The confusion (and, often, anxiety) that inevitably arises when confronting new and difficult problems

To allay anxiety caused by their inevitable confusion, I regularly explain to my students that any problem worthy of their professional expertise will require a period during which they do not have a clue how to solve the problem, when they feel completely confused.  I have to confess utter confusion regarding how this election will turn out.  On the one hand, a Democrat victory seems inevitable.  There is no one I know well who isn’t hurting these days.  The economy is in a shambles, prices on necessities are skyrocketing, we haven’t yet captured or killed Osama Bin Laden, Afghanistan is in chaos, what “victory” realistically constitutes in Iraq remains a mystery (do we really expect to walk out of their with a strong and democratic ally?) . . . I could go on.

At the same time, I would’ve been astounded during most of my life to think the U.S. would elect a black as President unless he happened to be a conservative Republican.  And my belief that a majority of U.S. voters would choose a Democrat this year runs up against that unshakeable feeling.  There are certainly people who will say their vote is based on race (and anyone who says otherwise really is out of touch with certain segments of the U.S.), but they are in a minority.  Others claim astonishment that people think their intentions are based on race even when all indications are otherwise.  Representative Lynn Westmoreland claims he is astonished that calling Barack and Michelle Obama “uppity” would be taken as a racist comment.

Others speak in a code maybe they themselves don’t realize is racist.  As reported in last week’s Cleveland Jewish News, a Cleveland mental health counselor, for example, is “’concerned not so much about Obama the man, but the influences he might be subjected to from Muslims. I know he was brought up as a Christian, but both his father and stepfather were Muslim, and there has to be some influence there,’ she maintains.  Although she also has serious reservations about McCain, she is ‘haunted’ by her concerns about Obama.’”

And then there are the people who’s financial motivations are difficult to separate from other motivations.  My son’s doctor yesterday asked me what I thought of Wednesday night’s Republican convention.  I said I thought it was “ugly.” He told me he thought it was excellent and that he doesn’t like “the people around Obama.”  Then he turned to my son and said, “You’re father’s a liberal.  He wants to make a lot of money and give it all away.”

I bit my tongue and stopped myself from saying, “Your doctor’s a conservative.  He wants to make a lot of money and keep it all for himself.”  But what do I expect from a loyalist to that a party that fraudulently claims Obama will will impose “painful tax increases on working American families” when in fact, as reported accurately by FactCheck.org, “Obama proposes to cut taxes for most individuals (81.3 percent of all households would get a tax cut), while raising them only for a relative few at the top”?

It’s difficult to separate people’s economic motivations from their more visceral motivations.  I can almost understand the people who make a lot of money and do not want to shoulder a fair burden of paying for the infrastructure, services, and schools necessary to a society that allows them and others to do so, but I cannot understand people like Mitt Romney (“It’s time for the party of big ideas, not the party of Big Brother!“) and Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City (“I’m sorry that Barack Obama feels that her hometown isn’t cosmopolitan enough. I’m sorry, Barack, that it’s not flashy enough.”). Check that — I can understand Rudy.  I once worked with Rudy.  I remember sitting across a desk from him and his eyes glazing over as I explained the results of legal research I had done for him.  His chief assistant was in the room, furiously taking notes.  I knew the assistant was the person I was reporting to while we were all pretending I was reporting to Rudy.  Rudy is a mediocre person wrapped in a remarkable amount of ambition.  I suspect Romney must simply be the same.  

The Republicans are, undeniably The Party in Power, Running as if it Weren’t.

Where will all of this leave us in November?  I don’t have a clue.  I need to follow the advice that I give to my students and not let this utter confusion cause me too much anxiety.

We all, always, are figuring out the stories the world is telling us.

Lawyers understand better than most that putting together a story in one’s mind is the most common everyday act we all engage in. People speak of “proof” and “facts” as if they’re certainties, but lawyers know that “proof” is merely evidence that can only be understood in light of other evidence and that “facts” are not hard and fast things inferred from the evidence. As I tell my students, “We never have God’s videotape.”

But we need to understand the evidence we confront as hard and fast enough to support the decisions we always have to make, whether we’re jurors or just ordinary people making the decisions ordinary people make all the time. And we’re not bad at it; we come to the best story we can given the facts and move forward. The process may almost be like natural selection: our decisions about how to interpret the evidence we have are tested by the consequences those decisions entail, and so our interpretations (we hope) get better as we see our decisions succeed and fail.

In short, the world is a story just like a news story, a movie, or a novel is. And those of us who engage in storytelling know more than a few things about how to put together the evidence to sway our audience in the way we want our audience to be swayed. I wrote the week before last about one pattern humans find compelling.

There are many, many more effective methods of telling stories. Tell the story from the point of view of the person with whom you want your audience to identify. Move what you emphasize to the front of your story, to the front of your paragraphs, and to the front of your sentences. Spend more time on what you want to emphasize. Stay credible. Take what you want to de-emphasize and bury it in the middle of your story, in the middle of a paragraph, and in the middle of a sentence. Better yet, surround that “bad” evidence by good evidence at the beginning and ends of those paragraphs and sentences. Do mention the “bad” facts (if you don’t, some adversary will, which will considerably damage your credibility), but mention them as briefly as possible.

I could go on, but that’s enough for today.

One last thing: how do you decide about the evidence regarding Sarah Palin?

Is she a true agent of change? She’s taken on the establishment in traditionally corrupt Alaska to become one of our ruling party’s rising stars and walks the walk when the real world we all struggle with confronts her. She ran for governor and won against the former Senator who had appointed his own daughter to succeed him in the Senate and is more popular with her constituents than any other governor is among his or hers. When she is faced by the kind of unanticipated smack in the face Reality often doles out — as she has been by her daughter’s pregnancy, a private matter that anyone could face — she shows that she stands by her principles. She opposed the “Bridge to Nowhere,” the project which is synonymous with business as usual in Washington, and she is a political enemy of the corrupt Senator from her own party, Ted Stevens. In short, John McCain showed he really is a true maverick in choosing her.

Or is she this year’s Thomas Eagleton and Geraldine Ferraro rolled into one? She’s a charismatic Christian creationist who would outlaw abortion even in cases of rape and incest. She was a member of a political party that stands for the secession of Alaska, the abolition of all property taxes, and the privatization and exploitation to the hilt of all public lands within the new country. She was elected governor of a state so unpopulated she only needed 115,000 votes to win, and so, while she may be popular there, her popularity hardly shows she is representative of “real” Americans. How could it? She has been governor of that state for less than two years. She believes in abstinence-only education, yet the ineffectiveness of that policy in fighting teen pregnancies is highlighted by her own 17 year old daughter’s pregnancy. She supported the “bridge to nowhere” before she opposed it. She didn’t “take on” the corrupt Ted Stevens, as Lindsey Graham claimed, but, rather, led a major fundraising effort for him. She’s even under investigation for pressuring Alaska’s commissioner of public works to fire the state trooper who was engaged in an acrimonious custody battle with her sister. In short, she is Exhibit A for the defects in John McCain’s decision-making and judgment.

Addendum: from Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings: “Sarah Palin was not registered as a member of the Alaska Independence Party, though TPM Muckraker found that her husband was.“