Here in the final stretch of the presidential campaign, things are getting even uglier, with the other side lobbing misleading verbal attacks while our side tries to remain above the fray. With this kind of negativity and distortion, it is hard to imagine the winning candidate being able to pull the country back together.
But perhaps my experience last weekend at my eight year old’s soccer game illustrates a way for all of us to put the campaign back into perspective.
My boy plays on a travel team stacked with fast and aggressive players who usually win, racing past the other team to any open balls. Ahead 4-1, they were still scrambling after the ball, trying to out-muscle the other team.
The ball trickled toward the sideline, and one of our players leaned into an opponent to get the ball. Parents of the other team waited for the referee to call a foul, but she let them play on. Outraged at this injustice, the parents began complaining among themselves about how rough our team was, how they were pushing all the time, and how the referee never seem to call fouls on our kids. They quickly decided that we were benefiting from home field advantage.
Armed with this “knowledge,” they found themselves in a competitive lather. Each time two boys fought for the ball, they were convinced that it was our kids who initiated the contact, and our referee who was allowing such inappropriate aggression. Caught up in the emotions of the moment, they began verbally abusing the referee, screaming that she was blind, biased, and didn’t belong on the field. When that didn’t work, a couple of the dads began yelling to their kids, instructing them to push our kids down.
When they called upon one of their kids to push my kid, I must admit to feeling a strong urge to beat the crap out of the two most egregious fathers. But the urge was only fleeting, mainly because I had two pieces of information that helped me to see the situation that day more clearly than the other parents.
First, I’d managed to strike up a conversation with the referee at halftime, and learned that she was a high school freshman from the same town as our opponents. She wasn’t a hired gun, favoring our team. She was a 14-year-old, struggling to figure out where to draw the line in a game between two groups of intense eight year old boys.
Which brings me to my second piece of information — having studied human behavior for the better part of my professional life, I knew that these parents were making an honest mistake. They were unconsciously viewing the game through distorted lenses. Studies have consistently shown that people have a very difficult time observing partisan contests with objective eyes. That’s why in a game between the Eagles and the Cowboys, Eagles fans will invariably believe, passionately, that the officials are biased in favor of Dallas, even pointing to specific plays that demonstrate clear evidence of such bias. Cowboy fans, of course, will believe that the officials are biased in favor of the Eagles.
I actually reflected on this phenomenon as two of the players leaned into each other that day, neither player initiating the contact, and neither player getting the better of the exchange. The opposing parents erupted in a flurry of catcalls and accusations upon witnessing this battle. They were honestly enraged, but the source of their rage, the circumstances that prompted their anger, were entering their consciousness only after being distorted by this powerful psychological lens.
It was easy at that moment to see this strange crowd as emblematic of the current presidential election. My son’s team is centered in Ann Arbor, a reliably Democratic community. Our parents were sitting calmly on the sidelines, muttering under their breath about the insane parents standing 20 feet to our right. The opposing team is from a solidly Republican city just south of Ann Arbor. And they sounded to us like the kind of angry crowds we’ve heard about who scream epithets at McCain/Palin rallies.
But how would we Ann Arbor parents have reacted of our team was behind 4-1 in a physical game like this? I’d like to think we would remain calm, like the presidential candidate favored in our community. However, there is lots of reason to believe we would have seen the game differently, viewing the aggression as more one-sided than it was.
The McCain campaign is trailing badly in the polls. Is it any surprise that McCain supporters are calling foul so aggressively at rallies? Is it any surprise that they believe that it is Obama who was the first one to go negative in the campaign? Is it any wonder that they are convinced that it is Obama who is putting his campaign ahead of the country’s best interests?
We citizens are currently standing on the sidelines observing two presidential campaigns caught up in an aggressive battle. We are all convinced that the media is biased against our candidate, just like those parents were convinced that the 14-year-old referee was taking sides.
When our psychological biases cause us to scream at our eight-year-old boys to maim other people’s eight-year-old boys, it can not come as a surprise that we exchange nasty words with each other when caught up in an intense and important political campaign.
But the campaign will soon be over, and the elbow throwing will cease. Maybe then we will all realize that this campaign wasn’t a game, and that we are all, as Americans, rooting for the same team.
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Why Health Care Never Wins Elections
Despite Barack Obama’s recent surge in the polls, much could change between now and election day. While it looks like this election will be decided by the economy, unexpected events could dramatically change the campaign narrative. Terrorists could conduct an attack inside the US. Obama, despite his two years of steady poise, could say something really stupid between now and November, that would cause independent voters to flee.
But one thing is certain: this presidential campaign, like all recent campaigns, will not be decided by the candidates’ health care proposals.
The US health care system is a bigger threat to the American population than terrorism ever was. As horrific and evil as were the attacks on 9/11, and as much as we needed to mobilize our troops to depose the Taliban from Afghanistan, the more than 3000 people who died on 9/11 are dwarfed in numbers by the tens of thousands of people who die, needlessly, because they have no health insurance.
Ask people what they are worried about, and health care usually sits near the top of their list. Almost 50 million people in the US have no health insurance, people who have to decide whether that gash really requires stitches, or whether that heartburn is a mere stomach problem or sign, instead, of a potentially fatal heart attack. A similarly vast number of people have too little health insurance to cover the basic health needs. Consequently, they hover in economic peril, one serious illness away from bankruptcy.
To make matters worse, persistently rising health care costs threaten our global competitiveness, handcuffing US industries with huge expenses. This health care inflation also adds to state and federal budget problems.
Yet despite this dire situation, health care doesn’t win elections, because health care problems never feel as immediate as other threats. When the Dow Jones plummets 800 points, people understandably worry. They can see their life’s savings dwindling, and their hopes of early retirement evaporating. When a student conducts a school massacre, everyone is caught up in the terrible drama, with their view of gun control quickly rising up their list of concerns: gun control advocates will feel even more passionately than before the massacre that we need to restrict gun ownership, while gun control opponents will become even more convinced that the whole situation could have been averted if more of the teachers were packing.
There is no aspect of the health care crisis that has the immediacy of a bank foreclosure, a terrorist attack, or even a verbal gaffe from one of the candidates. Our health care crisis fails to win elections in part because it doesn’t feel like a crisis to enough people. It also fails because it is hard for candidates to come up with a simple solution to such a complicated mess, and therefore any solution a candidate puts forth is easily caricaturized and criticized.
Both candidates have proposed ways they think will improve our health care system. I feel strongly that Obama’s approach, even in its preliminary form, is far superior to McCain’s. But that probably won’t matter on election day. Ultimately this campaign will be won over other issues.
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Presidential Debates Round Two and Three: Show Us That You Care
Barack Obama would like the next two debates to be about the economy. John McCain would like them to be about anything but the economy, preferably with plenty of discussion of 60’s radicals and crazy preachers.
McCain won’t get his way, of course. We will hear discussions of the bailout, taxes, health care and the like, with Obama eloquently explaining the failed Bush-McCain approach to these issues, while McCain tries to paint Obama as an out-of-touch, tax-and-spend liberal.
But what will it take for Obama to win the debates? The best answer I’ve heard to this question comes from a man who has been an irritant to Obama supporters for many months now, a man whose advice I approach with great caution, out of fear that he is setting a trap for the candidate. The man is Bill Clinton, and the advice is this: to win the presidency, it is less important to make people like you than to convince people that you like them.
The man who “feels our pain,” famously biting his lower lip, knows how to project empathy. Obama did not display this talent in the first debate. He did an excellent job of portraying competence and knowledge, and of appearing calm and presidential in the middle of a financial crisis, a strong contrast to McCain’s erratic behavior during the same period.
But the campaign is getting dirty now. Sarah Palin is accusing Obama of pallin’ around with terrorists. We can expect some unofficial interest group to start cranking out ads with you-know-who God d@#$ing America. McCain and company will try to scare people away from Obama.
To dampen these fears, Obama needs to show people that he cares for them. How best to do that? He needs to reveal his heart without coming off as a phony. If he starts biting his lower lip, we are in trouble. If he pulls out one of those tired old campaign stories and expects us to feel his empathy — “why just the other day in Toledo, I spoke with Betsy Wilkerson, a single mother blah blah,” — well, been there, slept through that.
Obama needs to tell us about people who he truly loves deeply, and about how he wants to help the same people. When he talks about his love of America, and therefore his love of the American people, he should talk about how our great country helps people very close to him achieve their own version of the American dream. Does anyone who he loves rely on Medicare? Let’s hear how that person would be affected by McCain’s policies.
Most undecided voters won’t be voting with their heads; they won’t be calculating tax rates, health-care deductibles, and federal budget deficits and seeing which candidate comes out on top. Instead, they will be voting with their guts. And if they can’t trust a candidate, they won’t vote for him.
The image of Barack Obama palling around with terrorists won’t stick in people’s minds if they see his caring side on display Tuesday night, and if they see how his head for policy details works together with his heartfelt desire to help the many people he loves.
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