Back in January, it was also CQ that got the ball rolling, as I noted in my diary:
"Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things." Peter F. Drucker
A range of people have commented about CQ's analysis showing that Barack Obama has achieved a record level of success in winning congressional votes on issues where he took a position. Many people would take this to be a measure of presidential effectiveness. Many people would be wrong. It's a measure of presidential efficiency, nothing more, nothing less.
For me, given all that's happened--and all that hasn't--over the past year, the most obvious comment would be, "So?" When you haven't done what needs to be done, no other measure really matters, even especially if it purports to show that you're number one.
I noted how a number of different folks weighed in, and then I got to Maddow:
Things were even worse when Rachel Maddow decided to take the tack of dealing with this story under the banner of "Conventional Wisdom Fail" (see, Obama is too a raging success!) And it went from bad to worse when she brough on Michael Beschloss, in full-on lamitude mode:
MADDOW: Empirically, whether or not you like Obama's policies, but from a pure quantitative perspective in terms of what this president has done-how does President Obama's first year stack up against previous presidencies?
BESCHLOSS: Well, he is the equal of Franklin Roosevelt in his first year, LBJ in 1965 or Ronald Reagan in 1981. You know, Obama last year, or two years ago during the campaign, kept on saying, "I want to be a transforming president," like Roosevelt, like Johnson, like Reagan. And the breadth of the kind of things he has done-you're absolutely right to talk about them-I think suggests that that's what he's going to be.
Reality Check: LBJ's Mind-Boggling Legislative Record
As I noted in that earlier diary, "Comparing Obama to FDR is nothing short of laughable. Heck, even on foreign policy, FDR's Good Neighbor Policy was more profound than anything Obama has done." But most significant was the long list of major legislation that LBJ passed. Here's the list of highlights that I presented then, just from 1965:
Civil rights
* Voting Rights Act of 1965
* Immigration and Nationality Services Act of 1965
War on Poverty
* Upward Bound
* Head Start
Education
* Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965
* Higher Education Act of 1965
Health
* Medicare
* Medicaid
Arts and Culture
* National Endowment for the Arts
* National Endowment for the Humanities
Consumer protection
* Cigarette Labeling Act of 1965
Environment
* Land and Water Conservation Act of 1965
* Solid Waste Disposal Act of 1965
* Motor Vehicle Air Pollution Control Act of 1965
With a record like that, it's self-evident why Maddow ignored LBJ: he would make her argument totally laughable. But that explanation only scratches the surface, IMHO. I'm convinced that there are very deep and profound cognitive processes involved in keeping us ignorant and stupid about just how bad things are in America and the world today, and while Maddow is often an exception to the rule, pointing out things that the rest of Versailles studiously ignores, she is ultimately not immune to this phenomena. Which leads us to our next section.
A Cognitive Science Reflection on Political Incompetence
In his NYT essay series this week, "The Anosognosic's Dilemma: Something's Wrong but You'll Never Know What It Is", Errol Morris starts off with David Dunning, a Cornell professor of social psychology, stumbling across the story of McArthur Wheeler, arguably teh most incompetent bank robber of all time:
Wheeler had walked into two Pittsburgh banks and attempted to rob them in broad daylight. What made the case peculiar is that he made no visible attempt at disguise. The surveillance tapes were key to his arrest. There he is with a gun, standing in front of a teller demanding money. Yet, when arrested, Wheeler was completely disbelieving. "But I wore the juice," he said. Apparently, he was under the deeply misguided impression that rubbing one's face with lemon juice rendered it invisible to video cameras.
Wheeler was not as dumb as he might seem. Two men had told him that if he rubbed his face in lemon juice, then cameras couldn't take his picture. But he didn't just take their word for it. He tested it out by rubbing his face in lemon juice and then taking a Polaroid picture of himself, which showed not a trace of his face! Unfortunately for him, his incompetence went much deeper than he ever suspected. (He had, apparently, turned the camera away from his face as he snapped the photo.) And that's really what Morris's essay series is all about--anosognosia, defined as:
a condition in which a person who suffers from a disability seems unaware of or denies the existence of his or her disability
Anosognosia originally referred to people suffering a neurological paralysis--that was the underlying disability of which they were unaware, when the term was originally coined by the nuerologist Joseph Babinski, but its meaning has become more generalized since then. Although Morris's essay series contains a great deal else--including some fascinating material about Babinski and his contemporaries, and the interplay between their work and Surrealism--there are two distinct aspects of Morris's series that I want to focus on here. First is Dunning's focus questions of competence, and second is the contemporary followup to Babinski's work by V.S. Ramachandran, who focuses considerable attention on the question of whether the anosognosic knows about the paralysis on some level. Ramachandran has produced experimental results showing that such knowledge is there in some senses, even if it isn't in others.
First, here's how Morris describe's Dunning's response to reading the article, and where it led:
As Dunning read through the article, a thought washed over him, an epiphany. If Wheeler was too stupid to be a bank robber, perhaps he was also too stupid to know that he was too stupid to be a bank robber - that is, his stupidity protected him from an awareness of his own stupidity.
Dunning wondered whether it was possible to measure one's self-assessed level of competence against something a little more objective - say, actual competence. Within weeks, he and his graduate student, Justin Kruger, had organized a program of research. Their paper, "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties of Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-assessments," was published in 1999.[3]
Dunning and Kruger argued in their paper, "When people are incompetent in the strategies they adopt to achieve success and satisfaction, they suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it. Instead, like Mr. Wheeler, they are left with the erroneous impression they are doing just fine."
It became known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect - our incompetence masks our ability to recognize our incompetence.
Dunning went on to refer to the Dunning-Kruger Effect as "the anosognosia of everyday life." But what's this got to do with Rachel Maddow ignoring the existence of LBJ?
Well, hold on just a little bit longer, and I'll be ready to make that clear. First, let's hear a bit more elaboration from Dunning:
DAVID DUNNING: If you look at our 1999 article, we measured skills where we had the right answers. Grammar, logic. And our test-subjects were all college students doing college student-type things. Presumably, they also should know whether or not they're getting the right answers. And yet, we had these students who were doing badly in grammar, who didn't know they were doing badly in grammar. We believed that they should know they were doing badly, and when they didn't, that really surprised us.
ERROL MORRIS: The students that were unaware they were doing badly - in what sense? Were they truly oblivious? Were they self-deceived? Were they in denial? How would you describe it?
DAVID DUNNING: There have been many psychological studies that tell us what we see and what we hear is shaped by our preferences, our wishes, our fears, our desires and so forth. We literally see the world the way we want to see it. But the Dunning-Kruger effect suggests that there is a problem beyond that. Even if you are just the most honest, impartial person that you could be, you would still have a problem - namely, when your knowledge or expertise is imperfect, you really don't know it. Left to your own devices, you just don't know it. We're not very good at knowing what we don't know.
Here, then, is the connection in two steps: First, if, like me, you responded to the announcement of Sarah Palin as John McCain's running mate by reading Alaska bloggers like Shannyn Moore, AKMuckraker, Andrew Halcro and others, you quickly got the impression--going back to her record in Wassila politics--that Palin was a classic mean girl grown up, an overgrown small-town bully utterly lacking in basic policy skills, but hyper-adept in blame-shifting. Like "Joe The Plumber" she epitomized a sort of self-celebratory incompetence so profound that they were "left with the erroneous impression they are doing just fine." Any feedback that either Palin or the not-plumber might be missing something was rejected as "elitism". This even applied to attempts by McCain campaign staff to try to prepare Palin for political prime time.
While we readily recognize Palin's policy incompetence, however, we are much less clear about the Democratic couterpart. And this brings us to step two. As Dunning's last quote above makes clear, the basic problem of knowing what you don't know transcends the problems of bias and bigotry that bedevil figures like Sarah Palin:
Even if you are just the most honest, impartial person that you could be, you would still have a problem - namely, when your knowledge or expertise is imperfect, you really don't know it.
Obama clearly is not like Palin in ways too numerous to mention. But he is like her--as we all are--in the way that Dunning describes. The way to get past that--at least provisionally--is to set up situations that challenge our thinking. But Obama's choice of subordinates and advisors has had exactly the opposite effect. He's routinely excluded the most articulate, competent critics of the conventional wisdom that's gotten us into so much trouble. This is especially obvious with respect to his economic team and his military team. There's no room for Cassandras at his table.
When Maddow blithely ignores the existence of LBJ and his massive record of legislative accomplishments, she's doing two things at once. First, she's facilitating the broader process of removing challenging information from consideration in evaluating Obama's competence. She is enabling the very dynamic that Dunning is waring us against.
But there's another reason that Democrats so easily ignore LBJ, and that is Vietnam. While LBJ was highly knowledgeable about domestic politics, he was not expert--or even comfortable, really--in foreign affairs. And so he ended up following expert advisors (whom Kennedy had often ignored, but never bothered to replace) on a path that lead to disaster. If LBJ's legislative accomplishments are staggering historically, so too is his folly in Vietnam. And the pain of confronting the latter still prevents Democrats from coming to terms with it and learning the necessary lessons. Although Maddow comes as close as anyone similarly situated to having learned those lessons, as my diary yesterday argued, the fact that she can turn on a dime and make this sort of argument for Obama's legislative greatness, utterly ignoring LBJ in the process, is a stark indication that she has not really grasped the full extent of the tragedy of Vietnam, and the tragedy of Afghanistan foretold.
This brings us to the work of V.S Ramachandran, who tells a very fascinating story:
V.S. RAMACHANDRAN: Offhand, I can't tell you when they started using the term "anosognosia" for other types of denial. I'll tell you one thing that may be of interest to you. I saw a lady, not long ago, in India, and she had complete paralysis on her left side, a very intelligent woman, but had both anosognosia and somatoparaphrenia - you know what that is, right?
ERROL MORRIS: Not really.
V.S. RAMACHANDRAN: Denial that a body part, in this instance, an arm, belongs to her. It's part of the same spectrum of disorders. So the wonderful thing about her is that she has a great sense of humor and was really articulate and intelligent. So I asked her, "Can you move your right arm?" and the usual list of questions, and she said "Yes, of course." I said, "Can you move your left arm?" She said, "Yes." "Can you touch my nose?" "Yes, I can touch your nose, sir." "Can you see it?" "Yes, it's almost there." The usual thing, O.K.? So far, nothing new. Her left arm is lying limp in her lap; it's not moving at all; it's on her lap, on her left side, O.K.?
I left the room, waited for a few minutes, then I went back to the room and said, "Can you use your right arm?" She said, "Yes." Then I grabbed her left arm and raised it towards her nose and I said, "Whose arm is this?" She said, "That's my mother's arm." Again, typical, right? And I said, "Well, if that's your mother's arm, where's your mother?" And she looks around, completely perplexed, and she said, "Well, she's hiding under the table."
So this sort of confabulatory thing is very common, but it's just a very striking manifestation of it. No normal person would dream of making up a story like that. But here is the best part. I said, "Please touch your nose with your left hand." She immediately takes her right hand, goes and reaches for the left hand, raising it, passively raising it, right? Using it as a tool to touch my nose or touch her nose. What does this imply? She claims her left arm is not paralyzed, right? Why does she spontaneously reach for it and grab her left arm with her right hand and take her left hand to her nose? That means she knows it is paralyzed at some level. Is that clear? [53]
ERROL MORRIS: Yes. Presumably, if she didn't know it was paralyzed, she wouldn't try to lift it with her right hand.
V.S. RAMACHANDRAN: And it gets even better, she's just now told me that it's not her left arm, it is her mother's arm, so why is she pulling up her mother's arm and pointing it at my nose? What we call belief is not a monolithic thing; it has many layers.
So it is with Maddow, and with all of us, really. We know things and yet we do not. It is not just belief, but consciousness itself, as well as everything it contains that is fragmentary and layered. It is a constant struggle to take these disparate pieces and layers and make of them a coherent whole.
As Ramachandran reminds us, confabulation is very common. We construct narratives out of disjoint parts that simply cannot fit together, and then we disable our abilitie to see through what we have done. For the Tea Baggers, it's ACORN stealing the 2008 election for an illegal, foreign-born candidate, despite the lack of any documentary evidence to support their narrative. And for Obamaphiles, it's the narrative of Obama's stupendous accomplishments, even if it requires blanking out the very existence of LBJ, and pretending that different pieces of the stimulua are Teh Awesome, even if the whole was roughly half of what was needed in the first place.
I'm not pretending to be immune myself. None of us is. But Obama's critics on the left don't have the kinds of myth-making, confabulating mega-machinery actively feeding their delusions that Tea Baggers and Obamaphiles have. It's easier for us to avoid commonplace errors of judgment precisely because we face a more hostile, unforgiving narrative environment.
That's our dark cloud's silver lining. That, and the fact that we do not ignore the mega-problems of empire that American national politics revolves around denying, |
