"Asymmetrical agency" in action

In a recent post I talked about the idea of people in the Israel-Palestine debate employing "asymmetrical agency" to defend their position. Here's an example of what I was talking about, from a pro-Israel Sullivan reader:

You're probably right that Avigdor Lieberman is going to be a major headache. But at least acknowledge one thing regarding the advancement of Lieberman into Israeli politics. The intifadeh and the incessant rocket attacks from Lebanon and Gaza are what laid the groundwork for Lieberman's success and also had the not insignificant result of effectively killed off the liberal peace camp within Israeli society. It wasn't a triumph of Israeli neo-conservatism or innate Jewish racism against Arabs or what have you. It was the fact that the Palestinians, or at least the groups who represent the Palestinians, through their intransigence and the willful malice of characters like Yassir Arafat wiped out the political credibility of anyone in Israel who wanted a final and peaceful settlement for both peoples.

So what the reader does here is admit the badness of Avigdor Lieberman, but turn things around by ascribing agency to the Palestinians only: suddenly, in this discussion of "who is to blame", Sullivan's reader gives us a (naturalistic) causal account of how Lieberman came to power as a consequence of the actions of the Palestinians. The subtle shift in perspective renders Israelis into not fully-formed individuals with free will and moral duties, but sociological subjects to which moral blame is not applicable. Arafat is all-too-human, capable of "willful malice"--but Lieberman is an inhuman empirical fact, a spinning cog in the machine that Arafat decides how to operate.

Of course, Sullivan's reader is not saying anything untrue (I don't think): it's pretty clear that Hamas' various attacks and rhetoric have radicalized Israel and ushered in the current hawkish, right-wing government, elevating certain extreme factions to power. But what does this true causal fact have to do with assessing moral blame? If elevating someone like Lieberman to power is blameworthy, then it is for reasons independent of the moral standing of the Palestinians or the causal chain of events that led to Lieberman's rise. Hamas being evil doesn't justify illiberalism any more than, say, the destruction of the World Trade Center justifies illiberalism.

So Sullivan's reader isn't uttering falsehoods so much as making an argument that never gets off the ground. Sure, Arafat "made" Lieberman; but you could argue back that some Israeli politican or action in the past "made" Arafat. Wherever you choose to pin the first instance of agency is arbitrary and can always be moved one step further back. Neither side can use this method of argument to make any headway in attributing blame to the other side.

So how can we sort out this dialog? There are a couple of different conversations that can be had. The first is a conversation about moral blame, and in this you attribute agency to everyone and judge everyone according to universal moral principles.* The second is a conversation where you try to gain a scientific understanding of the situation, and in this you attribute agency to no one--every actor is treated as the subject of naturalistic enquiry, and normative concepts like moral blame are left out of the picture. The third is a conversation about practical wisdom, where you try to dispense advice to one side as to what actions that side can take to achieve its strategic goals--in this case, you ascribe agency to your audience only (the faction you're advising), properly framing them as moral agents in a naturalistic world that they must carefully navigate in order to survive.


*It is usually in these conversations--about who is to blame--that the dreaded question "Are you pro-Israel or pro-Palestine?" crops up. The correct answer is that no one who embraces modernity is "pro-Israel" or "pro-Palestine", but rather pro-X, where X is some set of universal principles. Now, if I determine that Israel adheres more faithfully to X than Palestine, then I suppose that, as it happens, I am in a sense "pro-Israel"--but it must be understood that this support is contingent on Israel's behavior vis-a-vis X. So one very real possible outcome could be that one is neither "pro-Israel" nor "pro-Palestine", if it happens to be the case that neither side adheres to X. This whole thing of "choosing a side" obscures this "pox on both houses" possibility and turns the attribution of moral blame into a zero sum game--as if somehow if Israel does something wrong, then that means that Palestine has done something right.

John Hodgman, member of reality-based community

Phil says "pssst" and gestures to this AV Club interview with John Hodgman (who is, incidentally, currently guest-blogging at Boing Boing), where he gets into some interesting insights into the campaign:

The thing that I find so compelling is that right now Obama's whole campaign strategy is simply [to] speak to people as though they were adults and trust that the truth of the world situation will be evident to them.... So much of the past eight years in politics, whether you're a Democrat or a Republican, you have to acknowledge is based on what the Bush people to themselves have described outside the reality-based community. That the words they were speaking had no basis in reality and they felt no compulsion to exist in a real world. They were creating a world of their own imagining. They were writing their own book of fake trivia and that's a fine way to make a living, but I don't know that it's a very productive way to run a country. And I think we are seeing the results of that right now. So from a very selfish point of view, I'm enchanted by the idea that a politician can come along and speak simply and clearly and truthfully to an electorate as though they are grown-ups and to feel the electorate respond to that. I've found that to be astonishing and especially now that we are in the end game and you see basically the McCain campaign has nothing left but conspiracy theories to throw at Obama. It really has become a fight between fantasy and reality, and although I don't make my living off of it, I endorse reality.

The "reality-based" community concept comes from this famous quote from a Bush aide in the political glory days following 9/11, which appeared in a New York Times Magazine article by Ron Suskind:

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

Creepy--and so, so wrong. Has any President been spanked harder and more repeatedly by reality than George W. Bush?

When it's all said and done, you have to admit: Bill Clinton is good

Here's Bill Clinton at his best: making an impassioned yet clearly informed case for a certain set of economic policies. I've always thought that Obama could learn a thing or two from Bill Clinton with regards to rhetoric: whereas Obama's points tend to fizzle into platitudes ("this is just more of the same Washington game..."; "blah blah blah Wall Street blah blah blah Main Street"), Clinton simply made the case and let his folksy charisma do the rest.



(Hat tip: Coates)

Tact

There's been a bit of a dust-up recently over some comments that Hillary Clinton has made about Iran:

"I want the Iranians to know that if I'm the president, we will attack Iran (if it attacks Israel)," Clinton said in an interview on ABC's "Good Morning America."

"In the next 10 years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them," she said.

"That's a terrible thing to say but those people who run Iran need to understand that because that perhaps will deter them from doing something that would be reckless, foolish and tragic," Clinton said.

The thing is, though what she is saying is correct--any policy of deterrence entails the sort of massive retaliation that she is talking about--the way that she says it makes her sound unnecessarily aggressive.

In the first place, the question itself was a fairly outlandish hypothetical--there is absolutely no one who seriously believes that Iran would launch a direct attack against Israel. In fact, the reason this is the case is precisely because Iran and everyone else already knows that the United States would retaliate in such a situation (in addition to the retaliation that would be carried out by Israel itself). Therefore, Clinton's first reaction should have been to give a careful preface to her answer to make it clear that this was a purely hypothetical question with no immediate relevance to the current situation with Iran.

Next, rather than use colorfully bellicose language like "totally obliterate", she should have couched her answer in the most boring technocratic terms possible. I mean, you don't want to sound like you relish the idea of having to retaliate. Non-emotional, bureaucratic, mechanistic--this is how you want to express a policy of deterrence, because it gets the substantive point across without making anyone nervous or sending any confusing rhetorical messages. Moreover, she could have even avoided singling out Iran altogether, instead choosing to give her answer in terms of what the US generally does to protect close allies, Israel being one of them.

Obama, I think, is perceptive in seeing the potential trouble that remarks like Clinton's are likely to cause down the road:

"When Iran is able to go to the United Nations complaining about the statements made and get some sympathy, that's a sign that we are taking the wrong approach," Obama said.

Moreover, he seems to know how to give the more careful answer that I think is better to give:

"We have had a foreign policy of bluster and saber-rattling and tough talk, and in the meantime have made a series of strategic decisions that have actually strengthened Iran."

Israel is "the most important ally" the United States has in the Middle East, and that Washington would respond "forcefully and appropriately" to any attack, Obama said Sunday.

"But it is important that we use language that sends a signal to the world community that we're shifting from the sort of cowboy diplomacy, or lack of diplomacy, that we've seen out of George Bush," he said. "And this kind of language is not helpful."

It is not as if the sort of cowboy-diplomacy sloppiness of Clinton's remarks can be attributed to hers being off-the-cuff comments--she had already said earlier that Iran would undergo "massive retaliation" for an attack on Israel, and so she should have had her wording on this issue down pat.

In the end I think it comes down to a sort of fearfulness on the part of Democrats that has been ingrained in them by Republicans on national security issues, especially since the Republicans rose to dominance in the 90s: they don't want to look weak, and so they protect themselves from this perception by mimicking the Republicans, in style if not in actual policy. The result has been the dangerous lack of a counterweight to the sort of macho, with-us-or-against-us Bush foreign policy--an imbalance that expressed itself most painfully in the Democrats' non-existent opposition to the Iraq War resolution in 2003.

One thing I like about Obama is that he doesn't seem to have this fear. I greatly look forward to him taking on McCain on foreign policy in the general election.

Political Animal

Hillary Clinton has decided to personally weigh in on the Obama-Wright controversy:

"You know, I spoke out against Don Imus, saying that hate speech was unacceptable in any setting, and I believe that.... I think you have to speak out against that. You certainly have to do that, if not explicitly, then implicitly by getting up and moving."

What is interesting to me about this is the equivalence it strikes between Clinton's relation to Don Imus and Obama's relation to his pastor. In the first instance, you have two publicly-facing figures--Clinton and Imus--who are strangers to each other and yet both occupy a spot on the broad stage of American politics. Their interaction with each other was nothing more than part of the strange kabuki that invariably plays out whenever anyone runs afoul of the (sometimes arbitrary but mostly useful) rhetorical boundaries that separate racist from non-racist speech. Even despite the fact that no one seriously believed that Don Imus was actually a racist--and even though the women who were the target of his unfortunate "nappy headed hos" remark publicly forgave him for the mistake--a long line of unrelated public figures, including Clinton, went on television to "speak out" against Imus and say all sorts of obligatory things meant to send signals of support to those whose political power is expressed, in part, by universal recognition of and adherence to the boundaries that delineate acceptable political rhetoric on race. And, though doing this may have been unfair to Imus on a personal level insofar as it too-quickly castigated him as a racist, there was a political justification for it because it reinforced, re-validated, and re-legitimized the rhetorical boundaries that signify America's rejection of racism. So Clinton subjugated the personal to the political in dealing with Imus' gaffe; but this followed naturally from the fact that Clinton only had a political, and not personal, relationship with Imus.

Obama is in a different kind of bind because the unacceptable remarks were made not by a stranger who shares the national political stage, but a dear friend, mentor, and spiritual guide. If Obama were to "speak out" against Wright and sever ties with him--as Clinton seems to suggest Obama ought to do--he would, at least according to the rhetorical logic of American politics, be "sending a strong message" that no racist speech ought to go unpunished, and would thereby reinforce the legitimacy of America's stand against racism. However, it would also come at a great cost to Obama personally: he would be throwing someone he cares about under the bus, and compromising his integrity in the process. Obama's response was to try his best to have it both ways: while at the same time doing right by his pastor and defending him as a good man who sometimes says inflammatory things, he defused the rhetorical implications of not categorically denouncing him in front of the nation by explicitly addressing race in a major speech. This attempt to have it both ways was risky for Obama because it required Americans--and the media--to hear the speech as something meant to engage them directly and explicitly on race, rather than indirectly through rhetorical code geared primarily toward media consumption and echo-chambering. It is not clear if Obama was completely successful in this, but the fact that his campaign has not entirely collapsed suggests that he was at least successful enough.

Obama's demonstrated ability to survive politically without sacrificing his personal sense of decency puts Clinton's reputation for cut-throat politics into sharp relief. Consider David Brooks' recent devastating assessment of Clinton as some kind of relentless political beast:

For nearly 20 years, she has been encased in the apparatus of political celebrity. Look at her schedule as first lady and ever since. Think of the thousands of staged events, the tens of thousands of times she has pretended to be delighted to see someone she doesn’t know, the hundreds of thousands times she has recited empty clichés and exhortatory banalities, the millions of photos she has posed for in which she is supposed to appear empathetic or tough, the billions of politically opportune half-truths that have bounced around her head.

I have always thought these judgments of Clinton to be unfair; they describe any and every politician, Obama included. But the reason why Clinton gets this reputation and Obama instead gets dubbed "authentic" is not because one is calculating and the other is not, but because one is making a different calculation than the other. While Obama has attempted to bypass the often stifling limitations of conventional political rhetoric to good effect--admitting drug use, conceding that some ideas from opposing ideologies are worthwhile--Clinton has waged political war from firmly within its confines. Such a strategy must have appeared low-risk to her in the short-run; but over time, it has earned her the reputation of soulless, inhuman political animal.

Obama's speech on race: a clear, refreshing, distilled, icy glass of water

Some weeks ago I went and saw Helvetica, which is a documentary all about the history of the ubiquitous font, its significance in design, and its impact on culture. One of the people interviewed--graphic designer Michael Bierut--gives this memorable description of what it must have been like when the streamlined, modernist font came on the scene in the 1960s:

You go to a corporate identity consultant, circa 1965-1966 and they would take that and lay it here and say, "Here's your current stationary, and all it implies, and this is what we're proposing." And next to that, next to the belching smoke-stacks, and the nuptial script, and the ivory paper, they'd have a crisp bright white piece of paper, and instead of "Amalgamated Widget, founded 1857" it'd just say "WidgeCo" in Helvetica Medium.

Can you imagine how bracing and thrilling that was? It must have felt like you had crawled through a desert with your mouth just caked with filthy dust, and someone offered you a clear, refreshing, distilled, icy glass of water... It must have been just fantastic. (Hat tip: some guy Russell Beattie)

This quote is what came to mind when I read and watched Barack Obama's recent "major speech on race" (text; unnecessarily interactive Flash movie). For eight long years--and arguably, although to a more tolerable degree, the eight years before that as well--I've been fed nothing but the most intelligence-insulting, deliberately-repetitive, simplistic, lowest-common-denominator, platitude-laden, poll-tested, calculated, take-no-chances, sound-byte-friendly, made-for-TV, unnuanced, uninteresting, uninspired, unoriginal, committeed-to-death, unprincipled, unthoughtful, anti-intellectual, cynical, bromide-filled, conventional-wisdom-repeating, intellectually dishonest political rhetoric imaginable.

To be fair, Obama's speech is not entirely devoid of these trappings of TV-era American political rhetoric. For example, more than once he slides into the lazy populist habit of corporation-blaming ("...[T]he real problem is...that the corporation you work for will ship [your job] overseas for nothing more than a profit"). But despite this, the speech does succeed in grappling with lots of complexities and ambiguities in race--observing legitimate resentments felt by both blacks and whites, for example, and condemning but ultimately embracing the imperfect Reverend Wright. And this puts it head and shoulders above all others in terms of sheer level of discourse--in terms, in other words, of how it addresses its audience: as intelligent, discerning adults.

It is in this way that Obama's speech is, to me, "a clear, refreshing, distilled, icy glass of water".

Of course, I realize that I am commenting here more on the rhetoric of the speech than the actual substance of it. But I think this is appropriate. What makes the speech stand out isn't the novelty of its content, per se, but the circumstances in which it was uttered: by a candidate in the Democratic presidential primary, in a major, nationally televised address.

Complex, sober, and enlightening conversations on race and other issues have been out there for some time--in living rooms, between close friends, in academic circles--but they've been hard to find. One of the major projects of Obama's candidacy has been to bring them into the national discourse. This has not been easy. The 24-hour-news cycle, the news networks, the Clinton campaign, and the horse-race-obsessed punditry have made it difficult at times, even impossible to properly argue or explain anything in depth. Even now they are doing their best to reduce Obama's thoughtful and cohesive 40-minute argument into a meaningless media shrapnel of sound-bytes, "gaffes", and speculation as to whether he is "sending a message" to one demographic or another.

But internet--that vanquisher of the fascist, one-to-many fiend of the 20th century known by its sinister monogram "T.V."--is strong like ox. At nytimes.com, the full text of Obama's speech is the most emailed item. The video of the speech in its entirety is the number one video on You Tube. The force that propelled Obama's candidacy and financed his campaign is the same one that is presenting his case, unfiltered and unreconstructed, to the American electorate.

I wonder if they are as thirsty as I am.

An end to Pareto-suboptimal politics? Let's hope so

As anyone familiar with the primaries knows, Barack Obama talks an awful lot about hope--it's gotten to the point where he even addresses this fact in his stump speech. The first instinct is to let this schmaltzy boilerplate float out the other ear, but after a while you start to get the sense that Obama has actually invested some serious effort into developing his hope theme. Over time, in fact, I have come to think of it in terms of the fabled "Prisoner's Dilemma" problem.

***

The Prisoner's Dilemma is a thought experiment that illustrates how it can be that two self-interested parties rationally make a choice that does not maximize their payoff. In the scenario, two suspects are arrested for a crime and interrogated independently of each other. However, there is insufficient evidence for a conviction, and so the prosecutor must try to get them to testify against each other. Each suspect has two options: he can keep his mouth shut, or he can rat the other suspect out. If he keeps his mouth shut and his partner in crime does the same, then the prosecutor can't make a good case and they both receive a short, 6-month sentence on some minor secondary charge. If, however, the suspect keeps his mouth shut but his partner defects and rats him out, then the suspect receives the full 10-year sentence and his partner--the rat--goes free. Finally, if both suspects decide to rat each other out, then they both share responsibility for the crime and each receives a 5-year sentence.

Assuming that both suspects are rational self-interested agents--i.e., that they both just want to minimize their sentence--what is the best choice? Well, if I am a suspect, then there are two possibilities: either my partner stayed silent, or he ratted me out. If he stayed silent, then the best choice for me would be to rat him out, thereby allowing me to walk out of there a free man while leaving him with the full 10-years. However, if he ratted me out, then my best choice is still to rat him out--because that way I get the 5-year sentence instead of the full 10 years. And so I choose to defect and rat my partner out. Ironically, though, since my partner is just as rational and self-interested as I am, he comes to the same conclusion, and so we doom each other to a sub-optimal result: a 5-year sentence.

***

It only takes a little imagination to apply the Prisoner's Dilemma to the state of partisan politics over the last two decades. The Democrats and Republicans are like the suspects: locked in a dogged pursuit of their own agendas while all the while maintaining a rational distrust of the other side. When the Republicans control Congress, they shut the Democrats out of the legislative process--after all, why risk sharing power now only to be completely shut out when the Democrats regain control? When the Republicans seek a compromise on Social Security--allow some privatization, for instance--the Democrats reject it in toto. Why risk giving up an inch on Social Security now when the Republicans will surely take miles once they get a chance?

In this political environment, not only does the atmosphere become unpleasant--"poisonous" I think is the word often used--but the results become middling, and the progress incremental. We get Frankenstein legislative solutions--on health care, on energy--that are more about avoiding the worst possible scenario for both sides than actually effectively tackling the problem for the long-term.

However, there is a growing sense that the problems we confront as a nation are beginning to outstrip, in their sheer magnitude, the political mechanism we have created to handle them. Our health care system is not an ideological catastrophe for either side, but neither is it particularly effective. Entitlement programs are not on a sustainable track to accommodate projected increases in the elderly population. And as of today, there is basically no strategy in place for dealing with global warming (hint: ethanol subsidies won't cut it. Neither will ignoring empirical evidence).

In all this, there is a temptation to blame the self-interested nature of the factions involved. Why can't they put the national interest ahead of their own ideological agendas? But I don't think this kind of criticism holds water, because it misses the point: each faction really and truly believes that its ideological agenda is the national interest. The Democrats and the Republicans are doing nothing wrong by pursuing their versions of the political good--on the contrary, this is the very essence of democratic government. So I think it is not so much naive as incoherent to chide Democrats and Republicans for not "setting aside their differences" for the sake of the "national interest". If this is what is meant by bipartisanship, then bipartisanship is incompatible with the notion of representative government.

The proper target of blame is not the self-interested nature of today's political factions--theirs will always and should always be a rational political calculus that maximizes their own ideological payoff. Instead, we should blame the political environment that makes their calculus churn out sub-optimal results. Remember--the reason that politicians don't make effective compromises on long-term solutions isn't because they can't, but because it would be irrational to do so. Today's "5-year sentence" health care system is, after all, much preferable to the "10-year sentence" health care system that would surely result from letting the other side have too much leeway.

***

The goal, then, should be to change the political environment so as to shake up the political calculus on both sides, so that it is no longer irrational for self-interested political parties to cooperate on a meaningful level. But what does this mean, exactly?

Well, let's revisit our suspects in the Prisoner's Dilemma scenario. We might imagine that in this world there is a game-theory savvy Mafia boss who is sick and tired of his hired goons serving long 5-year jail sentences when they could, by cooperating, be back on the streets in a mere 6 months. Our Mafia boss, of course, is under no illusions about the self-interested nature of his goons, and so he decides to introduce an externality that will surely alter the suspects' interrogation-room calculus: he lets it be known far and wide that from now on, anyone who rats out their partner in crime will be tied to a large cement block and thrown into the Hudson River. This move is good news for our suspects! Now, if I am the suspect being interrogated, I know that if my partner in crime stays silent, then I should stay silent too, or else the Mafia boss will kill me upon release. Moreover, the fact that the Mafia boss will kill any rat guarantees that my partner in crime will not be ratting me out. The inevitable and optimal result is that we both get trivial 6-month sentences.

The question is: what kind of externality can we introduce in the political world that would alter the political calculus in such a way as to yield viable long-term solutions? What is needed is for there to be a high degree of confidence among the political factions that the other side will not take advantage of temporary power imbalances in the compromise process to bulldoze its own ideology through. The Democrats need to be confident that the Republicans will not use the limited privatization of Social Security as the first steps toward abolishing Social Security. The Republicans need to be confident that universal health insurance will not metamorphosize into an unwieldy government program that ignores market realities. Specifically, both sides need to be confident that such ideological power grabs will be politically punished--that the electorate will actually vote users of these tactics--the "rats"--out of power.

***

Enter Barack Obama, inexperienced one-term Senator with no executive background, an oratorical powerhouse that doesn't sound, look, or feel like anything in politics going. Judging him against the conventional criteria of a political candidate, he doesn't stack up all that well: he can spin a good yarn, sure, but substantively he brings nothing new to the table, and his untested meddle is a risk. Indeed, it is by precisely these sorts of metrics that the Clinton campaign has argued that Obama does not make sense as the Democratic nominee. Moreover, viewed from this perspective, the Clinton criticism of Obama's rhetoric as empty and naive is valid: it appears as though Obama thinks that, in thrall to his silver tongue, Republicans will magically jettison their ideological self-interest and support his standardly liberal agenda. Fat chance.

But the Clinton criticism misses the mark, because it fails to understand that Barack Obama is presenting the success of his very candidacy as the externality that will alter the political calculus of Democrats and Republicans and usher in a new era of good-faith politics and bold compromise. His very inexperience and political otherworldliness is crucial to his candidacy, because he needs to be credible as a true "Washington outsider"--someone who is not part-and-parcel of either side in the national political Prisoner's Dilemma, and who will not therefore engage in the same rational dead-end politics that have characterized both sides for decades. Moreover, he needs to demonstrate in his character, his rhetoric, and his political methods that conciliation and empathy are dominant values, and that political opponents will not be shut out of a Democratic regime. Those on the political right need to be assured that their arguments will be heard and taken seriously, and that, yes, they will even be given some power when in the minority to steer and participate in the national agenda. If Obama succeeds in embodying these values--and wins in virtue of them--then he will have remade the political landscape on the day of his election.

The extremely nifty thing about all this is that, if it works, it will not be because of any special talent of Obama's, particularly, or anything specific he is likely to do once in office. Indeed, a persistent rhetorical theme in his speeches is his status as a vessel--the political power doesn't originate from him or his silver tongue, but rather, from the vast and diverse movement for change that he is the arbitrary placeholder for. If he is elected President, he will take office in a radically different political reality, one where a totally inexperienced outsider stormed into office on a message of conciliation and compromise. The mandate will be obvious and indisputable, and it will be all the empirical assurance the Democrats and Republicans need in order to have high confidence that those who abuse political conciliation for undue ideological gain will no longer be tolerated by the electorate.

***

Viewed with all this in mind, Obama's rhetoric of hope, unification, and change suddenly makes sense, and the words--so deadened over the years by standard partisan boilerplate--turn out to be doing some serious work. His whole body of rhetoric supervenes on the elaborate, technical arguments I have outlined above. "Hope" is not just some sense of vague optimism that everything will turn out okay. It is the confidence we need to have in each other that, though we disagree, we will work in good faith towards pragmatic solutions and not attempt to hijack the process for our exclusive ideological gains, or unfairly demonize the opposition. If Barack Obama is indeed elected on the hope message, then in virtue of self-fulfilling prophecy we will all have a good empirical reason to believe that our hope will be rewarded by the hope of others--after all, we all voted for hope, right?

This notion of hope plays into his other rhetorical obsession--"unity", or "transcending partisan differences". Many commentators are baffled at how Obama can claim to be a unifying force in our politically divided nation while at the same time championing an indisputably Liberal agenda. They wonder what "transcending the partisan divide" means in terms of concrete policy details--does it mean that he will "triangulate" between the two sides and adopt centrist positions? Does it mean he will somehow persuade Conservatives and Independents to rally around traditional Liberal causes? But I think these commentators are mistaking the dynamic property of a candidate's political and negotiation methods for the static property of a candidate's policy preferences. Obama has always conceded that, at the end of the day, he is a Liberal and a Democrat--and, in an ideal world, would like to see the Democratic agenda fully implemented. In that sense, he transcends nothing. But in the sense that he explicitly acknowledges that whatever solutions we do end up passing cannot be defined at present, and that their substantive shape will take form organically in a yet-to-be-determined political environment of mutual conciliation, he really is transcending the partisan divide. It's just that the "transcendence" is in the process, not the policy details--and that it won't take place unless and until he actually gets elected President.

The Clintons once described the nomination of Barack Obama as "a roll of the dice". I agree with this. By nominating Obama as the Democratic candidate, Democrats--and Liberals and left-leaning Independents in general--will be signifying their intention to break free of the Prisoner's Dilemma politics of the last two decades and recast the political landscape as one that is more germane to sober conciliation and compromise. But the other half of the electorate might not be on board with the project. Indeed, if Obama loses the general election or wins on a razor-thin party-lines vote, Obama's political raison d'etre will have vanished, and we will be stuck with either a loser or a President ill-prepared for battle with the vaunted Republican "attack machine".

However, if Obama sweeps into office on the crest of a Reagan-like political realignment--an ideologically diverse mix of Democrats, Independents, new voters, and even some Republicans--then the roll of the dice will have been well worth it. And at this point, I'm not sure what other outcome is worth the hoping for.