Let’s pause and consider how rich it is that Bush is accusing Kerry of using the “politics of fear,” when he’s the one running with Dick “Our cities are doomed. _Doomed_, I tell you!” Cheney.

On “NPR this morning”:http://www.npr.org/rundowns/rundown.php?prgDate=20-Oct-2004&prgId=3 they ran a little spot on the subject, looking at Kerry’s flu chatter and Cheney’s apocalypse chatter. Fair enough — it _is_ silly that Kerry’s trying to make political hay out of the flu shortage, and he deserves to be called on it. But “You won’t get your flu shot and _it’s his fault_!” just doesn’t have the same horrific ring as “You’ll die in a nuclear explosion and _it’s his fault!_” And Kerry’s pulling this nonsense just now, opportunistically, whereas Cheney’s been doing it all through the campaign.

The spot is one of those classic instances of “balance” where equal time and consideration are given to unequal offenses. I realize this sort of thing is normal in the media, but despite “previous frustrations”:http://www.polytropos.org/archives/000480.html, I still expect more from NPR, and am frequently disappointed.

I haven’t brought up the “Ron Suskind article”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/17BUSH.html?oref=login&oref=login&pagewanted=all&position= because I didn’t have all that much new to say about it, but if you haven’t read it yet, do. It’s one of those pieces which will have some people shouting “liberal bias!” at the top of their lungs, and for once they’re probably right. But Suskind (as “Gary”:http://amygdalagf.blogspot.com/ notes) has a knack for getting people to talk to him who shouldn’t, and bias or no bias, their words speak for themselves. For those of you who don’t read other blogs, here’s the money quote:

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

It’s an audacious quote, but I think Kevin Drum is right “when he says”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_10/004937.php that the sentiment behind it is simply “Bush is a doer, not an analyzer,” and that making much more of it than that might be making too much. Matthew Yglesias is also right “when he says”:http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/2004/10/about_suskind.html that the core of the article — linking Bush’s mode of behavior to his faith — is quite weak. (As an aside, the “we make reality” attitude dovetails with conservatives’ great ability to shape the terms of debate — and thus dominate discourse — using language, in everything from “flip-flop” to “the war on terror” and “tax relief.” See “George Lakoff”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Lakoff.)

But, all that said, it remains clear that the Bush Administration has operated with astounding arrogance, very often ignoring or trying to shout down what all us poor thinking types like to refer to as “reality.” If Suskind’s article only advances that observation a little, it does, in the above quote, provide us with a convenient rallying cry. Thanks to “Gene Healy”:http://www.affbrainwash.com/genehealy/archives/014963.php for pointing it out:

PROUD MEMBER, REALITY-BASED COMMUNITY

I’ll be getting me one of those t-shirts when they’re available, and changing the blog’s subtitle through election day or so.

Should we also work on a secret handshake or something?

UPDATE: Don’t miss Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s “take on Suskind’s piece and much more”:http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/005631.html#005631.

UPDATE: Healy’s entry now has links to a couple different Cafepress t-shirt options. The first batch are missing the hyphen in “reality-based,” which is a small thing, but rubs me the wrong way. The logo on the second batch is simply too much. It will already be tricky to explain the t-shirt to people who aren’t familiar with the meme in question. How much more so with the Latin and the Escher? I think I’ll hold out for option #3, if and when it comes.

Gary Farber of “Amygdala”:http://www.amygdalagf.blogspot.com/ has posted, by my count, an average of 14 posts a day over the past four days. He’s linktastic! He’s out of control! Somebody stop him — if you dare!

Via “Matthew Yglesias”:http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/ via “Kos”:http://www.dailykos.com/, we have a “video”:http://www.dailykos.com/images/admin/President_Bush_Thanks_ISG.mpg of President Bush privately addressing the Iraq Survey Group (presumably some time in 2002-3). Kos hightlights Bush’s faltering delivery, but that’s not what concerns me. What concerns me (but does not surprise me) is the attitude exemplified in this statement:

. . . You’re truth-finders — you’re the folks we’re countin’ on to explain to not only our fellow citizens but to the entire world the true nature of evil . . .

It’s not “You’re truth-finders — you’re the folks we’re countin’ on to discover the truth about Saddam’s weapons programs.” For Bush, it’s “the true nature of evil.” Like I said, this isn’t _surprising_, but it does reinforce the sense that Bush pre-judged the situation in stark black-and-white terms that left no room for, as it turned out, the truth. And besides, how does someone concerned about ultimate evil pick Saddam over Osama bin Laden? Or Zarqawi, for that matter, whose assets were frozen — guess when? — “just yesterday”:http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=578&e=3&u=/nm/20041015/ts_nm/security_treasury_zarqawi_dc (hat tip to “TPM”:http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_10_10.php#003691).

Not that I ever watch Crossfire, but I wish I had caught this one. The “transcript”:http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0410/15/cf.01.html is up for Jon Stewart’s guest appearance, in which he savages the show and Tucker Carlson. It’s glorious. I read about it first on “Wonkette”:http://www.wonkette.com/ — strangely enough, she was at the table next to me at the coffee shop when she “interviewed” Tucker Carlson, as described “here”:http://www.wonkette.com/archives/breaking-wonkette-calls-someone-tries-this-reporting-thing-023530.php.

Stewart has this great insulation to say some of the things he says because his own show is, by definition, a big joke. And that’s something that in the whole interview Carlson simply could not get. Though he was smart enough to drop a quote to Wonkette afterwards, I guess.

UPDATE: “Go read”:http://www.puddingbowl.org/archive/2004/10/now_with_memeti.php Michael Hall on Stewart, Crossfire, and Wonkette. He’s pretty hard on Wonkette, but I think he’s basically right — her “look at me I’m not a real journalist!” schtick is now tired. She needs to take a page from Stewart’s book, which is her book too, or at least used to be.

Among the titles I scrounged off the tables at the State Department bookfair was _Backgammon: The Action Game_, by Prince Alexis Obolensky and Ted James. It was published in 1969, before Magriel’s _Backgammon_ and therefore by definition out of date, but it was only two bucks, and I thought it might be an interesting look at retro backgammon strategy.

The checkout was staffed by two very nice ladies, presumably wives of retired diplomats. “Oh!” one of them said. “I didn’t know Prince Alexis published a backgammon book!”

“Who’s Prince Alexis?” I asked.

“Russian nobility,” she replied. “His family fled here after the Revolution. Trying to live it up in exile — the White Russians, we call them.”

“Didn’t his brother work here?” said the other lady.

“Yes, I think so . . .” the first lady said. “And his son — no, it would have been his grandson — went to high school with Roger.”

Only at the State Department bookfair could such an exchange have ever taken place, I think. As it happens, the book has a good, quirky “history of backgammon” chapter, so it was easily worth the price. I don’t recall meeting any dignified old Russians at the backgammon club before, but I’ll be sure to keep a lookout the next time around.

I made the mistake of putting the most recent issue of _The Atlantic_ into the diaper bag and forgetting about it, so it’s taken me a while to read “Karl Rove in a Corner”:http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200411/green and “Welcome to the Green Zone”:http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/200411/langewiesche. Both are available online, and both are absolute must-reads. William Langewiesche is brilliant as always in his profile of postwar Baghdad, which is by far the most important article of the two. But Joshua Green’s profile of Karl Rove’s campaign tactics is particularly timely — I’m going to be gritting my teeth from here to election day wondering what his last-ditch ploy is going to be.

OK, so as it happens, I was able to watch the debate, I got your good ol’ unspinned insta-thoughts right here, baby!

I was surprised to find that my heart was beating quite quickly as the two candidates walked up to their respective podiums. It wasn’t excitement. It was, I realized on reflection, apprehension—the tension came from knowing what was at stake in the election, and the apprehension came because I was worried Kerry was going to screw up.

He didn’t screw up. He did all right. But so did Bush, who overall did a little better than he did in the second debate. I’ll still call it a Kerry win with my biased eyes, and I suspect the CW will evolve into something like a draw. There wasn’t any big moment in there that will shift things to a large extent.

Kerry was kind of lousy in the beginning but found his stride a few questions in. He stammered more often than in the previous two debates, and really nailed his responses less often than before. Of course, as a baseline he still did better than Bush on overall presentation, but as the last debate made clear, you can go a very long way on improving from low expectations. Bush replaced the sneer and slouch from the first debate and the whine from the second with a smarmy smile. It didn’t come off well either, but of the three it was the least egregious. At times during his responses, especially after he had pulled off what he clearly thought of as a zinger against Kerry, the smile reminded me of a seventh-grade bully proud at just having scored a diss on the class nerd.

I was really worried during Bush’s 30-second response to flu question that came second. He said “I want to remind people listening tonight that a plan is not a litany of complaints.” It was a perfectly-timed hit, and this was before Kerry had found his feet anyway, and I thought maybe it was all over. Kerry did fine on the tax question that came next, though—he went for a “pay as you go” line and Bush’s jabs in response didn’t amount to much. All in all, Bush trotted out “liberal” and “Massachusetts” a number of times, but it didn’t really amount of a wholesale attack like lots of people seemed to be predicting.

For Bush, the answer to everything was education. Specifically, the No Child Left Behind Act. At one point he even said “Listen, the No Child Left Behind Act is really a jobs act when you think about it.” He brought it up all over the place, and if Kerry had been just a little more on his feet he could have scored some points on that during the cheesy “women in your life” question that came at the end. Something like: “Before I get to that, Bob, let me congratulate you on posing a question that didn’t allow the President to bring in No Child Left Behind.”

Question #6—do you believe homosexuality is a choice?—was very important. Bush said “I don’t know.” Kerry came down (surprisingly) firmly in saying that it was not. I think it will serve him well, not simply because it’s right, but because the people who feel strongly about it an disagree with him are already voting for Bush, and those who are honestly unsure will respect the clarity, force, and confidence of his response. This question was one example, and there were others, also in the second debate, of Bush speaking to the base while Kerry goes for the middle. If I were a campaign adviser I’d have advised either of them at the outset to make motivating the base a first priority, but the fact that Bush has been the one to shift away from the middle lets Kerry go there much more easily.

It’s not in the transcript that I’m looking at, but after Kerry had referenced data from two news organizations in an answer on tax cuts, Bush started his response this way: -”It’s incredible to quote leading news organizations about . . . oh, never mind.”- “In all due respect, I’m not so sure it’s credible to quote leading news organizations about—oh, nevermind.” I would love to know what he meant to say there. I’m not sure he knew himself. The impression I had—and this was from his facial response as much as his words—is that quoting new organizations for data seemed ridiculous because, y’know, liberal media and all. Who knows if that’s what was going through his mind, but if it was, he had good sense to cut himself short.

I don’t have a url for it, but there was a NYT piece a couple weeks ago by Stanley Fish called “Kerry and Bush, As Seen from the Classroom.” In it, Fish talked about analyzing the rhetorical strategies of both candidates’ stump speeches with his undergrad students to see who they thought did better. And the answer, of course, was Bush—his communications team have always been great at rhetoric and style. Bush’s speeches clearly highlight his main points and use repetition to drive key ideas home. Kerry, by contrast, meanders. While he usually gets around to conveying the key fact or idea, by the time he’s there it’s been buried. Here’s a perfect example from Kerry’s response to Bush’s social security question:

You just heard the president say that young people ought to be able to take money out of Social Security and put it in their own accounts.

Now, my fellow Americans, that’s an invitation to disaster.

The CBO said very clearly that if you were to adopt the president’s plan, there would be a $2 trillion hole in Social Security, because today’s workers pay in to the system for today’s retirees. And the CBO said—that’s the Congressional Budget Office; it’s bipartisan—they said that there would have to be a cut in benefits of 25 percent to 40 percent.

The key piece of information here is “today’s workers pay into the system for today’s retirees.” That’s the heart of the matter and the hole in Bush’s plan. It is buried in a subordinate clause in the third sentence of his response. And it comes after a reference to a “hole” that only makes sense once you understand how the system works in the first place. So the “today’s workers” quote should have come first, followed by a description of the hole, and ending by calling it a disaster, once he’s actually communicated what he’s talking about. As it is, he creates steep expectations by putting “disaster” first, and then hides the key point that makes it all make sense.

Kerry does this sort of thing all the time. Bush sometimes does too when he’s speaking extempore, but never when he’s doing rehearsed speeches, because he has a killer speechwriting team. And the clarity of his speech rhetoric rubs off on him even in the debates—he’s used to making clear, forceful statements, and so they’re what he repeats on the spur of the moment as well.

Every time I thought Kerry was down for the count, he managed to pull himself up again, though. He got creamed with a lousy response to Bush’s succinct immigration answer, but lucked out with a minimum wage question to him right after that, which he nailed, followed by Bush’s grasping “NCLB is a jobs act” line.

My jaw dropped when Bush whipped out the “global test” line in his response to Kerry’s answer to a draft question. It wasn’t that he brought it up—that’s to be expected—but that he didn’t even bother to pretend to address what Kerry actually meant by it. He could have just dropped the phrase and let its associations squirm into people’s minds as they may, but he flat-out clarified the statement this way: “In order to defend ourselves, we’d have to get international approval,” and in doing so turned a perfectly weaselly insinuation into an easily refutable claim. But, again, he seems to be playing to his base now, so maybe in the long run it won’t matter.

Kerry’s closing statement was an all-too-familiar collage of the same old talking points. Bush’s started with “In the Oval Office there’s a painting,” at which point he had already won the closing statement exchange. See “killer speechwriting team,” above.

Looking back over it, I’ll be relieved if if the conventional wisdom ends up in a draw. Kerry was obviously up on substance, but only up on presentation if you factor out lowered expectations, which it seems you can’t really get away with. And Bush had his number on rhetorical style (I’d just go ahead and say “elocutio” if more of you had taken me for English 101).

Barring a big October Surprise, it looks like a dead heat straight on ‘till election day.

UPDATE: The insta-poll consensus (for what it’s worth, which ain’t much) gives Kerry a fairly solid win. Hey, I’ll take it.

Interesting contrast on Slate between Saletan (Kerry knocked it out of the park) and Suellentrop (it was close).

All in all, I’m warming up to the notion that Kerry won the debate (which I’m finding easy to do, go figure), but I still think it was Bush’s best performance of the three. It’s clear that his Osama bin Laden gaffe is going to haunt him big time, though. (UPDATE: The actual text of the OBL gaffe is in the comments.)

UPDATE: Kerry mentioned Cheney’s daughter during the “is homosexuality a choice?” question, and many conservatives, as well as Cheney’s wife, have been taking umbrage. Andrew Sullivan has some (UPDATE: many) words for them.

I’m not going to be able to catch the third debate live. Sorry to disappoint those of you who have grown accustomed to the instant commentary. Though there’s not too much point, out of habit I’m going to stay on media blackout until I’ve had a chance to watch the videotape and post some thoughts.

You don’t have to read far in Walden before you get to this:

I have travelled a good deal in Concord; and everywhere, in shops, and offices, and fields, the inhabitants have appeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways … I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in. Who made them serfs of the soil? Why should they eat their sixty acres, when man is condemned to eat only his peck of dirt? Why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born? They have got to live a man’s life, pushing all these things before them, and get on as well as they can. How many a poor immortal soul have I met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and woodlot! The portionless, who struggle with no such unnecessary inherited encumbrances, find it labor enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh.

When I read that on the road to Boston, I knew I was hooked, though my intention of getting through it before visiting Walden Pond turned out to be a pipe dream. Between one thing or another, I didn’t finish it for another couple of weeks, so all the beautiful nature prose didn’t wash over me until I was back in the big city. It’s easy to forget that Thoreau didn’t start his experiment out of a desire to frolic with the squirrels—it arose, rather, out of a touch of schadenfreude at the landed plight of his fellow townsmen.

The reason Walden’s opening sat so well with me is that it jives nicely with my own stuff-aversion, à la shelfworthiness. Thoreau’s message, translated into modern terms, allows those of us not burdened down with owning a house to feel pretty darn good about it. Sure, while romanticizing the life of the mind, he sometimes comes off as a little naive by romanticizing the life of the pauper, but if you’re like me and you’re occasionally consumed by the pressing desire to just throw away half of what you own, you’ll groove on passages like this:

At present our houses are cluttered and defiled by [furniture], and a good housewife would sweep out the greater part into the dust hole, and not leave her morning’s work undone. Morning work! By the blushes of Aurora and the music of Memnon, what should be man’s morning work in this world? I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and I threw them out the window in disgust. How, then, could I have a furnished house? I would rather sit in the open air, for no dust gathers on the grass, unless where man has broken ground.

I do wonder what Thoreau would have thought if he could have had an iBook, though. He railed against the material responsibilities that demand our attention, but his concern was really one of time more than matter. His grand experiment would have looked very different if he were carrying it out today. For one thing, he’d be much less likely to have a friend’s piece of land he could conveniently squat on for free. Having grown up among the literati, he probably wouldn’t have that convenient set of handyman skills to bring to bear. And there’s that troubling matter of health insurance. In 2004, his best bet for getting by on $400 a month or so would be to live in a group house, work part-time at the co-op, and maybe write all about it on the weekend at the coffee shop with the free wi-fi. Which leads me to what, I’m afraid, is my sole stunning insight upon rereading Walden:

If Thoreau lived today, he would so totally be a blogger.

I’m not talking about Walden as it was published, but as it was first written. Thoreau started off with daily musings scribbled down over the course of several seasons, and only much later shaped the thing into a cohesive whole. But even in its revised and organized form, the seams of what was essentially a running journal constantly shine through. Walden is series of short vignettes and everyday observations, descriptive paragraphs and flippant rants. Heck, the guy could be downright snarky at times:

As for the Pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.

“Ambitious booby!” I’d link to that! Acerbic wit aside, Thoreau was also prone to making wild statements off the top of his head, sometimes spilling over with wisdom, but often highlighting his inability to see that his grand vision might not be for everyone. In one section he describes the visit he paid to a poor Irish farmer, and how he explained to the guy that if he just quit his job and went to live in the woods (with his whole family!) that things would be groovy. It doesn’t take too much reading between the lines to imagine the farmer turning to his wife after Thoreau had left and saying “Jeez, what a jerk!” Which, again, has “blogger” written all over it—where would the blogosphere be without brilliant, eloquent people who are wrong as often as they are right?

I don’t know whether Thoreau’s day-to-day manuscripts are still available, but if they are, it would be quite easy to take them and post them sequentially, along the same lines as the Beatles Blog. Easy, but time-consuming, so I leave the task to some grad student studying American Transcendentalism with too much time on their hands.

Thoreau went to Walden loving simplicity, not nature, so it’s a little bit ironic that he’s best known as a nature writer and grandfather of the conservation movement. What he was was a writer, and his experiment in simplicity demanded that nature was what surrounded him, and so it was nature that he wrote about. Had he gotten it into his head that everybody should live ostentatiously instead of deliberately, he might have spent the time in Paris and written a very different book—though certainly one just as worth reading. Still, nature takes center stage fairly early on, to the benefit of a great many readers and nature lovers. I felt an unearthly tingle the whole time I was reading about his encounter with the loon, not least because I’ve played the very same game on Lake Anne-Marie in the Upper Peninsula. I’m tempted to quote the whole section, but it’s too long—go to the Gutenberg version, text-search for “As I was paddling,” and read on from there. Wonderful stuff.

Nature becomes Thoreau’s working material, but he’s ultimately interested in other things. Maybe it’s just as well that he wasn’t a blogger, because the necessity of somehow tying it all together is what made him think big. The call to heed our inner life never gets old, especially when the outer concerns are as shallow as they’ve ever been.

Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought. Every man is the lord of a realm beside which the earthly empire of the Czar is but a petty state, a hummock left by the ice. Yet some can be patriotic who have no self-respect, and sacrifice the greater to the less. They love the soil which makes their graves, but have no sympathy with the spirit which may still animate their clay. Patriotism is a maggot in their heads.

When you’re thirty-two and the bulk of your day is spent attending to the needs and desires of a 10-month-old baby, the notion of hopping aboard a Santa Maria of the mind for some probing inner exploration sounds rather exhausting, frankly. But the real core of Walden’s message—live deliberately—still rings true, and I doubt its lustre will ever fade. Make choices about how you live your life. Strip it down and build it back up again on purpose. Don’t do something because society does it or your peers do it or the conventional wisdom says that it seems sensible—do it for your own good reasons. It’s stuff everyone needs to be reminded about now and again—I’m not going to let another fifteen years go by before I read Walden again.