#indecision 2004

Jon Stewart on C-SPAN Presidential Politics, October 2004

Jon Stewart - The Daily Show: Indecision 2000 | 2000 Peabody Award Acceptance Speech

Jon Stewart - The Daily Show: Indecision 2004 | 2004 Peabody Award Acceptance Speech

It’s not as though I was particularly left-wing at the time.  Although all of my instincts compelled me to side with the left on most issues, particularly social ones, I was trying my hardest to be a centrist.  (It’s somewhat parallel to the way I vocally identified as “agnostic” at the time while denouncing atheism for being too certain, even though for all means and purposes I was more or less an atheist.)   This in itself is telling.   On the meta level, I felt the need to recognize that there are two sides to everything and that avoiding tribalism was of the greatest importance.  And I was attracted to John Kerry because I felt that his rhetoric exemplified exactly that.  Yes he was liberal but not particularly so -- he seemed more focused on showing that there were other sides to the issues on which Bush had strong convictions.  The allegation from the Bush camp that Kerry was a serial “flip-flopper” came across as an inability to appreciate that Kerry was able to see multiple sides of issues and therefore highlighted my favorite thing about him.  (Nowadays my view of him is slightly more cynical; while I still believe that he was generally sincere and held consistent beliefs, it’s clear to me that he was shrewd about pandering to different groups of people.)  Kerry was the very personification of my high-school-age rationalist sensibilities.

Meanwhile, Bush logic seemed to be a mess of pigheaded strong convictions for the sake of having strong convictions and claims that any vocal opposition amounted to “sending mixed messages to our troops”, which was clearly more important to him than open-mindedly seeking the truth on object-level issues regarding the war.  This is an instance of what I now call “conflating object and meta levels”, and although I didn’t have the vocabulary to describe it as such at the time, that fallacy was definitely a well-established Thing in my mind from personal conflicts I had with other people and for the first time I was observing a blatant example of it on the national political stage.  And of course it didn’t help that the Bush side was the one which promoted a religion-inspired social worldview while I was beginning to actively oppose religion as irrational.

(Heck, there was even a point in one of the debates where Kerry was defending his vote against a bill banning partial birth abortion.  He said he was against partial birth abortion in general but voted against the bill because it didn’t include exceptions for when the mother’s health was in danger.  He even said something like, “It’s not actually that simple.”  Bush’s “rebuttal” amounted to “Look, my opponent voted against banning partial birth abortions and I voted for it.  That’s all that matters, end of story.”  I’m not paraphrasing that liberally here.  I had actually forgotten about this exchange in intervening years and when I watched it again the other day even I couldn’t believe that Bush’s black-and-white-style rhetoric was that blatant.)

For instance, the campaign slogan of “Make America Great Again” has been criticized as unpatriotic (which in principal should imply that it’s criticizing what America is rather than its current actions), although of course the intent behind it is to say that things have been getting worse in America and we need a different direction.  This is not unlike the Kerry/Edwards campaign slogan in 2004 of “America Can Do Better”.  Similarly, the “African-Americans are living in hell” assertion (I’m trying to quote from memory) is blasted for sounding disparaging towards black people, while at least the purported message behind it is that things are getting worse for black people.  Both claims imply support for the desired ends but opposition to the current mode of execution for reaching them.

Then we have the controversy around that same campaign’s praise of Putin, where they say that Putin is a much stronger leader and so forth than Obama is.  This seems to be based on what seems to me like vaguely the same sort of misunderstanding.  But this time the quote is meant to indicate support for the means to certain ends (Putin’s strong leadership behavior) in spite of implied opposition to those ends (Putin’s values).