by John Mark Reynolds [author, academic]

On the Need to Bluff

Good campaigners rely on “talking points.” That drives those of us with academic backgrounds crazy. We hear the same message day-after-day and want more. Sadly, if the candidate is foolish enough to give us more, he or she will display the fact that nobody knows much about everything. He or she will display some ignorance or shallow ideas and then the other side will pounce.

Sad to say, but so it has been and so it ever shall be. There is no reason to think McCain, Obama, Palin, and Biden are not smart enough to do the job. Unless they plan dispensing with a cabinet or have shown they will not listen to their aides, they will get the knowledge they need to govern. For some reason in our republic, however, we like the impression that our candidates are all knowing.

There is no good way to discern what the right balance is in “knowledge” in making a successful president, but voters have shown they want the appearance of knowledge.

So all candidates “bluff,” but some candidates get the reputation for being “smart” while they bluff and others do not. The key to bluffing the mainstream media is to sound like a pundit’s idea of an academic. If you don’t, then you run the risk of being considered dangerously stupid or ill informed . . . like Ronald Reagan was.

On Being a Smart Candidate in Pundit Eyes

Reagan often gave straightforward answers to direct questions. Sometimes these got him in trouble as he would reveal a wrong idea, a bad anecdote, or views that were not in the mainstream. He also got the (undeserved) reputation as an intellectual lightweight. His witty replies were counted against him.

On the other hand, some candidates like Adlai Stevenson gain an undeserved reputation for intellectual depth. His witty retorts were taken as signs of his profundity. Stevenson was no deep thinker, but he talked like the media’s idea of what an intellectual sounds like. The fact that he was obviously not smarter than the commander of the D-Day invasion did not matter. Ike was the dunderhead and Adlai the “thinking man’s candidate.”

I teach bright students (very bright students) every day in seminars where I ask questions so hard that they make Charlie Gibson look kind. You soon learn there is a “clever” type of bluffer in any seminar room. He notices that saying what he really thinks often shows that what he really thinks is silly or wrong. This of course might lead to actual learning, but it also could cause him to lose status. He learns, therefore, to bluff as if he knows something that he does not. Eventually, in a good educational program this bluffing is exposed, but in politics it rarely is.

The “grilling” only lasts a few minutes in politics so a good academic bluffer is rarely caught in politics. Such a person is often given credit for insane amounts of knowledge, but need know little.

Not Everyone Should Try This Strategy

Nor can just any candidate follow this strategy (which I will soon reveal) . . . if one goes to Harvard (or any other “good school”) and uses the strategy of asking the questioner to “clarify the question” then one will get points for being thoughtful and careful. If one went to State U and tries this strategy, it will be assumed the questioner does not know anything at all and is trying to bluff.

People with strong regional accents (especially Southern people) should never try an academic bluff. However smart Bill Clinton was (and he was an academic for good and bad), he could not shake the Arkansas stereotypes. He was very, very smart, and got credit for it (it was impossible to ignore), but this was always done with a bit of a sneer (on the right and the left) because of his accent and roots.

Academic bluffing generally requires the right accent and the right pedigree. Do not, therefore, try this at home unless you are in the right class.

I am NOT critical of candidates bluffing sometimes. Every candidate must bluff when he or she is forced off his or her talking points. The real glory in this strategy is that sometimes academic bluffing will be considered smarter than giving true, but short straightforward answers that are not “deep!” Pundits will admire your bluff as a sign of intelligence (read: having learned to bluff in a seminar room and not on a fishing boat).

You can actually know less than your opponent and get by!

A Text From Which To Learn Academic Bluffing

Now assuming you have the right accent and pedigree to use it, let us begin the process of learning the academic bluff. We will begin with a masterful example from Senator Obama about the “Obama Doctrine”:

SIEGEL: Senator Obama, the short version of the Obama Doctrine.

SEN. OBAMA: Well, I think one of the things about the Obama Doctrine is it’s not going to be as doctrinaire as the Bush Doctrine because the world is complicated. And I think part of the problem we’ve had is that ideology has overridden facts and reality.

But I think that the basic concept — and I’ve heard it from some of the other folks — is that, increasingly, we have to view our security in terms of a common security and a common prosperity with other peoples and other countries. And that means that if there are children in the Middle East who cannot read, that is a potential long-term danger to us. If China is polluting, then eventually that is going to reach our shores. We have to — and work with them cooperatively to solve their problems as well as ours.

In the cold glow of my computer screen, without the aura of the candidate, this is obviously a fatuous answer, and as “bluff ridden” as anything Palin has ever said in a tight corner, but it exudes “smart” so it flies under the radar. People are not likely to question Senator Obama (in the media) about whether this answer reveals that he doesn’t actually have a thought out policy. It sounds like he does.* Looking at it I was able to see ten things that Senator Obama does as well as anyone ever has in politics . . . the academic bluff.

The Ten Rules

What are the Ten Rules to the Academic Bluff for Politicians (which will not set off pundit alarms about your smarts):

1. Never answer a question directly if you can avoid it.

2. Always rephrase or repeat the question using the terms found in the question at the start of your response.

3. As you are setting up your soon to come answer, use words like “subtle” and “complex” to describe the problem.

4. Compare your coming “subtle” answer with the “unsubtle” view of your foe.

5. At this point, you might be able to work in regret that you have run out of time and can stop. Do this as soon as you can. If you have a compliant interviewer, you can set up the question for a long time and then stop. You have survived the question without saying a thing! You will be given points for how your complexity cannot be fit in a brief video clip. You are now officially “deep.” You will make the interviewer feel cheap and shallow and lucky to have been able to partake in a moment of your constant First-Mover-like internal monologue.

6. Learn academic noises (”hmm. . . .”) that take a great deal of time off the clock while giving the appearance of thinking. (Don’t make the McCain “mistake” at Saddleback of actually answering questions . . . this goes quickly and leaves your interviewer time to ask more potential stumpers.)

7. Cite books and smart people you have read or consulted, but do NOT mention who they are. Have one all purpose book or person to use as an example . . . and when pressed to give an example, keep talking about that book or example until you run out of time.

8. Work in other issues (pollution in China) and connect them. If you have kept your earlier framing of the issue vague enough, you can make a quick connection that actually changes the subject. If pressed on global security, on which you might know less than you fear people want you to know (often unreasonably), this is a great strategy. You can say, “Pollution impacts us all. It is a global security problem.” Actually, it isn’t really (in the context security does not mean that), but it will get you points as a person who can connect Big Ideas on the fly!

9. If you are going to use no facts in your answer, use the word “facts.” Talking about facts is a great way to avoid mentioning any.

10. Leave your audience with the sense that you are “still in process.” Keep clarifying the question and expanding its scope until you run out of time. (Look at the quote above and tell me what the Obama doctrine actually is.) You will sound as if you had so much more wisdom to share, but the demands of commercials (darn it!) cut you off.

Joe Biden is a master of this if you are looking for another good teacher, but he is not Senator Obama’s equal since he often says bizarre things while filibustering.

The Problem With the Technique

The difficulty with this strategy is obvious: you will win the pundit’s respect and lose the voter’s. (You gain the bonus liability of having your pet pundits proclaim that rejecting you shows the public is puerile. That always helps in the electoral college!)

Pundits on both the right and the left will be more likely to think you “ready for office” and gaffes will get a discount. (”He is too smart to have meant that stupid thing.”) You will be King of Sunday Morning Talk Shows for life.

You are also, almost surely, an election night loser.

Why?

People like my dearly departed grandmother Nana could see through an academic bluffer in a minute. She did not understand the academic subculture, but she knew when someone wasn’t answering a question. She had more respect for a weak or even wrong answer honestly given (see Reagan), than a bluff.

People like Nana, the folks, know when they are being bluffed in this way and it irritates them. Sadly for the academic bluffer, there are more grandmothers than pundits in the voting booth. Academic bluffing is, therefore, a bad tool in a presidential race.

——-

*I am not trying to be unfair to Senator Obama. Academic bluffing is a valuable, though dangerous, political skill. At a presidential level, it may be fatal when deployed if the other side catches up with you (as they will).

None of that hits at Senator Obama’s competence to be President.

He is smart and has hundreds (literally) of foreign policy advisers. He will distill what they tell him and make decisions when he is President, if he becomes President. He is not a foreign policy expert . . . neither is Palin (who is after all running for Vice President), but he sounds comfortingly “academic” (while not saying much) to media while Palin does not. As far as I can tell, both are more than smart enough to be President (looking at previous successful candidates). ExileStreet

copyright 2008 John Mark Reynolds

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 18th, 2008 at 1:06 am and is filed under Reynolds. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.