A couple of days ago in the Jolt, I wrote:
Part of me marvels that so many still find [President Obama] so likeable, and I can’t help but get the feeling that a lot of people are wedded to the notion that the first African-American president of the United States would be a healing, wise, visionary statesman, like the second coming of Martin Luther King, Jr., instead of an over-promising, under-delivering, self-pitying narcissist.
Stuart, one of my regulars, writes in:
I suspect the truth lies between these extremes. I suspect that people are wedded to two complementary notions:
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That the first African-American President of the United States would fall within one or two standard deviations from the mean of all Presidents — that is, he would be basically competent at the job and might even better than the average of all the white guys that preceded him, either because he would have something to prove or because an African-American might bring something new and different to the office.
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That they themselves are capable of making good choices in political leaders and would therefore never vote for a complete incompetent.
The two notions are mutually reinforcing: no one wants to admit having made a colossal mistake about who they voted for, especially not if admitting that mistake also calls into question their own ideas about racial equality and affirmative action. If part of their decision-making in 2008 was, “Let’s give the Black guy a chance: what’s the worst that can happen,” then admitting that what has happened is worse than they could have dreamed before the election is a threat to their belief system, because it’s evidence that letting skin color stand in for other objective criteria of experience and capability was a bad idea.
Yes, this is one of the challenges for Republicans in this cycle. I wonder if we’re seeing a bit of the “sunken costs” phenomenon on Obama, in that folks invested so much of themselves emotionally in him throughout 2007 and 2008 that they feel that the only way to make that emotional investment “pay off” is to stick with him until fortunes turn around for Obama (and the country).
Of course, as the Wikipedia summary notes, “Sunk costs greatly affect actors’ decisions, because many humans are loss-averse and thus normally act irrationally when making economic decisions.” Like a gambler convinced that his next hand will be a big winner, Obama fans may look at three years or more of disappointment, scandal, and economic hard times and be convinced that a big turnaround and payoff is just around the corner . . .
I think a large amount of it is the development of the idea of a "magic negro" along the lines of most of the characters Morgan Freeman plays. White people from the Was a Hippie to the Remember the Soviet Threat age have been taught to have an inordinately positive reaction to a clean, well-spoken black man.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI thought the same thing, with both Richard Brookhiser's NR column "The Numinous Negro" and the Paul Shanklin "Barak the Magic Negro" parody coming immediately to mind.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseIf you are suggesting popular culture is pretty much responsible for the positive ratings despite disasterous results, would have to agree.
How many books and movies feature the disadvantaged but noble black man overcoming built in and oppressive discrimination to achieve the happy ending? You know the Obama movies of the future write themselves. Too bad most can't figure out liberty and the economy are not subject to Obama's Hollywood script.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseIt would seem that the Obama campaign is consciously choosing to play to the sunk cost dilemma, suggesting that the project is not complete.
I think the trick for the GOP will be to make the argument not to abandon the project, but that, given Obama got everything he asked for, the project IS complete, and it was a failure.
Whoever is elected in 2012 will have to start something brand new. Do you trust Obama to be that guy?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThanks, Jim! One of the most depressing things I've read recently. No, no don't sugar coat it. You're right, just tell it like it is.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseIf your "sunk costs" theory is right, Jim, we're all screwed. Re-electing a proven failure to a second term, simply as a means of affirming one's initial decision, will be ruinous.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseUnfortunately, if people voted rationally, Obama never would have been elected in the first place.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThis strikes me as just an explication of one of the many reasons that an incumbent has an advantage. People who vote for anyone - black, white, messianic or utterly human -- tend to want to reaffirm their prior choice until given a reason to do so. What I guess I can't see is why their attachment to Obama should be any greater than any other politician they thought would do a good job. If they realize he does a bad job, they are inclined to choose someone else. If they don't think he did a bad job or that the results weren't his fault, they'll find a reason to reaffirm their last choice.
Am I missing a deeper point here?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThe difference is the degree of emotional investment. I don't think there was as much personal stake in, say, Bill Clinton's supporters, as there was in The Lightworker, as one pro-Obama pundit called him.
I like the gambler's fallacy analogy Jim makes: Did you bust on that last double-down? Better go all in this hand!*
*(Can you go all in in blackjack?)
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseMarque managed to sneak in an interesting word:
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"messianic". How many times would THAT word apply to: Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, to take the presidents of the past 35 years excluding Obama? When your outlook has a quasi-religious overtone, or is as explicitly religious as Oprah Winfrey and others were about Obama in 2008, it is all the more difficult, if not impossible, to realistically assess the first 4 years of a presidency. "Changing one's mind" in that context amounts to a kind of heresy or apostasy, rather than a purely intellectual judgement. So Marque, via that one word (messianic) reveals that he too understands the "deeper point".
You all need to get a grip and avoid the constant assumption among many conservatives that Dems (and Indies, and some Reps) voted for Obama as a kind of affirmative action "because he's black."
People voted for Obama because they thought he was qualified (and I still do, by the way -- I think the guy is highly intelligent, hard working, etc.) and had the right policies.
Note that even in the primaries Dems didn't just vote for Obama "because he's black" -- he got a little over 50% of the vote against Clinton. Nor have Dems *ever* just voted in any numbers for a candidate "because he's black" -- just look at Jesse Jackson, and others. They lost, handily. (And by the way, it's also a well-worn fiction around these parts that Obama gets essentially all of the black vote just because he's black. If you look at past elections, Clinton and Kerry got almost all of the black vote too. It's because African-Americans have for several cycles voted almost as a bloc for Democrats -- Obama didn't change that, though he may have gotten greater numbers of black Americans to go to the polls.....)
This idea that Obama is utterly unintelligent, radical, etc. is all just a convenient fiction for you all. You'd like to believe it, because if it's true, then it's so much easier for you to imagine beating Obama in the next election.
But if you were right we'd have seen Democratic nominee Jesse Jackson *years* ago. And we would've seen Obama march to the nomination with hardly any competition. Neither of those things happened. (I feel like saying: Think, Republicans! Think! Don't just assume based on your own electoral and other biases.....)
Still, don't let me spoil your imaginary world of Democratic (and other) automatons voting based purely on skin color -- maybe that, among other things, will help us beat you next November! :-)
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI think you're wrong, but in an intelligent, constructive way, so you deserve a constructive response :).
I think it's easy to focus on Obama's race when determining why people were so emotionally invested in him as a candidate (something perhaps Jim is guilty of). I think many voters were so fed up with Bush II that they were looking for a candidate who was as different as the sitting president as possible. And here's Obama: smooth-talking where W was awkward, young-ish where he was old-ish, a diplomat where he was a sabre-rattler, and of course an urbane black man where he was a Texas Good-Ol'-Boy. That he was a relative novice in politics actually helped him in a strongly anti-incumbant political season. A truly historic, transformative candidate, unlike any we've seen!
That he turned out to be both more left-wing and less efficacious than advertised (and I think his policies, the prolonged economic situation under his presidency, and his polling among independents bear this out) will serve to take a lot of the shine off of his supposedly transformative political mien. The emotional buy-in Jim cites is probably real, but it won't be as big a factor as he states.
On an unrelated point you made on race: you're right that black support wasn't that much different for Obama as for other Democratic candidates as a percentage of black voters. The difference in 2008 was that black voter turnout was much higher than it had been previously, no doubt in part to bolster the chances of seeing the first black president serve. Conventional wisdom is that black voter turnout will subsume to normal levels in 2012.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI think Vonnegut is twisting it a bit: you seldom hear even conservatives say that Obama is unintelligent, let alone "utterly unintelligent". Rather the question is: to what effect has Obama used that intelligence over the course of his adult life? It's no secret that ambition plays a role in highly successful politicians, but one HOPES that along the way (ie as part of their career climb), they've developed expertise in one or more areas of policy (via membership in committees/subcommittees if in Congress, via some analogous administrative function if they were governors, mayors etc.), a sense of balance, a skepticism about rhetorical 'solutions' to complex problems. Yet Obama was, by all accounts, a mediocre and decidedly non-bipartisan US Senator for four years. For me, the signal moment of the Obama-McCain debates was when the subject of Afghanistan came up and Obama professed recognition of the vital role that Aghan policy was playing (and would play) in the overall anti-terrorism effort. This prompted McCain to ask (paraphrase) 'then how come you never once held subcommittee hearings on Afghanistan in the Senate, as chairman of the pertinent subcommittee?'; to this there was no substantive response from Obama. Which led me to ponder: okay, why DIDN'T he hold hearings? The obvious answer was: he had been running informally for president since his 2004 Senate campaign and if he had held hearings on Afghanistan, those might have provided soundbites that indicated a position not far from the dreaded Dubya's on Afghanistan (surges, ya know!). It wasn't in Obama's quite self-conscious career interests, so it wasn't done (the hearings weren't held).
I agree with Vonnegut that it wasn't completely because Obama was black that he got such passionate support, but a combination of that factor, plus his youth (another illogical element IMHO), his cool eloquence (glibness, I would say), and his insistence that everything was Dubya's fault.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseTelling his target audience what they wanted to hear.
Obama is incompetent. He really is. I also don't think he is that smart. There is some reason he won't release his transcripts. It probably is because he either got loads of C's or he took many gut classes.
PS. Obama got a much higher percentage of the black vote in the Dem primaries than Clinton did, relative to their overall totals. He received 85% of the black vote total in the Dem primaries.
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Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseSo, you think a senator who had the most far-left voting record in that body, who had served less than half of his freshman term before running for president, who had zero legislative accomplishments, who had a history of dubious relationships with radicals, and was extremely gaffe-prone off-teleprompter ... would have been a viable presidential candidate if he were white?
Really?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseSports commentators have in the past questioned the motives of teams that fire black coaches after only a couple of seasons. Perhaps voters are anticipating recriminations of the same kind and don't want to face them: "If you don't give Coach Obama 8 years to turn this team around, which is what WHITE presidents get, you're racist."
What's frustrating is that you know liberal lurkers are reading this and thinking, "Yeah, man, that's right."
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseIf we looked at the first black mayors or governors in the past, most were totally over their heads in the job. The second black mayors had to be elected on a more performance than myth level.
Examples: NYC Mayor Dinkins, Chicago, Harold Washington
Same goes for Hispanics:
So Obama got enough of the white liberal guilt vote to eclipse any questioning or performance issues. Not enough to get a second term
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI do think this is a real phenomenon -- Obama "should not" get reelected, but then stock market bubbles "shouldn't" happen either. But human psychology is what it is -- it's a bit of a "madness of crowds" thing.
I also wonder if we won't see a Wilder effect in this election because of it -- where lots of white Dems say they will vote for Obama (because it's the socially acceptable response AND "sunken costs" of having voted for him once), but then don't follow through. This could even happen moreso with the black vote, though "Wilder effect" would not be the proper term for it (and I think black voters would be more likely to stay home than cross party lines.)
Which is to say "sunken costs" might just be hiding some of Obama's weakness rather than a phenomenon that will save him at the last minute.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseTo further your stock analogy, many investors don't like to sell investments at a loss, because it makes them face up to the fact that their initial thought process was wrong. I think it is the same with moderate Obama supporters. It must be hard for them to face up to the fact that he did such a great job of bamboozling them. The liberals will go to the mattresses for their guy. It doesn't matter what the facts are. The key is to make the independents realize that they made a huge mistake in 2008.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThe idea that Barack Obama is in trouble with his base is one of the great political myths of 2011, although I'm glad so many Republicans are buying into it.
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