Paul Krugman: Authentic? Never Mind

Paul Krugman on how the the term "authenticity" is used by political reporters, and how it gets in the way of identifying and discussing more substantive issues:

Authentic? Never Mind, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times: Rich liberals who claim they’ll help America’s less fortunate are phonies.

Let me give you one example — a Democrat who said he’d work on behalf of workers and the poor. He even said he’d take on Big Business. But the truth is that while he was saying those things, he was living in a big house and had a pretty lavish summer home too. His favorite recreation, sailing, was incredibly elitist. And he didn’t talk like a regular guy.

Clearly, this politician wasn’t authentic. His name? Franklin Delano Roosevelt...

[T]oday, it seems, politics is all about seeming authentic. ... What does authenticity mean? Supposedly it means not pretending to be who you aren’t. But that definition doesn’t seem to fit the way the term is actually used in political reporting.

For example, the case of F.D.R. shows that there’s nothing inauthentic, in the normal sense of the word, about calling for ... policies that will hurt your own financial position. But the news media seem to find it deeply disturbing that John Edwards talks about fighting poverty while living in a big house.

On the other hand, ... Fred Thompson ... spent 18 years working as a highly paid lobbyist, wore well-tailored suits and drove a black Lincoln Continental. When he ran for the Senate, however, his campaign reinvented him as a good old boy: it leased a used red pickup truck for him to drive, dressed up in jeans and a work shirt, with ... Red Man chewing tobacco on the front seat.

But Mr. Thompson’s strength, says Lanny Davis in The Hill, is that he’s “authentic.”...

Talk of authenticity, it seems, lets commentators and journalists put down politicians they don’t like or praise politicians they like, with no relationship to what the politicians actually say or do.

Here’s a suggestion: Why not evaluate candidates’ policy proposals, rather than their authenticity? And if there are reasons to doubt a candidate’s sincerity, spell them out.

For example, Hillary Clinton’s credibility as a friend of labor is called into question, not by her biography or life style, but by the fact that ... her chief strategist — a man Al Gore fired in 2000 because he didn’t trust him — heads a public relations company that helps corporations fight union organizing drives.

And where do you start with Rudy Giuliani? We keep being told that he has credibility on national security, because he seemed so reassuring on 9/11. (Some firefighters have condemned his actual performance..., saying that rescue efforts were uncoordinated and that firemen died because he provided them with faulty radios. ... And the nation’s largest firefighters’ union has condemned his handling of recovery efforts...)

But he’s spent the years since then cashing in on terrorism, and his decisions about Giuliani Partners’ personnel and clients raise real questions... His partners, as The Washington Post pointed out, included “a former police commissioner later convicted of corruption, a former F.B.I. executive who admitted taking artifacts from ground zero and a former Roman Catholic priest accused of covering up sexual abuse in the church.”

The point is that questions about a candidate shouldn’t be whether he or she is “authentic.” They should be about motives: whose interests would the candidate serve if elected? And think how much better shape the nation would be in if enough people had asked that question seven years ago.

_________________________
Previous (6/8) column: Paul Krugman: Lies, Sighs and Politics
Next (6/15) column: Paul Krugman: America Comes Up Short

Comments

[anne]

http://select.nytimes.com/2006/12/26/opinion/26patterson.html

December 26, 2006

Our Overrated Inner Self
By ORLANDO PATTERSON

In the 1970s, the cultural critic Lionel Trilling encouraged us to take seriously the distinction between sincerity and authenticity. Sincerity, he said, requires us to act and really be the way that we present ourselves to others. Authenticity involves finding and expressing the true inner self and judging all relationships in terms of it.

Authenticity now dominates our way of viewing ourselves and our relationships, with baleful consequences. Within sensitive individuals it breeds doubt; between people it promotes distrust; within groups it enhances group-think in the endless quest to be one with the group's true soul; and between groups it is the inner source of identity politics.

It also undermines good government. James Nolan, in his book "The Therapeutic State," has shown how the emphasis on the primacy of the self has penetrated major areas of government: emotivist arguments trump reasoned discourse in Congressional hearings and criminal justice; and in public education, self-esteem vies with basic literacy in evaluating students. The cult of authenticity partly accounts for our poor choice of leaders. We prefer leaders who feel our pain, or born-again frat boys who claim that they can stare into the empty eyes of an ex-K.G.B. agent and see inside his soul. On the other hand we hear, ad nauseam, that Hillary Clinton, arguably one of the nation's most capable senators, is "fake" and therefore not electable as president.

But it is in our attempts to come to grips with prejudice that authenticity most confounds. Social scientists and pollsters routinely belittle results showing growing tolerance; they argue that Americans have simply learned how to conceal their deeply ingrained prejudices. A hot new subfield of psychology claims to validate such skepticism. The Harvard social psychologist Mahzarin Banaji and her collaborators claim to have evidence, based on more than three million self-administered Web-based tests, that nearly all of us are authentically bigoted to the core with hidden "implicit prejudices" — about race, gender, age, homosexuality and appearance — that we deny, sometimes with consciously tolerant views. The police shootings of Amadou Diallo and Sean Bell, they argue, are simply dramatic examples of how "implicit prejudice" influences the behavior of us all.

However well meaning these researchers, their gotcha psychology is morally invasive and, as the psychologist Philip Tetlock has cogently argued, of questionable validity and use. It cannot distinguish between legitimate apprehension and hateful bigotry as responses to identical social problems. A fearful young black woman living in a high-crime neighborhood could easily end up with a racist score. An army of diversity trainers now use Banaji's test to promote touchy-feely bias awareness in companies, which my colleague Frank Dobbin has shown to be a devious substitute for minority promotions.

I couldn't care less whether my neighbors and co-workers are authentically sexist, racist or ageist. What matters is that they behave with civility and tolerance, obey the rules of social interaction and are sincere about it. The criteria of sincerity are unambiguous: Will they keep their promises? Will they honor the meanings and understandings we tacitly negotiate? Are their gestures of cordiality offered in conscious good faith?

Scholars like Richard Sennett and the late Philip Rieff attribute the rise of authenticity to the influence of psychoanalysis, but America's protestant ethos and its growing intrusion in public life may be equally to blame....

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/01/opinion/l01self.html

Is It Who We Are, or How We Act?

To the Editor:

"Our Overrated Inner Self," by Orlando Patterson, represents the clearest thinking on social and political discourse I've read in a long while.

It breaks down the reality of interpersonal relations both at a microcosmic and a macrocosmic level to its root: how we act toward one another rather than how we think about one another.

The social contract by which we Americans live with one another here and how we live with those abroad depends more on how we abide by our agreements than on whether we agree on all our respective values and objectives.

If it didn't sound overly religious, I'd say Mr. Patterson's column could be summed up by the phrase "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you," long held by major religious and secular ethicists as the basis of good living.

Irv Rubenstein
Nashville, Dec. 26, 2006

[reason]

Anne,
thanks for the Orlando Patterson quote. It strikes me as very insightful.

Strangely, as a baby boomer, I agree with it. The cult of self-fulfillment which goes with it has also been very destructive.

My experience is that growing up means learning to live with our limitations. It used to be called wisdom. Now it is treated as cowardice. This is created much conflict and a lot of unhappiness. People don't see the circularity of self-referencing goals. They cannot all be fulfilled and eventually must create conflict.

I always find that people who are interested in the world and understanding how it works (rather than obsessed with their own goals or state) are happier and easier to deal with.

And of course it comes back to little problem of externalities. All living out our dreams, could ultimately poison the planet.

[anne]

Agreed.

[bakho]

Thanks for the quote, Anne. The authenticity vs sincerity debate is new to me.

Perhaps JFK framed it, "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country."

So much of politics and economic policy seem to divide the public into interest groups with policies aimed to further specific groups rather than addressing the greater good of the whole society. I believe that a society that maintains opportunity for all and distributes its resources is healthier than a society that promotes a winner take all battle between haves and have nots.

It is not that candidates in general support the interests of business or workers. Some interests are legitimate. It is candidates that favor special interest groups to the detriment of society as a whole. A public consensus on policies that will move us forward and measuring candidates against their support and competence to implement the policies might be a better alternative.

[reason]

bakho...
I don't know about you but that JFK quote certainly grates with modern sensibilities. Pure sophistry, it doesn't make much sense if looked at more closely (what exactly does "country" mean? The people, the land or the government for instance?) I would suggest that a collective "you" and your "country" are in fact the same thing, so the statement is non sensical. It is just another way of expressing the co-operative, individualist trade-off that is always part of living in a society.
No I think the issue is somewhat subtler and broader. It is to do with an individuals relationship to reality - how much he tries to adjust reality to himself(herself) versus how much he adjusts to reality. Today there is too much of the former and too little of the latter.
A related, but not quite the same, issue is form versus substance.

[James Kroeger]

If John Edwards had some good advisors, he'd stop letting the Republicans et al. continue to develop the themes that they clearly plan to use against him in an Image Campaign if he were to succeed in gaining the Dem's nomination. Right now they are seemingly bizarre criticisms (he cares too much about his good looks...he can't authentically care about the poor if he is rich) but as the Republicans well know, such criticisms can be effective if repeated enough over time.

One thing John Edwards ought to do right now is embrace the "John Edwards is a Rich Man" accusation. Instead of shying away from discussions of his wealth and spending habits, he ought to start branding himself as THE rich guy who is running for President (as though he were the only one) and start bragging though a clever marketing campaign that this Rich Guy is the one candidate who is calling on the other Rich People out there to start using their money to help the less fortunate through their government.

Stop running away from the issues they are creating; embrace them and turn them into positives. Criticisms of character/personality (laced with ridicule and sarcasm) can be very effective, as the Republicans well know, but only if they are not answered.

[anne]

When I am in the library, I will try to find the discussion of sincerity and authenticity by Lionel Trilling, who I would like to know more about in any event. I remember, but did not read, an essay by Trilling titled somewhat "the moral responsibility to be educated."

[anne]

Ah, here....

http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/t/trilling-moral.html

September 24, 2000

The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent
Selected Essays
By LIONEL TRILLING

The America of John Dos Passos

1938

* * *

U.S.A. is far more impressive than even its three impressive parts—The 42nd Parallel, 1919, The Big Money—might have led one to expect. It stands as the important American novel of the decade, on the whole more satisfying than anything else we have. It lacks any touch of eccentricity; it is startlingly normal; at the risk of seeming paradoxical one might say that it is exciting because of its quality of cliche: here are comprised the judgments about modern American life that many of us have been living on for years.

Yet too much must not be claimed for this book. Today we are inclined to make literature too important, to estimate the writer's function at an impossibly high rate, to believe that he can encompass and resolve all the contradictions, and to demand that he should. We forget that, by reason of his human nature, he is likely to win the intense perception of a single truth at the cost of a relative blindness to other truths. We expect a single man to give us all the answers and produce the "synthesis." And then when the writer, hailed for giving us much, is discovered to have given us less than everything, we turn from him in a reaction of disappointment: he has given us nothing. A great deal has been claimed for Dos Passos and it is important, now that U.S.A. is completed, to mark off the boundaries of its enterprise and see what it does not do so that we may know what it does do....

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/09/24/reviews/000924.24gilmant.html

September 24, 2000

The Foremost Authority
By RICHARD GILMAN

THE MORAL OBLIGATION TO BE INTELLIGENT
Selected Essays.
By Lionel Trilling.

Like many New Yorkers a generation ago, I didn't know Lionel Trilling was Jewish, and when I learned he was, I thought he must be an English Jew, a migratory Oxbridge don, or more likely the son of one. Someone of Trilling's enormous erudition must have had a head start at home, like Matthew Arnold, his lifelong model, or John Stuart Mill. There seemed to be no other way to account for his vast stock of learning or the immense air of authority his writing projected, a self-assuredness that hadn't been seen in American criticism since the early Edmund Wilson, and wouldn't appear again until the later Harold Bloom....

[robertdfeinman]

Every since TV became the main way to reach the disinterested voter the campaigns have been transformed. TV does not lend itself well to discussions of ideas - it is a visual medium.

If you watch any news show or even the political interview shows you will see that the camera doesn't stay on the speaker for long. The view quickly shifts to illustrating what is being said. Not the ideas, however, the nouns. If a person is mentioned by name they are shown. If a place is mentioned there is a picture. If the story is about the price of gasoline there is an image of someone at a filling station.

So those who wish to discuss issues gravitate to opinion journals and online text forums. What is left are those who specialize in appearences. The TV presenters focus on the horse race aspect of a campaign, the mannerisms of the candidates and other superficial factors because that is all they know and care about. Everyone can have an opinion about whether so and so "won" a debate without having a clue about the content of what they are saying. Wasn't there a study recently discussed about the ability to pick out the winners by just watching them on TV without the sound?

So why shouldn't candidates adapt to this environment. If image is what commentators focus on then image is what the candidates better work on as well. This is perfectly rational behavior given the present conditions.

There are two broad classes of voters. Those who have pretty strong feelings about issues and/or party. There is little chance of influencing their vote. Then there are those who are less engaged and uninformed. This 5% or so is where all the image making is directed. Image and emotion is how they make up their minds.

[Michael Cain]

One thing John Edwards ought to do right now is embrace the "John Edwards is a Rich Man" accusation.... start bragging though a clever marketing campaign that this Rich Guy is the one candidate who is calling on the other Rich People out there to start using their money to help the less fortunate through their government.

Maybe he can get an endorsement from Warren Buffett. For the last several years, Warren has effectively been complaining "My taxes are too low."

[Holly W.]

I think "authentic" is just a meaningless word like "elite," used only to distinguish "conservatives" from "liberals." Republican candidates are by definition authentic (even Mitt Romney will probably get to wear this mantle if he actually gets the GOP nomination), while Democrats, no matter what their background or lifestyle, are by definition "fake" and "out of touch."

This game of words is hardly worth playing. After all, anyone who's running for office has to be wealthy now, no matter what their childhood background was or what their hobbies are. An "authentic" candidate would say "Darn tootin' right I'm rich! And I know you want to be, too -- so here's what I'm going to do to help everyone in the country become better off."

[Turbo]

I agree with a lot of what is being said here, but isn't there something very hypocritcal about, for example, a group of wealthy rock stars, ex-ceo's and politicians leaving their 20,000 sqr foot mansions in a private limo, then flying by private jet (all extremely environmentally unfriendly) to a conference to tell the little people to reduce their carbon footprints? Everything even remotely political gets polarized beyond any hope of rationality now in the US, but the admonishment of do as I say, not as I do, doesn't even work on kids anymore, hence, I think, the bad press for wealthy Dems. That being said, the fact that a multi-millionaire can rent a pickup truck and play populist with the masses is probably an even sadder commentary on the state of American politics.

[anne]

"That being said, the fact that a multi-millionaire can rent a pickup truck and play populist with the masses is probably an even sadder commentary on the state of American politics."

Yes; and the immediate portrayal in the media of Fred Thompson, who is after all an actor, as authentic is where the real problem rests. Especially so, since Thompson could scarcely wait to show conservatives just how scary he is.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/us/politics/03fred.html?ex=1338523200&en=f6039efca3d1fa42&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

June 3, 2007

Thompson Makes Strong Pitch to Conservative Republicans
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE

RICHMOND, Va. — In a preview of the themes he is likely to emphasize in a presidential campaign, Fred D. Thompson tossed some red meat to Republicans here Saturday night, assailing the immigration bill in Congress and warning of a mushroom cloud he said radicals around the world were waiting to see rise over the United States.

But Mr. Thompson spoke in a soft Southern cadence, weaving in his biography as a homespun, small-town lawyer with a belief in basic principles and a desire to bring people together.

Mr. Thompson, 64, a former senator from Tennessee, has all but announced that he will be announcing his candidacy for president, probably within several weeks. He filed preliminary papers on Friday that allow him to start raising money and hiring staff.

He did not directly address his intentions here Saturday, but he made several allusions about the country needing new leadership and said at one point in his 35-minute speech, "We're going to cut some new ground over the next year or so."

In a brief interview afterward, he said he was just "testing the waters," but added, "The waters feel pretty warm, to tell you the truth."

Mr. Thompson's appearance at the event, a previously scheduled fund-raising dinner for the Virginia Republican Party, was his first since he and his supporters indicated a few days ago that he was preparing to enter the race. His supporters say he can fill what they see as a void for a true conservative who can also get elected.

The speech was both a call to arms and a declaration to conservatives that he is one of them. Mr. Thompson paid homage to Barry Goldwater as his political inspiration. He denounced the so-called death tax. He took a swipe at Democrats for what he said was hanging out a "surrender" sign in the war in Iraq.

"Believe it or not, we still have many friends around the world," Mr. Thompson said. But he said those friends needed convincing "that this is a battle between the forces of civilization and the forces of evil and we've got to choose sides."

He was short on specifics, offering instead a broad conservative approach toward smaller government, lower taxes and a bigger defense budget....

[anne]

Beyond the scary mushroom cloud, surrender imagery, notice the craziness of the forever smaller government conservative who is bent on increasing the $622 billion a year defense budget. (The $622 billion figure is just for starters, for there is all sorts of billions more for defense.)

All with a "soft Southern cadence, weaving in his biography as a homespun, small-town lawyer with a belief in basic principles and a desire to bring people together."

[anne]

Ah, and before I find and read Lionel Trilling, do we have "a moral obligation to be intelligent?" I am immediately taken by the idea, but need to work out why.

Paul Krugman has done us a particular favor with this essay which follows Orlando Patterson's argument so well.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/01/opinion/l01self.html

Is It Who We Are, or How We Act?

To the Editor:

I agree that what sincerity "means for us today is that the best way of living in our diverse and contentiously free society is neither to obsess about the hidden depths of our prejudices nor to deny them, but to behave as if we had none."

But is it not possible that by being civil and sincere, we one day also become "authentic"? Doing changes to being.

Ginger Nathanson
Long Valley, N.J., Dec. 26, 2006

•

To the Editor:

Turn on the television or the radio and listen to the emotional discourse that passes for rational thinking. One hears the irrational voice that used to be kept private.

Is this a failure of our education to impart the knowledge and confidence one needs to be mature? Or is it a product of our drifting in an ocean of overcommunication?

Whatever it is, our need now is to take back our private self and return rational thinking to the public self.

Hendrik E. Sadi
Yonkers, Dec. 26, 2006

[Lafayette]

PK: The point is that questions about a candidate shouldn’t be whether he or she is “authentic.” They should be about motives: whose interests would the candidate serve if elected?

Baby-blues

Problem is, why look at "political platforms" that candidates stand upon for election, when in fact the public is interested in celebrity personalities.

Authenticity goes hand in hand with baby blue eyes, a winning smile and an adoring wife with smiling children ... all an ageless recipe for election to political office.

Krugman assumes, rightly, that the principle element of an election candidate should be his/her stance, their values, their convictions. But, in fact, these attributes are irrelevant to a large part of the population, notably that part where the swing vote comes from.

A people have the political leadership they deserve - the one they voted for. Dontcha just love Dubja's baby-blues?

[save_the_rustbelt]

Both FDR and JFK (and daddy Joe) were shrewd, tough hardball politicians who never let their idealism get in the way of a good political brawl or a little subtle political bribery, especially in smoke filled rooms.

Winning is everything in politics, the losers go home to write books and cut ribbons at grocery stores.

The voting is up to us.

[kharris]

So, the guy who is going to swoop in an take the GOP nomination away from all those guys who aren't real conservatives is"

a) a lawyer (who worked as a congressional staffer),

b) an actor ('scuse me, a "Holliwood actor"),

c) a lobbyist for 18 years, and

d) is back in DC as an elected official?

Who cares if the guy wore suits and now wears jeans. This is the guy the Republican faithful want as the leader of the free world? This hired-gun/insider/actor? How did he miss being "part of the problem" to become "savior of the party"? Blue jeans and chaw are the least of our "authenticity" worries.

[robertdfeinman]

Anne:
Since you like to keep a handy set of relevant citations you may find this one useful at some point in the future. It shows graphically the size of the military budget:

Federal Pie Chart

Your estimate of the amount of military spending is off by half.

[btgraff]

"The point is that questions about a candidate shouldn’t be whether he or she is “authentic.” They should be about motives: whose interests would the candidate serve if elected?"

But this can be impossible to know - FDR when he was running for president talked about keeping a balanced budget, for example.

I cannot understand how politicians like Romney or Hillary Clinton can be taken seriously given their lack of "authenticity" - Romney changing his positions on abortion and other things from his time as governor, and Clinton for her lame attempts to move to the right in order to position herself for her presidential bid.

[anne]

Thank you, and I will look to the military budget again but I know for sure the direct appropriation for the coming fiscal year will be about $622 billion and I also know there are all sorts of additions such as the budget for the atomic arsenal which is under "energy."

[bakho]

I think the JFK quote comes to mind because Letterman plays the clip all the time. Usually it is FDR with "nothing to fear but fear itself" JFK with "Ask not.." followed by incoherent babbling by Bush. It is very jarring because those quotes are the opposite of Bush rhetoric (ignoring the mangled speech).

Funny but not funny at the same time. Maybe Letterman should start showing clips of the candidate debates?

Candidates striving for "authenticity" are trying to be "one of us" rather than asking us to join them in doing good. President Clinton was masterful at cajoling the public and Congress to do the right thing with "We can do better." I don't know much about 1992, but I doubt that Bill Clinton tried to run as Bubba the authentic redneck from Arkansas.

[anne]

What Franklin Roosevelt spoke about in 1932:

http://www.feri.org/common/news/details.cfm?QID=2056&clientid=11005

April 7, 1932

The Forgotten Man
By Governor Franklin Roosevelt

Albany, N. Y

Although I understand that I am talking under the auspices of the Democratic National Committee, I do not want to limit myself to politics. I do not want to feel that I am addressing an audience of Democrats or that I speak merely as a Democrat myself. The present condition of our national affairs is too serious to be viewed through partisan eyes for partisan purposes.

Fifteen years ago my public duty called me to an active part in a great national emergency, the World War. Success then was due to a leadership whose vision carried beyond the timorous and futile gesture of sending a tiny army of 150,000 trained soldiers and the regular navy to the aid of our allies. The generalship of that moment conceived of a whole Nation mobilized for war, economic, industrial, social and military resources gathered into a vast unit capable of and actually in the process of throwing into the scales ten million men equipped with physical needs and sustained by the realization that behind them were the united efforts of 110,000,000 human beings. It was a great plan because it was built from bottom to top and not from top to bottom.

In my calm judgment, the Nation faces today a more grave emergency than in 1917.

It is said that Napoleon lost the battle of Waterloo because he forgot his infantry—he staked too much upon the more spectacular but less substantial cavalry. The present administration in Washington provides a close parallel. It has either forgotten or it does not want to remember the infantry of our economic army.

These unhappy times call for the building of plans that rest upon the forgotten, the unorganized but the indispensable units of economic power, for plans like those of 1917 that build from the bottom up and not from the top down, that put their faith once more in the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.

Obviously, these few minutes tonight permit no opportunity to lay down the ten or a dozen closely related objectives of a plan to meet our present emergency, but I can draw a few essentials, a beginning in fact, of a planned program....

[anne]

Knowing how to be politically cutting:

http://www.hpol.org/fdr/fala/

The 'Fala' Address

These Republican leaders have not been content with attacks on me, or my wife, or on my sons. No, not content with that, they now include my little dog, Fala. Well, of course, I don't resent attacks, and my family doesn't resent attacks, but Fala does resent them. You know, Fala is Scotch, and being a Scottie, as soon as he learned that the Republican fiction writers in Congress and out had concocted a story that I had left him behind on the Aleutian Islands and had sent a destroyer back to find him--at a cost to the taxpayers of two or three, or eight or twenty million dollars--his Scotch soul was furious. He has not been the same dog since. I am accustomed to hearing malicious falsehoods about myself--such as that old, worm-eaten chestnut that I have represented myself as indispensable. But I think I have a right to resent, to object to libelous statements about my dog.

Franklin Roosevelt
September 23, 1944

[Lafayette]

rdf: Federal Pie Chart

A third of total government spending is by the DoD?!?

In what modern society is that sort of insanity tolerated? Perhaps Israel, at war since its inception.

But the US? Ya gotta be kidding?

Alas, no. America - warrior nation. Toys for boys whilst the elderly cannot pay the exorbitant cost of medicines and its youth incur debt to get a university degree. To mention just a few of the more prominent inanities.

[im1dc]

Our Professor Krugman opines "They should be about motives: whose interests would the candidate serve if elected?"

But he should have simple said judge them not on what they say as much as by what they do.

Motives smotives.

[anne]

Actually, I am reminded that this is all very Catholic in philosophy :)

[Alex]

robert,

Your link unfortunately is not helpful, as it doesn't do a very good job of defending the decision to remove social security and medicare from the chart. The spending related to them is still a government outlay, even if it is paid for by a payroll tax instead of an income tax.

[anne]

The http://www.cbpp.org/ website is possibly most convenient for looking to budget summaries. Again, the direct defense department budget for the coming year should be about $622 billion, but this does not count spending for domestic security or atomic security and on....

[Notice what a clever bird I am to have fixed the "D" key, for now. And, none of you had a word of advice; so there]

[calmo]

Might as well fess up and tell all: I have no motives as far as I can tell here.
You don't know how much more authentic I can get.
You expectin something special? Well me too, --where is resident philosopher eva to steer us through this mine field? Isn't this authenticity business sorta like being true to yourself...and adjudicated by those carefully picked trainers...so that the product comes across...as you, in your unblemished electableness?
Like don't get caught screaming like Dean...
Ok, that isn't it.
This B it: stuff the network managers with your people to ensure that you come across as "so Presidential" --and the other guys-- short beady-eyed, script-mangling incompetents.
Alrighty then.
Now izzit only me who thinks this statement is a hoot: You have a moral obligation to be intelligent. All those who disagree are not tryin hard enuff. You could be smarter if you tried, but you are lazy.
A lout.
A lout who is not even recognized by other louts...who are not moved by your piss poor performance as a lout.
Hoping eva is not on holiday...nothing like a good philosophical thrashing to start the week off.

[robertdfeinman]

Alex:
You need to go back and study a bit of history. The social insurance plans were only added to the "budget" during LBJ's term as a way to disguise the high cost of the Vietnam war.

There is no rational reason for them to be part of the discretionary budget. They are funded by a separate income stream and the funds must be used for only the designated purpose.

One of the tricks the right has pulled is to lump these programs into their bashing of "big" government. These are not government programs in the normal sense, the are government administered programs. The government performs a strictly clerical function. Who gets the money and how much is controlled by the enabling legislation. When conservatives complain about big government what they really want to cut are these insurance programs, they have no problem expanding the military and police sectors.

You can also check on the rise in the size of the staff in the federal government that are political appointees under this "small government" administration. The Whitehouse alone now has over 1000 employees.

Diluting the apparent size of militarism has proved so popular that no administration has wanted to go back to realistic budget reporting.

[gordon]

Calmo searches for a resident philosopher. George Burns is no longer resident here, but wasn't he the man who said: "The secret of acting is sincerity. If you can fake that, you've got it made"?

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/13/opinion/l13krugman.html

And Now, the Authentic Candidate

To the Editor:

"Authentic? Never Mind":

Once again, Paul Krugman gets to the heart of the style-over-substance nature of today's political campaigns. But he didn't mention one important problem this need for "authenticity" causes.

As presidential campaigns increasingly require astronomical sums of money, most candidates have personal fortunes that allow them to run. Does this mean that we can never have a national discussion about poverty? Yes, he's wealthy, but John Edwards has proved over and over that he genuinely cares about the plight of the poor.

Let's forget the mansion and the $400 haircuts and remember that style-over-substance got us where we are today: Iraq, the environment, the Justice Department, Katrina — need I go on?

Christina Ferrari
Brooklyn, June 11, 2007