Second-hand reports on Mitt Romney’s mind

Last week, to guests of Toronto’s distinguished Donner Foundation, Mark Halperin, senior analyst for Time Magazine and MSNBC, provided a broad overview of the US presidential election. To get things started, he asked them where they stood: By show of hands, they broke roughly 20-1 for Obama. The audience was lopsided, as “by-invitation” evenings often are in Canada. Nevertheless, for a good hour, they applauded Halperin’s even-handedness.

They over-compensated.

As with his book Game Change, Halperin's saving the “delicious” stuff for his next book. Americans will pick a president and then will be able to read the “telling details” along with the rest of us.

That’s fair for an historian, but falls short for a political journalist.

There was nothing intimidating about the audience; it was partisan, but civilized and highly informed. Nobody flinched when he said he liked Romney as well as Obama. No one laughed when he said that Mitt Romney was also intelligent and, in private, very funny.

The problem was: He went no further, as if that weighty term “in private” is evidence enough. This is manipulative. Halperin invited his audience to conclude that Romney and Obama are similar and, next year, could both be good presidents—by inference. 

Romney reasonably asks Americans to judge Obama by his record—by his public utterances and actions. Halperin seems to suggest that Romney can be handicapped by favorable second-hand reports about how he thinks and what he truly values.

That’s nothing less than giving the voter a license to decide when to take Romney seriously. To sound even-handed, he’s saying: Relax, whatever you think is all that matters.

You’re a Keynesian. But, you can vote for Romney because you can decide that what he says publicly about the deficit, tax cuts, and the debt ceiling is nothing more than tactical pandering.

You believe in universal healthcare, a women’s privacy, and better relations with Russia. Still, you can vote for Romney because he did say many reasonable things before running for president and, in private, may even chuckle about the excesses of the “Tea Party.”

Andrew Potter, in the latest Literary Review of Canada, turned to Stephen Colbert in a review of artistic fraud and authenticity .

When the satirist Stephen Colbert coined the term “truthiness” to describe American political discourse, he defined it as “‘what I say is right, and [nothing] anyone else says could possibly be true.’ It’s not only that I feel it to be true, but that I feel it to be true.” His point is that, by universal consensus, we no longer care about the facts or the external truth of the matter. What we care about is emotional truth and the politics of perception over reality. Not truth, but truthiness.

Click on: http://reviewcanada.ca/reviews/2012/06/01/van-gogh-s-bastards/

Potter noted that the art fraud, Otto Wacker, wondered why he was the one on the dock: “After all, a number of experts had authenticated his paintings.”

Before we vote, we should be hard on the Halperins, as well as on the spoken words of the candidates.

Stephen Harper’s moral culpability for the robo-calls affair

The scrupulous integrity of Conservative campaign manager Guy Giorno, the good judgement of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and their knowledge of the law—coupled with lack of evidence—are slowly having their effect.

Now, no one is even playing with the theory that Harper won his precious majority by tricking his opponents into an unpopular election and, then, orchestrating a vast conspiracy to suppress tens of thousands of voters who wanted to elect Michael Ignatieff as Prime Minister of Canada.

John Ibbitson formally buried the plot yesterday in “The case against a conspiracy.” He went on, however, to make a claim against Harper that deserves careful consideration, particularly in this American election year:

“That doesn’t mean the robo-calls affair is bogus – far from it. The Conservative leadership fostered such a hyper-partisan climate within the party that some person or persons at the riding or even regional level may have felt justified in crossing the line of legality. But this makes Mr. Harper, Mr. Giorno et al morally, not legally, culpable. Voters, not judges, will decide what punishment they deserve.”

Click on: www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/john-ibbitson/the-case-against-a-conservative-conspiracy/article2358364/

What is a “hyper-partisan climate” anyway? And when does it become morally and, conceivably, legally culpable?

Is having a winning zeal for the fight a vice or is the offense actually wanting to beat Liberals?

(Conservatives usually know when you are working in a losing campaign: journalists will note that campaign workers are realistic and surprisingly “thoughtful.”)

Excess in politics is often a matter of taste and expectations.

The clenched fist is cool in Facebook and cute when raised by a naïf in a park. However, wouldn’t you feel a little creepy if Bob Rae in a blue suit tried it at the Empire Club, or Thomas Mulcair used it at the New Democrats' Leadership Convention? Or any Senator in the US Senate?

Hyper-partisan slogans such as “Canada can’t afford Michael Ignatieff” or “Another four years of Stephen Harper and You Won’t Recognize Your Canada” or,  for instance, in the US, “America won’t survive another four years of Barack Obama” are junk food for paranoids and partisans.

They don’t, however, invite partisan zombies to commit crimes; they offer silly reasons to vote for the other guy. It’s a form of pollution we must live with—the ugly canary in the cave, if you will.

To hold politicians in competitive mass democracies morally accountable for the conduct of zealots—after they commit crimes—would emasculate open debate and would also be ridiculously inefficient.

Canadians should stop fretting about “American-style” dirty tricks, as if the US of A invents all the dirty politics, along with original sin. Politicians and pundits in Canada would be better served to stand up and embrace America’s best defense against political corruption today—political satire.

By emulating Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, Canada’s long-faced political analysts could do a much better job of exposing the hilarious excesses of the “hyper-partisan” talk we hear every day.

Just one new Mordecai Richler in Toronto or Montreal—or, imagine, Ottawa—would be worth half a dozen judicial inquiries and another three years of censure motions in Canada’s Parliament.

Looking for mad leaders for hard times?

Winston Churchill said he never found anyone interesting who’d lived through a happy childhood. Nassir Ghaemi, director of the Mood Disorders Program at Tufts University Medical Center gets in closer, assembling an entire book on the proposition that depression and mania make leaders more realistic and empathic, and mania makes them more creative and resilient.

“A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness” has touched a nerve. It’s been reviewed widely and he’s appeared on the Stephen Colbert Show. His series of short sketches of everyone from Churchill and Martin Luther King to Lincoln and Tony Blair, however, hasn’t caused much stir. The way his thesis is glibly applied to the present is the sensation.

“‘For abnormal challenges,’ Ghaemi insists, ‘abnormal leaders are needed.’ The text makes only one reference to the current president, warning us that while “‘no drama’ Obama might be considered the epitome of mental health,’ we must remember that ‘psychological moderation’ is not the prescription for greatness.”

Click on: www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/books/review/a-first-rate-madness-by-nassir-ghaemi-book-review.html?pagewanted=all

As one reviewer put it: Is Barack Obama too sane to lead the United States in times of crisis? Are stable leaders inappropriate for shaky time?

Click on: www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/careers/management/morning-manager/the-right-leader-in-a-crisis-may-not-be-the-stable-one/article2147615/

As a child of the Cold-War and Mutually Assured Destruction, there’s something ridiculously naive about the question. The government of the US today, like the Government of Great Britain in the summer of 1940, is not a start-up company that can be run by an egomaniac or a poem born after days of anguish alone in a room.  The White House’s ability to make decisions, to make a positive difference—and to not do terrible harm—rests on the reliable application of disciplined intelligence.  You can’t skip sanity to be a great President.

Churchill and Lincoln’s “black dogs” encumbered their lives but didn’t cloud either their values or their clear heads as decision makers. Churchill’s values and experience, and a great writer’s ability to see what he saw drove his early radical assessment of Hitler. His depressions and drinking in the Thirties only helped keep him out of power, unable to avoid a catastrophe.

When finally in office, Churchill didn’t decide to make a dear friend and pen pal out of President Roosevelt because he thought they would be ideal soul mates. To do his job—to survive Hitler—he had to. In the spring of 2008, Barack Obama didn’t huddle with bankers and big businesses and double the US deficit because he was a confused Uncle Tom, meekly following instructions George Bush had left on his desk. Obama saw it as his responsibility to avert another Great Depression.

Certainly, it would have been more interesting for everyone if Obama had waited for the economy to collapse and used that time writing fire side chats to radicalize America later. But, do we want leaders to lead us into “abnormal” times so they can be a little more “abnormal” as well?