Frank’s Case Book

It has been a hard time for those of us who enjoy popularized histories and historical biographies.  Doris Kearns Goodwin, perhaps best known for Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream and No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, and Stephen Ambrose author of, among many other volumes, Undaunted Courage and Citizen Soldiers were both caught in plagiarizing material.  Most likely these errors were the consequence of haste and sloppiness, rather than malice.  Much worst was the apparently deliberate historical fraud perpetrated by Michael Bellesiles who ended up resigning from Emory University for his misdeeds.  Bellesiles wrote Arming America which won Columbia University’s Bancroft’s Prize for History.  Columbia University’s Trustees later voted to rescind the prize after Bellesiles’s scholarly crime became clear.  On the basis of irreproducible evidence, Bellesiles argued that in colonial America ownership was far less ubiquitous as previously supposed. It was not lost on the cultural elites that such a result could effect our perceptions of the original understanding of the Second Amendment’s guarantee of the “right of the people to keep and bear arms.”  The original credulity of the Bancroft Committee and academia as a whole towards Bellesiles’s book is a testament to its rhetorical convenience to those for whom the Second Amendment is an inconvenient nuisance.

In between the careless errors of Kearns and Ambrose and the malicious ones of Bellesiles falls the deceitfulness of Joseph Ellis.  Ellis was caught by the Boston Globe in a series of self-aggrandizing lies told to his friends, colleagues, and students.  Ellis really spent his military career lecturing at West Point, but he told others not only that he was in Vietnam, but that he was a platoon leader in the storied 101st Airborne Division.  Ellis also claimed that he served on the staff of General William Westmoreland, the American Commander in Vietnam, giving him extraordinary credibility when teaching a course on that era at Mount Holyoke College.  Again, people were credulous about Ellis’s Vietnam claims because Ellis was anti-war in outlook.  The anti-war sentiments of a Vietnam War hero had greater claim to moral authority. For his sins, Ellis was suspended without pay for one year from his endowed chair at Mount Holyoke

And yet, Ellis is a wonderfully gifted writer, who won a well-deserved Pulitzer Prize in 2001 for his book the Founding Brothers: The American Revolutionary Generation.  There is a legitimate argument that Ellis is one of the most knowledgeable historians of the Revolutionary War Era. Despite these credentials and gifts, it is difficult to read Ellis’s new book, His Excellency, about George Washington, without nagging doubts caused by Ellis’s personal mendacity.  Fortunately, Ellis used the opportunity of this new book to return to historical scholarship.

His Excellency, is short (less than 300 pages) and does not pretend to be a comprehensive documentation of the events of Washington’s life and career.  Rather, Ellis tries to see beyond the marble bust vision we all have of and attempts to understand the motivations and outlook of George Washington the person.  Ellis does his readers a favor and resists the modern temptation to devote much time to Washington’s early infatuation with Sally Fairfax.  Instead, Ellis endeavors to understand the apparent contradiction in Washington’s personality.  How does one resolve the dilemma of a Washington having sufficient ambition to acquire a sizable estate at Mount Vernon, to successfully lead a rag-tag army against the most powerful empire of the time, and to become president of a fledging nation; while at the same time resisting the inevitable temptation to become an American Napoleon?

Ellis makes the case that Washington’s ambitions were indeed an important and even a transcendent motivation.  However, Washington’s unique quality was his realization that the approbation of history, rather than the more fleeting admiration of contemporaries, was the higher ambition.  There were at least four important instances when Washington eschewed acquisition of personal power and responded to the greater ambition of the respect of posterity.

1. The successful effort by Washington at Newburgh to thwart a cabal of senior officers from leading the Continental Army to Philadelphia to compel the Continental Congress to pay the troops established the principle of civilian control over the military.
2. Washington retired to Mount Vernon after his military victory over the British in the War of Independence and avoided the rise of an American Napoleon at the cost of democratic rule.
3. The fact that Washington set a precedent by only serving two terms re-enforced popular sovereignty.  This precedent lasted until this century, broken by the four terms of Franklin Roosevelt.  This precedent is now formalized in the Twenty-Second Amendement to the Constitution.
4. In Washington’s will, he distributed his wealth evenly among his heirs.  This guaranteed the dissipation of accumulated wealth and prevented the rise of a Washington family dynasty.  Washington’s legacy was political and institutional not familial.

Washington did not so much resist the temptations of power, but embraced the greater ambition of fathering a nation, a republic.

Ellis described Washington as the “rarest of men: a supremely realistic visionary, a prudent prophet… His genius was his judgment.”  It was most certainly not Ellis’s intention, given his personal Left-ward political leanings, but Ellis evokes a direct, but implicit comparison with the most recent George W. — George W. Bush.  Of course, the analogy like all analogies is imperfect, yet Ellis nonetheless finds the source of Washington’s abilities in his single-minded clarity.  Ellis was describing Washington, but he could just as well have been writing of Bush, when he observed that his unfailing judgment “did not emanate from books or from formal education.”  Rather, “Washington’s powers of judgment derived in part from the fact that his mind was uncluttered with sophisticated preconceptions.”  It is not so much that Washington, in Ellis estimation, or Bush now, is an anti-intellectual know-nothing; but rather they both recognize that clarity and firmness is many times more important than nuance.  For the wise, details are important in developing and implementing decisions, but they can be debilitating when they contribute to confusion rather than clarity or provide excuse for desultory inaction.  Read His Excellency, and understand both George W’s.

The world is full of political predictions that subsequently only provide clear evidence of how very difficult it is to make such predictions in a diverse culture, that is nearly evenly divided. Political predictions from partisans are almost worthless because they are not so much a dispassionate assessment as an attempt to push the electorate. There is something of a bandwagon effect. Those who are undecided may try to go with the anticipated winner. Supporters of the expected loser may become discouraged and unwilling to endure the inconveniences of voting.

On the Saturday before the 2000 election, the consensus of the national polls had the then Governor George Bush ahead of Vice-President Al Gore by about 3%, very close to the current margins in the national polls between Bush and Senator John Kerry. Given the general relationship between electoral votes and popular vote totals and this points spread, I expected a 3% Bush victory in 2000 with a corresponding 80-point margin in the electoral college. This would have represented a relatively close, but still comfortable victory.

Of course, we remember the actual results. Gore won the popular vote by about 0.5%, 48.38% versus 47.87%. Despite an election controversy that went to the US Supreme Court, Bush won the election in the Electoral College by a tiny five votes, 271 to 266.

Looking back at the contemporaneous polls just before the 2000 election reveals a mixed bag of results. See the table below. Zogby is often credited with picking the last minute movement toward Gore perhaps caused by the eleventh-hour revelation of Bush’s drunk driving arrest decades earlier. Zogby nailed Gore’s popular vote percentage on the head. As of this writing, Zogby now shows a movement for Senator John Kerry who enjoys a small 1% lead, but more importantly Zogby sees momentum for Kerry. Zogby did indeed accurately predict the Gore percentage, but significantly underpredicted Bush’s strength. Zogby expected Bush to only have 46% of the vote, nearly 2% less than his actual total. Zogby overpredicted the final popular vote for Nader. In retrospect, perhaps the CBS and Fox polls really did the best giving Gore a 1% margin and calling the election a dead heat, respectively.

	Bush	Gore	Buchanan	Nader
CNN	47%	45%	1%	4%
Zogby	46%	48%	0.5%	5%
ABC	48%	45%		3%
Battleground	50%	45%		3%
Newsweek	45%	43%
CBS	44%	45%
Fox	43%	43%	1%	3%
Wash. Post	48%	45%	1%	3%

This election is so peculiar, in so many ways, that it is almost impossible to generalize from history. However, some factors that argue against a Bush victory are:

• The stock market has at best been even over the last year. Winning incumbents are usually associated with increasing stock markets.
• Although there has always been such leftward tilt to the press, there has been nothing like the efforts of the mass media in this election to drive the people to Kerry. Nothing in memory corresponds to the remarkable credulousness of CBS News in allowing themselves to be duped into using forged documents to question President Bush’s National Guard service. Nothing in memory compares to the blinders the national media has put on about the irresponsible sweeping accusations of atrocities that John Kerry made about his fellow soldiers. Nothing in memory compares to the way the national media have not questioned Senator Kerry’s voting record in the Senate.
• No sitting president since Harry Truman has won an election if during the previous year, he was at sometime losing in the polls. Though he enjoys a small lead in the polls now, in August, Bush was behind in the national polls.
• The election is close and the conventional wisdom holds that undecideds typically break towards the challenger. This would tend to give the edge to Kerry.
• More voters have been registered this year. Polls indicate that Kerry chances improve when registered voters rather than likely voters are tallied. One suspects that a significant number of these new registrants will vote and this will help Kerry.

Other factors that weigh on Bush’s behalf are:

• Americans are loath to switch presidents during war.
• Unemployment is low by conventional standards and people vote according to their personal circumstances.
• The economy has been growing at a rapid pace during the past twelve months.
• Kerry is a Massachusetts Liberal.
• Political models predict that Bush will gain 53% of the vote. This promising prediction is mitigated by the knowledge that such models also predicted that Gore would win the 2000 election by a comfortable margin.
• Bush won the Weekly Reader poll among youngsters. Unlike other, more conventional and rationally constructed polls, the Weekly Reader poll has correctly predicted the eventual winner in every election since it began in 1956. That’s twelve in a row, with no mistakes.
• Betting polls which accurately predicted the recent Australian and California elections pick Bush by a comfortable margin. There is something about betting your own money that forces people to make more dispassionate analysis.

The mean of the polls shows a narrowing lead for Bush. As of this writing, an extrapolation of these polls does not close the gap fast enough to give Kerry an election-day victory. Nonetheless, given the number of newly registered voters, I do not believe that models for likely voters are accurate. They are at the very least untested. Among all registered voters, the polls show a tie, so I suspect that the Kerry will win.

Prediction 1: Kerry by 1.5% in the popular vote and 60 electoral votes. Bush supporters, like myself, should take heart in that my expectation of the popular vote totals was very wrong in 2000.

Prediction 2: Osma Bin Laden and his followers will believe (or at least claim) that the recent tape threatening America, released Friday before the election, was responsible for the Kerry victory. The truth of that assertion will not matter, as much as the perception. Fairly or unfairly, the international perceptions growing out of a Kerry victory would damage the war on terror and that is a very bad thing.

One of the perils of printed punditry is the possibility that words written long ago will serve as definitive evidence of just how little one really knows.   One should always remember the caution of Neils Bohr that, “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.”  On the other hand, some predictions are so easy to make that they provide no usefulinformation.  One can predict confidently now, that on the eve of the upcoming presidential elections, the official position of both the campaigns is that both their respective candidates will undoubtedly win the election.  There are other assertions, like the one to be made here, that are safe since they involve a “what if” assessment that can never be tested. Credibility is not at stake.

There are really only two strong passions motivating people in this election and one of them is not the economy.  Despite some important economic issues, the large deficit, good but not great employment numbers, polls show that most people are sufficiently comfortable with their personal economic situations that the election of an incumbent would not be threatened.

The two motivating passions are the War in Iraq, including its aftermath, and the deep-seated irrational hatred of Bush engendered by the bitter results of the 2000 election that some on the Left still (despite independent counts by news organization) have not accepted. Indeed, there is a line of argument that the latter issue is really the only motivating passion and Iraq just provides a convenient political rallying point.  Let us not presume the latter, because that would require people to be so animated by partisan animus that they would be willing to exploit a war to sate their anger.

The thesis here is the Joseph Lieberman would have been a much more formidable candidate against George Bush than John Kerry, despite the current narrowness of the head-on-head Bush-Kerry polls.  Let it be conceded, that given Lieberman’s  pro Iraq War stand, and his unwillingness to abandon his principled position when Governor Howard Dean excited Democratic partisans with an anti-war stance (unlike the unceremonious flight from pre-war positions of John Kerry and John Edwards), he would never garner the Democratic presidential nomination..

Lieberman would have qualified for the “anyone but Bush crowd.”  Without having to explicitly mention the 2000 elections, as Gore’s vice-presidential running mate, Lieberman could have unobtrusively benefited from the support of those who continue to wallow in the pit of election 2000 victim hood.  For those who hate Bush, Lieberman would have been a more than adequate candidate.

On the more important issue of Iraq, Lieberman could convincingly run to the right of George Bush and assuage the doubts of those whose primary concern is security.  When Bush decided on a plan of attack for Iraq, they could have gone in heavy or light, slow or rapid.  The advantages of going in light are:

• Light forces are more precise, reducing the likelihood of civilian casualties and the creation of large numbers of refugees (500,000 was the erroneous prediction of the United Nations).
• Light forces are faster, reducing the likelihood that Saddam Huessein’s forces could have engaged in a systematic destruction of critical Iraqi infrastructure.
• A large force would have required permission to deploy from Turkey. This would have involved Turkish troops in northern Iraq, exacerbating the tensions with the Iraqi Kurds, our strongest natural allies in Iraq.

Going in heavy would have had the key advantage of more systematically destroying Saddam’s forces.  It might have also meant an earlier destruction of insurgencies in places like Fallujah, that have been a constant problem since the end of the war.  Despite a higher level of destruction and civilian casualties on the front end, going in heavy might have decreased problems in the post-war era.  The strategic decision was a difficult one and reasonable people can disagree.  In hindsight, the advantages of going in light are forgotten, as we pay the costs for this course.  The costs in terms of casualties, refugees, and destroyed infrastructure of going in heavy are not tallied.

Lieberman could now make the claim, (especially in hindsight) that he would have gone in heavier and reduced post-war problems.  Lieberman could have reasonably argued that he would not have been so accommodating to insurgent forces in Fallujah, Sadr City or Najaf. Lieberman would make it easy for those whom the fight against terrorism is a priority to vote against Bush, without that apprehension that Democrats tend to be weak on defense matters.  Lieberman would not be so easily categorized as a free taxing Liberal and libertine on social issues, unconcerned about traditional social values.

The counter argument to the thesis that Lieberman would have been a better nominee is that Lieberman and Bush’s Iraq positions are sufficiently similar that people would not be inclined to switch presidents.  As Truman once said, if given a choice between a Democrat running like a Republican, and a Republican, the people would choose the Republican every time.

However, we are at a rather unique war time position. There remains a general unease about how the reconstruction of Iraq is perceived as going.  Lieberman could have provided a credible alternative to Bush without Kerry’s baggage of duplicity.  Unfortunately for the Democrats, they are plainly too angry to nominate a social moderate with a cogent position on Iraq, perhaps, in some respects, to the right of Bush.  If Lieberman were the Democratic nominee, he would be leading Bush now by double digits and might very well have had sufficient coat tails to regain a significant majority in the Senate.  The politics of hate may or may not cost Democrats the presidential election, but it will probably cost them the opportunity to stop and reverse the Republican electoral trends of recent years.

Being a moderately successful debater at both the high school and college level, makes presidential debates an ambivalent experience for me. On one hand, the competitive juices are aroused vicariously. How should arguments be marshaled? What constitutes persuasive evidence? How can the weakness in our own arguments be explained or at least hidden? How should time for various arguments be apportioned for effective presentation? On the other hand, we must recognize that presidential debates are not debates in the classic sense. The debating propositions are usually ambiguous and ill-defined. There is little chance for rebuttal and no opportunity for cross examination.

It is, therefore, difficult for me to arrive at a dispassionate assessment of presidential debates. The nature and technical flow of the arguments are confused with the simple ethos and likeability of the candidates. Candidates are not only selling their arguments, but themselves. Voters often make an assessment as to the glibness, passion, and affability of the candidates. It is this mix of selling of the argument and marketing of the candidate, I find difficult to separate. Frankly few would want most technically excellent debaters to be president.

By nearly all accounts, Democratic candidate John Kerry bested George Bush in the recent debate. Not only was Kerry smoother, Bush frowned in such a way as to reduce his likeability. In all likelihood, the polls should show slippage for Bush. Since, people have seen Bush for four years they have a fairly fixed opinion of him so the consequences for him are smaller. A similar performance by Kerry would have been more devastating.

However, the victory may yet prove Pyrrhic for Kerry. Kerry was an academic debater and suffers from an affliction common to ex-debaters: the excessive concern for winning the present argument and the arrogance to believe that they can, if necessary, talk in enough circles around others to obfuscate their positions.

Winning an argument is the essence of academic debate. The truth or falsity of the debate proposition is irrelevant. Indeed, the best debaters typically win regardless of which side of a proposition they are asked to argue on. Everything is contained within the content of a debate. No one is expected or wants to make consistent arguments over the long term. What a debater says in the morning is irrelevant to the argument he makes in the afternoon. Debate is about developing rhetorical skill. Rhetorical skill is uncorrelated to the ability to correctly choose those themes and goals for which those rhetorical skills are deployed.

However, consistency and belief are ultimately measured in a campaign. Kerry’s reputation for flip-floppy is partly the result of the academic debater’s instinctive tendency to please the audience immediately in front of him; to win the present argument irrespective of long term consistency.

Early in the primary campaign, Kerry was hawkish on the war because he felt that would play well in the general election. He quickly switched to a more dovish position, when it appeared that Governor Howard Dean was igniting support among Democrats. That is why it is so easy to find contradictory statements from Kerry.

Not long ago Kerry said that Iraq was the “wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time.” Now he says he will persuade allies to join us in pursuing the war. It is even hard for a clever debater to convince allies to join in what Kerry has already so forcefully and categorically characterized as a mistake.

As a measure of his rhetorical skill, in a single response, Kerry was able to say that both no country would have a veto power in preventing actions to defend the United States and at the same time saying some “global test” would have to be passed. These examples represent contradictions that are difficult to sustain.

As forceful and fluent as Kerry’s words were in the debate, they will come into direct conflict with contrary with equally eloquent words he has already spoken. Campaigns are not a debate, where the arguments in the previous rounds are ignored. Kerry has laid the foundation to sustain the Republican argument that Kerry has no fixed position.