POTUS is All In: Notes on the Fair-Weather Free Market

by Joshua H. Liberatore

In the midst of the most recent bailout offering from the White House, this time to the ailing automakers of Motor City, Michigan, POTUS has witnessed a remarkable transformation in his own rhetorical vocabulary. Usually a happy defender of the “free market” system, POTUS has spent the last few months explaining his views both to his traditional fellow travelers and his staunchest critics. A review of some of the most prominent themes from his last three months of speechmaking is most instructive.

What was the question on autos? (December 18, 2008)

Limited government interference is the surest path to economic prosperity, unless . . .

In a few moments, Secretary Paulson and other members of my Working Group on Financial Markets will explain these steps in greater detail. They will make clear that each of these new programs contains safeguards to protect the taxpayers. They will make clear that the Government’s role will be limited and temporary, and they will make clear that these measures are not intended to take over the free market, but to preserve it. (October 14, 2008)

Bureaucratic oversight does not equal command-and-control measures (i.e. socialism):

The Government intervention is not a Government takeover. Its purpose is not to weaken the free market; it is to preserve the free market. (October 17, 2008)

The much-vaunted “ownership society” still exists as a functional goal:

So over-regulating the overall economy will make it harder for the ownership society and I just hope that doesn’t happen. I don’t think it will. I understand the concerns, I share the concerns, and there’s going to be a lot of people like AEI [American Enterprise Institute] speaking out against keeping the government at the helm of the economy. And good tax policy and good regulatory policy beyond that will help small businesses grow. That’s an integral part of the ownership. Same with housing. The key on housing is obviously interest rates: How much does it cost to buy a house? And people are going to own homes. And the housing market will lead this recovery when it starts. And it’s going to take a while though – I’m not an economist. But it’ll take a while. And there are some encouraging signs – not many, but some. Evidently the amount of mortgage applications rose, which is a good sign. I don’t know whether that’s working off unsold homes yet, but it’s a good sign. (December 1, 2008)

Much like the blessings of liberty – according to POTUS, “a gift from the Almighty to every man, woman, and child on the face of the Earth” – which often require guns and ground forces to protect and propagate here and abroad, the mythical free market demands its own version of trench warfare under present circumstances:

In the wake of the financial crisis, voices from the left and right are equating the free enterprise system with greed and exploitation and failure. It’s true this crisis includes failures by lenders and borrowers and by financial firms and by governments and independent regulators. But the crisis was not a failure of the free market system. And the answer is not to try to reinvent that system. It is to fix the problems we face, make the reforms we need, and move forward with the free market principles that have delivered prosperity and hope to people all across the globe. (November 13, 2008)

Now, most honest observers will point out that The Free Market, as the phrase is commonly deployed by politicians and their acolytes, is largely a fiction. Readers of Adams Smith can only concur. In the age of permanent industry subsidies (agribusiness, pharmaceuticals, airlines), forced demand (defense manufacturing and services), and corporate welfare (everything else), the markets we follow so closely are anything but free in practice. In fact, they are aggressively, jealously managed at the highest echelons of authority. Nevertheless, The Free Market is a comforting myth still worth its weight in gold in narratives like this one:

Free market capitalism is far more than economic theory. It is the engine of social mobility, the highway to the American Dream. It’s what makes it possible for a husband and wife to start their own business or a new immigrant to open a restaurant or a single mom to go back to college and to build a better career. It is what allowed entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley to change the way the world sells products and searches for information. It’s what transformed America from a rugged frontier to the greatest economic power in history, a nation that gave the world the steamboat and the airplane, the computer and the CAT scan, the Internet and the iPod. (November 13, 2008)

So, what it boils to is that the free market gives us jobs, stuff, and well, more stuff. Rhetorical invocations of the free market, it seems, form an inseparable component of our national discourse. To admit otherwise is not only un-American, it is simply unconscionable.

The United States has taken some extraordinary measures. Those of you who have followed my career know that I’m a free market person – until you’re told that if you don’t take decisive measures then it’s conceivable that our country could go into depression greater than the Great Depression. (November 15, 2008)

I guess the lesson is that even the most precious constructions of our national imagination are subject to structural improvement and occasional massaging from the organs of government, the institutional version of “just a little help from my friends”:

I know in the wake of the financial crisis, free markets have been under very harsh criticism from the left and from the right. It’s true the free market system is not perfect. It can be subject to excesses and abuse. As we’ve seen in recent months, there are times when government intervention is essential to restart frozen markets and to protect overall economic health. (November 22, 2008)

Things got so bad in the stock market (even as the price of oil blessedly dropped, relinquishing wide concern for alternative energy production and investment) and capital flow charts that POTUS has been forced into some awkward rhetorical backpedaling. Even when the subject is his own imminent retirement, POTUS pleas distraction:

And so I – even though I haven’t had much time to think about it, since I’ve been interested in the free market system – [laughter] – by taking non-free market action to save the free market system – [laughter] – but when we get out of here, it will be to – this whole discussion we’ve had here is-will be a part of the institute. (December 1, 2008)

A frank confession here actually, but the nervous laughter betrays the stark political reality of POTUS’s present position: you’re damned if you do, and you’re damned if you don’t. In short, POTUS can see that he’s in a very tight spot.

This is a difficult time for a free market person. Under ordinary circumstances, failed entities – failing entities should be allowed to fail. (December 18, 2008)

Fair enough. What good are eight years of tax cuts and deregulation if not to provide the bona fides required in facing down fiscal conservatives at times like these? POTUS is after all adaptable, contrary to the long-held criticism that he is a stubborn zealot. What turned him was the 3 a.m. call dreaded by all apostles of the free market.

And what makes this issue difficult to explain is – to the average guy is, why should I be using my money because of excesses on Wall Street? And I understand that frustration. I completely understand why people are nervous about it. I was in the Roosevelt Room and Chairman Bernanke and Secretary Paulson, after a month of every weekend where they’re calling, saying, we got to do this for AIG, or this for Fannie and Freddie, came in and said, the financial markets are completely frozen and if we don’t do something about it, it is conceivable we will see a depression greater than the Great Depression. (December 18, 2008)

If the fear mongers and terrorist-baiters of the presidential campaign season didn’t persuade Americans that we are living in extraordinary times, facing unprecedented dangers, requiring retired visionaries like Rudy Giuliani to show us the way, POTUS knew all along that the economic crisis felt at the top levels of decision-making might not trickle down into popular understanding:

These aren’t normal circumstances, that’s the problem. This is a hard issue for political people, because people never know how bad it could have been. And so the decisions you make are easy for people to say, why did he do that? Why is he wasting our money on this? Or, why is he doing that? Because without a catastrophe, the reasoning doesn’t, it just doesn’t really make it down to the grassroots. (December 18, 2008)

It’s true: we tend to wait for cataclysmic events to inspire direct action, a strategy that has shown varying degrees of success. As for his partisan duty to defend the timeless value of the injured free market, POTUS is well aware of the thin ice on which he treads:

People look at, “My money being used because Wall Street got excessive.” And I make the case that I didn’t want to do this. It’s the last thing I wanted to do. Nevertheless, I felt compelled to do it, because it would make life worse for you. We lost 533,000 jobs last month. What would another million jobs lost do to the economy? What would that do to the psychology in markets? What would that do – how would that affect the working people? And so as you can tell, we’re all in, in this administration. And if need be, we’ll be in for more. (December 18, 2008)

Am I the only one troubled by such confident use of a gambling analogy to articulate cause for national optimism? I suspect I am not.

POTUS and the Other

by Joshua H. Liberatore

First, a disclaimer: a mood of ironic gloom has shrouded our editorial duties this week. POTUS made his surprise visit to the principal theaters of the “war on terror” and encountered a few surprises of his own, some shouted, some whispered. Presiding over all this, even in our humble, monkish fashion, pushed even the most detached and sober among us through a full range of sentiments, none without the symbolism of what thoughtful Americans must be feeling all over Freedom’s Land. In its 30-second, instantly-circulatable, YouTube manifestation, of course, the image of POTUS ducking that well-pitched first shoe with the speed and agility of the best Texas Ranger, one laughed and perhaps felt a shred of patriotic pride at the sheer deftness of POTUS’s evasive action. I myself chuckled, and joked with my colleagues about the wording of the box note we would have to add to our annotated text.

By Monday afternoon, however, after poring over the full 28-minute transcript of the remarks and Q & A, studying the C-SPAN video at various speeds three times, making extensive tape corrections to the stenographer’s text, and researching the story and background of the offending Iraqi journalist, who can be heard screaming several minutes after being dragged away by security personnel and apparently beaten in the adjacent hallways, while POTUS feigned cool and brushed off the incident as an example of “what happens in free societies,” I felt like weeping. For the sake of my country, I hope I am not alone in this feeling.

First of all, we’re here at the request of the Iraqi government.

Though we’d all like to forget it, and perhaps naively wish that POTUS-elect will make it all go away, the U.S. invaded and occupied a sovereign Iraq, installed a provisional government, and then applauded the advent of the functional constitution and authentic elections that gave rise to the current leadership. Now, I didn’t study history at Yale like POTUS did, but something in his rearview interpretation of events went over my head. Could that basic deception possibly be the source of some local anger in Iraq?

How do you know? I mean, how do we know what he’s expressing?

With all due respect to the opportunities for humor and merrymaking comedians and talk-show hosts the world over will have enjoyed and exploited by the week’s end and beyond, let us pause from our chortling to examine some of the more serious implications of this occasion. The man at the center of it, Iraqi journalist Muntadar al-Zaidi, who covered the U.S. bombing of Sadr City and witnessed firsthand the collateral damage of that and other campaigns, was not being cute or speaking from his armchair when he yelled in Arabic “killer of Iraqis, killer of children,” as fellow journalists and security staff piled on him in the brief mayhem following his act of “protest.”

Reporter: We had a translator who said he shouted about the widows and orphans.

THE PRESIDENT: I don’t know. I’ve heard all kinds of stories. I heard he was representing a Baathist TV station. I don’t know the facts, but let’s find out the facts. All I’m telling you, it was a bizarre moment.

Reporter: I wanted to ask something broader.

THE PRESIDENT: I don’t think you can take one guy throwing shoes and say this represents a broad movement in Iraq. You can try to do that if you want to. I don’t think it would be accurate.

It’s worth considering POTUS’s motivations for making the surprise visit in the first place. Ostensibly, he went to formalize the two security agreements with the Iraqi Prime Minister, Nuri al-Maliki, and touch base with President Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan on the back end. In the brazen vocabulary of public relations, certainly he also went to extrude a little deference and gratitude – however strained – from the two governments which Americans are devoting such sacrifice and treasure to prop up at all costs. Itemizing these sacrifices and American generosity formed the cornerstone of a lot of what POTUS had to say throughout the trip. Apparently, POTUS’s words had merely failed to persuade al-Zaidi of America’s righteousness:

The American people have sacrificed a great deal to reach this moment. The battle in Iraq has required a great amount of time and resources. Thousands of our finest citizens have given their lives to make our country safer and to bring us to this new day. We also praise the thousands of the coalition forces that came, and the sacrifices that those countries have made. And the Iraqi people have sacrificed a lot. They’ve suffered car bombings and suicide attacks and IEDs, and desperate efforts by terrorists to destroy a young democracy. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have stepped forward to defend this democracy, and many have paid a dear price.

A dear price indeed. Notice the tertiary position of Iraq’s collective sacrifices in this calibrated litany, as well as its deliberate rhetorical packaging. When Jennifer Loven of the Associate Press tried to draw POTUS out on the awkward ironies of the visit – occasioned as it was by news of fresh roadside bombings in Baghdad and shootings in Mosul in the midst of the newly minted security agreements and renewed self-praise for the surge’s triumph – he feigned indifference.

So what if a guy threw a shoe at me?

POTUS was the paragon of American stoicism and good sportsmanship under pressure, and he seemed pretty proud of it, joking later with journalists aboard Air Force One: “I didn’t know what the guy said, but I saw his sole” and “I’m pretty good at ducking, as most of you will know . . . I’m talking about ducking your questions.” Bright shame did, however, register palpably in the faces of Prime Minister Maliki and the tardy Secret Service agents who rushed from backstage after audience members had already subdued al-Zaidi in the super-secure, sanitized press room. POTUS-elect might care to take note of these subtleties.

But let me talk about the guy throwing the shoe. It is one way to gain attention. It’s like going to a political rally and having people yell at you. It’s like driving down the street and have people not gesturing with all five fingers. It’s a way for people to, you know, draw – I don’t know what the guy’s cause is. But one thing is for certain: He caused you to ask me a question about it. I didn’t feel the least bit threatened by it. These journalists here were very apologetic, they were – said, this doesn’t represent the Iraqi people. But that’s what happens in free societies, where people try to draw attention to themselves.

POTUS is partly right here. An Iraqi association of journalists has formally condemned al-Zaidi’s actions, but they have also lobbied for his release and fair treatment, much in the spirit of POTUS’s lip service to American norms of free assembly, speech, and protest. Out on the streets of Baghdad, however, the reaction has been less cautious. Reports of student demonstrations and strident popular gatherings in support of al-Zaidi show that not all Iraqis are so keen to apologize. And drawing attention to oneself is not the only outcome, of course. According to al-Zaidi’s brother, the shoe-thrower Muntadar “suffered a broken hand, broken ribs and internal bleeding, as well as an eye injury” and required hospitalization as a result of his handling and detainment. He may face up to seven years – ironically, under a Baathist-era law - in prison for the stunt.

I doubt in his worst nightmares [Saddam] ever would have dreamt that we’d be standing in one of his palaces.

POTUS also made the last-minute trip to spend some time with American troops and show his support for those “who wear the uniform” during another cycle of holidays spent far away from the comforts of home. Later at Camp Victory – that’s its official name – POTUS congratulated the troops, and per forma, himself:

Thanks to you, Iraq is no longer sponsoring terror – it is fighting terror. It’s making American people safer as a result. . . . But thanks to you, the Iraq we stand in tonight is dramatically freer, dramatically safer, and dramatically better than the Iraq we found eight years ago.

Eight years ago, by my calendar (standard Gregorian, government-issue), lands us in mid-December 2000, about a month after POTUS lost the popular vote and scarcely 37 days before he was sworn in, a full 28 months before the Iraq invasion. His barracks cheerleaders evidently did not resent this slip in historical contiguity, but we can understand how average Iraqis might.

Many said the mission was hopeless; many called for retreat. Retreat would have meant failure – and failure is never an option. . . . You have shown that when America is tested, we rise to meet the test. You have shown that the desire for freedom is more powerful than the intimidation of terrorists. You have shown that there is no task too difficult for the United States military.

Not to nitpick, but history has shown that failure is an option, even for the United States military. And however much this recognition hurts our pride, or sense of entitlement, or pretensions to exceptionalism, or whatever it is that has brought us to this precipice, failure is sometimes the best option. We’ve heard the rhetoric before, however. Remember Nixon’s “peace with honor”? The necessary humiliation of the U.S. retreat from Vietnam in 1975 and the psychology of wounded arrogance that it fostered in enterprising politicians, unfortunately, only led to the bizarre – to use POTUS’s own word – invasions of Grenada and Panama in the 1980s. Others have no doubt studied this curious pattern in our recent history. Perhaps we should too.

A Letter from the Provinces: On Corruption

by Patrick Baker                                                                              December 12, 2008

We in the provinces are gleefully following the story of Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich. How can one take delight in such an abuse of power? Well, how can one not? Especially if you’re from Detroit, which with thirty years of corrupt mayors from Coleman “Krugerrand” Young to Kwame “Party-at-My-Mansion” Kilpatrick (interrupted by the respectable but powerless Dennis Archer) has long left its residents the lone consolation that only Chicago is more corrupt. Now it appears that the whole state of Illinois is corrupt. There isn’t much to cheer about in Detroit these days, but we – even those of us in voluntary exile – will take what we can get.

    On the other hand, it is a bit disconcerting that Mr. Boogynightsavich (come on, the hair) can incite such shock, disapproval, and outrage, without bringing one person to the streets in protest. Sure, Obama has said he should resign; the Illinois Attorney General is asking the State Supreme Court to strip him of his power; and every self-respecting (read: self-important) pundit has called for him to step down. And yet B-Rod is back at the office, doing business as usual, which means he is probably still trying to find someone to buy a seat in that private club in Washington.

    Yes, the Congress Club, America’s official home of corruption. Where laws are sold to the least scrupulous “lobbyist” in return for campaign “contributions” and hidden perquisites. Where hundreds of billions of dollars are allocated to the great sucking sound on Wall Street, while tens of millions of Americans put up with poisonous food and air, substandard education, crumbling infrastructure, mountains of debt, and nowhere to run, nowhere to go (baby – yes, it does sound like a Bruce Springsteen song). Oh yeah, and club rules allow a convicted felon like Ted Stevens, although ineligible to vote for himself in a Federal election, to vote in its hollow chambers. In light of these observations, perhaps Rowdy Roddy B should appoint himself to the seat. He already seems to know and abide by the club code.

    Meanwhile on Main Street, wherever the [expletive] that was supposed to be, We the People are sitting at home, glued to the tube, unaware that all our self-righteous anger could be dealt with more constructively than with another helping of bagged chips. We might do well to take a lesson from Greece, where in the past week bands of “outraged” youth have decided to start kicking a little in the same place they’ve been taking it for the last five years (from a government so corrupt that even Cheney and Rove could learn something). I’m not saying that Americans need to set fire to banks and cars, but they could at least stop bending over so courteously.

    Of course, there is more at stake than Illinois politics here. And frankly, it doesn’t matter who gets appointed to Obama’s Senate seat. What can that one seat possibly be worth (besides several hundred K) in comparison to eight years of misrule by a sociopath? If Hot Rod should lose his job because “incapable of legitimately exercising his ability as governor” (in the words of the Illinois Attorney General), why wasn’t Bush impeached long ago? Similarly, how could Ted Stevens almost have been re-elected? And why are bamboozling bigots like Jerry Falwell considered holy?

    We Americans have a strange idea of corruption and of inappropriate behavior. We will ruin dedicated public servants like Bill Clinton and Eliot Spitzer for sexual indiscretions, but we will obsessively romanticize Camelot, for which a more appropriate name might have been the Playboy Mansion. I wonder what Kennedy’s chances would have been if a disgruntled Nixon had sicked a repulsive Ken Starr on him, or if the likes of the indomitable Patrick Fitzgerald considered consensual sexual activity grounds for prosecution. Mr. Blagojevich seems in this sense a most astute criminal. By keeping it in his pants, he has managed to keep the American people less outraged than it should be. And who knows, that might just be his ticket to the Senate of our empire, rather than to exile in its provinces.

Punctuating POTUS

by Joshua H. Liberatore

When I explain to people that I earn my keep by editing the President’s speeches, a common reaction – quite understandably – is some version of, “So you guys fix his grammar?” Well, no, not exactly. And much as the inner English teacher weeps not to be able to correct howlers like “Drugs destroys lives,” uttered precisely one year ago today, our main task is to make oral remarks readable as printed text. Our intended audience is posterity. Our modest aim is proper context and accuracy, not polish, verbal grace, or even basic subject-verb agreement.That said, meeting the criterion of future readability quite frequently demands aggressive and creative deployment of punctuation. And in punctuating POTUS, one of the familiar challenges we editors face is dealing with POTUS’s tendency to mix reported speech with direct speech, often in discussing fairly abstract concepts. For example, if you or I were discussing aid to Africa and how best to administer its use, we might say something along these lines: “We have expressed our desire to help African nations help themselves, but we don’t want to be heavy-handed about it. We want to show them that we trust local leaders to implement the programs themselves.”

POTUS pronounced a similar idea to superpastor Rick Warren, just last week at the Saddleback Forum on Global Health, in recognition of World AIDS Day. What follows is the version given in the rough transcript provided by the White House press office:

And so setting the goals also had to change the way we did development aid. In other words, we said to people, we want to help you. But rather than being paternalistic about our help – which basically says, we know better than you on how to achieve our goals – we expect you to be a partner in achieving the goals. Which was an attitudinal change basically saying to African leaders, in this case, we trust you; we think you’ve got the capacity to be a good partner.

What to do with all those embedded clauses, all those vague pronouns? What to do about those theoretical concepts framed as dialogue? One needs to make it clear that POTUS is explaining a philosophy for the dissemination of aid, not vocalizing an internal conversation. After many assays and much grammarian’s handwringing, we arrived at the following version, which is by no means perfect:

And so setting the goals also had to change the way we did development aid. In other words, we said to people, “We want to help you.” But rather than being paternalistic about our help, which basically says, “We know better than you on how to achieve our goals.” We expect you to be a partner in achieving the goals. Which was an attitudinal change, basically saying to African leaders, in this case, “We trust you; we think you’ve got the capacity to be a good partner.” (December 1, 2008)

To achieve a modicum of clarity, we sacrificed adherence to complete sentence structure among other sacred elements of style. There were other options of course, as you will readily discern, but few if any seem markedly superior. Sometimes it’s not easy to decide where to break these abstract quotations, but neither can we let them linger indefinitely, edging the syntax into a morass of confusion and linguistic despair. When it comes to punctuating POTUS, it’s principally a matter of choosing the lesser of two evils.

Given that POTUS likes to tell stories, and often uses a storytelling format to illustrate complex decisions or points of fundamental strategy, we encounter such difficulties more often than is healthy for our national security. Later in the Saddleback Forum, POTUS recycled one of his favorite stories, whose original dates back to a trip to Eastern Europe in November of 2002:

It’s a rainy day, there was a lit balcony, and I asked, why is that balcony lit? And it was because the tyrant Ceausescu had given his last speech in this balcony. Just as I stepped up to speak a full rainbow appears. It was a stunning moment. Remember it was a drizzly day, kind of dark. And I ad-libbed, “God is smiling on Bucharest,” because the rainbow ended exactly behind the balcony where the tyrant had given his last speech. And you can look at that any way you want to look at it. One way to look at it is, hey, pal, you’ve got a lot of influence – and you can use your influence for human liberty, for decency, and for justice all times, all places.

Would that God were smiling on the semi-colon or the unsplit infinitive! But POTUS is right: there are indeed many ways of looking at it, but we still can’t figure out what he meant in that terminal sentence. In that same spirit of humility, I end this week’s issue with two raw, interactive examples, works in progress, directly from today’s editorial desk. Outside advice is most welcome.

Secondly, what has changed with Iran is universal recognition about the dangers of Iran having a – the capacity to make a nuclear weapon. And therefore, one of the objectives of my administration is to create an international coalition all saying the same thing, which is, you have defied the IAEA; therefore, you cannot be trusted to say that you’re only enriching for civilian nuclear power; therefore, stop your process, verify they stopped their enrichment process, otherwise there will continue to be international sanctions. (December 7, 2008)

And so I’m confident history will say, oh, Bush could have done it better here, or, Bush could have done it better there. But I think from the strategic point of view, I’m confident that the idea of moving liberty in the region, a two-state solution to help the Israeli-Palestinian issue, the liberation of Iraq, and the follow-up with – to help the Iraqis realize their sovereignty – a strong push-back against Iran – I believe when people objectively analyze this administration, they’ll say, well, I see now what he was trying to do. (December 7, 2008)

We who toil to document that very history share your hope, POTUS, but in the meantime, we remain dutifully puzzled.

False Starts and Freudian Slips

by Joshua H. Liberatore

One of the distinctive challenges of editing POTUS for the historical record involves determining which verbal ticks must be preserved and which forgiven as negligible oral stumbles. The principle category comprises what we call “false starts.” In speaking, we are all practitioners of occasional self-adjustments, in which we begin a sentence using one construction ( “I think that if we cook . . .” ), then abruptly shift to another ( “. . . no, I’d rather go out for dinner tonight.” ). In fact, we do it so often that we scarcely notice, and for the most part, basic communication goes unhampered. If you were to record yourself in casual conversation, however, you might be surprised at just how often false starts interrupt and fragment otherwise intelligent discourse.The utterances of POTUS, on the other hand – no matter how casual or impromptu – are nearly always recorded by a faithful White House stenographer. And as his oral remarks are converted into published texts, false starts become a thorny question of editorial judgment, and sometimes just plain mercy.

Simple false starts, the result of ordinary verbal crutches, can be easily forgiven, and thus, omitted. For example, a simple repetition or stutter – “Yesterday the Working Group on Financial Markets, which is – which is obviously associated with the White House, announced an initiative to create these kinds of clearing houses” – can be safely excised from the edited version without seriously marring the authenticity of the public record (November 15, 2008).

In other cases, however, even simple shifts in verb choice need to be documented for fidelity’s sake. At this year’s APEC summit in Lima, Peru, on November 22:

So I want to talk today about how to do that and I want to focus – and I think we ought to focus our efforts on three great forces for economic growth: free markets, free trade, and free people.

So, how do we choose what to keep and what to forgive? The general rule of thumb is to measure substantive difference in word choices. Following that rule, we discover that POTUS’s false starts often reveal very interesting subtexts, providing a conduit into the inner workings of his psyche. A few examples will suffice.

On a government website promoting volunteer opportunities:

And you can search my hometown. They tell me that if you get on Crawford, Texas, you’ll find that the local Humane Society leaks – seeks volunteer pet groomers, which makes Barney really nervous. (September 8, 2008)

On responsible borrowing:

Some people bought homes to simply speculate. But there’s also a lot of sensible homeowners who can make mends – ends meet with just a little bit of help, and that’s what we want. (October 7, 2008)

Conversely, on biting off more than you can chew and seeking government assistance:

And so a lot of people say, “Who can I talk to to help me refinance my home? Where do I go?” And so the HOPE NOW allowance – Alliance is an opportunity to say to folks, here’s how you can find the ways to renegotiate your paper – renegotiate your note. And it’s working. (October 7, 2008)

And my personal favorite, in his formal remarks in Bangkok this August 7:

I was disappointed that the Doha round of trade talks has stalled, and the United States will continue to engage China, India, and other nations to help reach a successful collusion – conclusion.

If we were inclined to psychoanalyze POTUS, using just these recent examples as fodder, we might reach some very intriguing conclusions about his interior demons.

Above all, as his literary executors, we must resist the temptation to make the text pretty at the expense of accuracy. The fact is, sometimes we want to help POTUS arrive at cogent, fluent speech, but just can’t. At this year’s September 11th memorial dedication at the Pentagon, solemnity demanded a precision that just barely eluded POTUS:

The years that followed have seen justice delivered to evil men and battles fought in distant lands. But each day on this year – each year on this day, our thoughts return to this place. Here, we remember those who died. And here, on this solemn anniversary, we dedicate a memorial that will enshrine their memory for all time.

And in the same APEC address cited above, we winced to curate this monstrosity:

The nations in this region must also continuing to work down – must continue to work down – continue working to break down trade barriers at the global level. We have an immediate opportunity to do so through the Doha Round at the WTO. One of the enduring lessons of the Great Depression is that global protectionism is a path to global economic ruin.

Poor POTUS! But we must not allow pity to muddle our editorial standards, we his humble documentarians of false starts, Freudian slips, and everything in between.

“Amusing Ourselves to Death” by Neil Postman

by Joshua H. Liberatore

Nearly a quarter-century has passed since Neil Postman published Amusing Ourselves to Death, but its mordant commentary on the state of American “public discourse” in the television era is no less relevant or important today. In fact, reading this succinct and responsibly researched treatise in 2008, when the Internet is the communication and marketing tool of choice, one can’t help but notice that many of Postman’s brave insights might easily apply to that medium as well. I leave that premise for the experts to tackle, however. What is clear is that our culture and our “national conversation” are still very much in the grip of the senior technology, the television, the effects of which can be readily observed in our consumption habits, our political campaigns, and the content of our social lives. Postman begins by rehearsing two literary warnings. The more familiar Orwellian warning is that government powers might seize control of information channels and limit the range of speech through totalitarian psychology and force. The less famous – and according to Postman, more pernicious – scenario was described by Aldous Huxley, who foresaw people choosing for themselves to ignore information and allowing public speech to “drown in a sea of irrelevance.”

    In just 164 pages, Postman issues a sharp warning of his own, working from Huxley’s prescient worry, that we are approaching that “sea of irrelevance” and indeed, might already be wading in its putrid tidewaters. Working from the well-documented theorem that television shapes the way we learn, influences the way we process information, and alters the capacity of our memories, Postman examines several aspects of our discourse that have changed in light of the shift from a text-based to an image-based system of communication. Short of saying we have become dumber (which, though likely true, might alienate even patient readers), Postman shows how political discourse, teaching techniques, consumer acumen, and even parenting have witnessed dramatic deteriorations in efficiency and effectiveness. In every case, delivery of substantive content, our attention span, overall ratio of comprehension, and ultimately, audience retention, are all circumscribed – which is to say damaged – by the advent and preponderance of television in modern life. As a result, we have become lazy, diffident, and moody as consumers and users of information. If you’re weary of this diagnosis and are loath to hear another intellectual scolding our collective complacency, Postman’s suggestions for countering the desolation of our minds might just surprise you.