The President's problem: hubris

That’s not exactly how Charles Krauthammer puts it, but that’s the problem he’s identified:

Obama then compounded it by vastly misreading his mandate. He assumed it was personal. This, after winning by a mere seven points in a year of true economic catastrophe, of an extraordinarily unpopular Republican incumbent, and of a politically weak and unsteady opponent. Nonetheless, Obama imagined that, as Fouad Ajami so brilliantly observed, he had won the kind of banana-republic plebiscite that grants caudillo-like authority to remake everything in one’s own image.

Accordingly, Obama unveiled his plans for a grand makeover of the American system, animating that vision by enacting measure after measure that greatly enlarged state power, government spending and national debt. Not surprisingly, these measures engendered powerful popular skepticism that burst into tea-party town-hall resistance.

Obama’s reaction to that resistance made things worse. Obama fancies himself tribune of the people, spokesman for the grass roots, harbinger of a new kind of politics from below that would upset the established lobbyist special-interest order of Washington. Yet faced with protests from a real grass-roots movement, his party and his supporters called it a mob—misinformed, misled, irrational, angry, unhinged, bordering on racist. All this while the administration was cutting backroom deals with every manner of special interest—from drug companies to auto unions to doctors—in which favors worth billions were quietly and opaquely exchanged.

“Get out of the way” and “don't do a lot of talking,” the great bipartisan scolded opponents whom he blamed for creating the “mess” from which he is merely trying to save us. If only they could see. So with boundless confidence in his own persuasiveness, Obama undertook a summer campaign to enlighten the masses by addressing substantive objections to his reforms.

If you don’t believe Dr. Krauthammer, consider this from the Politico article on Barack Obama’s speech to Congress tonight:

2) He will not confront or scold the left. “This is a case for bold action, not a stick in the eye to our supporters,” said an official involved in speech preparation. “That’s not how President Obama thinks. The politics of triangulation don’t live in this White House.”

3) He will make an overture to Republicans. “He will lay out his vision for health reform—taking the best ideas from both parties, make the case for why as a nation we must act now, and dispel the myths and confusion that are affecting public opinion,” the aide said.

You cannot do both of these things at once. You just can’t. You cannot “make an overture to Republicans” without promising to actually consider Republican ideas and integrate them into your program—and to do that, you would have to confront the Left, to tell them that they’re going to have to give up some of the things they really want and to allow the Right to get some of the things they really want. You have to actually follow through on “taking the best ideas from both parties,” which would require actually forcing the Left to compromise, and scolding them for their dogmatic refusal to do so to this point. It’s not triangulation (and when did that become a dirty word, anyway?), it’s recognizing that you can’t eat your cake and still have it.

That the President doesn’t realize this is clear from the fifth point in Politico’s list:

5) Obama will try to reassure the left about his commitment to a public option, or government insurance plan. Aides said they are rethinking what he will say about this. He wants to thread the needle of voicing support for a public option, without promising to kill health reform to get it. But liberal congressional leaders were unyielding in their support for it on a conference call he held from Camp David yesterday, and he's going to meet with them at the White House early next week.

Again, if he actually wants to make a serious overture to Republicans, the public option has to come off the table; that’s completely unacceptable to folks on the Right, and meaningless “concessions” that make no substantive difference won’t be enough to win any meaningful Republican support. But of course, to take that off the table, he’ll have to confront the Left, in a big way, and so far, he’s shown no stomach whatsoever for doing that (if in fact he’s ever actually wanted to). President Obama has a choice: reach across the aisle, or continue to appease the Left. He’ll have to pick.

As a result, the inestimable Jay Cost (who has to be one of the three or four best political analysts going right now) comes to this conclusion:

I think this will be little more than a change in tone—perhaps from cool/slightly mocking Obama to angry/forceful Obama. From the looks of it, the President is still planning to make all the same points he’s been hammering for months. He’ll ask for bipartisan cooperation while remaining cagey on the public option (a deal breaker for 99% of the Republican caucus). He will again insist the time for debate is over and the time for action is now. He’ll make a not-terribly-compelling case about how this somehow relates to the current economic morass, even though the benefits do not kick in for years. He’ll fearlessly stand up to Republican straw men, who never offer anything except disingenuous attacks.

Which, if that does indeed to turn out to be the best he can do—and if it isn’t, then why haven’t we seen something better well before now?—raises a critical question: what’s the point of this speech? Why is the President doing this? Cost suggests two related reasons:

First, it has begun to believe its own spin that the President is good at giving game changing speeches. But he isn’t really. Nobody is. If the game could change because of a speech, the game would constantly be changing because lots of people can give a decent speech, especially when they have a TelePrompTer. President Obama is a compelling speaker to a relatively narrow segment of the country—namely, African Americans and white social liberals. He inspired them to support his primary campaign against Hillary Clinton—but other voters (including many in his own party) were harder to win over. His Philadelphia speech on race was no Cooper Union; it merely distracted attention from the main question of why he spent so many years in that church. His numbers still fell, and he struggled through the rest of the primaries, even losing South Dakota on the day he declared victory. He then gave big speeches in Europe and Denver, but it was only thanks to the financial panic of last September that he had a breakthrough.

Still, his speechifying seems to give some people a thrill up the leg—and the idea that he’s not just a good speaker, but a game changing speaker, has become conventional wisdom. I think the White House believes that this is actually true.

Second, it does not know what else to do. It looks like Congress is at something less than square one. There is no passable compromise that has been proposed—nothing that can win enough votes in the center without losing the left flank. But now the “Gang of Six” has basically broken up, public approval has tanked, moderates are scared, and if there isn’t bad blood on the Democratic side of the aisle there is at least a lot of finger pointing. If Humpty Dumpty breaks and you don’t know how to put him back together—why not give a speech and boldly proclaim how important it is to put him back together?

Cost believes, and has been arguing, that the administration needs to scale its plan way back and go for incremental health-insurance reform rather than trying to revamp the whole system on the fly; I think Cost is right. If President Obama were to take that tack, he could keep the moderates in his own party and pick up the moderates from the other side of the aisle; with a little creativity, he might even come up with something that could attract support from some conservatives without losing liberals, which would be a huge accomplishment. While he would probably still emerge from this whole fight weakened, producing an actual bipartisan reform package would allow him to recover a lot of face and a lot of his prestige—as well as some of his “post-partisan” image—and thus to salvage a fair bit from an initiative that so far has been a complete fiasco for him. As Cost concludes,

If the President scaled back his ambitions, the final bill would not be as far to the left as the liberals like, but since it is not comprehensive they could at least plan to fight for the public option another day. Then, Obama could pick up enough moderates to pass it, and he could declare victory.

Incidentally, this is how most legislation gets passed in the Congress.

Which suggests, yet again, that Barack Obama would be a more effective president if he’d spent enough time actually doing his job as a legislator to actually understand things like that. As it is, all he can do is give (yet) another speech. If Allahpundit is right and the purpose of this address to Congress is really to push hardliners on the Left to compromise without admitting he’s doing so (which would alienate his base a fair bit more than he already has), then the President may actually accomplish something almost despite himself. We shall see.

Thomas Sowell asks a very important question

one that I've been asking as well, in his latest column:

One plain fact should outweigh all the words of Barack Obama and all the impressive trappings of the setting in which he says them: He tried to rush Congress into passing a massive government takeover of the nation's medical care before the August recess— for a program that would not take effect until 2013!

Whatever President Obama is, he is not stupid. If the urgency to pass the medical care legislation was to deal with a problem immediately, then why postpone the date when the legislation goes into effect for years—more specifically, until the year after the next Presidential election?

If this is such an urgently needed program, why wait for years to put it into effect? And if the public is going to benefit from this, why not let them experience those benefits before the next Presidential election? . . .

If we do not believe that the President is stupid, then what do we believe? The only reasonable alternative seems to be that he wanted to get this massive government takeover of medical care passed into law before the public understood what was in it.

Moreover, he wanted to get re-elected in 2012 before the public experienced what its actual consequences would be.

Hard to argue with Dr. Sowell's conclusion.

The upside of trials

Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that
the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing. . . .

Blessed is the man who remains steadfast under trial, for when he has stood the test
he will receive the crown of life, which God has promised to those who love him.

—James 1:2-4, 12 (ESV)

From a human perspective, this sounds ludicrous. Consider it nothing but joy when your back gives out, or your knee, or your hip, and you need surgery? Consider it nothing but joy when you fight temptation? Consider it nothing but joy when someone you love is sick? Consider it nothing but joy when you’re threatened and your home is attacked? That takes a lot of nerve to say; but that’s what James says. He’s not saying we should be happy when trials come—it’s not as if we’re supposed to say, “Oh goody, I’ve just been evicted from my home, isn’t this wonderful”—but in the midst of trials and the struggle and suffering they bring, we should find joy. Why? Because unlike happiness, which is rooted in our circumstances, joy is rooted in the promises of God through Jesus Christ, and in our certainty that he who made those promises is faithful to keep them.

One of those promises is that God is in control in everything that happens to us, using it for our good; and so James says here, “Count it all joy, because you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness”—or, we might translate that, endurance. It has been often and truly said that the Christian life is a marathon, not a sprint, which means that if we’re running to win, we have to be able to keep up the pace, even when it’s hardest; and just as exercise tries our muscles in order to force them to respond and grow, building physical strength and endurance, so trials force us to respond and grow as whole people, building strength of character and the ability to endure difficult times without losing our faith. Of course, if you overstress your muscles, you’ll hurt yourself, and a trial too great for us to handle would do the same; but we can trust that God won’t send us any trials we can’t handle—even if, as Mother Theresa once said, we might sometimes wish he didn’t trust us so much. It’s simply that the only way to build endurance is to reach what we think is our limit—and keep going.

As we face trials, the testing of our faith produces endurance in our faith; and as we grow in endurance, we mature in the work God has called us to do, bringing that work ultimately to completion. And note the purpose James declares for this—not simply that we each might do good things, but so that we ourselves might be perfect and complete. Ultimately, it’s not only the things we do that are the work in view here, but it’s us—we are the finished product. The idea is, as NT scholar Luke Timothy Johnson puts it, that the deed perfects the person: as we endure trials and act in faith and hold fast to God and do his will, God works in us through these actions to transform and perfect us, to bring his work in us to full maturity, so that we may be perfect and complete, with no areas in which we fall short.

(Excerpted from “The View from Saturday”)

9:9:9, 9/9/9

Like I said a while back, this sort of thing amuses me.

She said “death panels,” she meant “death panels”

and for excellent reason, as Sarah Palin told the New York State Senate:

A great deal of attention was given to my use of the phrase “death panel” in discussing such rationing.[7] Despite repeated attempts by many in the media to dismiss this phrase as a “myth”, its accuracy has been vindicated. In the face of a nationwide public outcry, the Senate Finance Committee agreed to “drop end-of-life provisions from consideration entirely because of the way they could be misinterpreted and implemented incorrectly.”[8] Jim Towey, the former head of the White House Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, then called attention to what’s already occurring at the Department of Veteran’s Affairs, where “government bureaucrats are greasing the slippery slope that can start with cost containment but quickly become a systematic denial of care.”[9] Even Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson, a strong supporter of President Obama, agreed that “if the government says it has to control health care costs and then offers to pay doctors to give advice about hospice care, citizens are not delusional to conclude that the goal is to reduce end-of-life spending.”[10] And of course President Obama has not backed away from his support for the creation of an unelected, largely unaccountable Independent Medicare Advisory Council to help control Medicare costs; he had previously suggested that such a group should guide decisions regarding “that huge driver of cost . . . the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives . . .”[11]

The fact is that any group of government bureaucrats that makes decisions affecting life or death is essentially a “death panel.” The work of Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, President Obama’s health policy advisor and the brother of his chief of staff, is particularly disturbing on this score. Dr. Emanuel has written extensively on the topic of rationed health care, describing a “Complete Lives System” for allotting medical care based on “a priority curve on which individuals aged between roughly 15 and 40 years get the most chance, whereas the youngest and oldest people get chances that are attenuated.”[12]

(Full text of her testimony below.)

Gov. Palin backed this up with her op-ed this evening in the Wall Street Journal:

In his Times op-ed, the president argues that the Democrats’ proposals “will finally bring skyrocketing health-care costs under control” by “cutting . . . waste and inefficiency in federal health programs like Medicare and Medicaid and in unwarranted subsidies to insurance companies . . .”

First, ask yourself whether the government that brought us such “waste and inefficiency” and “unwarranted subsidies” in the first place can be believed when it says that this time it will get things right. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) doesn’t think so: Its director, Douglas Elmendorf, told the Senate Budget Committee in July that “in the legislation that has been reported we do not see the sort of fundamental changes that would be necessary to reduce the trajectory of federal health spending by a significant amount.”

Now look at one way Mr. Obama wants to eliminate inefficiency and waste: He’s asked Congress to create an Independent Medicare Advisory Council—an unelected, largely unaccountable group of experts charged with containing Medicare costs. In an interview with the New York Times in April, the president suggested that such a group, working outside of “normal political channels,” should guide decisions regarding that “huge driver of cost . . . the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives . . .”

Given such statements, is it any wonder that many of the sick and elderly are concerned that the Democrats’ proposals will ultimately lead to rationing of their health care by—dare I say it—death panels? Establishment voices dismissed that phrase, but it rang true for many Americans. Working through “normal political channels,” they made themselves heard, and as a result Congress will likely reject a wrong-headed proposal to authorize end-of-life counseling in this cost-cutting context. But the fact remains that the Democrats’ proposals would still empower unelected bureaucrats to make decisions affecting life or death health-care matters. Such government overreaching is what we’ve come to expect from this administration.

As far as I’m concerned, she’s right on. Contrary to the misrepresentations of her position, she’s not accusing the president of wanting to fund euthanasia; the concern, rather, is that people will be denied care because some bureaucrat somewhere doesn’t think their lives have sufficient value (defined in economic terms) to be worth saving. Of course that’s what will happen—it’s inevitable. It’s also unacceptable, and here’s hoping it stays that way.

Full text of Gov. Palin’s testimony to the New York State Senate Committee on Aging:

Senator Reverend Ruben Diaz
Chair, New York Senate Aging Committee
Legislative Office Building
Room 307
Albany, NY 12247

September 8, 2009

RE: H.R. 3200: America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009 and Its Impact on Senior Citizens

Dear Senator Diaz,

Thank you for asking me to participate in the New York State Senate Aging Committee’s hearing regarding H.R. 3200, “America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009.” You and I share a commitment to ensuring that our health care system is not “reformed” at the expense of America’s senior citizens.

I have been vocal in my opposition to Section 1233 of H.R.3200, entitled “Advance Care Planning Consultation.”[1] Proponents of the bill have described this section as an entirely voluntary provision that simply increases the information offered to Medicare recipients. That is misleading. The issue is the context in which that information is provided and the coercive effect these consultations will have in that context.

Section 1233 authorizes advanced care planning consultations for senior citizens on Medicare every five years, and more often “if there is a significant change in the health condition of the individual … or upon admission to a skilled nursing facility, a long-term care facility… or a hospice program.”[2] During those consultations, practitioners are to explain “the continuum of end-of-life services and supports available, including palliative care and hospice,” and the government benefits available to pay for such services.[3]

To understand this provision fully, it must be read in context. These consultations are authorized whenever a Medicare recipient’s health changes significantly or when they enter a nursing home, and they are part of a bill whose stated purpose is “to reduce the growth in health care spending.”[4] Is it any wonder that senior citizens might view such consultations as attempts to convince them to help reduce health care costs by accepting minimal end-of-life care? As one commentator has noted, Section 1233 “addresses compassionate goals in disconcerting proximity to fiscal ones…. If it’s all about obviating suffering, emotional or physical, what’s it doing in a measure to ‘bend the curve’ on health-care costs?”[5]

As you stated in your letter to Congressman Henry Waxman of California:

Section 1233 of House Resolution 3200 puts our senior citizens on a slippery slope and may diminish respect for the inherent dignity of each of their lives…. It is egregious to consider that any senior citizen … should be placed in a situation where he or she would feel pressured to save the government money by dying a little sooner than he or she otherwise would, be required to be counseled about the supposed benefits of killing oneself, or be encouraged to sign any end of life directives that they would not otherwise sign.[6]

It is unclear whether section 1233 or a provision like it will remain part of any final health care bill. Regardless of its fate, the larger issue of rationed health care remains.

A great deal of attention was given to my use of the phrase “death panel” in discussing such rationing.[7] Despite repeated attempts by many in the media to dismiss this phrase as a “myth”, its accuracy has been vindicated. In the face of a nationwide public outcry, the Senate Finance Committee agreed to “drop end-of-life provisions from consideration entirely because of the way they could be misinterpreted and implemented incorrectly.”[8] Jim Towey, the former head of the White House Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, then called attention to what’s already occurring at the Department of Veteran’s Affairs, where “government bureaucrats are greasing the slippery slope that can start with cost containment but quickly become a systematic denial of care.”[9] Even Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson, a strong supporter of President Obama, agreed that “if the government says it has to control health care costs and then offers to pay doctors to give advice about hospice care, citizens are not delusional to conclude that the goal is to reduce end-of-life spending.”[10] And of course President Obama has not backed away from his support for the creation of an unelected, largely unaccountable Independent Medicare Advisory Council to help control Medicare costs; he had previously suggested that such a group should guide decisions regarding “that huge driver of cost . . . the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives . . .”[11]

The fact is that any group of government bureaucrats that makes decisions affecting life or death is essentially a “death panel.” The work of Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, President Obama’s health policy advisor and the brother of his chief of staff, is particularly disturbing on this score. Dr. Emanuel has written extensively on the topic of rationed health care, describing a “Complete Lives System” for allotting medical care based on “a priority curve on which individuals aged between roughly 15 and 40 years get the most chance, whereas the youngest and oldest people get chances that are attenuated.”[12]

He also has written that some medical services should not be guaranteed to those “who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens . . . An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia.”[13]

Such ideas are shocking, but they could ultimately be used by government bureacrats to help determine the treatment of our loved ones. We must ensure that human dignity remains at the center of any proposed health care reform. Real health care reform would also follow free market principles, including the encouragement of health savings accounts; would remove the barriers to purchasing health insurance across state lines; and would include tort reform so as to potentially save billions each year in wasteful spending connected to the filing of frivolous lawsuits. H.R. 3200 is not the reform we are looking for.

Thank you for calling attention to this important matter. I look forward to working with you again to ensure that we keep the dignity of our senior citizens foremost in any health care discussion.

Sincerely,

Governor Sarah Palin

1 See http://edlabor.house.gov/documents/111/pdf/publications/AAHCA-BillText-071409.pdf
2 See HR 3200 sec. 1233 (hhh)(1); sec. 1233 (hhh)(3)(B)(1), above.
3 See HR 3200 sec. 1233 (hhh)(1)(E), above.
4 See http://edlabor.house.gov/documents/111/pdf/publications/AAHCA-BillText-071409.pdf
5 See http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/07/AR2009080703043.html
6 See http://www.nysenate.gov/press-release/letter-congressman-henry-waxman-re-section-1233-hr-3200
7 See http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=113851103434
8 See http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/54617-finance-committee-to-drop-end-of-life-provision
9 See http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204683204574358590107981718.html
10 See http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/10/AR2009081002455.html
11 See http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/03/magazine/03Obama-t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=1
12 See http://www.scribd.com/doc/18280675/Principles-for-Allocation-of-Scarce-Medical-Interventions
13 See http://www.ncpa.org/pdfs/Where_Civic_Republicanism_and_Deliberative_Democracy_Meet.pdf

Sarah Palin and the Kobayashi Maru

This was posted on Big Hollywood over a month ago now, and I have no idea how I missed it; this is just too fun. A tip of the hat to Leigh Scott for coming up with this:

Sarah Palin is Captain Kirk. Why? Because she just passed the Kobayashi Maru.

For those of you who don’t know what the Kobayashi Maru is, let me explain. In the Star Trek universe it is an unwinnable test. It’s creator, Mr. Spock, designed it to test how Starfleet captains deal with failure and death. There is no right way to successfully navigate through it.

But cadet James Tiberius Kirk found a way to beat it. He rigged the computer simulation to allow him to complete the mission without killing his crew. Starfleet accused him of cheating, but Kirk’s response was simple, eloquent, and very revealing. “I don’t believe in the no-win scenario. I don’t like to lose.” Kirk didn’t change the strategy. He changed the rules. . . .

Palin was faced with her own Kobayashi Maru. How could she effectively govern the state of Alaska while facing ridiculous ethics charges and the scrutiny of the national media? How could she increase her exposure in the lower 48 while staying true to the people in Alaska who elected her? Perhaps if the wingnuts in Alaska didn’t stalk her with silly lawsuits she would have simply put her larger ambitions on the back burner and continued to do her job as governor. But it wasn’t meant to be. She was perfectly set up to fail. Her popularity in Alaska would decline. The national media would point to it as an indicator of her overall effectiveness. The Klingons . . . I mean the left, would have won.

But Palin defied them. She changed not her strategy, but the very rules. She resigned her position, turning the state over to her loyal Lieutenant Governor to continue the plans and policies she put into motion. Like any good story, it was an unexpected twist, yet when viewed in retrospect it was the only way it could play out.

That's an interesting analogy. You might not like the comparison between Sarah Palin and James T. Kirk in general, but as an analysis of what exactly Gov. Palin did with her resignation, I think it's a good one.

On this blog in history: April 1-6, 2008

April Fool!
Have you ever thought of April Fool's Day as a Christian holiday?

Responsibility
A thought on a melancholy little passage from James Baldwin.

Martin Luther King Jr.: yad vashem
A tribute, and a consideration of his legacy and what we've made of it.

Brief meditation on gratitude and discipleship
True discipleship only grows from gratitude.

Thoughts on Jesus' ascension
Yes, Ascension Day matters.

Sometimes it's nice to be wrong

Back in May, I noted that gas prices had climbed by 60 cents a gallon in the previous several weeks and predicted that they would keep climbing; I thought there was a good chance they'd be threatening the $4 per gallon mark again by Labor Day. Instead, they've dropped slightly over that time (down below $2.40 a gallon here this morning); the weakness of the economy has stifled the rise that I thought I saw coming, at least for now. (For the long term, I still see people projecting a significant rise in oil prices, and the administration policies that would tend to drive that are still in place.)

I'm glad I was wrong about that. I'm glad because higher gas prices would have taken money out of our pocket as a family; I'm glad because part of the picture in all this is that the energy-tax bill hasn't passed the Senate; and I'm glad because I think the country's better off than it would have been had I been right.

Sarah Palin knew what she was doing

when she stepped down and turned the Alaska governor's office over to Sean Parnell: he's been able to govern Alaska without the farrago of nonsense and spite that was draining her time and energy, since he isn't Target No. 1 for the Left and its battalion of snipers, and he's been carrying on her policies and approaches the same way she would have, as the ADN points out:

Gov. Sean Parnell is playing the state's cards just right with the North Slope gas holders. Before they'll invest billions in a North Slope gas pipeline, they say they need more "fiscal certainty" over future taxes than the state is currently offering. It's too early to talk about more concessions, says Gov. Parnell. The big three gas holders are split between two different gas line projects, including one led by the state's licensee, TransCanada. When the gas holders unite behind a common project, Gov. Parnell says, then we can talk about whether more tax certainty is really needed.

That's absolutely the right call. . . .

With so much at stake, a misstep in this business deal could cost the state billions. As Gov. Parnell has said, in business, one rule is that you don't negotiate against yourself. You don't give up valuable things early in the process before you are absolutely certain it's necessary. . . .

Gov. Parnell is not worried about being "friendly" with the oil and gas industry on the gas line. He's doing what a responsible Alaska governor should be doing. He is taking a strong stand that protects the business interests of his "shareholders"—Alaska's citizens—in this multibillion-dollar business deal.

So, she got free of the anklebiters and put herself in a position to influence the direction of this country on a national level through Facebook and other platforms, all without jeopardizing the success of the initiatives she'd begun in Alaska, because she knew she and her successor were on the same page and he had the skills and the understanding to finish what she'd started. Not that it's really needed at this point, but I'd say that's yet more vindication of Gov. Palin's political judgment and the wisdom of her decision to resign.

(Crossposted at Conservatives4Palin)

The angle of faith

There are a lot of folks in this world who try to live the Christian life out of their own strength, according to their own wisdom, as it seems reasonable to them; and there are a lot of churches that cater to such folks, and operate on such principles. That, I think, is part of the reason for the modern desire for legalism that Jared Wilson has written so much about. The problem is, that just doesn’t work; you can’t live a life that is in any meaningful way Christian from the same perspective and the same set of assumptions from which the world operates. You just can’t do it. Following Christ in this life has to begin with the renewing of our minds, with a radical shift in perspective and assumptions, because it’s only from that new perspective that we can even see what the Christian life really is, let alone that it makes any sense at all.

From the world’s perspective, life is all about us; from the perspective of faith, it’s all about God. From a human perspective, the life of faith makes no sense, because we can’t control how God will take care of us; from the perspective of faith, we can see that he will always give us what is best for us, and always in time. And a human perspective on how to live the Christian life breaks down, because it understands neither the depth of our sin nor the goodness of God, into either legalism or lawlessness. The perspective of faith helps us to see just how bad our sin is, and just how thoroughly it permeates our lives—and just how great a gift our salvation is, and how wonderful the grace of God is, and how much better God is than anything this world has to offer; it inspires us to gratitude for that gift and the desire to please God, and to know God, and that is what drives the kind of life that pleases him. Indeed, only that can produce the kind of life that pleases him, because what he wants most of all is for us to seek him.

(Adapted from “The View from Saturday”)

Programming note

I've added the post on my most-searched posts to the blog orientation at the head of the sidebar. While I was at it, I realized that I'd missed one, a post I did a year ago August on the elemental powers of this world, so I added that in, with an additional link to a follow-up post I did, working with an insight contributed by cyberfriend and commenter Doug Hagler.

Notes and neurons

I was thinking about this this morning and realized I'd never gotten around to posting it; this is wonderful. It is indeed, as Bobby McFerrin says, the power of the pentatonic scale—and of music in general, I think; it's also a remarkable illustration of the beauty of the order of God's creation, and of the ways in which we're made for, and made to respond to, that order, even in our fallen state.

Considering the intelligence of Barack Obama

What I want to know, if I have reason to try to figure out how smart people are, would be things like this: Are they able to comprehend, internalize, and then begin to properly use complicated concepts? If so, how quickly—are they fast learners? How about their problem-solving ability? Can they innovate, finding new ways around problems, or do they just keep going back to a few approaches that have worked for them before? Are they creative? Do they have a nose for good ideas, whether their own or someone else's? Can they recognize when someone's critique of their own ideas is valid, and if so, are they able to make use of that critique to improve their ideas?

As it happens, my idea of what an intelligent person looks like meshes well with that of Elaine Lafferty, former editor of Ms. magazine:

Now by “smart,” I don't refer to a person who is wily or calculating or nimble in the way of certain talented athletes who we admire but suspect don't really have serious brains in their skulls. I mean, instead, a mind that is thoughtful, curious, with a discernable pattern of associative thinking and insight. Palin asks questions, and probes linkages and logic that bring to mind a quirky law professor I once had. Palin is more than a “quick study”; I'd heard rumors around the campaign of her photographic memory and, frankly, I watched it in action. She sees. She processes. She questions, and only then, she acts. . . .

For all those old enough to remember Senator Sam Ervin, the brilliant strict constitutional constructionist and chairman of the Senate Watergate Committee whose patois included “I'm just a country lawyer” . . . Yup, Palin is that smart.

The question is, does this description match the reality of our president? One of the big arguments for Barack Obama from his supporters has been that he's extremely intelligent; at this point, that's pretty much the received wisdom. I'm increasingly skeptical about that, though. Sure, there's no question he's a smart man; but the idea that he's extremely smart essentially rests on five things:

• He went to Columbia

• He went to Harvard Law

• He's written books

• He's good one-on-one with people

• He's liberal

And that's basically it. The last comes into play because of the natural human tendency to overrate the intelligence of people who argue for positions we ourselves support—we tend to overvalue arguments that lead to conclusions we agree with, and undervalue arguments that challenge our conclusions. Thus, from the perspective of our liberal media, Barack Obama must be smarter, because he believes and argues for things which are true, than (let's say) George W. Bush, who believes and argues for things which are not true. The fallacy, of course, is that whether we like the conclusions of an argument or not doesn't actually say anything about the quality of that argument, and thus people aren't actually smarter because they agree with us; but we tend to perceive them so.

As for the others? Well, yes, he went to Columbia; but if he showed any evidence of extraordinary intelligence or aptitude while there, we haven't seen it, because the president and his supporters have been quite careful not to let us see it. This tends to suggest, of course, that his academic record there doesn't in fact show any such evidence.

Harvard Law? Well, he clearly showed evidence of significant political skills there, getting the student body to elect him president of the law review; but beyond that? Carole Platt Liebau, who the next year would be the first female managing editor of the Harvard Law Review, paints an unflattering picture of his tenure there:

[W]hen he was at the HLR you did get a very distinct sense that he was the kind of guy who much more interested in being the president of the Review, than he was in doing anything as president of the Review.

A lot of the time he quote/unquote "worked from home", which was sort of a shorthand—and people would say it sort of wryly—shorthand for not really doing much. He just wasn't around. Most of the day to day work was carried out by the managing editor of the Review, my predecessor, a great guy called Tom Pirelli who's actually going to be one of the assistant attorney generals now.

He's the one who did most of the day to day work. Barack Obama was nowhere to be seen. Occasionally he would drop in he would talk to people, and then he'd leave again as though his very arrival had been a benediction in and of itself, but not very much got done.

His inaction extended beyond his indifference to running the Harvard Law Review; during his time at the law school, he wrote almost nothing for it—just a brief case comment—and nothing during his tenure as its president. That he would be allowed to run the HLR with such a thin résumé suggests that it wasn't his abilities that kept him in the position. By way of comparison, here's Beldar's account of his time as an editor of the Texas Law Review:

Second-year members were required, upon penalty of being kicked off the Review, to produce, on deadline, a publishable quality "student note." At Texas and most other top 20 law journals, such student notes tend to be not much different, either in scope or length or even quality, from the articles submitted by aspiring young law professors hoping to publish to promote their tenure prospects. We'd moved away from the earlier practice of having students write shorter, more limited "case-notes" that typically focused on a single new judicial decision, and instead encouraged more ambitious writing that would genuinely add something creative and new to the legal literature.

It was quite typical at Texas (and, I think, at most other major law reviews) that each new editor-in-chief, in fact, would be the student who, as a second-year member, had produced and published the very best student note. In the class ahead of me, my own class, and the class behind me at Texas, there was a wide-spread consensus on whose notes were the best. It is inconceivable to me that any of the three of them would have been selected to be editor-in-chief if they hadn't written a publishable note at all. And indeed, the quality of their respective notes became the source of the each new editor-in-chief's credibility as first among equals, final decision-maker, and the only editor permitted to use a blue pencil for his copy-editing (which no other editor would dare erase or alter without close consultation). . . .

At Texas and, I believe, most other major law reviews, the rule for members was (and I think still is): "Publish or perish, up or out." If you didn't produce a publishable-quality note on deadline, your name was stricken from the membership list on the masthead, you had no opportunity to become an editor, and—worst of all—you became ethically obliged to call back all those employers who'd extended you job offers in part based on a résumé credential that you were no longer entitled to claim.

Taken in conjunction with the fact that Obama didn't do much as a young lawyer, there's simply not a lot here to support any great claims for his intelligence.

But what about the book? Even if he didn't write anything of significance at Harvard, he has written a couple books, and particularly Dreams from my Father. Except that there are good reasons to doubt that he did in fact write that book, for one; and for another, even if we grant him that credential, writing an engaging memoir isn't really evidence of high intelligence. Kirby Higbe did the same thing, though with acknowledged help, and he only had a seventh-grade education.

The thing that really convinces people that the president is super-smart, though, is that he's good at making that impression. That is, of course, no small thing; but it's not necessarily the proof people think it is. The thing that really strikes me about the oohing and aahing over President Obama's intelligence is how content-free it is. What I mean by that is, I see a lot of people coming away from encounters with him talking about how smart he is, but I don't see any of them talking about any new ideas he expressed, or any startling insights. I don't see any evidence of the products of intelligence, just of his ability to convince people he's highly intelligent. In my experience, that's usually a sign that the person in question is really just smart enough to fake it.

This fits: I don't see any new ideas or insights expressed in the work of his administration, either. I don't see any great leadership coming from his administration—rather, I see an administration that has left many of its leadership responsibilities to Congress. I see the same old ideas recycled—and when they're met with opposition, I see the same old tired tactics recycled to deal with that opposition. This administration doesn't seem able to out-argue its critics; when its initiatives flounder, it doesn't seem to have any better ideas than to accuse its opponents of racism and call them Nazis and brown-shirts, on the one hand, and to have yet another stacked town meeting full of puffball "questions" on the other, preferably on prime-time TV.

All of which is to say, while I don't have any doubt that President Obama is a smart man and a gifted campaigner, I don't see any significant evidence of his intelligence beyond the fact of his election. On the basis of his record, what I see is a smart man, but far from a brilliant one, whose intelligence has been largely focused on impressing people, and who's very good at doing that, both one-on-one and on the large scale of a political campaign. I don't see much evidence of wisdom in any aspect of his life, and I don't see any real evidence of an active broad-gauge intelligence.

(Adapted from a post on Conservatives4Palin)

The remarkable reach of the hand of God

Brent Bozell tells a remarkable story:

I was stunned to read on Life Site News that a new movie is being planned about Our Lady of Guadalupe, so-named for an appearance of the Virgin Mary near Mexico City in 1531 that’s credited with converting nine million indigenous Mexicans to Christianity. The film, still untitled, will be produced by Mpower Pictures, the company that was launched with the pro-life movie "Bella" in 2006 and founded by "The Passion of the Christ" producer Steve McEveety.

That a movie would be made about Our Lady of Guadalupe is amazing, but that wasn’t half the surprise. The movie is being written by Joe Eszterhas. Yes, the same Joe Eszterhas responsible for screenwriting filthy movies like "Basic Instinct" and most infamously, "Showgirls," a movie so pornographic even the late Jack Valenti condemned it.

What I didn’t know until now is the story of the conversion of Joe Eszterhas in 2001, powerfully captured in his 2008 memoir entitled "Crossbearer: A Memoir of Faith."

It's yet another reminder that God doesn't just do the impossible, he does the implausible. Read the whole thing.

The power of grace

I'm reading Larry Crabb's book Real Church right now—I was given a copy by one of my fellow pastors here in town, and I expect we'll be talking about it; I also expect I'll be writing some about it, once I've finished it. I'll have to, if I want to process it fully. For right now, I just want to post this quote from the book, which really struck me:

Grace has no felt power in our lives until it surprises the hell out of us.

Yeah, that's the way of it, alright.

Free to repent

Ray Ortlund put up a wonderful post recently considering the question, "How come a stereotype of the church today is one of a 'holier than thou' mentality?" He offers some thoughts on the matter (which are well worth your time to read—it's not a long post), then closes with this:

I know this. We Christians will see more repentance in our city when our city sees more repentance in us. And we can be honest about our failings, because it isn't our performance that makes us okay. It's Christ's performance for us. That's the gospel. It's so freeing.

Amen. That's the thing about the gospel: it sets us free from the need to be good enough, and thus from the need to convince others (and ourselves) that we already are good enough. You'll never know how heavy a burden that is until you lay it down. I think that often, one of the biggest things that holds us back from repentance is the unwillingness to acknowledge to others that we are in fact sinners, because that would mean admitting that we aren't good enough; it's a wonderfully freeing thing to be able to lay that aside and just repent.

The wages of love

Jared Wilson, writing about an encounter between Craig Gross (of XXXChurch.com) and some colleagues, some of the Westboro Baptist Church crew (of "God Hates Fags" fame), and the American Idol tour (the WBC folks had come to protest Adam Lambert; Gross and his friends were counter-protesting), asks a penetrating question: "What Happens When You Love Haters?" On the evidence, the answer is, "Not what you'd expect." Hate breeds more hate—but love can breed hate, too.

If you followed some of the Twitter brouhaha, you could see many Adam Lambert fans and supporters of gay rights causes cursing out Craig, telling him that God hated him, and saying plenty of things that make the Westboro crew sound downright genteel. They didn't know he didn't agree with the Westboro people; they just saw his proximity and saw him loving them. That was enough. They got confused and thought Craig was with Westboro.

Which says something really profound about a ministry of love. If you love everyone, no matter their brokenness and no matter their sin—prodigal or pharisaical—you're gonna get slammed by both sides.

On elites, ordinary barbarians, and the willingness to accept help

The Anchoress linked back the other day, in her Ted Kennedy retrospective, to a 2005 Peggy Noonan column (one of her best, I think) expressing her foreboding about America and its future:

I think there is an unspoken subtext in our national political culture right now. In fact I think it's a subtext to our society. I think that a lot of people are carrying around in their heads, unarticulated and even in some cases unnoticed, a sense that the wheels are coming off the trolley and the trolley off the tracks. That in some deep and fundamental way things have broken down and can't be fixed, or won't be fixed any time soon. That our pollsters are preoccupied with "right track" and "wrong track" but missing the number of people who think the answer to "How are things going in America?" is "Off the tracks and hurtling forward, toward an unknown destination." . . .

I mean . . . the whole ball of wax. Everything. Cloning, nuts with nukes, epidemics; the growing knowledge that there's no such thing as homeland security; the fact that we're leaving our kids with a bill no one can pay. A sense of unreality in our courts so deep that they think they can seize grandma's house to build a strip mall; our media institutions imploding—the spectacle of a great American newspaper, the New York Times, hurtling off its own tracks, as did CBS. The fear of parents that their children will wind up disturbed, and their souls actually imperiled, by the popular culture in which we are raising them. Senators who seem owned by someone, actually owned, by an interest group or a financial entity. Great churches that have lost all sense of mission, and all authority. Do you have confidence in the CIA? The FBI? I didn't think so.

But this recounting doesn't quite get me to what I mean. I mean I believe there's a general and amorphous sense that things are broken and tough history is coming.

Now, there's a lot I could say about this. If I wanted to analyze Noonan, I could talk about this being the seed of her infatuation with Barack Obama that would bloom three years later—that his general and amorphous promise of "hope" and "change" offered her a psychologically irresistible escape hatch from her worry that "things are broken and tough history is coming." Or I could look at it theologically and express my agreement with her, my belief that in fact, things are broken, and tough history is coming, that we have dark times looming ahead before the final return of Christ. Or I could consider her point from an historical perspective, with the reminder that many had a similar sense in the 1960s; one example would be Allan Drury, whose foreboding of the brokenness of American society caused the series of novels he began with Advise and Consent, a straightforward work of political wonkery, to evolve into something that can only be called political apocalyptic.

As it happens, though, I'm more interested in where Noonan went with this, with her analysis of the elite response to the situation she limns.

Our recent debate about elites has had to do with whether opposition to Harriet Miers is elitist, but I don't think that's our elites' problem.

This is. Our elites, our educated and successful professionals, are the ones who are supposed to dig us out and lead us. I refer specifically to the elites of journalism and politics, the elites of the Hill and at Foggy Bottom and the agencies, the elites of our state capitals, the rich and accomplished and successful of Washington, and elsewhere. I have a nagging sense, and think I have accurately observed, that many of these people have made a separate peace. That they're living their lives and taking their pleasures and pursuing their agendas; that they're going forward each day with the knowledge, which they hold more securely and with greater reason than nonelites, that the wheels are off the trolley and the trolley's off the tracks, and with a conviction, a certainty, that there is nothing they can do about it. . . .

That's what I think is going on with our elites. There are two groups. One has made a separate peace, and one is trying to keep the boat afloat. I suspect those in the latter group privately, in a place so private they don't even express it to themselves, wonder if they'll go down with the ship. Or into bad territory with the trolley.

I lack the advantages of Noonan's insider position, but I think she's right about what's going on; at least, that's certainly how things look from out here in the hinterlands. I do not think, however, that she's right about elitism being a problem. I think elitism is a problem for our elites; I think we saw it to some degree in their response to Harriet Miers, and I think we see it in a much larger way in their response to Sarah Palin—and I don't think you have to believe in the particular ability and fitness of either woman to see that. (In retrospect, I don't think they were wrong about Miers; but that doesn't mean they were right for the right reason.)

For those who have made their separate peace, whose unspoken motto is "I got mine, you get yours," this elitism is rooted in the simple, very human but very juvenile desire not to share. They believe they've earned what they have, and they don't want anyone pushing into their little club from outside. This is the attitude common to the worst of the aristocracy in every human civilization throughout history; we need not be surprised to find it in ours.

That said, it's the elitism of the second group that's more dangerous, for a reason very similar to what I called last week "the leaven of the Pharisees." It's their elitism that Noonan herself expresses, that is the root of her disdain for Gov. Palin, with her assertion that "Our elites, our educated and successful professionals, are the ones who are supposed to dig us out and lead us." The unspoken corollary to this is that it's only our elites who are supposed to do that, and how dare anybody else try to horn in? It's a big job, and at some level they're worried (most of them, anyway; I have the sense our president doesn't share this humility) that they aren't going to pull it off—but by jingo, it's their job, and they aren't going to share it.

Why? Because they know that whether they're up to the task or not, they're the best possible people to be doing it, and certainly nobody else could possibly be. They have all the proof they need for that complacent certainty in the fact that they are the ones who are rich and educated and accomplished and famous, and nobody else is; their worldly accolades are all the evidence they could require of their own superiority to the rest of the world.

The only problem with this attitude is, it's pure and utter bunk. The science-fiction novelist Elizabeth Moon explains this well in her book Against the Odds, where she has one of her characters observe,

Any system which does not give ample opportunity for talent to displace unearned rank will, in the end, come to grief. . . .

My point is that every time society has given it a chance, it's been shown that talent exists in previously despised populations. . . . Over and over again, it's been shown that an ordinary sampling of the population, including those considered inferior or hopeless, contains men and women of rare intelligence, wit, and ability. Just as ponds turn over their water yearly, revitalizing the pond's life, so a good stirring of the human pot brings new blood to the top, and we're all the better for it.

The reason for the elite opposition to Gov. Palin is that she's from "an ordinary sampling of the population"—not from an elite family, not from an elite school, not from an elite profession, but a journalism major from the University of Idaho (her fourth college, no less) who lived in a small town on the edge of civilization who actually worked (and killed things!) with her hands. She's an ordinary barbarian like most of us in this country. As such, they refuse to believe that she could possibly be a woman of "rare intelligence, wit, and ability"; the very idea creates severe cognitive dissonance for them.

This prejudice—for it's nothing less than that; in its extreme forms, we may fairly call it bigotry—is highly unfortunate, because it only worsens the difficulty of getting the trolley back on the rails. For one thing, it aggravates the distrust that already exists between us ordinary barbarians and the elites of this country; this makes us less likely to follow them when they have a bad idea, to be sure, but it also makes us less likely to follow them when they're right. It makes our politics more reactive and more divided, which inevitably makes them less productive.

And for another, whether our elites want to admit it or not, they're simply wrong in their belief that they and only they have the talent, skills, perspective and character to right the trolley. There are many ordinary barbarians in this country—on the right and on the left, both—who would have a great deal to contribute to the leading of this nation, if they only got the chance. Gov. Palin is in many ways their avatar, someone who has already created that chance for herself and demonstrated prodigious talent as a leader and politician, and who I hope will create opportunities for others to follow suit.

What America really needs (one thing, at least) is for others to rise up and follow her into leadership roles in this country, to turn over the water in the pond and bring "new blood to the top"—new blood with new ideas, new experiences, and a new perspective on our nation and its problems. Unfortunately, it's hard to see that happening on any major scale as long as the elites resist—and they will continue to resist, both out of their sense of their own superiority and out of their desire not to share their baubles. The latter is probably the easier to overcome; the former is harder, because it can be very, very difficult to admit that we need help, and especially to admit that we need help from those we've been accustomed to regarding as less capable than ourselves. As long as our elites can continue to see the rest of us that way, they're not going to be willing to make that admission.

Which means that the only way to improve our situation is a grassroots revolution; the levers of power and of media influence may be in the hands of our elites, but the levers of the ballot box are still, ultimately, in ours. If we, the people want to force a path for ordinary barbarians into the halls of the elites, we have the ability to do so, if we will band together and use it. But in the meantime, we need to support the ones we have—with Sarah Palin at the head of the list.

Now, if your political convictions are simply too different from Gov. Palin's for you to support her, then so be it; those matter, no question. In that event, though, I'd encourage you to look for ordinary barbarians who do agree with you, whom you can support. I firmly believe that the domination of our politics by one class of our society is, in its own way, as serious a political issue as any we face; and it's one which we need to address, and soon, if we want to keep the trolley from going clean off the rails. Our elites aren't up to the task by themselves, whether they're willing to admit the fact or not; they need our help, and we need to provide it. Wanted or otherwise.

(Cross-posted at Conservatives4Palin)

The future of Macintosh

This is fun. My thanks to Chris Forbes for posting it.

Run to win

Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one receives the prize? So run that you may obtain it. Every athlete exercises self-control in all things. They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable. So I do not run aimlessly; I do not box as one beating the air. But I discipline my body and keep it under control,
lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified.

—1 Corinthians 9:24-27 (ESV)

I had a Sunday-school teacher one time who talked about Paul describing the life of faith as a race; and at some point during that class, he declared, “And Paul says, don’t run in order to win.” I argued with him (opinionated? Me? Whatever gave you that idea?), but he wouldn’t listen to me, and he wouldn’t look it up—he told me I didn’t know what I was talking about, changed the subject, and went on with the class.

Now, there are some mistakes I understand, but that one made no sense to me. I’m sure differences in temperament played in to this, since I can be a pretty competitive sort, but why would you want the Scripture to say, “Run, but don’t try to win?” If you aren’t trying as hard as you can to win, why are you bothering to run? Especially when you consider that in the life of faith, if we win, that doesn’t mean that everyone else loses—we can all win together, and in fact, the better each of us runs our own race, the more help we are to all those around us as they run theirs.

I suspect Paul saw things much the same way, since he clearly likes athletic metaphors. I imagine, from this and other aspects of his writings, that he had a pretty strong competitive streak; sure, he was a saint, and a brilliant man, and God used him powerfully to do amazing things in and for the body of Christ, but he can’t have been easy to live with. As well, he clearly had considerable respect for how hard the athletes of his time worked and how completely they focused themselves in order to give themselves the best chance possible to win the prize at the Games; it's understandable why he saw them as a model for the Christian life.

The amazing thing, as he notes here, is that the prize for which those athletes competed was nothing more than a laurel wreath! Given a week or two, their prize would be no more. If they could work as hard as they did, if they could dedicate themselves as completely as they did, to win a prize they wouldn’t even be able to keep, shouldn’t we as Christians be at least as focused on the prize of eternal life which God has set before us? Shouldn’t we be running to win, rather than dawdling along by the side of the road, wandering off to explore the thistles?

Paul certainly thinks we should. Run the good race, he tells us; run well, run hard, run with all you have—run to win. Run to win, and stay focused on the prize before you; take hold of the eternal life to which you were called—it’s already yours, but you need to grab hold and live into it. Don’t let anything else sidetrack you or slow you down, but let everything you do be focused on running as well as you possibly can, to the glory of God and the accomplishment of his purposes.

(Adapted from “Run to Win”)