Tag Archives: Barack Obama

General discussion

End of stupid questions

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After eight years of grunting and chanting instead of reasoning and discussing, this excerpt from a tape of Obama discussing a May 2007 debate performance is refreshing.

Obama continues: "When you have to be cheerful all the time and try to perform and act like [the tape is unclear; Obama appears to be poking fun at his opponents], I'm sure that some of it has to do with nerves or anxiety and not having done this before, I'm sure. And in my own head, you know, there's—I don't consider this to be a good format for me, which makes me more cautious. When you're going into something thinking, 'This is not my best …' I often find myself trapped by the questions and thinking to myself, 'You know, this is a stupid question, but let me … answer it.' Instead of being appropriately [the tape is garbled]. So when Brian Williams is asking me about what's a personal thing that you've done [that's green], and I say, you know, 'Well, I planted a bunch of trees.' And he says, 'I'm talking about personal.' What I'm thinking in my head is, 'Well, the truth is, Brian, we can't solve global warming because I f–––ing changed light bulbs in my house. It's because of something collective'."

While this may not be the end of stupid media questions–boxers or briefs Brian?  How much do you pay for your haircut?–it is at least an end one particularly awful instantiation of stupidity (see the video at the link as well):

However, perhaps one of the most astounding and previously unknown tidbits about Sarah Palin has to do with her already dubious grasp of geography. According to Fox News Chief Political Correspondent Carl Cameron, there was great concern within the McCain campaign that Palin lacked "a degree of knowledgeability necessary to be a running mate, a vice president, a heartbeat away from the presidency," in part because she didn't know which countries were in NAFTA, and she "didn't understand that Africa was a continent, rather than a series, a country just in itself."

Now give those third graders–wink wink wink–some extra credit!

George Will, Lack of Evidence

Ten fifths a person

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George Will has the courage to say what the people who aren't thinking are thinking:

There will be "some impact," Will declared. "And I think this adds to my calculation — this is very hard to measure — but it seems to me if we had the tools to measure we'd find that Barack Obama gets two votes because he's black for every one he loses because he's black because so much of this country is so eager, a, to feel good about itself by doing this, but more than that to put paid to the whole Al Sharpton/Jesse Jackson game of political rhetoric."

Perhaps if it's hard to measure, and you're a conservative columnist prone to gullibility, you should back off and wait until there's evidence.

Charles Krauthammer, General discussion, Specious allegations of fallacy

Race baiting

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Charles Krauthammer, despite his apparent recognition of the shortcomings of the Republican ticket, can still find a way to generate outrage.  Today, for instance, he complains about those who would suggest there is a racial element to the McCain campaign.  Here's the charge: 

Let me get this straight. A couple of agitated yahoos in a rally of thousands yell something offensive and incendiary, and John McCain and Sarah Palin are not just guilty by association — with total strangers, mind you — but worse: guilty according to the New York Times of "race-baiting and xenophobia."

Unsurprisingly, he doesn't have it straight. For in the rest of the article, Krauthammer rails against Obama himself for charges the New York Times made about McCain's campaign.  He concludes:

And Obama has shown no hesitation in doing so to McCain. Weeks ago, in Springfield, Mo., and elsewhere, he warned darkly that George Bush and John McCain were going to try to frighten you by saying that, among other scary things, Obama has "a funny name" and "doesn't look like all those other presidents on those dollar bills."  

Why would he say that?

 

That's kind of a dollar bill, I suppose.  Story here.  Now of course that's not McCain's campaign, but Obama didn't say that George Bush and John McCain were going to frighten you–he said, "they."  And if they includes any Republicans, he was right more times than just once.  

Update: 

Then there's this.

Academics, specious comparisons

Don’t be negative

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A guest op-ed in the Washington Post (by Vanderbilt Political Science Professor John G. Geer) makes the obvious point that "negative" ads are not ipso facto bad (a similar point was made more effectively I think by Jamison Foser at Media Matters, discussed by me here).  They are more likely, the author correctly argues, to provide information to the voter than "positive" ads.  This need not necessarily be the case, but it seems in fact to be the case (the author has empirical research to support this claim). 

My problem with this op-ed, however, is another.  In all of the discussion of "negative" ads, the author fails to distinguish between "attack" ads and "critical" ads.  One might make finer-grained distinctions, as I am sure someone has, but these will suffice for the moment.  Let's say a "critical" ad makes an argument against an opponent's position on some or other issue.  An "attack" ad consists argument free character style attacks.  Those, as anyone can see I think, are clearly different.

A defense of the one kind of negative ad, need not be a defense of the other.  I would argue in fact that defending critical ads entails rejecting "attack" ads as "politically informative."  So this, for instance, strikes me as a false equivalence:

And Obama's not innocent, either. While McCain's running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin, blasted the Democratic nominee for his rather thin ties to a seemingly unrepentant member of the Vietnam-era Weather Underground, Obama responded with an ad reminding voters of McCain's role in the "Keating Five" savings-and-loan scandal of the 1980s. Recent data from Nielsen suggest that the campaigns have aired roughly the same number of negative ads. Even Karl Rove, who knows a thing or two about attack ads, has declared that both sides have gone too negative.

The thin links between Obama and Ayers made by the McCain campaign and Fox News are dishonest and misleading.  Obama's linking McCain to the Keathing Five is another matter.  McCain was a member of the Keating Five (otherwise it would have been four), he intervened on Keating's behalf, had a tight relationship to Keating and helped, in a legislative way, Keating commit fraud.  He was in fact officially reprimanded by the Senate for that.  The Ayers and Keating allegations are not, in other words, in the same logical category.  It would be very helpful, I think, to keep them distinct.

bad company, Bloggers, General discussion, Specious allegations of fallacy

Association by guilt

Perhaps some of you might have heard that Barack Obama has been "pallin' around with terrorists," such as William Ayers of the Weather Underground, or that he listened while his minister criticized America, or that some guy from the same city as him is going to go to jail.  Such are the McCain campaign's charges.  You might also notice that these are attempts "guilt by association" (here we call it "bad company"). To many, such a tactic is wrong on its face.  Rather than discuss the substantive policy questions that ought to be driving the current Presidential race, we have to sit through endless stories about who met with whom when where and how.  It certainly is dumb, and it makes all of us dumber.  Here's a well known leftish blogger:

So Palin’s "palling around" accusation is no more true than her boast that she "told congress ‘Thanks, but no thanks’" on the Bridge to Nowhere, or that she had the Alaska Permanent Fund divest from Sudan. But it seems to me that pointing out factual errors gives this line of argument too much credit: guilt by association, even when the association happens to be real, is a silly charge.

It's not a silly charge, however.  Whether the charge is true is certainly important.  As important as that, however, is whether the charge is relevant.  Relevance, in fact, is what makes the difference between a fallacious guilt by association charge and a legitimate one.  It's not, in other words, simply a matter of the form of argument.  The content–who is the associate, how long? how important? etc.,–makes all of the difference.

It turns out, I think, that Palin's charges are false or at best misleading.  Ayers is, in fact, a rather prominent person in Chicago politics–he even pals around with such mainstream figures as Richard M. Daley, our longtime mayor.  Besides, Ayers isn't in jail, and he doesn't seem to be currently a terrorist.  Besides that, he, in his civic role in Chicago politics, "palled" around with Republicans as well.

All of this, of course, makes a huge difference as to the relevance of the charge.  If Sarah Palin, for instance, "palled around" with members of a treasonous secessionist political party, I think that would indeed be relevant.  The same would be true for John McCain.  If he palled around with people who advocated assassination as a policy, or who defrauded thousands of people of their life savings, we might have reason to question his judgment.

So, while whether such charges as these are true matters a good deal.  But it matters just as much whether they have any relevance to stuff that matters.  Sometimes they don't.  

Ad Hominem Abusive, Ad hominem circumstantial, bad company, William Kristol

Stay classy, Bill Kristol

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William Kristol has a strategy for raising the level our national discourse as the election draws near:

That debate is important. McCain took a risk in choosing Palin. If she does poorly, it will reflect badly on his judgment. If she does well, it will be a shot in the arm for his campaign.

In the debate, Palin has to dispatch quickly any queries about herself, and confidently assert that of course she’s qualified to be vice president. She should spend her time making the case for McCain and, more important, the case against Obama. As one shrewd McCain supporter told me, “Every minute she spends not telling the American people something that makes them less well disposed to Obama is a minute wasted.”

The core case against Obama is pretty simple: he’s too liberal. A few months ago I asked one of McCain’s aides what aspect of Obama’s liberalism they thought they could most effectively exploit. He looked at me as if I were a simpleton, and patiently explained that talking about “conservatism” and “liberalism” was so old-fashioned.

Maybe. But the fact is the only Democrats to win the presidency in the past 40 years — Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton — distanced themselves from liberal orthodoxy. Obama is, by contrast, a garden-variety liberal. He also has radical associates in his past.

The most famous of these is the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and I wonder if Obama may have inadvertently set the stage for the McCain team to reintroduce him to the American public. On Saturday, Obama criticized McCain for never using in the debate Friday night the words “middle class.” The Obama campaign even released an advertisement trumpeting McCain’s omission.

The McCain campaign might consider responding by calling attention to Chapter 14 of Obama’s eloquent memoir, “Dreams From My Father.” There Obama quotes from the brochure of Reverend Wright’s church — a passage entitled “A Disavowal of the Pursuit of Middleclassness.”

So when Biden goes on about the middle class on Thursday, Palin might ask Biden when Obama flip-flopped on Middleclassness.

The answer, so it seems, is for McCain and Palin to turn the campaign away from issues that matter towards petty, false and irrelevant matters of "character."  It's one thing third-tier minds such as Kristol says these kinds of things themselves, it's quite another when they advocate others think and act as they do.  The one is just embarrassing, the other is criminal.

General discussion, George Will, Ruth Marcus, Straw Man

Stand down

A few posts back (and for a couple of posts) I remarked on the tendency of "liberal" pundits to separate themselves from the "liberal" candidate by frequently criticizing him or her, usually for failing to look enough like the conservative candidate.  Yesterday Ruth Marcus provided another excellent example of this–going after one of Obama's campaign lines for "misrepresenting" John McCain's record.  I wouldn't quibble with the criticism, my view is that no one should misrepresent anything.  But there is a question of scale. 

We have on the one hand Obama, in Marcus's world guilty of a straw man for not criticizing the strongest versions of McCain's one-time social security plan (Obama said had McCain had his way, many people would now be in dire straits–when in reality, only had this crisis happened a few years on, would people be in dire straits on account of McCain's plan–oops!).  Obama probably is guilty of that logical offense.  It's an offense nearly too typical, in my estimation, for one even to remark upon.  Candidates thrive by knocking down weak versions of each others' policy positions.  Obama didn't need to do it, however, as his point was independent of the specific facts of the case–in a privatized social security market, he had been saying, this is the sort of thing that could really doom us.  And no doubt he's right about that.

But that's not my point.  Marcus, for some reason, wanted to even the truthiness playing field, where McCain and Palin lie repeatedly and without apparent consequence about nearly everything, and Obama misrepresents McCain's position once.  Marcus bent over backwards for apparent even-handedness.  

To my very great and growing surprise, however, Marcus's righward colleagues, usually lockstep in their defense of their guy, have shown me to be astoundingly and thankfully wrong.  Here, for instance, is George Will:

Conservatives who insist that electing McCain is crucial usually start, and increasingly end, by saying he would make excellent judicial selections. But the more one sees of his impulsive, intensely personal reactions to people and events, the less confidence one has that he would select judges by calm reflection and clear principles, having neither patience nor aptitude for either.

It is arguable that, because of his inexperience, Obama is not ready for the presidency. It is arguable that McCain, because of his boiling moralism and bottomless reservoir of certitudes, is not suited to the presidency. Unreadiness can be corrected, although perhaps at great cost, by experience. Can a dismaying temperament be fixed?

Ouch. Notice also for a moment the huge difference between Will and Marcus.  Marcus takes Obama to task all of the time (and for the stupidest of reasons–such as he's not "regular" enough); Will, if you look at his recent posts (and search our Will archive) has almost never directly challenged the rightward guy.  He's made, in fact, a rather valient effort in recent days to make McCain's case (arguing, in one instance, that maybe one should not think about the economy, since life has so much else to offer than just money).  

There goes my theory about the right wing pundit corps, my theory of the non-existent left wing pundit corps still stands, for the moment.  

category mistake, specious comparisons

Theory of negativity

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Jamison Foser at Media Matters notices some very stunning idiocy and responds accordingly.  He writes:

The Wisconsin Advertising Project looked at a single week's worth of ads in determining that 56 percent of McCain ads and 77 percent of Obama ads were "negative." Aside from the dangers in drawing conclusions from such a small sample of campaign ads, the findings are of limited value given that the project made no effort to assess the veracity or fairness of the ads in question. In fact, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, the study counted any ad that so much as mentioned the opponent's name as "negative."

I suppose it might be mildly interesting to know that 56 percent of John McCain's ads mention Barack Obama, or that 77 percent of Obama's ads mention McCain. But it doesn't really tell us anything useful. How did they mention each other? Did the ads criticize policy positions or personality? Were they honest? The answers to those questions are essential to any meaningful assessment of the candidates' campaign tactics. (If you do find the project's findings compelling, you should keep in mind that in July, based on a much larger sample, the project found that more of McCain's ads were negative.)

Despite the study's failure to even attempt to assess the validity of the ads it declared "negative," several news organizations hyped the findings. Worse, some suggested the finding that more of Obama's ads have been negative undermines the recent conclusions of many impartial observers that the McCain campaign ads have been more dishonest than those of the Obama campaign.

The New York Post, for example, reported that the results of the study "clash with recent media coverage accusing McCain of distorting Obama's record in ads." Nonsense. That's like saying that the fact that this is September clashes with the fact that it is Friday.

Foser is right.  This is what one would call a "category mistake."  Also, I think I speak from experience that many people wrongly call anything critical an "attack" and assume that anything "negative" is wrong.  Foser's whole piece is well worth reading, as always.

General discussion, Sebastian Mallaby, Specious allegations of fallacy, Straw Man

Posts blog posts

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I normally don't read the Post's election blog posts primarily because they're blog posts, but this one from Sebastian Mallaby, "Obama's Faulty Logic," caught my eye.  I thought, "perhaps someone has caught Obama in a crazy non sequitur I can talk about here." 

Then I read it and it occured to me that Mallaby thinks logic means something else than I do.  But that's interesting anyway, because I often wonder what people who haven't been teaching it for many years think it is (feel free to comment on that).  When I use the term, I mean something rather specific.  I mean to point out the part of an argument that takes one from one fact to another fact.  This is what logicians call an "inference."  Even though this has to do with the facts in some very important sense, one can isolate the inference and see it as part of a larger pattern, a scheme, or whatever, independent of the particular facts.  To say someone has faulty logic, for me, means he endorses faulty inference patterns or schemes.  

For Mallaby it means something like there's something wrong with the thinking without any specific attempt at a diagnosis.  In this particular case, in fact, he just seems to think Obama has wrongly diagnosed the cause of the current financial crisis.  That's fine–so long as he attempts to prove it (which, to my mind, he doesn't, but that's another matter).  Then Mallaby, swinging about accusations of faulty logic, writes:

The regulation-versus-deregulation rhetoric is appealingly simple, and both parties abuse it. Republicans like to say they will get the economy going by cutting red tape. Democrats like to say that they will make the economy more stable by demanding rational oversight. Neither claim is worth much.

The Republicans fail to acknowledge that the easy economic gains from deregulation were exhausted more than two decades ago, when clearly destructive restrictions on competition in trucking, airlines and so on were scrapped by Carter and Reagan. The Democrats fail to acknowledge that there is a limit to what government oversight can do. Modern financial institutions are so complex that government inspectors are hard pressed to understand their trading strategies. That is why an outfit such as Citigroup, a deposit-taking institution theoretically overseen by multiple government bodies including the Fed, could park billions of dollars of toxic mortgage securities in off-balance-sheet vehicles, with nary a protest from regulators.

Yes, Wall Street's woes reflect greed and reckless borrowing. And yes, some regulatory reform is necessary. But you can't blame the mess on either political party — at least not if you want to remain honest.

It's staggering to say that more rational oversight wouldn't have helped.  But it's silly to say that anyone, even Democrats, would argue that oversight would solve all problems.  That, in fact, is a bit of a George Will style straw man–one which has the liberals demanding that the government will prevent every wrong if it's allowed to.  Obviously some amount of nefarious activity will take place, and unless Obama says that the government will stop every problem, cure every sickness and so on, then Mallaby is making Obama's position more absurd than it needs to be.  

It's fine, in other words, for Mallaby to correct Obama's assertions–that's his job, I think at least.  But accusing him of faulty logic when he's not guilty of it–even in Mallaby's enlarged sense–doesn't help anyone. 

General discussion

An Army of One

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Perhaps I don't need to make the point (again) that there is essentially is no mainline liberal pundit army.  There are liberal pundits, maybe lots of them, but they don't work with the kind of mission-oriented military discipline as their conservative counterparts.  They're more likely, in fact, to criticize the liberal guy than to advance his arguments.  For more on that, see here.

Having said that, all of the griping about Obama not being forceful enough in his response to McCain's sea of BS seems somewhat misplaced.  Obama is only one guy.  McCain is more than that.  He has in the first place an army of pundits who will either repeat his talking points, or invent their own arguments to advance his cause, which they may see to some extent as their cause.  While George Will, for instance, may not emphatically support McCain, he cares enough to argue that whether one is economically better off should not matter anymore as a reliable guide in the current election.  It's a ridiculous argument, but it comes out just in time to support McCain and it seems in fact that Will thought it up all on his own.  No one needs to tell him McCain needs help.  On top of this pundit army, McCain also has a television network (Fox), and legions of well-disciplined bloggers. 

On top of this, of course, Obama can't even count on the press.  Here, for instance, is an actual exchange on the TV about the McCain campaign's tendancy to make stuff up:

ROBERTS: That would appear, Paul, to end any argument over whether or not she supported the bridge initially. But why can't Barack Obama make that point stick?

Roberts, a journalist, responsible for separating the true from the false, wonders why Obama can't make the point that the true and the false are different.  That's Roberts job, at least in a normal world.  What does Roberts say?

ROBERTS: We still have 56 days to talk about this back and forth.

That's just nuts.

With that, when Paul Krugman, not a huge fan of Obama, says:

Did you hear about how Barack Obama wants to have sex education in kindergarten, and called Sarah Palin a pig? Did you hear about how Ms. Palin told Congress, “Thanks, but no thanks” when it wanted to buy Alaska a Bridge to Nowhere?

These stories have two things in common: they’re all claims recently made by the McCain campaign — and they’re all out-and-out lies.

Dishonesty is nothing new in politics. I spent much of 2000 — my first year at The Times — trying to alert readers to the blatant dishonesty of the Bush campaign’s claims about taxes, spending and Social Security.

He's virtually alone.  If Obama is having trouble, this is part of the reason why–there seems to be only one top shelf pundit making actual arguments in his favor.