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By Root 1010 0

of Americans who supported the war at its outset in 2003, fully half had withdrawn that support by 2007. In the intervening years, after all, new information had become available to the public, the on-the-ground situation in Iraq had changed, and the credibility of the Bush Administration had waned. The hope that we were bringing a better life to the Iraqi people had grown increasingly difficult to sustain. And the cost of the war—in literal dollars, human lives, and America’s diminished moral status in the international community—had far exceeded anything anyone could have imagined on the day in 2003 that Bush declared “Mission Accomplished.” Surely, then, this was a situation that merited the high-minded if somewhat sneering riposte of John Maynard Keynes: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”

Keynes’s policy is a good one. But, like Kerry’s U-turns, it is at odds with an enduring and troubling feature of our political culture. In politics, staying the course is admired (and changing direction is denigrated) intrinsically—that is, without regard to where the course itself might lead. As the late renowned military historian Barbara Tuchman observed, “to recognize error, to cut losses, to alter course, is the most repugnant option in government.” This is Hamlet all over again: we notice the uncertainty, hesitations, and reversals without noticing (or caring) what inspired them. No matter how merited doubt and admissions of error might be, we loathe them in our political leaders, and associate them—inaccurately, but indissolubly—with weakness.

Before some readers take umbrage, let me acknowledge that this is an excessively broad use of the word “we.” It’s true that the allure of certainty is potent and, in one form or another, near-universal. And it’s also true that, in the mass marketplace of attraction, the crowds tend to form around those who exude conviction. But it doesn’t follow that all of us admire certainty and abhor doubt (or that any of us have a straightforward relationship to either of them). On the contrary, and as the Bush-Kerry contest suggests, some people are rendered as acutely uncomfortable by ardent conviction as others are by indecision.

Still, even the doubt-tolerant have their breaking point. Public opinion might have been divided about George Bush and John Kerry in 2004, and about John McCain and Barack Obama in 2008, but on one issue, at least, we enjoyed almost complete unanimity: we all despised the undecided voter. Even the treatment the far left and far right accorded to their respective nemeses seemed positively respectful compared to the hatred, contempt, and mockery aimed at the undecideds. Two examples, both culled from the 2008 election, will suffice to illustrate the point. On the Daily Show, Jon Stewart presented a pie chart that divided undecided voters into four equally unflattering categories: “attention seekers; racist Democrats; the chronically insecure; and the stupid.” A few weeks later, the humorist David Sedaris wrote what became an instantly famous New Yorker article in which he imagined the following situation transpiring on an airplane. “The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. ‘Can I interest you in the chicken?’ she asks. ‘Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?’ To be undecided in this election,” Sedaris wrote, “is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.”

This is the undecided voter in the popular consciousness: needy, insecure, ideologically unpalatable, moronic, and incapable of choosing between chicken and shit—i.e., a chickenshit. Just what is it, exactly, that gets us so worked up about these people? One possibility—a reasonable and, I think, partially accurate one—is that we fear and despise uncertainty in the electorate for the same reason we fear and despise it in the elected. If we rely on our political leaders to make important decisions every day, we rely on our fellow voters to make a particularly important decision