This recent column of Christopher Hitchens brought up another phenomenon that thinkness first witnessed in Bill Clinton's speech at the Democratic convention. Hitch says that the security apparatus of this country are getting slammed for being careful, and for not being careful enough. What, he asks, gives.
I do agree that this is one of the ridiculously numerous occasions when people are just harping because they're used to it and being contrarian, without necessarily much behind it. If I were president and 9/11 happened, I'd be pretty cautious, too.
But one thing this overlooks is that there are more decisions to be made than just how high an alert we should be at [I mean that both for the color-coded alert system and in a more general sense]. There is more to homeland security than just, "how much" -- there's also, "how". And it may very well be that the methods the administration is using are not necessarily the wrong degree of safety, but the wrong way of getting safety.
In his convention speech, Clinton bashed the Republicans numerous times for being too conservative for the country. They pulled us too far right, he said, and the more sensible Democratic program was superior. I think that in this, Clinton was largely saying what he believed -- the Republicans were aiming far right, and he was aiming at a bit left of middle. But this overlooks the fact that the highest art in politics is not shooting for the middle and telling the truth, it's shooting further out and saying it's the middle.
Or more to the point, it's really about selling a persona that transcends this left-right axis. Clinton did accomiplish this a bit with his folksy demeanor. But I found it telling that he looks back at his presidency and sees that he was close to the middle while the Republicans were far off to the right. If he had been more successful, he would have been able to escape a 1-dimensional model. Reagan was good at that, because he could get people to vote for him, regardless whether they understood his policies even a whit. Bush is good at that in some sense -- people vote for him rather than his policies -- but it turns out that the people who vote for him are probably the same ones that would vote for his personality.
Barack Obama, unlike Clinton, really worked to stay away from that one dimension, and he did it pretty effectively with his One America bit. [Perhaps I'm being unfair to Clinton -- after all, this was only one speech. Maybe he did this well when he was in office. Sorry Bill, now you're just the husband of a senator and a rhetorical device.]
Oh, and thinkness approves of this bit of color: "On a lesser note, an administration that has recently undergone such hard pounding for 'ignoring warnings' will obviously prefer to adopt the policy of Mark Twain's celebrated cat, which once jumped up to sit on a hot stove and would never afterward sit on a cold one."
Astute reader will be reminded of the snake/rope phenomenon [which is far better than the old "one bitten, twice shy"].
You can ping this entry by using http://www.mindtangle.net/movabletype/mt-tb.cgi/863 .
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