Transparency?

A word that's been popular for a while is "transparency." Almost every one who writes an article or book on how to make business and government better cites more transparency as a goal. McCain mentioned it three times last night.

But what do we (and they) really mean by "transparency"? The Wikipedia entry is not too much help, talking a lot about openness and accountability. With government, it points out such positive steps as open meetings and freedom of information acts, and those are good things (too easily circumvented; we're still waiting to hear who "helped" Dick Cheney formulate an energy strategy in the early days of the Bush administration).

The concept gets even muddier when applied to business. Would this financial crisis have been mitigated by knowing exactly what securities were bundled into these shaky mortgage obligations? Perhaps, but how specific can you get? To understand the nature of those underlying mortgages, you would need to know not only the sales price of every house, but the financial condition of everyone who took out those mortgages.

Moreover, much of the value of a particular company comes from its "private" information, the techniques and ideas that they have developed and their competition hasn't. Should potential investors in Google, which, since they're a public company, includes everyone, be informed as to the company's exact search algorithms so they can ascertain the real value of their technology over, say, Yahoo's?

Back to government. McCain can be withering when he accuses Obama of giving away too much information: "You don't tell the enemy what your plans are." Perhaps true, but that's not exactly transparency, is it? Ultimately, everyone is in favor of more transparency for everyone else, but not for themselves. Until each person confronts and resolves that conundrum, calls for transparency seem easy and hollow.

After the fourth debate

Once again, my familiarity with the stances of each candidate keeps me from being particularly surprised by anything I saw. I expected to see the measured, calm demeanor of Obama, and the energetic near-powderkeg of McCain, and I saw that. I expected Obama to be able to lay out his plans in a well-reasoned fashion, and McCain to shoot for one-liners while having less command of the details, and I saw that. (In fact, Obama seemed to understand McCain's own medical plan better than McCain did.)

Not that I wasn't disappointed. Neither man had much to offer in the way of an economic crisis plan; I suspect the real answer is that there is no such plan, that the economy is going to have to work its way through this period, and Washington can only hope to mitigate, not fix, the damage. Let's not forget that the New Deal didn't magically dissipate the Great Depression, it took a world war to do that (and I half expected McCain to offer that as a possibility: "My friends, we're going to invade Iran to perk up the economy.") Neither wishes to confront the reality that their objectives will have to be put on hold as America finds itself unable to pay for their bold plans. When you consider, however, that their advisers (like Larry Summers for Obama) don't see any such deferral as necessary, I probably shouldn't be surprised.

I thought Obama did a better job of pointing out that his plans would have long-term benefits at some short-term cost, though I don't really believe that those benefits as stated will be fully realized. McCain is less coherent here, cutting taxes and freezing spending while adding programs to do certain things. He also seemed to feel that vouchers are a magic bullet for transforming education, citing Washington D.C. as an example, and the schools remain terrible in our capital.

Some of the post-debate pundits said that they thought McCain's performance would energize the base, but that's not what McCain needs right now. With 19 days to go, he's going to have to chop about a half a percentage point per day off Obama's lead; even if he somehow achieved that last night, if only through increased turnout, that momentum is unlikely to be maintained. Unless he can come up with a new financial program that Americans will embrace as the solution to their problems, or find a way to cast doubt on Obama's fitness, it would appear that the race is over. It will be interesting to see which approach he'll take - I fear the latter.

Before the fourth debate

Not a lot to say, though I will be catching the final McCain-Obama contest. I don't think it will represent anything of a game changer, unless Barack brings Bill Ayres and Reverend Wright up on the stage and announces his intention to make them chief of staff and Secretary of Islam.

Obama's probably too careful to make any such major mistake, so McCain shouldn't hold out too much hope that this will propel him into the role of favorite. McCain could still win, though the polls make this less likely all the time, but it's going to have to be the result of convincing Americans that he really is the safer choice.

As they say in basketball, there's no such thing as an eight-pointer, so if you're down, you have to play good ball and come back over a period of time. McCain certainly has to avoid mistakes himself - he doesn't want to give people an excuse to jump - but his campaign cannot count on tonight to put him back in the game. We'll see what happens.

OK, now... - 1/7/08

[I've had reason to reconsider my absolutist position on libertarianism, though I think it is still a long way from becoming mainstream. I'm glad that the party is discussing what it wants to be in a realistic way, but escaping "fringe" status will be hard.

The rest of this post holds up well. The two candidates we have are unwilling to confront our problems in an adult manner, pandering to the mass electorate instead of reexamining issues in the light of reality.]

I want to follow up on my Saturday comments about Ron Paul. Again, I do not support his "philosophy" (libertarianism is arbitrary and unrealistic), but he reminds me of, well, myself.

I'm a software developer with an MBA who has worked in quite a few industries on different problems. While I don't profess that this background grants me great wisdom (just a little, maybe), it does allow me to comment on things from a fairly broad perspective. I've seen various issues arise, and seen (and participated in) various solutions, some of which have worked better than others.

So, in a meeting, I'm frequently going to be the person bringing up the larger issues ("if we want to support the needs our customers have, we will have to restructure the database access to allow users to query it directly"). A huge proportion of the time, the response, from people ostensibly concerned with the same situation, is stark uncomfortable silence, followed by, "OK, now..." ("what color should the splash screen be?", a topic which then consumes the rest of the hour).

I don't think I'm particularly strident in bringing up these matters; quite the contrary, there are people close to me who say I'm far too quiet and unassuming. What I think is happening is that the room is simply not prepared to discuss such things, no matter how true or significant they may be. It takes a long time for most people to accept that the world is not the way they want to assume it is, that the status quo may be downright wrong.

From my standpoint, however, the worst thing is not that the problem is going to go on, possibly fester, until it becomes so obvious that change is needed that action is finally taken. (Managers, who ought to be taking the longer-term view, tend to be the leading proponents of the conservative, backward-looking approach.) That should bother me the most, but I'm human, and what frustrates me is the is-he-an-alien look that the other people tend to have before moving on to another, far less critical, issue. I want to go Close-ian on all these people who are neglecting what ought to be a major part of their responsibility ("I'm not going to be ignored, Dan").

And this is Ron Paul in a meeting of candidates.

Does terrorism against the West result from the actions of the West in Muslim countries? Does our "occupation" of holy Saudi Arabia inflame anti-U.S. passions (and "they asked us to be there" is no defense; many Muslims feel that the sheiks are as bad in their decadence and embrace of Western ways)? Is our historical interference in their politics a rallying cause? Do our actions come out of a need to prop up a failing, petroleum-based lifestyle?

These are valid issues to discuss, and discussing them would seem to be extremely pertinent in the changed post-9/11 world. (An interesting book on this is Imperial Hubris by intelligence official Michael Scheuer; regardless of how you evaluate his ideas and solutions, it struck me as an important contribution to the literature.) Being simplistic would seem to be the worst thing we could do.

Yet it is exactly what the candidates do. Ron Paul is trying to bring up these issues, albeit in a quasi-lunatic style that does not serve him well. And he gets the look (particularly from Romney, who strikes me as a supercilious smarm-master), that look that says we're not just going to disagree with you, but that you're insane to try to discuss such things.

But we have to discuss such things if we're going to reach a long-term accommodation with Islam. Sound bites like "they hate us, they hate our way of life" may sound tough on the stump, but will not assist the next President in actually engaging the problem. We all fear terrorism and the uncertainty it brings to our lives, but reducing the causes to individual pathology will not illuminate the situation, nor will it lead to a solution.

So I wonder how frustrated Ron Paul is getting, as he tries to be the adult in a room of intellectual children. I suspect that Paul's support, which has surprised a lot of pundits, comes from people who suspect that the issues we face are more serious and complicated than the other candidates are letting on. Blathering on about change is meaningless unless the change is meaningful (and kudos to Huckabee for at least acknowledging that), and meaningful change should only result from a deep understanding of the forces involved, not from focus group-tested, simplistic slogans.

The most watched ... ever

[Note: this seems, at the beginning, to be a sports post. It really isn't, so hang with it for a minute.]

Sports Illustrated has an interesting book excerpt in the current issue about the NFL championship game of 1958. This game matched the Baltimore Colts against the New York Giants, it went to overtime, and has attained near-legendary status:

This was the game that launched pro football into the stratosphere of billion-dollar franchises and multimillion-dollar player salaries. With 17 future Hall of Famers on the field and on the sidelines, it was watched by a TV audience of 45 million, the largest ever to witness a football game to that point. It remains in the memory of many sports fans.

[The forthcoming book is The Best Game Ever, its writer is Mark Bowden, the author of Black Hawk Down, and the excerpt is a good one. It focuses on Colts receiver Raymond Berry; if you have any curiosity as to how a receiver and quarterback develop the "mystical connection" that we've read about many times, you'll get a flavor of that here.]

I'm a bit young to remember this game, but the statements in the quote above were part of the commonly-accepted lore of football as I grew up. This was the game that made the NFL what it is today, served as a springboard for the business-ification of sports in general.

The main point that is mentioned is the TV audience, the unprecedented 45 million who watched the game and propelled it into the national consciousness. The excitement of the game and the high level of play hooked a whole generation of people on pro football, luring them away from the popular sports that prevailed at the time (college football, baseball, horse racing, and boxing).

There's a problem there: those 45 million people had to tune in before they knew how exciting the game was going to be. For the game to have created interest in pro football, the viewers would have had to know the game was going to overtime, and that 17 Hall of Famers were playing.

I'm not trying to discount a couple of other factors. It is at least theoretically possible that fewer people were watching at the beginning and, as it became clear that this game was going to be thrilling, viewers called other people ("Turn on your TV, Harold, this is great") and built the audience. Another idea is that there is a little causality problem in the writing, that people tuned in casually and became hooked by the excitement, so this game built the future audience.

I can't evaluate those two things, I think the first is a small effect, the second more plausible, so I still think there is something misleading about the common statements; there was already a growing interest in the game, people were already fascinated enough to turn it on. It may have been a catalyst for the growth of the NFL, but I don't see it as "the cause." (Another factor: the growth in number of TVs was so high during the '50s that the audience would have been higher, even if interest stayed constant.)

What does this have to do with politics, you ask? One of the defenses of last week's Democratic debate is that it was the most-watched of the debates during this primary season. Therefore, despite the minority of wonks who wanted more issue-oriented questions, viewership numbers prove that flag pins and Bill Ayres are important to voters.

Such nonsense. People had to make the decision to watch the debate based on their interest before they turned on the TV. To believe that George and Charlie asked the questions that America wanted asked requires us to believe that 10.7 million people somehow guessed what those questions would be.

Yet many people have written that the ratings will lead to more such questioning in the future. We're to believe that other broadcast outlets will look at the ratings and up the "gotcha" factor in future debates. And they probably will, given that logic doesn't seem any more part of the repertoire of newsrooms than anywhere else.

But, we can still argue to the contrary of what I've written if there was an increase in viewership from one hour to the next, as people got wind of the thrill-packed Reverend Wright questioned. No, the ratings actually went down 4% from the first hour to the second. Some of that may be the Idol factor, but we are still left with the basic precept that the ratings prove nothing about how much people liked the questioning. Those who claim otherwise are either trying to spin the outcome or trying to find false significance, whether they're trying to justify ABC's questions or the eternal importance of a football playoff game.

The debate (again)

I was going to leave it alone, really I was, but then I read Ross Douthat's defense of last week's debate in The Atlantic. His essential point, while far better expressed than David Brooks was able to do, is that the questions of the first 52 minutes "matter because they're personal," because they reveal the inner thoughts and feelings of people to whom we are granting extraordinary power. Douthat believes that specific policy proposals may not matter so much in the long or even medium term (presumably because situations change, new priorities arise), but that trivial-seeming items such as Bush's inability to remember the names of world leaders in 2000 actually end up disclosing important truths about the candidate's ability and direction.

There are essentially two objections to this line of reasoning, I think. First, and it's something that has been missed by a lot of defenders of Charlie and George, most rational people haven't objected to any specific question that was asked (I don't profess to have read every one of the thousands of comments that were posted at ABC, but I saw a good sampling). The problem most of us had was that they spent 52 minutes on things that were not very important. If the debate had been 8 hours long (and, heavens, I'm not advocating that), maybe it's true that we could have wandered through the thicket of who-knew-who-when for close to an hour. But, at a time of profound national challenges, it was irresponsible to spend close to half the time on such things.

Douthat's main point is better reasoned, but I still think it comes up short. The problem is that it is pretty much impossible to figure out which moments have symbolic resonance. It's easy to look back now and claim that Bush's name problem implied that he would be indifferent to the opinions of others, or that his speech at Bob Jones University implied that he would be all too beholden to the Christian right, but that's picking out a couple of events. These campaigns are so long that anyone could probably find events to support whatever interpretation is desired.

I picked Douthat's Bush examples, but he does find a couple from the other side of the aisle, but I don't think that fare any better. He cites Hillary's name changes as evidence of her "echt-feminist principle and political opportunism." I might agree with that now, but, at the time, it could have been seen (and was) as a demonstration of her responsiveness to social norms; had subsequent events been different, the deconstruction would be too.

My point is that, unless this reading leads us to an unequivocal conclusion, we can only get hints from these kinds of actions, and this can be immensely misleading. I don't know how close Obama is to Bill Ayres; my sense of the importance of this is colored by my previous feeling toward Barack, and he's not likely to say anything which will change that (oh, if he had said he felt that Ayres' actions were great and wonderful, I might blink, but is that going to happen, and should ABC be circling around and hoping so?).

I said much the same thing in my review of Jacob Weisberg's book (also cited by Douthat). Weisberg's thesis that Bush's actions can be explained in terms of his family dynamic is fascinating, likely true, but, unless it gives us a way to anticipate what he will do, it has little current (but great historic) value. Whether a candidate wears a flag pin or not falls into the same category, it implies anything you want to believe, and, thus, nothing.
*****
An additional note: I wouldn't have been satisfied even if the ABC boys had asked two hours of questions of substance, because they would still have been framed and constrained in the usual ways. I would love to see the moderators ask larger questions, questions that get at the heart of the philosophy of the candidates. It would be far more potentially useful to hear the answers to questions such as, "What will be your Administration's philosophy about Europe?," or, "What do we tell our children when they ask what career they can go into?" I'm sure any thinking person can come up with quite a few more, and they would have a chance to reveal something about the candidates that doesn't come verbatim from the stump speech.

OK, now...

I want to follow up on my Saturday comments about Ron Paul. Again, I do not support his "philosophy" (libertarianism is arbitrary and unrealistic), but he reminds me of, well, myself.

I'm a software developer with an MBA who has worked in quite a few industries on different problems. While I don't profess that this background grants me great wisdom (just a little, maybe), it does allow me to comment on things from a fairly broad perspective. I've seen various issues arise, and seen (and participated in) various solutions, some of which have worked better than others.

So, in a meeting, I'm frequently going to be the person bringing up the larger issues ("if we want to support the needs our customers have, we will have to restructure the database access to allow users to query it directly"). A huge proportion of the time, the response, from people ostensibly concerned with the same situation, is stark uncomfortable silence, followed by, "OK, now..." ("what color should the splash screen be?", a topic which then consumes the rest of the hour).

I don't think I'm particularly strident in bringing up these matters; quite the contrary, there are people close to me who say I'm far too quiet and unassuming. What I think is happening is that the room is simply not prepared to discuss such things, no matter how true or significant they may be. It takes a long time for most people to accept that the world is not the way they want to assume it is, that the status quo may be downright wrong.

From my standpoint, however, the worst thing is not that the problem is going to go on, possibly fester, until it becomes so obvious that change is needed that action is finally taken. (Managers, who ought to be taking the longer-term view, tend to be the leading proponents of the conservative, backward-looking approach.) That should bother me the most, but I'm human, and what frustrates me is the is-he-an-alien look that the other people tend to have before moving on to another, far less critical, issue. I want to go Close-ian on all these people who are neglecting what ought to be a major part of their responsibility ("I'm not going to be ignored, Dan").

And this is Ron Paul in a meeting of candidates.

Does terrorism against the West result from the actions of the West in Muslim countries? Does our "occupation" of holy Saudi Arabia inflame anti-U.S. passions (and "they asked us to be there" is no defense; many Muslims feel that the sheiks are as bad in their decadence and embrace of Western ways)? Is our historical interference in their politics a rallying cause? Do our actions come out of a need to prop up a failing, petroleum-based lifestyle?

These are valid issues to discuss, and discussing them would seem to be extremely pertinent in the changed post-9/11 world. (An interesting book on this is Imperial Hubris by intelligence official Michael Scheuer; regardless of how you evaluate his ideas and solutions, it struck me as an important contribution to the literature.) Being simplistic would seem to be the worst thing we could do.

Yet it is exactly what the candidates do. Ron Paul is trying to bring up these issues, albeit in a quasi-lunatic style that does not serve him well. And he gets the look (particularly from Romney, who strikes me as a supercilious smarm-master), that look that says we're not just going to disagree with you, but that you're insane to try to discuss such things.

But we have to discuss such things if we're going to reach a long-term accommodation with Islam. Sound bites like "they hate us, they hate our way of life" may sound tough on the stump, but will not assist the next President in actually engaging the problem. We all fear terrorism and the uncertainty it brings to our lives, but reducing the causes to individual pathology will not illuminate the situation, nor will it lead to a solution.

So I wonder how frustrated Ron Paul is getting, as he tries to be the adult in a room of intellectual children. I suspect that Paul's support, which has surprised a lot of pundits, comes from people who suspect that the issues we face are more serious and complicated than the other candidates are letting on. Blathering on about change is meaningless unless the change is meaningful (and kudos to Huckabee for at least acknowledging that), and meaningful change should only result from a deep understanding of the forces involved, not from focus group-tested, simplistic slogans.

The nation turns its eyes to Granite

Tonight's debate was interesting, though the post-coverage, both on ABC and on Chicago local news, was reductive and disappointing (was George watching, to think that Fred Thompson was strong?). Just a few impressions late at night.

The Republicans are a tired bunch, discussing yesterday's issues without engaging any of the real challenges we face. Giuliani's tough-guy act is tired and Bush-esque. Romney is strangely devoid of passion for the issues (which probably comes from his management consulting background - every problem is equivalent to any other, as long as you get paid for coming up with an answer). Thompson seems to be auditioning for a production of Inherit the Wind. McCain, while quite energetic for a man of 71, didn't seem to have anything new to offer.

For my money, the best in terms of actual performance were Ron Paul and Mike Huckabee. I couldn't vote for either one, but both were engaged and seemed to try to talk about matters of significance.

Ron Paul was the only candidate who tried to bring up larger questions, such as the extent to which Islamic hate comes from our own actions, and how much economics has driven our behavior in foreign policy. But his libertarianism (a philosophy I consider sub-sophomoric) and his loud guy on the street corner manner will forever consign him to the fringe (he's essentially the Republican version of Kucinich). However, that he has a philosophy as opposed to a laundry list of focus group-tested sound bites distinguishes him.

Huckabee has a remarkable style, soft-spoken and so reasonable. He's been characterized as an extremist, but he appears on talk shows and in the debate as a rational thoughtful man whose positions just happen to conflict with the vast majority of Americans. This will ultimately defeat him, but he may continue to do a lot better than people think.

On the Democratic side, Richardson had the relaxed mien of someone who won't win and knows it, Obama was rational and measured (if a little too much at times), Clinton had some hysterical and shifty-eyed moments, and Edwards seemed to have the passion, especially in the second half, and thus, for me, came off the best of all ten.

Overall, I was amazed that there was not more discussion about the economy (one presumes the result of ABC and WMUR's choice of questions, though the previous debates that I've caught have not been heavy on financial issues either). Nothing is more important to the average American than their future and that of their families, and that was just elided over as if it was irrelevant (as opposed to the endless parsing of the word "change," which everyone supports).

I may have more to write as I reflect on this later, but that's enough for now.