Lately, I’ve been thinking about Euclid — especially his first proposition.

In St. John’s Graduate Program, this is how the Math and Science semester begins. (Well, technically it begins with this: A point is that which has no part; a line is breadthless length; the extremities of a line are points. But this proposition follows soon after.)

I’m not sure why it’s been on my mind, but I think it will do me some good to lay it out and to think through it again here.

Proposition 1

On a given finite straight line to construct an equilateral triangle.

Let AB be the given finite straight line.

It is required to construct an equilateral triangle on the straight line AB.

With center A and radius AB describe the circle BCD. Again describe the circle ACE with center B and radius BA. Join the straight lines CA and CB from the point C at which the circles cut one another to the points A and B. (Postulate 3)

Now, since the point A is the center of the circle CDB, therefore AC equals AB. (Definition 15)

Again, since the point B is the center of the circle CAE, therefore BC equals BA. (Definition 15)

But AC was proved equal to AB, therefore each of the straight lines AC and BC equals AB.

And things which equal the same thing also equal one another, therefore AC also equals BC. (Common Notion 1)

Therefore the three straight lines AC, AB, and BC equal one another.

Therefore the triangle ABC is equilateral, and it has been constructed on the given finite straight line AB.

—

Postulate 3: (Let it have been granted) To describe a circle with any center and distance.

Definition 15: A circle is a plane figure contained by one line such that all the straight lines falling upon it from one point among those lying within the figure are equal to one another.

Common Notion 1: Things which are equal to the same thing are also equal to one another.

—

For everyone who does not live within a reasonable distance of either Annapolis or Sante Fe, I’m sorry; you should consider moving. For everyone who does, you should enroll in the Graduate Institute today:

Students in the Liberal Arts program explore the persisting questions of human existence by studying classic works of the western tradition, organized into five semester-long thematic segments: Philosophy and Theology, Politics and Society, Literature, Mathematics and Natural Science, and History. Students earn a Master of Arts in Liberal Arts (M.A.L.A.) by completing four of these five segments. A common curriculum provides the basis for a shared intellectual community; discussion with fellow students and faculty is the mode of learning both inside and outside the classroom. In order to accommodate a wide range of students, a number of options provide for flexibility: students may begin the program in the fall, spring, or summer semester, may take the segments in a number of different sequences, and may take time off between segments.

Each semester students attend a seminar, a tutorial, and a preceptorial - all carried out as small-group discussions under the guidance of St. John’s faculty members (called tutors). These three types of classes are the framework of the distinctive St. John’s educational experience.

During the fall and spring semesters, classes in the Liberal Arts program are held two evenings per week to permit students to maintain part-time or full-time employment while engaged in the program.

The school seal: (”I make free people out of children by means of books and a balance.”)

This is fun! You can vote for your VP picks, and then see who advances to the next bracket.

VP Madness (Democratic Edition)

It’s time for presumed Democratic nominee Barack Obama to turn his attention to a running mate. To help, we bring you the second installment of VP Madness, where users decide who Obama should choose as his #2. Vote in the head-to-head match ups below to determine which candidates advance to face each other in the next round. You can view the latest results by clicking the button at the bottom of the page. The winner will be revealed on July 1, in plenty of time for Obama to consider your choice.

Today I discovered iGoogle. I really don’t think I had ever heard of it before. At first it was fun to customize my very own little page with phases of the moon and news and weather… but it quickly began to feel a little creepy and lame.

I think that iGoogle’s creepiness and lameness is twofold:

1. Google Itself: What is Google? Is Google evil? I admit a slight infatuation with conspiracy theories – but no one can deny that Google certainly does have an awful lot of information about everything, including each of us. In a 2006 Mother Jones article, aptly titled “Is Google Evil?” Adam Penenberg wrote:

Google’s stated mission may be to provide “unbiased, accurate, and free access to information,” but that didn’t stop it from censoring its Chinese search engine to gain access to a lucrative market. Now that the company is publicly traded, it has a legal responsibility to its shareholders and bottom line that overrides any higher calling.

So the question is not whether Google will always do the right thing—it hasn’t, and it won’t. It’s whether Google, with its insatiable thirst for your personal data, has become the greatest threat to privacy ever known, a vast informational honey pot that attracts hackers, crackers, online thieves, and—perhaps most worrisome of all—a government intent on finding convenient ways to spy on its own citizenry.

…99 percent of its revenue comes from selling ads that are specifically targeted to a user’s interests. “Google’s entire value proposition is to figure out what people want,” says Eric Goldman, a professor at Silicon Valley’s Santa Clara School of Law and director of the High Tech Law Institute. “But to read our minds, they need to know a lot about us.”

But there are at least ways to avoid seeing the ads. Co-worker Dave introduced me to the world’s best download: Adblock Plus, which fully blocks banner ads and the like.

2. The Customizable Factor: As a fairly average human being, I really can’t claim to be some kind of heroic iconoclast. But I certainly don’t want to be a person whose every interest (or even many interests) can be turned into a widget on a web page. I do enjoy staying abreast of the news and scanning blogs for new or interesting thoughts. But I think I would like to limit my familiarity with the internet there. As Wendell Berry has said

[W]e have long encouraged ourselves to feel at home on “the cutting edges” of knowledge and power or on some “frontier” of human experience. But we are talking now in the presence of much evidence that improvement by outward expansion may no longer be a good idea, if it ever was.

He was writing within the context of the environment and economy – but I don’t think it’s a stretch to apply it here. (After all, Wendell Berry has also written the essay “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer.” You can read excerpts here.) So why don’t I get rid of my computer? It is a troubling question! I don’t believe there must be infinite progress or infinite regress. We all draw lines all the time. We do the best we can, and it’s good for us to be troubled by the Wendell Berrys.

It is far, far better to see the moon and note its phases in the real world than in the digital one. Most things are probably like that.

]]> http://leahelizabeth.wordpress.com/2008/06/06/igoogle/feed/ leahelizabeth http://leahelizabeth.wordpress.com/2008/06/05/george-lakoff-on-the-political-mind/ http://leahelizabeth.wordpress.com/2008/06/05/george-lakoff-on-the-political-mind/#comments Thu, 05 Jun 2008 19:30:43 +0000 leahelizabeth http://leahelizabeth.wordpress.com/?p=108

Earlier this week, I went to hear George Lakoff speak at Politics and Prose about his new book, The Political Mind: Why You Can’t Understand 21st Century American Politics with an 18th Century Brain.

He was truly delightful! His theory does, I think, have its weaknesses… but I liked him and his ideas enough to buy the book. He seemed very authentic and trustworthy. (Traits of someone who knows how to “frame.”) He was perfectly cheerful and gracious even when a disgruntled Hillary supporter lashed out at his “unbalanced” support for Obama.

He began by explaining what Enlightenment thinkers believed about reason: it is conscious, literal, dispassionate, logical, disembodied, universal, and self-interested. But none of these, he says, are accurate.

Reason actually operates, he says, through “frames:”

Every word evokes a frame.

A frame is a conceptual structure used in thinking. The word elephant evokes a frame with an image of an elephant and certain knowledge: an elephant is a large animal (a mammal) with large floppy ears, a trunk that functions like both a nose and a hand, large stump-like legs, and so on.

Words defined within a frame evoke the frame.

The word trunk, as in the sentence “Sam picked up the peanut with his trunk,” evokes the Elephant frame and suggests that “Sam” is the name of an elephant.

Negating a frame evokes the frame.

Evoking a frame reinforces that frame.

Every frame is realized in the brain by neural circuitry. Every time a neural circuit is activated, it is strengthened.

He went on to discuss how the Right Wing has used framing (for evil purposes) for the last thirty or forty years:

Conservatives have worked for decades to establish the metaphors of taxation as a burden, an affliction, and an unfair punishment – all of which require “relief.” They have also, over decades, built up the frame in which the wealthy create jobs, and giving them more wealth creates more jobs.

The power of these frames cannot be overcome immediately. Frame development takes time and work. Progressives have to start reframing now and keep at it. This reframing must express fundamental progressive values: empathy, responsibility, fairness, community, cooperation, doing our fair share.

Progressives have to articulate over and over the moral basis for progressive taxation. They have to overcome the outrageous conservative myth that wealthy people have amassed their wealth all by themselves.

The truth is that the wealthy have received more from America than most Americans — not just wealth but the infrastructure that has allowed them to amass their wealth: banks, the Federal Reserve, the stock market, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the legal system, federally-sponsored research, patents, tax supports, the military protection of foreign investments, and much much more. American taxpayers support the infrastructure of wealth accumulation. It is only fair that those who benefit most should pay their fair share.

Reframing is telling the truth as we see it – telling it forcefully, straightforwardly, articulately, with moral conviction and without hesitation. The language must fit the conceptual reframing — a reframing from the perspective of progressive morality. It is not just a matter of words, though the right words do help evoke a progressive frame: paying their fair share, those who have received more, the infrastructure of wealth, and so on.

Reframing requires a rewiring of the brain. That may take an investment of time, effort, and money. The conservatives have realized that. They made the investment and it is paying off. Moral: The truth alone will not set you free. It has to be framed correctly.

Taxation is not an affliction. Tax cuts will not create jobs. These are facts, but stating them as we just did just reinforces conservative frames. The right framing for the truth must be available and used for the truth be heard.

If the truth doesn’t fit the existing frame, the frame will stay in place and the truth will dissipate.

It takes time and a lot of repetition for frames to become entrenched in the very synapses of people’s brains. Moreover, they have to fit together in an overall coherent way for them to make sense.

Effective framing on a single issue must be both right and sensible. That is, it must fit into a system of frames (to be sensible) and must fit one’s moral worldview (to be right).

My favorite part of his talk (aside from all the Obama love) was his emphasis on empathy. He made it very clear that empathy is at the heart of progressive politics, and this country was founded on empathy. I was also especially interested in the connection he made between art and empathy. When people began to write novels and create paintings depicting the suffering of others… human rights were born. I’m not sure if it’s true, but it is a beautiful idea.

This is neat; I wish I had thought of it. From NPR:

Artist Sheryl Oring worried that too many people’s voices were shut out of the political process. Oring decided to help fix that by setting up a typewriter in public places and taking dictation for letters to the next commander in chief.

Oring calls her project “I Wish to Say,” and so far she has typed tens of thousands of notes from people all over the world. She keeps one copy for herself and sends the other to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. “So you want to send a letter to the next president,” she tells the people who sit at her table. “How would you like to start?”

Watch the Video:

Yesterday, before I talked to people who love me and don’t want me to die a premature death, I decided to buy a scooter for my Spring and Summer commute to DC. I did a little research, and determined that a 150cc engine (capable of going up to 61 mph) Piaggio Fly would be just the thing.

Evidently, a vehicle capable of getting me to and from work (via the George Washington Parkway: 50 mph speed limit and lots of aggressive Republicans in Mercedes) without using gasoline is totally unavailable. Most electric cars can go no faster than 25 mph, although Miles Electric Vehicles is on track to release a $39,000 highway-safe totally electric sedan by 2010. When I buy one, I’ll be able to drive up to 85 mph, and drive for 120 miles before I need to recharge the battery. I won’t ever have to get an oil change, because it won’t use engine oil. And I won’t need to buy gasoline at all – thereby avoiding a host of unpleasant side effects for myself and our planet.

But the Miles XS500 isn’t available to allay my guilt and solve all the world’s problems yet. My Piaggio would get 70 miles per gallon, and it would be so fun. But alas, a scooter would simply not be enough to protect me from the frothy white rapids (aggressive Republicans) in the stream of commuters.

So what is a person to do? As everyone now finally knows, and as Wendell Berry begins his excellent May article in Harper’s: the era of cheap fossil fuel is ending. I’m craving a scooter or an electric car to satisfy my need to get to work and my desire to do it ethically (and affordably). But the problem, as Wendell Berry explores, is not just oil – it’s our economy.

The thrust of Berry’s article, “Faustian Economics,” is that we perceive ourselves as limitless animals, but we are in fact “specifically human,” and “we must have limits or we will cease to exist as humans.” I’ve copied long excerpts from the article below. Read it all.

The problem with us is not only prodigal extravagance but also an assumed limitlessness. …We have founded our present society upon delusional assumptions of limitlessness…

In keeping with our unrestrained consumptiveness, the commonly accepted basis of our economy is the supposed possibility of limitless growth, limitless wants, limitless wealth, limitless natural resources, limitless energy, and limitless debt.

There is now a growing perception, and not just among a few experts, that we are entering a time of inescapable limits. We are not likely to be granted another world to plunder in compensation for our pillage of this one. Nor are we likely to believe much longer in our ability to outsmart, by means of science and technology, our economic stupidity.

Every cultural and religious tradition that I know about, while fully acknowledging our animal nature, defines us specifically as humans – that is, as animals (if the word still applies) capable of living not only within natural limits, but also within cultural limits, self-imposed. As earthly creatures, we live, because we must, within natural limits, which we may describe by such names as “earth” or “ecosystem” or “watershed” or “place.” But as humans, we may elect to respond to this necessary placement by the self-restraints implied in neighborliness, stewardship, thrift, temperance, generosity, care, kindness, friendship, loyalty, and love.

I doubt that we can define our present problems adequately, let alone solve them, without some recourse to our cultural heritage. We are, after all, trying now to deal with the failure of scientists, technicians, and politicians to “think up” a version of human continuance that is economically probable and ecologically responsible, or perhaps even imaginable.

And so our cultural tradition is in large part the record of our continuing effort to understand ourselves as beings specifically human: to say that, as humans, we must do certain things and we must not do certain things. We must have limits or we will cease to exist as humans; perhaps we will cease to exist, period. At times, for example, some of us humans have thought that human beings, properly so called, did not make war against civilian populations, or hold prisoners without a fair trial, or use torture for any reason.

I know that the idea of limitations will horrify some people, maybe most people, for we have long encouraged ourselves to feel at home on “the cutting edges” of knowledge and power or on some “frontier” of human experience. But I know too that we are talking know in the presence of much evidence that improvement by outward expansion may no longer be a good idea, if it ever was one. If it is a good idea in the form of corporate gigantism, then we must ask, For whom? Faustus, who wants all knowledge and all the world… is a man supremely lonely and finally doomed.

Our human and earthly limits, properly understood, are not confinements but rather inducements to formal elaboration and elegance, to fullness of relationship and meaning.

To recover from our disease of limitlessness, we will have to give up the idea that we have a right to be godlike animals, that we are potentially omniscient and omnipotent, ready to discover “the secret of the universe.” We will have to start over, with a different and much older premise: the naturalness and, for creatures of limited intelligence, the necessity, of limits. We must learn again to ask how we can make the most of what we are, what we have, what we have been given. If we always have a theoretically better substitute available from somebody else or someplace else, we will never make the most of anything. It is hard to make the most of one life. If we each had two lives, we would not make much of either.

To deal with the problems, which after all are inescapable, of living with limited intelligence in a limited world, I suggest that we may have to remove some of the emphasis we have lately placed on science and technology and have a new look at the arts. For an art does not propose to enlarge itself by limitless extension but rather to enrich itself within bounds that are accepted prior to the work. A painting, however large, must finally be bounded by a frame or a wall. A composer or playwright must reckon, at a minimum, with the capacity of an audience to sit still and pay attention. A story, once begun, must end somewhere within the limits of the writer’s and the reader’s memory. And of course the arts characteristically impose limits that are artificial: the five acts of a play, or the fourteen lines of a sonnet. Within these limits artists achieve elaborations of pattern, of sustaining relationships of parts with one another and with the whole, that may be astonishingly complex.

It is true that insofar as scientific experiments must be conducted within carefully observed limits, scientists are also artists. But in science one experiment, whether it succeeds or fails, is logically followed by another in a theoretically infinite progression. According to the underlying myth of modern science, this progression is always replacing the smaller knowledge of the past with the larger knowledge of the present, which will be replaced by the yet larger knowledge of the future.

In the arts, by contrast, no limitless sequence of works is ever implied or looked for. No work of art is necessarily followed by a second work that is necessarily better. Given the methodologies of science, the law of gravity and the genome were bound to be discovered by somebody; the identity of the somebody is incidental to the fact. But it appears that in the arts there are no second chances. We must assume that we had one chance each for The Divine Comedy and King Lear. If Dante and Shakespeare had died before they wrote those poems, nobody ever would have written them.

The same is true of our arts of land use, our economic arts, which are our arts of living. With these it is once-for-all. We will have no chance to redo our bad experiments with agriculture leading to soil loss. The Appalachian mountains and forests we have destroyed for coal are gone forever. It is now and forevermore to late to use thriftily the first half of the world’s supply of petroleum. In the art of living we can only start again with what remains.

And so, in confronting the phenomenon of “peak oil,” we are really confronting the end of our customary delusion of “more.” Whichever way we turn, from now on, we are going to find a limit beyond which there will be no more. To hit these limits at top speed is not a rational choice. To start slowing down, with the idea of avoiding catastrophe, is a rational choice, and a viable one if we can recover the necessary political sanity. Of course it makes sense to consider alternative energy sources, provided they make sense. But also we will have to re-examine the economic structures of our lives, and conform them to the tolerances and limits of our earthly places. Where there is no more, our one choice is to make the most and the best of what we have.

As a child of the south, I feel a bit ambivalent about my warm, mossy home. I have often said that I’d like to move back to the south – that people here in DC have an inflated sense of their own importance and lack a sense of place and a sense of humility that is common in the south. And although I realize that people from every region of the country love their own geography and their own local culture, I do think there is something particularly poignant about the south. We can, for example, claim Flannery O’Connor, William Faulkner, Mark Twain, Harper Lee, Robert Penn Warren, Cormac McCarthy, Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, Walker Percy, Tennessee Williams, and of course, Wendell Berry as “our own.” But it’s clear that our deep and terrible history of racism is a major, if not the defining force of our region. Hence, my ambivalence. I love the warmth, the culture, the land, and the down-to-earth quality of the people. But I cannot abide the ignorance, the conservatism, and the racism. (My love/hate relationship with religion also plays a part in this.)

This is all a fairly long, yet inadequate, and perhaps slightly unrelated introduction to the big story from Mississippi.

I’m particularly interested in and encouraged by Travis Childers’ win over Greg Davis yesterday. Not only did it steal Hillary’s West Virginia thunder, and not only is it very good news for the November elections, but it also gives me a faint sense of hope in the south.

In 2005, as reported by The Memphis Commercial Appeal, Greg Davis and Horn Lake Mayor Nat Baker said that DeSoto County would “gladly accept” statues of Grand Wizard Nathan Bedford Forrest and Jefferson Davis “if Memphis didn’t want them.” There has been a bit of confusion as to which mayor would have accepted which statue, but so what? Either way, last night a racist, conservative, good ole boy lost a congressional seat to a democrat who had the audacity not to renounce an endorsement from Barack Obama.

From The Hill:

The third straight House special election loss in three conservative districts this year is a clear indication that the GOP brand is turning off voters and the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) is in disarray.

From The New York Times:

Interviews with voters indicated the supposed Childers-Obama link could influence votes.

“It probably would,” said Bill Chism, a refrigeration mechanic. Asked to elaborate, he ducked his head and said, “I’d rather not say,” nodding to a black customer approaching his wife’s flea market stall in Tupelo on Sunday.

From The Stump:

As always, the race has its own quirks that resist its transformation into some grand narrative template — the Republican candidate has to be one of the least good-looking political hopefuls out there, for one thing…

House Republicans are completely, utterly, entirely, totally, dead-out screwed for November. If the NRCC dumps $1.3+ million, a good fifth of its total money, into a Deep South safe seat and sends Dick Cheney down to campaign and has both W. and Laura Bush record a get-out-the-vote robocall and loses the seat anyway, the debris cloud from John Boehner’s head exploding will be visible from space.

From Keith Olbermann:

And, on a not altogether unrelated note, Wonkette delivers the best analysis I’ve read on this shameful item from Georgia:

Rednecks Enjoy ‘Obama Monkey’ T-Shirt

Here’s the latest cuteness from America’s fat dumb racists: It is a t-shirt, stealing the trademarked children’s character “Curious George,” with the addition of a possibly insincere “Obama in ‘08″ slogan.

You can read more here.

Today on Ken Silverstein’s Harper’s blog, Washington Babylon, he quotes an anonymous reader’s remarks on Clinton and Obama. I think this person is spot on:

Put in simplest terms, I think Obama understands this moment in a way that Hillary doesn’t (and cannot afford to) understand. Hillary’s skill set, like that of her husband, works only when she can present herself as beleaguered, hemmed in by irrational opponents who deride her personally. It’s true that I find such politics distasteful—both the dumb-ass pursuit of centrist Democrats pushing a Republican agenda in power as though they were some kind of violent cohort of secular socialist revolutionaries, and the no-less-oafish effort to depict conservative political power as a dark mystical force that can be defeated only by an authentic battle-tested victim of the right’s predations (or a bloodthirsty monster, if you will).

What’s frustrating in all this is that it seems almost beside the point to object to Hillary’s candidacy—which I most emphatically do—on grounds of her policy positions. There’s her purist posturing on the health-care mandate she all but single-handedly destroyed in 1993; her pandering on the “gas tax holiday”; and—worst of all in my book—her hollow symbolic pose as a fire-breathing populist when she actively backed all sorts of worker-damaging policies in the White House, from the ratification of NAFTA to the repeal of Glass–Steagall.

A lesser but still baleful strain of her ideology is what a friend of mine calls “pedo-centric liberalism”: the effort to define liberal governance as an extended exercise in kiddie protection. Hence, her epically time-wasting hearings in the Senate (abetted by that equally self-regarding thug Lieberman) on the graphic content of videogames; hence, her long tutelage at the child-fetishizing feet of Marion Wright Edelman. I’ve got nothing against kids per se, mind you—it’s just that their recruitment as “poster children” in the effort to resuscitate liberal politics diminishes both them and whatever remains of liberal thinking and legislating in these dark times. It’s also empirically untrue that this generation of children is in some grave moral peril thanks to the digital gadgets they covet. There’s no shortage of real problems—like trade, energy policy, the real costs of environmental upgrades, a national industrial policy—that the Dems haven’t even started to address in any elementary fashion. As Roger Waters said, leave those kids alone.

At the end of the day, I don’t give a shit whether candidate A or candidate B has a self-image as a fighter, a reformer, a hope-pusher, or what have you. I just care about their ability to deliver some semblance of economic equity while forthrightly acknowledging that imperialism in the service of daft efforts to re-engineer parts of the world and systems of belief we know nothing about is a really, really bad idea. (Don’t get me started on Hillary’s mind-bending efforts to reel back her 2002 vote on the Iraq use of force resolution without conceding it was a mistake.) Obama, while no angel himself, stands a far better chance of delivering on some of these basic agenda items, by virtue of record, temperament and—most of all, I think—his salutary impatience with the dorm-room tenor of Boomer politics. Also—no small thing, this—he’s shown a striking ability to bring more people into the party. Hillary at best mobilizes a pre-existing Dem base that is, in all sorts of demographic measures, shrinking. If you cleave to the sentimental notion that the Dems should be the party of the ordinary people’s interests, counterposed to the G.O.P.’s standing as the party of money and business, then you want candidates at the top of the ticket who can use a broader voting base to fight the influence of today’s robber-baron class.

Anyway, this is all pretty much academic, since Obama’s going to be the nominee, barring a Michigan-Florida floor fight that would basically destroy the party. I have no doubt that Clinton, bloodthirsty monster that she may be, is contemplating such a measure—just as I have no doubt that, should she go through with it, John McCain would have the presidency locked down by the time the Democrats leave Denver.

From Andrew Sullivan:

• Drudge Calls It

From Matthew Yglesias:

• Now We Know

From Huffington Post:

• Reality Has Well-Known Obama Bias
• Obama Victorious, Clinton On The Ropes

From Politico:

• Obama takes decisive step toward nomination

From RealClearPolitics:

• How Obama Beat the Line

From AP News:

• Clinton lends herself $6.4M as Obama’s lead grows

From The Economist:

• In Obama’s grasp

From The New York Times:

• Obama Widens Delegate Gap With N. Carolina Win
• Clinton’s Options Seem to Dwindle

From NPR:

• Clinton Lacks Clear Path to Victory

From David Brooks’ Op-Ed in the New York Times:

Clinton signaled that she wasn’t going to concede even an inch to the vast elitist conspiracy. She wasn’t going to feel guilty about ignoring the evidence. She was going to stomp on it, flay it and leave it a twisted mass of jelly quivering on the ground. She was going to perform the primordial duty of an alpha dog leader — helping one’s own. …

…Obama still possesses his talent for homeostasis, the ability to return to emotional balance and calm, even amid hysteria. His astounding composure has come across as weakness in the midst of combat with Clinton, but it’s also at the core of his promise to change politics. He vows to calm hatred and heal division.

This contrast between combat and composure defines the Democratic race. The implicit Clinton argument is that politics is an inherently nasty business. Human nature, as she said Sunday, means that progress comes only through conquest. You’d better elect a leader who can intimidate. You’d better elect someone who has given herself permission to be brutal.

Obama’s campaign grows out of the longstanding reform tradition. His implicit argument is that politics doesn’t have to be this way. Dishonesty and brutality aren’t inevitable; they’re what gets in the way. Obama’s friend and supporter Cass Sunstein described the Obama ideal in The New Republic: “Obama believes that real change usually requires consensus, learning and accommodation.

Campaign issues come and go, but this is a thread running through the race. One believes in the raw assertion of power, the other the power of communication.

Read the full article here.