My wife recently drew my attention to an old article (www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/health/011800hth-behavior-incompetents.html) that I think casts the Obama and McCain campaigns in an interesting light. The crux is that incompetent people not only have an inflated sense of their own ability, but similarly have difficulty assessing competence in others. The implications of this seem pretty clear. McCain projects incompetence on Obama while, inexplicably, claiming the opposite in Palin. Obama, on the other hand, seems to go out of his way to assume the best about his opponents, all the while accepting his own fallibility. I think this can be further extended to the way each candidate views the voters. McCain's clear contempt for us is matched only by Obama's confidence in our capacity for reason. Obama assumes the best of us; McCain is counting on the worst. This is the filter through which I've been viewing the past few weeks, but I'm fairly certain that someone more competent than me could examine the last 18 months and come up with even more illustrative examples of this phenomenon.