Why Obama is "Even Close"

Columnist David Brooks was well chosen to be the gentle voice of conservatism for The New York Times.  He's careful to write in a way that makes his ideas at least acceptable to his knee-jerk liberal readers.



So when he asks the rhetorical question: why is Obama even close in the  presidential opinion polls, he provides comfortable words for the NYT faithful.   After backing and filling for 700 words he leaves them with this fudge.

I’d say that Obama is a slight underdog this year: the scuffling economy will grind away at voters. But his leadership style is keeping him afloat. He has defined a version of manliness that is postboomer in policy but preboomer in manners and reticence.

But the best thing to do when thinking about Obama is to do the Bush substitution.  Imagine that President Bush was presiding over 8 percent unemployment and sluggish 2 percent growth.



Exactly.  Back in 2002 the Democrats and their willing accomplices in the media were screaming blue murder about 3 percent growth and 6 percent unemployment.  Imagine what they would be doing if a Republican president had President Obama's numbers.  They would be pulling the place down.



The reason that President Obama is even close is not that he has defined a "new version of manliness" but that up to now he hasn't really experienced any serious opposition.  That's the way with US politics.  Republicans only get to talk to the moderates and independents for about six months before an election, when they pay for the privilege.  The rest of the time the MSM is pushing its liberal agenda from the horrors of climate change to the cruelty of budget cuts and the mean-spirited policies of eevil Republicans.  That's all that non-political people get to see on their TV news.



Guess what.  Here we are, about six months out from the November election and the Republicans have selected a candidate and his campaign is starting to get into gear.  That means that the independents and moderates are finally beginning to get a message from the Republicans.



Guess what his campaign theme is.  "Believe in America."  It's as gauzy as "Hope and Change," but you can see the difference.  "Believe in America" is a direct appeal to American nationalism, the American idea, and American exceptionalism.



It suggests that the Obamis don't believe in America (Ya think?).



David Brooks is right.  Right now the election is pretty close, and it's pretty remarkable.  But I don't think things are going to stay that way.  Watch when the needle starts to move.  Then the wailing and gnashing of teeth will start in earnest.

Plato's Receptacle

Suppose you are Plato and you've been pushing your concept of the Forms for ages. Everything comes from these perfect ideas that can be comprehended up there in the firmament beyond the rim of heaven. Ordinary things that you and I see, the perceptions and particulars, are not reality but opinion, true belief.

But if you were Plato you might worry a bit about how you get from the perfect Forms to the everyday sensible particulars. So Plato pops behind the curtain and briefs his alter ego Timaeus on a quick and dirty fudge, a half-way house between the Forms and the particulars: The Receptacle.

You can think of this Receptacle as a kind of wetnurse. Or you can think of it like gold: Gold is gold, but you can manipulate it into all kinds of shapes. Or you could think of it as the mother, the receptacle of the father's seed or Form, which incubates the offspring. Or you could think of it as a plastic, impressionable stuff, or you could think of the receptacle as the odorless liquid that is used as the base for a fragrance.  You see the point.  Plato reckons he needs something more substantial than Forms upon which to hang the everyday impressions of moment to moment sensation.

In our modern science we have a similar concept, for we understand that the sensible particulars we detect with our eyes are in fact the result of electromagnetic radiation emitted from a lattice of atoms and molecules, which don't necessarily have sensible properties by themselves but emit signals to us that we interpret as red and yellow, hard and soft, solid and liquid.

Let us take an example: a left shoe. First of all, the left shoe comes into being in a Receptacle, as an instance of the Form of shoe in a process of shaking disordered elements into order, producing the particular instance of left shoe. On the gold analogy, it would be the combination of elements shaped and molded into a shoe. On the mother-father analogy it is the offspring of the Form of a shoe incubated by a lactating mother. On the plastic, impressionable stuff, it is the Form of shoeness impressed upon plastic stuff into the particular of a shoe. Or the receptacle is shaken and stirred, like the pieces in a kaleidoscope into the instance of a shoe from the Form of shoeness. On the reflection metaphor, the left shoe is a projection into a certain space or site of the Form shoenessness.

In part, the Receptacle is meant to represent stuffness, the place where Form is manifested into stuff; in part, according to another interpretation, the Receptacle is the space, the place, the room where an instance of a thing comes into being and then, in time goes out of being.

But what happens when the left shoe moves? Perfectly simple. We have the shaken-and-stirred analogy to account for that. The shoe is shaken from its original position and moved, for the Receptacle is not just stuff but a space, a site of stuff. Or it is gold, moved and remolded into a new shape in the Receptacle. Or it is switched from one breast of the wetnurse to the other.

There is no doubt that, the more specific you get, the more incoherent the analogies become that Plato uses to illustrate his Receptacle concept. But there is no shame in that.  Our modern science is barely free from incoherence. We have the action-at-a-distance problem with the notion that a single photon can seem to go through two slits at once and interfere with itself. And what really do we have in a solid lattice of molecules, or a soupy wetland of a liquid? We have our likely story, our true belief about what is going on that is developed by persuasion and we have our understanding, our theories of relativity and quantum mechanics that are communicated to young physicists by years of instruction.

What does it all mean? Ask Plato about that.

Arianna's Greek Fantasy

If you want a native's eye view of the Greek crisis why not turn to America's favorite Greek, Arianna Huffington.  That's what The New York Times did.

When I was growing up, my family was a tiny microcosm of the current Greek economy. We were heavily in debt; my father’s repeated attempts to own a newspaper ended in failure and bankruptcy. Eventually, my mother took my sister and me and left him...



Further austerity was coming, but my mother was clear about one thing: she would cut back on everything except our education and good, healthy food...



As I contemplate the statistics — especially the 54 percent unemployment rate among young Greeks — I think of all the stories behind this appalling data. All the dreams dashed. All the promise unfulfilled. And all the guilt, shame and fear that so often go hand in hand with intractable unemployment and little hope for a better future.



The punitive path of austerity and relentless economic contraction is, not surprisingly, likely to lead to further stagnation in 2013 and cannot be allowed to continue...



Argentina, which defaulted and restructured beginning in 2001, offers a point of comparison. The austerity crowd warned that Argentina would collapse if it stopped pegging the peso to the dollar and defaulted on its debt. There are many differences between Argentina and Greece. But Argentina’s default was followed by a few short months of economic crisis and then many years of steady economic growth — a dramatically different direction than the one Greece is now taking toward a potentially endless path of contraction that is destroying millions of lives and crippling the indomitable Greek spirit.

Er, no Ariana, darling.  Maybe you should check the stats.  Argentina's GDP went from $269 billion in 2001 to $102 billion in the trough of 2002.  That's a decline of over 60 percent.  So far the Greeks have only experienced three years of GDP decline from the peak of $341 billion: 2% in 2009, 4.5% in 2010 and an estimated 3% in 2011, around $290 billion.



In Greece, as the saying goes, they ain't seen nothing yet.  I don't know what Ariana Huffington reckons as austerity, but I'd say that contracting the GDP from around $300 billion to $100 billion in one year, as the Argentines did "in a few short months of economic crisis", counts as something a little worse than Paul Krugman's dreaded "austerity."



The problem for Greece has is that, tied to the Euro, it can't steal money from its people right now and reduce government entitlements by 50 percent.  To do that it needs to cut loose from the Euro and devalue the currency, as Argentina did in the 2001-2002 crisis by converting dollars in Argentine bank accounts to pesos.  People riot in the streets if you cut their benefits, but a devaluation is a fait accompli.  If you look at the chart, Greek GDP will probably decline from the current $300 billion to about $125 billion, one way or another.



The problem for the politicians in a debt crisis is how reduce the weight of government without the people burning the place down.  The best thing is not to create a big government in the first place, but it's now a bit too late for that, for Greece and for many other countries.



On the other hand, you have to hand it to Arianna Huffington.  Her father may have failed in the newspaper biz, but she is doing fine--not in old-fashioned newspapers, but in new online media.

Marriage: It's For the Next Generation

Right now, I'm reading Mrs. Gaskell's Wives and Daughters.  This 19th century novel is about broken families and step-parenting.  Of course, back in those days you didn't have divorce.  But you did have 17-year-old Molly Gibson, who wakes up one day to realize that her widower father is going to remarry.  Just like today's children of divorce, Molly is not happy about this.  In fact she is devastated.

There is a reason that stepmothers get such a bad press and are such a tempting target for novelists.  Once you get beyond the situation of a child being raised by its biological, married parents--or its married adoptive parents--you get to less-than-optimal child-raising conditions, and you get the stuff of drama.

And for all the focus on poor little rich kids, the people that really suffer when being raised by a single parent or parent and step-parent are the children of the lower class.

Just about everything we do these days in the modern welfare state is damaging to children.  We divorce, we have careers that keep us, men and women, away from home.  We dump children in government child custodial facilities.  We marginalize low-income men by making it profitable for women to marry the state rather than the unskilled father of her child.

Then, of course we valorize childlessness, in many different ways.  The cult of creativity, for a start, that goes back at least to the Romantic movement.  Why not create abstract works of art instead of living and breathing children?  It's the modern way of sneering at people who get their hands dirty at work.

The welfare state encourages politicians to buy votes by offering free stuff, and by legislating morality for powerful pressure groups.  Sometimes that is a good thing, when the powerful pressure group is Martin Luther King Jr. and the black civil rights movement helped along by white liberals.  Or it is the worthy goal of decriminalizing homosexual behavior.

But the trouble with political movements--and government bureaucracies--is that they never just get their issue passed and then go home.   The leaders and the activists get a taste for power and influence and search for ways of keeping the movement going.  So the civil rights activists became race hustlers and the gay rights community has gone beyond achieving toleration for gays to the bullying of everyone that doesn't endorse the gay marriage agenda.

Back in the old days of clan and land, young people were married young, before they could object, and they were married in accordance with the clan or family agenda.  The idea for the clans, just like in dynastic royal marriages, was to cement clan alliances in the next generation.  For landowning families the goal was to concentrate family wealth in the oldest son in the next generation.  Otherwise clan power or family wealth would dissipate away.

But the rise of the bourgeoisie changed all that.  The bourgeoisie does not play with political power or sit on land.  It lives by its wits, by trade, by making things, by serving people.  So it changed the rules from arranged marriage to companionate marriage based on the love between man and woman.  But the point of their marriages was still the next generation.  That is the point of marriage.  To protect children and the mothers that love them from the instinct of men to play the field.

The trouble with no-fault divorce, with cohabitation, with gay marriage, and with the polyamory that is probably next on deck, is that the focus is on the needs of sexual adults rather than the next generation.  You'd expect that in the modern era because necessity, the basics of food and shelter and survival, have receded in importance as capitalism has increased income from $2 per day to $100 per day.

When you are poor and you do something stupid at $2 per day, that may be all she wrote.  But to be rich in any society, or middle-income in today's society of $100 per day, allows you the scope to do stupid things and keep doing them for quite a while without getting rubbed out.

In the old days, stupidity in the rich was symbolized by eldest sons getting deep into debt so dad had to mortgage the ancestral estate or even sell it.  Today we see it in the selfishness of the "me" culture.  People do stupid selfish things, and usually, if they are in the upper 20 percent, they can afford it.  Their children may be furiously angry with them, but the children still get educated and live useful lives.  As you go down the batting order things are not so cheerful, and that is what Charles Murray writes about in Coming Apart. But his take is nothing new.  We read back in the 70s that the children of the rich recovered pretty well from their Sixties hippiedom.  It was the children of the no-so-rich that ended up as casualties of sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll.  We didn't get to read much about the children of the hippies until much later.  They didn't enjoy hippiedom too much.

The liberal "lifestyle" culture is best understood as our modern version of the eldest-son-behaving-badly syndrome.  Only, of course, since the liberals dominate the culture, they represent their selfish culture as creativity or finding your identity, just as they boosted the Sixties counterculture half a century ago.

Liberal writers write benevolently of polyamory, but liberal wives like Hillary Clinton and John Edwards' wife Elizabeth weren't quite as nonchalant about the polyamorousness of their liberal husbands.

The net result of all sexual license is that women get screwed, with disease, with heartache, and with children that never got a childhood or never got to live.  Some day, women will see through the liberal snow job and get clarity on this.  Until then conservatives will be fighting a strategic retreat, and many ordinary people will get chopped up by the sabers of the pursuing cavalry.

We're Overseas about "Overseas"

Today I'm in Greenwich, Connecticut, for the roll-out of my daughter Beatriz Williams' debut novel, Overseas.  There's an event at the Greenwich Library tonight at 7pm EDT, but right now we are listening to an author interview on "The Business of Living" AM1490 WGCH.  It's a delight: Beatriz comes across as knowledgeable, confident, articulate, with a good radio voice.  Just how you'd want your daughter to come across.



So what's Overseas all about?  Here is an interview in the Greenwich Citizen.  Says Beatriz:

"Overseas" is a sweeping love story about a First World War infantry officer who follows the woman he loves across time to contemporary Manhattan. It really crosses over genre lines, with elements of historical fiction, mystery, contemporary romance, and a touch of the paranormal.

Or, as I like to pitch the book: Overseas is about young Kate Wilson in Manhattan in the 2000s.  She's fallen in love with this guy Julian that runs a $20 billion hedge fund, but then she gets a book in the mail about a family in World War I.  And her Julian looks exactly like a British infantry officer that was killed in the Battle of the Somme!  What gives?



Real estate, they say, is all about three things: location, location, location.  Book publishing is similar.  It all comes down to three things: publicity, publicity, publicity.  So whatever people are saying about the book, whether it's on your website, on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Twitter, Facebook, GoodReads, radio, newspaper, it's all good.  The only thing that's bad is when nobody is talking about you!



But publishing a book is not all fun and games.  Being the father in question you have to expect a little gentle ribbing.  You find that your fatherly advice comes back to haunt you.  Here's where I come in, the sorrowful father with gloomy advice as recalled by Beatriz Williams:

If you must write, he told me, with a sorrowful shake of his head, go off and do something else first. Otherwise you'll have nothing to write about except writing.

Well.  Thank goodness that my daughter took my advice.  Children very often do, you know, for better or worse.  So you should be careful when you dish it out.  They are listening, even when they are teenagers and pretending that they don't hear a word you say.

A 60-40 Year?

The big question in any election is: who will turn out to vote?  That is the dirty little secret that the pollsters keep under wraps in their "turnout models."  That's why it is meaningless to show, right now, that the presidential race is tied.  Because the pollsters really don't know who will turn out in November.



But now we are beginning to get a look at things.  The 60-40 defeat of 80-year-old Senate incumbent Dick Lugar (R-IN) in the Republican primary sends a message.  The 60-40 success of a man-woman marriage amendment sends a message.  The majority piled up by Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI) against all of his Democratic primary opponents sends a message.



The message is that it looks like Republican voters are coming out to play.  So if I were a Democrat, or if I were President Obama's campaign managers, I would start to get really worried.



On top of everything, it feels like Republican presumptive nominee Mitt Romney is hitting his stride.  He is starting to articulate an economic message, and he is starting to tout his business experience as an asset. (Imagine that!)  He is even taking a swipe at Julia, life of.



In my view it is serendipity that in the slowest recovery since the Great Depression the Republicans are running a candidate whose whole business experience is about starting up new businesses and trying to reorganize failing businesses.  Think about it.  As the economy struggles to create new jobs what else would be more timely that a politician in charge who really understands how jobs are saved and created?



I wonder if the American voters agree?

The Four Causes in Plato

Everyone knows that Aristotle invented the Four Causes.  In the Metaphysics he lays it out: the Material Cause, the stuff that something is made of; the Formal Cause, the form or pattern, the shape of something; the Efficient Cause, the source of the something, such as the father of a child; and of course the famous Final Cause, the purpose or "end" of something in the world.

Today of course, we often like to think that nothing has a purpose: everything just is.  But then everything in the world acts as if it had a purpose, whatever that means.

Aristotle may have been the chap to define the Four Causes, but Plato seemed to take the Four Causes for granted in his dialogues.  For instance, in the Timaeus he tells us how the world came into being.  First of call, of course, it came into being because God wanted it.

The god wanted everything to be good and nothing to be bad so far as that was possible, and so he took over all what was visible--not at rest but in discordant and disorderly motion--and brought it from a state of disorder to one of order, because he believed that order was in every way better than disorder. [30a]

Reads like an Aristotelian Final Cause to me, even if young Timaeus spoke it.

Having decided to bring order out of disorder the god next had to decide what the world would look like.  And so he decided to make it like "the best of the intelligible things... a single visible living thing".{31a]  But here's a puzzler.  Should there be one heaven or many?  What a modern thought: universe or multiverses?  But if it is to be One Living Thing, then obviously it must be one and not two.[31b]  Of course it ought to be shaped in a way "that embraces all the shapes there are" and that would obviously be a sphere.  And there it is, turning in a circle in a single solitary heaven.[34b]

So much for the Formal Cause of the heaven and the earth.

What of the material of the earth?  It would obviously have to be at least "fire and earth."  Now it is clear that if two bodies need to be bonded together they need a third agent, and since the world is to be a solid, it needs not one but two bonding agents: air and water.  So the universe will be composed of earth, fire, air and water, just as we would expect.  The Formal Cause of binding together the universe requires a Material Cause of the four elements.

Then there is the Efficient Cause, the designer god himself.  In his art he had to decide whether the universe needed all the appurtenances that humans need: ears, eyes, nose, hands, and feet.  It wouldn't need that, he decided, because he would build it complete and self-sufficient.  It wouldn't need to see or hear or breathe or digest, or catch or stand on anything.  It would just need to spin.  It would be complete and entire, organizing the disorganized, able to "keep its own company without requiring anything else."  There are a lot of decisions to make when you are designing and building the universe.

A rather male universe too, it seems to be.  But then Plato probably didn't ever ask his wife Xanthippe what she thought about the origin of the universe.