Leave It Behind > Brian Bailey

The first debate

Note: I actually wrote this without reading or watching any commentary on the debate (yes, not even twitter). I have no idea how it is being spun by either side or what conventional wisdom says about the impact on the race. In other words, this could be entirely off-base, but it's my honest thoughts on what I saw before someone else tells me what I saw.

If only presidential debates were like sporting events. A game has a simple scoring system and when it's over, no one disputes who the winner was. Debates aren't quite so simple.

Success in a debate is determined by performance, but performance within the context of the current state of the race and the expectations for the candidate. Here's how I see the race.

The polls generally show the race tied, with a 2-3% edge to Obama nationally (within the poll's margin of error) and a slightly bigger lead in the electoral college totals. It should not be forgotten that it is truly stunning that the race is this close. After 8 years in the White House and with an extremely unpopular president, a Republican candidate starts at a significant disadvantage. Combine that with the incredible 18 months that Senator Obama has had, the enthusiasm and money he has generated, and the desire for change in the country, and McCain should be trailing by 10 points.

Though the race is close, the momentum is on Obama's side. The economic crisis reinforces his strengths and McCain's weaknesses. Others have said that this is Obama's election to lose and I would agree. I believe that a clear majority of the country wants him to be the next president, but enough have hesitations and see a possible alternative in McCain to keep it close. They're really looking for an excuse to rule out McCain and he almost gave them one this week.

So, the undecided voters tuning in tonight wanted Obama to convince them that he's ready to be president, particularly command-in-chief. They don't want to feel like they're taking a risk by voting for him. McCain, on the other hand, needed to remind people why they were attracted to him in the first place, and reassure them that he's up to the job and as determined to bring about change as he claims.

The Obama campaign had insisted that the first debate be on foreign policy, preferring to finish strong, but that was not without uncertainty. Sometimes the first debate proves to be the most important one, and with the incredible buildup this week, this debate may attract the largest audience of the three.

Under these circumstances, I believe that it was a better evening for McCain. Both candidates accomplished most of what they set out to do and Obama certainly came across as smart, confident and ready to be president. This can only help his numbers.

However, McCain was the more aggressive of the two and managed to score a number of points without coming across as terribly negative. The campaign clearly had developed a theme and he was effective in touching on it again and again, "Senator Obama doesn't understand.." The best lines of argument reinforce perceptions and polls show that the greatest hesitation voters have about Obama is his foreign policy and national security knowledge and experience.

McCain also managed to distance himself effectively from the Bush Administration and Obama failed to make the case by complimenting McCain at times for his independence and also largely agreeing with him on certain issues. I'm sure Obama will be much more successful in this during the debates on domestic issues.

The beginning of the debate focused on the bailout package and the economy. McCain somehow managed to focus the entire segment on earmarks and pork barrel spending, which was a remarkable achievement. This was the one moment where I could imagine Democratic voters missing Senator Clinton. She would not have let McCain get away with that and probably would've scored the soundbite of the debate by pointing out his lack of solutions.

After each debate, the number of undecideds will drop. In this case, I believe that McCain stopped Obama's momentum for now and helped change the story from the past 10 days. The pause will be brief, though, as many more storylines are waiting to be written.

Don't call them worthless

I know the easy thing is to blame the candidates and campaigns for the silly and disappointing turns during election season. I do it myself and am as frustrated as anyone. It angers me to see small issues (many a decade old) made into defining moments and a few out-of-context words treated as a window into someone's soul. I hate the ridiculous ads that stretch the truth to a laughable degree and yet are framed as if the very survival of our nation and planet is at stake. I fight to tune out the campaign spinsters parroting the company line ad nauseum, casting every act by the opposition as a craven, dishonest, predictable, desperate and possibly illegal maneuver.

There's not much we can do about the candidates, but we can change how we talk and write about politics. The first step is to change how we consume political news. Find sources that are somewhat neutral or seek out quality commentary from the other side. If your sources are nothing other than Daily Kos and The Huffington Post or Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, your views will be as limited as the very people you dislike so much.

At some point, though, we have to take responsibility for the tone of politics. Even though our discourse is largely a reflection of what we hear from the parties and the media, why should we descend to that level? Why can't we do better? If you are fed up with how politics is practiced, let's start changing how we practice politics.

The candidate you support is motivated by political calculation and a desire to win just like his opponent. He has compromised when he shouldn't have, ducked when he should have stood up, and made many mistakes (and will continue to do so). Like all national politicians, he is a flawed man surrounded by flawed advisors. The nation's problems will not be solved by his election, but he can and hopefully will makes things better, improve the political process, and appeal to our better natures.

The candidate you oppose is not stupid, senile, dangerous, different, or corrupt. He loves this country and has served it most of his life. He will defend our nation with honor and always do what he thinks is in the best interest of America. He does not deserve to be mocked, belittled, or hated. The snide and snarky only serve to make intelligent debate between reasonable people impossible, while escalating the smack talk arms race.

There are endless arguments to be made for and against each of these candidates on the issues, but why do we have to demonize and deify them in the process?

One of my favorite West Wing moments is when Ainsley, Hayes, a Republican lawyer, is offered a job in the Democratic White House. Her first reaction is no, but she changes her mind at the last minute. Here's what happens when she meets her Republican friends at a bar, who believe she has turned down the offer. The parties are irrelevant, but the point is anything but:

Friend: Tell me about the look on [Chief of Staff] McGarry's face. I wanted you to say it to his face...I wanted to see...

Other Friend: I hate these people

Friend: Did you meet anyone there who isn't worthless?

Ainsley Hayes: Don't say that.

Friend: Did you meet anyone there who has...

Ainsley Hayes: I said, don't say that.

Say they're smug and superior. Say their approach to public policy makes you wanna tear your hair out. Say they like high taxes and spending your money. Say they want to take your guns and open your borders. But don't call them worthless.

At least don't do it in front of me.

The people that I have met have been extraordinarily qualified. Their intent is good. Their commitment is true. They are righteous. And they are patriots.

And I'm their lawyer.

The political book of the year

I just finished reading The Pact: Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, and the Rivalry that Defined a Generation by Steven Gillon. It is the best political book I have read in a long time. If you are interested in recent history and how Washington works, I can't recommend it enough.

The book tells the story of how Clinton and Gingrich rose to power. It touches again and again on how similar the two men were personally, despite their political differences. The core of the book is the story of how the two became more and more reliant on one another to accomplish big goals. They grew to respect their opponent and spoke and met frequently. And in 1996, fresh from recent successes and with a booming economy and tax surpluses, they worked behind-the-scenes (and against the wishes of their staffs or without their knowledge) to form a new coalition that reached across party lines and appealed to the center of the country. This coalition was to first tackle the problems in social security, followed by Medicare and Medicaid. Tragically, the Lewinsky scandal broke a month before this was to be set in motion at the State of the Union. Both men were forced to abandon any signs of cooperation as the impeachment battle began.

What is truly fascinating, and equally sad, is how little interest there is in Washington to accomplish anything. The focus is almost entirely on gaining and maintaining power, and scoring political points against the other party at every opportunity. The Democratic leaders in the House and Senate did not want Clinton to work the Republican congress to pass anything - it would deprive them of campaign issues. Similarly, the right of the Republican Party was actually very frustrated with Gingrich's cooperation with Clinton, and insisted that he fight him every step of the way rather than compromise. And because so many congressional districts have been drawn in such a way as to eliminate competition, few congressman have any incentive to moderate their views.

I promise you will learn a great deal from this book and enjoy the experience.

The reasons Bloomberg decided not to run (and why he was wrong)

New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg spent the first half of this year deciding whether or not to run for president as an independent. On February 28th, he announced that he would not be a candidate. My guess is he wakes up every morning regretting his decision.

At the time, the choice seemed obvious. Bloomberg is an independent (though formerly a Democrat and a Republican) politician focused on achieving common sense solutions by working with both parties. He is open to the best ideas, regardless of where they come from. And he appeals primarily to independents and moderates in both parties.

At the end of February, it was clear that John McCain would be the Republican nominee and an Obama victory seemed imminent. Both candidates were seen as the more moderate, post-partisan choices in each of their fields. Both were willing to break with their party, McCain by opposing a Republican president on a number of issues and exposing corruption in his party, Obama by shocking Democrats with kind words about President Reagan and acknowledging that we should be open to good ideas from Republicans (and that "good ideas from Republicans" isn't an oxymoron). Both candidates relied on crossover and independent voters in some races and regularly reached out to them in their stump speeches.

Lastly, a large focus of the campaign up to that point was foreign policy and the war in Iraq, with McCain winning his race by emphasizing his credentials and support for the surge and Obama focusing on his judgment in opposing the war from the beginning. Though health care and the economy were growing as issues, it was still thought that a city mayor would be at a significant disadvantage in an election dominated by national security.

Bloomberg was going to run only if he was convinced he could win. The possibility of a third party candidate winning the presidency is remote to say the least, especially a short, unmarried, Jewish mayor, as Bloomberg himself often pointed out. But this election seemed stacked against him. Both parties were set to nominate candidates he had spoken highly of in the past and who occupied much of the same ground as himself. Whereas a Hillary Clinton vs. Rudy Giuliani race (yes, once considered a possibility) would be negative and polarizing (with the added benefit of featuring two candidates he doesn't much care for), Obama and McCain had wide appeal across party lines and were the ones most likely to run respectful campaigns.

Bloomberg made three mistakes: he assumed the race was over, he assumed the core issues of the election were set, and he assumed that the candidates were more important than their parties.

The Race

The Republican race was considered over at the end of February, and the Democratic campaign nearly so. However, on March 4th, Hillary Clinton won Texas and Ohio and made it clear that she intended to compete until the end of the primaries. Later in March, Obama was hit by the Rev. Wright controversy. Soon, the debates and campaign commercials turned much more aggressive and the race increasingly divisive. The race did not end until June 3rd.

The Issues

No one foresaw in February where we are in September. The surge has been so successful that the war in Iraq has largely receded as an issue and it's increasingly likely that the majority of troops will be withdrawn over the next two years regardless of who is elected.

More importantly, the crisis in the mortgage industry and financial markets has now grown into the dominant issue in the campaign. As he showed on Meet the Press this morning, Mayor Bloomberg is uniquely qualified to speak to this problem and would be dominating the debate if he were currently a candidate.

The Parties

Before the Iowa Caucuses, I endorsed John McCain and Barack Obama for president. Believing neither was likely to win, I wrote: "That would truly be a once-in-a-lifetime election as both men believe in appealing to the best in each of us."

The great disappointment over the past four months has been the realization that even the best candidates cannot overcome the parties, the consultants, and the media environment that give us the exact same campaign every four years. If there was one year when things would be different, I honestly thought it would be this one. I was completely wrong.

Soon after Obama won the nomination, he changed his mind on accepting public financing and participating in a series of town hall debates with McCain. After promising a positive campaign that fully respects his opponent, McCain has launched attack after attack, each more cutting and dismissive than the last. Both campaigns regularly twist words, grab a few sentences out of context, reduce votes on complex bills to footnote-based outrage, and generally behave emotional, high-strung teenagers who perceive a slight in everything.

Each party and most of each candidate's supporters believe that they have no choice. You have to hit back harder and faster than your opponent if you want to win. And no matter what your high aspirations are for January, they're irrelevant unless you are victorious in November.

Bloomberg was convinced that these two candidates left no room for an independent, solutions-driven candidate who appealed to moderates and people who believe more in solving problems than assigning blame and taking credit. Who needs an immensely successful businessman, 2-term mayor of the largest city in America, with expertise in domestic and economic issues during a time of war?

We did.

Mayor Bloomberg, like all politicians, is a flawed man with many positions that I do not support. But he had the chance to be the first legitimate third-party candidate since Teddy Roosevelt. His wealth, success, focus on results, and appeal across party lines would have given him a platform to reveal the flaws, corruption, and true silliness of our existing parties and election process. It is nearly impossible for an independent to win the presidency, but I'm convinced that if he had run, and the last few months had played out in an identical fashion, that the polls would show a three-way tie right now.

And our country would be better for it.

Learning to Write, part 3

A lot of our conversations with family and friends involve books. Whenever someone asks me what type of books I like to read, the answer is always non-fiction, mostly politics, philosophy, technology and business (wow, that is one of the most boring sentences I have ever written). In fact, I usually have a hard time remembering when I last read any fiction.

But then it occurs to me that I have a wonderful son who I've been reading with for all of his 13 years. There has never been a time when we weren't in the middle of a book together (currently The Underneath). So, I actually read fiction all the time, and love it, it just happens to be out loud.

The same is true with writing. I think of myself as someone who only writes about ideas and politics (and unsurprisingly the rest of the reading material listed above), but each Christmas for the last eight years, I've written a story for one of Ben's presents (often involving cats or one of his current favorite things). So, I actually write fiction all the the time, and love it, it just happens to be for the family.

Each time I read or write fiction though, I'm struck by just how endlessly complicated it is. For me, writing non-fiction is very, very different and much, much easier. Fiction requires mind muscles that must be terribly underused in my case because it is often a painfully slow process. There are more details and decisions in a paragraph of fiction (who's talking? who else is in the room? what is the room like? how does this character talk? how did the talk the last time they spoke? how does this scene relate to what came before and what comes next? are you revealing too much or too little? is the reader asleep at this point? etc...)  than a chapter of non-fiction (does this make a point clearly and economically? is it reasonable? does it fit where it is? is it a pleasure to read? does it hold the reader's attention? repeat...).

So, when I started thinking about writing code and writing fiction, I realized that both of these things make my mind work in completely new ways and present unique challenges. After spending many weeks brainstorming ideas for a novel, I have started writing a story about a thought I mentioned a few months ago: don't hate the part of you that most makes you feel alive.

Now, when I say "started writing", I mean there are a few disjointed paragraphs and a Backpack page that makes the newspaper-covered walls in A Beautiful Mind look like a Library of Congress card catalog. I have no illusions about the likelihood that such a project will ever be finished, or if so, published. Without a contract, cash, and a deadline, neither the flesh nor the spirit is willing, more often than not.

But I am having a lot of fun lying in bed each night, thinking about these characters and scribbling fun phrases on scraps of paper. And once in awhile, a couple of sentence come together in such a way that I smile and think, "Is this what it feels like to be a writer?" The funny thing is it happens with a few lines of code sometimes, too.

The one thing I'm struck by is the thought that fiction can be more timeless than non-fiction, and in some cases speak to a reader in a much more personal way. I think I'd like to give that a try.

Learning to Write, part 2

A few months ago, I started a fun little experiment. I wondered what it would be like to learn how to write code and fiction at the same time. I've dabbled in both over the years, making minimal progress and slowly  moving on to things that are, well, easier, at least for me. But its become clear recently that these really are dreams of mine, they are part of who I want to be rather than just skills I want to acquire.

Programming has been part of my life since I was a teenager learning Basic on my TI-99/4A. In high school, I took a Pascal class, which I loved. In college, I chose a computer science class (C, of course) for one of my electives, partly because it gave me access to a sweet lab of NeXT boxes. I enjoyed the class enough to briefly consider extending my education for a couple of years to major in computer science, but decided my philosophy degree was more than enough to launch me into the job market.

The next few years involved more dabbling in this and that, mostly in my free time, until I had the chance to write some .NET code, accessing web services in C#. At the same time, I was starting to learn a lot more about server administration, networking, web servers and databases. I took a Java class as well as some Microsoft courses, which tend to be more about the tools (I probably learned more about Visual Studio than actual programming).

I had the opportunity to continue down the development path, but could not turn down the chance to  lead a web team. I loved being able to set the direction, manage people and touch all the different parts of web projects, but it also kept me far from development. Thankfully I was wise enough to move our platform to open source, so I gained a lot of experience with (and appreciation for) PHP, PostgreSQL, Apache, Linux, and the command line.

My son started being curious about programming around this time, which launched me on a obsessive (and ongoing) search for the best way for a beginner to learn how to program. Eventually, I realized that this was maybe a little bit for me as well (hey, some dads make their kids play football). I hope to write a post eventually on what I learned along the way, but the short answer is Ruby and Chris Pine's book.

A year ago, I had the incredible opportunity to join a web startup. The fact that it was a Ruby on Rails shop made it even more attractive, and I've be able to learn a huge amount about the full Rails stack from my ridiculously talented co-workers. This taste has only made me want to learn more.

I've spent a lot of evenings over the last few months reading some terrific development books, watching screencasts, and writing some rudimentary code. Ruby truly is a revelation. You hear the words "joy" and "happiness" used over and over again when people talk about Ruby and Rails, and it's true. Whenever you think, "I don't know how to do this, but it would make sense if it was something like this", it usually turns out to be true. Compared to most languages, the code is so simple and readable. Most anyone could understand Ruby code and learn to write it with a bit of instruction. It's the perfect language for a beginner and I hope it becomes common in high school computer classes.

I just got back from Denver, where I was privileged to spend 3 days with two of the top Ruby on Rails experts around, Dave Thomas and Chad Fowler. Pragmatic Studio's Rails class was the best training I have ever had. Just 40 students in a comfortable room, tons of coding opportunities, and entertaining instructors with heavy real world knowledge. Now it's time to put the books down and write.

Sometimes I wonder why I've never lost my interest in programming. Developers are like the carpenters of old, people who can take a pencil drawing and build something real out of it. I love the problem solving aspect of writing code, along with the power to make ideas happen. And I admit to being intrigued by the art of it as well, the drive to write beautiful code, constantly editing and improving until it is truly creative, elegant and expressive.

A little like fiction, no?

Learning to Write, part 1

This blog has slowly gone quiet over the past few months. There is a certain rhythm to blogging that is hard to maintain unless you allow your commitment to your blog to supersede other priorities. The single thing I ever did to become good at blogging was committing to posting at least once a day. Like nearly anything else you want to master, daily effort is the key. I did it for years and truly loved the challenge of finding something to write about each and every day.

Writing hundreds of blog posts opened the door to an entirely different form of writing, a book. I knew when I signed the contract for The Blogging Church that writing tens of thousands of words on my blog did not truly prepare me for writing a book, and I was right. The book writing process was so different and much more challenging. I had to learn to think very differently about developing thoughts and arguments, being consistent in style but not repetitive in method, and keeping a reader entertained for more than five minutes at a time. I loved that year immensely, despite many late and somewhat miserable nights, and the feedback I've received from many of you has truly meant the world to me.

The first question after you write a book is, "What is your next book going to be about?" I actually think about that just about every day, but that's how my mind has always worked - brainstorming new ideas, thinking through the best ones, and then moving on. I have yet to find the perfect idea for another book, not because there is an absence of good choices, but because I'm impatient and restless, and highly resistant to repeating a formula.

And that's what a blog often becomes eventually: repetitive. Many times over the past year I've thought about writing a post and then realized that I had said much of it before, just in a different context. I'm not convinced that it's worth my time, or yours, to rehash those thoughts and arguments for whatever happens to be demanding our attention today. Similarly, I've stopped reading most of the top blogs for the same reason. After a few years, you begin to see the same ideas, the same patterns, the same arguments, repeated again and again. Life's too short.

Not long after the book was published, I left the church world to join a web start-up. I wanted to be challenged in new ways and to be exposed to new ideas. It's been an incredible, addictive experience so far, though it's certainly taken me far from my comfort zone. If I had stayed in the church web world, I might be speaking at some small church technology conferences, writing posts every day about the latest web tools and controversies, and working on "The Social Church: Facebook, Twitter, and the Internet Church". Many smart, talented people (and friends of mine) are wired up that way, but not me. I already did that once.

Over the past few months, I've been pouring all of my free time into learning to write in two new ways, code and fiction. I'll be writing about these more over the next two posts. No surprises, no big announcements, just the latest explorations of one of my favorite things in this world, writing.