle-income,” that’s where all of the votes are. Frequently, Americans, whether sitting comfortably within the top five percent of income earners or walking the poverty line like a tightrope, view themselves as middle class. So when a politician talks about defending middle class Americans or putting his political focus on their interests, citizens will tend to think that he’s talking about them. And there’s little doubt that politicians know this.

President Obama’s comments at the National Prayer Breakfast regarding the Christian obligation to help the poor were striking precisely because they are so anomalous in mainstream politics. The sentiment seemed earnest and was well-placed at the event, but the fact that the DNC ad was released on the same day compels me to view it with a great deal of cynicism. The ad is a transparent attempt to score points by leaping on an easy way of portraying the Democratic Party, fairly or unfairly, as having more compassion for the poor than their opponents. I can only hope that the prayer breakfast speech was genuine, and not a more subtle example of the same – a quick response to Romney’s ostensible gaffe the day before.

If it was intended as a response, that illustrates the very problem with political treatments of the issue of poverty and economic disparity. The best that the Democratic Party can do most of the time is wait for a Republican to say something objectionable, and then issue a response that says, “We’re not like that; we care about everybody.” I’d be far more convinced if they took the lead, if they actually demonstrated their commitment to solving society’s ills from the bottom up, rather than from the middle out. As it is, the commitment to helping the poor is only something that is claimed, and rarely something that decides policy.

The DNC ad was framed entirely as part of a negative campaign. It cites nothing that Democrats have done or plan to do in order to eradicate poverty, homelessness, or hunger. It points out the initiatives that Romney would likely undertake that would hurt the poor, and it is right to do so, but a preponderance of negative campaigns risks miring us in negative government, wherein the avoidance of harm is considered a good unto itself. I trust the Democratic Party to avoid willingly making life worse for the nation’s poorest citizens, but I do not trust them to undertake truly original initiatives to mend what is broken within American society.

So long as I have reason to believe that the choice in American politics is between the party that doesn’t care about the poor and the party that cares about them only enough to make themselves look good, I won’t be much inclined to take empty pronouncements on the topic seriously, not matter which side they come from.

Jobless Experiences Contradict Political Claims

On Monday, President Obama hosted a video conference to answer questions submitted online and speak directly to a small group of voters and students. During the chat, a Fort Worth, Texas woman named Jennifer Weddel shared her husband’s personal story and used it to challenge the president on the nation’s employment situation. Her husband is a semiconductor engineer and has not been able to find permanent, full-time work in three years.

Weddel evidently recognizes this situation as contradicting the president’s claims about the availability of skilled labor jobs within American companies, but those same claims were precisely the response that Obama offered. He insisted that there is a great deal of demand for positions like those for which Weddel’s husband is qualified, and he reiterated the comments that he had made in the State of the Union Address to the effect that American high-tech companies want to hire American workers but cannot find enough of them with the appropriate skill sets. Furthermore, Obama offered to circulate the unemployed engineer’s resume among the companies that had been giving him that information.

Stories like this are all too familiar to me, and indeed to many of us. They illustrate the often stark, sometimes incredible differences between what private individuals experience and what persons and aggregates of persons claim from a position once-removed. There is clearly tension between Weddel’s story and the president’s claims. In this, it has to be that someone is disingenuous or misinformed.

Anecdotal evidence is unreliable in making general claims, but it is also the foundation for statistical data. Obama’s claims are based on anecdote, as well, provided to him by industry executives rather than low-level workers. At the same time, one surely need not look far to find other stories that parallel Weddel’s. Are those workers struggling because of some spectacular personal failing in their job search strategies? Conversely, are companies failing to connect with these workers because of deficiencies in their recruitment? If either or both of these explanations are entirely at fault, it’s a shame that the entire body of skilled laborers can’t channel their resumes through the White House.

I’m much more inclined to believe, though, that there are further explanations. For instance, perhaps the president’s industry contacts are not completely in earnest when they say that they want to hire American workers but can’t find them. That claim can be taken in different ways, one of which is that companies can’t find engineers whom they can hire for wages low enough to make it economically feasible for them to hire Americans over foreign workers. This might partly account for why according to figures utilized in last year’s Georgetown University study, of college graduates who majored in engineering, only thirty-two percent actually work in engineering. For many of those graduates, it may be economically preferable to take jobs that are outside of or only peripherally related to their field.

It seems to me that the president privileges the most optimistic interpretation of industry claims because he has been one of the most vocal supporters of the uncharacteristically simplistic assertion that whatever our problems are, more formal education will solve them. And the more fundamental assumption behind that thinking is that if one is qualified for a given type of job, he gets it. That too flies in the face of the lived experiences of many of the unemployed and underemployed (and those who, like me, are necessarily self-employed).

The president’s response to Mrs. Weddel could be seen as implying disbelief – a failure to comprehend why someone who purportedly has the skills necessary to be employed in a particular field hasn’t received a suitable offer. And the president should feel confused, because the great mass of citizens who are jostling for frightfully scarce positions feel that way with every resume that vanishes into the ether. But I worry that President Obama will not share in that feeling for long, because when his endorsement secures Weddel’s husband a job, it will be all too easy to believe that the only reason it took so long was because he hadn’t looked in the right place before. But that convenient explanation will do little good for engineer that I met who was working in a local café, or any of the unemployed lawyers and teachers I’ve known, all of whom have been told, frequently and with sincerity, that the jobs are out there.