One of the most striking facts I've read concerning gotcha journalism/campaigning is that, in all of the years the "Whitewater" investigation of Hillary drug on, not a single accusation of wrong doing was launched, except, of course, that she had dealings with a man who broke the law. She was Guilty By Association (GBA). But no other charge was even made, much less proven. Obama's got a bunch of GBA's hanging around his neck, and they may be starting to drag him down, not because there's any actual wrongdoing on his part, but because he doesn't respond decisively enough.

He tends to argue against the facts, saying that, for instance, he didn't hear the worst of Wright's hostile, spurious blather. When that didn't work, he said that he was committed to the whole church community and that Wright had done many laudable things that put the lie to his radicalism. Same reaction to the Bitter Blather and the Ayers Associated, Amalgamated Guilt. These arguments can sound defensive to a voting public that should have trouble figuring out the truth. This stuff is confusing. And the problem is not with the facts. It's more subtle than that. It's a logic problem.

I just returned form a conversation with a fairly well educated, pro-Obama voter who was born in Sweden. She kept prefacing her questions about the attacks against Obama with, "I didn't grow up in this country, so I don't understand this stuff." That seemed only defensive to me. The problem was that she couldn't see through the illogic, the flim flam, just as many other well-meaning, probably middle 20 percent of the electorate have trouble.

Obama should only be helping them, not arguing the facts--the facts will abound. And pointing out the illogic doesn't involve trashing his opponents. He can sustain his elevated demeanor but be much more decisive. He just has to play logician and judge instructing the jury, helping people to understand the ploy and how to see through it.

What helped my Swedish-American friend the most was to boil down the attacks to guilt by association. The tricky part of the flim flam is that they sense that we can't help making their case sort of unconsciously, without putting the implicit accusation in play. The implicit accusation is that, in the case of Wright, if Obama won't leave Wright's church, he must agree with Wright. He must be a closet reverse racist. Or he must secretly condone bombing the Pentagon. Or he must secretly degrade low and middle class voters. Making these implicit accusations explicit is a major step toward enlightening people.

I argued then that there is zero proof of these implicit accusations other than the circumstantial evidence that he has some association with Wright, Ayers, and obviously effete folks who could care less about people who hunt and fish. I continued that the people who make these accusations are counting on you to get lost in the aura of guilt they're creating.

Then, If I were Obama, I'd make a speech to on TV with the same tone that Michael Douglas' character had in his role as president in the movie, An American President. Near the end of that movie, he challenged his guilt by association opponent to a debate about character. Obama could say, Either bring on some real evidence against me or stop trying to deceive people.

Furthermore, I'd argue, You're hi-jacking elections. You're grossly deceiving people into making choices based on their vulnerability to the guilt by association flim flam. You're undermining our democracy by creating false choices, by hoodwinking people. Put up with specific charges and evidence, or shut up and find some other way to advance your journalism or political careers.

Do I sound like I'm being defensive, like I'm hiding something. I say to my accusers, Go after me. Find some evidence that I am truly guilty of any of the implied charges. Otherwise, consider that you actually are doing something very wrong. You're hijacking these elections.

Today, TPM's fearless screeder, Josh Marshall, out-did himself in his piece, titled, "Redundant." The title gets a D-; actually I'm being nice about that. But the analysis of the media's reliance on gotcha politics is easily the most helpful I've seen.

He's helpfully characterized the media use of gotcha politics, as an "organized campaign of falsehood, distortion, and smear on the reasoning that is anticipates the eventual one to be mounted by the Republicans." He adds the more troubling justification that Sephanopoulos and others have put forth, that they need to air smears so that primary voters can consider how electable candidates are. The idea hear is that voters need to know that, in the horse race to come, much of what determines the outcome is the relative success of various smears. How far removed from quaifications or the president can we get?! Josh is terrific for having divined and announced that this is the state of political journalism and of campaign strategy too.
 
TPM reported that Hillary adds the idea that trashing a candidate is a good thing as a test of the candidate's ability to stay in the hot kitchen of the White House without having to cut and run. She's converted Obama's campaign for an issues oriented, high-minded campaign into an inability to tolerate the stress of being president. Ohh, what Karl Rove hath wrought.

As I pointed out regarding other writers in my blog, "Goctcha [sic] for Gotchaing: An Empathic View of Gotcha Politics," one senses that Josh is falling prey to the very thing he opposes. He never quite tips into smearing the objects of his criticism, but his criticism only faults rather than fully enough enlightens them. A clue that he's shading into smearing them is that he never offers an empathic view of them.

To solve the problem of gotcha politics does first require the kind of analysis Josh presents in "Redundant." He identifies what's happening, what's going wrong and partly why. But there's not enough of an explanation to lead us enough toward a solution.

I argue that there's a Texas size dead elephant in America that prevents us from most helpfully understanding each other. It's prevailing morality. In this deeply engrained view, it's difficult to go deeper in understanding anybody when the main enforcement tool of morality is in the house. When shame about shameful behavior is lurking in and around a candidate, our brains turn to mush.

David Broder did, as I reported from Glen Greenwald's article on gotcha politics, say that he liked and admired Karl Rove. A distinguished German Jewish writer who was an enemy of Hitler and an unequivocal humanitarian liked and respect Stalin after interviewing him. These gross mistakes should not incline us to fault these otherwise reasonable people. Rather we should try to understand that they are in the grip of a point of view that distorts their thinking. Prevailing morality dupes us into prematurely weighing in on the character of people we know and know of.

Obama's inspiring. What a great guy. Ooops, he was in Wright's Church. What a reverse racist. Ohh, his speech on race was so inspiring and genuinely empathic toward lower and middleclass people. Now wait a minute. There's The Sentence out there, proving that he most likely is a latte drinking, effete snob who could care less about those stupid hunters and church goers.

The idea here is not that we're gullible and stupid. It's that our minds are ruled by prevailing morality's insistence that, when you see or smell bad behavior, you've got to attack it. Your instinct born of prevailing morality is not to understand. It's to shame first and ask questions later.

We can beat up George Stephanopoulos for pandering to the lowest common denominator. We can imply that he's all about red meat and ratings. But we would be better off to admit that we don't really know what's driving him.

It could be that he's just lost, that he can't see the forest for the trees because he drank Rove's koolaid, because, after all, inuendos seems to make so much sense to so many people. I'm rushing to understand George. Actually, we'd have to interview him in depth to understand why he believes that it's good for the country to give air time to the guilt by association and rumors that now dominate campaigns. We need an in-depth analysis that enables George to feel empathized with, not put down.

Roland Summit wrote an article that has been amazingly useful for psychotherapists and their clients. He titled it, "The Accommodation Syndrome." It's about the plight of women, who, after all, have been grossly abused. They've been trivialized, marginalized, and otherwise degraded for being weak, stupid, playing victim, and must worse, and they have a long history of being treated as second class citizens, of which the "class ceiling" phenomenon is just one of many examples.

What's difficult for women to face is Summit's insight that childhood and adolescent abuse sticks. It has a lasting impact that is more and less difficult to work one's way out of depending on the severity of the brainwashing to believe that they deserved the degradation. One of the impacts is to become compulsively angry at men, compulsively in the sense that their anger makes too little sense in some specific instances. You see where I'm going.

There is a hard core of women who support Hillary that many bloggers have recognized but only in passing. I'm trying to focus on their realization that these women explain themselves by saying that it's vital to have a woman president, apparently without regard to the relative qualifications of each candidate.

Of course, they may be right. Maybe it is important to elect Hillary, regardless of her negatives and relatively weak positives in comparison with Obama. Maybe the benefits to our country of having a woman give voice to the concerns of mothers and professional women and much more outweigh the value of Obama. I think that's a formidable argument, the accommodation syndrome notwithstanding. But I think the value Obama brings is so vital that we have to elect him over Hillary.

In my view, Obama is not only a once in a life time candidate. He's unique in American history. Why? It's because of his feeling for people and his ability to express his empathy in intellectually credible ways. His speech on race captured perfectly the feelings of people that no liberal or conservative have been able to grasp. In so doing, he stopped what was becoming an inexorable slide into defeat. The much more important characterization is that be did a near impossible thing, he brought together two normally antagonistic groups, lower and middle class white voters too often degraded as racists and his natural supporters, the people who easily identify with him. This feat, which was foreordained in his work as a community organizer and in the Illinois Senate, is truly unprecedented, not only because he brought them together but because he did so in such and intellectually credible, empathic manner.

Some of us believe that, at every level of conflict--whether regarding abortion rights of the conflict with Iran--"realistic empathy" is the difference that makes all the difference. James Blight of Brown University and many other top scholars agree with this conclusion. Mediators and negotiators rely on it to solve some of the most entrenched local and international troubles. 

Obama truly is a natural, although, like even Mother Teresa and the most empathic psychotherapist, he goofs. We do live in a shaming, blaming world. But the depth and power of his empathy is entirely natural, as many analyses of his life have demonstrated. His mother, you women folks, gave that to him. She was a natural, a deeply empathic woman.

Perhaps feminist values would spread more fully and quickly if Hillary were president. I don't think so. The deepest, most powerful womanly value, the capacity to express transformative empathy even to one's enemies, is in Obama, not Hillary.

Today must be Gotcha Politics Day. Salon.com published Glen Greenwald's beautifully written dissection of the media's dysfunctional love affair with Rovian tactics. And TPM has M. J. Rosenberg's piece on trivial personal attacks along with TPM's lament about last night's gotcha-laden questions from ABC's moderator.

Unless you're steeped in the logic of double-negatives and their effects, it's difficult to notice that these pieces do what they are decrying. Rosenberg calls GotchPol Purveyors "stupid." TPM says the GotchPol moderators of ABC perpetrated "inanity." And Greenwald goes for the black heart of GotchPol, adding to the above list that Rove, Atwater, and other icons of GotchPol along with the media's almost gleeful complicity are destroying representative government. They're distracting us from substantive issues, all because they have no conscience. He might as well call them "evil."

Now I enjoy a good bloodletting as much as anyone, especially this one. I'm a progressive, and I truly hate what Rove has done. But when it comes to trying to understand this stuff, it seems that these kinds of attacks don't cut it. They're just more of the same, albeit a bit more enlightening than the gotchas they're gotchaing.

A clue that something's wrong with these writers' degrading picture of GotchPol is Greenwald's report that no less than David Broder of the Washington Post is guilty of liking and respecting Rove. Say what you will about Broder, it's amazing that he's so taken in. Although his Rove love is scary and makes you want to shake your head and change the subject, it is also a clue to an insight that promises to help us work our way out of our GotchPol malaise.

If a man as educated and highly placed as Broder can fall prey to the deceptions of such a completely transparent GotchPol as Rove, then it must be extremely difficult to discern reality in politics and life in general. Greenwald's, Rosenberg's, and TPM's blindness to their gotchaing in the name of anti-gotchism also makes this point. Perhaps the most compelling example in history of this vulnerability is the case of Lion Feuchtwanger, a German Jew who was an accomplished writer and was listed by Hitler as "enemy of the state number one." He settled in the US and was an obviously compassionate person. You would think he was the last person who would admire Stalin. But that's just what he did after interviewing that genocidal maniac. Stalin privately ridiculed him as a "servile fool."

Again, how can such brilliant and good people be so completely taken in by such obviously treacherous people. 

The underlying problem here will become increasingly apparent if Obama is elected. He is at least implying by the way he empathizes with people who can't stand him that we are mired in a moralistic, shame-based understanding of and method for dealing with problems. More important, he has a compelling alternative.

How are we moralistic? We see a problem, like GotchPol, and we think mostly in categories of right and wrong. And when we see somebody doing something wrong, we pull out our shame guns and start blasting. The worse the offense, the more likely we are to shift into high shame gear. The result? No genuine, problem-solving understanding. As soon as we turn to shaming or blaming, we stop thinking, stop trying to come up with a revelatory insight that will help us transform our lives.

It's important, lest I seem to be caught in the trap I'm outlining, to emphasize that we are helpless, literally unable to do otherwise within our moralistic society, within our deep commitment to prevailing morality. We can do no other unless we have somehow managed by luck to be born or stumble into the lives of particularly empathic people, as Obama was. As is increasingly reported, his mother was remarkably able to put herself in the shoes of "not like me" people.

Obama's speech on race is a model of at least a big chunk of what we need to rise up out of this complicated trap. Although he is no expert on the big ticket fundamentals of empathy, he is a profound empathizer. Just as icons of religion and spirituality have tried to understand their enemies, Obama offered an intellectually credible understanding of people that almost all liberals castigated as racist. His understanding pointed the way to solving the race problem in this country. Once you're up above a conflict, it can seem that harmony can only reliably and lastingly ensue from harmonious, or agreeable, methods.  

It is common to ridicule all psychologizing as either sheer psychobabble or irrelevant to large scale relations. The Realists say it's all about self-interest, which, ironically enough, is a psychological hypothesis offered as a truism. But a movement with no head is emerging in the social sciences to put the lie to that patently moralistic, insular point of view. I feel blessed to have studied under a few luminaries in psychology, all of whom argue that intellectually credible empathy is the difference that makes all the difference when it comes to solving the personal part of any problem, including international conflicts.

James Blight of the Watson School of International Relations at Brown University is one of many top flight academics who are arguing for the use of what he calls, "realistic empathy," in international relations. In his book, Wilson's Ghost, which was co-written by Robert MacNamara, he illustrates in detail how powerful is that approach. That's the same reasoning employed by Obama when he advocates talking to Iranian leaders with no conditions. The simple point is that you can't solve a relationship problem unless you thoroughly understand both parties, unless your fully step into their shoes. To stamp your feet and demand that they change before you minister to them is the height of illogic and tragic relations.

Personal attacks may have their place as angry, one-sided attempts to say a bit of something meaningful and important. But we need to find a way to delve deeper and create understandings that actually contribute to solving our problems. Intellectually credible, or realistic, empathy is a promising alternative.

Actually, I skimmed a few pieces that included some quotes, and that brief exposure also sold me. But my main point here is that Obama is easily the better thinker and more effective speaker. That's been proven many times. Everybody makes gaffes unless their completely canned, and candidates do more and less well from appearance to appearance. But there's no argument concerning his ability to out-think and out-talk Hillary and any other presidential candidate who's been in the race. Am I swooning. Nah! I do this kind of evaluation of intellectual and speaking ability for a living,  and there really is just no comparison.

George's article in the New Yorker must've been written before the recent polls came out. As is now well known, Obama's not, as George claims, "sinking in the pollls." He hasn't partly because many of the people about who Obama was commenting understood him as he intended to be understood and clearly stated in his interview with Charlie Rose in 2004. Packer acknowledged that interview was agreeable, and that alone partly undermines George's argument. Moreover the Pennsylvanians' in question perhaps realize that The Sentence doesn't a candidate's views make. They probably heard of him saying something that no president in recent memory has dared to say. At a recent union event, he came out unequivocally for unions in the most compelling terms. That will float his boat with working class people more than anything he has said.

The weak heart of George's view is that the fatal phrase in Obama's sentence is "antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment." George argues that this is condescending inasmuch as it is a view of Pa'ers that they don't share. As a therapist, I've learned that interpretations that aren't shared by the client only cause problems when they feel like a put down. Some working class peole will feel that way, but the ones I've heard seem mostly politically motivated. They're pro-McCain/Clinton in the first place. Other folks immediately recognize the truth of Obama's statement.

After all, it's just human nature--not some terrible failing--to blame anyone who might at least seem to be at fault when times are tough, when you're being grossly rejected and abandoned by the leadership of this country. Who wouldn't argue that immigrants are taking our jobs away when there are no jobs and they see immigrants with jobs. I resent the hell out of folks in India who are answering all of my desperate phone calls for help with my computer and phone service. More to the point, the concern that immigrants are taking jobs is at least a reasonable first take on the low and middle-class job situation in this country, one that is shared by many people. It's not, as George implies, an occasion for a put down, and Obama didn't make it one. I don't really know if those folks are to blame for the dearth of jobs, and I'm open to other views. But I also sort of like getting pissed off when times are tough. Obama's just explaining that, not putting anyone down for doing it.

Packer adds that "to confuse wedge issues with traditional values is the mark of the high-minded reformer.... It's the kind of mistake one could make only from a great distance...."

He goes on to say that Obama's making each of those voters into "an abstraction." It's tempting to close with the idea that Packer is here doing to the people of Pennsylvania the same thing he's accusing Obama of doing. He thinks he knows what "they" are thinking and feeling. But as I remind readers above, there's no "they" there. There are at least two major reactions to The Sentence. But George's point here deserves comment.

I'd like him to explain how he thinks Obama is confusing wedge issues with traditional values. I think the guy who wrote, What's the Matter With Kansas, may have. But Obama seems clear. For one thing, the wedge issue that Packer wishes weren't mentioned in The Sentence, immigration, is not at all linked with traditional values. And Obama did not mention any other wedge issues. Obama is only saying that jobless people with traditional values are on the side of anti-immigration. Of course, some jobless people may not be. But he did not say that their values determine their stand against immigration. Their joblessness does.

George here seems guilty, as many of us are, of trying to extract far too much from a single sentence and, in George's case, a single phrase. The Phrase just doesn't cut it as a launching pad for the heart of George's indictment of Obama.

I think he is confusing a truly effete position well known in journalistic circles with Obama's view as expressed in The Sentence and then failing to take the step he comes so close to taking. Even though he mentions one corrective to his interpretation, the 2004 interview, he fails to put his interpretation of The Phrase in The Sentence into it's rightful perspective as a comletely unrepresentative interpretation of Obama's overall views and sensibility.

I know that many journalist admire George, because he's a good thinker and writer. But he was wrong on the Iraq War, as he admitted, and he seems to be wrong on the Bitter Blather, as many others have now explained, albeit in terms different than mine.

Here's what he said. "It's not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

He did not, as many people argue, say that these people choose or sustain their beliefs and activities because of economic woes. He only said that they "cling" to those values when, for many years, their economic plight worsens. Admittedly, "cling" is a poor choice of words, only because he doesn't explain it. But his sentence in question does not at all demean their values. 

He's tried to dispel the negative interpretation, but some people just don't believe him. The best reassurance is in his 2004 interview with Charlie Rose, which is easy to find through Google. In it, he explains that, for instance, hunting is a valid, meaningful thing to do. He displayed not a drop of condescension.
 
If you still don't get it, try considering that your understandable prejudice against condescending intellectuals is distorting your thinking, just as effeteoids thinking about working class people is distorted by their prejudices against them.

(For an intellectuals guide to the Bitter Blather, see my post, Maureen Dowd's Doddering Dateline.)

Maureen Dowd showed once again how even smart people can seem like they're on the road to Alzheimerville. Einstein couldn't do simple math, which didn't disgrace him any more than Dowd's latest goof disgraces her. She isn't dottering. She just made a mistake that many people have made.

She said, "Barack Obama showed his elitism, attributing the emotional, spiritual, and cultural values of "lunch pail" Pennsylvanians to economic woes." This is the now widespread misreading of Obama's much flapped single sentence delivered in the dreaded bastion of wingnuts, San Francisco, my home town.

Here's what he actually said. "It's not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

I'm trying to contort his meaning into hers, but I see no glimmer in his words of attributing anybody's values to economic woes. He only said that they "cling" to those values when, for many years, their economic plight worsens despite politicians' most earnest promises to create jobs, etc. He did not say that they choose and sustain those values because of their frustration. Am I missing something here?

If my logic isn't fleshy enough for you, you really should tune into the 2004 Charlie Rose interview of Obama. In that relaxed context, he gets to say more than a sentence. True to his interpretation of his remarks in San Francisco, Obama explains that hunting, for instance, gives genuine, valid meaning to the lives of people who hunt. I am an intellectual who could easily be branded "effete," but I worked side-by-side with those sorts of people in the building trades during my twenties and thirties, and I can elaborate based on first-hand experience and my subsequent insight I acquired in graduate school and 35 years of experience as a counseling minister.

I can explain that hunting is all about being out in nature, free from pressure. We're all dying for that sense of freedom. It's an ultimate value. The killing that some Lefties abhor has many interesting meanings, not the least of which is that it was, for most of humanity's existence, the way we fed ourselves, not an aberrant, crazed self-indulgence. I could go on for hours, because one of my favorite things to do is apply my ability to empathize in interviews of hunters and discover more obviously valid meanings of hunting.

The point here again is that Obama isn't at all effete. As people are learning, his work as a community organizer was all about empathizing with people "not like me." That's what he did in his speech on race. That's who his mother was. That is just the way he is. He's as consistently empathic as a person not rained as a therapist can be, especially when he is focused on getting to know a particular person or group and perhaps not as much when he is answering a question during a stage presentation filled with pressure and time constraints.

Could it be that people like Dowd who either want to side with or actually come from the values orientation in question are and for many years have been simmering about the view they are inferring from Obama's words? They do seem pretty angry about their interpretation of his words and point to the roots of it and how, throughout the past 25 years, both liberals and conservatives have kept it alive. Many liberals do have degrading, much less politely condescending views of this values group.

The aim of the above rhetorical question is that Dowd's misrepresentation of Obama's words amounts to a counter-prejudice surfacing against Obama and other educated people. Like all other prejudicial views, the elitist prejudice against farmers, blue collar workers, and other related cultural groups evokes this backlash prejudice.

I resent it, because, although I sometimes slip and either am blatantly prejudicial or just ambigous as Obama was in San Francisco, I pride myself on genuinely respecting and caring about all types of people, even, for god's sake, sociopaths with whom I work in a parole office. I also understand and, for the most part, tolerate and even empathize with this prejudice. I even sometimes say prejudicial things against "effete snobs," although I call them experts, which I define as "bastards from out of town." I can have an empathic reaction to prejudice against me for being an intellectual, partly because I've lived on both sides of the cultural divide and partly  because my education and professional life as a therapist have made me more rather than less empathic to people not like me. Obama is the same way. He is marvelously empathic to the values group Dowd and so many other people prejudicially defend.

Okay, so she lied about the flying bullets to make herself look good. Then she lied about lying about the bullets. I can almost overlook those kinds of lies, as I did during the Monica scandal. Back then, I was caught up in righteous indignation at the Right Attack Machine (RAM). I can't forgive her for voting for Bush's Iraq War measure. She had no reason to trust him, having known that he was a pathological liar and shill for the zealous and, therefore, destructive Neocons. And the consequences of that strictly political, cynical vote to maintain power are just unspeakable. It's common to feel numb about the deaths that ensued and slide into a "that's just politics" fuzz, but her vote was a horrific transgression that she and her supporters only partly acknowledge. With her stature and alliance with her husband, she could have led opposition to Bush's war measure and forced him to wait longer and dig deeper for the actual facts in Iraq. Somewhere between these two kinds of transgressions is her use of Obama's connection with Rev. Wright and the Bitter Boggle. She's becoming more and more like RAM, the very identity she fought against during Whitewater and Monicagate.

For a woman who presents herself as a liberal, a person who identifies with the plight of the poor and the middleclass, Hillary has become the worst kind of cynical, expoitive politician. In clearly Rovian fashion, she completely degraded Wright and Obama despite knowing that both of them have worked hard throughout their lives on the front lines of the war against poverty. In ways similar to the exploitive maneuvers of RAM, she told us that she would not have stayed in Wright's church, despite widespread votes of confidence for Wright from many black leaders and the overwhelmingly white United Church of Christ, of which Wright's church is a full-fledged member, and despite Wright's ministry to her husband during Monicagate. Whereas Obama turned this cynical attack into an occasion to deeply empathize and inspire, Hillary and many other Americans floundered in their cynicism.

Now she's again degrading Obama, helping to lead us into that dark place, despite knowing from his speech on race that he is fully capable of empathizing beautifully with the people she now says he is condescending to. Obama's 2004 interview with Charlie Rose in which Obama had time to more carefully craft his words was widely available just after the Bitter Boggle erupted, and she could've seen in it the obvious, that Obama's words then were consistent with his current interpretation of his Bitter Blather in San Francisco. He not only respected blue collar Americans but explained how their hunting, going to church, and other life preferences are meaningful and worthy of respect. She also could readily discover, as I have, that all of the people who worked with him in Chicago consistently say that he fully empathized with blue collar people. In sum, she lied, expressing her long-engrained cynicism about politics and America in general.

We expect cynical exploitation from RAM. That's who they are. But we shouldn't lapse into, "It's just politics," regarding Hillary. Cynicism has consequences. It dispirits the public. That kind of leadership demoralizes America. It's a testament to how cynical many Americans have become that she's even in the race. Lying is part of politics, people say, but we've become so completely immersed in it that we don't realize how dispirited and empty we've become.

Obama is trying to lead us out of that bleak state of mind. That's why his voice is so important and, well, great. He's making a spiritual life-or-death difference in this country.

My only criticism of him is that he's too often putting the cart before the horse when he asks us to give up attack politics and focus on the issues. Instead of first calling us to be positive, he should always preface that inspirational theme by helping us see our plight, the malaise that is ruling us. As a prelude to calling us forward, he must help us appreciate what we are blind to, that we are too lost in lies and self-deception. He should do more of what he did in his comments about American's bitterness--tell the truth of how people feel.

It may be that the most important way we feel is our absence of emotion. We're far too dead, or numb, or spiritually lost in our political lives. We don't see how much we've accepted the emotional violence of cynicism and physical violence into our lives. In terms of the great American hymn, Amazing Grace, we have to recognize that we are lost to be found, and Obama is terrific at doing that in an uplifting way. Ultimately, I'm advocating more rather than less of the kind of comments that he made in San Francisco. Perhaps another major speech, a speech about how our deceptiveness is affecting us and how truth in politics can save us.

Bob Johnson, the African American wealthy guy and Clinton supporter, rekindled the embers of Ferraro's semi-famous gaffe. He said she was right to point out that Obama wouldn't have "started out with 90 percent of the black vote" if he was white. Of course, that isn't what she said. She said he wouldn't be where he was contending closely for the nomination well into the primary season if he was white. We'll never know if either one of them is correct, but that's beside the point. The point is that injecting race into the campaign is a cynical ploy, especially in Johnson's case. What other reason might they have for doing that?

To more decisively expose their cynicism,  you have to step into the shoes of  Obama supporters.  My take is that they're responding to  Obama's  message.  I know I am. I could've cared less about  Jesse Jackson's candidacy, because he's a throwback, an angry, disrespectful civil rights warrior. Obama is unique in politics because of his capacity to, as he puts it, disagree without being disagreeable. He's all about deeply empathizing with people who oppose him. That's a step further than any other great American leader has ever taken. If Johnson and Ferraro would only consider this heart of Obama's candidacy and then show how it's not the reason so many blacks and whites are voting for him, they wouldn't seem so cynical.

If these two people can't even bring into their analyses the uniqueness and power of Obama's capacity to empathize even with poor and middle-class white Americans who feel judged as being racist and overlooked relative to African Americans, then it's difficult to take their observations seriously.

While I agree with Josh that Obama's comments about poor Americans' who don't vote their best economic interests, I wish he would've explicated his position a bit more. The Bitter Blather still has legs precisely because no one has convincingly made the argument that he wasn't at all being condescending, effete, etc. That's partly because the three lines of argument on the he-was-condescending side haven't been separated.

Perhaps the easiest criticism to dispel is the one launched by Hillary. She argued that the voters aren't bitter. They're positive thinkers, optimists. To her, the voters should feel put down for being called "bitter." Ironically, she's implying that people shouldn't be mad at the way they're being fleeced by the truly elitist titans of our economy in and around the Bush, and, to a lesser extent, the Clinton administrations. Some compulsively positive people will feel put down, but most ordinary folks do feel as though it's understandable that they're angry. Many voters even think, perish the thought, that anger is completely justified in this case.

The other two arguments against Obama here are fused into one. People say he is degrading voters for clinging, as he put it most recently, "to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations." The first half of the inferred condescension here is that he looks down on people who hunt, go to church, and have other non-effete life preferences. The problem for Obama here is not that he slipped and spewed out his hidden true feelings of superiority to voters, as his harshest critics suggest. Put differently, the problem is not that he looks down on people for hunting and going to church or tractor pulls. The problem is that he didn't in this recent comment thoroughly enough say what he meant. In the 2004 Charlie Rose interview he did. I'm paraphrasing, but he extended his remarks in the calmer setting, saying that hunting, going to church, etc. give people important meaning in their lives. He was not a bit condescending. On the contrary, he celebrated those parts of their lives no less than he celebrates playing basketball and going to his kind of church in his own life.

Let's look for a second at the overall context of his recent remarks. His ability to empathize deeply with people who aren't like him was demonstrated thoroughly in his speech on race that he alone wrote. His comments accurately captured their feelings about race without a hint of condescension; you can't make that stuff up. Moreover, he did, after graduating very high in his law school class, pass up lucrative, "effete" job situations to work for peanuts to help poor people. His mother was very sensitively devoted to the concerns of poor people. This guy has no track record for being condescending about poor people's life preferences.
 
The third concern tucked into his comments is that people have these life preferences not because they mean something to them, not because they're actually meaningful, but because these preferences and the beliefs behind them are escapes from the suffering involved in being poor. But he said nothing of the kind. He said that people focus exclusively on political opponents positions on cultural issues out of abject frustration with politicians' unwillingness or inability to improve the economic lot of poor and middleclass people. They express their frustration that way. The problem with this part of his remark is that it's unexplained. In his very brief remarks, he didn't explain how this complicated, displacement mechanism works. And I don't think he could. It's too complicated. More important, it just doesn't make much sense.

I'd rather say that the economic plans options voters had were too difficult to understand. Based on the details of competing economic plans alone, they couldn't figure out with whom their interests lay. The Democrats, I think, did a poor job of laying out the alternatives. So many voters gravitated to the only bases for trust they knew, the cultural issues. They reasoned, I'm not certain who will improve my financial situation; most likely, it's the guy who shares my values. Now that it's clear that the war is a train wreck and that Bush's economic principles were flawed, people are voting for Obama, often despite clear and dramatic differences they have with him on cultural issues.

I'm a psychotherapist devoted to empathizing with people, and I'm especially sensitive to the condescension that sometimes creeps into my mouth and out into the world. I know that I can't stop it completely and that it can hurt people's feelings. But it would not be fair to call me "effete and condescending." Nor is it at all fair to call this amazingly sensitive politician the same names.

The candidates bowling, hunting, and other distracting pursuits dominate many posts. I understand. Everyone's looking for an edge, and it can be difficult at first to know how influential a bit of stuff will be. 

Meanwhile, back at the war, the "phased withdrawal" position isn't persuasively enough stated. Proponents of that position haven't decisively countered the "bloodbath" and "Mideast instability" fears that still stalemate this progressive proposal. The "phased" half of the title of that position is a reed in the wind. McCain still feels confident calling this Democratic view a "sudden" or "fast" withdrawal, implying that Clinton and Obama just don't get it. They're hell bent to withdraw regardless of the consequences.

In the recent Petraeus/Crocker hearings, Obama tried a new qualifying word, "measured" withdrawal. No one really noticed the difference, and there may not be a substantial difference between "phased" and "measured." He did heavily qualify his meaning, saying that he would not allow a bloodbath or any other dire consequences. However, his qualifications did not convincingly put the lie to the charge that his kind of withdrawal would create chaos. He only said he wouldn't do that, not how he would prevent a bloodbath. The image of a relentless, brigade by brigade pullout over the course of a year or two, still feels like a precipitous withdrawal. And his calls for a "diplomatic surge" seem nebulous.

"Measured" at first did strike me as a real alternative for the bumper-sticker level of political discourse that is much needed to get one's point across. I thought, "He means that, after each brigade is withdrawn, he'll measure the impact of it and deal with that." I inferred that he will be massively working on the reactions to each partial withdrawal. Unfortunately, at this point, his calls for a diplomatic surge are disconnected from the specifics of the withdrawal process.

I drew an analogy between this withdrawal process and how therapists deal with panic and post-traumatic stress disorders, which are roughly analogous to what the Iraqis and their neighbors will be experiencing as the withdrawal unfolds. Their already considerable panic and trauma will intensify. Therapists deal with problems like the fear of flying gradually, in steps. They encourage sufferers to move a bit closer to the feared situation. After each step forward, they stop and talk extensively about clients' reactions, helping them to put to rest fears and sort out the implications of the change they underwent. Therapists call this process, "working through."

The goal of each step forward is to achieve a level of acceptance and mastery that enables the suffering person to take another step. But clients are prevented from taking a new step forward until they have worked through the fear and other difficult circumstances at each level. That rule is what reassures clients more than anything else. They can rest assured that no one is going to plunge them into the most intense versions of their murky feelings. Eventually, the problems associated with getting to the final goal are solved. This gradual process makes sense, and it works.

The difference between this procedure and the Bush/McCain method is that the "therapist" in the progressive view is arguing that, to make progress, you must take clear, unequivocal steps toward the goal of independence. You will only flounder if you don't have clear steps. Petraeus couldn't or wouldn't specify the conditions for withdrawal, or the specific goals of his interventions. He had in mind complex "military geometrics" that no one can relate to. There's nothing in his process that clearly moves the Iraqis toward the final goal. So, as many have pointed out, the Iraqis have "no incentive." I'd rather say that they have too little reassurance that a process is in place that will deal with their fears not just of chaos but of disenfranchisement and, worse yet, a return to dictatorship.

Okay, but what will be an at least better bumper-sticker phrase to capture the process I've outlined. "Phased" and "measured" don't express the all important, reassuring "working through" I think that especially Obama has in mind. I'm considering, "diplomacy infused withdrawal" and "phased diplomatic goals withdrawal" and "phased goals driven withdrawal."  Too clunky, I'm sure. How about "reassurance based withdrawal." I can see this search is going to be like trying to remember a person's name. .