… Mr. Bush said Mr. Kerry had been rated “the most liberal member of the United States Senate.”

“And he chose a fellow lawyer who is the fourth-most liberal member of the United States Senate,” Mr. Bush went on. …

   — New York Times

Piffle!

This illustration shows one dot for each senator in the current Senate. The blue dots are democrats, the red dots are republicans. There is one green dot toward the left for the one independent senator. The dots are sorted left to right to illustrate their ranking liberal to conservative. The data is from the gold standard in such ranking.

Edwards score on this chart is 19.5; Kerry’s is 24.5; and Bush isn’t a lawyer only because the University of Texas declined to admit him.

More

“Groupthink” appeared a lot in the coverage of the recent congressional commission reports. I hadn’t heard that term for 20 years; which sent me off to see from whence it came. Irving Janis’s work on fiascos and decision making apparently. Why did it fall out of common usage? Why’s it making a return appearance?

My insta-theory for it’s disappearance is that Americans don’t like to admit that groups have any control over our behavior and we particularly don’t like to admit that this control might be unconscious and unspoken. For example, if you suggest that people are sometimes manipulated by cults most people will argue either that it was the controlling abusive influence of the cult leaders or that the victims were weak and/or willing.

Janis tries to avoid studying the fiascos that come out of totalitarian or other highly controlled groups. No surprise when such groups fall victim to narrow minded problem solving, blind spots, and fiascos. Janis is looking at the much more interesting cases. Group of well meaning highly capable people that fall into highly controlling modalities of behavior patterns. How’s that happen? Collective behavior.

It is amusing to contrast this with the work on how complex behavior emerges from the combination of simple bits and pieces. The behavior piles of sand, or groups of insects, or simplistic electrical networks. These days we have dozens of examples of systems where seemingly globally coordinated behavior emerges from surprisingly primitive individual players. For example: that a field of fireflies can synch their flashes with only a few neurons. An entire national electric grid can collapse given the failure of a handful of elements.

It’s not a pretty thought that groups of highly capable people might fail in similar ways. So people decline to embrace the idea that such modalities might arise in human groups. It’s not a very empowering idea. If nobody is conscious of it then who do we blame?

This kind of model is very popular in one scenario though. After the fiasco, when the group writes the report that explains what went wrong. This framework is just what the Doctor ordered!  Since it offers the people writing the report a chance to avoid blaming anybody.

I’m not surprised that the Iraq commission used this diagnosis.

Consider Janis’s model of the antecedents of group think.

• Illusion of invulnerability, shared by most or all the members, which creates excessive optimism and encourages taking extreme risks;
• collective efforts to rationalize in order to discount warnings which might lead the members to reconsider their assumptions before they recommit themselves to their past policy decisions;
• an unquestioned belief in the the group’s inherent morality, inclining the members to ignore the ethical or moral consequences of their decisions;
• sterotyped views of enemy leaders as too evil to warrant genuine attempts to negotiate, or as too weak and stupid to counter whatever risky attempts are make to defeat their purposes.
• direct pressure on any member who expresses strong arguments against any of the group’s stereotypes, illusions, or commitments, making clear that this type of dissent is contrary to what is expected of loyal members;
• self-censorship of deviations from the apparent group consensus, reflecting each member’s inclination to minimize to himself the importance of his doubts and counter arguments;
• a shared illusion of unanimity concerning judgments conforming to the majority view (partly resulting from self-censorship of deviations augmented by the false assumption that silence means consent);
• the emergence of self-appointed mindguards – members who protect the group from adverse information that might shatter their shared complacency about the effectiveness and morality of their decisions.

Fits the Iraq fiasco like a glove doesn’t it!

Research like this can be empowering. Once you identify the ailment then you can begin to look for symptoms, treatments, cures.

Laying the blame at the feet of groupthink just doesn’t cut it. Sure, groupthink is a failure mode of decision making groups. There are plenty of such failure modes! A whole laundry list in fact. For example overreacting to one constraint in the problem space and thus becoming blind to all the other constraints.

Competent people know how to reduce the severity of these failure modes. That’s what you hope to get when you put “proven executives” in charge. While you can’t expect each and every person in a group to have this kind of expert knowledge – the knowledge of how to navigate around all the failure modes of group problem solving – is it too much to ask of the groups assembled to tackle the top few problems facing the nation?

From John Robb’s weblog:

On Point.’ Anonymous (the CIA agent who wrote “Imperial Hubris”) speaks.’ Major points he made:

• Al Qaeda isn’t a terrorist organization.’ If it was, we would have destroyed it several times over by now (NOTE:’ this supports my term Global Guerrillas).
• Al Qaeda and its ilk represent a national security threat to the US.’ This is war and it is going to last a long time.
• The tempo of attacks and activity within al Qaeda and other’Islamic extremist organizations’is increasing.
• We are losing the war in Afghanistan and Iraq.’ Fallujah was an important defeat.
• Polls in the Islamic world indicate that our policies are opposed by 80-90% of the people (not our way of life).’ This is the basis of al Qaeda’s support.
• The policies opposed:’ Our military presence in Saudi Arabia.’ Our support for appostate regimes in the Islamic world (Egypt and Saudi Arabia).’ Our unqualified support for Israel.’ Pressure to maintain low oil prices.’ Support for regimes that surppress muslims (India and China).
• These’policies cannot be debated within the US political system.
• Democracy can’t be exported.
• The solution’is to revise our policies to meet the needs of the Islamic world because it is in our interest — or — if we can’t do that, we should be ruthless in our use of military power.
• Our military posture is defensive.’ It should be aggressive.’ Our generals have become bureaucrats.’ To win this militarily, it is going to require a high body count.
• No single official will be faulted in the 9/11 report (and therefore nobody will be fired), despite substantial failures.
• No basis for optimism.

npointradio.org/shows/2004/07/20040721_b_main.asp”>audio is very interesting. Two points additional points I found interesting.

• Our countries organizational blindness
• The sense of duty and professionalism of a civil servant.
• “We” are precieved of occupying the three top holly sites of Islam.
• Our policies that the Muslim world see as offensive are not under discussion here – at all.
• Totally lost the battle for hearts and minds.

But most disturbing is his general read of the situation. That given our deep structural inability to reframe the situation we will play the only card in our hand. Military power. Which is going to kill a hell of a lot more people on both sides. That, of course, will polarize things yet more.

“Master of the Senate” is about LBJ’s rise to power in the Senate
during the 1950s. It is an amazing story. Johnson was a methodical
and calculating ass licker and sadist. It’s is difficult to
understate that story. He would enter a community, figure out who were
the powerful old men, particularly the lonely ones, in that community and then proceed to suck up to them until they gave him power. Then he would turn around and use that power to demand that those below he brown their noses.

Johnson wasn’t a man of high principle; but he was one of strong low principles. He was enthusiastic about to using the weaknesses and principles
of others to manipulate them. The 1950s were an excellent time to do just that.
The old racists were looking for somebody to hand off the flag to. The young liberals were looking for somebody in the south they could talk to.

There have always been two powerful dialectics in American politics:
race and commercial regulatory power. While Master of the Senate
would be a better book if it had something to say about the second
dynamic the issue of race is the interesting story of that period.

The single most significant shift in American politics of the last
50 years was the realignment of the race card. Entering this period
the Republicans were on the side of large economic entities and against
the smaller economic entities; in particular labor. Meanwhile the
Democrats drew much of their power from the south and the southern
democrats were racists. Exiting this period the flag of anti-civil;
the fear that “others” would destroy one’s sacred culture had passed
to the Republicans and the Democrats had lost the South. Johnson rode
on the power released by that realignment.

If you don’t want to believe that the Republicans now carry the racist flag
then you should suffer thru this TV Ad from a
Republican cantidate for congress in today’s election. It is a
horrible classic example of how leaders use hate speech to sharpen the
boundries around their group. The kind of speech that leads over time
to violence.

Johnson played the power inherent in that dialectic to a T. First he
convinced the old racist democratic senate chairs that they were to him
“like a daddy.” They handed him the power to run the Senate. Meanwhile
he convinced the northern liberal senators that he was one of them, that
he was their best hope to get something, anything, that would finally bring the vote to southern blacks.

When it became clear that no Southerner would ever be president
without making progress on civil rights Johnson turned on his patrons.
Over the next decade the power of the federal goverment was used to
deliver a modicum of civil rights to the southern blacks and the
Democrats lost the South. No wonder Walmart came out of Arkansas. No wonder “For black men in their mid-thirties at the end of the 1990s, prison records were nearly twice as common as bachelor

… our president is an idiot.

I was quite disappointed by the apology that appeared recently in the New York Times. This version by their “public editor” is better.” I certainly hope they aren’t finished with this soul searching. I might prescribe some bleeding, drain the noxious humors from the corporate body.

I think they got it right. Mostly.

Mostly?

One of the easy moves when doing PR damage control is to identify a scape goat; pile as much of the responsiblity as possible on his shoulders and then kick him out. If your lucky; the outraged public will then take a deep breadth and give you time to do something more substanative; or better yet they will just wander off and stop bothering you.

Obviously Rumsfeld should go. But it would be a huge mistake to pretend that the cancer who’s symptoms those photos reveal will go with him. It’s going to take some very serious surgery to cut that cancer out. Not until we as a nation suffer that operation will there be any hope of reclaiming our historical role in the room of nations.

I am afraid we will never reclaim that honorable position. Damn them. Damn them all. Have they no honor? Have they no conscious? Apparently they have no ideas what they have done to our nation.

I see that Kevin Drum is reenforcing the hair-on-fire meme around Richard Clarke’s testimony. He stoops to suggesting Clarke is suffering from “monomania.” Kevin even signs on to the “clinton-bush-same-policy” meme.

How can Bush and Clinton have had the same policy if Al Quida was the #1 or #2 foreign priority of the Clinton administration while the Bush administration didn’t manage to have a meeting about it until September? How can they be the same policy when Rice’s essays on what is and isn’t important leading into up to their take over barely even mention terrorism and when they do it’s only in the context of state sponsors.

The hair-on-fire meme is the most serious accusation, but it’s only one of many so far. So far, the opponents of Mr. Clarke have suggested he’s gay, and that he’s picking on a black woman, that he’s a lier, a opportunist, … we could go on. So possibly we shouldn’t be too concerned if the mud that sticks is that he is a “true believer,” a man with a mission. But I think that terribly misses the point.

I’ve been thinking recently that one aspect of this story is how a liberal organization v.s. a conservative one responds when a guy enters the room and announces there is a huge unrecognized problem. For a liberal organization the response is “Sigh, another constituency. Ok, tell me your story and we will see what we can do.” For a conservative organization the reaction is “Calm down my son. Your problem is covered in our model, which has worked for years and will endure for many more.”

So it’s entirely consistent that Clarke was able to get a hearing and make his case in the Clinton administration. In the Bush administration he was considered just another one of those people with their hair on fire.

When ever any large institution changes course the social network of the people involve will have people out in front of the change and people that lag far behind and cling to the old ways. The folks out in front are always characterized as being over the top. Recall that enthusiasm was, until recently, a sin: to believe yourself full of the breadth of the lord. What distinguishes a healthy organization from a stagnant one is that it manages to filter thru the various enthusiasms and integrate in the ones that it must.

Institutions that fail to adapt act progressively more and more dysfunctional as the world around them changes and they don’t. At first this dysfunction is indistinguishable from all the usual background noise of the real world. In time it becomes sharper as the mismatch becomes more severe. Finally it is fatal.

It is clear that the Clinton administration was adapting and it’s clear that the Bush administration was not. Further it’s clear that as the signals from the real world became stronger the Bush administration retreated into their classic old models of how to address the problem.

There was a failure of the Bush administration to pick up the ball from the Clinton administration. Worse yet when they finally found the ball on fire on their front door they reacted by heading off in entirely the wrong direction. Feeding the supply chain of the terrorist networks with huge pool of outraged young men.

Ok so now we have a guy, Clarke, who was one of the folks on the fore front of trying to get the institution to change. He labors for years to help the ship of state change course. He makes significant progress. He suffers a set back when the new administration arrives. Over the months it becomes clear that he’s not getting thru to these people. They are deeply loyal to their model of the world and he’s not managing to get their attention.

Then the horrible day. No longer is his hair on fire, now the lawn out front’s on fire. What do they do? They go in entirely the wrong direction.

What would you do at that point? He did exactly what any well practices organizational specialist would do. He engaged in “object shift.” He looked for a different venue in which to make the case. This time he shifted the discussion to the public sphere. Is that excessive enthusiasm, monomania? No that’s effective workman like organizational grunt work.

We owe this guy a huge debt. To engage in projection and suggest that he’s suffering from narrow minded religious passions is the worst kind of insult. It paints him with the same brush we might appropriately select to paint religious terrorists, the oklahoma bombers, and possibly even the neo-cons.

This
is outrageous.

“I blame the entire Bush leadership for
continuing to work on Cold War issues when they back in power in
2001. It was as though they were preserved in amber from when they
left office eight years earlier. They came back. They wanted to work
on the same issues right away: Iraq, Star Wars. Not new issues, the
new threats that had developed over the preceding eight years.”

Please! Read
the entire thing.

“But these figures do seem to seriously undermine the slur that the Spaniards
lost their bottle after the bombs and decided to cave into Bin Laden.”

What a great insult: ‘Ah, you’ve lost your bottle.” I assume it’s origin is in a sentence like “Oh, poor baby! Did baby lose her bottle. Here here, let me help you.”