As a supporter of Obama – Biden, I found the debate last night soothing. Biden performed well, better than Ryan. From my partisan point of view, it was a good night. After the first Obama – Romney debate, I had a hard time sleeping. Last night, I slept like a baby.

In form and substance, I think Biden was convincing, presenting passionately and clearly the case for re-election, providing Obama a proper introduction for a debate comeback. The contrasting approaches to the practical challenges of our times were on clear view and, I believe, Biden made the Democrats approach more cogent, while Ryan was not able to overcome the contradictions of the conservative Romney-Ryan approach.

First form: Republicans are in convinced. Biden was boorish, Gore – like, patronizing rude. Fred Barnes at the Weekly Standard summarizes their judgment: “You don’t win a nationally televised debate by being rude and obnoxious. You don’t win by interrupting your opponent time after time after time or by being a blowhard. You don’t win with facial expressions, especially smirks or fake laughs, or by pretending to be utterly exasperated with what your opponent is saying.”

Indeed Biden was highly expressive. He interrupted Ryan. He smiled, laughed and non-verbally belittled his opponent. I knew as I watched Biden’s performance that the Republican partisans would draw the Gore analogy. I worried, but was also enthused. Now that I have had a bit of time to deliberately consider the evening, I think that there was good reason for my enthusiasm.

Biden non-verbally framed the debate, deflecting Ryan’s criticisms, highlighting the thinness of the Romney-Ryan critique of the administrations foreign policy, and the contradictions of the Romney Ryan economic plans. Take a look at the embedded video. Notice that Biden’s expressive behavior was responsive to what Ryan was saying and that it is consistent with what we know about Biden, the man, how he presented himself last night and how he has presented himself in our experience.

Biden is an honest Joe, sitting at the bar, infuriated by the nonsense he is hearing, unable to control himself, wanting desperately to set the record straight. Herein lies Biden’s victory (I am thinking about the great sociologist Erving Goffman and his master essay “The Nature of Deference and Demeanor”). Far from being a weakness Biden’s expressions are at the root of his decisive victory.

Through his demeanor and his lack of deference, Biden managed to define the situation. He turned the evening in his favor. The debate started with Obama – Biden on the run. Romney had won the last debate and has been on a roll. His stock was up, Obama’s down. Romney seemed to be turning the election into a referendum over the Obama record, as he presented himself as a competent moderate Republican technocrat: no right-wing extremist he. Biden last night in his body language reversed the trend. Who are Romney and Ryan? And why are the saying what they have been saying about American foreign policy? With a puzzled frown, Biden underscored this question. And what are they saying about taxes, Medicare and Social Security? With a flash of a smile, Biden raised serious doubts about the veracity of what they have been saying.

Apart from this win, the debate was a success because each man presented his party’s position: on foreign policy, taxes and deficits, economic growth, social justice, and on the proper relationship between religious belief and public policy, including the issues of women’s rights and abortion.

As a partisan, I am very pleased that Biden made the positions of Obama and his party clear, with a full command of the facts. Ryan also presented his party’s positions effectively. As a theater critic, though, I am struck by the fact that Biden’s performance was more sincere, fluid and engaging. But I know that other theater critics, such as Peggy Noonan at that great theater review, the Wall Street Journal, with different politics, review the debate drama differently.

But theatrical performance, of course, is not really the issue. How the performance is defined by and helps define a script is. And this is why I think that not only did Biden win last night, but that Ryan and Romney lost. Their script is flawed, filled with contradictions about which they can’t, in the end, give persuasive account.

Their response to Obama’s foreign policy successes is to tell a story of weakness, of apology for America. They present a neo-conservative position, while not clearly identifying with the position as brought to us by Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld. They want to criticize Obama’s policies in North African and the Middle East, asserting the need for toughness. They criticize Obama for working through the United Nations, consulting with allies, dealing with Russia and China as they are, not as imagined Cold War enemies, but they have not presented alternative policies, which very well might not be popular. As Biden suggested: ground troops in Syria and a regional conflict, an international conflict in Iran with a global economic crisis, and continued American troops in Afghanistan.

On tax policy, Ryan claimed they had a plan but wouldn’t explain any details. Cut tax rates for the rich and middle class alike by twenty per cent, pay for it by closing loopholes and reducing deductions, with only the faintest hint of what would be closed and reduced. There’s a problem. Now Romney-Ryan want to claim that this will not affect the taxes of the middle class, but if it is born by the rich (oopps, I mean job creators), how would this lead to their supply side fantasies of an economic boom created by cutting taxes.

The Ryan plan of old was more about reducing the size of government and unleashing private entrepreneurship, unshackling individual creativity, advocating minimal government, his strong Randian inspired ideological streak, also the rallying cry of the Tea Party. Romney, the severe conservative, supported this during the Republican primaries and his choice of Ryan confirmed this support. Now the running mates are running away from this position, as is confirmed by both debates. Romney somehow pulled this off last week, a commanding performance. Ryan couldn’t.

Biden did his job. He has helped Obama by leveling the playing field for the next debate. Biden wins, and the campaign proceeds. I think with the advantage now turning in Obama’s favor.

We can call this first form of political fallibilism, as our sitting President has, self-conscious humility.  Jeff has highlighted what is good and worthy in this practice, especially when compared with strident ideological inflexibility. This argument has also been forcefully put forward in a long-standing controversy about the existence and nature of an “Obama Doctrine.” Some commentators approve of this policy, and others don’t; all agree that the Administration is trying, anyway, to strike a balance between “realism” and “idealism,” between Kissingerian realpolitik and George W. Bush’s “Freedom Agenda.” In other words, the Administration’s policy in Iraq, Afghanistan, and more recently (and more tortuously) in Libya, is all about recognizing political fallibilism, even if not always put expressly in those terms. More recently, over the past weeks, with the circus over the debt ceiling raging, and political leaders competing over who can use the words “imperfect” and “necessary” more often and in closer connection, we’ve seen the “domestic” side of this form of repudiating over-confidence with the uncertainty of political events. Whether at home or abroad, this form of political fallibilism is all about the recoginition of one’s limits. Not just the limits of one’s capacity to act under a certain constellation (such as not having limitless resources, not being able to “dictate” to other nations, or serving as chief executive during a period of divided government). But also, and more importantly, the limits of one’s ability to know the truth about matters that one must act upon. Who are the Libyan rebels? What might a post-Assad Syria look like? How many jobs will be created in the next 6, 9, 12, 18 months under this or that blend of interest rate lowering and/or stimulus spending?.

So far, I suppose, I do no more than provide some contextualization to Jeff’s thoughts, if I have succeeded in doing this much. However, without undercutting this form of political fallibilism, I want to point to a second, and I believe deeper form. To uncover it, we should remember the core convictions of (philosophical) fallibilism, as developed (among others) by the great American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. While easy to oversimplify, the heart of this epistemological position is not hard to briefly express. Let’s put it thus: it is neither true that there exists some knowledge claim that can be asserted with absolute certainty, nor is it true that every knowledge claim can be reasonably doubted. A fallibilist, in this sense, is someone who believes in the existence—and the importance—of what Plato’s Socrates calls “true opinion,” but also recognizes that both the subject who believes and the object of that belief are caught up in a developmental process: that all truth is historical. This does not commit one to the view that nothing is true, nor must one think that all beliefs are equally fallible. But it does mean seeing the fallibility as endemic to the possibility of knowledge, and not to the psychology of the knower, or the physical conditions of things to be known. One is not saying here, “I might be wrong about this, but…” Rather, one is saying, “I might very well be absolutely right about this, but even if I am, that about which I am right might very well not be what it is right at the moment. I might be right about it relatively soon.”

A classic example of this “structural fallibilism” is the perception of what Aristotle calls “common sensibles,” most infamously, perhaps, color.  The structural and the humble fallibilists both agree that there is no certain knowledge of color as such; while the humble fallibilist attributes this to the subjective conditions of the knowledge—that the senses err, that other minds perceive color differently than we do—the structural fallibilist says that what is actually “out there” to be perceived as color is context-dependent.  So to say, it’s not our “fault” that we will never perfectly perceive what’s “there,” it’s that, in a very real sense, there’s no “there” there.

And here we see, I think, a difference between the two forms. In the quote with which I began, Jeff—rightly, to my mind—underscored the deleterious role of “true belief” in undermining the possibility of the first form of political fallibilism: one cannot be ready to make political compromises (i.e., recognize the limits of one’s ability to act, responsibly) if one refuses from the outset to recognize the limits of one’s knowledge. At the same time, the second form of political fallibilism actually embraces “right opinion,” and calibrates one’s belief in that opinion not against the limited possibility for one to be right, but against the limited possibility for events to allow for being right. In both cases, one acknowledges fallibility.  The difference is that, while in the first instance, this is based on the certainty that one cannot infallibly assert their view, insofar as any view of things can be mistaken, in the second, one is rather certain that the object of their view is itself uncertain.  This is what makes fallibilism in the second sense an anti-skeptical position.

This second form of fallibilism has an analogue in the political arena. In place of the “humility” of the first form—which is still focused on the psychological and physical conditions of the knower who would act in public, the structural form puts before us the possibility of holding contradictory beliefs, while understanding them as bound within separate spheres. Humility-fallibilism leaves you saying something like: “It is my earnest conviction that, but…” Structural fallibilism provides the space to say: “Given that it is my earnest conviction that the United States can never stand by idly as dictators murder their own people in the streets, and that it is my earnest conviction that the United States cannot use military means to ensure that all people, everywhere, can live free of such indiscriminate violence, it is clear that one or the other of these two convictions will be violated when the decision is made to intervene militarily when a dictator decides to use indiscriminate force against unarmed citizens. All the same, I am going to act, confident that I can never know if events will vindicate my decision, but also that I have acted on the best of my knowledge.” Under this scenario, the fallibilist can embrace the uncertainty of political developments as an end, and not merely as a means, of the cultivation of open societies.

“The Remarks by the President in Address to the Nation on the End of Combat Operations in Iraq,” of August 31, 2010, was a speech by the head of state, addressed to a nation, about a momentous event.  The President had a responsibility to deliver the speech, and the Oval office was the place to deliver it.  The President had things to say that went beyond partisanship, as I tried to show yesterday.  He was applying his political philosophy to the task at hand, something he first did in his anti-war speech in 2002.  He fully presented his general position in his Nobel Laureate Acceptance Speech, most directly basing it on “just war theory.”  (see Michael Walzer’s book, Just and Unjust Wars) Sometime in the near future, I hope to post more on that, but today, after the last two posts on Obama on Iraq, we move from the consideration of the relationship between context and text, to the text of the speech itself.

The Speech beyond Cynicism

He opens by revealing the logic of the entire speech: “Tonight, I’d like to talk to you about the end of our combat mission in Iraq, the ongoing security challenges we face, and the need to rebuild our nation here at home,” and he then develops and applies the logic. We should note how clearly the speech develops the themes that were the basis of his anti war speech and how it is addressed to a broader audience, not only those who were against the war, but also those who favored it.

About Iraq, Obama is careful.  He focuses on the service and sacrifice of the American military, the defeat “of a regime that terrorized its people” and “the chance for a better future for Iraq,” and underscores that he is delivering on the promise, which he made as a candidate and which was officially agreed upon with the Iraqis, of American withdrawal from the war.  His language is subdued.  He notes accomplishments and dangers.  He addresses his audience as people of good will who are divided in their judgments about the war.

It is at this point he honors President Bush’s patriotism, as he notes that he and the former President disagreed about the war.  The clear message: we Americans were divided about initiating the War, but we are united in honoring the troops that fought the war and hoping that the outcome of the war will serve the interests of the Iraqi people, the region and the interests of the United States, and despite our past differences, we must move on to the challenges before us.

The transition sentence was important, even if it had the sound of cliché, “The greatness of our democracy is grounded in our ability to move beyond our differences, and to learn from our experience as we confront the many challenges ahead.   And no challenge is more essential to our security than our fight against Al Qaeda.”  The President is trying to focus the public on the immediate national security issue.  This is significant and newsworthy, although it was not generally picked up in the media, obsessed as they were about his body language, whether or not he would thank President Bush, apologize for his opposition to the surge, and whether the speech helped or hurt the Democratic Party’s prospects in the upcoming elections, etc.

Obama is defining and delimiting the war in Afghanistan as a war against Al Qaeda.  The tasks are to break the Taliban’s momentum and to prevent Afghanistan from serving again as a base for terrorism.  He justifies increased troop deployments there in these terms and the withdrawal of troops on the same terms.  Progress in Afghanistan and Iraq serve the broader task of peace in the broad region, he maintains, and thus mentions the upcoming negotiations between the Palestinians and Israelis.

Yet, his main argument concerns the condition of the nation at home: “Throughout our history, America has been willing to bear the burden of promoting liberty and human dignity overseas, understanding its links to our own liberty and security.  But we have also understood that our nation’s strength and influence abroad must be firmly anchored in our prosperity at home.  … Unfortunately, over the last decade, we’ve not done what’s necessary to shore up the foundations of our own prosperity.”

This is not just a chance transition.  In his first anti-war speech, he warned that the war in Iraq would lead to “undetermined consequences” at home.  The consequences are upon us, and Obama called on his fellow citizens to address them in his speech last week.   There is a need to address problems long neglected. “Our most urgent task is to restore our economy, and put the millions of Americans who have lost their jobs back to work.  To strengthen our middle class, we must give all our children the education they deserve, and all our workers the skills that they need to compete in a global economy.  We must jumpstart industries that create jobs, and end our dependence on foreign oil.  We must unleash the innovation that allows new products to roll off our assembly lines, and nurture the ideas that spring from our entrepreneurs.  This will be difficult.  But in the days to come, it must be our central mission as a people, and my central responsibility as President.”

Deliberate Conclusions

Certainly, there are differences concerning the pressing political and economic challenges of our day.  Certainly, Obama was positioning himself and his Party for making their case to the public in the coming elections.  But in the speech on the end of the combat mission in Iraq, the President was calling on the nation to again focus on challenges together, even as he understood that there will be different and competing ways to address the challenges.  He gave a speech as the Head of State to the Nation, unfortunately most commentators across the political spectrum missed this central point.