The Closing of the Conservative Mind

As Paul Krugman says, to be a conservative today in good standing you must believe or pretend to believe things that are demonstrably not true.




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May 25, 2013, 10:53 am 75 Comments

The Closing of the Conservative Mind

Jonathan Chait has an interesting portrait of Josh Barro; Mike Konczal, citing this and also a longer discussion of “reformish” conservatives by Ryan Cooper, argues that there really isn’t much to see here. I agree, and have been trying to pin down what I mean by that.



Start with the proposition that there is a legitimate left-right divide in U.S. politics, built around a real issue: how extensive should be make our social safety net, and (hence) how much do we need to raise in taxes? This is ultimately a values issue, with no right answer.



There are, however, a lot of largely empirical questions whose answers need not, in principle, be associated with one’s position on this left-right divide but, in practice, are. A partial list:



1.The existence of anthropogenic climate change

2.The effects of fiscal stimulus/austerity

3.The effects of monetary expansion, and the risks of inflation

4.The revenue effects of tax cuts

5.The workability of universal health care



I’ve deliberately chosen a list here where the evidence is, in each case, pretty much overwhelming. There is a real scientific consensus on 1; the evidence of the past few years has been very strong on 2 and 3; there are no serious studies supporting the view that we’re on the wrong side of the Laffer curve; one form or another of UHC operates all across the advanced world, with lower costs than the US system.



So? You could, as I said, take the “liberal” position on each of these issues while still being conservative in the sense that you want a smaller government. But what the “reformish” conservatives Ryan Cooper lists do, in almost all cases, is either (a) to follow the party line on these issues or (b) to hint at some flexibility – and thereby cultivate an image of being open-minded — as long as the issues don’t get close to an actual policy decision, but to always find a way to support the Republican position whenever it actually matters.



But aren’t there people like Bruce Bartlett or Josh Barro who really do break with the party line on some or all of these issues? Yes, but they are then immediately branded as “no longer conservatives”, in a sort of inverted version of the none-dare-call-it-treason effect.



The point is that there remains essentially no room for independent thinking within the conservative movement.



Could you say the same thing about liberals? I don’t think so. A few decades ago, you might have been able to draw up a somewhat similar list for the other side, involving things like the superiority of tradeable emission permits to command-and-control pollution regulation, the general undesirability of rent control, the benefits of airline deregulation, the absence of a usable long-run tradeoff between unemployment and inflation (and hence the impossibility of setting a 4 percent target for unemployment). But many liberals eventually conceded the point in each of these cases (maybe even conceded too far in a couple), without being declared no longer liberal. The point is that being a good liberal doesn’t require that you believe, or pretend to believe, lots of things that almost certainly aren’t true; being a good conservative does.



And like Mike Konczal, I see no sign that any of this is changing.

To the Graduates Etc.

To the graduates of 2013: Congratulations and best of luck as you go forth. You'll need it. Please remember your manners and send thank you notes to those who grudgingly favored you with graduation presents. You'll face trials & tribulations as you proceed down life's post-graduation road. Tribulations are better than trials because legal bills are so darn high in these litigious days. Yes, ...who you know can be important, but what you know will ultimately pay the bills especially if you expect to buy a house before you're 45. You are not bullet-proof. If you ever find yourself in the wrong place at the wrong time, well, good luck is all I can say. Sneak out quietly and go home. You'll muddle your way thru most things and learn as you go especially as you're on your 4th job in three years starting out. Your parents love you but they're probably already thinking about redoing your room so don't even think about returning home. A final word to the wise: stay off Facebook late at night. Nothing good happens on Facebook after midnight or if you're in a drunken stupor.


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Tag PeopleAdd dateTag actionOnly MePublicFriends (+)Friends except Acquaintances (+)Only Me (+)CustomClose FriendsCengage LearningSee all lists...FamilyWinfield High SchoolPelham, Alabama AreaWinfield FriendsAuburn UniversityJefferson State Community CollegeAcquaintancesGo BackPublicFriendsFriends except AcquaintancesOnly MeCustomClose FriendsCengage LearningSee all lists...FamilyWinfield High SchoolPelham, Alabama AreaWinfield FriendsAuburn UniversityJefferson State Community CollegeAcquaintancesGo BackPost..Fred Hudson

Yesterday

.To the graduates of 2013: Congratulations and best of luck as you go forth. You'll need it. Please remember your manners and send thank you notes to those who grudgingly favored you with graduation presents. You'll face trials & tribulations as you proceed down life's post-graduation road. Tribulations are better than trials because legal bills are so darn high in these litigious days. Yes, ...who you know can be important, but what you know will ultimately pay the bills especially if you expect to buy a house before you're 45. You are not bullet-proof. If you ever find yourself in the wrong place at the wrong time, well, good luck is all I can say. Sneak out quietly and go home. You'll muddle your way thru most things and learn as you go especially as you're on your 4th job in three years starting out. Your parents love you but they're probably already thinking about redoing your room so don't even think about returning home. A final word to the wise: stay off Facebook late at night. Nothing good happens on Facebook after midnight or if you're in a drunken stupor.See More



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Diann O'Mary Harbin Barrett, Kimberley Stewart, Jane Moore Patton and 4 others like this..Kimberley Stewart Wise advice Fred!

22 hours ago via mobile · Like..Tom Tidwell Entitled: Extemporaneous Commencement Address by Non-invitee

16 hours ago · Like..Fred Hudson The post was not extemporaneous. I made it up as I went along.

16 hours ago · Like..Diann O'Mary Harbin Barrett Well said, Fred!!

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Write a comment.....Fred Hudson

Friday

.To Moyna: I got a hot rod ford and a two dollar bill, and I know a place just over the hill. Hey good lookin! What you got cookin? How's about cookin something up with me?



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Hank Henley, Peggy Jackson Hopp, Lucy Horsley Lewis and 3 others like this..View 1 more comment..Fred Hudson You're on!

Friday at 8:28pm · Edited · Like..Josie LoGiudice You guys are too cute!!!

Friday at 8:37pm via mobile · Like..Lucy Horsley Lewis You're all dressed up for the dance!

Friday at 11:10pm · Like..Lynda Kirkpatrick Get a room.

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Jefferson

It seems that I am preoccupied with reading about Thomas Jefferson.  The scholarship on our third President is so vast I realize that it will be impossible to ever come to a conclusive opinion about this man.

The Benefits of Optimism Are Real

BY Emily Esfahani Smith
The Atlantic
1 March 2013

One of the most memorable scenes of the Oscar-nominated film Silver Linings Playbook revolves around Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, a novel that does not end well, to put it mildly.
  
Patrizio Solitano Jr. (Bradley Cooper) has come home after an eight-month stint being treated for bipolar disorder at a psychiatric hospital, where he was sentenced to go after he nearly beat his wife's lover to death. Home from the hospital, living under his parents' charge, Pat has lost his wife, his job, and his house. But he tries to put the pieces of his life back together. He exercises, maintains an upbeat lifestyle, and tries to better his mind by reading through the novels that his estranged wife Nikki, a high school English teacher, assigns her students.

Pat takes up a personal motto, excelsior -- Latin for "ever upward." He tells his state-appointed therapist, "I hate my illness and I want to control it. This is what I believe to be true: You have to do everything you can and if you stay positive you have a shot at a silver lining."

Which is why the Hemingway novel, which is part of Nikki's syllabus, is such a buzz kill. When he gets to the last pages, and discovers that it ends grimly with death, he slams the book shut, throws it through a glass window of his parents' house, and storms into their room in the middle of the night, saying:

This whole time you're rooting for this Hemingway guy to survive the war and to be with the woman that he loves, Catherine Barkley... And he does, he does, he survives the war after getting blown up. He survives it and he escapes to Switzerland with Catherine. You think he ends it there? No! She dies, dad! I mean, the world's hard enough as it is, guys. Can't someone say, hey let's be positive? Let's have a good ending to the story?

Another best picture nominee, Life of Pi, employs a similar device. Pi finds himself aboard a lifeboat with a ferocious Bengal tiger in the aftermath of a shipwreck that has his entire family. Lost at sea in the Pacific Ocean for 227 days -- starved, desperate, and forced into a game of survival with the tiger -- Pi pushes forward, even though he, like Pat, has lost everything. Pi says, "You might think I lost all hope at that point. I did. And as a result I perked up and felt much better."

Pi's resilience is incredible once you realize what happens on board the lifeboat and how Pi copes with the tragedy that he witnesses and endures. There's more to the story than the boy and the tiger. Though what really happened is terrible, Pi chooses to tell a different story. His parallels what really happened, but is beautiful not bleak, transcendent not nihilistic.
 
"Which story do you prefer?" he asks at the end.

***

 

This questions turns out to matter a great deal if you are trying to figure out who grows after trauma and who gets swallowed up by it, a question that each movie addresses and that psychologists have been grappling with for years. Think back to the last time you experienced a loss, setback, or hardship. Did you respond by venting, ruminating, and dwelling on the disappointment, or did you look for a faint flash of meaning through all of the darkness -- a silver lining of some sort? How quickly did you bounce back -- how resilient are you?

The New Yorker's Richard Brody criticized Silver Linings Playbook for its sentimentality and "faith-based view of mental illness and, overall, of emotional redemption." The New York Times' A.O. Scott made a similar, if predictable, criticism of Life of Pi: "The novelist and the older Pi are eager...to repress the darker implications of the story, as if the presence of cruelty and senseless death might be too much for anyone to handle...Insisting on the benevolence of the universe in the way that Life of Pi does can feel more like a result of delusion or deceit than of earnest devotion."
 
But these criticisms miss the point. First, they fail to understand why these two strange and idiosyncratic movies, both based on novels, resonated with so many millions of people. Their themes of resilience speak to each of us -- and there is a reason for that. The key insight of each movie is, whether their creators realized it or not, grounded in a growing body of scientific research, which Brody and Scott overlook.

Far from being delusional or faith-based, having a positive outlook in difficult circumstances is not only an important predictor of resilience -- how quickly people recover from adversity -- but it is the most important predictor of it. People who are resilient tend to be more positive and optimistic compared to less-resilient folks; they are better able to regulate their emotions; and they are able to maintain their optimism through the most trying circumstances.

This is what Dr. Dennis Charney, the dean of Mount Sinai School of Medicine, found when he examined approximately 750 Vietnam war veterans who were held as prisoners of war for six to eight years. Tortured and kept in solitary confinement, these 750 men were remarkably resilient. Unlike many fellow veterans, they did not develop depression or posttraumatic stress disorder after their release, even though they endured extreme stress. What was their secret? After extensive interviews and tests, Charney found ten characteristics that set them apart. The top one was optimism. The second was altruism. Humor and having a meaning in life -- or something to live for -- were also important.
  
For many years, psychologists, following Freud, thought that people simply needed to express their anger and anxiety -- blow off some steam -- to be happier. But this is wrong. Researchers, for example, asked people who were mildly-to-moderately depressed to dwell on their depression for eight minutes. The researchers found that such ruminating caused the depressed people to become significantly more depressed and for a longer period of time than people who simply distracted themselves thinking about something else. Senseless suffering -- suffering that lacks a silver lining -- viciously leads to more depression.
  
Counter-intuitively, another study found that facing down adversity by venting -- hitting a punching bag or being vengeful toward someone who makes you angry -- actually leads to people feeling far worse, not better. Actually, doing nothing at all in response to anger was more effective than expressing the anger in these destructive ways.
  
Even more effective than doing nothing is channeling your depression toward a productive, positive goal, as Pat and Pi do. James Pennebaker, a psychological researcher at the University of Texas in Austin, has found that people who find meaning in adversity are ultimately healthier in the long run than those who do not. In a study, he asked people to write about the darkest, most traumatic experience of their lives for four days in a row for a period of 15 minutes each day.

Analyzing their writing, Pennebaker noticed that the people who benefited most from the exercise were trying to derive meaning from the trauma. They were probing into the causes and consequences of the adversity and, as a result, eventually grew wiser about it. A year later, their medical records showed that the meaning-makers went to the doctor and hospital fewer times than people in the control condition, who wrote about a non-traumatic event. People who used the exercise to vent, by contrast, received no health benefits. Interestingly, when Pennebaker had other research subjects express their emotions through song or dance, the health benefits did not appear. There was something unique and special about the stories people told themselves. Those stories helped people find a silver lining in their adversity.
 

***

 

Barbara Fredrickson, a psychological researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has looked more closely at the relationship between being positive and resilience. Her research shows how important one is for the other.

For starters, having a positive mood makes people more resilient physically. In one study, research subjects were outfitted with a device that measured their heart activity. After their baseline heart activity was recorded, they were presented with a stressful task: Each was asked to quickly prepare and deliver a speech on why he or she is a good friend. They were told that the speech would be videotaped and evaluated.

Heart rates rapidly increased. Arteries constricted. Blood pressure shot up.
  
Then, participants were shown a short video clip that either evoked negative emotions (like sadness), positive emotions (like happiness), or a neutral condition of no emotions. The participants were also told that if they were shown a video clip "by chance" that they were off the hook: They did not have to give the speech after all. That meant that their anxiety would start to subside as the video clips started.

Here was the interesting finding: The heart activity of the participants who viewed the positive clips returned to normal much quicker than their peers who were shown the negative or neutral clips. Positive emotions can, the researchers concluded, undo the effects of a stressful negative experience. The researchers found that the most resilient people were also more positive in day-to-day life.

It turns out that resilient people are good at transforming negative feelings into positive ones. For instance, one of the major findings of Fredrickson's studies was that resilient people took a different attitude toward the speech task than non-resilient people. They viewed the task as a challenge and opportunity for growth rather than as a threat. In other words, they found the silver lining.
With that in mind, the researchers wondered if they could inject some positivity into the non-resilient people to make them more resilient. They primed both types of people to approach the task either positive or negatively. The researchers told some people to see the task as a threat and they told others to see it as a challenge. What they found is good news for resilient and non-resilient people alike.

Resilient people who saw the task as a challenge did fine, as predicted. So did, interestingly, resilient people who were told to view the task as a threat. Resilient people, no matter how they approached the task, had the same cardiovascular recovery rate.

The people who benefitted from the priming were non-resilient people. Those who were told to approach the task as an opportunity rather than a threat suddenly started looking like high resilient people in their cardiovascular measures. They bounced back quicker than they otherwise would have.
Resilient people are good at bouncing back because they are emotionally complex. In each of Fredrickson's studies, resilient people experience the same level of frustration and anxiety as the less resilient participants. Their physiological and emotional spikes were equally high. This is important. It reveals that resilient people are not Pollyannas, deluding themselves with positivity. They just let go of the negativity, worry less, and shift their attention to the positive more quickly.

Resilient people also respond to adversity by appealing to a wider range of emotions. In another study, for instance, participants were asked to write short essays about the most important problem that they were facing in their lives. While resilient people reported the same amount of anxiety as less resilient people in the essays, they also revealed more happiness, interest, and eagerness toward the problem. For resilient people, high levels of positive emotions exist side-by-side with negative emotions. Think of how Pi responds to his seemingly hopeless situation aboard the boat: "I tell you, if you were in such dire straits as I was, you too would elevate your thoughts. The lower you are, the higher your mind will want to soar."

When your mind starts soaring, you notice more and more positive things. This unleashes an upward spiral of positive emotions that opens people up to new ways of thinking and seeing the world -- to new ways forward. This is yet another reason why positive people are resilient. They see opportunities that negative people don't. Negativity, for adaptive reasons, puts you in defense mode, narrows your field of vision, and shuts you off to new possibilities since they're seen as risks.

This calls to mind one of the best scenes from Silver Linings Playbook, in which a bad situation nearly consumes Pat. He is at a diner with Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence), when he hears "Ma Cherie Amour" playing in his head -- the song that was playing when he found his estranged wife naked in the shower with another man -- and has a traumatic flashback.

Tiffany helps him work past the episode: "You gonna go your whole life scared of that song? It's just a song. Don't make it a monster... There's no song playing. There's no song. Breathe, count backwards from ten. That's it." He recovers and their interaction sets the stage for the rest of the movie.

Like Life of Pi, Silver Linings Playbook is about how we can tame our inner demons with hope and a positive outlook on life. By finding meaning and love in terrible circumstances, as Pi and Pat do, they overcome their suffering and, in the process, reveal how uplifting silver linings can be.

Yeats 2013

Yeats 2013. Things fall apart. The center cannot hold. People are rushing to purchase Poweball lottery tickets (but please hold on to your grocery money). Another Gatsby movie is out (Lord have mercy). Another Dan Brown book is published (Heaven help us). Texas justice reigns (Stay out of that state). Another American Idol is crowned (The Republic survives once again). I am waiting for my yard to green up real good (Climate change).


The best lack intensity while the worst are full of conviction. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. What now?

Gatsby Controversey is Nothing New

This Week in 'Nation' History: Reviewers Have Argued About 'Gatsby' Since 1925

Katrina vanden Heuvel on May 18, 2013 - 10:00 AM ET

.With its Jay-Z soundtrack, bizarre 3-D effects and commitment of Nick Carraway to a mental institution, Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby has seemed to some critics insufficiently deferential to a precious cultural totem. But long before it won silver in Modern Library’s list of the 100 best English-language novels, writers in The Nation offered drastically different assessments on both the book’s meaning and its legitimate place in the literary pantheon.



Carl Van Vechten, a writer and photographer who later served as Gertrude Stein’s literary executor, reviewed The Great Gatsby for The Nation in the issue of May 20, 1925, just a month after the book’s publication:



Mr. Fitzgerald is a born story-teller…[H]is work is imbued with that rare and beneficent essence we hail as charm. He is by no means lacking in power, as several passages in the current opus abundantly testify, and he commands a quite uncanny gift for hitting off character or presenting a concept in a striking or memorable manner…



Up to date, Mr. Fitzgerald has occupied himself almost exclusively with the aspects and operations of the coeval flapper and cake-eater. No one else, perhaps, has delineated these mundane creatures quite as skillfully as he, and his achievement in this direction has been awarded authoritative recognition. He controls, moreover, the necessary magic to make his most vapid and rotterish characters interesting and even, on occasion, charming, in spite of (or possibly because of) the fact that they are almost invariably presented in advanced stages of intoxication…



In “The Great Gatsby,” there are several of Mr. Fitzgerald’s typical flappers who behave in the manner he has conceived as typical of contemporary flapperdom. There is again a gargantuan drinking-party, conceived in a rowdy, hilarious, and highly titillating spirit. There is also, in this novel…something else. There is the character of Gatsby…



But in a review the following year of a stage production of Gatsby, The Nation’s theater critic, Joseph Wood Krutch, mocked Fitzgerald’s blurring of the line between spectator and spectated, satirist and satirized. Almost ignoring the theatrical production entirely, Krutch instead skewered the book:



F. Scott Fitzgerald was born into the flapper age with exactly the qualities and defects which would enable him to become its accredited historian. Though granted just enough detachment to make him undertake the task of describing, he is by temperament too much a part of the things described to view them with any very penetratingly critical eye and he sees flappers, male and female, much as they see themselves. Sharing to a very considerable extent in their psychological processes, he romanticizes their puerilities in much the same fashion as they do; and when he pictures the manners of the fraternity house or the Long Island villa he pictures them less as they are than as their practitioners like to imagine them. He makes cocktails and kisses seem thrillingly wicked; he flatters the younger generation with the solemn warning that it is leading the world straight to the devil; and as a result he writes The Flapper’s Own History of Flapperism. Thus he becomes less the genuine historian of a phase of social development than one of the characteristic phenomena of that development itself, and his books are seen to be little more than documents for the study of the thing which they purport to treat.



The book, Krutch added, was “preposterously maudlin.”

The Nation has had only distaste for both screen adaptations of Gatsby reviewed in its pages. Painter and film critic Manny Farber panned the 1949 Paramount adaptation as “a limp translation,” writing that the film’s purposefully antiquated style “takes on the heavy, washed-out, inaccurate dedication-to-the-past quality of a Radio City mural.” Farber also said that the actress Betty Field failed as Daisy because she was “no more marked by Southern aristocracy than a cheese blintz.”



“Respectful work and appalling” were the choice words Robert Hatch, a longtime executive editor of the magazine, had for the 1974 adaptation starring Robert Redford as Gatsby, Sam Waterston as Nick and Mia Farrow as Daisy, with a screenplay by Francis Ford Coppola. “When it sticks to the original, it adds nothing; when it deviates, it puts a heavy foot into Fitzgerald’s magic,” Hatch wrote. “Overall, its most conspicuous weakness is that it cannot handle vulgarity or ostentation without becoming vulgar or ostentatious”—precisely the same complaint Krutch expressed about the book itself in The Nation almost fifty years earlier.



Other Nation articles about Fitzgerald include a 1945 essay by Lionel Trilling—putting him in the same category with Shakespeare, Dickens, Voltaire, Balzac and Goethe—and a 1996 appreciation by friend-of-the-magazine E.L. Doctorow, who wrote that “in its few pages” Gatsby “arcs the American continent and gives us a perfect structural allegory of our deadly class-ridden longings.” And as many have argued, the release of “Gatsby” should also be an occasion for renewed discussion of inequality in America.







Read more: http://www.thenation.com/blog/174416/week-nation-history-reviewers-have-argued-about-gatsby-1925#ixzz2Th5NvRve

Republicans are Fools Waiting for the Facts

From Jonathan Chait-------Republicans Shouldn’t Let the Facts Speak for ThemselvesBy Jonathan Chait 0 17 Share on email As the investigative phase of the Obama presidency commences in earnest, Republicans are promising that their overriding goal is to proceed cautiously and let the facts speak for themselves. “We have stuff here that’s real, so you don’t need the distraction of politics to give people an excuse to say we’re being silly,” a House Republican leadership aide involved in the investigations tells Politico. “Everyone is keenly aware of the overreach risk.” Likewise, Charles Boustany Jr., who is helping lead the IRS investigation on the House Ways and Means Committee, tells the New York Times, “I’m being very cautious not to overplay my hand.”



Part of this is advertising — if Republicans want the media to take them seriously, and not as crazed partisan witch-hunters, they have to assure the media they are serious and not crazed partisan witch-hunters. But there also seems to be an element of genuine calculation here. Republicans do recall the 1998 midterm election blowback they suffered for impeachment mania. They think a slow, patient investigative process will produce fruitful results.



I happen to think they’re wrong about this. While I don’t have much sympathy for their goals, as a pure strategic calculation — and my analysis here is completely value-free — I think caution is the wrong play for the Republicans here. They should probably let their freak flag fly.



The explicit assumption of the slow-careful strategy, which is also the implicit assumption of the stories reporting on it, is that more digging will produce harmful news about the Obama administration. “This is just the beginning. I want to emphasize that. We have a lot of work left to do in getting to the root of this,” Boustany tells the Times.



That might be true. But what if it’s not? What if we’ve already gotten to the root of it?



Indeed, what we’ve seen so far is that the stories looked most damaging when they were first reported, and subsequent revelations have made them look less, not more, scandalous. The idea that there is a series of “Obama scandals” took its root last week when ABC reporter Jonathan Karl misleadingly claimed to have seen incriminating White House e-mails, which turned out to have been doctored by House Republicans. An independent report of the IRS found no political direction at all led to the agency’s use of a one-sided search program to flag partisan tax-free groups.



Once journalists start to think of an issue as a “scandal,” then they assume it will necessarily lead to progressively stronger evidence of wrongdoing. That assumption isn’t necessarily true. And the sequence of events that made everybody start to think of a few disconnected stories as “Obama scandals” was mainly an odd and somewhat shaky confluence of events.



If Republicans do manage to unearth some significant misdeeds, then playing it cool and rational will help them build the case to force resignations, impeach the president, or wherever they want to take this. The more likely scenario is that they won’t find anything groundbreaking. And then they have to ask themselves how they want to continue to keep the scandal narrative going.



Endless hearings that produce little news won’t do. A constant drumbeat of impeachment talk, and browbeating reporters for failing to promote it, is more likely to succeed. The accusations from Republicans are what make the story newsworthy. And they reestablish the boundaries of opinion, so that impeaching Obama becomes defined as the irresponsible right-wing position, but “there’s nothing here” becomes the irresponsible left-wing position. The respectable centrist thing to say is that there’s definitely something fishy in the administration, even though impeachment seems premature.



You may think that screaming bloody murder over a non-scandal will utterly backfire. I invite you study volumes I to V of the Wall Street Journal editorial page’s collection of wild denunciations of massive, unprecedented criminality in the “Whitewater scandal.” The scandal, in fact, amounted to nothing in the end. But it did successfully implant an aura of sleaze and wrongdoing. If you’re looking to foment a scandal, having the facts on your side is obviously helpful, but it’s not necessary. (Republicans should probably stay away from actual impeachment — that part of the lesson of 1998 seems clear enough.)



I think Republicans made a huge strategic miscalculation on how to fight Obama in the first term. They assumed his policy agenda, and the economic devastation they figured it would bring, would be so unpopular they could oppose him on policy grounds alone. They made little effort to undermine Obama as a political figure. That reservoir of trust has helped Obama enjoy strong personal favorability ratings. If they’re smart, they’ll get to work on creating a narrative of wrongdoing and sleaze. If they wait for the facts to make the case for them, they may blow their chance altogether.