What is the best explanation of the moral, legal, economic, and strategic failures of the Bush Administration? Scott McClennan's What Happened offers a series of illuminating answers. While the book has received a great deal of attention, one of his principal, and most interesting, themes has been barely noticed.

As McClennan describes the Bush White House, it is the very opposite of the team of rivals described in Doris Kearns Goodwin's account of Lincoln's executive branch. McClellan describes failures, not merely of Bush and Cheney, but also and crucially of their multiple advisers, who failed to bring up objections and counterarguments. What McClellan captures is a team of unrivals--a set of conformists who repeatedly echoed the prevailing line, even when they had private doubts, or relevant information that pointed in a quite different direction.

In a sense, McClellan's account offers a much more dramatic and sustained version of Arthur Schlesinger's description of the disastrous invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in 1961. Schlesinger says that Kennedy's advisers silenced themselves, even though they had serious qualms. Indeed, Schlesinger suppressed his own doubts but did not object: "In the months after the Bay of Pigs I bitterly reproached myself for having kept so silent during those crucial discussions. ... I can only explain my failure to do more than raise a few timid questions by reporting that one's impulse to blow the whistle on this nonsense was simply undone by the circumstances of the discussion." As McClellan describes it, this form of self-silencing has been pervasive during the Bush Administration, and it has contributed to terrible errors of morality, law, economics, and strategy.

The Bay of Pigs disaster is often used as an illustration of "groupthink," above all by Irving Janis in his book that coined and elaborated that term. But the concept of groupthink is not well-specified, and McClellan's account is better described as capturing the process of group polarization, by which like-minded people entrench one another's inclinations, producing greater confidence, more firmness, more opposition to dissenting views, and greater extremism. In fact, McClellan might be understood to have produced a series of stories of group polarization in action. His book offers important lessons, not merely for those who seek to understand why and how the Bush Administration went so badly wrong, but also for those who want White House processes to work better in the future.

 --Cass R. Sunstein

Now we know why Barack Obama spent so much time in the gym those last days in Chicago before taking off for Afghanistan. He was practicing jump shots, preparing for the sensational 25 footer he sank in the Kabul gym in front of cheering US troops.

All practitioners prepare. Professionals are defined as much by preparation as practice. Great professionals practice as Obama does, their focus on key moments, striking, often unexpected occasions and opportunities. ("Photo ops" is the vulgar phrase.) The great practitioner takes a longer view than the people around him. The fine, diligent New Yorker piece by Ryan Lizza about Obama making his slow, challenged way to political office in and through Chicago shows him learning the ropes and continually abandoning them for other ropes, other learning, other modes of advancement. The same goes for his negotiating with University of Chicago law deans and professors who wanted to recruit this brilliant, attentive young man, one going so far as to tell him after a political defeat that he had no future in politics but might well have a great career in the academy and then perhaps as a public intellectual, a la Judge Richard Posner. Obama accepted an office, a stipend, and some lecturing on constitutional law, but nurtured his political career, his long view, as he wanted.

Because of the recent Wimbledon tournament, I think of Richard Williams, seeing the money and glory earned by women tennis players, buying a book on the sport in order to learn it and then working thousands of hours with two of his daughters to make them international champions.

These are great triumphs of practice and professionalism. The knowledge of oneself, the people around, contemporary conditions, and future possibilities is so great for both these men--one is tempted to use the word genius for them. The basketball shot that Obama made in that gym was photographed and sent around the world. I expect that it will become what is too frequently called "iconic," and will be found in history books or their digital equivalents for a long time.

This week I reread a marvelous book, 50 years old this year. It is the Prince of Lampedusa's only novel, Il Gattopardo--The Leopard. It is about the last days of such Sicilian aristocrats as the extraordinary 19th century prince, Don Fabrizio de Salina, as Garibaldi's 800 red shirts invade the island and tumble the feeble Royalist troops of Fabrizio's helpless acquaintance, King Ferdinand. Fabrizio's knowledge of his friends and family--particularly his beloved, princely but impoverished nephew Tancredi--is matched by a remarkable and remarkably articulated sense of his land, Sicily, and its people, particularly such shrewd, bourgeois-graspers as Don Calogero Sedara, whose wealth and the mind-boggling beauty of whose daughter will give Tancredi if not a princely life like his uncle's, but one as close to it as the new era permits. Shortly after the triumph of the Victor Emmanuele regime, which will unite Italy into a single state, a representative of the regime, a wise old Piedmontese aristocrat, Chevalley, is sent to invite Don Fabrizio to become a senator and thus help determine the bright future of his part of the new state. Don Fabrizio courteously declines the offer and then shares what he knows and feels about Sicily, knowledge and feeling which help explain his decision:

In Sicily it doesn't matter if things are done well or badly; the sin, which we Sicilians never forgive, is simply that of ‘doing' at all.... Sleep, my dear Chevalley, sleep, that is what Sicilians want, and they will always hate anyone who tries to wake them, even in order to bring them the most wonderful gifts.... All Sicilian expression, even the most violent, is really wish-fulfillment: our sensuality is a hankering for oblivion, our shooting and knifing a hankering for death; our laziness, our spiced and drugged sherbets, a hankering for voluptuous immobility ... novelties attract us only when they are dead, incapable of arousing vital currents; that is what gives rise to the ... constant formation of myths ... which are really nothing but sinister attempts to plunge us back into a past that attracts us only because it's dead.... Sicilians never want to improve for the simple reason that they think themselves perfect; their vanity is stronger than their misery...[what] we ourselves call pride in reality is blindness.

Richard Williams and the even more eloquent Barack Obama may never express their knowledge of what surrounds or nurtures them as richly or poetically as Lampedusa's Gattopardo, but I think each understands the obstacles before them with some of the same profundity and originality. This is some of what underlay both this year's Wimbledon women's final and the wonderful three-point shot which Barack Obama made before the troops, the American voting public, and history this week in Kabul.

--Richard Stern 

Ten days ago, I watched "Venus Wimbledon," as her family calls her, defeat her younger sister Serena for her fifth Wimbledon championship. One's pleasure in this, the best of the sisters' matches I've seen, was marred only by the self-gratulatory garrulity of Mary Carillo whom, year after year, NBC couples with the adolescent stooge, Ted Robinson, and the informed, surprisingly modest John McEnroe, who, unlike the others, actually stops talking when the players are going about their business.

The day after the sister match, there was a marvelous and moving men's final in which Roger Federer, playing at or near the top of his game, suffered what he said was the worst loss of his life, a five setter, to Rafael Nadal. The last game was played in semi-darkness, which the gracious and gallant Federer mentioned as a factor in his loss. Still, the beauty and power of tennis was here--"The best match I've ever seen," said the superlative-lover, McEnroe--and puts to shame much of the political rot of the planet.

On Bastille Day, the UN condemned the monster who rules Sudan for genocide, a brief eclipse of the monstrosities of Robert Mugabe, the octogenarian who gripped again the reins of the country he's ruled and ruined. Oddly, there's a stroke of silver in this monster's portrait. A brilliant bit of journalism by The Washington Post's Craig Timberg revealed that the day after Zimbabwe's March 29 election, Mugabe told his circle of cronies that he'd lost and would resign. "No, you won't," was the response of General Constantine Chwenga, the chief of staff who went on to order the old thug that there would be another election, which he would win. Chwenga's fellow usurpers unleashed the 100,000 thugs of their Thugarchy. They killed, raped, and drove out of the country the opposition. And, sure enough, on June 27, the old monster was reelected.

All of us who complain about the Zimbabwean misery--including many of those at the recent African conference in Egypt--can't cohere into a fist to smash him. This week, Thomas Friedman wrote of the outrageous cowardice of Vladimir Putin and Thabo Mbeki, whose ambassadors vetoed a Mugabe-punishing resolution at the UN.

Of such irresponsible cowards, Celsus, the powerful and witty critic of Christianity whose work we know because Origen quotes him extensively in Contra Celsus (m), wrote

If they will take wives, and bring up children, and taste of the fruits of the earth, and partake of all the blessings of life, and bear its appointed sorrows (for nature herself hath allotted sorrows to all men; for sorrows must exist, and earth is the only place for them), then must they discharge the duties of life until they are released from its bond...

Would that the fortitude and civility of Rafael, Roger, and the soeurs Williams could be installed in those of us with the power and responsibility to counter the monstrosity that disfigures humanity in the actions of Mugabe, his cronies, Omar al-Bashir, and his.

--Richard Stern

The most level-headed, wise and modestly self-assured of George W. Bush's appointees, Robert Gates, has proposed a Rooseveltian enrichment of the already de-Rumsfelded Pentagon: the funding of social scientists and other professional researchers to work on such problems as China and Iraq: According to yesterday's New York Times,  "Gates has compared the initiative--named Minerva, after the Roman goddess of wisdom (and warriors)--to the government's effort to pump up its intellectual capital during the cold war after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957. Although the Pentagon regularly finances science and engineering research, systematic support for the social sciences and humanities has been rare. Minerva is the first systematic effort in this area since the Vietnam War..."

There is mention of humanities scholars, none for poets and novelists, a loss. (In Three Days of the Condor, the Robert Redford character works for a small CIA outfit that reads such bizarre material in order to pick up out-of-the-box suggestions for unspecified machinations.) I just finished John Updike's novel, Terrorist, one of his many recent books that most critics slammed. But Updike may be the wisest of all American observers, and I trust that Minervans will read--though it won't be necessary to fund--him. The novel is full of acute observations, usually made by characters that haven't passed the political-correctness exam. Here, Hermione Fogel, the spinster assistant of a Tom Ridge-like Secretary of Home Security, comments on the new breed of security screeners:

"In a land of multiplying security gates, the gatekeepers multiply also. To the well-paid professionals who traveled the airways and frequented the newly fortified government buildings, it appears that a dusky underclass has been given tyrannical power.... Where once a confident manner, a correct suit and tie and a business card measuring two by three and a half inches had opened doors, the switch is no longer tripped, the door remains closed. How can the fluid, hydraulically responsive workings of capitalism, let alone the commerce of intellectual exchange and the social life of extended families, function through such obdurate thicknesses of precaution?  The enemy has achieved his goal: business and recreation in the West are gummed up: exorbitantly so." 

Whether or not this observation will serve Secretary Gates and his Minervan cohorts I don't know, but its free floating intelligence is the sort of thing that at least limbers up intellectual muscles.

I'm now 75 pages into Denis Johnson's NBA winning novel Tree of Smoke and though one seventh of the text isn't enough for pronouncements, it looks as if one of its American war themes seems to be the fluidity of alliance and enmity. (Japan, an enemy in 1945, is an ally today. Russia, an ally in 1945, was an enemy through the Cold War and is now--what?). Not a great insight, but in Johnsonian detail, powerful. It might be obliquely covered in a joke from another novel read last week, James Salter's Light Years:

"There were two drunks on an elevator.... A woman got on---she was completely nude. They just stood there and didn't say anything.  After she got off, one turned to the other. ‘You know,' he said, ‘It's funny, my wife has an outfit exactly like that.'"

The Pentagon Minervans shouldn't ignore jokes, irony, sarcasm, cynicism, or wit of any sort. The human enterprise, even in its destructive and diabolic forms, turns just as often on these axes as on the doom-heavy ones Messrs. Bush, Cheney, Petraeus, and McCain apparently prefer.

--Richard Stern

The following is a revised, updated, and edited version of a piece originally published in The Independent of London a few months ago. In view of recent events, and continuing debates, I post a revised version here. I should add, by way of disclaimer, that I have been an occasional, informal adviser to Senator Obama.

Not so long ago, the phone rang in my office. It was Barack Obama. For more than a decade, Obama was my colleague at the University of Chicago Law School.

He is also a friend. But since his election to the Senate, he does not exactly call every day. On this occasion, he had an important topic to discuss: the controversy over President George W. Bush's warrantless surveillance of international telephone calls between Americans and suspected terrorists. I had written a short essay suggesting that the surveillance might be lawful. Before taking a public position, Obama wanted to talk the problem through. In the space of about 20 minutes, he and I investigated the legal details. He asked me to explore all sorts of issues: the President's power as commander-in-chief, the Constitution's protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the Authorization for Use of Military Force and more.

Obama wanted to consider the best possible defense of what Bush had done. To every argument I made, he listened carefully and offered a specific counter-argument. After the issue had been exhausted, Obama said that he thought the program was illegal, but now had a better understanding of both sides. He thanked me for my time.

This was a pretty amazing conversation, not only because of Obama's mastery of the legal details, but also because many prominent Democratic leaders had already blasted the Bush initiative as blatantly illegal. He did not want to take a public position until he had listened to, and explored, what might be said on the other side. This is the Barack Obama I have known for nearly 15 years--a careful and even-handed analyst of law and policy, unusually attentive to multiple points of view. The University of Chicago Law School is by far the most conservative of the great American law schools. It helped to provide the academic foundations for many positions of the Reagan administration. But at the University of Chicago, Obama is liked and admired by Republicans and Democrats alike. Some of the local Reagan enthusiasts are Obama supporters. Why? It doesn't hurt that he's a great guy, with a personal touch and a lot of warmth. It certainly helps that he is exceptionally able. But niceness and ability are only a small part of the story. Obama also has a genuinely independent mind, he's a terrific listener and he goes wherever reason takes him.

Many people are emphasizing that Obama is a terrific speaker; they are wondering whether he has substance as well. But those of us who have long known Obama are impressed and not a little amazed by his rhetorical skills. Who could have expected that our colleague, a teacher of law, is also able to inspire large crowds?

The Obama we know is no rhetorician; he shines not because he can move people, but because of his problem-solving abilities, his creativity, his lack of partisanship, and his attention to detail.

In recent months, his speaking talents, and the cult-like atmosphere that occasionally surrounds him, have led people to ask about the substance behind the plea for "change" - whether the soaring phrases might disguise a kind of emptiness and vagueness. But nothing could be further from the truth. He is most comfortable in the domain of policy and detail.

I do not deny that skeptics are raising legitimate questions. After all, Obama has served in the Senate for a short period (less than four years) and he has little managerial experience. Is he really equipped to lead the most powerful nation in the world?

Obama speaks of "change," but it is reasonable to ask: Will he be able to produce large-scale changes in a short time? An independent issue is that all the enthusiasm might serve to insulate him from criticisms and challenges on the part of his own advisers--and, in view of his relative youth, criticisms and challenges are exactly what he requires.

Fortunately, the candidate's campaign proposals offer strong and encouraging clues about how he would govern; what makes them distinctive is that they borrow sensible ideas from all sides. Some people are describing Obama as a conventional liberal, or as "the most liberal person in the Congress," but these descriptions are preposterous. Obama is a pragmatist, first and foremost, and he defies the standard political categories. In this sense, he is not only focused on details but is also a uniter, both by inclination and on principle.

He is strongly committed to helping the disadvantaged, but his University of Chicago background shows. He appreciates the virtues and power of free markets. In some of his most important disagreements with Senator Clinton, he suggested caution about mandates and bans, and stressed  the value of freedom of choice.

Transparency and accountability matter greatly to him; they are a defining feature of his proposals. With respect to the mortgage crisis, credit cards, and the broader debate over credit markets, Obama rejects heavy-handed regulation and insists above all on disclosure, so that consumers will know exactly what they are getting.

Expect transparency to be a central theme in any Obama administration, as a check on government and the private sector alike. It is highly revealing that Obama worked with Republican Tom Coburn to produce legislation creating a publicly searchable database of all federal spending.

Obama's healthcare plan places a premium on cutting costs and on making care affordable, without requiring adults to purchase health insurance. (He would require mandatory coverage only for children.) Republican legislators are unlikely to support a mandatory approach, and his plan can be understood, in part, as a recognition of political realities.

But it is also a reflection of his keen interest in allowing people to choose as they see fit. He seeks universal coverage not through unenforceable mandates but through giving people good options.

It should not be surprising that in terms of helping low-income workers, Obama has long been enthusiastic about the Earned Income Tax Credit--an approach, pioneered by Republicans, that supplements wages but does not threaten to throw people out of work. In the environmental domain, Obama is a strong supporter of incentive-based programs, not of command-and-control. Here too, he draws on ideas that have been pressed most prominently by Republicans (and he gives them credit for their initiative in this domain).

But Obama is no a compromiser; he does not try to steer between the poles (or the polls). "Triangulation" has no appeal for him. Both internationally and domestically, he is willing to think big and to be bold. As everyone knows, he publicly opposed the war in Iraq at a time when opposition was exceedingly unpopular. (In his speech opposing the war, by the way, he went out of his way to emphasize, before a largely pacifist audience, that he does not oppose all wars: "After September 11th, after witnessing the carnage and destruction, the dust and the tears, I supported this Administration's pledge to hunt down and root out those who would slaughter innocents in the name of intolerance, and I would willingly take up arms myself to prevent such a tragedy from happening again.")

As everyone also knows, Obama favors high-level meetings with some of the world's worst dictators. He would rethink the embargo against Cuba.

He proposes a $150 billion research budget for climate change. He wants to hold an unprecedented national auction for the right to emit greenhouse gases. (This is an idea, by the way, that has large support among economists and that can be traced to an essay by Ronald Coase on communications policy.) He has offered an ambitious plan for promoting technological innovation, calling for a national broadband policy, embracing network neutrality, and proposing a reform of the patent system.

His campaign has spoken of moving toward "iPod Government"--an effort to rethink public services and national regulations in ways that will make things far simpler and more user-friendly. These are points about policies and substance. As president, Obama would set a new tone in US politics. He refuses to demonize his political opponents; deep in his heart, I believe, he doesn't even think of them as opponents. It would not be surprising to find Republicans and independents prominent in his administration. Obama wants to know what ideas are likely to work, not whether a Democrat or a Republican is responsible for them. Recall the most memorable passage from his keynote address at the 2004 Democratic Convention: "We coach Little League [baseball] in the blue [Democratic-voting] states, and, yes, we've got some gay friends in the red states. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq, and there are patriots who supported the war in Iraq."

In his book The Audacity of Hope, he asks for a politics that accepts "the possibility that the other side might sometimes have a point." Remarking that ordinary Americans "don't always understand the arguments between right and left, conservative and liberal," Obama wants politicians "to catch up with them,"

After he received an email from a pro-life doctor, Obama recalls how he softened his website's harsh rhetoric on abortion, writing: "[T]hat night, before I went to bed, I said a prayer of my own--that I might extend the same presumption of good faith to others that the doctor had extended to me."

In short, Obama's own approach is insistently charitable. He assumes decency and good faith on the part of those who disagree with him. And he wants to hear what they have to say. Both in substance and in tone, Obama questions the conventional political distinctions between "the left" and "the right" He has attracted significant support from Republicans and independents, and it is largely for this reason.

From knowing Obama for many years, I have no doubts about his ability to lead. He knows a great deal, and he is a quick learner. Even better, he knows what he does not know, and there is no question that he would assemble an accomplished, experienced team of advisers. His brilliant administration of his own campaign provides helpful evidence here.

But there may be some fragility to the public fervor that has occasionally envelops him. Crowds and cults can be fickle, and if some of his decisions disappoint, or turn out badly, his support will diminish. Some people think it might even collapse.

My own concern involves the importance of internal debate. The greatest American presidents (above all Lincoln and Roosevelt) benefited from robust dialogue and from advisers who avoided saying, "how wonderful you are," and were willing to say: "Mr President, your thinking about this is all wrong." Because Obama himself is exceptionally able, and because so many people are treating him as a near-messiah, his advisers might be too deferential, too unwilling to question. There is a real risk here. But I believe that his humility, and his intense desire to seek out dissenting views, will prove crucial safeguards.

In the 2000 campaign, Bush proclaimed himself a "uniter, not a divider," only to turn out to be the most divisive President in memory. Because of his own certainty, and his lack of curiosity about what others might think, Bush polarized the nation. Many of his most ambitious plans went nowhere as a result.

As president, Barack Obama would be a genuine uniter, drawing ideas from multiple points of view. If he proves able to achieve great things, it will be above all for that reason.

--Cass R. Sunstein

(Modified versions of this piece previously ran in The Independent and the Huffington Post) 

Thirty-six hours ago, on our annual trek to our summer residence on Tybee Island, Georgia, my wife and I stopped at a Comfort Inn in Dandridge, Tennessee, a few miles west of the Great Smoky Mountains. For dinner, we ate very well and very cheaply (for both of us, under $30.00 including a 30-percent tip) at a Perkins restaurant. Around us were tables full of contented, obese patrons, many of whom left with cartons of leftovers.

A few days before, I'd seen on the CBS Evening News a vignette from another small Tennessee town, Dover, on the other side of the state, near Nashville. This featured the distribution of boxes of free food to hundreds of ordinary looking, mostly white people of all ages, the boxes handed over by volunteers who looked much like the recipients. Interviewed by a reporter, the latter said that they were both humbled and grateful, but there was also a sense that something was wrong. They were all workers, hard workers; some held two jobs. They'd been overwhelmed by the prices of food, gasoline, and newly- revised mortgage payments. These food distributions were a matter of life and death. There were two terrible worms in this charitable apple: (1) Many applicants were habitually turned away every distribution day and (2) this was the last of the distributions: Tennessee had run out of the funds which purchased the food.

I'd put away my turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, hash-brown potato casserole, salad, fresh strawberry pie, and coffee--part of my mind on those decent-looking and -talking Tennessee men, women, and children hoisting the boxes of free food. I thought, "Is this the Irrawady Delta of Myanmar, the Zimbabwe of the monster Mugabe, the post-quake Chinese villages, New Orleans in the days after Katrina? No, this is fat old USA," and though, as we ate, the unemployment rate leaped ahead to 5.5 percent, the price of oil soared another 11 dollars a barrel and the stock market plunged 394 points (the stale participles constitute the tragic basso rilievo of these days), most of my colleagues and friends were doing, as usual, pretty well. Yes, I'd been paying close to four dollars a gallon for our Toyota's fuel, but days earlier I'd received from my few shares of Exxon and Conoco what amounted to half of my first year's salary as an instructor at Connecticut College for Women back in 1954-55, $3500, on which I somehow supported four people.

But something is rotten in the state of Tennessee, something seriously wrong in the good old USA.

Now here at Tybee, on the table next to my bed is a fat paperback edition of Adam Smith's Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations with a fine introduction by my friend, Alan Krueger, the prize-winning Princeton economist. Krueger quotes Smith: "It is but equity that they who feed, clothe and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well-fed, clothed and lodged." And the great champion of the free market's power supplied a sort of solution to the defunded misery of the Dover distribution: "It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense not only in proportion to their revenue but something more than in that proportion."

My 30 percent tip in Perkins did not suffice. My support of stockholder proposals, which the directors (against whom I habitually voted) suggest be voted down, did not suffice.

Is the solution above my pay grade, not part of my JD ("job description," as Maria Sharapova explained after her exit from the French Open to crowd boos when reporters asked why she was disliked)? Not really. My puzzlement and anger at the Dover hunger line lead to this blog post and to questions about solutions to its readers including my economist friends Krueger and Smith's great disciple, Gary Becker, and perhaps my neighbor and one-time colleague, Senator Obama.

What can, what should be done about this American misery?

--Richard Stern

By all accounts, one of the distinctive features of the Bush Administration has been its relative intolerance for internal dissent. High-level officials have tended to settle on a particular course of action, quite early on, and to squelch rather than to promote discussion and debate within the White House or the administration more generally. The point applies to the Iraq war, of course, but to many other issues as well, including climate change, tax cuts, energy policy, the mortgage crisis, Hurricane Katrina, and much more. The Bush Administration's relative intolerance of internal dissent has extended to issues of fact, not merely issues of policy.

In this respect, the Bush Administration has been radically different from the Reagan Administration (which in many ways it sought to follow). I was privileged to serve as a lawyer in the Office of Legal Counsel under President Reagan, and even from my (lowly) vantage point, it was easy to see disagreement, debate, and contention within the White House. President Reagan was hardly indecisive, of course, but he did not stifle internal debates. On many issues at the intersection of policy and constitutional law, deliberation among contending positions was pervasive.

In the environmental context, a prominent example involves the problem of ozone depletion. After a vigorous debate, the White House favored extremely aggressive steps to combat ozone-depleting chemicals, and hence the United States took a leading role in the Montreal Protocol, which led the way toward phasing out such chemicals all over the world. (It is instructive to compare the Reagan White House on ozone depletion with the Bush White House on climate change.)

In investigating group dynamics, people often speak of "groupthink," but the term is vague and it's not clear whether it points to a testable hypothesis. A more helpful concept is "group polarization," which predicts that like-minded people, deliberating with one another, will typically end up in a more extreme point in line with their predeliberation tendencies. For example, French people who are suspicious of the United States will, after talking to one another, become more suspicious; people who tend to be racist will, after speaking with one another, become more racist. Common consequences of deliberation among like-minded types include (a) more extremism and (b) greater confidence.

In the Bush White House, the greater extremism, and the greater confidence, that followed from internal deliberation was often a product of group polarization and fueled by discouraging dissent. Of course, the Reagan White House didn't always make the right decision. But when it did well, it was often because of an internal system of checks and balances, produced by a diversity of view, and by a receptivity to those who challenged the prevailing orthodoxy.

There's a large lesson here for Senators Obama and McCain, and for thinking about their presidencies. Presidential candidates attract sycophants and worshippers. Because of their personal histories, Obama and McCain are unusually vulnerable to both. If they are to do well, they will need to avoid the Bush model and to build on the Reagan White House at its best. The executive branch has become so large, and so able to act for good or for ill on its own, that it needs to develop an internal system of checks and balances. Such a system is a critical safeguard against the forms of group polarization that have proved so damaging under President Bush.

 --Cass Sunstein

I never have quite figured out what should go here as opposed to back on my own blog. I don't post here if I don't think the piece has any outside-academia interest; seems like this space should be a little more geared toward public commentary than toward strictly academic news. So I don't tend to, for example, blog conference announcements here. I'm pretty sure, however, that this one time a conference post is appropriate.

June 2-4, at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, there will be a conference on the thought and work of TNR Contributing Editor Michael Walzer, sponsored by the Carnegie Council. The conference lineup includes not only many of the leading political philosophers and political theorists in the field, but also two out of the top three names on TNR's masthead. Walzer is a stimulating and provocative thinker who's written on a very broad range of subjects--and a number of excellent papers have been duly stimulated and provoked, to be presented clustered into panels on "Distributive Justice," "The Interpretive View of Ethics," "The Practice of Social Criticism," "Multiculturalism, Civil Society, and the Politics of Recognition," "The Just War Theory--Moral and Legal Perspectives," "Tradition, Radicalism, and Solidarity," "The Moral Standing of States," and "The Jewish Political Tradition." Panels are free and open to the public, but RSVPs are requested.

--Jacob T. Levy

Campaigning in Kinston, North Carolina, Hillary Clinton drew the line:

"All I hear about is gas prices. Gas and diesel, everywhere," she said. "I want the Congress to stand up and vote. Are they for the oil companies, or are they for you?"

And, lest one think that was just another moment of ‘misspeaking', she repeated her point in Jeffersonville, Indiana:

"I believe it is important to get every member of Congress on the record. Do they stand with hard pressed Americans who are trying to pay their gas bills at the gas station or do they once again stand with the big oil companies? That's a vote I'm going to try to get, because I want to know where they stand and I want them to tell us--are they with us or against us?"

Asked by George Stephanopoulos to name one "credible economist" that agreed with her plan for a gas-tax holiday, she said, ""I'm not going to put my lot in with economists."

Rarely has there been such unanimity among economists across the political spectrum that the gas-tax holiday is a bad idea. Even Paul Krugman, who has basically been backing Clinton, called this proposal "pointless and disappointing." But he then adds, "Just to be clear: I don't regard this as a major issue. It's a one-time thing, not a matter of principle, especially because everyone knows the gas-tax holiday isn't actually going to happen." I agree that the gas-tax holiday is not itself a major issue, but the way Clinton is handling it ought to be. It is one thing if Clinton does not want to throw in her lot with economists--voters can then decide whether they want to throw their lot in with someone willing to make a policy decision in the face of all we know about economics. But her reaction to criticism is to turn this into a loyalty issue for lawmakers. According to Hillary, either you are "with us"--and the only way to show it is to jump on board this preposterous bandwagon--or you are "for the oil companies." One might think there ought to be a little wiggle room here--namely, for those who think their judgment ought to be influenced by the accumulated learning of economics. But, on Hillary's accounting you are thereby taking a stand for "big oil." Not only that, she has called for a public drama in which each member of Congress has to take a stand on the gas-tax holiday as the litmus test of whether they are "with us or against us." 

It is difficult to know what Hillary is up to here, so it is worth traveling down every interpretive route. Let's suppose she's serious. She really thinks the gas-tax holiday is a good idea and thinks those who don't support it really are supporting "big oil." She thinks this is an issue of such importance that one must require each member of Congress to take a stand. On this serious view, Hillary is someone who will not listen to the overwhelming mass of evidence when it points against her own judgment. Indeed, she seems to form her judgment independent of anything the rest of the world would consider evidence. And rather than cutting others some slack because they are trying to weigh the evidence, she sincerely categorizes them as "against us," "against you," "for big oil."  There is no room in this division for a person of integrity and good judgment who disagrees with her--and, on this hypothesis, she sincerely believes that. It is hard to see how anyone could think that a person who makes up her mind this way has the judgment to be a good president. So, let's go down the opposite road and assume she's not serious. Then we have someone who is cynically willing to play to her audience's fears, and to exploit the innate human tendency to divide the world into us and them. And she is willing to entangle her colleagues in Congress in a loyalty parade, all the while knowing that the issue is fake. She has made up the rules of who is in and out: an exhaustive partition of good guys and bad guys, drawn along the fault lines of the publicly shared anxiety of the moment. Remind you of anyone? 

One might think that serious versus not-serious cover all the bases, but in fact there is another interpretive option: she is operating in a realm in which the question of seriousness does not arise. This is like the realm of dramatic entertainment and make-believe, where we simply suspend the question of whether anyone is being serious about their claims. As the child psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott pointed out, parents intuitively know not to ask their children the question, "Are you really calling for a gas-tax holiday, or just pretending?" Even in child's play, it is hard to keep pretending when the question of whether one is pretending is explicitly raised. This interpretive option does have some advantages. It allows us to think ‘she can't really be serious' without having to flip over to the other side and see her as utterly cynical. If Election Campaign is the name of the game--the game of getting elected--then Hillary is just making moves within it. And it would explain her irritation about being called out by economists about the plan. From inside the game, it seems unfair for the ‘adults' to call her out on the reality of her proposal. No wonder she called them "elites" who are "out of touch" with the American people. Let us alone! Let us continue to play! This interpretation also gives insight into the name that Clinton's own advisors have dubbed the inner sanctum: Hillaryland. It is as though they acknowledge there is some degree of fantasy at work here.

But if we consider Hillary's either/or in terms of the structure of a fantasy, it is not a pretty sight. This is a world in which all ways of weighing available evidence in order to form a mature judgment have been suspended. Instead, there is a massive group, "the American people," and a leader (Hillary) who has the power to say who is "for us" and who is "against us," "for big oil." It is the leader who can draw up the litmus test that every other purported leader must pass or fail. Of course, one can find this kind of fantasy-structure on playgrounds across the country and around the world. It is a familiar structure of us-versus-them play. But when the playground is the battle for the Democratic nomination, it is hard to see this as anything other than exploitation of the very real fears and anxieties of voters about their economic and social futures. Hillary Clinton is, I think, correct when she says she is listening to the American people; but her response is problematic when it comes to exercising a leadership role. This, as opposed to the gas-tax holiday itself, ought to be a major issue.

--Jonathan Lear

Reasonable people are making reasonable arguments for and against Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John McCain. But in a recent column attacking Barack Obama, Paul Krugman has lost his bearings.

Krugman objects to Obama's suggestion, on Fox News, that he accepts the Republican claim that regulation should take the form of tradable emissions permits rather "top-down command and control." Krugman says that Obama is "giving Republicans credit for good ideas they never had."

Here is what Obama actually said:

"I think that back in the '60s and '70s a lot of the way we regulated industry was top-down command and control, we're going to tell businesses exactly how to do things. And you know, I think that the Republican Party and people who thought about the markets came up with the notion that, 'You know what? If you simply set some guidelines, some rules and incentives, for businesses--let them figure out how they're going to, for example, reduce pollution,' and a cap and trade system, for example is a smarter way of doing it, controlling pollution, than dictating every single rule that a company has to abide by, which creates a lot of bureaucracy and red tape and oftentimes is less efficient."

Krugman objects, "Mr. Obama's answer was puzzling because he gave credit where it isn't due."

Actually Obama had it right. As Harvard's Robert Stavins, a long-time participant in the relevant debates and perhaps the world's leading expert on what actually happened, wrote me, "I think I know the history and provenance of U.S. of cap-and-trade and emission-reduction-credit systems relatively well, and Krugman's column is exceptionally misleading."

The major emissions trading program in federal law, enacted in 1990 and focused on acid deposition, was developed under Bush 41, in the White House no less (under the leadership of C. Boyden Gray, an influential Republican and a pioneering figure, in political circles, with respect to emissions trading). The law was pushed through an initially skeptical Democratic-controlled Congress. The pivotal role of the Bush White House has been carefully documented in books and articles. (See, for example, A. Denny Ellerman et al., Markets for Clean Air.)

The several early emissions trading systems, adopted in the 1970s, were established in Republican administrations (Nixon/Ford), with significant opposition from Democrats (and environmental organizations). The trading program for lead in gasoline was also adopted under a Republican president (Reagan).

Krugman is quite right to say that the Reagan administration resisted a regulatory response to acid deposition (a point that is irrelevant to Obama's claims). He is also right to say that economists of all stripes supported tradable permit systems by 1990. But in the political domain (which was clearly the topic), Obama was correct to say that such systems have come from Republicans. As Robert Stavins writes, "the history is what it is, and unfortuately Krugman has misled his readers in order to score some political points."

There is a more general point here. Krugman wants Democrats to attack Republicans and to call them "the party of denial," rather than to give them credit for good ideas. But where credit is due, it is not exactly terrible to give credit.

--Cass Sunstein

I haven’t learned my Iraq lesson yet. I want the U.S. to pluck Robert Mugabe out of his criminal fastness in Zimbabwe and drop him, parachuteless, from 40,000 feet, during which he’ll have enough seconds to reflect upon the horrors he has inflicted on the country of which he was once a benefactor.

“Do unto others...”

If Ian Smith had allowed the jailed Mugabe to attend the funeral of his three-year-old son, who knows how many people, decades later, might have been spared Mugabe-inflicted viciousness. In jail for ten years, schoolteacher Mugabe earned three degrees from the University of London Extension Division. Soon after he came to power, Zimbabwe’s educational system was Africa’s best. Child mortality dropped, national prosperity seemed possible. Land owned by six thousand white citizens was expropriated and distributed to blacks, too many of them Mugabe stooges. Do unto others... When Cecil Rhodes--who’d given his name to the land that became Zimbabwe--expropriated the land that those settlers eventually owned, was questioned about its propriety, his graceful response was, “I prefer land to niggers.”

When drought hit the country, the long-stored hatred in Mugabe burst into what wrecked his country: life expectancy the worst in Africa, inflation at 1000 per cent, political opponents jailed and tortured, starvation and chaos in the streets.

Corruptio optimi pessimi. Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.

The bespectacled octogenarian with the gleaming wicked head is trying to squirm out of last month’s electoral defeat. Soldiers and police are bribed to obey him, the seething populace is waiting for African and world leaders to ratify their choice and expel the monster, but they are molasses-slow to act; the United Nations secretariat mutters; the
American administration condemns, but as of today, Mugabe reigns.

Roll out that plane.

--Richard Stern

Nothing like a few days in hospital to refresh--at least revise--one’s usual view of the world. The hospital world of repair, renewal, rescue, of injury, illness, the breaking and broken, the sinking and the sunk is unto itself, connected here and there but essentially cut off from the world of busses, bakeries, borrowing, and earning. It’s thousand technicians, doctors, interns, nurses, cleaners and transportationers inhabit the bright, immaculate corridors and labs, concentrating on their complex occupations, almost in the center of which--the “almost” can become a problem--is oneself. In the tiny den of one’s self-manipulable hospital bed--television, lights, and sometimes nurses at one’s finger--one is visited day and night by technicians who take and retake one’s “vital signs,” by interns, residents, and doctors who tap one’s chest, feel one’s glands, listen to one’s lungs and heart, ask and re-ask questions about one’s susceptibilities and habits (“Are you diabetic?” “Do you take any street drugs?”) and discuss one’s condition and its possible causes and remedies.

No private rooms available, I was curtained away from two successive roommates, men decades younger than I but so assailed by difficulty that I felt a prince of health. They were diabetics, blind, they beshat themselves and were in diapers, but each was far more alert than the doctors who raised their voices addressing them. They were ironic, funny, skeptical, contemptuous of the attempt to treat them as children or morons.

The first of my two nights, I couldn’t sleep. There was every sort of noise, loud-speakered summonses to nurses, television chatter, the intrusions of the pursuers of vital signs. The second night, my doctor prescribed a sleep-inducing drug and I awoke hours later amazed that nighttime had been annihilated. Finally, but two days in, the joy of having the doctors of my two teams (one was the hematologists debating the cause of my anemia) concur in discharging me. I was “transported” in a wheelchair by one of the good-spirited transportationers to the be-winged entrance where my wife waited with the car. And then the oddly unfamiliar but oh-so-welcome world of streets, houses, trees, CTA buses, and cars where I’ve spent most of the last half century.

It was the Monday before the Pennsylvania primary where my brilliant neighbor, Barack Obama, was trashed and trounced by the almost madly driven wife of the great political performer who, but weeks before, had my allegiance, admiration, and affection. In my own bed, fed the food I loved, I broke off the endlessly repetitive commentary of MSNBC and watched my beloved Cubs play the kind of baseball that sees them in their division’s first place. I then read a few more pages of War and Peace, which I was reading in the hospital, more astonished than ever by its fascinating human strands beautifully, magically interwoven. (Daniel Mendelssohn, otherwise writing well about Herodotus in the New Yorker, foolishly compares his wildly, uncontrollably restless pages on the rise and fall of Persia to Tolstoy’s powerfully, subtly assembled masterpiece.)

Home.

The luck of being home with anything material I could want. Now and then, though, one’s heart half-broke watching and hearing stories of thousands being foreclosed and thrown out of theirs or, worse, of hundreds of millions over the planet with nothing to eat, their gorgeous huge-eyed babies wordlessly begging that they might live a few more less tormented days. Malthus, Darwin, the gurus of demography, their predictions inscribed on the tragic human faces and swollen bodies. Senators Clinton, McCain, and Obama, one of whom would soon have the sort of power which might extend, alter, and even brighten at least some of these existences, subtly and not so subtly trashed each other and demeaned their otherwise superior selves. “What,” the thought came to me, “if Tolstoy himself were president? How much would that alter the world? Or would he succumb, one way or another, to the world’s assembled greed and hatred?”

Still, the Cubs and Tolstoy’s book eased my easily easable spirit, and I slept without benefit of medication.

--Richard Stern 

In response to the massive criticism of the ABC Presidential Debate, George Stephanopoulos has said, "Overall, the questions were tough, fair, relevant, and appropriate." This is not true. For the issue is not just about the bias towards gossip and gotcha-questions--(over which people may differ as to whether they are fair, relevant and appropriate). At one point, Stephanopoulos asked Obama: "do you think Reverend Wright loves America as much as you do?" And after Obama's answer, he keeps it up, "But do you believe he's as patriotic as you are."

This is not asking about a particular incident or about any particular belief or commitment of the candidate. It is asking one person to speculate on another person's love for their country. How could Obama possibly know the answer to such a question? Was he supposed--Bush-like--to have gazed into Reverend Wright's soul? 

And, of course, there is no way to answer the question without losing. If the answer is ‘yes', then the question becomes, well, then, how patriotic are you, really? If the answer is ‘no', then the question is, why are you hanging around with a priest you know to be unpatriotic?

There is no politician in living memory who has more directly and honestly faced a political problem than Obama in his speech on Reverend Wright and the lingering problems of race in this country. Instead of dealing with the issues that the Wright controversy does genuinely raise--which would be "tough, fair, relevant and appropriate"--Stephanopoulos actively tried to bring the issues down to the level of unfounded speculation and gossip.

The real issue then is not that Stephanopoulos brought up the Wright issue yet again; it is the manner in which he did it. It was, obviously, an attempted mugging.

--Jonathan Lear

Of the many ludicrous political discussions of the last six months, the most ludicrous may well be the discussion of the alleged association between Barack Obama and Bill Ayers, former member of the Weather Underground.

Bill Ayers and his wife, Bernadine Dohrn, have lived in the Hyde Park area in Chicago. So has Barack Obama. (So have I.) If you lived in Hyde Park for (say) a decade, there was a good chance that you'd run across Ayers, and maybe even be at a social occasion with him. And if you were a social person, or someone who was running for political office, you would meet a lot of people, and it's pretty likely that you would run across Ayers, or be at some social occasion with him.

Ayers is one of numerous people, in the Chicago area, whom Barack Obama has run across. Obama has much closer relationships with numerous conservatives on the University of Chicago faculty, many of whom have given money to Obama's campaign, and many of whom have talked to him at length and been at social occasions with him.

I know for a fact that Obama has actually played basketball with Richard Epstein, a libertarian on the law school faculty who has written some pretty controversial things on property rights and government regulation. I also know that Obama has had a number of conversations with former law school dean Daniel Fischel, a Reagan Republican who has written some pretty controversial things on corporations and government regulation.

True, Ayers apparently had a small party for Obama back in 1995; true, Ayers gave some small sum of money to one of Obama's campaigns; and true, Ayers and Obama simultaneously served, for a time, on a board of a local organization, the Woods Fund, which helps disadvantaged children.  But there was nothing even vaguely like a close relationship between them; and it would be easy to identify countless people, since 1995, with whom Obama has had much closer associations.

Of course many legitimate questions can be raised about any candidate for public office. But it is a gross understatement to say that the alleged Ayers-Obama association is not one of them.

--Cass Sunstein

Real heroes seldom look like their predecessors or textbook models. Ben Shalom Bernanke reminds me of Lewis Carroll’s Dormouse. Small, bald, pepper-and-salt bearded, his voice repressed toward monotone, this ex-student of the Talmud, son of a Dillon, SC pharmacist and a school teacher, taught himself calculus, got the highest SAT scores in his state, worked as a waiter to help put himself through his Harvard summa cum laude BA and, according to a friend of mine who knows him, endured and clearly overcame serious personal phobic crises. Out of this human swirl emerged a Roland, a Galahad, a non-Heston El Cid, who under enormous pressure led to the making of a decision that may well have saved the world economy from plunging into a black hole. Through light and dark hours, estimating the consequences of not acting or acting poorly, gathering with other dedicated guardians of the economy, he helped work out the decision to keep Bear Stearns from the collapse whose blasted filaments would almost surely have brought on economic catastrophe. To hear him on April 2 and 3 responding to the well-informed, often belligerent, often self-serving “inquiries” of congressmen, one saw the epitome of thoughtful, forceful, knowledgeable reason. None of the egocentric self-flaunting, mean-spirited boastfulness of some of his questioners (my least favorite, the ex-great pitcher, Jim Bunning of Kentucky). Here we had the true civil servant at his best, a model, as far as I’m concerned, for the person who under pressure makes crucial decisions.

As I listen with familiar but renewed joy to a fine pianist (Cecile Licad) play Chopin’s G Minor Ballade (Opus 23), some of the human strength which has been drained these last weeks from my old body, flowed in, and I felt the luck of being left with the genial inventions and creations of human genius. In his way, little Ben Bernanke was helping create the conditions out of which such creations and inventions come.

I’d been having trouble finding something truly engaging to read, but three days ago, dropped the poorly written new book that hadn’t drawn me in and took up two old favorites, the prose of George Orwell and the stories of W.S. Maugham. I read Orwell on Mark Twain as a “licensed jester,” his portion of Voltairean disgust and outrage muted by his enchantment with success and by the prudential decorum of his wife, his brilliance surviving largely in his portraits of an age otherwise irrecoverable. A harsher judgment than my own but as always in Orwell, the sense that a high, independent intelligence has made one that had to be considered. Then Maugham: two stories of the far east, “A Vessal of Wrath” and “Flotsam and Jetsam.” The exactitude and surprise of observation, the unexpected, piquant detail and the powerful underplayed feeling for the happy, Dutch hedonist who runs the Malaysian colony or against the hate-charged, failing rubber plantation whose hating couple welcomes the malaria-struck white man who’s carried into their home took me thousands of miles and hours away from the markets Bernanke and company had saved and I could hardly wait to see what would happen to the puritanical evangelist who brings the dissolute Ginger Ted to the malaria-struck island although terrified that he will rape her or what had driven the couple in the other house to remain together despite the hatred that colored every inch of the air around them.

But lesser Maugham stories tired me, so I took up Anna Karenina and rose into narrative sublimity, just reading here and there about Dolly and her children, Levin working with the peasants, Anna’s amazing stream of consciousness as she heads for the railroad station and her suicide. I wish I knew Russian so that I could relish, say, what the brilliant D.S. Mirsky  says about Tolstoy’s style (its combination of idiomatic Russian nobleman speech and complex French syntax) but there is enough here for a thousand enchanted readings.

Finally, a film, the amazing There Will Be Blood, with a central portrait unmatched by anything I’ve seen in film including Citizen Kane, Daniel Day-Lewis’ Daniel Plainview. I haven’t read the book on which Paul Andersen’s script is based, Upton Sinclair’s Oil, but I suspect it is an attack on capitalism and religion. The film could be reduced to such “meaning,” but that would be like reducing Ben Bernanke into a standard bureaucrat and Tolstoy into another merely excellent writer.

--Richard Stern