Jul 26 2009

Captain Brandon del Pozo On Crowley/Gates

Police Discretion: A Different Perspective

by Henry on July 23, 2009

Brandon del Pozo is a captain in the NYPD (now working for Internal Affairs on internal police corruption cases, but with plenty of experience as a beat cop in Brooklyn and Manhattan, and as a police instructor too). He is also a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at CUNY. He has sent us a post with a different perspective on police discretion and the Gates arrest than that of my last post. We are publishing his post in the interests of furthering serious debate. Brandon asked me to make it emphatically clear that all views expressed here are purely personal, and that he is not acting as a spokesperson for the NYPD in any way. His post is below.

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From my own experience and what I have learned about the incident, I highly doubt that I would have ordered the arrest of Professor Gates for any charge. I do, however, think that based on his actions as alleged by Sergeant Crowley, his arrest was somewhat plausible within the universe of possible outcomes to the incident. That still does not mean that the cops in question weren’t acting “stupidly,” as President Obama suggested. It is possible to do a lawful thing that is stupid, and that is why officers have discretion in many cases. While it can be misused, discretion is there to prevent them from stupidly enforcing the letter of the law. That the arrest was unwise and imprudent has also been made clear by how quickly the charges were dropped and the apologies issued by the government of Cambridge.

On the other hand, I do feel that Professor Gates seems to have acted inappropriately. There was no good reason for him to converse belligerently with the responding officer from his first words, or accuse him of racism, or refuse to answer basic questions directly related to the scope of the officer’s legitimate investigation. Of course, Gates also had the prerogative to say nothing at all, but this is different from saying nothing constructive, and instead issuing verbal abuse. This is not how people should relate to police officers as officials who are ostensibly trying to ensure public safety, but at least as importantly it is not how people should relate to other people in their community whose behavior they haven’t had the chance to independently assess. Police officers are expected to bear much greater burdens than the average citizen in this regard due to the nature of their job, but the limits on these burdens acknowledge their core personhood.

So, to go through a few things:

Whether or not a person should be arrested for disorderly conduct depends on subjective assessments that are nonetheless important to make. (more on discretion later) These include the extent to which the interaction is actually in public, the extent to which he has genuinely impeded the investigation by being verbally combative with an officer who needs to elicit investigative information from him, or created a situation of genuine public alarm, and, admittedly more controversially, the extent to which he fosters a climate wherein it’s acceptable for people to harass, berate and otherwise annoy the police as they are trying to conduct routine investigations that are in the interest of public safety.

Two men are breaking open the door to a home in Cambridge, MA, in the middle of the day. Almost all residential burglaries happen during the day. This is when residents are least likely to be home. Commercial burglaries, on the other hand, almost all happen at night. This is when stores are most likely to be vacant. The time in question fits what we know about this type of crime.

Breaking open a front door is inconsistent with the behavior of people who live in that home to an extent that suggests the possibility of criminal activity to an impartial observer. In the widest range of cases, people who live in a home will enter with a key or be let in by another person who lives there. In certain, rare cases, a person who lives in a home will force its front door open. Unfortunately, this is one of the most common ways a person who has no permission to enter a home gains entry to it, along with forcing open a window. Good judgment, even by the layperson, indicates that a person breaking into a home is possibly committing a criminal act. This possibility warrants a call to the police, who have a duty to investigate such things; the citizen observer’s has no such duty to further clarify what she sees.

A resident of Cambridge is walking by, sees two black men she doesn’t recognize breaking open the front door to someone’s home, and calls the police to report a possible break in. This seems like the way a good neighbor should behave towards the people in her community. She should also have called if the men breaking in where white (as my own police experience has revealed a significant population of white burglars). The issue in that vein that troubles some is not that she called about Gates and his driver, but whether or not she would’ve called about Dershowitz and his driver. The important thing here is that what she did in this case was reasonable and in the civic interest. Suppose for a moment the woman knew a black man lived at the house, and made the call to protect his home from these other black men who were breaking into it. That seems like good civic behavior (and the source of many 911 calls in my career). It’s still good behavior even if she didn’t know the arbitrary fact that the home was owned by a black man.

To put a finer point on it: It does us very little good to wonder what the woman would have done if the door-breaker was white and anger ourselves with the possibility that there exist many people who wouldn’t have called the police on white door breakers but only black ones. What the woman did in the case of what actually happened with Gates was a morally acceptable act.

Sergeant Crowley responded to the scene based on the information provided by the 911 caller. He would have responded regardless of the race of the burglars; they are required to respond to all such calls. The police met the caller outside the home, and she reiterated what she said to 911. It appears she remained on the scene at the request of the 911 operator and made every effort to be a responsible witness to what she thought could have been a crime in progress.

The responding officer then encountered a black male at the location where he was informed that a black male had broken into a home. So far, then, he is confronted with consistencies that bolster, not diminish, the credibility of the caller’s account. It is now the officer’s duty to see if the person had permission and authority to break into the home or not.

The officer instructs the person to exit the house and talk on the porch. This is standard police safety practice. An unfamiliar building with unknown occupants that is the potential site of a burglary is not a safe place for an officer to enter, especially alone. If he is drawn into the home and attacked there, he can be locked in and will take longer to rescue. Kitchens have a variety of weapons, and rooms have limited sight lines and places for suspects to hide. Bringing a suspect to the porch is a prudent move for an officer.

The man knows what’s going on. He did, in fact, just force his own front door open. All accounts indicate the sergeant showed up moments later; the 911 caller personally informed him, in sum and substance, “he just went into the house a few seconds ago.” There is a continuity of events that indicates a reasonable person would understand why the police came to his door a few moments after he broke it open. The only thing that could indicate a race bias is the unobserved hypothetical that the police would not have been there if he was white. This doesn’t matter; for a homeowner of any race there is a facially plausible race-neutral reason why the police have come to the door.

Around this time, the person begins to accuse the officer of racism, at first refusing to cooperate with the investigation. This makes the investigation more difficult, and might make the officer wonder if he is safe. To assume Gates isn’t the type of man to use violence when he is angry and using obscenities is to emasculate him, or patronize him, or to resort to stereotypes based on age, stature, type of employment, etc. Anyway, early on, the sergeant concludes this man is not a burglar, but reports that the man continues to be verbally belligerent.

*[So at some later point the sergeant arrests Gates. I have said what I feel about his arrest. Some more general comments follow; the degree to which some apply to Gates and the sergeant depends on the relative veracity of differing accounts of the incident.]*

The police cannot be expected to leave a location simply because the person there is screaming at them and ordering them around, even if that person is apparently innocent and likely lives there. They should still thoroughly investigate. If this were a legitimate expectation of the police, then it would sometimes allow genuine criminals to berate cops into leaving the scene prior to a complete and thorough investigation of the crimes they have committed. Officers should leave when they are convinced that the investigation is complete, and that the situation is under control, regardless of the demeanor of a person.

The police need to foster an environment in which they can deliver public safety without being subject to obscenities, accusations and yelling from any party, even innocent parties. The judgments of policing are obviously difficult and subjective, and are often marred when they are made in the face of people issuing inflammatory comments even as the police are rendering routine services with an obvious cause. It is in the collective interest of citizens and police to promote an environment where the police can conduct an investigation calmly and with mutual respect. It cannot become commonplace for people to be allowed to scream at the police in public, threatening them with political phone calls, deriding their abilities, etc. Routine acts like rendering aid to lost children, taking accident reports and issuing traffic violations could be derailed at any time by any person who has a perceived grievance with the police. The police service environment is not the best venue for the airing of such grievances.

The police should not be cowed by threats of phone calls to people such as mayors, police chiefs and presidents of the United States, along with allegations that “you don’t know who you’re messing with.” It is traditionally whites who have had this type of crooked access and influence. These appeals to higher authorities are often meant to exempt the ruling castes from following the rules and laws that the rest of the community will be expected to follow. It happens, it is unfortunate, and it is not in the interests of justice for it to continue. Nobody trying to do their job fairly deserves to hear the equivalent of “My daddy donated fifty million to this university, and you’ll be getting calls from everywhere in the administration about raising my grade enough for this class to count as a distributive requirement.”

It is possible for a person to commit disorderly conduct by unabated screaming and verbal abuse in a public setting. Without drawing conclusions about the Gates case, there comes some point where a person is genuinely causing public alarm, and where he is acting with a rage that exceeds what we can expect from a reasonable person in a heated moment. The mere presence of the police conducting a legitimate investigation should not provoke continuous rage and epithets from such a person. One response is that the police should just leave if the investigation has been conducted successfully, and that this will calm the person down. In practice, this is indeed often the best thing to do. On the other hand, it should be noted that it is just as much the responsibility of the citizen to see that his actions are an inappropriate way to relate to police officers who have not, in the specific case at hand, acted unreasonably. This point may be hotly contested, but I believe it is true: there is no obligation for the police to hurry in their activities or to leave as soon as possible because they have incited the rage of a person who is acting unreasonably. There is a distinction between hanging around to show them who’s boss and working at a steady, professional pace, to be sure. But in the end the mere presence of the police cannot be seen as an acceptable reason for disorderly conduct, and should therefore not spur the police to leave a scene simply to de-escalate it. A police strategy of “winning by appearing to lose” emboldens citizens to attempt to get the police to lose in more and more serious matters, including walking away from situations where a person is genuinely guilty of a crime.

It is in the civic interest for cops to have discretion over violations and some misdemeanors. Any person who has been warned after committing a traffic violation, or told to empty a beer can instead of being summonsed for it, or who was let go with a warning from the clerk in the presence of an officer after shoplifting has benefited from officer discretion. Whether or not the sergeant in Cambridge used his arrest discretion soundly is a legitimate topic for debate, but the fact that officers should have it is pretty much off the table. I don’t think we want to live in a society where the police are obligated to arrest or cite for everything they observe or are informed of, and are limited only by practical constraints of how fast they can do these two things. In the end, the standards of proof that lead to arrests and citations are worded to incorporate the judgments of police officers and citizens: “reasonable cause to believe, etc.” and therefore we are better off selecting cops who are likely to have better judgment than taking the ability to make judgments away from them.

Assuming a cop is a racist is its own form of unwarranted bias. Because a person has chosen a career in policing does not mean that person is a racist. There are certainly racist cops, but if a person truly believes in the rights and responsibilities of the individual community member, then it will ultimately be that officer’s own conduct that determines whether he is a racist or not. Reports seem to indicate that Gates made accusations of racism before he had any meaningful interaction with the officer, who was called there by an impartial Cambridge resident to protect his home. Again, this is not a way to treat a person you have just met, regardless of the role he is acting in.

A responsible program of community policing would not have averted this type of encounter. Gates is not a store owner, hanging out in a shop all day and available to get to know the local cops. The last thing this professor wants to do is chum around with Cambridge cops so that they get to know him by face. He wouldn’t be inclined to make small talk with them about community issues, etc. Even if the sergeant were informed that they were responding to the residence of a notable (black) Harvard professor, this would not have necessarily helped: he would have responded thinking he was investigating the possibly burglary of a black professor’s home by one or two other black people. He would also assume that in almost every case, professors open their doors using keys in a routine manner.

The police are called to situations with the purpose of seizing control over them, examining them, and bringing them to a conclusion that serves the interests of justice and public safety as established by their oversight. Powerful/arrogant people—or those who have a certain idea of personal freedom that does not acknowledge emergency exceptions—find it annoying that the police can suddenly do this to their environment, when so few others can. This control also serves the safety of citizens who have become victims of a violent, uncontrolled situation. I am aware of the problems that this type of power can produce in certain people who wield it. All I can say is that I personally know cops who have been killed or badly injured at every time of the day, responding to both routine and critical calls, because they lost control over the situation or were unable to establish it in the first place. Police officers cannot be expected to do their work without this type of control, and they must be given a berth to establish it, or they have the explicit legal right to take that berth. It doesn’t matter who you are. Lives depend on it in a way that assiduously watching every episode of The Wire cannot adequately convey (it deals too much with long-term investigation and narcotics work and not enough with patrol operations, in any event).

This particular incident was not an instance of racial profiling. A small point worth clarifying. Profiling occurs when the police proactively investigate possible criminal activity, independently using the race of a person as a contributing factor for considering that person to be the suspect in a crime. For example, given a mixed population of drivers on a highway, they select out the black drivers for investigation with the belief that they are the ones who are most likely to be running drugs. This is obviously a whole other problem. In the case here, the officer was informed by a citizen that a crime may have occurred, and the woman stated the people who she observed were in fact black. It would have been profiling in this case if the sergeant went peering into the windows of Cambridge homes, leaving white occupants alone, and confronting the black occupants to see if they were burglars. It would also have been profiling if the sergeant drives past white door-breakers without investigating but stops and questions the black door-breakers he sees. Without a doubt, good cops stop anyone who is forcing a front door open. It should be followed by either arrest, or assistance.

I have come to expect a wide range of conduct from police officers, some of it excellent, most of it acceptable, and some of it sadly lacking. My feeling was one of being let down by both the sergeant and by Professor Gates. The sergeant is acting under the color of law, and all Gates is required to do is exercise his rights as a citizen. True enough. Still, I expect more from thoughtful and wise people than from people who are less reflective and considerate. Flying in from Asia can really wear a person out, I have experienced, and that’s worth noting on Gates’ behalf. Not being able to get into your own home after such a flight must be especially irritating. I don’t think it was a good outcome to have him arrested, but I also don’t think the officer involved did anything wrong initially to incite the very poor reception he got from of all people a man who is capable of making such exceptional observations and judgments. I have had hundreds and hundreds of encounters with every type of innocent person from every walk of life in every context, and the vast majority ended amicably. They ended this way, however, not only because I acted with dignity and restraint, but because the citizen did as well. I think that collectively our interactions resulted in not only a safer but a more civil and just state. This seems like the type of project Professor Gates is interested in and that the sergeant should be held accountable for.

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Jul 10 2009

Taxes as Incentives

Reversed Psychology: Tax Cuts and Work

by Bruce Webb

In comments to his last post A Response to Megan McArdle, Again Cactus put the following up as a summary of the Economic Right’s approach to tax cuts:
1. tax cuts mean people are encouraged to work harder
2. people work harder
3, growth

Another version of this was posted, without apparent irony, on a MY post on the soda tax. How to Think about Pubic Health Taxes (bolding mine but actually echoed when MY later quoted himself)

Think about the case for taxing income, via the income tax and FICA. Why do it? Well, to get the money. That’s how we finance Social Security, the Department of Defense, Medicare, interest payments on the national debt, Medicaid, federal aid to schools, veterans’ health care and benefits, the FBI, etc. Now what’s the case against taxing people’s income? Well, it’s that it discourages work and it discourages investment. And that’s bad for the economy. Now we go back and forth over whether any given expenditure has a value that outweighs the economic costs. Liberals, like me, tend to think that a relatively high level of expenditure is justified whereas folks on the right tend to disagree.

But that simply shows, and not for the first time that some of our progressive wunderkinden have simply internalized the central tenet of supply side voodoo, the idea that income taxes are a tax on work and capital gains taxes are a tax on investment, and that like proposed taxes on soda or existing taxes on liquor and gasoline the more you tax something the less people are inclined to expose themselves to that tax.

This I think is a profound misunderstanding of the psychology of work and investment. Those who care about why I would think that and those who are just dying to mock the whole idea can follow me below the fold.


Now there are some people who work just for the sake of work itself. In fact a lot of people will spend many hours on work that comes with no monetary compensation at all. We call these people ‘hobbyists’ and ‘unpaid volunteers’. And I suppose if you taxed these people directly on their time there would be some tendency to reduce that time, or at least the time reported to the tax man. But most people do not approach work as some sort of dispensable hobby, instead work is the means to some other desired end whether that end be subsistance, or fame, or fortune with its attendant material objects, or in some cases simple sociality (e.g. some people live to organize office birthday parties). Mostly though people are one way or another working for the paycheck.

But even the paycheck amount is not an end in itself, at least not for everybody, and particularly not for those people who work outside the hyper-competitive world of Wall Street, not every clerk dreams of being office supervisor, not every framer dreams of being site superintendent. some times what you have is good enough.

And when we examine history we can see that in most times and most places this is the norm, sure there are always strivers and always some measure of economic mobility but particularly in largely pre-industrialized societies people tend to end up at some equilibrium. And that equilibrium point is mostly established by a desired level of consumption.

I first came across a formalized version of this in Chayanov’s The Theory of Peasant Economy. I just now ran across a pretty good version of Chayanov’s overall thesis here Russian History Encyclopedia: Peasant Economy

Perhaps the greatest theorist of the peasant economy was a Russian economist named Alexander Chayanov, who lived from 1888 to 1939. Chayanov published a book entitled Peasant Farm Organization, which postulated a theory of peasant economy with application for peasant economies beyond Russia. He argued that the laws of classical economics do not fit the peasant economy; in other words, production in a household was not based upon the profit motive or the ownership of the means of production, but rather by calculations made by households as consumers and workers. In modern terminology, the family satisfied rather than maximized profit.

According to Chayanov, the basic principle for understanding the peasant economy was the balance between the household member as a laborer and as a consumer. Peasant households and their members could either increase the number of hours they worked, or work more intensively, or sometimes both. The calculation made by households whether to work more or not was subjective, based upon an estimate of how much production was needed for survival (consumption) and how much was desired for investment to increase the family’s productive potential. Those estimates were balanced against the unattractiveness of agricultural labor. Households sought to reach an equilibrium between production increases and the disutility of increased labor. In short, households increased their production as long as production gains outweighed the negative aspects of increased labor. This principle of labor production in the peasant economy led Chayanov to argue that the optimal size of the agricultural production unit varied according to the sector of production at a time the official policy of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was pushing for large collective farms. As a result of this disagreement with Marxist economists and the Party line, Chayanov was arrested in 1930 and executed in 1939.

Chayanov came to his understanding not from a position of armchair theorist but by doing some serious data analysis of the surprisingly (to us) abundant documentation of peasant work life in Czarist Russia. And the result was that he found some very large divergences in work effort over the course of the standard peasant work-life with the peasant couple stepping up their work hours during some periods (for example while children are small and when setting up children with their own holdings) and then dialing it back.

Now even in the Peasant Economy there are strivers who undertake to raise their equilibrium point, your German ‘kleinbauer’ maybe wanting to rise to the status of ‘bauer’ and your ‘bauer’ to ‘grossbauer’, but equally the shift could go the other direction in any given generation, but the whole effort was not particularly driven by the profit motive but instead by the desired outcome.

Which is where supply siders get their psychology reversed. They see the income tax as a tax on work and as such a disincentive to work itself. Just as they see a tax on capital gains as a tax on capital and so a disincentive to invest. The historical reality generally shows the exact opposite, the higher the tax the more you have to work to achieve your desired consumption outcome, and similarly the same is true for investment, more tax means more intensification of investment activity. Now certainly there are limits to how far this process can go, if you tax labor output down to subsistence and sub-subsistence levels you risk your serfs and/or wage employees simply running away, and contrawise if you tax capital at rates up to 98% it is no wonder that the Beatles ran away from England as well. But there is no evidence that current levels of taxation are actually above the sweet spot where taxes mean more work and more capital investment rather than less.

Meaning we need to redraw that Laffer curve to include consumption equilbrium points for various income levels. If a person’s current income is above his own personal equilibrium point he might well react to a tax cut by reducing his hours of work. If instead a tax increase takes him from above equilibrium to below he might react by increasing hours. And the same is true for the investor. If as a group a society’s top 5% or top 1% are living large at current returns and rates, a tax cut might just lead to them commissioning artists or patronizing writers and scholars. Traditionally aristocracies have sought to reduce or eliminate their overall tax burdens, and it was not because they had a burning desire to spend every day working their fingers to the bone. Instead that tax exemption enabled them to maintain or even expand their consumption.

Supply side psychology treats ‘work’ and ‘investment’ as ends subject to direct incentives or disincentives from taxes. But historical reality shows they the are instead means to other ends that include such things as consumption and display. Calculating the impact on any given tax change on any given group requires some deeper understanding of the sociology involved among that group. History is full of instances where people scraped and scrapped behind the scenes simply to maintain appearances at Court or its socio-economic equivalent (think ‘Sunday Go to Meeting Clothes’ among the working classes).

How hard are you willing to work to keep that Bass Boat and the Lake Cabin even as the taxes on them are “killing you”? Are you really going to cut back your overtime in response to a tax increase if it means giving up your Season Ski Pass?

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Jul 9 2009

The Emperor Has No Clothes

via, anonymous liberal :

One of the more fascinating sociological phenomenon is the tendency people have, in certain situations, to ignore what their own senses are telling them and instead buy into an elaborate fiction just because other people appear to be doing the same thing. The classic illustration of this phenomenon is Hans Christian Andersen’s story The Emperor’s New Clothes — where a couple of con men convince the Emperor that they’ve made him a new suit out of the finest cloth there is, but that only smart people can see it. Not wanting to look dumb, the Emperor and his ministers rave about how beautiful the suit is and organize a procession through town. The villagers, not wanting to admit they don’t understand what’s going on, also rave about the Emperor’s beautiful new suit as he marches naked through the town. It’s not until a child points out the obvious — that the Emperor has no clothes — that the entire fiction crumbles.

Sarah Palin’s manic, rambling, completely incoherent resignation speech the other day was just the latest of her many naked processions through town. Yet for reasons I can’t begin to fathom, a large number of people, in both Republican circles and the mainstream media, continue to insist that she’s wearing a beautiful new suit. For instance, Mark Halperin of TIME insists– despite all evidence and common sense to the contrary — that by quitting her only significant governmental job before serving out her first term, and doing so in a complete train wreck of a speech, Palin actually strengthened her 2012 prospects. And though many on the right are belatedly acknowledging that the Emperor has no clothes, many others continue to insist that Palin is a viable presidential candidate and that her decision to step down may have been a “shrewd” one.

As Josh Marshall so perfectly put it earlier today:

[A]ny pundit who thinks this is some risky but potentially brilliant strategic move is absolutely smoking crack. Hitting the crack pipe, or, just as likely, being witlessly contrarian to set themselves apart from the common herd of sane people.

Though I’m sympathetic to the crack-smoking theory, it’s probably the second sentence that most accurately describes why people like Halperin say the things they say, and have been doing so since last fall. Sarah Palin has gone out of her way over the last year to display for everyone who is willing to acknowledge what their senses are telling them just how totally and completely unsuited she is to hold high office. She is a complete mediocrity, quite possibly the most superficial, ignorant, joke of a politician ever to have achieved such political prominence.

It is nothing short of astonishing what Palin has been able to get away with while still being taken seriously. During the presidential campaign, she was kept completely away from the media for nearly a month after being selected–something that is completely unprecedented. When she was finally permitted to be interviewed, she flamed out in spectacular fashion, displaying a profound lack of policy knowledge and a near total inability to express her thoughts coherently or logically. Her stump speech was riddled with easily falsifiable claims about her record, claims that she continued to repeat even after they had been repeatedly and exhaustively debunked. She never held a press conference or appeared on any of the Sunday news shows. Toward the end of the campaign, polls were conclusively showing that she was a drag on the ticket and her own staff was trashing her in the media. Rather than send her to contested states, the McCain campaign began shipping her off to reliably red states, a clear acknowledgment that she was doing more harm than good in the states that mattered.

Yet despite all of this, many within the media continued to treat Palin as if she was a serious presidential candidate in her own right. They continued to pretend that the Emperor’s new suit was, if not spectacular, at least well-tailored.

But this past weekend, even those who continued to buy into this delusion should have been jolted back to reality. Palin announced that she is resigning as Governor of Alaska, just over halfway through her first term. In a hastily thrown together press conference, she gave one of the craziest speeches I’ve ever seen. It was manic from start to finish, a totally unintelligible hodge-podge of random and often contradictory quotes and metaphors that left you wondering whether she had completely lost her mind and provided no insight at all into why she was actually resigning from office, leaving even her defenders not knowing what to say.

The Emperor has no clothes, people. It’s well past time to put an end to this delusion. Sarah Palin is transparently, manifestly unqualified to be in any position of power and this is obvious to anyone who cares to look.

UPDATE: Ross Douthat weighs in on Palin and, thankfully, points out the obvious: that it is “delusional” to believe that Palin’s decision to resign the governship will help her presidential chances and that her “bizarre, rambling resignation speech should take her off the political map for the duration of the Obama era.”

Ross devotes the second half of his column, however, to spinning the tired narrative of Palin as victim of the cruel misogynist liberal media. Though Ross doesn’t seem to realize it, this meme is just as delusional. Does Ross really believe that the media would have been kinder to a male liberal politician who performed as disastrously as Palin did during the presidential campaign? Imagine Obama had picked Tim Kaine as his runningmate and Kaine then hid from the press for most of the campaign, lied repeatedly about his record in every speech, and gave interviews like the ones Palin gave to Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric. Let’s further suppose that this hypothetical Kaine became embroiled in a number of scandals, became an obvious drag on an ultimately losing ticket, and that his own staffers began viciously attacking him in the media before the campaign was even over. Would anyone be indulging in the fantasy that this hypothetical governor was a viable presidential candidate? Would anyone be claiming that he was a victim of the media? Of course not. Indeed, I’m virtually certain that the press treatment this hypothetical Democratic governor would have endured would have been far more brutal than anything Sarah Palin has endured. The truth is, the media has been far kinder to Sarah Palin than she deserves. They’ve continued to take her seriously long after she gave them any reason to. They’ve been delicate in pointing out her obvious inadequacies as a politician and gentle in rebutting her repeated bold-faced lies. They’ve continued to indulge in the delusion that Palin is a serious national candidate long after there was any reason to believe that was true.

This last line from Ross’s column also bothers me:

Sarah Palin is beloved by millions because her rise suggested, however temporarily, that the old American aphorism about how anyone can grow up to be president might actually be true.

This is a ridiculous statement. If you want evidence that anyone can grow up to be president, how about looking at the current President. It’s hard to imagine a more unlikely future president than the biracial son of a teenage mother in Hawaii who was given the name of his absentee Muslim father. But Obama did well in school, worked hard, impressed everyone he met with his intellect and managed to put himself in a position to become president.

Palin stands for a very different proposition, that if you have the right backers, anyone, no matter how unqualified or unsuited for the job, can potentially become president. That’s scary. While I very much want to believe that a smart kid who works hard and plays her cards right can become president someday, no matter where she comes from, I don’t want to believe that any random schmuck can become president. The president shouldn’t be an average person. The president should be someone who is most decidedly above average in most respects. Pedigree doesn’t matter to me, but capability does. And it should to all Americans.

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