In which I extract some hope from the news of the day

I may be following wandering fires, but I thought I picked up a couple of glimmers of hope regarding electoral trends in today's Times.

First up is a factoid accompanying Charles Blow's column. Blow's focus is on GOP voters' attitudes toward media and race. But what caught my eye in the sidebar was the percentage of the electorate as a whole who find the president trustworthy: 61%. That's far ahead of Obama's job approval rating, which is I think* 46-47% . In an era of all-time-low trust in government, 61% seems stratospheric.  If Americans even value trust in elected officials any more, it's got to help him  -- especially as Gingrich and Romney (and their hands-off Super Pac minions) do their vicious uninhibited best to highlight one another's documented lack of integrity and throw in a few gratuitous smears to boot.

The high percentage of Americans who trust Obama is comparable to the percentage who believe he negotiates with the Republicans in good faith -- approximately twice as many as those who believe the reverse. His low approval numbers are mainly an inevitable effect of the anemic economic recovery, perhaps augmented by a perception of ineffectuality that got a boost when he acceded to a no-new-revenues deficit reduction package on August 1. The public supports his "balanced" approach to deficit reduction, the measures in his jobs package, and his proposed means of paying for them, but probably blames him for not be able to get them enacted, as Steve Benen reminds us at regular intervals. Being viewed as a trustworthy conciliator, he therefore has plenty of running room to stage confrontations with Republicans in Congress and issue executive orders advancing progressive policies, as in the payroll tax cut fight, the recess appointment of Richard Cordray, and the order that health insurance plans cover birth control. If he can shore up his image as a tough, successful fighter (see: foreign policy), he will have a character troika: honest, reasonable, tough.  And I doubt anyone but bigots (and perhaps a few far-right ideologues) doubts his intelligence.

Once again, the attacks on Romneycare fall harmless

In this debate, finally, Romney's rivals tried to sustain a collective attack on the health insurance program he designed and implemented in Massachusetts. Someone (Gingrich, I think) charged that it jacked up healthcare costs in Massachusetts, which have indeed risen at faster than the national rate (as they did before the plan was implemented). Someone else (Perry, I think) charged that Romney had held the plan up as a model for the whole country -- rehashing an excision between editions of Romney's campaign book -- and others piled on.

Once again, however, what nobody managed to do was to spell out the extent to which the Affordable Care Act was modeled on Romneycare-- that the national plan borrows the subsidized exchanges composed of private health plans conforming to minimum coverage rules, with the whole structure made economically viable by the individual mandate and the employer mandate.  Romney was again allowed to emphasize that he created a free market solution for the uninsured, though he didn't get around this time to the lie that the ACA is by contrast "government controlled," as if it weren't structured the same way. Gingrich even threw Romney a bone, asserting that Romneycare "wasn't as bad" as Obamacare without detailing how they were different, or similar.

Wherefore base? Bastardy base?

Andrew Sullivan, plumping as ever for Obama and McCain, submits to his own 'base instincts' while worrying about those of the electorate:

The chart above shows the remarkable polling similarities in John McCain's recent primary successes. After a slow decline, at some point late last year, voters sensed he really was their best bet on character, policies and viability. And so the battle now is really one between the worst base instincts of both parties and their most promising candidates for the general election. It's about the defensive figures of the past defending their turf and power against their own parties redefining themselves for the center. I'm hoping McCain and Obama manage to defeat these forces of entropy.

While he has totally bought in to the promise of Obama as a "uniter," Sir Sullivan, as many have noted, has some polarizing tendencies of his own (ya think?). I support Obama, but I recognize that there are plenty of good reasons to support Hillary. And while I admire McCain and have been disgusted by the campaign Romney has run, a large corner of my brain suspects that Romney would be a better president - I think he's ten times smarter than McCain, and intelligence counts for something if not everything.

Sullivan, like too many commentators, has succumbed to the assumption that if voters don't go his way they've gone to hell in handbasket. In the inscrutable mind-heart-gut calculus, many may conclude that Hillary's toughness and Romney's brains are qualities needed in a President. How can Sullivan, or anyone, be certain that McCain won't drive the U.S. off another pre-emptive cliff, or that Obama could handle a world-threatening crisis like, say, nuclear war between India and Pakistan? All of us should trust that the electorate is smarter than we are. Not infallible, but on the whole an effective decision-making engine.

It Takes a Leader: the Creativity of Evil

In Questioning the Banality of Evil, The Psychologist Jan. 2008, S. Alexander Haslam and Stephen D. Reicher bring into sharp relief the danger posed by current American leaders and would-be leaders whose chief appeal lies in fear-mongering and demonizing of real and perceived enemies. Those who execute tyrants' orders (and enemies) are not affectless functionaries but enthusiastic believers:

A spate of books...suggest that very few Nazis could be seen as ‘simply following orders’ – not least because the orders issued by the Nazi hierarchy were typically very vague. As a result, individuals needed to display imagination and initiative in order to interpret the commands they were given and to act upon them. As Ian Kershaw notes, Nazis didn’t obey Hitler, they worked towards him, seeking to surpass each other in their efforts. But by the same token, they also had a large degree of discretion. Indeed, as Laurence Rees (2005) notes in his recent book on Auschwitz and the ‘final solution’, it was this that made the Nazi system so dynamic. Even in the most brutal of circumstances, people did not have to kill and only some chose to do so. So, far from simply ‘finding themselves’ in inhumane situations or inhumane groups, the murderers actively committed themselves to such groups.

How do conditions arise in which such self-selected executors - and executioners - are free to fulfill their potential? When enough people feel threatened enough, demagogues pick up the charge:

we do not interpret the world on our own, as many social psychological models tend to imply. Rather, people are surrounded by would-be leaders who tell them what to make of the world around them...Indeed, tyrannical leaders only thrive by convincing us that we are in crisis, that we face threat and that we need their strong decisive action to surmount it. In the BBC study, participants as a whole may have become relatively more authoritarian, but it still needed active leadership to exploit this and to make the case for a new tough regime. The role of leaders becomes particularly pernicious when they suggest that ‘our’ problems come about because of the threats posed by a pernicious outgroup. In this way they can begin to take the groups with which we already identify and develop norms of hostility against outsiders. Their role becomes even more dangerous when they tell us that ‘we’ are the sum of all virtues so that the defence of virtue requires the destruction of the outgroup that threatens us. These are the conditions which allow groups to make genocide normative and to represent mass murder as something honourable (Reicher et al., 2006).

While Andrew Sullivan finds insight here into jihadist ideological commitment, I'm more concerned about the implications for the U.S. Can you hear the crowds chanting Rudy, Rudy, Rudy? Americans have been badly frightened in the past six years, and the Rovian message machine has kept the fire stoked. Worse, the Bush Adminstration has laid bare the fact that the tissue of statutory and common law in which our vaunted civil liberties are embodied is kept intact not so much by "the consent of the governed" as by the consent of the governing. Our leaders before 43 have for the most part adhered to norms and taboos that have restrained their power. Now, for six years, the executive has imprisoned whom it wishes indefinitely without trial, tortured at will, spied on Americans in violation of the law, and asserted the president's right to disregard laws passed by Congress when he deems doing so essential to national security.

Americans are resilient and seem to be rejecting Bushian fear-mongering at last. If nothing else, we're used to the media skewering our leaders to the point where few of us take their pronouncements at full face value, and Bush at least has not meddled much with freedom of the press. But we've been subject to six years of of intermittent code orange. My fear is that some electoral accident - e.g., a Bloomberg 3rd party run - will throw the election to a dictator-in-waiting like Giuliani or possibly Romney. Romney doesn't seem a thug by nature, just a chameleon. But in his vocal support of torture and absolute executive power we would do well to take him at his word. We need a President who will roll back the executive power grab. Otherwise, dictatorial power is there for the taking.

A Democrat "for" McCain

Financiers, who know how to hedge, often contribute to candidates in both parties. Why not the rest of us? This letter accompanied my contribution today to the McCain campaign:

Dear Senator McCain:

While I will almost certainly vote for the Democratic nominee in 2008, I am contributing to your campaign because I fear for the future of American democracy should a proponent of torture and the destruction of American civil liberties such as Rudy Depends-who-does-it Giuliani or Mitt Double Guantanamo Romney win a major party nomination.

This contribution is to honor your sustained and essential opposition to torture, suspension of habeas, assertions of unlimited executive power, and wholesale flouting of the Bill of Rights. Should you win the Republican nomination, I will rest assured that Americans are not prepared to sell their ancient liberties for a little bit of perceived security.

I should add that I believe that your support of President Bush’s misadventure in Iraq contributed to that disaster; that your campaigning for Bush in the 2004 election helped bring on four more years of assault on our core liberties; and that the ‘compromise’ you green-lighted in the 2006 Military Commissions Act ratified the Administration’s abuses. I am also disappointed by your repudiation of your own principled opposition to the Bush Administration’s irresponsible tax cuts, and by your cozying up to corrupt theocrats.

Nonetheless, on the all-important issue of torture and civil liberties, history will recognize that you stood as the conscience of a party run amok with fear-mongering and power-grabbing.

American democracy cannot function without (at least) two viable major parties. Should you win the nomination, the Republican Party will have taken a giant step toward a return to responsible governance.