Herman Cain and numerology.

I've already expressed my concerns...

It's not conservative to trash the entire system of funding the federal government and replace it with something concocted more out of numerology than economics.

... but Michelle Cottle really makes the connection:

In Chapter Nine of This Is Herman Cain—entitled “‘Forty-Five’—A Special Number,” Cain notes that his “conception, gestation, and birth all occurred within” the year 1945 (true of pretty much anyone born in the last three months of that year). He then launches into a detailed account of how “45 keeps on popping up as I go about the business of being elected—you guessed it—as the forty-fifth president of the United States of America.”



Meaningful signposts include events both past (in 1945, Reader’s Digest published a version of Friedrich von Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, which Cain ran across last year and loved) and future (in 2013, the year the 45th president will take office, Cain and his wife will celebrate their 45th wedding anniversary.)

In some cases the digits 4 and 5 are only part of a figure, like the times when one of Cain’s weekly commentaries ran to 645 words or when the final leg of a campaign trip took place on Flight 1045 traveling at 45,000 feet. At times the 45 in question is only tangentially related to Cain, as when he cites a Las Vegas campaign event where he met a couple celebrating their 45th anniversary. And in one case, the key moment ultimately doesn’t have anything to do with 45 at all: at an early strategy meeting, Cain and two aides believed they were seated at table 45 in a restaurant, only to be told that there were only 43 tables total. Regardless, it all adds up to something big for Cain.

It’s not just the casual numerology....

Oh, lord...

"Men who go there are branded pigs. Gals who do it are denounced as catty, bitchy perpetuators of a system that fixates, unjustly and insultingly, on..."

... on hairstyles and, generally, the way women look. Michelle Cottle is ruminating over what Carly Fiorina said about Barbara Boxer's hair and, more specifically, how Carly tried to save herself from opprobrium by playing the breast cancer card:

“My goodness, my hair has been talked about by a million people, you know. It sort of goes with the territory.... Especially when you don’t have any hair. As you remember, I started out with none.”

Fiorina also likes to say things like: “After chemotherapy, Barbara Boxer isn’t very scary anymore.”

While overcoming any serious disease can make for a compelling political narrative, beating breast cancer is a struggle that resonates with, and makes a candidate more relatable to, women in particular....

From a purely strategic perspective, the heroic cancer narrative is hard to counter. ...

Invoking a breast cancer battle as a kind of character testimony is one thing; brandishing it as a partisan weapon is more problematic....

This kind of naked exploitation is risky—as is Fiorina’s using her survivor status to deflect criticism when she makes a bush-league mistake like Hairgate. But if the candidate can avoid such heavy-handedness, her more subtle invocations of her cancer battle could prove devastating in her fight for California women in particular.

Should a candidate can talk about his or her diseases? I remember Paul Tsongas doing it well, many years ago. It made him look sympathetic and strong... at least until it turned out he was actually too ill:

If Mr. Tsongas had gone on to win, America would now [in 1992] have a President-elect stricken with a debilitating, conceivably life-threatening disease....

When Mr. Tsongas' health became an issue during the primaries, his doctors at first said he had been free of all traces of cancer ever since, suggesting that the radical procedure had cured him. Only after he dropped out of the campaign did they acknowledge that he had suffered a "localized relapse," suggesting that the cure may not have been complete.

Now a cancerous growth has been found in Mr. Tsongas' abdomen....

Tsongas died of his cancer in 1997.

Exploiting one's cancer is a self-limiting political enterprise.

Why racial attitudes that helped Barack Obama will hurt Bobby Jindal.

Christopher Orr struggles to explain:

Both Obama and Jindal are at the geeky end of the spectrum among American politicians. But Obama's race cuts against this persona, and makes him "cool" in a way (however studiously achieved) it's hard to envision a comparably wonky white politician being perceived. As Michelle noted in her essay on the subject:

Biracial heritage aside, Obama is a black man. And, in this country, black men have long had the edge on cool.... [A]s a thought exercise, imagine Obama as a white politician. Wonky, overeducated, idealistic, unflappable, reform-minded, big into basketball, articulate but without the lyrical echoes of the African American pulpit -- far from being brother cool, Obama would be ex-senator turned failed presidential candidate Bill Bradley.

So while Jindal may not face the same radical-black-guy stereotypes as Obama, neither will he benefit from the same cool-black-guy stereotypes. If anything, the common stereotypes of Asian-Americans -- as earnest strivers who may be a little nerdy -- could exacerbate Jindal's already wonky self-presentation. When Ace of Spades (exactly the kind of conservative id figure Jindal will want to impress if he runs for the GOP nomination at some point) says that last night the Louisiana governor reminded him of "Achmad, Jaglesh, Clayton, etc., in Animal House," the ethnic geek stereotype is hard to miss. And that could be an issue in a nation where seven of the last eight presidential elections have been won by the candidate widely perceived as cooler, more likable, more popular: Reagan, Reagan, Clinton, Clinton, Bush (arguably primarily for these reasons), Bush, and Obama. (I consider the 1988 election a draw in terms of uncoolness.)

To be clear, I'm not trying to indulge these stereotypes. But it would be silly to pretend they don't exist in the minds of a non-trifling number of voters. Now, if Jindal gives many more national speeches as bad as last night's, his ethnicity won't make any difference. (The fact that he's been most widely compared to Kenneth of "30 Rock" is a nice indicator of Americans' ability to see beyond skin color.) Moreover, for a number of reasons I think it would be a great thing for the GOP, and the country, if Jindal were his party's nominee for president in 2012 or (more likely) 2016. But he may have a trickier path than some of his fans imagine.

Okay, there's a lot going on here, and I will leave some of this open for discussion and respond to what you have to say, but let me sketch out a few points.

1. "Cool" is a cop-out word. It's a word to make racism cute and safe. It's a word white people manipulate black people with: Come, bring your coolness, just the part of what we think of as blackness that makes us feel cool, but don't be whatever it is that we find excessive and fail to perceive as cool. Soothe us appropriately and you can be successful. You can even be President. Look! President Barack Obama! Yay! Aren't we cool? How terribly embarrassing.

2. Nerdiness, done right, is endearing. We might even call it cool. Orr suggests that white people warm up to the black nerd — Obama as Urkel — but not to the "South Asian" one, because there are just so darn many South Asian nerds. Do white people have ideas about the appropriate nerd proportion in the various racial/ethic groups? Are white people ashamed of themselves?

3. Comparing Jindal to Kenneth of "30 Rock" is not a nice indicator of Americans' ability to see beyond skin color. Quite the opposite! Instinctively repainting him white is — I would say — presumptively racial. To strip away his racial identity — to stereotype him as an especially white white man — is a powerful racial move. This is not nice at all. I would really like to know what makes white people so sure they are being nice about racial things. This confidence in niceness is misplaced, yet very very common....

4. .... in liberals. Liberals believe they are the good people with the good beliefs, the good hearts. Especially about race. How could it be otherwise? They are so nice and so good-hearted. And Bobby Jindal is not a liberal. He's a conservative. That's not good. That's bad. Bad, bad Bobby Jindal. Quick! Help me think of all the ways Bobby Jindal is just terrible. Ack! Don't look at him! He's horrible! I can barely stand to look at him. When he first emerges from behind a curtain, I moan "Oh, God." This is terrible. This is automatically horrible. A man of color, who is not supporting our side. One look and I am disgusted. How loathsome!

IN THE COMMENTS: Palladian writes:

Reading Orr's piece in The New Republic was a painful experience, although an informative one. It's a terrifyingly illustrative model of the racial psychopathology still endemic in the American psyche. In bringing about the absolutely necessary and noble goals of the early Civil Rights Movement, it was necessary to change the way people thought about the issue of race. Unfortunately this mental change quickly developed into a complicated neurotic knot that still strangles so many contemporary minds.

If you reread the article, it's not really about anything at all. It's just a tortured attempt to justify the author's political biases by attaching politics to race. The political discourse (for lack of a better word) in America today is yet another manifestation of the primitive force behind racism, sexism, xenophobia &c: us vs. them. Terrible to see racial and political bigotry merge, but it looks like that's where we're headed.

Liberals believe they are the good people with the good beliefs, the good hearts. Especially about race. How could it be otherwise? They are so nice and so good-hearted.

A good point about some liberals. They believe that it's entirely self-evident that they are the good guys. They sometimes seem to believe that this gives them license to say the most dreadful and stupid things because, after all, their hearts are in the right place. I've had friends express the most unspeakably offensive ideas to me under the assumption that they had immunity from responsibility because they were liberals.

It's like that scene in "Annie Hall":

Allison: No, that was wonderful. I love being reduced to a cultural stereotype.

Alvy: Right, I'm a bigot, I know, but for the left.

"At Sarah Palin’s old church in Wasilla, they spoke in tongues. Maybe that’s where she picked it up."

Maureen Dowd makes the joke that Michelle Cottle used the phrase "prompts nasty quips" to distance herself from.

Sarah Palin "falls apart, babbling nonsensical non-sentences that prompt nasty quips about whether the former Pentecostal is speaking in tongues."

Writes Michelle Cottle in TNR.

Ha ha ha. I get it. What a hilarious idea for political humor! You pick a religion that the candidate has some past relationship to, then you pick some aspect of it that seems ridiculous to a cloddish nonbeliever, then you attribute that trait to the candidate.

Okay, thanks, Michelle! Come on everyone! Let's come up with some cool new wisecracks! Let's test out th is new comic device on Barack Obama.

What's the matter, Michelle? You don't think it would be very nice to use your comic device against him and against Muslims?

Oh, you say you didn't actually yourself ridicule Palin for seeming as if she's speaking in tongues like a Pentecostal, you said that her "non-sentences ... prompt nasty quips" abut whether she's speaking in tongues like a Pentecostal. So that wasn't you making that quip. You were just reporting the quips that come from out there somewhere. "Prompts nasty quips" gets those quips out at some distance from you. You didn't cite the conventional "some people" -- or "wags" -- but they are in there, implicitly. And you even chided them for their nastiness.

Got it. So, remember, when you use Cottle's comic device, decorously preface the religion mocking with the phrase "prompts nasty quips" so you don't get your hands dirty.

Good lord, "prompts nasty quips" is itself an awe-inspiring rhetorical device that should empower us to say all sorts of crude and politically incorrect things!

Do you approve, Michelle?

"An irresponsible, intellectually dishonest windbag like Moore."

In TNR, Michelle Cottle writes about the Michael Moore/Disney tangle:

On his website, the filmmaker portrays himself as a courageous, long-suffering truth-teller, lamenting the "profound censorship obstacles" he often encounters and characterizing this latest "struggle" as part of a larger "lesson in just how difficult it is in the country to create a piece of art that might upset those in charge." Fortunately for the American people, the resolute Moore vows to keep fighting for our right to view his latest masterpiece--"because, after all, it's a free country."



Yes, it is a free country, but it is not a perfect one. Because in a perfect country, an irresponsible, intellectually dishonest windbag like Moore would not be a rich, successful, Oscar-winning documentarian. He would instead be just another anonymous nutter, mumbling about fluoride in the water and penning anti-establishment tracts by candlelight in some backwoods Appalachian shack.

Why assume every crackpot belongs in Appalachia? He'd be in Michigan. And I think a perfect country needs its share of blowhard, dishonest filmmakers. My idea of a perfect country would be one with plenty of great artists and smart, educated citizens who know better than to think that artists are telling the straight truth. It would also have professional, ethical journalists, who preserve the long term value of journalism and don't just use it in the short term to make their own political statements. Oh, and it would have people who make political statements be making them because they genuinely believe the truth of what they are saying and therefore rationally choose to persuade through sound evidence and argument--because the citizens are smart and educated. Where does the documentary filmmaker fit in, then? Well, you can either be a journalist-documentarian or an artist-documentarian. I include the comedian-documentarian in the second category. That's what Moore is. If you don't like him, don't pay attention to him.



Do I think Disney is wrong not to distribute his film? No. They didn't break any deals, as Cottle's article, like other articles, explains. (I assumed the contrary here, and take it back.) They have an interest in preserving the wide appeal of the Disney name by not affiliating it with strong political statements, like Moore's, and they built that interest into their arrangement with Miramax. So Moore (it appears) hasn't been wronged. But do I blame Moore for grandstanding and milking this and dragging in Jeb Bush? Nah! Those are typical Moore antics. Stop paying attention to him. You're only giving him power! Disney gave him power, too--the point of my earlier post--by tangling with him.