Another Election Day is soon upon us!

I won’t believe the Democratic majority will be utterly demolished until it happens. I won’t I won’t I won’t.

One of my favorite posts, from just before the inauguration (has nothing to do with politics or elections, I just wanted an excuse to dig this bit up):

Call me a damned sap, but my favorite piece is “Parenthesis” (the 1/2 chapter…what makes a chapter half a chapter?).  This is Barnes’s essay on love.

On the expression “I love you”, Barnes says of the French version, “Je t’aime”: “The grammar is also one of reassurance: with the object positioned second, the beloved isn’t suddenly going to turn out to be someone different.”  So true!  What sensible fellows those Frenchmen are.

This, I think, is my favorite metaphor (for the ephemeral nature of love) because it’s not only so true, but so unexpected.  Bleak.

A photograph develops in a tray of liquid…  We slide the photo quickly into the tray of fixer to secure that clear, vulnerable moment, to make the image harder, unchippable, solid for at least a few years.  But what if you plunge it into the fixer and the chemical doesn’t work?  This progress, this amorous motion you feel, might refuse to stabilize.  Have you seen a picture go on relentlessly developing until its whole surface is black, its celebratory moment obliterated?

Finally, a discussion of the brain v. the heart (rationality v. sentimentality):

Put the heart beside the brain and see the difference…  The brain looks sensible…  You can deal with the brain, as I say; it looks sensible.  Whereas the heart, the human heart, I’m afraid, looks a fucking mess.

I picked up a free book!

Before one suspects that I’ve forgotten I’m in Paris, a Paris update. Shakespeare and Co. had a basket of free books at the front of the store 🙂  That really is such a lovely store–the free FUSAC in front of Shakespeare helped me find this apartment! I’m quite fortunate, too. My Japanese friend has been on the apartment-search for three weeks now.

As mentioned, I picked up The Invasion Handbook by Tom Paulin from Shakespeare and Co. It’s shows just how little I know about the origins of World War II. Paulin covers the events leading up to World War II, starting from the Versailles Treaty in 1919–all in 200 pages. How? Comme ça:

Presidential Decision-Making, Part III

And just a bit more, then I really will (eat dinner) then study some French.

Ryan Lizza on the hapless Tim Geithner:

At the beginning of this year, Timothy Geithner seemed like the Administration official most likely to soon be spending more time with his family… Geithner’s nomination as Treasury Secretary was marred by revelations that he hadn’t paid various personal taxes. Then, on February 10th, two weeks after he was confirmed by the Senate—where thirty-four members voted against him, more than against any other Obama Cabinet nominee—he gave a highly anticipated speech laying out the Treasury Department’s plan to nurse back to health the still fragile banking industry. It was immediately panned, and the following day the Dow dropped three hundred and eighty-two points… “Geithner, that poor son of a bitch,” Axelrod told me. “He was going to be the first human sacrifice of our Administration as far as Washington was concerned.”

Presidential Decision-Making, Part II

When I was writing the last post about presidential decision-making, I recalled a great instance where dissent can lead to a better decision. My sophomore year, I took my one and only International Relations course, which wholly dissuaded me from continuing down that route. Too theoretical, in my opinion. That said, that class exposed me to some great articles, as well as to Errol Morris’s The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara. For that alone, the class was worth it. The film goes into the details surrounding the Vietnam War; more generally, it talks about presidential decision-making in high-pressure situations, and how poor outcomes can come of well-intentioned judgments. The part that came to mind during the last post was McNamara discussing the Cuban Missile Crisis during Kennedy’s presidency. His point was that empathizing with one’s adversary is important, my point is that it’s good to not have a room full of assenters.

Excerpt from the transcript:

Presidential Decision-Making

Read a good, albeit six months old, article in The New Yorker about Obama’s economic team. Like what it showed about decision-making and discussion within the team–no groupthink here!

We talked about presidential decision-making only briefly during my Presidential Politics class, I particularly recall reading an analysis about the Bush administration in which the author talked about the penchant for groupthink. Obviously, there is no way for a president to be an expert on everything, hence the reliance on advisers. Between reading to kids in elementary schools, posing for the press corps, traveling to Podunk, USA, the president has only a limited amount of time. Hence information-filters, like the Chief of Staff or Cabinet heads. As GMU political scientist James Pfiffner writes of Bush:

In the George W. Bush administration, however, advice to the president was dominated by Vice President Cheney, and he was effectively able to manage the policy process to ensure that his preferences prevailed. In making many important decisions, the administration lacked an orderly policy-making process and the benefit of an honest broker. In Bush’s case such a process would have helped because, in Scott McClellan’s words, “He is not one to delve deeply into all the possible policy options…before making a choice. Rather, he chooses based on his gut and his most deeply held convictions. Such was the case with Iraq.”

Gut reactions. That’s really scary. I make gut reaction decisions about whether or not I want to go to class, about whether I want to have a baguette de tradition or a baguette parisienne, not about whether or not to start a war halfway across the world.

During meetings with the president, what happens to dissenters establishes an important precedent. If dissent is seen as positive and is encouraged, then the president will, one hopes, receive information from different angles that will contribute to him making a final decision. If dissenters are treated as outsiders, or have their access to the president restricted, then the president will end up hearing only those opinions he favors. I read somewhere that that is precisely what happened to Colin Powell during the Iraq War decision. In the end, it all comes back to the president. He determines who gets access, he puts in place an informal structure of deliberation, and finally, he makes the decision.

Why is this important? To me, it’s crucial because this is precisely why I hold the current president in such high regard. I’m less an ideological Democrat than, as a previous post stated, an Obama Democrat. [Update: come to think of it, I’m also pretty solidly Democrat in terms of political views. If Obama had a Republican twin, I couldn’t see myself supporting said twin.] My support for Obama over Clinton can be summed up easily: decision-making potential. I trust that he’ll make rational decisions that will benefit the US based on careful deliberation, that he’ll listen to all sides of an argument, and that he’ll thoroughly consider the consequences of said decisions. I was inordinately pleased that by his Cabinet picks. I could go on about it, but I also need to study French and to look through my old presidential politics readings. For now, I give you The New Yorker:

Mots croisés.

We did a simple crossword in class today, and nothing struck me as unusal.

Just now, dining on my soup, I read a post by New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg on David Frum‘s ouster on TNC’s blog:

The Politburo has dealt appropriately with David Frum, the notorious left devationist antisocial element. Frum has been frog-marched from his Kremlin office and exiled to a minor position in Nobuxograd.

Good laugh. Then I thought, “It’d be cool if David Frum was a crossword answer ten years hence.” Then it STRUCK me: I haven’t done a crossword puzzle since February 16!

Amused.

And as always, to delight us all, the Vice President of the United States: