Barack Obama, Warlord of the 21st Century

cross-posted from Dagblog

You know who I really, really wouldn't run against on a national-security platform? A Nobel Peace Prize winner who killed Osama bin Laden.

But that's just me. Last week Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic, in an extended and generally thoughtful interview with President Obama, asked the following question:

GOLDBERG: One of the aspects of this is the question of whether it's plausible that Barack Obama would ever use military power to stop Iran. The Republicans are trying to make this an issue -- and not only the Republicans -- saying that this man, by his disposition, by his character, by his party, by his center-left outlook, is not going to do that.

Three days after Goldberg published that interview, Obama's Attorney General gave a speech declaring that the Executive Branch could target American citizens for assassination whenever it liked, because (wait for it), the "due process" demanded in the Constitution is not the same as judicial process. By Holder's standard, as long as the President and his aides use a process when they're deciding who to kill, it's all good with the Founders. Which leads us to the question: how could someone with the disposition, the character, and the center-left outlook to order unreviewed drone strikes on American citizens ever bring himself to use military force?

Not seeing Obama as he really is has become one of our national pastimes, and both the Left and the Right play it at championship level. Some people on the Left cannot forgive Obama for not being the peacenik we (and I include myself in that "we") wanted to think we were electing. And I'm certainly not happy about the stands he's taken on targeted killings, or on executive detention. But to give Obama his due, he was absolutely up front with the voters about his military plans if elected. He wanted to get out of Iraq, but recommit to Afghanistan, and he's done that. He explicitly told the American voters, on TV, that he would hunt and kill Osama bin Laden. He didn't say capture or apprehend. He didn't even go with Bush's swaggering "dead or alive." Obama said "kill," full stop. And that's what he did. He also said, in both the primary and general-election debates, that we was willing to breach Pakistani sovereignty if that's what it took to get Bin Laden. Even if some of us don't have the President that we thought or hoped we were electing, on military questions we definitely have the President that the candidate told us he would be.

Right wing critics, on the other hand, fervently insist that Obama somehow is the peacenik that the Left thought he was, and that he's coddling America's military enemies. This coddling generally takes the form of relentless attacks with predator drones, and I suspect our enemies get tired of it pretty quickly. The idea of Obama as weakling is a strange but resilient fantasy, impossible to disprove because it's never been even remotely based on military reality.

So let's review what we, as voters, actually did in the 2008 general election:

We replaced George W. Bush with a better and more effective war leader.

This is not the story anybody tells. It is not what anybody believes happened. But it is what obviously did happen. Barack Obama has been a very effective war leader, given the mess he inherited. In fact, he's been much, much better at coping with the gigantic military mess that Bush II left behind than he has been at coping with the gigantic economic mess Bush left behind. (This only makes sense: Obama could start thinking about military strategies before he even started campaigning, but when the economic crisis hit we were already in the countdown to Election Day.) Obama succeeds because, unlike George W. Bush, he keeps his eye on the ball: achieving goals and taking out enemies while risking as few American troops as possible.

This is what we voted for, and when it comes down to it, what the average middle-of-the-road voter wants: more victories, fewer casualties. This country didn't turn away from George W. Bush and sour on the Iraq war because they had developed philosophical objections to warmongering or were worried about erosion of habeas corpus. They turned against Bush and his wars because those wars brought casualties instead of victories. Most American voters don't like Americans getting killed. And most voters like presidents who get things done. That's Barack Obama as Commander-in-Chief: soldiers come home and jobs get done.

So Obama gets behind the bombing campaign in Libya, and Qaddhafi gets toppled without American boots on the ground. Obama authorizes predator drone strikes and special forces raids and more predator drone strikes, targeted attacks with calculate risk against reward. He signs off on the Bin Laden raid deep inside Pakistan but insists on a backup helicopter. Which takes us back to Goldberg's question:

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Look, if people want to say about me that I have a profound preference for peace over war, that every time I order young men and women into a combat theater and then see the consequences on some of them, if they're lucky enough to come back, that this weighs on me -- I make no apologies for that. Because anybody who is sitting in my chair who isn't mindful of the costs of war shouldn't be here, because it's serious business. These aren't video games that we're playing here.

Now, having said that, I think it's fair to say that the last three years, I've shown myself pretty clearly willing, when I believe it is in the core national interest of the United States, to direct military actions, even when they entail enormous risks.

Since Barack Obama used most of his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech lecturing about Just-War Theory and when he felt justified launching military attacks, I'd think that's much more than fair to say. But here's the truth: that preference for peace over war, that refusal to risk people without a compelling reason, is part of why he is good at this. Weighing risk and reward is a virtue in almost any enterprise, but it's especially important as a military virtue. Good commanders don't take pointless risks. This is why George H. W. Bush, mocked on national television for using the word "prudent," won a war in Iraq and why his swaggering son did not. This is why John McCain, whose solution to seemingly every problem is to send more troops, never became an admiral like his father and grandfather, and why he did not become president.

The fantasy that Obama is weak on defense is deeply and dearly held by Republicans, and the three Republican presidential candidates who've managed to carry states have all begun, to various degrees, attacking that presumed weakness. But by "being stronger," the Obama-is-weak crowd mean "acting tougher, in a loud theatrical way." They mistake swagger for strength. They think George W. Bush was "strong" because he'd say dumb stuff like "Bring it on," and fearlessly send lots of other people into unnecessary danger. They think John McCain, who was angry at Obama for not sending American ground troops to Libya and who during the 2008 campaign urged a military intervention against Russia, is "strong," because he's an impetuous hothead who always wants more boys in harm's way. And this kind of tough-on-TV thing can pass for strength for a little while, because most of our country is so insulated from the sacrifices that our military make. But given time, and we've been at war for more than a decade, voters figure this out. In peace time, the guy who makes the biggest show of toughness in the bar gets treated as the tough guy. In war, people learn the difference and don't forget it. Sonny Corleone acts tougher than Michael Corleone, but that's no reason to get in the car with him.

The leading Republican candidates don't seem to have grasped this yet. And they (or their base) seem fixated on the idea that Obama's weakness as a war leader will make him vulnerable to attack. Attacking one of your opponent's strongest points because you've mistaken it for a weak one is pretty much the opposite of strategy. Ask Custer.

Let's remember what that naive peacenik state senator from Illinois said all those years ago when he opposed the second Iraq war:

I'm not against all wars. I'm against dumb wars.

If that's a platform you want to campaign against, good luck. You were never going to make a good commander-in-chief anyway.

Teaching by the Numbers

cross-posted from Dagblog

Last week, New York City released Teacher Data Reports for every teacher in its system. This week, I got my own teaching numbers: last semester's teaching evaluation scores. Getting my numbers was a good thing for me personally; they were very high, and my bosses tend to reward that. Releasing the New York City numbers was a bad thing generally, which can only set education in the city back. But both sets of numbers are largely bullshit.

Teaching quality is very difficult to quantify, and no method that currently exists comes anywhere close to doing it accurately. It's not impossible. But it is impossible with the current tools. It's like going to Mars: a good thing to do that is impossible this week but can be possible someday if we keep working.  In fact, getting quantifiable teacher assessment right is probably a bigger technical challenge, in terms of how far the existing technology is from the ultimate goal, than a Mars mission. Measuring teacher quality accurately is something that we should do, and which will have important benefits for K-12 and university teaching alike. But it's important to be realistic about what we can actually achieve right now. And relying too quickly on the flawed early technology, like launching a mission to Mars in a rocket that can't make it, will only set back progress and cause real people pointless harm.

These aren't sour grapes. The current method of quantifying university teaching treats me very favorably, and if more weight were given to those numbers it could only be to my benefit. My evaluation scores are reliably high, and last semester's were close to perfect. But that's no reason for me to believe them. Student evaluations, which are the only widespread quantitative measure of university teaching and by which some numbers-minded administrators set great store, measure student satisfaction, not student learning. These are obviously not the same thing. My numbers don't prove I'm effective. They prove that I'm well-liked. And the students have no way to know how much, or how little, they would have learned with a different teacher, because mine is the only version of that class they've taken. If, for example, I did not cover material that students at other universities would routinely learn in that course, my students would have no idea. And if my students learned significantly more than students in a similar course somewhere else, if they covered more material, understood it better, and developed stronger intellectual skills than students elsewhere, they couldn't know that either. They do have an intuitive sense of whether they're learning or not, and that intuitive sense is part of their satisfaction with the course and the teacher, but it's only part. These numbers are correlated with effective teaching, but the correlation isn't strong and (even worse) the correlation itself varies widely from class to class. Some popular teachers are very effective. Some are simply easy. Still others are merely likeable. Which am I? The numbers don't tell me.

There are other ways to evaluate university teaching: peer observations, teaching portfolios, testimonial letters from former students, and so on. All of these methods are also imperfect. They work best when several methods are combined, which gives you a fuzzy but reasonably adequate picture of how someone is doing in the classroom. The fuzziness of those measures has fundamental consequences for the entire profession of college teaching. They're good enough to weed out flagrant incompetence, or at least to reassure the school that the flagrantly incompetent have been weeded out. But they're not focused enough to make fine distinctions between good teachers and very good ones, let alone distinctions between the very good and the truly excellent. This is why professors ultimately advance their careers either as researchers or as administrators; research talent and administrative skill are easier to measure, and make it easier to distinguish the excellent from the merely good and the very best from the merely excellent. There isn't a career path that rewards superb teachers for their teaching, because the available measurements can't reliably tell those people from the teachers who are only above-average.

If college administrators tried to use the existing measurements to reward the best teachers by, say, promoting people whose teaching scores were 10% better than their colleagues', they'd be prospecting for fool's gold. Was I really 5% or 10% better last semester than I was the semester before? Hell, no. In fact, I was badly distracted last semester: I had an especially laborious and high-stakes administrative role to perform, I was making an inter-state commute almost every weekend, I got terrible medical news about people dear to me, and halfway through the semester I got married. I never slacked on my course prep, but I guarantee you that there was no extra time to put into it. The numbers, taken at face value, suggest that I should strive for that level of stress and distraction every semester, but the numbers should shut their damn mouths. And when this semester's numbers "show" that my effectiveness has "declined" 10% or 15% (because last semester's scores can only decline), that won't mean that I've actually become less effective. It will mean that the scores fluctuate widely from semester to semester because they are extremely imprecise.

But my bullshit evaluation numbers are a masterpiece of statistical rigor compared to the numbers that New York City just published. That data is related to students' performance on a standardized test, which is already imperfectly correlated with how much students have learned. So from the start you've got a shaky correlation with a shaky correlation. Then the numbers are adjusted in various ways to make them more "meaningful," but considering how small the sample sizes are  all the extra variables and sub-tabs, and the addition of new correlation problems with each new variable, actually make the numbers murkier and more volatile. Even if you ignore all those problems, and you shouldn't, there's the problem of sample size itself. In some instances the number crunchers themselves admit that the margin of error for particular teachers hits 53%. This means that a teacher ranked in the 50th percentile might actually belong in the 103rd percentile and be a miracle worker, or belong in the -3rd percentile and have been dead since the 1990s.

When I call these numbers bullshit, I don't mean that they serve no purpose at all. We will only get meaningful techniques of measurement by experimenting with different approaches. The numbers we have are not useful as actual measurements. They are useful as steps in the project of devising better measurements. Bullshit, put to the right use in your garden and combined with the right mix of water, seeds, and sunlight, will eventually yield a nutritious salad. But that doesn't mean you put the bullshit on a plate and call it lettuce. The New York City numbers are pretty obviously not ready for public consumption. Serving them up represents a health hazard.

Bill Gates, a champion of number-driven education reform, published an op-ed in the Times opposing the release of the teacher numbers. By and large, Gates gets it: the numbers aren't ready for prime-time and using them to publicly shame teachers will only cause harm. And Gates is right that using numbers punitively, especially when the numbers themselves aren't even half-baked, will only make teachers resist the whole project of numerical assessment. Of course it will.

Finding ways to measure teaching quality would eventually benefit teachers enormously. Teachers don't oppose measurement and numerical assessment because they fear change, or don't want to be held accountable, or because they're union thugs. Teachers oppose these "reform" initiatives because the "reformers," sometimes with the best of intentions, often use badly flawed measurements as if they were self-evident facts. No one in their right mind would want to be evaluated that way, especially when "education reform" in its current form has no suggestions for helping "underperforming" teachers except firing them. Gates understands that education reform should ultimately aim to help teachers improve, rather than simply replacing them, but many "reformers" take a much cruder approach. Claiming that the teachers are just looking out for their self-interest doesn't cut it; you can ask teachers to put their own interests aside for the sake of the kids' education, but you can't ask them to put their interests aside for the sake of number-driven policies that don't help the kids' education and likely hurt it. Turning over K-12 education to a set of statistics that don't actually measure learning is not a worthwhile goal, period, let alone a goal worth getting fired for.

People with the best intentions can do enormous damage to our education system by naively relying on numbers that are a long way from becoming reliable. These people are perfectly sincere. They really think that the bullshit is lettuce, and they will tell you at length how important leafy greens are to a good diet. If someone tells you that identifying the best teachers is perfectly simple, you're likely talking to one of these naive and disastrously well-meaning souls. They not only do damage to the current education system, but they set back reform, because peddling bullshit and calling it lettuce has the long-term effect of making teachers oppose lettuce on principle, and moves us further from the day that we can actually produce a healthy salad.

And what Bill Gates does not get is that not everyone who advocates these number-driven policies is naive or well-intentioned. There are a number of people supporting numerical assessment who are not interested in improving education at all, but who are simply anti-teacher or even anti-education. Some are union-busters, some have ideological problems with public schools, some have other motives. But they are not interested in producing lettuce. They just want to see some teachers eating shit. This can be difficult for well-meaning "reformers" to see; when you understand yourself as crusading for the public good, you tend to see anyone who joins you as one of the good guys. But it is transparently and intuitively obvious to teachers. When the same politicians and interest groups who were down on teachers last year are suddenly talking about "assessment" and "reform" this year, it's obvious that those politicians and activists are just adopting a new name for the same old ends. And that leads many teachers to see all advocates of reform, no matter how well-intentioned, as part of an older anti-education agenda. When reformers talk about reform leading to higher pay for the best teachers while the "underperformers" are fired, it is very obvious to people who actually teach that no one is going to get much of a raise, but that the firings are at the top of the agenda. (Even when school systems follow through with merit pay, the increases are small, and in many systems the "best" teachers don't do any better financially under the "reformed" system.) The sincere reformers, such as Arne Duncan or Barack Obama, generally don't grasp this. Their opportunistic allies do.

The genuine reformers damage their cause through their careless choice of allies, and by working with people who are operating in bad faith. They not only create resistance from the very people who should be their most important allies, the teachers themselves, but they ensure that any "reforms" enacted will be implemented abusively rather than productively: that flawed numbers will be treated as hard data, that results will be used to punish teachers and not to help them, that the promised raises never come but the threatened firings do. "School reform" will be a thin disguise for teacher-bashing as long as the "reformers" include education-bashers in their political coalition. That alliance will always provide enough political backing for new punishments, but not enough for the promised rewards. Bill Gates should be applauded for reminding the well-meaning readers of the New York Times what education reform is supposed to be. But his plans will never bear fruit until he comes to grips with what "education reform" actually is.

Prime Time Persecution

cross-posted from Dagblog

Anyone on television talking about how they're being persecuted for their religion is not being persecuted. How do I know this?

Because they are on television.

Birth Control Makes Catholicism Work

cross-posted from Dagblog

My brilliant co-bloggers Ramona and Destor have been especially brilliant this week on the Catholic bishops' outrage at having to pay for full employee health insurance. Destor is so smart about the church and state principles involved, and Ramona so good on the women's-health issues, that I have nothing left to add but my own personal experience. I am a former employee of the Catholic Church. I used to have a health-insurance card with the Archdiocese of Boston's seal printed on it. That wasn't an experience of religious liberty. That was an employer exercising its muscle to impose on employees' religious consciences. And it involved the hypocritical pretense that the Archdiocese and its good works did not fundamentally depend on careful family planning by its employees, as every American diocese did and does.

I was in no personal need of the contraceptive pills that my health card wouldn't get me, because I was a dude and because I had a romantic life which rendered family planning moot. But one of my co-workers explained what our health-insurance card meant for her. Prescriptions for contraceptives weren't covered, and had to be paid for out-of-pocket at the exorbitant rate reserved for the uninsured. And any doctor's appointment where contraceptives were discussed or prescribed was also not covered, even if the appointment was primarily to treat something else. (And obviously, it didn't matter why contraceptives were being prescribed. If, like many women, my co-worker needed the pill for medical reasons unrelated to family planning, then she would simply have an uninsured medical problem.) That isn't just refusing to be "forced to buy contraceptives." That is an employer using its muscle to put obstacles in its employees' way, to press its own agenda upon employees no matter their own religious beliefs. In this case, my Jewish co-worker had her employer's religious convictions forced upon her. That is not freedom of conscience.

This is what "freedom of religion" has come to mean to today's religious right: the privilege to push your religion on others, and to play the victim when your bullying is interrupted. The official leadership of the Catholic Church has utterly failed to convince even its own followers of its position on contraception: 

in recent polls, about 95 percent of Catholics have said they use contraceptives, and 89 percent say the decision to use them should be theirs, not the church’s,

and another recent poll shows Catholics favoring the Obama administration's ruling by a 58-37 margin. So the "religious principle" being discussed here is a recent teaching embraced mainly by the Church's hierarchy, but not actually part of most believers' practice of the faith. But having failed to persuade rank-and-file Catholics of the Church's novel and ill-thought-out position, the leader of my Archdiocese, Bernard Cardinal Law, resorted to bullying employees with his economic power, interfering with their medical decisions because he was The Boss.

The claim that Cardinal Law's conscience would have been violated if the organization he led had been "forced to buy contraceptives" is nonsense. The Church does not buy contraceptives, penicillin, X-rays, or any other medical good. It buys a premium for a health plan for its employees, and that plan pays for medical goods and services. But isn't that just buying contraceptives with the Cardinal's money? No. Because the premium on my health plan was not the Cardinal's money, even if his little stamp was on the card. It was my money. It was part of my pay. I had earned it, through the work specified in my contract, and what I did with the benefits I was owed was no more the Cardinal's business than what I did with my paycheck. Employees' medical decisions and religious beliefs are their own. (If I bought a hamburger on Good Friday, I wasn't forcing the Cardinal to "buy meat" against his religious beliefs. Once someone pays you, the money is yours.)  Even if the employer pays the insurer directly, that doesn't entitle it to dictate the way medical insurance was used. If it did, the Christian Science Monitor couldn't be required to provide health insurance at all.

And let me be very blunt here. Almost all of the employees covered by the new ruling are working in the non-profit sector at non-profit salaries. They are teachers, doctors, nurses, and social workers in the Catholic Church's schools, hospitals, charities, and colleges. They are not paid unfairly, but the Church does not pay them, and could not afford to pay them, well enough that they don't need to worry about when and how they start their families. The first year I worked for the Boston Church, I was paid the princely sum of fifteen thousand dollars plus health insurance. My co-workers who had more experience and credentials than I did were paid better than that, at least, but they were still paid much less than people in similar jobs outside the Church. I didn't think my salary was unfair, considering the original skill level I brought with me, and I was happy to have the opportunity to do the work I was doing and to get better at it. But that decision was only possible for me because I was not going to be starting a family. I could not have taken that job if I were responsible for a child. If I'd had a child on the way, I would have had to look for other work. And the idea that I would "let God decide" when children would come, and in what numbers, while I was working for a salary that wouldn't cover day care, is the height of irresponsibility. Catholic schools and Catholic charities and Catholic hospitals are only economically possible because of contraception. Without family planning, they would have to close.

The sisters and brothers who once staffed those institutions no longer exist in anything close to the numbers needed to keep them open. You cannot run a school or hospital with American nuns any more, because there aren't any. They have been replaced by lay employees who have not taken vows of poverty, and so need to be paid. The schools and hospitals stay open because those lay workers are willing to work for below-market wages. But since those educated below-market-wage professionals have also not taken vows of chastity, they have to make decisions about starting families, and about the size of their families. They cannot afford to let children come on their own schedule, in whatever numbers. They have to make the same decisions that most middle-class families make about when they can afford to have a baby, except they have to make them even more carefully. If everyone who worked for the Catholic Church in this country had the large, unplanned families the Church recommends, then the schools and hospitals and charities would not be able to pay the parents well enough to support their children. Those schools and hospitals would either go broke or lose most of their workers to more profitable jobs. This is the reality underlying the Church's good works.

It isn't wrong; those schools and charities and hospitals need to be low-cost to serve the Church's mission. I've never been sorry I worked for them, or served the people I served while I was on the Church's payroll. But to pay people a wage which will not allow them to start a family and then make them go into their underpaid pockets for the birth-control pills that allow them to keep working for you is wrong. It is unworthy of any of the values the Church stands for. And making a grand pious show of it only makes the bishops' behavior more sinful.

The GOP's Drunk-Dad Primary

cross-posted from Dagblog

There's been a lot of punditty chatter about what the Romney vs. Gingrich struggles means: insiders vs. outsiders, establishment vs. Tea Party, elite vs. non-elite, whatever. But listening to that clip of Gingrich attacking John King, listening the open, undiluted pleasure that Gingrich takes in his own rage, made it clear to me what this is really about. The Republican primary voters are electing their political family a new Drunk Dad. And they want to be sure they get the right kind.

Of course, none of the Republican contenders are alcoholics. (Romney abstains from alcohol completely.) They're not literal drunks. But the Republican Party is now like a family headed by an alcoholic or otherwise dysfunctional parent. There are huge problems that no one can bring themselves to face. And although the parent figure actively prevents the real problems from getting better, they also lead the family in the crucial effort to deny those problems. The Drunk Dad sets the tone and direction for family's most important shared effort: covering over the fact that dad's a drunk.

Make no mistake: the Republican Party's current approach to this nation's problems is stone-cold denial. This is true whether they end up nominating Romney, Gingrich, Ron Paul or the Man in the Moon. And in policy terms, the differences between Romney, Gingrich, Santorum, Perry, etc., are trivial. The two Republican plans for dealing with America's serious economic problems are to stick with the policies that created the problems or to make them worse.  Republican energy policy is to drill for more domestic oil, ignoring the basic fact that the don't have even half as much oil as we use, and to cut research on renewable energy so that when the oil does run out we won't have any other options. Republican military policy is Not To Do Things Like Obama Does, meaning effectively and with minimal American casualties, but to go back to the way George W. Bush did it, meaning colossal failed military adventures that leave the country weaker. The only question is whether to try to get back into the quicksand of Iraq, or to stake out a new quagmire in Iran, or both. In every case, for every Republican candidate, the plan is to do things more like George W. Bush, although no one says that because doing things that way was a colossal failure.

And that's the Republican plan in a nutshell: to go back to the Bush Era while simultaneously disowning it because every knows Bush was a big failure. Doing that takes mighty acts of denial. The leader of their party needs to be the Denier in Chief, and lead the faithful through the minefield of cognitive dissonance to the Promised Land, where you do everything the way you always do but everything is somehow better. This kind of profound group self-deception requires a dysfunctional father figure for the faithful to believe in, someone to be the voice of rationalization and convenient self-delusion: a Drunk Dad.

Romney is like the Nice Drunk Dad, the kind that holds his liquor well and speaks politely and can only be recognized as an alcoholic if you know him. Generally, this kind of Drunk Dad seems like the best of the bad deals: he looks basically respectable, he doesn't fly into drunken rages, and he can even find socially-acceptable excuses for all the drinking, so that to casual visitors he just seems to be enjoying a few social cocktails instead of ruthlessly pickling his own brain. When the Nice Drunk Dad lies to you he sounds all calm and easy-going and sincere. He's actually excellent at selling the lie, even when circumstances make it implausible. He'll look you right in the eye and tell you everything's going to be better, and the family's just had a bit of inexplicable bad luck, and he's starting tomorrow he's going to turn over a new leaf because you kids are the most important thing in his life. And it all sounds really believable when he says it, especially the first time. He might, out of prevaricator's necessity, have to throw some personal slanders in with his lies, blaming the supervisor who fired him or the electric company that keeps "losing his checks," but that's not his strong suit, and even then he often affects a kind of more-in-sorrow-than-anger vibe about it.

Gingrich, however, is like the Angry Drunk Dad, who powers his denial with deep, quick-rising rage. The Angry Drunk Dad will often insult you and hurt your feelings, but he has an easy explanation for why things keep going wrong for the family: those no-good bastards are out to get him. He's surrounded by enemies wherever he goes, enemies who steal his job or cut off his electricity, and the family's task is to make common cause against those enemies. The enemies, of course, are out to get him because he's better then they are, because he's a bigger person and better at things and because he's got principles and they can't deal with that. And you can trust the Angry Drunk Dad not to back down. Whenever he feels wronged, which is nearly always, he goes on the attack: after all, those bastards have it coming.

(Rick Santorum, of course, is the Magical Thinking Drunk Dad, who tries basically the same bullshit on you that he used when you were three years old. And Ron Paul isn't so much a Drunk Dad as a Crank Uncle, who tells quirkily entertaining stories, warns you at length about the dangers of fluoridation and Freemasonry, and spends most of his time in the basement working on his perpetual-motion machine.)

On the face of it, the Nice Drunk Dad seems like the obvious go-to choice; for those of us who grew up with functional parents, the obvious move is to pick the one who seems closer to functional. That is basically the rationale for the Romney candidacy: he's less obviously embarrassing, and he looks like someone who could hold onto a job. But this turns out to be a mistake. The Nice Drunk Dad is still a drunk. There's no real benefit to the fact that he looks functional, and the fact that he looks so much like better dads whose families live better, more stable lives only drives home the fact that your family doesn't get to live like that. Candidate Romney doesn't have any actual programs to sell in the general election. He might not embarrass himself right out of the gate by talking about poor people on food stamps or raving about building a moon base, but anyone who's around him for longer than it takes to have two drinks is still going to figure out that he's got nothing. And President Romney has no plan to stop things in this country from going further and further into hell. If elected, he's just going to have a series of heart-to-heart talks with us about how things aren't really as bad as they seem and everything will get better, because he has our best interests at heart. Meanwhile, things are going to get worse and worse.

It's those heart-to-heart talks that are excruciating, and make the Nice Drunk Dad much worse, in lots of ways, than the Angry Drunk Dad. All he's got is bullshit, after all, and once you've heard the same bullshit a few times the fact that he sounds like he believes it doesn't make it better. In fact, it makes it worse. And you're forced to pretend that you don't see through him. It's terrible. The Angry Drunk Dad, on the other hand, doesn't ask you to believe his lies. He commands you to believe him, and attacks you the instant your faith wavers. You're not allowed to think for yourself, which is a relief; it keeps you from being able to notice how bad everything is. And the Angry Drunk Dad's talent for hate, his furious scapegoating and blame-shifting, not only helps you participate in the denial but actually gives you an outlet for all the hurt and rage and shame that comes from being in such a messed-up family. The Angry Drunk Dad has a convenient, consistent explanation for every setback, an explanation that helps you get through the day, and he offers you a place to unload all those terrible feelings you're carrying around, onto those convenient enemies. All these things that are going wrong aren't Dad's fault! ACORN did it! Saul Alinsky! Black people on food stamps! The liberal media!

Sure, your objective reality will be at least as bad as it would be with the Nice Drunk Dad, but face it: your objective reality was going to suck anyway. Things won't get better in the real world until/unless you break away from the family (the party) completely and start over. If you're not willing or able to do that, and lots of Republican primary voters aren't, the only question is how well you can keep your awareness of the ugly realities at bay. And at that game, the aggressively anti-reality Angry Drunk Dad beats the genteel, reasonable-sounding Nice Drunk Dad hands down. The Angry Drunk Dad helps you seal off the unpleasant truths that are always seeping through the Nice Drunk Dad's jive. And he gives you something to do when those truths unexpectedly confront you: get angry. In the Nice-Dad system of denial, the truth is something uncomfortable and embarrassing. In the Angry-Dad system, the truth is an enemy to be destroyed. It's not healthier than the Nice-Dad system, but it's a lot more emotionally satisfying. And it's what Newt Gingrich has to offer the voters.