I was reminded recently that I was once in fifth grade. I was reminded that I once had a hearty belief in the power of Michael Jordan, and that I had once heretically questioned my classmates belief in cooties. I was reminded of this when I found myself talking to a girl last week, in a bagel shop.
She stood in line behind me and I noticed her right away because she had covered her face with make-up, but you could still tell that underneath, she was pretty. Not model pretty. She was plain pretty. But she was plain pretty enough to look out of place, especially since she was standing next to me. I'm more accustomed to pretty people being on the other side of the street, walking in the opposite direction from me, stylish and put together, ear to a cell phone, talking about things pretty people talk about, like their wonderful lives. So you can imagine my surprise when she tapped me on the shoulder and asked if I could grab her a bottle of water from the display refrigerator that was closer to me.
The fact that she asked for water specifically should have meant nothing. But it meant something to me. You see, I drink water too. The only other thing I knew about her is that she was good looking. Water was the one thing we had in common. So I commented on it, before she could walk away. I offered her what I claimed was useful advice as a fellow water drinker, that bottled water should be shaken well before being consumed since I found that the oxygen generally settles to the bottom during shipping making the first sip very hydrogen-y. She actually laughed.
I must have followed that odd joke with some charm because pretty soon after, I found myself sitting with a very buttered wheat bagel, across from from a very pretty girl, at a very wobbly table, and that table is a good metaphor for how I felt at the time, a feeling I had not felt in a few years.
***
The first time I ever felt wobbly over a girl was in fifth grade and I enlisted my grandfather as my life coach. "When trying to attract a girl, the best approach is to be yourself", I remember him saying, "and if that doesn't work, then become someone else entirely." I was straining for the attention of a one Kathy Cleary. My grandfather, I reckoned, was a true ladies man (he was not), so I took him quite seriously.
At the time my whole sense of self and identity was tied up in the brand and cost of the sneakers I was wearing. Sneakers meant everything to me. Every time I would pass a shoe store, my heart would skip a beat. I'd rush in to see the latest in the placement of air vents, unique color coordinations and if they had found new locations in the sole to inject what I thought was that most critical of ingredients for an effective athletic shoe, Nike branded air.
Change the shoe, change the person. That was what I believed. So I concluded that the only thing separating me from Kathy Cleary's heart, was an expensive trip to The Foot Locker. Which is why I began a weeks long campaign to win the approval of my parents. They, of course, were the ones who would have to invest the money for the shoes I was going to become. So I delivered a set of speeches at the dinner table. I made a series of promises to my parents. I essentially promised that I'd start acting like a good boy, if they would buy me those shoes. This last point is quite important.
Change the shoe, change the person. That was what I believed, but what ended up happening was quite the opposite. For example, before Kathy Cleary, my bed sheets were left as a pile on the floor and my leaving a trail of clean dishes in my wake was unheard of. What was heard was my parents regularly talking to me about making my bed and cleaning my dishes, but that all changed after Kathy Cleary. I became something of a different person after Kathy Cleary, a more responsible person. By the time I did get the shoes that were going to change me, the real transformation had already happened.
***
On a weekend in the middle of November during my fifth grade, I came back from the Yorktown Mall carrying a shiny box, imprinted with a swoosh and the picture of a silhouetted basketball player. The box, when opened, released that new shoe smell. And the moment I tied them securely to my feet, I was sure I had become someone Kathy Cleary would like. And I had. Kathy Cleary did end up liking me. But not long afterwards I stopped liking Kathy Cleary.
My and Kathy Cleary's doomed, in-school three week courtship during the fifth grade was something of a memorable era. She demanded that I do things like think about her all the time, which proved too much for me. She also had me write her notes attesting to our everlasting love, and endure her crying when I didn't do it well. I on the other hand, demanded that she do things like think about me not so much, which proved too little for her. I also had her engage in discussions about basketball and endure my crying when she didn't do it well.
***
The outcome of our relationship notwithstanding, Kathy and I were something of pioneers and our short-lived pairing was a long time in the making. The year before was when I first noticed Kathy. I noticed that I liked her. I noticed that she was nice to me, as long as I kept my distance. Keeping a foot or two of distance was key to her niceness, because Kathy Cleary, intelligent as she was, had been swept up along with most of the fourth grade class in a growing hysteria about cooties. Cooties being a disease all children in America believe infects anyone of the opposite sex.
Cooties is a fake disease, it doesn't actually exist. The fake story about it's fake origins has some thing to do with fake monkeys transmitting it somehow to fake people in a fake country within Africa. But all this fakery has the real implication of causing children, in schools across the country, to actively avoid contact with the opposite gender.
I was an early skeptic of cooties, which is how near the end of the school year in fourth grade I gathered the courage to tell Kathy Cleary I liked her. She said something along the lines of, "Ewwww. You have cooties." She went to the nurse. She told all her friends and soon the whole of my world knew. She thought I had infected her with a deeply virulent strain of cooties just by what I said, and so did everyone else. No one knew what the actual consequences of having cooties were, but everyone seemed sure that they were dire. There was a vague feeling in the air that it led to a quick death.
Kathy walked into class the next morning, perfectly alive. Her survival was a small surprise that had the big effect of inoculating my whole class against their most feared disease. By the beginning of fifth grade the following fall people had stopped talking about cooties and not long afterwards, the more progressive members of my then fifth grade class stopped being scared of touching each other.
Kathy Cleary avoided me for months after The Great Cooties Scare had subsided. I thought she would never talk to me again. That summer I played a lot of basketball. I also thought about her a lot, unaware that I had laid important groundwork for winning her attention the following school year. I had planted a seed that flowered with the help of a pair of expensive shoes.
Monday, November 24, 2008
Monday, May 5, 2008
(Barack + Christianity)/(Me + Hinduism) = Something To Read
I wrote an article for an online web publication targeted at South Asian women, called ABCDLady.com. Excellent excerpt:
There are many people who consider themselves spiritual but not religious. I used to be spiritual but not religious. Before that I was religious but not spiritual. It is a ridiculous life, the latter. Praying every morning to nothing. But having seen each side of that coin, I can say from experience, they're both a little odd.
Read the full article here.
There are many people who consider themselves spiritual but not religious. I used to be spiritual but not religious. Before that I was religious but not spiritual. It is a ridiculous life, the latter. Praying every morning to nothing. But having seen each side of that coin, I can say from experience, they're both a little odd.
Read the full article here.
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Zen and the Art of Rubik's Cube Racism
After spending years trying to rearrange the patchwork coloring of a Rubik's Cube that's been sitting in my apartment, and failing, I finally went online and found a variety of websites that gave insight on solving the problem. I chose to follow the instructions on a site that showed how to remove the offensively arranged stickers outright with a blow dryer, clean off the remaining adhesive and replace them with new ones that could be purchased for a reasonable price. With a little bit of money, mostly spent on a glass display case, and more importantly a minimal investment of time and effort I finally had the monument to my intelligence that I've always deserved.
I began wondering if I could find similarly elegant solutions to other intractable problems in the the world. That's when I set my sights on the problem of racism.
Racism is the opposite of a Rubik's Cube in so many ways. Racism is made of people, Rubik's Cubes are made of plastic. Instead of trying to segregate colors, ridding the world of racial prejudice is about helping integrate them. There are no stickers people can purchase to make racism alright.
It is on that last point that I'd like to offer a suggestion. It doesn't have to be that way. Stickers may be the long-overlooked solution to racial injustice for which this country has been waiting. In fact, I do believe they are.
(Like the world, a Rubik's Cube has four dimensions. Height, width, depth and stickers.)
The most important result of the media firestorm that resulted from Geraldine Ferraro's and Jeremiah Wright's comments was not in highlighting how race relations are little changed in the last forty years, but how they are little changed in the minds of older people.
Older people seem to believe that race is still related to skin color. It is an idea that makes them seem very old. The key concept driving modern racial identity is that race is not related to skin color, but correlated with skin color. Whereas, in the past, being white referred to having a lack of pigment, modern whiteness can also be defined by purchases and actions.
For example: A few months ago, a friend of mine commented that she was the whitest person she knew. "I'm the whitest person I know", she said. She’s Indian. She then detailed the characteristics she displayed, of modern-day white people. She drove a Toyota Prius, once went backpacking and regularly drinks fair-trade coffee. According to modern racial thought, those choices overwhelmed her brownness so much, that it made her the whitest person she knew.
The logic becomes straightforward. Purchasing Jimmy Buffett albums make you whiter, and having a taste for Young Jeezy makes you blacker. Abercrombie, white, Sean John, black. Race has moved away from skin color into lifestyles and branding. Which means with the right investment of time or money, racial identity can now be purchased. This can only qualify as a positive development.
(You are not the color of the sticker that was put on you in the beginning, but the color put on you in the end. - Zen Rubik's Cubist saying)
In the 1960s when U.S. government finally took the stance that all races were equal under the law, it looked like racial reconciliation was inevitable. All the states were forced to follow suit and institutional racism in the United States was effectively removed. Looking back, the belief that this would pave the way towards real racial equality may have been somewhat naive. Central planning in a country that detests such a thing was unlikely to work, especially when it came to planning people's beliefs. In that way, the nationalized effort over the last four decades to eradicate personal racial prejudices was bound to fail.
Modern racial thought could qualify as a reaction to this failure, a failure of the government to deliver on promised racial equality. The result is that, individuals of each race have devised a crude way to purchase equal treatment within the other racial groups using the time and money they spend.
Measurable problems can have measurable solutions. The problem with fighting individual racial prejudice until now has been that we could not quantify it. But if the racial-ity of a purchase can actually be measured, even crudely, then that should change everything.
(Do not wear the sticker. Be the sticker.)
The fight against racism has some significant parallels with current fight against global warming. There is general agreement that both are bad, and it's seemingly cheaper to sit back and not do anything about either.
In the case of global warming, a few years ago an effort was made to fix this market inefficiency, and a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions was developed. How it works is not relevant. What is relevant is that, it could only happen because carbon is measurable. The result, is that companies who emit too much carbon, through the purchase of carbon credits, must now pay to pollute. Carbon emissions have now become a luxury item.
If the government were to intervene and set a cap on individual racial prejudice, a trading market would develop, and would have a similar effect. Instead of our society being racially prejudiced and wishing we were not, we'd stop having racial prejudices and could yearn for them. The only people who would be prejudiced are those who could afford it.
A new vocabulary would come into being. Racial credit, racial offset, racial footprint. People could go race neutral. But even without government intervention people have been going race neutral for years.
(Before there were stickers, there were no stickers.)
The concept of race neutrality, or the offsetting of the perceptions about one's race, has been around for a long time. What has not existed is an easy way for individuals to achieve it.
Traditionally it is done with the investment of time, through volunteering or participating in the life of a different racial community. Bill Clinton, for example, invested a great deal of effort reconciling with African-Americans. He actually ended up more than offsetting people's perceptions, over-neutralizing his race and is considered to be America's first black president.
Race-neutrality is quite valuable, for example, it is an almost requisite feature of any Presidential candidate especially from the Democratic Party. More people than just politicians would likely try to achieve it if the traditional method, the Clinton method, had a lower barrier to entry. It takes work. To achieve neutrality, and promote reconciliation, Bill Clinton went into black communities and actually interacted with black people. This is something a lot of white people, who otherwise are for racial reconciliation, are not comfortable doing. Racial credits would work because they specifically address this.
(Be the sticker until you realize, there is no sticker.)
An obstacle to racial reconciliation has always been that the public had to change their lifestyle to achieve it. Whether it is a racist person enduring twinges of discomfort while play-acting not being racist in the solitude of his home, or a Young Jeezy fan listening, with teeth clenched, to a Jimmy Buffet or Nickelback album, courageous individuals can currently move towards racial-neutrality the only way available, painfully.
Racial credits would allow people, in the pursuit of racial harmony and reconciliation to substitute their time and discomfort with money. With that money they would purchase a stake in the future of a different racial community, with the goal of offsetting their racial footprint. A racial credit could be linked with giving to charitable organizations such as the NAACP for black racial credits or in the case of white racial credits, say, Farm Aid. In this way, racial-reconciliation would become pain-free for a price.
(Beneath the sticker, we are all the same color. - Zen Rubik's Cubist saying)
But even this solution is hobbled by the mere fact that it relies on individuals who already have a motivation to reconcile races, like politicians, or feel guilty about their racial prejudices, like liberals. In spite of having a new mechanism to measure the racial-ity of lifestyles, nothing will be achieved unless there exists an incentive for racial harmony that appeals to a broad variety of people.
This brings us to stickers. People love stickers. From the age of five in elementary school when the best students were given gold stars, we as a society have been conditioned to change our behavior with the prospect of receiving stickers. This is why a good racial credit program would be accompanied by a good amount of stickers. For each racial credit purchased, individuals could be given a racial sticker they could affix to the side of their car or backpack or body, to show off their commitment to racial harmony. The peer pressure alone to have the most stickers would cause a great deal of money to be funneled into race-neutralizing purchases and charities and thus racism would be solved.
(Try not. Buy, stickers.)
Racism is a complicated problem. That must be why people avoid looking for simple solutions. They think they wouldn't work. Most people can't imagine solving a long-simmering problem like racial prejudice with stickers. But they should start. I have a monument to solving such a problem sitting on my mantle. It's in a glass case with a Rubik's Cube inside. Stickers work.
I began wondering if I could find similarly elegant solutions to other intractable problems in the the world. That's when I set my sights on the problem of racism.
Racism is the opposite of a Rubik's Cube in so many ways. Racism is made of people, Rubik's Cubes are made of plastic. Instead of trying to segregate colors, ridding the world of racial prejudice is about helping integrate them. There are no stickers people can purchase to make racism alright.
It is on that last point that I'd like to offer a suggestion. It doesn't have to be that way. Stickers may be the long-overlooked solution to racial injustice for which this country has been waiting. In fact, I do believe they are.
(Like the world, a Rubik's Cube has four dimensions. Height, width, depth and stickers.)
The most important result of the media firestorm that resulted from Geraldine Ferraro's and Jeremiah Wright's comments was not in highlighting how race relations are little changed in the last forty years, but how they are little changed in the minds of older people.
Older people seem to believe that race is still related to skin color. It is an idea that makes them seem very old. The key concept driving modern racial identity is that race is not related to skin color, but correlated with skin color. Whereas, in the past, being white referred to having a lack of pigment, modern whiteness can also be defined by purchases and actions.
For example: A few months ago, a friend of mine commented that she was the whitest person she knew. "I'm the whitest person I know", she said. She’s Indian. She then detailed the characteristics she displayed, of modern-day white people. She drove a Toyota Prius, once went backpacking and regularly drinks fair-trade coffee. According to modern racial thought, those choices overwhelmed her brownness so much, that it made her the whitest person she knew.
The logic becomes straightforward. Purchasing Jimmy Buffett albums make you whiter, and having a taste for Young Jeezy makes you blacker. Abercrombie, white, Sean John, black. Race has moved away from skin color into lifestyles and branding. Which means with the right investment of time or money, racial identity can now be purchased. This can only qualify as a positive development.
(You are not the color of the sticker that was put on you in the beginning, but the color put on you in the end. - Zen Rubik's Cubist saying)
In the 1960s when U.S. government finally took the stance that all races were equal under the law, it looked like racial reconciliation was inevitable. All the states were forced to follow suit and institutional racism in the United States was effectively removed. Looking back, the belief that this would pave the way towards real racial equality may have been somewhat naive. Central planning in a country that detests such a thing was unlikely to work, especially when it came to planning people's beliefs. In that way, the nationalized effort over the last four decades to eradicate personal racial prejudices was bound to fail.
Modern racial thought could qualify as a reaction to this failure, a failure of the government to deliver on promised racial equality. The result is that, individuals of each race have devised a crude way to purchase equal treatment within the other racial groups using the time and money they spend.
Measurable problems can have measurable solutions. The problem with fighting individual racial prejudice until now has been that we could not quantify it. But if the racial-ity of a purchase can actually be measured, even crudely, then that should change everything.
(Do not wear the sticker. Be the sticker.)
The fight against racism has some significant parallels with current fight against global warming. There is general agreement that both are bad, and it's seemingly cheaper to sit back and not do anything about either.
In the case of global warming, a few years ago an effort was made to fix this market inefficiency, and a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions was developed. How it works is not relevant. What is relevant is that, it could only happen because carbon is measurable. The result, is that companies who emit too much carbon, through the purchase of carbon credits, must now pay to pollute. Carbon emissions have now become a luxury item.
If the government were to intervene and set a cap on individual racial prejudice, a trading market would develop, and would have a similar effect. Instead of our society being racially prejudiced and wishing we were not, we'd stop having racial prejudices and could yearn for them. The only people who would be prejudiced are those who could afford it.
A new vocabulary would come into being. Racial credit, racial offset, racial footprint. People could go race neutral. But even without government intervention people have been going race neutral for years.
(Before there were stickers, there were no stickers.)
The concept of race neutrality, or the offsetting of the perceptions about one's race, has been around for a long time. What has not existed is an easy way for individuals to achieve it.
Traditionally it is done with the investment of time, through volunteering or participating in the life of a different racial community. Bill Clinton, for example, invested a great deal of effort reconciling with African-Americans. He actually ended up more than offsetting people's perceptions, over-neutralizing his race and is considered to be America's first black president.
Race-neutrality is quite valuable, for example, it is an almost requisite feature of any Presidential candidate especially from the Democratic Party. More people than just politicians would likely try to achieve it if the traditional method, the Clinton method, had a lower barrier to entry. It takes work. To achieve neutrality, and promote reconciliation, Bill Clinton went into black communities and actually interacted with black people. This is something a lot of white people, who otherwise are for racial reconciliation, are not comfortable doing. Racial credits would work because they specifically address this.
(Be the sticker until you realize, there is no sticker.)
An obstacle to racial reconciliation has always been that the public had to change their lifestyle to achieve it. Whether it is a racist person enduring twinges of discomfort while play-acting not being racist in the solitude of his home, or a Young Jeezy fan listening, with teeth clenched, to a Jimmy Buffet or Nickelback album, courageous individuals can currently move towards racial-neutrality the only way available, painfully.
Racial credits would allow people, in the pursuit of racial harmony and reconciliation to substitute their time and discomfort with money. With that money they would purchase a stake in the future of a different racial community, with the goal of offsetting their racial footprint. A racial credit could be linked with giving to charitable organizations such as the NAACP for black racial credits or in the case of white racial credits, say, Farm Aid. In this way, racial-reconciliation would become pain-free for a price.
(Beneath the sticker, we are all the same color. - Zen Rubik's Cubist saying)
But even this solution is hobbled by the mere fact that it relies on individuals who already have a motivation to reconcile races, like politicians, or feel guilty about their racial prejudices, like liberals. In spite of having a new mechanism to measure the racial-ity of lifestyles, nothing will be achieved unless there exists an incentive for racial harmony that appeals to a broad variety of people.
This brings us to stickers. People love stickers. From the age of five in elementary school when the best students were given gold stars, we as a society have been conditioned to change our behavior with the prospect of receiving stickers. This is why a good racial credit program would be accompanied by a good amount of stickers. For each racial credit purchased, individuals could be given a racial sticker they could affix to the side of their car or backpack or body, to show off their commitment to racial harmony. The peer pressure alone to have the most stickers would cause a great deal of money to be funneled into race-neutralizing purchases and charities and thus racism would be solved.
(Try not. Buy, stickers.)
Racism is a complicated problem. That must be why people avoid looking for simple solutions. They think they wouldn't work. Most people can't imagine solving a long-simmering problem like racial prejudice with stickers. But they should start. I have a monument to solving such a problem sitting on my mantle. It's in a glass case with a Rubik's Cube inside. Stickers work.
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Post-Rational
I sat with some devout Barack Obama supporters recently for dinner. They’re just my friends actually, but they’re all basically Obama supporters. It’s funny to think about, looking at your flawed friends and thinking about how they are the change they seek; that they are the kinds of people who can bridge the divisiveness of modern politics; that these are people who believe there isn't a Red State America and a Blue State America, there is just America. It’s funny to think these things when you look at your friend’s face across from you and it still has pimples. That’s not really the change I seek.
Sitting with them, I thought it was an opportunity to learn more about their candidate. They did little to illuminate their thought process until, as a mild joke, I told them I was going to vote for John McCain. Then they did a lot.
Barack Obama wants us to believe that a vote for him is post-racial, and post-partisan. But if you look at it, he promises almost the exact same things that Hillary Clinton promises but with none of the Washington experience to accomplish it. From that point of view a vote for Obama sounds post-rational too, because it doesn't make any sense.
Believing in things that make no sense is not a new thing. The dominant faith-based movement over the last thirty years has been the Evangelical Christians. These are people who seem scared of reason. Their beliefs, unlike the new Post-Rationals are pre-rational. Obama supporters are not scared of reason. They're the opposite. They're bored of it.
But the biggest difference isn't fear and boredom. Evangelical Christians have a well-defined set of irrational events to believe in. Water turning into wine, curing of a leper. Obama supporters do not. Barack Obama's supporters, a group that is educated and wealthy are generally skeptical of religion and organization. They're certainly wary of miracles that happened in the past, miracles that can be analyzed and debunked. Apparently though, if the miracles are promised in the future, they're quite agreeable.
But what are these miracles? What does it mean to place your faith in Barack Obama? For the answer to this question, the best we can do is study the campaign he’s run against Hillary Clinton.
The difference between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama has consistently been painted as the difference between substance and style. Over and over Obama runs up against the criticism that there is no meat to go along with the kool-aid. But what exactly does that mean? Like Hillary Clinton, Obama has laid out clear, detailed policies on every issue that concerns the presidency. Their policies are so similar it’s almost not worth discussing. The difference, what is worth discussing, lies in their approach.
Hillary Clinton's stump speech is full of policies. She has prescriptions about, health care, immigration, predatory loans. You name it, she has a policy response to solve it. The key is, her campaign promises no more or less than fighting for these policies.
Barack Obama’s stump speech has policy prescriptions addressing all the same issues as Hillary. The difference is that his speech is not full of his policies like hers. It's half-full of them, or half-empty, depending on your perspective. The other half of his speech is what illuminates their differences.
The other half of Obama’s speech is devoted to energizing listeners into believing in a political system that they feel is broken. The broken political system is an over-arching issue that Hillary Clinton does not address so effectively. Because for her, it is the impetus for just another policy paper to sit beside all the other ones. This misses the point, because the broken political system, it can be argued, is not a policy problem it is a philosophy problem. (Of course, maybe she doesn’t miss this point. Maybe she realizes that her experience is in navigating this broken political system. Fixing it, as Barack Obama promises, would diminish her clout and reduce the value of her experience.)
Regardless, this is the difference between the two campaigns. Hillary Clinton is promising a change in policy. Barack Obama is promising that and a change in philosophy. He is promising to get the same policies passed, all while staying above the fray.
Hillary Clinton’s promise is that she soldiers well in the trenches of modern Washington warfare. Barack Obama’s promise is that just by his sheer willpower he can transform Washington into the more gentlemanly battlefield of yesteryear. He promises that unlike Hillary, he can stay clean. The reason people question his substance, is the same reason Barack Obama is a religion. It lies in that difference. Because when asked how he plans to do that, how he plans to stay clean, his response is essentially the same as any faith. Just believe.
At the heart of Obama's gospel of change is the idea that he cannot do it alone. He's dependent on his supporters to help him effect this transformation. This brings me back to when I told my friends that I would support John McCain. It turns out Obama supporters don't reach across the aisle (or dinner table as the case was) and shake your hand, like you would expect, saying, "I look forward to working with you.” No. Obama supporters look at you weird if you support John McCain. And one out of three of them say, "You're a Republican? What the hell is wrong with you?"
If I'm going to believe in Barack Obama, unlike my friends, it won't be because he promises a future deliverance. I guess, just like the Evangelicals, I need to see some miracles, yesterday. He can start by making his supporters self-aware.
Sitting with them, I thought it was an opportunity to learn more about their candidate. They did little to illuminate their thought process until, as a mild joke, I told them I was going to vote for John McCain. Then they did a lot.
Barack Obama wants us to believe that a vote for him is post-racial, and post-partisan. But if you look at it, he promises almost the exact same things that Hillary Clinton promises but with none of the Washington experience to accomplish it. From that point of view a vote for Obama sounds post-rational too, because it doesn't make any sense.
Believing in things that make no sense is not a new thing. The dominant faith-based movement over the last thirty years has been the Evangelical Christians. These are people who seem scared of reason. Their beliefs, unlike the new Post-Rationals are pre-rational. Obama supporters are not scared of reason. They're the opposite. They're bored of it.
But the biggest difference isn't fear and boredom. Evangelical Christians have a well-defined set of irrational events to believe in. Water turning into wine, curing of a leper. Obama supporters do not. Barack Obama's supporters, a group that is educated and wealthy are generally skeptical of religion and organization. They're certainly wary of miracles that happened in the past, miracles that can be analyzed and debunked. Apparently though, if the miracles are promised in the future, they're quite agreeable.
But what are these miracles? What does it mean to place your faith in Barack Obama? For the answer to this question, the best we can do is study the campaign he’s run against Hillary Clinton.
The difference between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama has consistently been painted as the difference between substance and style. Over and over Obama runs up against the criticism that there is no meat to go along with the kool-aid. But what exactly does that mean? Like Hillary Clinton, Obama has laid out clear, detailed policies on every issue that concerns the presidency. Their policies are so similar it’s almost not worth discussing. The difference, what is worth discussing, lies in their approach.
Hillary Clinton's stump speech is full of policies. She has prescriptions about, health care, immigration, predatory loans. You name it, she has a policy response to solve it. The key is, her campaign promises no more or less than fighting for these policies.
Barack Obama’s stump speech has policy prescriptions addressing all the same issues as Hillary. The difference is that his speech is not full of his policies like hers. It's half-full of them, or half-empty, depending on your perspective. The other half of his speech is what illuminates their differences.
The other half of Obama’s speech is devoted to energizing listeners into believing in a political system that they feel is broken. The broken political system is an over-arching issue that Hillary Clinton does not address so effectively. Because for her, it is the impetus for just another policy paper to sit beside all the other ones. This misses the point, because the broken political system, it can be argued, is not a policy problem it is a philosophy problem. (Of course, maybe she doesn’t miss this point. Maybe she realizes that her experience is in navigating this broken political system. Fixing it, as Barack Obama promises, would diminish her clout and reduce the value of her experience.)
Regardless, this is the difference between the two campaigns. Hillary Clinton is promising a change in policy. Barack Obama is promising that and a change in philosophy. He is promising to get the same policies passed, all while staying above the fray.
Hillary Clinton’s promise is that she soldiers well in the trenches of modern Washington warfare. Barack Obama’s promise is that just by his sheer willpower he can transform Washington into the more gentlemanly battlefield of yesteryear. He promises that unlike Hillary, he can stay clean. The reason people question his substance, is the same reason Barack Obama is a religion. It lies in that difference. Because when asked how he plans to do that, how he plans to stay clean, his response is essentially the same as any faith. Just believe.
At the heart of Obama's gospel of change is the idea that he cannot do it alone. He's dependent on his supporters to help him effect this transformation. This brings me back to when I told my friends that I would support John McCain. It turns out Obama supporters don't reach across the aisle (or dinner table as the case was) and shake your hand, like you would expect, saying, "I look forward to working with you.” No. Obama supporters look at you weird if you support John McCain. And one out of three of them say, "You're a Republican? What the hell is wrong with you?"
If I'm going to believe in Barack Obama, unlike my friends, it won't be because he promises a future deliverance. I guess, just like the Evangelicals, I need to see some miracles, yesterday. He can start by making his supporters self-aware.
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
Hillary vs. Change?
If you just looked at the campaign signs you'd think the two people running for the Democratic nomination were Hillary and Change.
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Hillary's Giuliani Strategy
It's strange to tacitly concede primaries that have yet to pass. It's even stranger to think that after doing so you believe you can make up the lost victories with a demonstrative victory in a bigger state. This is the strategy Hillary Clinton's campaign is using. They are silently accepting their non-existent losses in upcoming primaries and banking on a strong showing in Ohio and Texas. But we don't have to wait until March 4th to get a sense of the result. There is a campaign that tested this strategy already. Former Republican front-runner, Rudy Giuliani's.
When Rudy Giuliani was confronted with his first whiff of resistance in Iowa, he immediately retreated to a stronger position. The second wave of resistance came in New Hampshire at which point he quickly pulled back to his most fortified position, thinking his supposed advantages there would not be worn away by the passage of time. In Florida, he was trounced. His eggs in one basket strategy failed to realize that Floridians would not be stuck in a time-warp that froze their opinions in the position they were in two months earlier.
Rudy Giuliani had spent so many months as the de facto front-runner that he assumed his status would carry him to victory in the larger states. There were demographic reasons to believe this to be true. His aggressive stance on national security played well to specific constituencies in Florida. His national exposure and publicity translated well to the broad diversity of people living in Florida. What he failed to account for could maybe be called momentum, but other's momentum, McCain's, Huckabee's, could not fully explain his dramatic loss of support in the state. A more traditional explanation exists. Giuliani supporters did not abandon him because people in other states did not support him. They left him because his Florida strategy weakened the core pillar of his own support. Rudy Giuliani, who had staked his whole campaign on his reputation as a fighter, was not fighting.
Hillary Clinton seems to be falling into this same trap. Clinton has staked her whole campaign on her own reputation as a fighter. Yet at a time when the winds seem to be blowing against her, she seems to be standing down. Waiting, not fighting. This is a mistake and Hillary can look to the other Republican candidates to see how she can fix it.
The fundamental reason Mitt Romney dropped out of the presidential race wasn't his perception that it was good for the party. It was that Mitt Romney did not know how to run a campaign without spending many millions of dollars, far more than he could fund raise. That difference in money had to come from his own pocket and he did not feel comfortable parting with any more of it. On the other hand, it's doubtful Mike Huckabee would know what to do with that much money.
After John McCain's victories, Romney had become an insurgent for the Republican nomination and he had no experience in that role, and apparently none of the will to cultivate it. Hillary Clinton is drifting towards a similar position. Her inevitability has been removed, her vast resources exceeded by her opponent. Does she have the will that Romney did not? Does she have the fight of a Mike Huckabee?
If anything, Mike Huckabee's campaign is proving that it's not the size of the dog in the fight but the size of the fight in the dog. That is how people perceive what he's doing. They think he'll lose, but they perceive him as a fighter. He is a fighter. He concedes no voters before they've voted. He concedes no elections before they've been held. He pays no attention to polls. He debates with media pundits and uses every opportunity to break out of the boxes in which they place him. He's made no assumptions about the electorate and has made fools out of people who have. He works overtime to tell people that he is there and that he is fighting for their vote. His strategy is based on the belief that he can win. Her strategy it seems is still based on the belief that she can't lose.
Rudy Giuliani believed he couldn't lose. Americans don't like people who can't lose. They like winners. Hillary Clinton needs to start believing she can win. She needs to put the Arkansas back into her New York, she needs to go down swinging. People need to see her working tirelessly to gather support in the upcoming states where the public thinks she won't win. If she doesn't start fighting now, a month from now, after Texas and Ohio, she may have more in common with Rudy Giuliani than just being from the same state.
When Rudy Giuliani was confronted with his first whiff of resistance in Iowa, he immediately retreated to a stronger position. The second wave of resistance came in New Hampshire at which point he quickly pulled back to his most fortified position, thinking his supposed advantages there would not be worn away by the passage of time. In Florida, he was trounced. His eggs in one basket strategy failed to realize that Floridians would not be stuck in a time-warp that froze their opinions in the position they were in two months earlier.
Rudy Giuliani had spent so many months as the de facto front-runner that he assumed his status would carry him to victory in the larger states. There were demographic reasons to believe this to be true. His aggressive stance on national security played well to specific constituencies in Florida. His national exposure and publicity translated well to the broad diversity of people living in Florida. What he failed to account for could maybe be called momentum, but other's momentum, McCain's, Huckabee's, could not fully explain his dramatic loss of support in the state. A more traditional explanation exists. Giuliani supporters did not abandon him because people in other states did not support him. They left him because his Florida strategy weakened the core pillar of his own support. Rudy Giuliani, who had staked his whole campaign on his reputation as a fighter, was not fighting.
Hillary Clinton seems to be falling into this same trap. Clinton has staked her whole campaign on her own reputation as a fighter. Yet at a time when the winds seem to be blowing against her, she seems to be standing down. Waiting, not fighting. This is a mistake and Hillary can look to the other Republican candidates to see how she can fix it.
The fundamental reason Mitt Romney dropped out of the presidential race wasn't his perception that it was good for the party. It was that Mitt Romney did not know how to run a campaign without spending many millions of dollars, far more than he could fund raise. That difference in money had to come from his own pocket and he did not feel comfortable parting with any more of it. On the other hand, it's doubtful Mike Huckabee would know what to do with that much money.
After John McCain's victories, Romney had become an insurgent for the Republican nomination and he had no experience in that role, and apparently none of the will to cultivate it. Hillary Clinton is drifting towards a similar position. Her inevitability has been removed, her vast resources exceeded by her opponent. Does she have the will that Romney did not? Does she have the fight of a Mike Huckabee?
If anything, Mike Huckabee's campaign is proving that it's not the size of the dog in the fight but the size of the fight in the dog. That is how people perceive what he's doing. They think he'll lose, but they perceive him as a fighter. He is a fighter. He concedes no voters before they've voted. He concedes no elections before they've been held. He pays no attention to polls. He debates with media pundits and uses every opportunity to break out of the boxes in which they place him. He's made no assumptions about the electorate and has made fools out of people who have. He works overtime to tell people that he is there and that he is fighting for their vote. His strategy is based on the belief that he can win. Her strategy it seems is still based on the belief that she can't lose.
Rudy Giuliani believed he couldn't lose. Americans don't like people who can't lose. They like winners. Hillary Clinton needs to start believing she can win. She needs to put the Arkansas back into her New York, she needs to go down swinging. People need to see her working tirelessly to gather support in the upcoming states where the public thinks she won't win. If she doesn't start fighting now, a month from now, after Texas and Ohio, she may have more in common with Rudy Giuliani than just being from the same state.
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