Palintology

There are a few themes on which Americans broadly agree, one of which is our general loathing for quitters. While Americans as a rule hate to fail, in social terms it is often treated with a measure of nuance, as a step on the ladder of upward mobility, while the Europeans and Japanese seem to see it more as just desserts for an excessive level of personal ambition. It helps to fail well--c.f. Kerry compared to Gore--but losing, once anyway, does not automatically relegate a player to the afterlife of a coach or commentator.

Because of that, quitting is an especially ignoble thing. It is like being told that the enemy will only aim for your legs, and still cowering in your foxhole when the charge is sounded. One can give the good fight all he's got, and still lose to a stronger foe, but to quit is an entirely personal choice. To compare Palin to Nixon in 1960, Reagan in 1976, or Gore in 2000 is to elide this crucial difference. The more appropriate comparisons at this point are Perot in 1992, or Romney in 2006, or even McCain's suspension-of-campaigning stunt last September.

There is a mitigating factor though, and a curious one it is. If 2008 was the first election to take place in the age of Perez Hilton, Sarah Palin was the first national politician to be treated like LiLo, or perhaps more appropriately, Carrie Prejean. In the 80s, one had to subscribe to the sort of newsletters that advertised in the back of Soldier of Fortune in order to read the sort of wild-eyed rumor and accusations which were daily staples of a plethora of A-list blogs this past cycle. While one might object that this knife cut both ways, let's just call a spade a fucking shovel and call that out for the bullshit that it is.

Sarah Palin endured what surely ranks as some of the most vicious personal slander seen in a presidential election since the days of Jackson and Adams calling each others' wives bastards and bigamists. This unceasing background chatter formed an inner monologue which more than once leaked its way onto mainstream news budgets, where it was presented without the degree of condemnation and refutation accorded to similar emanations from the fever swamps of the Right.

It is not difficult to imagine Palin, after a year of having her family dragged through the mud, doing what many of her soi-disant feminist critics have suggested she do all along--quit playing this man's game and focus on taking care of her children. It is likewise not terribly difficult to imagine a male politician caring sufficiently more about gratification of his own ego to look past its effects on his wife and kids. Palin has proved that many of the feminist critiques of how our society treats ambitious, "uppity" women remain valid, so long as the woman in question can be painted as sufficiently low-status relative to her enlightened critics.

What remains is that Palin almost instantly won the hearts of a segment of the population whose travails and concerns are of diminishing interest to the elites of either party. Where Kerry and Obama and even Bush play-acted and dressed up as hunters, construction workers, or other "salt of the earth" ordinary folk, Sarah didn't need to send an aide to procure a blaze-orange jacket or hardhat.

If the nation has progressed so far that it can no longer accept as a leader a woman who recently worked a fishing boat for pocket money and whose husband spends summers in the oil fields, then perhaps we have lost something essential in the process. At a time when many of our most vaunted professions lie in various degrees of ruin and disrepute, it is hard to imagine Sarah Palin losing that which made her such a novel element to begin with. Her rise, unlikely to begin with, may have a chapter more improbable still to be written.

Honduras WTF?

I thought Obama's initial equivocation on the Iranian elections and their discontents was at least plausibly grounded in a sort of skeptical realpolitik. We Americans have a pathological tendency to think of the world as divided into "Americans" and "People Who Remind Us of Our Neighbors From Whereverstan Who Are Just Like Us, Really," and this is often reflected by a foreign policy that is one part naivete and one part we-are-so-rich-and-powerful-that-you-have-no-choice-but-to-overlook-our-stupidity. So while I tend to think that a more robust response to the mullahs might have worked out well, I sympathize with those who felt differently.

But I am completely baffled by his reponse to the Honduras crisis, which shares virtually none of the elements that make Iran such a minefield. We have a would-be president-for-life defying the very term limits erected to prevent such a thing, being removed by a military acting in obedience to the country's legislature and supreme court, both of which are at least as democratically legitimate as the Presidency. Not only does Obama not equivocate, he sides with the President who is making a mockery of the rule of law.

Between Iran, Iraq, the financial crisis, and the global warming tax and health care spending bills, I suspect Obama's position on Honduras is 1% Barack and 99% unnamed administration official. Our southern compadres are also justly-famed for military coups, so perhaps he is taking a default position with little regard for the confounding factors on the ground. So heads, he is supporting a Chavez acolyte out of hard-left solidarity, tails he's a blundering ignoramus. Which explanation would you prefer?

Burned by Bernie

With Bernard Madoff's sentencing we are again being treated to the gnashing of teeth and rending of garments of victims who lost everything to his scam. While Madoff richly deserves to die in prison, I wish the intrepid media would dare to dig a little deeper into what some of these people were thinking. I think it would be instructive--not to generate sympathy for an evil thief--but to remind people that it does not require a genius-level intellect to make sound financial choices.

To be fair, among the 8,000 estimated victims one will find elderly widows and the occasional guileless charity case, but the vast majority of Madoff's investors were sentient adults. "Diversify" is not exactly difficult investment advice, especially to the multi-millionaires who comprised the vast majority of his personal clients. While none of them deserved to lose everything, most were voluntary if unwitting accomplices to their ruin.

Why would a person with several millions of dollars, nearing or past the end of their earning years, not choose to sock away a sizable chunk of that in savings bonds, Treasuries, or other such maximum-safety assets? Greed, enabled by hubris, provides the answer. Greed causes a person to put everything they have in a bucket that pays 10-15% interest rather than splitting it into another bucket that pays 3% or so but truly has no risk. Hubris, to think that you had discovered the fountain of financial youth, allowed people to transform their greed into wisdom. Average schlubs had to invest in the markets where you could lose 30% at any time, but you "knew people" and so could safely rack up better returns year after year.

This is all true even if we elide a point that is only slightly more subtle and yet far more profound--that economic theory and history alike effectively disprove the existence of riskless assets that pay greater returns than T-bills. This is only a marginally more complex restatement of the old "if it sounds too good to be true" rule, but it was enough to convince many investors that Madoff was up to something fishy. Particularly in the cases of larger investors (such as my alma mater, which counts more than one billionaire among its alumni and lost $20 million), the willingness to overlook this seems almost pathological. Far from being "sold," more than a few of these institutional players paid fees to middlemen for the right to be robbed blind. Their share of any monies recovered deserves to be infinitesimal.

It is popular in some quarters to regard the financial markets as little more than a casino without the cocktail waitresses, so stories of shirt-losing play easily into the narrative. While it is true that outcomes will be unequal, they are almost never irrational. While I will refrain from ascribing deliberate intent, presenting the tale of Madoff's victims as blameless militates for the notion that true financial security can come only from the government, which reserves for the crown the right to operate the very type of scheme for which Bernard Madoff will spend the rest of his life in jail.