From an article on Michelle Obama’s speech at the DNC:
If the speech is effective beyond the power of well delivered rhetoric, it will be because the first lady took this description of Obama’s core self and linked it to policy. This is what Ann Romney and Mitt Romney never did. The message of the GOP convention was “Trust Mitt.” That was Michelle Obama’s message too: Her husband could be trusted because he came from a background and has lived a middle class life. But then she started connecting the biography to the policy. This was always Bill Clinton’s great gift. If this connection is successfully made, then that’s what will make this pitch more politically than just a pretty speech by a loving wife who thinks her husband deserves an A for effort.
I don’t want to criticize Michelle Obama because I understand that she made the speech she had to make. But it is very frustrating to see -yet again! – this pernicious idea that a president’s policies should be dictated by his “core self.” I don’t want to care about politicians’ biographies. I want them to act the role of hired managers who put in practice what their voters want them to do, not what a memory of their grandma tells them to do. I don’t want to hear about the politicians’ broken kitchen table, their dog, their grandfather, or their favorite brand of candy. I want to hear how a politician will put his or her personal interests, prejudices and foibles aside and do the job of representing the people.
We do not care about the “core selves” of any professional we hire to perform a service. My students don’t expect me to teach well because I come from a long life of female teachers. They expect me to teach well because that’s my job. Neither do I question whether a dentist will be able to treat me well based on her family experiences with Ukrainians, Jews or autistics. She has to do her job well, irrespective of what her life has been like and what her maternal aunt told her 40 years ago.
When will politics stop being turned into a cheap melodrama and become centered around elected representatives who do the will of their voters and avoid bugging us with their numerous relatives and difficult childhoods?
Clarissa's Blog 
Presidents, or indeed people in general do make decisions based upon their core values, at least I think so. A person who has a core conviction is not going to make a decision contrary to it. You have sometimes cited the fact that Putin’s biography includes working in the KGB. Is this not relevant.
Would you vote for someone who’s biography included murdering abortion providers, for example? I think people in this country tend to trust someone with self-made wealth, who started out very poor. Oprah is an iconic example. I disagree a lot with Oprah, but I admit that I instinctively trust her.
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Yes, people’s actual experience and their priorities matter but I think this US fetishization of people who started poor and are now wealthy is all too sentimental. It is also terribly right wing, since many more started poor and are still poor and it is *not* their “fault.”
I know plenty of people in who started our poor, or poor-ish … there are FDR electrical coops, and there were better public schools, much less expensive college, and much better food stamp and public health programs a couple of decades ago than now, so poor wasn’t the same then as now. They are now much richer and voting for Romney, the death penalty, expanded wars, and Artic drilling. The maudlin story about their Mama canning vegetables for winter does not mean they give a damn about whether people are hungry now. And they have “core values” about the sanctity of embryos and so on.
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I first understood the American myth about nasty poor people when I saw Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby. The complete lack of any sort of psychology or inwardness represented in this movie was striking. The grasping, poorly spoken relatives of the “Baby”, who lacked fashion sense, coordination or the will to see beyond their noses, were clearly representative of a right-wing caricature of the poor. The real poor don’t behave in that way, or maybe they do in America.
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It’s Eastwood, what do you expect? The guy became famous through cowboy movies, for Pete’s sake.
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Eastwood’s movie, with its lack of psychological analysis of any sort, was far more successful than Girlfight, a movie that did have solid, dramatic appeal.
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The movies that are the most successful at the box-office and the Oscars are always the crappiest ones.
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Yes, because they resonate with how the majority have been taught to experience reality, rather than with those who have deviated from expectations by learning how to think.
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It is also terribly right wing, since many more started poor and are still poor and it is *not* their “fault.”(Z)
Do people bear *any* responsibility for where they end up in life?
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“Do people bear *any* responsibility for where they end up in life?”
Well yes, sure. People make choices and act. Their choices and actions however are also constrained and shaped by various circumstances in life. It’s not a matter of choosing between two extreme positions where either someone’s in control of everything or in control of nothing. It’s a more complicated blend of the two.
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“It’s not a matter of choosing between two extreme positions where either someone’s in control of everything or in control of nothing. It’s a more complicated blend of the two.”
– Good point! Simplistic approaches to ultra-complex issues never work. People in my field who went on the job market with me in 2007-8 couldn’t get jobs because 40% of positions in my field were closed. Wonderful, hard-working people were left without jobs because the objective reality outside their control changed. I got a TT job when many extremely qualified people didn’t because I was very lucky. Of course, what I now do with this extreme good fortune is up to me. If I just sit there flapping my ears in the air and don;t publish anything, I will not get tenure and that will be my fault.
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It’s not a matter of choosing between two extreme positions where either someone’s in control of everything or in control of nothing. It’s a more complicated blend of the two.(hkatz)
I agree completely. One of my issues is when either side thinks they have all the answers. As much as it isnt just a “pull your bootstraps up” mentality, it also isnt just “throw some more money and social programs” at it.
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Well, if you really feel it is important to have a structure in which there are lot of low paid workers, which you do if you praise companies like Wal*mart as “job creators,” then you really cannot fault the people who are doing precisely the jobs you think many should be doing. And if you close the schools as we are essentially doing where I live, saying “get an education so that you do not have to be one of the low paid workers at my big box store” is not going to be realistic.
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” You have sometimes cited the fact that Putin’s biography includes working in the KGB. Is this not relevant.”
– Of course, previous work experience is crucial for any job seeker.
“Would you vote for someone who’s biography included murdering abortion providers, for example?”
– Are people convicted of violent felonies even allowed to run for office?
Romney is quoted as saying a long time ago that he supports women’s right to choose because he had a relative who had to get an illegal abortion and that traumatized him. I think the whole thing is just bizarre. Why should MY reproductive rights depend on whether Romney had a relative and what happened to that relative? The absolute majority of people in this country support abortion in some cases. This is what every candidate’s position should reflect. The will of the people, not his own beliefs or those of his relatives. And if a politician cannot put his own convictions aside and do his job of representing the voters, then he is unsuited for this job.
If a politician is deeply convinced that a fetus is a human being but manages to remember that his job is not to represent himself but the voters, then I’m all for that politician.
“I think people in this country tend to trust someone with self-made wealth, who started out very poor. Oprah is an iconic example. I disagree a lot with Oprah, but I admit that I instinctively trust her.”
– I also like Oprah a lot. But I believe it is absolutely wrong to select politicians on the basis of how well they sell the story of their lives. Ideally, I wouldn’t know anything about their lives. All I need to know is their voting record.
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Under your definition of the ideal politician (with which I agree), even their voting record would only be relevant as it compared to the desires of their constituency when they made that vote. So even if they voted against abortion before, because they were representing people who were against it, ideally if the people they were representing began to lean to pro-choice, the politician representing them should also change his voting. Unfortunately, we like to elect people that we think we can “trust” which also lets us off the hook to come up with an opinion on every issue, because we can just “trust’ them to vote the way we would if we actually thought about the issue!
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That “core self” thing is problematic, too, in terms of its conservative effect on preserving gender differences. Not too much room to experiment with different ways of life if you have to maintain, in order to market, a credible “core self”.
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I think the opposite is true. My “core self” has always been pro gender equality, anti race based discrimination. I remember vividly being scolded for drinking from a colored-only water fountain as a child.
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It really depends on whether the “core self” is an ideology, or whether it really is a core self. I think if it’s an ideology, it will have to be rigid. If not, it can be relatively organic and consistent, but will also change over time. Some people are highly suspicious of any change and view it as a sign that one lacks credibility or decisiveness in action. This view is held especially among those of the right. Can you imagine if a child is brought up to fit an ideology concerning identity and is never allowed to change? Either they are lucky and the identity imposed on them matches their inner “core self”, or else the imposition of a rigid demand prevents the actual core self from being expressed.
It’s late here and I’m parsing abstractions, however you can see that everything depends on the assumptions one holds about human identity.
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How funny. When I was a small child all those water fountains in Miami had been transformed by the power of the Civil Rights Act into the “children’s water fountains.”
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@That “core self” might or might not be marketable, it depends. What seems to be essential in candidates’ rhetoric is that they believe what they do due to personal experience, or family experience, not for more abstract reasons and that they are living examples of the American dream.
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“What seems to be essential in candidates’ rhetoric is that they believe what they do due to personal experience, or family experience, not for more abstract reasons ”
– There is nothing more abstract about doing what the voters want than doing what some non-existent grandma told you to do.
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Well, for reasons other than alleged direct personal experience or experience of a family member, which showed you that, for instance, some people might be poor despite being hard working and studying as much as opportunity allowed. So, you learned to temper your rigid, and still generally correct principles, with due compassion…
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As a practical matter, it is not possible for a poor or lower middle class person to run for office in the U. S. Running for office is a full time job, and it is illegal to get paid for it, since campaign contributions cannot be used for personal expenses. Since many poor and middle calss Americans are distrustful of wealthy people, it seems to be necessary for candidates to say that they were not always wealthy. I remember people talking about this when Kennedy was a candidate in 1960, and I suspect it cost him quite a few votes.
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“I remember people talking about this when Kennedy was a candidate in 1960, and I suspect it cost him quite a few votes.”
– I would never vote for anybody with the last name ‘Kennedy’, no matter what policies they advocated. I have a personal bias against the spoiled ultra-rich boys and girls and nothing could overcome that. They are my class enemy. 🙂
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But then does that not mean you do care about the biography, after all? And that you, too, want to hear that this now rich candidate was poor as a child?
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“But then does that not mean you do care about the biography, after all. And that you, too, want to hear that this now rich candidate was poor as a child?”
– I’d rather not hear anything about anybody’s biography at all.
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I agree, I also don’t particularly like the idea of my rights being dependent on the beliefs/experiences of other people.
However, the flip side of that is I don’t necessarily want my rights decided by mass vote either- see recent history of states voting to define marriage as a strictly heterosexual arrangements. In theory the structure of the government has checks and balances to prevent the abuse of minority rights, but it is often about as slow of a process as changing the population’s opinions… So I think I derive some comfort from candidates having lines in the sand they will not cross that align with my own (and evidently many other people do as well) since personal beliefs will often color a person’s interpretation of rules and affect how strongly they fight for a cause.
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I agree on the personal beliefs. It’s just the standard narrative on how one came to have these that I find unnecessary: caring about X because you have had personal experience with it. I am much more interested in something like: “I believe in zero hunger and here is my record on that issue.”
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I still find it incredibly bizarre that politician’s spouses are expected, even almost required, to give speeches.
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