Compare And Contrast

by hilzoy

Barack Obama on his response to the economic meltdown:

"We were getting phone calls from people in Washington and I think there were some on our staff that were thinking that maybe we should interject and respond in some way. My strong feeling was that this situation was of such seriousness that it was important not to chase the cameras. One of the advantages that we had was that I think we had been steady from the start. I had already called my economic advisors together. I had already put forward a clear set of principles that were in the process of being adopted. I had been talking to Paulson and Bernanke and the congressional leadership on a regular basis so it wasn't like I felt in any way that I was out of the loop. I felt like I was helping to shape the direction of this. And one of the things that I have become more and more convinced of during the course of this campaign is that in an environment like this one where people are really paying attention because they are worried and they are scared good policy will end up being good politics -- more than I think might have been true during boom times in the nineties when people were just feeling like it was sport, it was a game. "

Robert Draper on McCain's response:

"The meeting was to focus on how McCain should respond to the crisis -- but also, as one participant later told me, "to try to see this as a big-picture, leadership thing." As this participant recalled: "We presented McCain with three options. Continue offering principles from afar. A middle ground of engaging while still campaigning. Then the third option, of going all in. The consensus was that we could stay out or go in — but that if we’re going in, we should go in all the way. So the thinking was, do you man up and try to affect the outcome, or do you hold it at arm’s length? And no, it was not an easy call."

Discussion carried on into the afternoon at the Morgan Library and Museum as McCain prepared for the first presidential debate. Schmidt pushed for going all in: suspending the campaign, recommending that the first debate be postponed, parachuting into Washington and forging a legislative solution to the financial crisis for which McCain could then claim credit. (...)

Schmidt evidently saw the financial crisis as a "true character" moment that would advance his candidate's narrative. But the story line did not go as scripted. "This has to be solved by Monday," Schmidt told reporters that Wednesday afternoon in late September, just after McCain concluded his lengthy meeting with his advisers and subsequently announced his decision to suspend his campaign and go to Washington. Belying a crisis situation, however, McCain didn’t leave New York immediately. He spent Thursday morning at an event for the Clinton Global Initiative, the nonprofit foundation run by former President Bill Clinton. As McCain headed for Washington later that morning, he was sufficiently concerned about the situation that Schmidt felt compelled to reassure him. "Remember what President Clinton told you," Schmidt said, referring to advice Clinton had dispensed that morning: "If you do the right thing, it might be painful for a few days. But in the long run it will work out in your favor.""

What's interesting to me is that both candidates seem, on the surface at least, to have operated on the same principle: "good policy will end up being good politics", "If you do the right thing, (...) in the long run it will work out in your favor." The obvious next question is: OK, what is the right thing to do? And McCain got that one so spectacularly wrong that it's hard to imagine that he cared about it in the first place.

If a Presidential candidate truly wants to do the right thing in a situation like this, it seems to me that the best thing to do is not to talk about it, and not to do anything dramatic, but to work as hard as you can behind the scenes. Very few difficult policy decisions are improved by having Presidential politics injected into them, and this seemed unlikely to be one of the exceptions. McCain is not on any of the relevant committees, has no obvious expertise in finance, and, by all accounts, does not have the kind of standing in Congress that would let him rally members behind him. That means that it's not at all clear how his returning to DC would help at all, especially since he could just as easily have tried to round up support for whatever course of action he thought best by phone.

If McCain had actually asked himself what the right thing to do was, it's hard to see how he could have come up with the answer: suspending my campaign and heading to Washington. If he did think that that was the most helpful thing he could do under the circumstances, I'd have to seriously question both his judgment and his insight into his own capacities.

Steve Schmidt was right to see the crisis "as a 'true character' moment". It revealed a lot about McCain. For instance, it revealed that in the midst of the biggest economic crisis in decades, he was more concerned with looking like a leader than with acting like one, and more concerned with the politics of his own response than with doing the right thing. It also revealed that he doesn't think his own responses through, which is why he had to un-suspend his campaign so quickly.

But it's also revealing that when Steve Schmidt had to "reassure" him, he told McCain that he was doing the right thing. It was pretty obvious that that wasn't true: at any rate, a few questions about why this was the right thing to do would have made it clear that there was no reason at all to think that it was. It's interesting both that Schmidt tried to buck McCain up by appealing to his desire to think of himself as doing the right thing, and that he could count on McCain to accept that appeal to his vanity without subjecting it to scrutiny.

Decisions like this one reveal what matters to a person. People who care more about actually doing the right thing than about thinking that they do take the time to figure out what the right thing is. People who care more about their own self-image than about actually doing what's right, by contrast, have no reason to bother with that question. It seems to be important to John McCain to think of himself as an honorable person who does the right thing. But in this case at least, he didn't seem to care whether or not that thought was true.

Comments

[tomeck]

It seemed to me that McCain was doing the same thing with this response that he did when he "cut back" the convention so he could check up on the preparations for the huricanes.

McCain and his advisors don't understand the difference between "looking presidential" and being president. McCain, candidate or not, is still only the Senator from Arizona. He had no business sticking his nose into the Southern states as they prepared for a natural disaster.

In this and in the economic crisis, he was trying to place himself as if he were already president. But all he did was make a fool of himself and it was right after his performance that his campaign became aa train wreck.

[aimai]

What tomeck said. Hilzoy, you are way too nice. You are overthinking this. Obama's campaign said it all in the first few lines--he'd *already* grasped that "the economy" was a big issue for the country and the next president. He'd *already called together his economic advisors.* McCain *doesn't have* any economic advisors. Just like it came out in an earlier New Yorker piece that he doesn't have any foreign policy advisors because, as his campaign so charmingly put it, tiger woods doesn't need coaching on his golf swing. The heart of the matter is that Obama is a working class kid with working class values--work hard, harder than the other kids, to get to where you want to go. McCain is an elitist, born to power, who scorns hard work as something for others to do. And he's proud of it. He's *too proud* to have "advisors" in the sense of specialists in an area that is too complex for him--because he's too proud to need advice. He's been like that his entire life. There was never a moment when he thought about what a President would do *in reality* with an economic meltdown.
To quote Tomeck's much more succinct version:

"McCain and his advisors don't understand the difference between "looking presidential" and being president." or, worse, they think that "looking presidential" like "looking agressive" and "looking brave" are all identical to those qualities. That's a very dangerous delusion for a person who wants power (and for his advisors) since sooner rather than later they will meet a circumstance where you can't fake your response.

aimai

[MeDrewNotYou]

My favorite line:
My strong feeling was that this situation was of such seriousness that it was important not to chase the cameras.

That just says so much about Obama. I'm really excited about a president with an attitude like that.

[gwangung]

McCain *doesn't have* any economic advisors. Just like it came out in an earlier New Yorker piece that he doesn't have any foreign policy advisors because, as his campaign so charmingly put it, tiger woods doesn't need coaching on his golf swing.

Shows the tone-deafness of the McCain campaign, since Tiger has famously reworked his swing a couple times in his relentless drive to get better.

[Ben Alpers]

There's something truly peculiar about the McCain campaign's conception of the role of electoral politics in our political system. They seem to believe that "being serious" about something political means not engaging in electoral politics. However, everyone (correctly) sees these moments of "serious" suspensions of political business-as-usual as profoundly political. The whole package has the effect of the McCain campaign's showing extraordinary contempt for the political process on at least two levels.

First, while Obama says "good policy is good politics," McCain's premise is that small-d democratic politics necessarily interfere with good policy. Far from being the foundation of the policymaking process, democracy is a distraction. (No wonder they treat the process so unseriously, even as they try to treat the policy making seriously.)

Secondly, in assuming that such transparent moves will score political points, they come across as cynical, hypocritical and contemptuous of the intelligence of the America electorate.

[hilzoy]

aimai: you thought the last sentence was nice? I didn't.

[tomeck]

aimai

Nice edit. Works for me.

It's interesting that the campaign is actually working the way it's supposed to this year. People have learned about the candidates, not through the stump speeches, but through their reactions to events around them.

Voters have seen McCain saying "we need a steady hand at the tiller" at the same time he's suspending the convention, no wait I can come back, suspending his campaign and taking credit for a deal a few hours before it falls through. In the meantime, his VP choice gives a shoutout to her third grade classmates back in Alaska.

Rarely in recent elections has a ticket so honestly showed the American people what their administration would be like if they get elected.

Now all we have to do is make sure all the votes get counted.

[Mithi]

I think you're going to have to elaborate on your assertion that it was obvious the day after McCain announced the suspension, that it wasn't the right thing to do. I'm inclined to believe it wasn't obvious to him at all. He's no expert on the economy after all, by his own admission. I do agree that this casts serious doubt on his judgment.

It just seems like such a leap to say he showed he didn't care about doing the right thing. And statements like that are a breath away of calling someone unpatriotic or accusing them of not loving their country. Not really helpful in encouraging a healthy political discussion.

American political discourse never fails to baffle me in how common and accepted the amount of venom and distrust is. Unnoticed, even. I don't think I've ever heard any of my (Dutch) countrymen accuse a politician of not caring about their country. That they're delusional, bigoted and entirely misguided, sure. But not that they don't care about the nation's wellbeing.

[xanax]

Mithi @7:00 "American political discourse never fails to baffle me in how common and accepted the amount of venom and distrust is."

Well, Mithi, to understand, just take a good look at the consequences... not just for the US, but for the entire world... when we get it wrong.

[Gary Farber]

"In the meantime, his VP choice gives a shoutout to her third grade classmates back in Alaska."

Not her third grade classmates. The class her brother teaches.

[tomeck]

Not her third grade classmates. The class her brother teaches.

Um, I was being a bit sarcastic about her being IN the third grade based on the level of her responses in the debate (I'll answer my own questions, so there!). I know, sarcasm doesn't work well on the internets.

[Turbulence]

I'm inclined to believe it wasn't obvious to him at all. He's no expert on the economy after all, by his own admission.

Part of being an adult is recognizing when you lack the skills needed to solve particular problems. This is why it would be immoral for me to try and perform surgery on people, even if they really needed it: I'm not a surgeon. McCain is old enough to know that he doesn't know jack about the economy. He's experienced enough to understand that this is serious business and screwing it up could create major problems for millions of people. Trying to fix a really dangerous situation when you know that you lack the basic understanding needed to do so, let alone the skills, is not compatible with doing the right thing.

I'm sure that McCain does love his country, and that he loves it very much. I just think that he loves his own ego and his own quest for power more than he loves his country.

I don't think I've ever heard any of my (Dutch) countrymen accuse a politician of not caring about their country. That they're delusional, bigoted and entirely misguided, sure. But not that they don't care about the nation's wellbeing.

I'm not sure the distinction is as real as you claim. A drunk man who insists on driving is misguided. He might insist vehemently that he would never hurt anyone. Yet his insistence on driving demonstrates that he does not love the people in his town, because he is taking actions that can reasonably be expected to harm them.

[Carleton Wu]

I think you're going to have to elaborate on your assertion that it was obvious the day after McCain announced the suspension, that it wasn't the right thing to do. I'm inclined to believe it wasn't obvious to him at all.

I have a hard time fitting that in with subsequent events- saying he was going to Washington to fix things, sitting in on a meeting and - if anything- strengthening the resolve of the House GOP to resist the initial bailout. Then attending the debate which he had said he would skip to deal with the crisis, and finally restarting his campaign because everything was back on track- even though there was much work left to get the two sides together and the bailout passed.

I cannot see, in that sequence of events, someone who was seriously trying to solve the problem. If McCain thought that suspending his campaign to deal with the crisis was in fact correct, how could he restart his campaign almost immediately with the crisis still looming?
I suppose if we postulate a sufficiently ill-informed and pliable McCain (like a second-term Reagan) then we can keep his good intentions intact, but only by claiming that he has little control over the course of his campaign. But I don't believe that of him.

[hilzoy]

Mithi: I think that if you were really concerned about doing what was best during this crisis, you'd be focussed on figuring out what actually was best. Consider what McCain would have had to believe in order to think that what he was doing was not just a decent move politically, but what was most likely to help the country get the best possible response to the meltdown:

(a) His dramatically "suspending" his campaign would make it more likely, not less, that Congress would end up doing the right thing. -- I just find that very hard to credit. Since when does dramatizing and politicizing delicate negotiations actually help?

(b) He actually had something to offer that he couldn't provide via telephone. -- What, exactly? He has no relevant expertise. To my knowledge, he does not have deep relationships with many of the major players.

(c) There was no chance that his doing this would give Democrats, or Republicans thinking of 2012, an incentive not to arrive at a deal, in order to deprive him of credit. -- I mean, this is an obvious downside risk to what he did.

Mostly, though, (a) is the one I find unbelievable. These negotiations needed to be carried out quietly, without McCain's press entourage in attendance. Thinking McCain's appearance would help would be like, oh, Princess Diana thinking that it would help some couple who were trying a difficult and painful reconciliation in private if she were to descend, with all the paparazzi in tow, to "help".

[Gary Farber]

"He actually had something to offer that he couldn't provide via telephone."

And what he in fact did when he went to DC was say little to nothing in the meeting Bush held, and then go home and stay on the phone.

[jonnybutter]

The sad thing is that McCain doesn't seem to think it really matters if he skates, is cynical, is disruptive-and-worse, etc. The assumption is that everything will work out in the end no matter what mistakes he makes because everything *always* works out. This is delusional, and it's born of two things: being personally spoiled, which McCain certainly is; and, in a sense, the *country* having been somewhat spoiled by our post WW2 experience. Churchill's wartime (I believe) comment, 'You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else' was pretty canny. McCain's America is the adolescent America, the one which can fk anything up, squander fortunes of wealth (of all kinds) and not only survive, but thrive - out of sheer youth and luck. In a political sense, this election marks the end of the post WW2 era in this country, it seems to me - that's what 'passing the torch' means. George Bush seemed to have been aware enough of the coming change to have made sure his buddies strip mined a whole lot of wealth before things fell apart. I think Obama is aware of it just by virtue of his being younger (and intelligent and of good character). McCain...not so much.

[david kilmer]

I am probably going to smile to myself for at least a year every time I think about the McCain wanting to make this campaign "about character". Maybe they meant "character" in the same right-wing-framey sort of way as they do with the word "values". But in the end, character means what it means. They have been, as Coates says, "sonned".

[Porlock Hussein Junior]

Stock cartoon scene of two emaciated guys chained to the wall of a dungeon. One is saying,
"Now here's my plan--"

[I am so glad I took a wild stab at seeing whether I could get an attribution for that cartoon I saw about 1960.
http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/s/shel-silverstein/now-here-s-my-plan.htm
Didn't know his work by name till later.]

And when you've got a real good plan, it matters whether you can carry it out. McCain's incapacity has been pretty well covered here. But there's one other bit of the delusion worth getting into.

Remember the famous remarks about the reality-based people? McCain drank the "We make our own reality" Kool-Aid the same as all the others. It has, as david kilmer says, been an enlightening campaign as to people's character.

[david kilmer]

Oh - I forgot about my obligatory general musing comment.

The verb "lead" comes from words that have to do with motion in space. The idea of "going" and "going in front" are very much a part of our conception of leadership.

One of the senses of "lead" is "guide", which comes from words having to do with showing and seeing. Obviously, this sense is part of our conceptual structure too (i.e., "visionary" leader), but I would guess that it's secondary for a lot of people.

It seems pretty clear from hilzoy's quotes which sense of "leading" is primary for each candidate. Obama, as far as I know, didn't make a big deal at the time out of the fact that he was helping to shape the outcome. He leads in a quieter way. In fact, when reading about some of his legislative work, I've come across the phrase that Obama was "behind" such-and-such an idea or compromise.

I guess some of us are going to have to get used to a leader who is "behind" a lot of the things that happen.

[Mithi]

@xanax: Heh, fair enough. I suppose I must be grateful. Course, it doesn't seem to have helped you get it right the past two elections. And if McCain loses I doubt it will be because voters believe he doesn't care about his country.

@Turbulence: McCain lacks the basic understanding and skills to fix a situation like that, but I don't believe he intended to single-handedly resolve the situation. As the article says it was a leadership thing. He didn't need to know how to fix the issues, but he needed to know how to direct others to fix the issues. There he failed horribly, but I am not convinced that he didn't think he could do good.
As for the drunk driving analogy: I would disagree with the notion that this man doesn't love the people in his town, because I believe he doesn't expect his actions to harm them. If you do, that makes you rational, responsible (providing you don't still drive drunk), and not misguided. I don't think it means you love people whereas the drunk driver doesn't.

@Carleton Wu: I'll repeat that I don't think McCain thought he could fix the crisis himself, but he might have thought he could spur others into fixing it, and perhaps provide investors some comfort and reassurance with his commitment. I doubt he expected the House GOP to sell him out like that, so that just shows poor judgment. And as for restarting the campaign: he changed course when it was clear the suspension wasn't having the effect he hoped for and that he wasn't going to do any good. I don't see much of a problem with that.

@hilzoy: I agree that (a) is the most difficult to defend. It requires a special kind of disconnect to not see the dangers of pulling such a stunt. But I would still rather believe there was such a disconnect than that he didn't care.
(b) See my responses to Turbulence and Carleton Wu. My imagination doesn't stretch far enough to try to claim that McCain actually believed he could be of use for his expertise. But he might have believed he could provide some comfort to the financial community by showing leadership - misguided, but well intentioned. I also think he thought he had some clout over the House GOP, which brings us to (c).
Democrats might not begrudge him the credit, but they've hardly been known to show spine in politically dangerous situations. Republicans, on the other hand, are renowned for their unity and their obedience to the party line. I don't think McCain expected them to mutiny.

Now to all of you, let me ask you a question. Do you believe McCain would knowingly and willingly plunge his country into financial turmoil for political gain? Or even that he would 'just' risk it, for political gain? And tangentially, he had to have a motive for the suspension one way or another. If the risks were so obvious to him, as you all claim, why would he make such a move? It's just as likely (or more likely, according to you) to cost him political points as it is to score him some. In other words, is it really that much difference, in terms of mental gymnastics required, between thinking that the suspension would be genuinely helpful, and thinking that it would be politically expedient? It would seem to me the two are closely correlated.

[Bernard Yomtov]

I think McCain has no understanding whatsoever of the mortgage situtation. Here's what he said in his radio address today:

What's more, I'm not going to spend $750 billion dollars of your money just bailing out the Wall Street bankers and brokers who got us into this mess. I'm going to make sure we take care of the working people who were devastated by the excesses of Wall Street and Washington.

Two weeks ago, I announced a plan to protect the value of your home and get it rising again by buying up bad mortgages and refinancing them so if your neighbor defaults he doesn't bring down the value of your house with him. This will help stem the tide of foreclosures that are hurting families, and it will put a floor under the broken housing market that was at the root of the financial crisis.

Consider how wrong this is. First of all, even though it was never clear during the debates where he stood on the bailout, he ultimately voted for it. So what's the business about not bailing out Wall Street?

Second, what does he think his plan to pay off mortgages is? It's a gift to the holders of MBS that have a market value of probably less than fifty cents on the dollar.

Third, does he think that would be free? No. It wouldn't be.

The whole thing is as incoherent as his actions leading up to the passage of the bailout legislation.

[hilzoy]

Mithi: I think I see where we might disagree. When I say that McCain doesn't actually care much about doing the right thing, I don't mean that I think he would willingly and knowingly plunge the country into catastrophe for the sake of political gain. I don't think that he is e.g. sociopathic. I just mean that he doesn't care enough to get it right, or even close to right. I also think, as I said, that he does care about his ability to think of himself as an honorable person, which puts some limits on what he can do.

Possibly this old post might clarify what I had in mind. In it, I argued that Bush, Rumsfeld, et al did not really care about winning in Iraq, since if they had, they might have made mistakes, but not the kinds of mistakes they actually made. (E.g., not planning for the occupation.) I mean something like that here. If you really care about something, you try to get it right. And I just cannot wrap my mind around the idea that if John McCain had really tried on this one, he would have done what he did.

[Kenneth Almquist]

It's amazing: every day McCain seems more and more like Bush. I think what we are seeing is a product not just of McCain's character but also of the culture of the Republican party. Hilzoy writes:

It's interesting both that Schmidt tried to buck McCain up by appealing to his desire to think of himself as doing the right thing, and that he could count on McCain to accept that appeal to his vanity without subjecting it to scrutiny.

But if McCain, before heading to Washington, had talked to a couple of people who cared more about solving the problem than about the political fallout, I think he might have acted differently. Yes, McCain should have scrutinized Schmidt's claim that McCain was doing the right thing, but intellectual laziness is a common failing, especially when it comes to questioning beliefs that support one's self image. What surprises me about this incident is that as far as I can tell, no one around McCain really cared whether McCain was doing the right thing.

[Hartmut]

David, maybe another definition of lead fits the Son of Cain better:
lead - toxic heavy metal, formerly important in the production of vitriol. Symptoms of poisoning are (among others) apathy and loss of judgement. ;-)
Palin then would be the lead weight on the Son of Cain's tumbler that will have him sink to the bottom.

[david kilmer]

Hartmut - Hmmm. You might be interested to know that the word "plumber" comes from a word for that sort of lead.

And, of course, plumber is directly related to "plummet".

[Hartmut]

Being a chemist by profession I should have spotted that connection myself :-(

[CitizenE]

The more I reflect on this, the more it seems to me 2 things are at play here. Obama appeared on the surface to be doing very little, yet in the initial bailout the what calmed a populace that were outraged by the possibility of bailing out Wall St. were the taxpayer protections that Obama early on suggested and McCain signed on to. Not enough can be said about Obama as a professional politician; I can only hope when it gets to governance he reaches his potential.
The second is that while everyone has spoken to the overall lack of strategy and vision of McCain's campaign, some of this must be attributed to McCain's age and the grueling schedule of campaigning that would surely undo many far younger than McCain. He's had his ups and downs with his public moods but in the end this is John McCain's campaign, and at that crucial moment in time, he didn't have the mental stamina to really think out the situation, as he has not throughout the campaign, which has lurched from one last gasp to the next.

[Rocky]

In the 1700s the average life span was about 55 to 60 years of age. Therefore the Framers assumed that by putting a bottom limit of 35 years of age they could figure on enough maturity. They didn't worry about a top end age. Today we have a longer life, but that dosent mean that we don't loose the ability to reason. Maybe it is time to set a maximum age on all three branches of Govt. Old age does not always mean smarter..
I am 70 myself so I am not speaking from a biased position.