Facts Versus “Facts”

I’m sick of Sarah Palin stories. The Republican base doesn’t really care what the truth is about her, they just want somebody in the White House who has a sidekick they’d like to sit next to at a church potluck and who likes to put down Democrats with nasty little asides as much as they do. Ultimately, Palin’s not going to win or lose the election; McCain and Obama are the names people will vote for, or against.

Meanwhile, the undecided folks must be listening to their guts rather than to the facts, or they’d have made their minds up months ago.

Facts don’t seem to sway undecided voters much; you can’t get through to them with mile-long lists of concrete examples of why Republicans’ policies are dangerous to the country (and planet) in general or how Republican administrations work against the interests of individual families in particular because undecided voters don’t get their opinions from weighing facts. You can give them all the policy lists you want; they don’t seem to care.

I keep seeing articles, speeches, open letters and snarky asides by people like The Vagina Monologues’ creator Eve Ensler and Barbra Streisand, celebrities positively brimming over with virtuous liberal outrage. Eve Ensler’s piece in the Huffington Post has a number of salient points, but from the outset the tone of the article is embarrassing:

“I am having Sarah Palin nightmares. I dreamt last night that she was a member of a club where they rode snowmobiles and wore the claws of drowned and starved polar bears around their necks. I have a particular thing for Polar Bears. Maybe it’s their snowy whiteness or their bigness or the fact that they live in the arctic or that I have never seen one in person or touched one. Maybe it is the fact that they live so comfortably on ice. Whatever it is, I need the polar bears.”

The content is presented in a painfully personal and emotional way that has nothing to do the the main point of the article. Well, yes, it does—the article, like all of Ensler’s writing, is esssentially about her. I’m sure she felt it was her powerful contribution to the national dialog, yet everything she writes is ultimately about her. Many women have found her writing refreshing and empowering; it has helped them feel less shame in their bodies and more pride in being women. That’s valuable and her success in this area is laudable. But I have always found her to be a showboater whose work inevitably revolves around herself. She displays an earnest confidence that the basis of all her beliefs is some unassailable deep wellspring of eternal womynpower and magical vaginally derived wisdom. To question either her insights or her way of expressing them is to be a repressed, self-loathing misogynist in the eyes of her ardent followers, many of whom have an unfortunate tendency to overlay logical and compassionate humanistic feminism with a gauzy scrim of mystical yoni-fetishizing self-importance. I find a self-absorption in her writing that masquerades as deep wisdom.

Streisand’s insulting and sometimes vulgar comments and songs attacking Republicans at her concerts and rallies are so unfortunate. She’s a bright, well-read, articulate woman whose website offers lots of good fact-based reasons to support Democrats, but her arrogant, insulting personal commentaries just make her look snotty and elitist to those who aren’t already party regulars. They’re just as snarky, ugly and personal as Palin’s sneering, smarmy antics and they don’t do our candidates or our party any good, as far as I can see.

People like Ensler and Streisand preach to the choir and put off the people who think of themselves as “real Americans” and down-to-earth people who don’t want to be intimidated by their leaders or told how to think by rich, famous women who believe finding 100 ways to shout “Vagina!” in public makes them freer, more powerful and more authentic than people who would rather not find even one way to say it in public, thank you very much.

In contrast, I thought this article by Primary Colors author Joe Klein in Time magazine was excellent. While it does point out that McCain’s “facts” are often not factual, and it gives concrete examples of his mendacity, the main thrust of the article is that McCain lies knowingly and repeatedly. This is the kind of writing that I believe could persuade undecided voters better than all the personal invective and sexist ad hominem attacks I’m seeing against Palin combined with the well-research investigative reporting and detailed facts published in Slate and Salon and the New York Times. (But I do wish more people would read fact-based articles like this one by Michael Kinsley on why Democratic leadership is better for the economy than Republican leadership.)

Articles like Joe Klein’s are more effective in wooing the mushy middle than the bitter, I-know-better-than-you-do, sisterhood-is-powerful diatribes by angry women who give feminists like me a bad name. Millions of people want just enough facts (or even “facts” like Obama being a secret crackhead Muslim with ties to Al Qaeda) to help them decide which candidate makes them feel more comfortable inside. We Democrats want to think that we’re above all that, but I’m seeing an awful lot of pouty articles and letters trashing Sarah Palin personally and dripping with sarcasm and invective rather than pointing out the stuff that makes an actual difference.

Which presidential candidate will do more to make our economy more robust, our soldiers safer and the international community less like to hate us enough to kill us? Who will do more to expand international and national liberty and justice? Which senator will likely do more to expand healthcare coverage to more people? Who will continue his policy of supporting the erosion of our civil liberties and disrespecting women’s rights to determine the fate of their own bodies? Which party tries to push gay people back into the closet and pretends that underpaid immigrants aren’t the backbone of our farming and construction industries?

Which candidate has a lifelong history of acting without thinking beforehand? Who is so brilliant that he was the editor of the Harvard Law Review and knows the constitution so well that he teaches law students about it? And who graduated near the bottom of his class at West Point, earned so many demerits there that he was on the verge of expulsion (but was saved because his father was an admiral), married his mistress and became embroiled in one of the biggest government ethics scandals of the last 25 years?

Who cares?

Okay, you and I do, but millions of Americans don’t. So we need to focus on getting just enough facts out there to get the skittish people in the center to feel safer and more comfortable voting for Obama if we want this country to have any chance of redeeming itself in the eyes of the world and in the eyes of its citizens. Too many facts and these busy, tired, frustrated people’s eyes will glaze over. They need us to get to the point.

When just enough facts are gathered together to support a gut feeling that people can feel okay about, they’ll go that way. We need more mainstream, middle-of-the-road publications like Time magazine pointing out the truths that elicit strong gut feelings with pithy articles like this one by Joe Klein. Enough whining and pouting and invective! People are won over by good feelings and scared away by amorphous fears. Shine a light on the fears; face them and dispell them. There’s a place for long diatribes and carefully researched backstory, yes, but we need to focus on positive, pithy truths that make people feel good. Less Barbra, more James Brown!