Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [87]
Better still, some of our own doubt is alleviated by following a confident leader—because, as it happens, other people’s certainty makes us feel certain. As social psychologists can tell you, both doubt and certainty are as contagious as the common cold: all else being equal, our own confidence increases around people who radiate assurance, and our own doubts flare up around the hesitant. It’s no surprise, then, that in politics (as in business, the military, and the sixth-grade student council), we typically anoint the ultraconfident to lead us. William Hirstein even suggests that, when it comes to those in power, we often feel that “an answer that is possibly (or even probably) wrong is better than none at all.” Translation: we are more alarmed by leaders who waver than by those who screw up.*
This brings us, of course, to John Kerry. Specifically, it brings us to the 2004 election, which pitted Kerry against then-incumbent George W. Bush—truly one of history’s finer examples of a contest between a man who wavered and a man who screwed up. On the one side was Kerry, who fought a war he subsequently repudiated and funded a war he previously denounced—two reasons, although not the only two, that the right painted him as a tergiversator. On the other side was Bush, who framed complex geopolitical issues in black and white and brooked no challenges to his opinions—two reasons, although not the only two, that the left painted him as autocratic and dangerously unsophisticated. In a sense, the infamous polarization of the 2004 electorate could be boiled down to this: voters who were disquieted by changes of mind versus voters who were disquieted by impermeable conviction.
Accusing your opponent of changing his mind is, I will grant, a standard move in the playbook of American politics. But in John Kerry’s case, that accusation was the playbook. It wasn’t just his altered stances on Vietnam and Iraq that attracted criticism. Kerry’s detractors also charged him with vacillating on the death penalty, welfare reform, social security, gay marriage, affirmative action, the Patriot Act, and No Child Left Behind, among others. To give you a sense of the tenor of the election season, William Safire, the “On Language” columnist for the New York Times Magazine, took on the phrases “wishy-washy,” “waffle,” and “flip-flop,” all between March and October of 2004.† Jay Leno proposed two possible slogans for the Kerry campaign: “A mind is a terrible thing to make up,” and “Undecided voters—I’m just like you!” During the Republican Convention, delegates took to doing a kind of side-to-side stadium wave whenever Kerry’s name was mentioned: a visual waffle (or call it a waver). For ten bucks, you could purchase a pair of actual flip-flops—the footwear, I mean—with Kerry’s face on them. Or you could sport anti-Kerry campaign buttons featuring pictures of waffles or of Heinz ketchup bottles—the latter being an oblique reference to his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, and a direct reference to his supposed indecisiveness: “57 positions on every issue.”
Some of the allegations of waffling leveled against Kerry were bogus—such as the suggestion that serving in Vietnam is incompatible with viewing it as a moral and political disaster. Others were legitimate—such as the claim that he changed his mind on mandatory minimum sentences not out of a principled reconsideration of the issues but because of standard “tough on crime” political pressure. But the validity (or lack thereof) of these charges isn’t the point. It never was. In our political culture, whether or not a leader has good reasons for changing his mind is generally less important than the fact that he changed it in the first place.
Take John Kerry’s much-ridiculed assertion that he was for the Iraq War before he was against it. Now, there is a case to be made that this was a perfectly legitimate political trajectory to traverse. Almost all of us know people who underwent a comparable change of heart. And many of us are such people: of the 76 percent