The earlier post Prime Time complained that pundits were unreliable. Their pretensions to careful thought were abandoned when it most mattered, revealing their pedestrian emotionality and muddled thinking. Gang Sign noted some research about some of the reasons this is so. There are neuro-chemical predispositions to "motivated reasoning" and few have the character to resist.

Some try.

It’s something of a cottage industry right now for snarky intellekchles like me to gloat over the incoherence and grammatical incompetence of Sarah Palin. . . We are, however, missing the point.

We academocrats are used to a kind of hyperformalized orality that basically speaks in essays. . . We are some really strange folks.

People whose audience is not captive have to think more carefully about the rhetorical fit between what they’re saying, how they’re saying it, and who they’re saying it to. So no, Sarah Palin is not explaining anything coherently. She is sermonizing. Her audience already know what they think (or think they do) and she is not trying to change that; she’s trying to hook into it and activate it in her favor. Her objective is not grammatical correctness or propositional coherence but instant intelligibility, using highly familiar and oft-repeated (call-and-responsable) words, phrases, inflections and gestures to appeal directly to the emotions and prejudices of her target listeners.

Who are not us. Barack does the same thing, but his target listeners’ emotional response is triggered by a different sort of articulation. The point is, in their current public performances the candidates are not trying to govern the country, they are trying to win the election. And rightly so.

This is obviously "motivated reasoning", but he doesn't just let it run and congratulate himself too much. He pulls the punch enough to grant that all of the players are playing, indeed, that's all they are doing. They show the colors and gestures of gang affiliation.

There’s much to learn from Palin’s self-vulgarized orality about how the Republicans think they can do that — certainly their contempt for the intelligence of their base voter could not be more clear — but her personal ability to think and speak clearly is not part of the available information.

This also misses the point since Obama's contempt for the intelligence of his base could not be more clear. No one with two gray cells to rub together could mistake his casual certainty that he is speaking to people who have no clues whatsoever how things work, or don't care. Politicians do not respect voters' intelligence. That's not news.

But more than hypocrisy is at work here. It is not just far Left, American-hating radicals he now disowns. You get the sense that he believes everyone can be played. Rashid Khalidi can believe that Obama finds no one suffers more than the Palestinians. Jews can buy that he was moved by the Holocaust from a summer camp experience. Voters in his Congressional race in 1990 can be told that there is no difference ideologically between him and 100% ADA-rated Bobby Rush, but the rest of the state in 2004 (and eventually the country) can buy that he’s a post-partisan reformer. Terrorists come to believe he shares their scorn for America, but Iowa voters hear him talk about his appreciation that only in America could his story have happened. Primary voters in Ohio are coddled with protectionist promises - and then privately scorned while he is talking to San Fransisco liberal donors.

There is no end to it — everyone gets the version of Obama that perfectly fits his own world view. It is not hypocrisy. It’s fraud. Whatever he told or shared with Ayers, Dohrn, Wright, or Pfleger counts for no more that what he told or shared with other now inconvenient groups and individuals. He’s sold the same piece of political real estate to multiple buyers for multiple, conflicting uses.

This is possible, even probable, since partisans engage in "motivated reasoning".

The researchers also used neuroimaging to look at the neural responses of individuals who described themselves as partisan. They showed the participants one of three groups of slides: one group about their party's candidate, one about the other party's candidate, or one about a neutral control subject. In each group, the first slide revealed a position the politician had taken, and the second depicted a contradiction — something the candidate had done or said that seemed to be contrary to what the first slide was saying. Not only were the participants unable to see the contradiction for their own candidate, but the neuroimaging showed that they were regulating their emotional response.

The psychologists specifically saw large areas of activation in the prefrontal cortex, which indicated emotional influence on reasoning, and in the posterior cingulated cortex, associated with forgivability. Essentially, participants detected the contradiction in their reasoning, but they weren't allowing it to affect their opinion. Westen describes this as "motivated reasoning."

There's more. Westen showed the participants yet another slide, this one offering a rationale for the earlier contradiction: large areas in the ventral striatum became active, suggesting that participants were rewarding themselves for working through the problem. This combination of the suppressed negative emotions and reward for reaching a biased conclusion "suggests why motivated judgments may be so difficult to change," Westen wrote. "They are doubly reinforcing."

I think that there is information in political speech about the ability to think and speak clearly. It's not always easy to winkle out, and is often ambiguous. Punditry that has real value - if such a thing can be imagined - would be about this very subject. Those who pee in the pool - such as the "snarky intellekchles" in their cottages - would earn raspberries and public scorn.

Still, it's a small thing. Elections are about values not intelligence or other types of ability. Values and personality are far more relevant than ability. The "he's a jerk, but smart" defense has no value. That's hard for academocrats to grasp since they tend to be, well, jerks. To some extent they are emotionally still the same as when they were 10 years old and excused their jerkiness as being somehow related to intelligence or at least bookishness. Other people had to face the fact at some point that 10 year olds are all jerks, and that they had better grow up. Many do so, but not all. Some are as smart or smarter than the academocrats, though they aren't attracted to the cloister.

Update: No Neutrals

One interesting--and irritating--feature of online argument, especially in an election year, is the routine assumption that everyone is on one side or the other and that which side you are on determines what you say. If you say something favorable about Governor Palin you must be a Republican supporter and are therefor obligated to respond to any argument offered against Senator McCain. If you say something favorable about Obama you must be a supporter of the Democrats and obliged to defend Obama against any and all arguments. . .

Part of the explanation of the pattern is, I think, the natural human tendency, probably hardwired, to view the world in terms of in group and out group, us and them. If I defend Palin or point out Biden's errors I am obviously not part of the Obama in group so must be on the other team.

There may be a second element. Most people are not very interested in political, economic, historical matters. But most people do enjoy cheering for their team. So political arguments, especially online during an election year, are populated by a lot of people who are arguing not because they are interested in the ideas but because it is a way of fighting for their side. It is natural enough for them to assume that everyone else is doing the same thing.