Here’s something interesting about human behavior. The following clip was added by 1stAmendmentVoter who is apparently an Obama supporter. This person seems pretty sure that when Palin and Biden went head-to-head, the Senator from Delaware was a clear victor. It’s only two minutes long. Why don’t you scan it for some actual reasons that a neutral observer should think Sarah Palin lost the debate.

Did you see what I saw? A poll. A poll of strangers decided, 51-36, that Biden did a better job. If you go to the page for this clip you see a bunch of quotes from luminaries. Also strangers. But what neutral, objective, balanced and dispassionate strangers they are, huh.

Bob Shrum: “She Barely Kept Up”… “McCain Lost the VP Debate Too”… Madeleine Albright: “Biden’s Night… We Need A VP Who Can Be Persuasive With Foreign Leaders”…Leah McElrath Renna: “Biden’s Tears Did More For The Equality Of The Sexes Than Palin’s Presence”… Newsweek’s Fineman: Palin Like “A Wolverine Attacking The Pant Leg Of A Passerby”

Now, back in ’95 we saw our country’s racial divide open up just a bit, as O.J. Simpson’s trial entered the home stretch and then finally reached a verdict. What arose to confront us was the Rashomon syndrome; two people with different interests, especially different interests seldom discussed in polite company, see something. It’s a singular thing. They disagree about what it is they saw. They shouldn’t, but they do.

That’s what’s happening right now with this Palin/Biden debate. What interest me here, however, is what is presented by the two different sides as they each make the case why they saw things the way they think they saw them. In 2008, this is what makes the sides truly different; these different perspectives, speak to their character. Go back and watch that clip again. Study it, one more time, for reasons you should think Biden won the debate. What do you find? You should think Biden won the debate…because…this other person, over here, thinks Biden won the debate.

Compare and contrast. John Hawkins has a YouTube clip too. His clip gives reasons to think Palin won the debate. Except Hawkins does something pretty strange here: He allows viewers to listen to the debate themselves! Wow, you’re putting a lot of faith in the hoi polloi, aren’t you John?

For me, this defines a crucial difference between the way liberals and conservatives think. How they see things. What goes on in their heads when they see things. Liberalism is the last gasp of a dying age — the twentieth century, in which it was a novelty that one man could speak, and in that very moment be heard by thousands or millions. By the nature of that kind of technology it is impossible to unworkable for those masses to have any efficient way of letting the speaker know what they thought of him. Mass communication is not necessarily bidirectional communication. And so, having reached maturity on this imbalanced diet, liberalism has nurtured down to the marrow of its bones a reflexive proclivity to tell people what to think.

A liberal is not necessarily inclined to make the clip John Hawkins made. Some liberals do, of course. If you show a great level of competence and creativity in selecting the clips to include, and sequence them just so, so that your compilation eventually compels an uninformed viewer to reach conclusions directly opposed from what reality would suggest — what you have there, then, is a Michael Moore product. And isn’t Mr. Moore’s career just a damning indictment of liberalism itself. He became famous because he discovered ways to c-a-r-e-f-u-l-l-y show some footage in such a way that liberalism looked good. Question: If that’s Moore’s contribution, but liberalism is already supposed to be a good idea, then why was his chosen craft such an incredible novelty? Answer: Because there is some difficulty involved in getting that done.

Now, look at Hawkins’ clip one more time. There is no Michael-Moore trickery involved here; this is exactly the way the debate went down, just with a little bit less waiting. What he’s showing are, for all intents and purposes, random samples. Liberals must tell people what to think, conservatives allow people to make up their own minds about things. And this is the way things went. Palin would highlight in some subtle way the difference between the way people decide things inside the beltway, and the way people decide things in the rest of the country. Biden, if he is truly a master of expressing the best part of an argument through his words and his tone and his facial expressions, must have been making a counter-argument of “look how white my teeth are” because that’s all he had to say about it. Just a big ol’ crocodile smile. Nothing else.

That would be an effective and fair summary of most of what took place.

Palin: Something is wrong in Washington. Those people do not think about important problems the way people with real responsibilities think about important problems.
Biden: Yeah, but look what a great smile I have!

Well, you know what my conclusion is about it? Biden and Palin both represented the grievances and passions of millions of their virtual constituents in this match-up. And that’s how debates are truly won. But Biden’s constituents are a bunch of peaceniks. Their battle cry, of an “illegal and unjust war,” is old and tired by now. We invaded Iraq; get over it. We can debate what to do going forward, but as far as going in in the first place, it’s a piece of history. Furthermore, Biden’s tent is way too big. Some of his constituents genuinely do hate the country. They do, they do, they do — some of ’em. Others have a more sincere desire to see peace. Some are pie-eyed absolutists living in utopian bubbles, and insist war should become a thing of the past. Others are more realistic and say war is sometimes unavoidable, but it should only be engaged when it is inevitable, and that was not the case here. Some are anarchists. Some are totalitarians. Some are isolationists. Others desire a one-world government with more authority invested in the United Nations.

Obama and Biden face an impossible task of uniting them…should they win this election. I don’t think it’s really do-able. These people have nothing in common with each other. Their egos are wrapped up in the Obama/Biden ticket because of Barack Obama’s personal charisma, and Obama’s charisma holds such an appeal for them because they’re uninformed on the issues. That’s their commonality. The only one.

Palin emerges as the true heroine here, fighting the good fight. She’s representing the rest of us. We’re out here in “flyover country,” living our lives…our normal lives…and Washington, DC is getting further and further away from us. Quite frankly, we don’t know what to make of it. We’re working and paying bills, and nobody’s bailing us out of things. This “Dick Cheney” guy Biden kept bashing all night long, calling him the most dangerous Vice President ever — what is the Cheney doctrine, anyway? It’s also called the One Percent Doctrine and it says if there’s a 1% chance that shenanigans are going on, sometimes you have to treat it as a certainty if you regard the potential shenanigans to be a sufficient cause for concern. This just goes to show how far apart the beltway is from the rest of the world, because out here, that makes perfect sense. It may very well be the most unpopular doctrine to ever have been voiced around the Patomac, since the day our nation’s capitol was located there. Out here, meanwhile, everyone who manages their own life’s business, believes in the One Percent Doctrine. It is how we do things. Everyone believes in it…except for those who are somehow sheltered from making decisions that matter.

One percent chance there are black widows under your kids’ play equipment, you treat it as a certainty.

One percent chance your wife’s car has a leak in the brake lines, you treat it as a certainty.

One percent chance you left the stove on when you left the house, you act as if you most certainly did.

It really all comes down to management styles. Palin won the debate, because the way she makes decisions about things that come under her executive management jurisdiction, flows seamlessly into the way she managed this debate; and that, in turn, flows seamlessly into her personality. She’s the mother bear protecting her cubs — but she doesn’t treat the rest of us as cubs to be protected. She treats us as other mother bears, who are also protecting our cubs. Because that is precisely what we are.

And we don’t understand voting for something before voting against it — as she pointed out (right before another impressive display of Biden crocodile teeth). We don’t see how it’s okay to lie about something under oath just because the question was “personal”; we don’t understand comments about “letting Wall Street run wild” when we know the regulators had much more of a hand making the problem in the first place. We don’t understand bailouts. We don’t understand saying all these nice things about John McCain, and then once you’re Barack Obama’s running mate, trying to get people to pretend you never said them. We don’t understand radical left-wing democrats when they protest a war, make up lies about the soldiers killing and raping civilians — and then claim to support the troops. We don’t understand all this brow-beating that global warming is a big concern, but the damage to our infrastructure from these carbon cap-and-trade initiatives are not…and these creeps all over the world putting fatwas on the United States and trying to develop nuclear weapons…are also not a concern. We don’t see how it’s any of Germany’s or France’s or Canada’s damn business who we’re going to elect as our next leader. We don’t understand that. We just don’t get that stuff, and we don’t want to get it. You have a job to do, you do it. If something comes along that might mess up that job, you treat it as a certainty that it will.

And you do not, do not, do not, ever lead people by giving them sanctimonious and poorly-informed instructions that they shouldn’t be worried about something, that in reality, should worry the dickens out of ’em. It’s a contrast between weak management and strong management. That’s what this election is really all about. So if someone is out there thinking Biden won the debate, and they’re voting, that’s just the latest piece of evidence that we have way too many people in this country voting.

Our candidates for high office shouldn’t be selling us weak management with slick sales pitches, emotional connections, mosh pits and crocodile teeth. They shouldn’t even be tempted to mobilize a campaign like that. Yet they are not only tempted, but acting on it.

Don’t blame the candidates, blame the people. But Palin won. Among thinking men and women who have real responsibilities, there can be no question.

Thing I Know #112. Strong leadership is a dialog: That which is led, states the problem, the leader provides the solution. It’s a weak brand of leadership that addresses a problem by directing people to ignore the problem.