Achenblog

[My story in today's paper.]

President George W. Bush once boasted, "I'm not a textbook player, I'm a gut player." The new tenant of the Oval Office takes a strikingly different approach. President Obama is almost defiantly deliberative, methodical and measured, even when critics accuse him of dithering. When describing his executive style, he goes into Spock mode, saying, "You've got to make decisions based on information and not emotions."

Obama's handling of the Afghanistan conundrum has been a spectacle of deliberation unlike anything seen in the White House in recent memory. The strategic review began in September. Again and again, the war council convened in the Situation Room. The president mulled an array of unappealing options. Next week, finally, he will tell the American public the outcome of all this strategizing.

"He's establishing his decision-making process as being almost diametrically the opposite of the previous administration," says Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel who served as Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's chief of staff. Wilkerson, who teaches national security decision-making at George Washington University, says the Bush-Cheney style was "cowboy-like, typical Texas, typical Wyoming, and extremely secretive."

Stephen Wayne, who teaches about the presidency at Georgetown, said: "He's not an instinctive decision-maker as Bush was. He doesn't go with his gut, he thinks with his head, which I think is desirable." Referring to the Afghanistan decision, Wayne said, "I don't think he is an indecisive person, I just think this is a tough one."

But to his critics, Obama's prolonged Afghanistan review suggests weakness rather than wisdom. Former vice president Richard B. Cheney lobbed the "dithering" accusation last month. Then last week, former senator Fred D. Thompson (R-Tenn.) said on his radio show that Obama has waited so long to decide on an Afghanistan strategy that the war is now lost. "The president does not have the will and determination to do what's necessary to win it. His heart's not in it, and never has been," Thompson said.

Obama's style has been attacked from his left flank as well. Liberals have zinged him as being too cautious, too much of a compromiser. Some of his supporters would like to see him show more fire in the belly and recapture the energy that propelled him to victory last year.

"I think the Obama we've seen as president is a very different Obama than we saw during the campaign. He doesn't seem to be connected, he doesn't seem to have the passion, he doesn't seem to be conveying the grand and inspiring vision," says the progressive historian Allan Lichtman of American University. "If you want to be a transformational president, you've got to take the risks."

Sean Wilentz, a history professor at Princeton, says Obama has suffered from unrealistic expectations among those who put him in office. "They kind of were sold Utopia, and they bought it, and it didn't happen," he says. "People were comparing the candidate to Abraham Lincoln before he served a day of his presidency. Nobody can live up to that."

As commander in chief, economist in chief, diplomat in chief and figurehead in chief, the president has a job description nearly as long as the tax code. He is in the Situation Room one night, holding a state dinner in a South Lawn tent the next -- and pardoning a turkey in the Rose Garden the following morning. His portfolio of responsibilities covers much of the planet; no president has seen so many countries so fast. But critics are not satisfied. The reaction to his recent trip to Asia was, in effect, that he went all the way to China and came back with only a lousy T-shirt.

[Bulletin, just fyi: Washington Post closing all national bureaus. I remember when we had Booth in Miami, Maraniss in Austin, gobs of people in New York, someone in Chicago, Denver, and three people in Los Angeles, including a Style writer.]

Last week, with Lebron visiting, I wandered down to the Verizon Center area to feed off some of the energy. There was no need to go to the game itself, though it was a good one, up there in the corner of an Irish pub. The neighborhood itself is an astonishing development: Whether you call it Chinatown, or Gallery Place, it's Washington's answer to Times Square, a place that throbs with energy on almost any night of the week, all year long.

And that's thanks to Abe Pollin, the owner of the Wizards.

Pollin died today at 85. He was, from what I've read, one of the great owners in all of professional sports, committed to more than just winning. Maybe a little more winning would have made some fans happy, but Pollin was the epitome of decency in his relations with the community. What other owner would change the name of his team because he didn't like the way it echoed the crime rate in his city?

Here's a profile of Pollin that appeared in The Post a dozen years ago:

This morning I overhead someone talk about "the best thing since sliced bread." But I missed hearing about the thing that was the object of her superlative. I felt my innards congeal with curiosity, and when it didn't pass, I realized I needed to think this through. When did they invent sliced bread? Before or after canned beer? And why is sliced bread so amazing? Sure, sliced bread is extremely convenient when you've got exactly 30 seconds to make the PB&J for the critter who has to run out the door to catch the bus in the morning, but should it really be the standard by which measure innovation?

I'm just wondering if the saying really should be something more along the lines of "The best thing since, and perhaps even encompassing the invention of, sliced bread." Imprecision in speech is a form of evil.

In any case, several things come immediately to mind as being possibly the best things since s.b. (and note that I have chosen to limit my list to consumables):

I've got to go with Kevin Huffman in this pundit contest, even while noting, with clenched jaw, face twisted in a death's-head grimace, that both of the contestants have exposed their weaknesses. (You can cast your vote until 8 p.m.)

Huffman's column has Mobius-strip reasoning that makes the reader work too hard. Once again he has polyurethaned his prose with satire and snark. It's too clever by half, or maybe three-quarters -- or perhaps I just haven't woken up yet. In general, you don't want the main reaction of your readers to be, "What is he saying????"

But thematically the column works, as it jabs the conservatives for their perverse rejection ("death panels!") of evidence-based, results-oriented medical treatment. Of course, I'm pretty sure that the liberal Democrats and administration officials were equally reluctant last week to embrace the scientific recommendations for fewer cancer screenings. The simple fact is that no one in this town is willing to tell voters that they can't have everything they want. We're pain-averse to the point of pathology. With no cure in sight. (Though we do have a good screening process, known as elections.)

Zeba Khan comes at health care from a more personal angle, detailing her troubles as a freelancer who lacks insurance and needed dental work. But there is no momentum in her narrative and the prose stylings are not yet equal to her obvious intellect. So there's room to grow there.

For a pretty good summary of what it takes to be a pundit, check out Andrew Rosenthal's discussion in the Times yesterday (scroll down midway in this Q&A), which was triggered by some reader blowback over a MoDo column. Excerpt:

'Most of all, columnists are not only free to express their personal opinions, that is the primary part of their job. We pay them to have strong opinions and to express them sharply and with great style. They can choose any subject they want to write about, within the bounds of decency and appropriate journalistic inquiry (although we do ask them, with varying degrees of lack of success, to avoid directly endorsing a candidate for office)....

'While columnists must adhere to The Times's high standards of factual accuracy, they are allowed great latitude in characterizing events, people or issues in a way that expresses an opinion. They are free, for example, to say that they believe that the Catholic Church's hierarchy treats nuns unfairly, even if the members of that hierarchy deny it. They are not even required to include that denial in their columns. Columns are not required, or intended, to be fair and dispassionate accounts of events. They are by nature one-sided. Columnists may find it useful to give the opposing views on any position they take, or they may not, and it's entirely up to them.' .

You may have read about the computer hackers who stole years of emails that show climate scientists being nasty and cranky (for example, "Next time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I'll be tempted to beat the crap out of him") and, if you believe the global-warming-deniers, manipulating the climate data. This is going viral on the web, At RealClimate, some of those scientists respond:

More interesting is what is not contained in the emails. There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research, no grand plan to 'get rid of the MWP', no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no 'marching orders' from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords. The truly paranoid will put this down to the hackers also being in on the plot though.

My initial glance at the news reports leads me to think that this is not a scandal so much as a window on real scientists working on a politicized issue. But I haven't read but a snippet of the emails.

More from RealClimate:

...it's important to remember that science doesn't work because people are polite at all times. Gravity isn't a useful theory because Newton was a nice person. QED isn't powerful because Feynman was respectful of other people around him. Science works because different groups go about trying to find the best approximations of the truth, and are generally very competitive about that.

[To digress: I love this comment someone posted at RealClimate: 'You say "Gravity isn't a useful theory because Newton was a nice person." I agree. But isn't it also true that Newtons antipathy towards Hooke and his use of his position in control of the Royal Society, ensured that the concept of an achromatic lens for a telescope - which would have competed with his mirror solution - had to wait until after his death before someone was brave enough to think the "impossible"?']

In my dawn-patrol ritual on the back porch, the meditative moment, the contemplative pre-electronic communing with the planet in its optimistic turn toward our star, I often find myself flooded with yearning, with need, with want, with -- dare I say the word -- desire. So it was this morning as I surveyed my estate. I really, really, really wanted to cut back the crape myrtle.

[Regulars here, on seeing the word "yearning," instantly thought: he's going to make a joke about wanting a new lawn mower. But I'm not so predictable!!]

Being a man, particularly one past that conquer-the-world phase, is extraordinarily easy. We prune back our ambitions until they are mere goals, and then trim them some more until we have just a severe little topiary shrub shaped strikingly like the Lombardi Trophy. We learn to putter, and dither. We eyeball our stocks and gradually shift the money to bonds. We fall asleep in front of the TV. We're livin' the dream.

But women! Gosh, it seems so exhausting, just watching from a distance (not so far a distance in my heavily distaff household). So many women take on what are essentially two full-time jobs (professional and domestic), just for starters. They have standards of decency and cleanliness and comportment, which is a huge timesuck. They also have all those feelings, which looks to me as hard as running an orphanage.

First Newsweek had that ridiculous cover "In Search of Aliens" a few months back, a wild exaggeration of a story about the Kepler mission to find Earthlike worlds. Then Newsweek had a cover asking if your baby is racist. Now we have the Sarah Palin cover, using a sexy photo taken for Runner's World. Jon Meacham defends the decision:

"We chose the most interesting image available to us to illustrate the theme of the cover, which is what we always try to do," Meacham said. "We apply the same test to photographs of any public figure, male or female: does the image convey what we are saying? That is a gender-neutral standard."

Ain't nothin' gender-neutral about Sarah Palin. Her sex appeal is part of the package. But that's all the more reason to be sensitive to the perils of over-leveraging that aspect of her celebrity. Newsweek over-leveraged. In a single editorial decision, Newsweek has called attention to its own editorial judgment rather than to the Bizarro-World rise of Palin as an allegedly credible leader of the world's most powerful nation. That's got to get a flag and 15 yards and perhaps, pending a review by the league, at least a one-game suspension.

No fine will be imposed because, hey, it's a newsweekly, and we have a mercy rule around here.

Next offense to adjudicate: The Steve Pinker review of Malcolm Gladwell's new book. The review ran in the New York Times Sunday Book Review. Pinker is a brilliant guy, but he also gets a flag and 15 for unsportsmanlike conduct.

He was assigned to review Gladwell's book of essays, "What the Dog Saw," but it's obvious that the moment he picked up the book he was gunning for the curly-headed didact. Pinker describes his rising gorge while reading Gladwell's "Outliers" on the Kindle. He's already hatin' on Gladwell before he's read the first sentence of the new book.

Pinker argues that Gladwell can't be trusted with complex issues involving statistics and psychology, and that he makes some very basic errors in his reporting.

An eclectic essayist is necessarily a dilettante, which is not in itself a bad thing. But Gladwell frequently holds forth about statistics and psychology, and his lack of technical grounding in these subjects can be jarring. He provides misleading definitions of "homology," "sagittal plane" and "power law" and quotes an expert speaking about an "igon value" (that's eigenvalue, a basic concept in linear algebra). In the spirit of Gladwell, who likes to give portentous names to his aperçus, I will call this the Igon Value Problem: when a writer's education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong.

Of course the lack of academic expertise will be jarring to an academic. But Gladwell writes for a popular audience. He's not writing for Pinker. Nor should he. He writes for the rest of us, who will cut him a little slack if he doesn't precisely nail the definition of homology and sagittal plane.

No one mistakes Gladwell for a scientist. He is a science writer and explainer, and he does it better than just about anyone else in the game right now.

It's fair to question (as Pinker does) whether Gladwell's conclusions are correct. That's a good topic for a book review. Does the totality of Gladwell's argument hold up? You can prove anything with cherry-picked anecdotes. But Gladwell's fundamental credibility is solid. Everyone who puts pen to paper (that's still done, right?) makes a mistake here and there, particularly when the material is abstruse (gawd I love that word). Fact-checking at The New Yorker, where these essays appeared, is the gold standard in the business.

It's unfair to compare Gladwell to academics, because the appropriate comparison is with other science writers. Pinker admits that Gladwell can tell a story and has a winning way with his prose; most academics lack that talent. If you're going to have an informed society you need storytellers (Gladwell, McPhee, Ferris, Preston, etc.) who can dive into complex, academic, scientific and technological subjects and translate information into language ordinary people of all ages and backgrounds can understand. And so Malcolm Gladwell is a national treasure, even if some experts don't think he has much...you know...igon value.

[Update:

The Pinker-Gladwell steel cage death match is getting interesting. Please read Gladwell in his blog firing back at Pinker for intellectual impurities such as research-by-Google. Gladwell makes no excuses for igon value but takes umbrage at the suggestion that he's wrong when he writes that draft position is na unreliable predictor of subsequent quarterback performance. I hope this spat goes on for a while (why do I feel like I'm watching two guys whip out their slide rules to see whose is longer?).

See also this interesting comment in the Language Log blog:

'Not to defend Gladwell, but Pinker's book The Blank Slate was guilty of the same kind of dilettantism that he dings Gladwell for, including a telltale typo: he quoted Virginia Woolf as saying, "In or about December 1910, human nature changed," when she actually wrote, "On or about December 1910 human character changed. "The Igon Value Problem," indeed. (Pinker's mistake was particularly galling because he was superfluously quoting Woolf just to disagree with her, which I think should not be done.)'

So Pinker's not perfect! That means we should trust nothing he writes, ever! Clearly a charlatan! (By the way, in college I interviewed a football player after a game, and jotted in my notes, "We showed a lot of char. out there today." Typed up the story. It ran in the school paper as "We showed a lot of charisma out there today." The football player wanted to stomp me.)

Some interesting comments in the boodle today. A sample:

Pragmatix: Re Pinker's review of Gladwell, I have to disagree with Achenbach. In my opinion (and I'm no professional scientist or statistician), almost every piece by Gladwell I've ever read is biased toward proclaiming a "fresh, counterintuitive"

The recent Nor'easter pounded the tar out of the Delmarva peninsula. See these pictures of Chincoteague. I'm worried about my campground at the north end of Assateague and wondering how the ponies rode out the storm. Storms regularly breach the berm (I guess you'd call it a dune except it's industrially created) that runs down the island, and the campground gets flooded, but this was no ordinary storm, lasting as it did for four days. Clearly -- obviously -- irrefutably -- I need to head to the beach today to check out the damage and blog about it, which really should only take five or six days of reporting. Also I should see how the Outer Banks handled it. And Bermuda. And the Amalfi Coast.

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Weingarten was just as mean as I was in that pundit contest that dot.com is running. Gene hates the tendency to be inoffensive and earnest. It's true, earnestness is deadly in an opinionator, almost as bad as its evil cousin, sanctimony. But maybe there's a generational element at work. Younger folks nurture ideals that have not yet been blasted and eroded and sandpapered away to the point where nothing is left but the iron core.

The comment threads are brutal. Like: "Even when they talk about privilege (like Courtney Martin's post on class privilege, or Jeremy Haber's post on being a lukewarm accepter of gay rights) they do so with acknowledged but ultimately unfettered privilege oozing out of their words."

Give these contestants some combat pay!

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Sure, Wilbon's right, it goes in the books as a terrible call by Belichick to go for it on 4th and 2 from his own 28 while holding a 6-point lead against the Colts. But if he'd made it, we'd all be calling him a genius again. Does anyone think Manning couldn't have marched 70 yards instead of 28 yards with more than 2 minutes to play? Either way, same outcome.

[more to come]

Increasingly I want to take a sledgehammer to my laptop. It's following me, nagging me, pestering me, forcing me to pay attention to it when I really ought to be doing something healthier, like texting.

I know my laptop better than I know my own children. Yesterday I was down by the river in the morning, the four-day storm had broken, the air was sparkling, and I found myself alone in what could plausibly pass for wilderness but for the rusty camp grill and the old fire ring and the two picnic tables -- and the laptop. The aircard works out there. Communed with nature, fired off some emails.

Who among us has not sniffed around a woodsy park in search of an outlet?

You know you have it bad when you check for a socket in the port-a-john.

The other problem with the laptop is that it is a transfer medium for stupid punditry and irritating blog-squawking. I mean, I really don't want to read about Sarah Palin's book. She is destined to turn into Lou Dobbs, who is destined to turn into Sarah Palin. There is nothing there that interests me. Nor do I want to read any more about how Obama hates America. This meme is a staple of conservative blogitry. The president, we're told, has "antipathy" toward America. He's on an endless apology tour. His wife thinks America is "mean," and so on.

Obama is, indeed, trying to change and improve the relationship between the U.S. and other countries, and one of his tactics is to acknowledge that America has had dark chapters and hasn't been perfect in upholding its ideals. But to my ear his speeches still are resoundingly pro-American. Judge for yourself by reading the the transcript of his town hall meeting today with students in Shanghai:

China is an ancient nation, with a deeply rooted culture. The United States, by comparison, is a young nation, whose culture is determined by the many different immigrants who have come to our shores, and by the founding documents that guide our democracy.

Those documents put forward a simple vision of human affairs, and they enshrine several core principles -- that all men and women are created equal, and possess certain fundamental rights; that government should reflect the will of the people and respond to their wishes; that commerce should be open, information freely accessible; and that laws, and not simply men, should guarantee the administration of justice.

Of course, the story of our nation is not without its difficult chapters. In many ways -- over many years -- we have struggled to advance the promise of these principles to all of our people, and to forge a more perfect union. We fought a very painful civil war, and freed a portion of our population from slavery. It took time for women to be extended the right to vote, workers to win the right to organize, and for immigrants from different corners of the globe to be fully embraced. Even after they were freed, African Americans persevered through conditions that were separate and not equal, before winning full and equal rights.

None of this was easy. But we made progress because of our belief in those core principles, which have served as our compass through the darkest of storms. That is why Lincoln could stand up in the midst of civil war and declare it a struggle to see whether any nation, conceived in liberty, and "dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal" could long endure. That is why Dr. Martin Luther King could stand on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and ask that our nation live out the true meaning of its creed. That's why immigrants from China to Kenya could find a home on our shores; why opportunity is available to all who would work for it; and why someone like me, who less than 50 years ago would have had trouble voting in some parts of America, is now able to serve as its President.

And that is why America will always speak out for these core principles around the world. We do not seek to impose any system of government on any other nation, but we also don't believe that the principles that we stand for are unique to our nation. These freedoms of expression and worship -- of access to information and political participation -- we believe are universal rights. They should be available to all people, including ethnic and religious minorities -- whether they are in the United States, China, or any nation. Indeed, it is that respect for universal rights that guides America's openness to other countries; our respect for different cultures; our commitment to international law; and our faith in the future.

I still feel bad that I said mean things about those pundit contestants simply because some of their stuff was so dreadful. The truth, of course, is that I'm jealous, because they're young and have a future and can become America's Next Great Pundit, and I'm destined to cover night cops in Gaithersburg. Resentment is becoming my foundational emotion. As I get older I become more and more aware of having grown up on a dirt road, a loose end in a broken family. Maybe it's because my own kids buy name-brand everything and seem to think they are to the manor born. (Or is it manner. Surely it's manor. At least it used to be manor back in my day.)

My grouchiness extends to water discoveries in the solar system. I want the liquid. I don't care so much about ice and vapor. When scientists say the moon is wet, I say sure, but it's a dry wet.

In any case, here's my story on the moonwater discovery:

Water on the moon, once a wild conjecture, appears to be solidifying into a scientific fact. Jubilant NASA scientists announced Friday that they have found the telltale signature of significant quantities of water, in the form of ice and vapor, in a shadowed crater at the moon's south pole.

The discovery came from the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, which early on the morning of Oct. 9 abjured the tradition of looking at the moon in favor of crashing into it. A spent rocket body went first, trailed by a spacecraft bristling with instruments. The rocket blasted out a hole 60 to 100 feet across. The spacecraft, four minutes in the rear, scrutinized the plume of ejected lunar material and beamed data back to Earth before it, too, crashed.

Having pored over the data, members of the NASA team concluded that they had found unmistakable signs of water -- 220 pounds of it, the equivalent of about 26 gallons had it been in liquid form.

"Can you believe it? Isn't this cool?" said Peter Schultz, a Brown University planetary scientist and team member.

This does not mean there is a lake on the moon, or a frozen pond waiting for the first astronaut with skates. It is not clear how much water is present, nor to what extent it is ice or vapor, nor how it mixes with other material in the lunar regolith. Scientists don't know if the water is as abundant at other locations on the moon. But they were surprised by how much they found. They were prepared to find only about 1 percent of what turned up.

For NASA, the pole turned out to be a water jackpot.

"It's pretty much been a 'Holy cow!' moment every single day since impact," said NASA scientist Anthony Colaprete, the leader of the LCROSS team.

A dozen astronauts walked on the moon between 1969 and 1972, but the moon as an object was overshadowed by the technology of the missions and the heroics of the astronauts. When Buzz Aldrin stepped on the moon, he looked around and uttered the words "magnificent desolation," and that was the moon's reputation thereafter. Although there were hints of water in moon rocks brought back to earth, scientists viewed that as contamination.

The Apollo missions targeted the moon's equatorial regions. No astronauts have explored the poles, where portions of craters are in permanent shadow and temperatures drop to 220 degrees below zero Celsius.