The Roving Psychologist

The Peacemaker

John D. Gartner, Ph.D. — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 13:48:20 +0000

When Hillary Clinton was running for president she said she would use her husband Bill as a "roving ambassador." It was a good idea then, and it's a good idea now. Former president Clinton, whose visit to North Korea won the freedom of two captured American journalists, may be the most prolific peacemaker of all time. Most remember the handshake between Rabin and Arafat on the White House lawn (Clinton, standing between the two men, physically pushed them together), and some recall that he brought peace to Northern Ireland and stopped the genocide in Bosnia, but few have any idea how ubiquitous a force for peace the Clinton really was. During his presidency Clinton appointed an unprecedented fifty-five special envoys to virtually every troubled region in the world. He helped avoid nuclear war between India and Pakistan and worked to reduce tensions between Greece and Turkey. He also played a central role in resolving lesser known conflicts, for example, helping to negotiate an end to the disputes between Peru and Ecuador, and between Eritrea and Ethiopia. Anywhere on planet earth where there was conflict, the hypomanic Clinton was personally involved performing some kind of intervention.

And in the final years of his presidency, the former president yearned to travel to North Korea to clinch a deal that would have curbed its nuclear program. He simply ran out of time, and relations between America and North Korea have steadily deteriorated since he left office.

Clinton's unique ability in this area is rooted in his psychology. Because he played the role of peacemaker in his troubled alcoholic family, it is a role he is driven to perform. He physically stopped his step-father from beating his mother, but never lost empathy for the man who he had every reason to hate. Even as a child, Clinton was known to routinely break up school yard fights as early as kindergarten.

As part of the research for my book, In Search of Bill Clinton, I traveled to Northern Ireland where I met with most of the players in the Irish peace process, as well as speaking to the senior official in the Clinton administration involved in the negotiations. Clinton's natural intelligence, curiosity, and empathy gives give him an almost uncanny natural ability to master the details of every local conflict and makes people on all sides feel that he both cares about them and "gets it." His capacity to form relationships with people who were deemed unreachable is profound. All agreed that he charmed them, understood them, and made them feel he cared—even the Unionists, who had every reason to hate him believing he was sympathetic to the Catholic cause because he needed the American Irish Catholic vote.

To give themselves plausible deniability, the Obama administration has described this as a private mission, and emphasized it was "100 percent about the journalists." But The New York Times said the visit "opened a diplomatic channel to North Korea's reclusive government." Korean state-run media described the three-hour talk with Kim Jong il as "wide-ranging." Anyone who has spent time with Clinton will tell you he is incapable of having a conversation which is not wide-ranging (and long-winded). "It would be someplace between surprising and shocking if there wasn't some substantive discussion," said Robert L. Gallucci, who negotiated with North Korea in the Clinton administration. It is no accident that Kim Jong Il sent his top nuclear negotiator to meet Clinton at the airport.

Can the world's most seductive man connect with one of the world's most paranoid leaders? If he can't do it, nobody can. What role, if any, Bill Clinton will play in the Obama administration has been an open question. But Obama, who has shown he is not afraid to work with a team of rivals, has smartly chosen Bill to do what Bill does best.

John Gartner, Ph.D. is author of In Search of Bill Clinton: A Psychological Biography and part time assistant professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins.

The Amazing Emanuel Brothers

John D. Gartner, Ph.D. — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 11:25:36 +0000

My study of Rahm Emanuel, "Hothead of State" appears in the July/August issue of Psychology Today. For reasons of space, some material was omitted, and so I am including on my blog some aspects I would have likes to have covered in more depth.

If anybody wanted to study a natural experiment in what makes success, they might consider studying the Emanuel brothers. It is exceedingly rare to find a family with three uber successful brothers, each of whom has reached the pinnacle of their respective fields. Rahm is Barack Obama's chief of staff. Ari is Hollywood's top talent agent and the inspiration for Ari Gold the "manic barracuda" agent in Entourage. And Zeke is a physician who advises the president on healthcare and may be on the short list for a Nobel Prize.

What interested me in the Emanuel brothers at first is that they all seem to have hypomanic temperaments, a mildly manic disposition that I have linked to success in my books, The Hypomanic Edge: the Link Between (a Little) Craziness and (a Lot of) Success in America and In Search of Bill Clinton: A Psychological Biography. I have found that super successful people often have energy, drive, confidence, creativity and charisma, as well as the restlessness, impatience, irritability and impulsivity that comes with being just a little bit manic as a stable trait.

The "hyperkinetic Emanuel brothers" have been overly active since birth. The family was forced to move from their second floor apartment because of the noise their commotion created. "We were the vilder chaiah of the block," Zeke said, using the Yiddish term for "wild animal." And they are still that way as adults. In her New York Times profile of the three brothers Elisabeth Bumiller wrote "They're all intense, pugnacious, and in perpetual motion," their inability to be still evidenced by the fact that "At one point, all three brothers, apparently unknowingly, are jiggling in unison;" And she noted, they all have a diminished need for sleep: "All three get up before dawn." In particular the brothers are known for their combativeness. We could call them the fighting Emanuel brothers. Since birth, these brothers have shared a high energy temperament that includes strong aggressive drives. When the three brothers discussed their relationship on the Charlie Rose show, Rahm said "We're all very aggressive," To which Ari replied, "The aggression is in our DNA."

However, what started as a simple case study in hypomania in a successful family became much more interesting as I progressed in my research. It was the interaction of nature and nurture that produced these three remarkable brothers. While it seems that they came from an unremarkable middle class Jewish family, something very remarkable happened. The parents were very supportive of their talents and interest-but that's not so unusual. Virtually every member of the Emanuel family tree is a rebel or revolutionary in the service of some cause-more so than most Jewish families, though this too is not uncommon. The Emanuel family was one where aggression was modeled and tolerated but integrated within loving relationships, as symbolized by the Emanuel family dinner table where debate was "gladiatorial," but in the spirit of a friendly "Talmudic debate." With an Israeli immigrant father, they all had the typical ambition of the immigrant family. But even together these factors would not predict the Emanuel brothers amazing success.

I began to think of Darwin's observations of the Galapagos Islands. Darwin noted that when a gene pool was isolated, weird mutations are more able to take hold because the new genes are not so easily diluted by the general gene pool. Evolutionists who study man's origins believe the modern human was born in a small isolated community of hominids in East Africa, whose very isolation allowed their helpful mutations to quickly become expressed by the entire small population.

The Emanuel family was similarly isolated. At first they lived in a lower middle class neighborhood where they were virtually the only Jewish family, and later in a suburb where they also stood out as different being the only ultra-liberals. They recall being the only children in their large high school who wore black armbands when Martin Luther King was killed. Their mother was a civil rights worker who took them to rallies and often got arrested.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the Emanuel story is the unusually close relationship between the three brothers. They were stuck with each other, and left to their own devices, with little in the way of toys, "We occupied ourselves more with imagination than things," said Zeke. The small room they shared became "a fort, a pirate ship." The brothers spent most summers in Israel with no structured activities. "We just did things together: hung out at the beach, went fishing, played soccer." Only one of those summers were they enrolled in camp. They "pitched a fit" when assigned to different bunks and got their own room which became the "camp social club." "We were a unit." There was "a lot of competition, a lot of bloodshed, plenty of fights" between the brothers, said Zeke. But they have also had a deeper bond that has transcended and contained their aggression. Loving and competitive feeling were integrated in this tri-filial relationship.

While most gifted high energy kids must deal with the confusing feelings that come with being different, they had their own subculture, their own peer group. "Each Emanuel brother derives a large part of his identity from that of the others. No one else, it seemed, mattered as much," wrote Elisabeth Bumiller. Like the X-Men at the mutant academy, the brothers felt normal in one another's presence, and could be themselves with a vengeance.

The brothers have developed their own culture and even their own language. They still talk every day but it's not what most people would call a conversation-more like high speed shorthand with "no real verbs or adjectives or connecting words," according to Rahm.

One of Freud's great insights was that childhood relationships become templates for adult relationships. Rahm's capacity for good relationships with other hard driving alpha males and females is a major asset in Washington. The middle child, he knows all the fraternal positions.

Rahm knows how to be a good big brother: Though he pushes his teams relentlessly (Gotta shake ‘em up," he says) , according to Axelrod, most of his people "would walk through walls for him." Perhaps because they also know he cares about them. He is "amazingly sensitive to his staff's private concerns and family problems," said Sabato.

Rahm also knows how to be a good middle brother. He has maintained surprisingly close working relationships with his peers, the other senior political advisors from the Clinton Whitehouse, Paul Begala, James Carville and George Stephanopoulos. It was recently revealed that the four men have spoken on the phone almost every day since 1992. Like the three brothers, they use rapid clipped phrases, typically without hellos or goodbyes. "I refer to it as the 17-year-long conference call," Rahm said.

And finally, Rahm knows how to be a good little brother, which may explain the unusually intimate chemistry that has already developed between Obama and Emanuel, an asset which may have as big an effect on Emanuel's effectiveness in his new job as his ability to refrain from shouting or cursing. "In meetings, it is not uncommon for Mr. Obama and Mr. Emanuel to engage in teasing banter," wrote Leibovich. When Obama complained during a meeting that Emanuel's knuckle cracking was distracting him, Emanuel stood up and held "the offending knuckle" to Obama's ear and "like an annoying little brother, snapped off a few special cracks." It's not that he doesn't recognize Obama's dominance. "He still comes to attention when Obama enters the room," Leibovich told me. But like an annoying younger brother, he must playfully challenge his boss, which elicits in Obama the indulgent teasing attitude of an older brother. When Emanuel received a call from Steny Hoyer, Emanuel proclaimed he was too busy to talk, and handed the phone to the President sitting next to him in the limo. Obama jokingly said he was, "always happy to take calls for his chief of staff."

While some presidents might take offense at such irreverence, Obama, with his team-of-rivals approach, has shown a confident capacity to work with strong personalities. "Obama values truth telling and bluntness" and he "has a lot of loving-teasing relationships," Leibovich said. "The Emanuel dinner table represents his idealized cabinet meeting."

America's undiplomatic top diplomat

John D. Gartner, Ph.D. — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 13:19:31 +0000

“Hillary Rodham Clinton's blunt and unadorned style of diplomacy has been evident throughout her first trip as secretary of state the past week in Asia. She questioned the efficacy of sanctions against the repressive junta in Burma, spoke openly about a possible succession crisis in North Korea and admitted that she expected to make little progress on human rights in China” wrote the Washington Post. As the Post reports, Clinton’s unvarnished honesty offended some, especially those who believe we must keep up the rhetorical pressure on China in the area of human rights.

However, the truth is, and this has been the truth for a long time, America is not about to jeopardize its relationship with one of our top trading partners, especially in these perilous economic times, over an issue that China simply refuse to budge on.Normally, when dealing with China, America talks tough on human rights, and then quietly goes to work on bread and butter economic issues. What was unusual was that Clinton was honest enough to acknowledge what has been our defacto policy since Nixon. It was particularly surprising (and upsetting) to some coming from Hillary, who has been outspoken advocate of human rights, especially women’s rights.

While Hillary has developed a reputation in the press for being a schemer, even a “congenital liar,” as the New York Times’ William Safire famously put it, the truth is the diametric opposite. She is frank to a fault and always has been. Her specious reputation as a dissembler grew during the politically motivated Whitewater investigation led by Ken Starr. While most Americans recall her being hauled before a grand jury by Starr, few know that the special prosecutors final report vindicated both Clintons completely on Whitewater. The truth about Whitewater was exactly what the Clinton claimed all along: They gave their money to a con man and got taken, period.But their exoneration was given all the attention of a retraction found on page 13 of a newspaper, after years of front page stories about the faux scandal.

If you knew Hillary, her impolitic honesty would be no surprise. I have interviewed dozens of people who have known Hillary for decades. “She tells it like it is, and she’ll give it to you right between the eyes,” one old friend told me, laughing and shaking her head. In my many conversations there was complete consensus on this point. Especially in a state like Arkansas, where politeness is at a premium, her take-no-prisoners bluntness stood out.

Unlike Bill who, because of hypomanic temperament, often says what he thinks in an impulsive outburst he later regrets, Hillary means to say what she says and never apologizes for it. She is formidable, tough and intimidating. She is also pragmatic, hence her real politic statement about China. Are these good traits in our top diplomat? I don’t know. We’ll find out. But honesty, strength and pragmatism are a powerful combination.With Hillary that’s what we’ll get whether you like it or not.No surprises.

John Gartner, Ph.D., is the author of the book, In Search of Bill Clinton: A Psychological Biography

What to do with Bill?

John D. Gartner, Ph.D. — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 16:15:09 +0000

It's stunning how fast Bill Clinton's stock plummeted - faster, it seemed, than the Dow Jones industrial average after the fall of Lehman Brothers. When Hillary Clinton launched her bid for the presidency, the question was: How would she deploy "the greatest politician in our generation"? Unfortunately, a few ill-timed comments caught on tape during the campaign transformed Bill almost overnight into the crazy uncle in the attic, an embarrassment to be kept largely out of public sight.

Early in her campaign, Hillary called Bill "the most popular person in the world" and vowed to use him as a "roving ambassador." Now that she is a step away from becoming the nation's top ambassador herself, the question returns: What should we do about Bill?

Last year, I learned just how popular Bill Clinton is overseas. In Ireland, strangers in pubs insisted on buying me a Guinness just because I was researching a book about him. Traveling with Mr. Clinton in Africa, I was almost trampled by a crowd in Tanzania that was so hungry to touch the man that they jumped over barriers en masse, to the visible horror of the Secret Service.

Outside the U.S., people's feelings about Mr. Clinton are a lot less conflicted than ours. They don't care about Monica Lewinsky or about his critical remarks about Barack Obama during the campaign. In Ireland, they love him because he played a crucial role in bringing peace to their country. In Africa, it is because he is saving a million lives in his Clinton Foundation's fight against AIDS. But more than that, around the world people feel a personal connection to him. "Why, when he goes to India, do they have hundreds of thousands of people?" James Carville asked me. "Was his India policy really any different from that of George Bush? I doubt it. When people look at him, they say, 'This guy cared about us.'"
There is one obvious role that Bill Clinton is uniquely qualified to play on the world stage: peacemaker. He is the most prolific peacemaker in American presidential history. Everyone remembers the handshake between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn, and many recall that he brought peace to Northern Ireland and stopped the genocide in Bosnia - all huge achievements. But few have any idea how ubiquitous a force for peace Mr. Clinton really was.

During his presidency, Mr. Clinton appointed special envoys to virtually every troubled region in the world. He helped avert nuclear war between India and Pakistan and worked to reduce tensions between Greece and Turkey. He also played a central role in resolving lesser-known conflicts, for example between Peru and Ecuador and between Eritrea and Ethiopia. Almost anywhere there was conflict, Mr. Clinton was personally involved.

His unique ability in this area is rooted in his psychology. Because he played the peacemaker in his troubled alcoholic family, it is a role he is driven to perform. Because he is naturally empathic, curious and intelligent, Mr. Clinton has an almost uncanny natural ability to master the details of every local conflict and makes people on all sides feel that he both cares about them and "gets it." Because he is a gifted politician, Mr. Clinton understands how to get foreign leaders to say "yes" by structuring aid, deals and public photo ops to make them look good to their constituents for doing the right thing.

In such a role, would he steal the thunder from his wife, the incoming secretary of state? Not at all. The Clintons have always been a team. She played a supporting role to him as first lady; now it's his turn. Bill's unique peacemaking skills will complement, not contradict, Hillary's diplomatic skills.

Democratic Sen. Jack Reed, head of the Armed Services Committee, has said that he thought it "entirely likely" that Bill Clinton would be tapped by President-elect Obama as a special envoy to mediate the conflict between India and Pakistan, which has heated up again after the terrorist attacks in Mumbai. If Mr. Clinton can head off a nuclear war, it is not only his stock that will rise again. As he said in Northern Ireland: "In peace, everyone can win."

This was originally published in the Baltimore Sun

How Will Obama Lead?

John D. Gartner, Ph.D. — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 15:40:16 +0000

This historic election is over, and now the question becomes how will Barack Obama lead? To understand how an Obama White House might be similar to or different from that of his immediate predecessors, Bush and Clinton, it pays to compare and contrast the three men on two components of their basic temperaments: curiosity and hypomania. Clinton was both hypomanic and curious. Bush was neither. And Obama appears to be curious but not hypomanic.
     For a hundred years, academic personality psychologists have been trying to identify the basic axes on which to map the human personality. Intellectual curiosity, it turns out, is one of these fundamental dimensions, according to the widely accepted Five Factor theory, developed by Paul Costa and Robert McCrea at The National Institutes of Health. According to their data, you are either born curious, or not. Hypomania, too, as I argued in The Hypomanic Edge, and more recently in my book, In Search of Bill Clinton, is also best understood as an innate temperament, imbuing one with dynamic traits such as energy, creativity, confidence, and charisma, but also with problems in self-regulation and impulse control.
     When Bill Clinton was making the case for Barack Obama with the voters, the first qualification that he noted was that Obama was both intelligent and curious. While at first blush, curiosity might seem like a strange qualification to emphasize, Clinton was not offering feint praise, as some suspected. Clinton knew just how important curiosity really is to the day-to-day work of a president. If one had to point to one factor that distinguished Clinton from Bush, and explained why Bush was a failure and Clinton a relative success, this would be it.
     Simply put, Bush just wasn't that interested in the details of governing. He didn't like to consider alternate views or findings. He accepted neo-conservative dogma on faith, and that was that. Even when his policies appeared to be failing or unpopular, Bush was had no desire to hear dissenting ideas or inconvenient facts. Bush who is neither curious nor hypomanic kept his meetings short-no point in jaw-boning these things to death-and went to bed early, losing little sleep of America's problems.
     Clinton, who is both intensely curious and hypomanic couldn't be a stronger contrast. Well-known for being a policy junkie, Clinton was insatiably omnivorous in his consumption of everything ever said or written about every aspect of policy. Clinton reads everything related to public policy, and even more remarkable, remembers it all. Journalist Joe Klein wrote in The Natural that Clinton "seemed to know everything there was to know about domestic social policy....Oh, could he talk policy! He seemed to know more about the school choice experiment in East Harlem than the governor of New York did; he knew all about the competitive bidding for sanitation contracts in Phoenix, the public housing manager in Omaha who'd come up with a great after-school program for kids in the projects, the terrific for-profit welfare to work program in New York." In my interviews with people who know Clinton, I was told again and again by experts in a half a dozen fields "He knows more about my specialty than I do." And, because Clinton was hypomanic as well as curious, there was a driven quality to his quest for endless information and ideas. He often stayed up all night reading, usually half a dozen different books at a time, devouring them with an almost physically greedy intensity.
What does a White House run by a curious hypomanic look like? Where Bush' meetings were short and structured, Clinton's were endless and open ended. Clinton wanted to hear every point of view, review every fact, and play with creative variations of every exiting idea. Cabinet officers confessed to me that they were physically passing out from fatigue and hunger during these marathon meeting, asking themselves, as Leon Panetta put it, "Where the hell all this going?" While Clinton was widely criticized for this chaotic creative style, it worked. Panetta argued that Clinton usually made very good decisions, "even if he had to go by way of Mars to get there."
     Obama, who is curious but not hypomanic, is likely to fall in between these two extreme contrasts in style. Because he is curious like Clinton, Obama is likely to also hear from a range of advisors, review findings and arguments from diverse sources, and consider creative policy approaches. However, because he is not hypomanic, the Obama White House should be less chaotic than that run by Clinton. No drama-Obama has proved to be but unusually steady, cool, and deliberative. Indeed, during the financial crisis, it was Obama's "preternatural calm" that seemed to reassure the country that he was presidential enough to lead. We have reason to be optimistic that Obama's temperament may be just right, not too hot and not too cold.
     And that should help us all sleep better at night.

Palin is the one pallin' with extremists

John D. Gartner, Ph.D. — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 21:28:35 +0000

"Our opponent is someone who sees America as imperfect enough to pal around with terrorists who targeted their own country," said Sarah Palin, referring to Obama's glancing association with William Ayers a reformed 1960s radical who served with Obama on a charity board. That hardly makes them pals. Ironically, Palin is the one who pals with people who think that America is imperfect enough that they feel compelled to stockpile arms, just in case they need to shoot it out with the United States government. Just this week, disturbing new information has emerged about Sarah Palin's connection to the Alaska Independence Party (AIP), an extreme right wing group of Alaskan secessionists. "She doesn't have any room to accuse Barack Obama of dallying with terrorists," David Neiwert, an expert on the right wing militias who has been investigating Palin's connection to the AIP, told me. "The Republican ticket is working hard this week to make Barack Obama's tenuous connection to graying, 60's revolutionary Bill Ayers a major campaign issue. But the Palins' connection to anti-American extremism is much more central to their political biographies," wrote David Talbot in Salon.

The AIP was founded in the 1970's by gold miner Joe Vogler, who said: "The fires of hell are frozen glaciers compared to my hatred for the American government...I'm an Alaskan, not an American. I've got no use for America or her damned institutions." Vogler was prepared for armed struggle with the U.S., should that prove necessary: "My government is my worst enemy. I'm going to fight them with any means at hand," he said "When the [federal] bureaucrats come after me, I suggest they wear red coats. They make better targets. In the federal government are the biggest liars in the United States, and I hate them with a passion. They think they own [Alaska]. There comes a time when people will choose to die with honor rather than live with dishonor...I hope we don't have to take human life, but if they go on tramping on our property rights, look out, we're ready to die." It's worth noting that Vogler isn't just some figure from ancient history. He is still hailed on AIP's website. He also said, "the problem with those John Birchers is that they're too damn liberal."

According to Neiwert, the AIP has been a core part of Palin's political base throughout her career. In Salon, he and Max Blumenthal wrote about the close political alliance between Palin and Mark Chryson, head of the AIP, going back to her beginning in politics. Sarah's husband, Todd Palin, was a card carrying member of the AIP until 2002. Sarah attended their conventions in 1994 and 2006. According to Neiwert, she put party members in key state leadership positions. The AIP is fiercely hostile to taxes, environmental regulation and gun control, all seen as unwanted government interference. Palin worked with them to successfully amend the state's constitution outlawing all forms of gun control. "It took over 10 years to get that language written in," Chryson said. "But Sarah [Palin] was there supporting it." So for example, ordinances forbidding bringing guns into schools, much like one Palin helped defeat when she was mayor of Wasilla, are now unconstitutional statewide. She has also been in alignment with the AIP in her fierce fight against environmental regulation, from denying the human role in global warming to suing the federal government to have polar bears kept of the endangered species list. Chryson has stated that Pallin has always had an open door policy with him. Party leaders campaigned actively for her gubernatorial bid in 2006.

The AIP is one part of what has been called the "patriot" movement. These loosely affiliated, right wing groups can be heavily armed. "I never met one of them that didn't have a lot of guns." Many share a paranoid idea, that a coming "world order" aligned with the federal government will take over the world, and when the time comes they must be prepared to resist it by lethal force. These are ‘the black helicopter people," Neiwert told me. That doesn't make them terrorists, but on the other hand one hopes that they're on a watch list somewhere at Homeland Security since they are preparing for a possible war with America. Timothy McVeigh was heavily influenced by similar groups, and it McVeigh's belief system that motivated him to bomb the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 men women and children and injuring 450, the most horrific act of domestic terrorism in American history.

While some AIP members are building bomb shelters in their basements laden with supplies and ammo, others are going on the offense seeking to invade the federal government with God's agents of righteousness. The AIP has close ties to the Constitutionalist Party, a far right group that preaches Dominionism: the belief that America was founded by Christians and must be restored to a theocracy. They are like an American Taliban, seeking to establish a Christian version of Sharia as the law of the land. "This great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religions but on the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The goal of the Constitution Party is to restore American jurisprudence to its Biblical foundations," reads their mission statement. The AIP has been listed as the Constitution Party's state affiliate since the late 1990s, and it has endorsed the Constitution Party's presidential candidates (Michael Peroutka and Chuck Baldwin) in the past two elections.

A tenet of this philosophy is that God's soldiers need to penetrate the centers of power in society, often by stealth. AIP Vice Chairman, Dexter Carter, has urged AIP members to infiltrate the two major parties. Could Sarah Palin be a "stealth dominionist candidate" as some bloggers have started to ask? What does Palin believe?

Several people in Alaska who I talked to think Palin is simply an opportunist who has used the AIP for her own political advancement. While that idea is disturbing, the alternative, that she sincerely believes these things, is beyond alarming.

Palin is no dummy. To openly advocate the AIP's more extreme views would make her unacceptable as a national candidate. Former Wasilla mayor, John Stein who was defeated by Palin, in no small measure because of the support she got from the AIP, said "She got support from these guys," Stein remarked. "I think smart politicians never utter those kinds of radical things, but they let other people do it for them. I never recall Sarah saying she supported the militia or taking a public stand like that. But these guys were definitely behind Sarah."

Palin, who "lies with ease about her record" according to Frank Rich, is either lying to the extremists about her sympathy for their cause, or lying to America about how radical she is. I think there is reason to believe the latter. In a recent interview with Katie Couric, Palin disowned some of her more extreme positions to avoid being too far right of the electorate. You really can't be elected in national politics today denying global warming. On December 4, 2007 Fairbanks Daily News-Miner quoted Palin saying, "I'm not an Al Gore, doom-and-gloom environmentalist blaming the changes in our climate on human activity." As recently as August 29th, Palin said in an interview, "I'm not one though who would attribute it to being man-made." But when Couric asked if human activity was the cause of global warming Palin gave this confused answer "There are man's activities that can be contributed to the issues we're facing now, but I'm not going to solely blame all of man's activities on changes in climate....It kind of doesn't matter at this point, as we debate what caused it." Well, it kind of would matter what caused it if we were going try to solve it. And it also matters that Palin is lying: In an interview with ABC News's Charlie Gibson, Palin flatly denied that she had ever said climate change isn't caused by human activity.

A final reason to believe that Palin may be as extreme as she seems is her religious history. For example, though Palin is now back pedaling, she has been an ardent creationist. When Couric asked her recently about whether evolution should be taught in schools as a accepted scientific principle, Palin replied "I believe it should be taught as an accepted principle, but I won't deny that I see the hand of God in this beautiful creation that is earth." Phil Munger is a Wasilla school teacher who has known Sarah Palin for 18 years. He's had several personal conversations with her over the years about creationism. He told me that Palin told him that she believes that the earth is no more than six or seven thousand years old, and that humans shared the earth with dinosaurs. In 1994, when she was still a member of the town council before becoming mayor, she worked vigorously to appoint people to the school board who would add creationism to the curriculum. As recently as October 2006 in her debate against her gubernatorial opponent she stated that "both views should be taught." Munger told me that he never heard her describe evolution as anything close to an accepted principle.

Is Palin a stealth Dominionist candidate? The final piece of evidence to consider his this: the Wasilla Assembly of God where Palin was raised is a stronghold of Dominionist teaching, as are the other two churches she has frequently attended in Alaska as an adult.

Recently, videotape emerged on YouTube of Sarah Palin being blessed by Pastor Thomas Muthee at the Wasilla Assembly of God Church before her 2006 election to the governorship. The press focused on the fact that Muthee, who has repeatedly claimed to have driven a witch out of Kenya, made reference to witchcraft in the blessing. But there is something much more nefarious in this blessing, only slightly hidden beneath the surface: a Dominionist agenda to take over the government for God.

"In a moment we will pray for Sarah, and I'll tell you the reason why. When we talk about transformation of our community we are talking about God invading our society...We see God's kingdom infiltrate and influence seven areas of our society...Believers need to take over government," Adding, without irony, "If believers had not done something in this country we would not have the president we have now." How much does Palin believe what Muthee was preaching? After Palin won the governorship, she explicitly stated that she believed that she won because of this prayer by Muthee. In other words, she was elected as part of God's master plan to invade, infiltrate and influence of our government.

At least in Wasilla they have some pretty messianic ideas abut Sarah. Radio journalist Shannyn Moore told me that at the Wasilla Assembly of God Church they have a nickname for Palin, "Queen Esther," a ruler of Israel from Biblical times known for battling corruption and ungodliness. "Theses are the kind of people who line up newspaper headlines with revelations, said Moore. And they believe that Sarah is the one Revelations prophesized about when it said, ‘and a great power shall come from the north.' Well, you can't get much more north than Alaska. They think she's chosen to play a role in the end of the world." They also believe that Alaska will be a final refuge for the godly in the end times.

Would president Palin also line up the headlines with Revelations when deciding whether, for example, to bomb Iran? Would apocalyptic thinking shape her policies toward Israel? Reverend Tim McGraw, a pastor at Wasilla Assembly of God, said that believers are always searching for signs of end times and added that: "The idea that Sarah would take this huge influence of the worldview that really only the Bible and the relationship with Jesus opens up ... and suddenly marginalize it and put it over on the shelf somewhere and live apart from it-that would be entirely inconsistent." In an earlier post I suggested that Palin is more like Bush than Bush himself. In 1994, the Bush White House was described by one of his own advisors as "faith-based," in opposition to the the "reality-based community." Bush's mistaken sense of spiritually inspired messianic purpose led us into Iraq. Palin would most likely also be a member of the faith-based school of foreign policy. She called the Iraq war "a task from God," when she spoke before the Wasilla Assembly of God Church this June.

Is Sarah Palin just a conservative, or is she on the lunatic fringe of the right wing? Just as George Bush ran as a compassionate conservative and then proved to be a divisive ideologue, Palin may be hiding her true colors from all but the elect who can read the secret hand signals and buzz words.

This year Palin sent a videotaped greeting to the to the AIP convention, telling them to "keep up the good work." "I share your parties' vision for upholding the constitution of our great state. My Administration remains focused on reigning in the growth of government so individual liberty and opportunity can expand...Good luck on a successful, inspiring convention...God Bless you." Palin later said she sent the message to "encourage political competition," but Neiwert pointed out that she sent no comparable message to the Alaskan Democratic Party. John Stein believes that the message was a "wink, wink, nod, nod" to the AIP to let them know she is one of them. As one AIP senior official put it, "she sounds just like Joe Vogler."

Palin is more like Bush than Bush himself, Part I: Lack of curiosity

John D. Gartner, Ph.D. — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 10:36:33 +0000

Palin has energized the bases, both of them. On the right, she has been greeted as a rock star, while on the left she has been described as reason to move to Canada, if she wins. But how much do we know about Palin and how she thinks? Palin bears an eerie resemblance to George Bush, and psychologically, she is even more extreme than Bush himself on the many of the dimensions that have made him arguably the worst president in US history. As bad as things are now, someday, under President Palin, we may look back upon today's bleak times as the good old days.

Palin is an ideologue who is not interested in varied ideas and opinions, but only the views of her church and her inner circle. She values loyalty above competence, faith above science, and she is animated by a messianic, indeed an apocalyptic Christian faith.

Lack of intellectual curiosity

One factor former president Bill Clinton has mentioned in interviews as one of Obama's most important qualifications is his curiosity. Intellectual curiosity was one of Clinton's greatest assets as president. While he is well known as a "policy wonk," most people have no idea how widely he read, and how much he retained. And Clinton recognizes the same essential trait in Obama. Clinton stopped mentioning curiosity, perhaps because it sounded vaguely condescending-but Clinton knows what a very important qualification it is. Look at the consequences of having a president who is deficient in curiosity: George Bush. Bush, the decider, knows what he knows (even when it's wrong) and he isn't interested in contradictory facts or arguments. The contrast between the two men couldn't be starker on this dimension, and it explains a lot of why Clinton's presidency was a success and Bush's a huge failure.

Palin by contrast appears to read almost nothing at all. She was recently interviewed by Katie Couric who asked what newspapers she read. She asked three times, and Palin could not mention one. Not one! She didn't even just fake it and say Washington Post or New York Times.

"I've read most of them," she said.

"What, specifically?" Couric responded.

"Um, all of them, any of them that have been in front of me all these years."

"Can you name a few?"

"I have a vast variety of source where we get our news," Palin said. "Alaska isn't a foreign country, where it's kind of suggested, 'wow, how could you keep in touch with what the rest of Washington, D.C., may be thinking when you live up there in Alaska?' Believe me; Alaska is like a microcosm of America."

There is a longstanding anti-intellectual streak in the Republican Party that derides Democratic eggheads going all the way back to Adlai Stevenson in favor of people of action with supposedly good values and instincts. But the truth is, running America is complicated. And simplistic ideology based policies can have disastrous consequences on a global scale. In a rare self -lampoon at a press club dinner Bush joked that one of his professors wrote a book at Yale, and he read one. But this reading deficit is no joke. No child left behind? What about a nation left behind?

Not only does Palin appear to read few books or newspapers, she doesn't want anyone else to read them either if they are the wrong type of books. She tried to have the Wasilla librarian fired for refusing to ban books. This raises anti-intellectualism to a new low.

In group-groupthink

Even if she's not a reader, would Palin at least entertain a diversity of ideas if they were presented to her? Not likely. In a highly publicized public letter, Palin's Wasilla neighbor, Anne Kilkenny wrote, "She's not very tolerant of divergent opinions or open to outside ideas or compromise. As Mayor, she fought ideas that weren't generated by her or her staff. Ideas weren't evaluated on their merits, but on the basis of who proposed them." In this she mirrors the decision making process of George Bush, the "decider," who makes up his mind quickly, in response to input from a few key ideologically driven neo-conservative advisors, and then never reviews, reflects or revises his views in response to contradictory information or arguments. This decision making style makes for orderly brief staff meetings, a disciplined on-message team and catastrophic decisions.

Bill Clinton' decision making style was the opposite extreme, involving marathon meetings where contrasting opinions were argued endlessly, testing the participants' patience and even physical endurance. Alan Blinder, a member the economic team, admitted that the process had the "superficial appearance of chaos." Indeed, "if one peered into the room, they would see open pizza boxes, wastepaper baskets full of trash, and lots of people milling about talking at once." The proof was in the pudding. The economy soared under Clinton, and Alan Greenspan gives Clinton much of the credit. The messy creative process was not a weakness, as it was portrayed, but a strength. "That was a strength of the meetings, not a weakness, because governments make bigger mistakes when the president is kept in a bubble and only hears one opinion." When a leader forms opinions in bubble, as Bush and Palin do, then big mistakes are more likely to get made.

When George Bush took over the White House he campaigned as a fiscal conservative. However, by doggedly pursuing an ideologically driven tax cut policy, he turned record surpluses into record deficits. And now the taxpayers will be responsible for a 700 billion dollar bailout. In this way also, Palin is Bush's twin. According to Kilkenny, "Sarah campaigned in Wasilla as a ‘fiscal conservative.' She inherited a city with zero debt, but left it with indebtedness of over $22 million."

But never, at any point did Bush or Palin ever seem to wonder: What if I'm wrong? Is there a better way to grow the economy? It's the failure to question, the failure to be curious that is so dangerous. One can be utterly certain, and utterly wrong, while driving the country over a cliff.

John D. Gartner is author of In Search of Bill Clinton: A Psychological Biography

Why Does Bill Clinton Keep Saying Nice Things About John McCain?

John D. Gartner, Ph.D. — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 00:49:17 +0000

During this week Bill Clinton has appeared on a series of national television shows talking about the presidential campaign. On The View, he addressed the fact that people have criticized him for saying nice things about John McCain. "I've made everyone mad during this election because I genuinely like both candidates. I genuinely admire both candidates. I think we make a terrible mistake finding something wrong with the candidates we can't vote for." Though predicting Obama will win, Clinton made sure to refer to McCain's heroism during Viet Nam. "The American people, for good and sufficient reasons, admire him," Clinton said, referring to his war record, "He's given something in life the rest of us can't match." This has enraged some. In his Trailhead blog for Slate, Christopher Beam wrote under the title "Why Bill Clinton is such a lousy surrogate," Chris Beam takes Clinton to task for praising McCain on The View and noted with incredulity that he did it again on Good Morning America. "Clinton can't help himself," Beam concluded.

However, I think Beam is wrong. This in not an instance in which Clinton "can't help himself," though there certainly are many such instances with Clinton. As I write about in my book, In Search of Bill Clinton: A Psychological Biography, Clinton has a hypomanic temperament that makes him biologically prone to all sorts of impulsive behavior in multiple areas, not just sex. He compulsively overeats, loses his temper and says things he shouldn't off the top of his head. So it seems to make sense when Beam says, there he goes again. Except, there's nothing impulsive about this behavior. I watched Clinton on half a dozen appearances over a week, and he praised McCain each time. This behavior was clearly systematic and planned, not impulsive.

So what's going on here? If you listen carefully, Clinton always tries to makes the sale for Obama, and has since his soaring endorsement at the Democratic convention. What he won't do is trash McCain or Palin. Why not? Clinton has an expansive inclusive view of the universe. Where most politicians divide the world into their friends and their enemies, Clinton strives to find room under the big tent for everyone: Room enough for he and former president Bush to collaborate on tsunami relief, and room enough for both Obama and McCain to present at his annual Global Initiative. In large part this is what allowed Clinton to be such an effective peacemaker. Only Clinton, it seemed, could convince the people of Northern Ireland that there truly was room for both Catholics and Protestants on their small island, no small feat indeed.

Clinton has been this way his whole life. In part it is because of his innate empathy. When people want to lampoon Clinton, they will sometimes quote his famous line, "I feel your pain." But Paul Begala, who was with Clinton the day he said those words, told me "It wasn't phony." He believes that Clinton's empathy is his greatest political gift. In his somewhat cynical book about Clinton, Because He Could, Dick Morris, the former Clinton advisor turned professional Clinton critic (he works as a commentator on Fox News and now advises Republicans exclusively), gives Clinton his due on this point. In a chapter entitled "Running on Empathy," Morris writes: "Clinton's uncanny capacity for empathy is the key to understanding him...He truly felt people's pain and it impelled him to action."
Empathic people have a natural tendency to be forgiving and seek harmony in relationships. But in addition, Clinton has an ideological commitment to the Christian command to "love your enemies." Many people don't realize how deeply influenced Clinton has been by Christianity. It was one of my more surprising discoveries. Since he was a boy, Clinton has striven to forgive and be reconciled to those who have hurt him, beginning with his abusive alcoholic stepfather, Roger Clinton. Teenage Bill Clinton physically intervened to put an end to Roger's beatings, but he never turned against his stepdad "Bill had as much reason as anyone to hate him, to hold a grudge, but he didn't. He loved and forgave him and was even instrumental in getting me to put my own anger at Roger aside" wrote his mother Virginia.

That same attitude has translated to his political rivals His childhood friend Rose Crane told me that, "Me with my mean, sharp tongue, I'd say something critical about one of his political enemies who had pulled some dirty trick on him, and he would say: ‘you have to understand, it's not their fault, they're just having problems.'" When Terry McAuliffe brought up, with great satisfaction, the news that Linda Tripp had been indicted for her illegal tape recordings of Monica Lewinsky, recordings that both betrayed her friendship with Lewinsky and paved the road to impeachment, he was taken aback by Clinton's response: "You know, Mac, I've got to tell you I really feel sorry for that woman...She's really had a rough life. She had a really, really bad marriage and she got divorced....It wasn't her fault, Mac. I hope it's behind her."

No one it would seem would have more reason to hate the Republicans than Bill Clinton. Impeachment, one of the most serious threats to the Constitution in our nation's history, really was the result of a vast rightwing conspiracy at the highest levels of the Republican Party. But Clinton won't go there. His highest role model is Nelson Mandela, who forgave his jailers when he got out of prison. While I was in Africa with Clinton in 2007, the day he celebrated Mandela's birthday, as he does every year, he said he could not have survived impeachment psychologically had it not been for Mandela's example.

So yes, Clinton will affirm and reaffirm his respect for McCain and Palin. And no, it is not party disloyalty or petty peevish feelings over Hillary's defeat that drive him to do so. After the Jewish Holidays, Clinton will begin campaigning in swing states to win over Hillary supporters who could make the difference in this election. Clinton will try to make the sale-in the way only he can: by appealing to a higher moral vision, not by devaluing the Republican ticket. When Clinton was in Derry pleading for peace in Northern Ireland in 1994, he issued a challenge to the people that defines his philosophy: "Are you going to be somebody who defines yourself in terms of what you are against or what you are for?"