cerebralpaladin

Preliminary thoughts on D&D 4E

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 16:13:17 GMT

Dungeons and Dragons Fourth Edition (“4E”) (actually more like the tenth edition of a D&D game, depending on how you count, but who’s counting?) came out a little over a week ago. I followed the reports about 4E pretty closely, and my expectation was that it would be a very good game for people whose interests in RPGs were different from my own. Nonetheless, I’ll inevitably play a fair amount of 4E because of friends’ preferences and at conventions and so forth, and I figured I might run a 4E campaign at some point, so I picked up the “gift set” of Players Handbook, Dungeon Masters Guide, and Monster Manual as soon as it came out. Since then, I’ve DMed two games—a session of WotC’s “Into the Shadowhaunt” scenario for Worldwide D&D Game Day and a game for 11th level pregenerated characters that I wrote. I figured that I would share my thoughts about 4E.

Overall, I don’t like it. This is significantly a matter of taste, but I also think that the game was badly underplaytested and that it has some significant flaws even for its core purpose. I also found that some of my objections were stronger than I expected. This is based on a small sample set of games, one of those games was a lousy module, and I haven’t been a player in any 4E games—a crucial step in reaching a fair overall conclusion. But so far, I’m not impressed.

Production values

As people familiar with WotC’s recent major publications would predict, the 4E books are attractive, well-presented books with good artwork. A fair amount of artwork is recycled, especially in the Monster Manual, but lots of it is new. It does have a higher amount of “gratuitous” depictions of female characters, but at least most of them are portrayed as competent and strong adventurers who happen to wear unusually low cut breastplates or the like. In general, I was pleased with how the books looked. That said, three out of three of my books had minor printing errors—creased pages, small rips at the top of the pages, and the like. That’s disappointing in a new book, especially a new book that may see heavy use. They’re not bad enough to make me want to deal with exchanging them, but it was annoying. Unfortunately, the writing is also not very clear. There are lots of questions that I’ve had a hard time understanding, and I’m not at all convinced that they present things in a useful, user-friendly order.

The game itself

4E has been radically redesigned from prior D&D versions. In particular, it is now much more “gamist” and much less “simulationist” than prior versions. As far as I can tell, every possible conflict between “what do we think makes the most sense in a game world?” and “what do we think makes for the most fun gameplay?” has been resolved in favor of the designers’ judgment about fun game play. 4E reads like it is intended principally for use as a tactical level war-game with a light veneer of story linking the fights. That’s not to say that you can’t run a role-playing intensive, story oriented game with 4E, or for that matter a simulationist, sand-box style game, but the ruleset does not appear designed to help you.

There are three main aspects of 4E that I don’t like. First, the decision to disregard any pretense of in-game logic really bugs me. Second, combats take too darn long to play through. Third, the game was woefully under playtested.

I care a lot about RPGs having a semblance of internal logic. That’s not a matter of needing everything to model the real-world accurately—at that point, you have no heroic characters, no magic, and an overly gritty play-style. But I get my fun from RPGs out of interacting with an interesting world that feels “real.” Without some feeling of logic, the game isn’t worth playing to me.

4E appears to have been designed with a diametrically opposed viewpoint. For example, traditionally, rogues were limited in their ability to backstab/sneak attack to creatures with recognizable anatomy and vulnerabilities. That created obvious swings in capabilities between foes—the rogue who is deadly against humans or even demons could be worthless against zombies or constructs. 4E does away with that: rogues can sneak attack anything! That giant undifferentiated ooze—the rogue can still find its weak point! It makes the gameplay more consistent, but it doesn’t make sense to me. Some creatures are immune to certain types of attacks, like fire elemental type things being immune to fire. But there are powers that can take away immunities. How can a fire elemental be burned by flames? We don’t know, but 4E doesn’t care—it makes fights more predictable and makes a fire based character more effective to let them have powers that can eliminate immunities, so there you go. Fighters and other non-magically based classes get per-day attack powers where they do extra damage or have a special effect once per day, at their choice. What is that modeling? How does that decision and limitation make sense to the character in the gameworld? Not a concern for 4E. Warlords, another non-magical class, eventually get the power to move all nearby enemies around to whatever positions they like, even throwing them off cliffs or into pits of fire. How can you do that without magic? We don’t need to know or care—the powers aren’t about the flavor descriptions, they’re about the game mechanics in 4E. Now, I can layer on some fanwankery to make this sorta make sense—maybe even the martial classes actually are adepts in mystical combat disciplines complete with ki powers and fast combat rituals. (Earthdawn did something like that.) But 4E’s core rules don’t do that. 4E is designed from a perspective that we shouldn’t care about why or how, what matters is making the fight fun for the players. Which is fine for some players, but not for me.

Second, in my experience, 4E combats are very long and time-consuming, especially at higher levels. In the 11th level game I ran, a fairly straightforward “shake-down” fight at the beginning of the game lasted for three hours. It was fairly tactically interested at the beginning, but by the end of the fight I was bored silly, desperately wishing that my adventure hadn’t been derailed by the first battle. Now, part of that was inexperienced players who were acting more slowly and making less optimal choices than more experienced players would, but only part of that. I would guess that even veteran players might take an hour and a half to get through an encounter like that—simple math suggests that. The characters were dealing damage in the ballpark of 1d10+8, 2d10+7, or in a few cases as much as 5d8+11. They were fighting a set of creatures with a total of more than 600 hps. If the PCs are averaging 20-30 hps of damage per hit, and they’re hitting about half to two-thirds of the time, it will take them something like 35-50 attacks to win that fight—more when you consider rounds in which a character takes an action other than an attack. Even for players who are on the ball, know exactly what they want to do, and act quickly, that adds up to a lot of actions, with the monsters adding another 30 or 45 actions over the course of the fight. 4E greatly increased the number of hit points for both characters and monsters (especially for monsters), while in general reducing damage output—gone are the days of a tenth level wizard doing 10d6 damage to a large group of enemies, or a two-weapon wielding 9th level rogue sneak attacking three times in one round for a total of 18d6 damage. One-shot kills (or effective eliminations from an encounter like paralysis) are also greatly reduced or gone, which probably makes things more fun, but also slows things down. All of that makes 4E good for people who like giant set-piece battles that last for most of the session, but not so good for people who want a four-hour game to include two or three fights plus two hours plus of role-playing.

Also, 4E appears woefully under playtested. There are highly unclear rules that I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out and am still not sure I have right. There are pointless powers that don’t actually work given the rest of the ruleset. And there are examples of terrible math.

I’ll give two examples. First, 4E gives characters more feats than 3E did—advantages that make a character more effective at certain tasks. In 3E, some feats were great, many were good, and a few were dogs. In 4E, they appear to have taken this to its logical extreme: a handful of feats, mostly restricted by class or race, are pretty good or even great; a few are useful but unexciting; and most of the rest are terrible, almost not worth the complexity of remembering to apply them. For example, one of the basic feats that most combat-oriented characters in 3E would take eventually was Weapon Focus, which gave a +1 to hit with a specific weapon. One out of every twenty attacks would be turned from a miss to a hit by taking that feat, which wouldn’t alter every fight, but can easily change some. The Weapon Focus feat in 4E adds a +1 to damage. At best, that might be increasing your damage output by 10% at first level, but that rapidly falls to insignificant. And that’s one of the more effective feats. Another feat, that you can’t take until 11th level, adds 1d10 on a critical hit—which generally requires a natural twenty. Yeah, adding about 0.25 hp of damage per attack is really useful. Even if you have one of the relatively rare abilities to get a critical on an 18-20, that’s adding an average of 0.75 hps of damage per attack at a point when you’re fighting monsters with between 100 and 600 hps each. As it stands, 4E would almost be better off without the feats altogether and with the class and racial feats folded into the basic powers of the classes and races. It would reduce complexity with very little other changes to how the game plays.

Second, the DMG includes a system of skill challenges—rules for resolving noncombat tasks with a more involved, more satisfying system than just “make a skill check to see if you succeed.” Many other games have had skill challenge systems—the first I can remember was Victory Games’s James Bond 007 RPG from the 1980s, which had a nice extended seduction system. That’s a great idea for a way to improve D&D from prior editions. Unfortunately, as written, the skill challenge system in the DMG appears to be broken. The DMG recommends difficulty numbers based on what level the PCs are—but the difficulties are so high that normal characters who haven’t invested in the Skill Focus feats will fail half the time if they are trained in the skill and three quarters of the time if they aren’t. At the same time, PCs need to succeed at a skill check two-thirds of the time in order to win a challenge. Needless to say, with those numbers, the players will lose the vast majority of skill challenges. (Maybe they should all take the Skill Focus feat—since most of the combat feats are lame, taking a relatively minor bonus to skills may be worthwhile. Of course, if there assumption is that every mid-level character will have multiple Skill Focus feats, they probably should have indicated that somewhere.)

I tried a skill challenge out with the pre-gen characters I made for the game I wrote. Using the difficulty numbers from the DMG, they would have had no chance of succeeding at the skill challenge in the game. I reduced all of the difficulties by 5 from the DMG values—a huge modifier—and was generous about giving them +2 circumstance modifiers, and the players barely won the challenge. That can’t be the right balance. Oh, and if you let characters use the assist another action, where they’re checking against a fixed target of 10, does that make it work? Nope—then the dominant strategy is to have everyone assist the best person in the party, at which point the skill challenges suddenly become laughably easy. The skill challenge system is a really good idea. If they started the development process with what they have now, playtested it and found out why it didn’t work, and then fixed it, they could have added something worthwhile. As it is, they added less than a good Dragon article—some ideas that a good DM can rebuild and redevelop into something worthwhile, but that isn’t usable out of the box. The playtesting process should have caught this and fixed it into something that worked. That it didn’t is a serious flaw.

There are many other minor bits of stupidity. One of the “paragon paths” gives a penalty to saves against fear-based effects it puts on enemies. Which would be kinda cool, except that only one or two of the many fear-based effects that that class has actually give opponents a saving throw. So you have an apparently cool power, that in fact never comes into play. The rules also have lots of unclear little bits. Does the cleric’s Healer’s Lore power modify static healing numbers (i.e. “the target heals 5 hp” or “the target can spend a healing surge”)? If it doesn’t it’s a pretty lousy power. But the general rule appears to be that static numbers don’t get affected by modifiers. Either way is plausible, but you would think a smart experienced gamer could read the rules, look for an answer to an important, obvious question, and get a clear answer. You’d think that, but you’d be wrong. If they had six months of playtesting ahead, they’d be in good shape. But this is the release version.

All in all, I don’t like 4E so far. It doesn’t deliver what I’m looking for in an RPG. And even for what it does deliver, it has a lot of problems in my limited experience. I’m sure that I’ll play it a bunch. But I’m not looking forward to that. Hopefully, my first experiences will be proved wrong, and when I play it, as long as I disregard some of the purely personal taste issues, I’ll find that it makes for really fun and interesting games. Many friends whose opinions on games I respect have praised 4E based on their experiences. I’d love to post a follow-up in a few months saying that I was wrong and 4E is great at what it tries to do. But currently, I doubt that I will.

California marriage equality decision

Fri, 16 May 2008 16:02:32 GMT

As most people probably know, the California Supreme Court struck down the state ban on same-sex marriages yesterday, in a decision referred to as In Re Marriage Cases. Because the decision clearly and explicitly relies solely upon state law grounds, it cannot be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court (contrary to at least some media coverage that suggested that an appeal was likely). I thought I would post some quick thoughts from the perspective of a lawyer.

I have read the majority opinion and the concurrence, but not the dissenting opinions (which are technically concurring and dissenting, but really just dissents). Also, my usual disclaimers about this not being legal advice, I'm not your lawyer, etc., apply, although I do consider this case to be within my field of professional expertise.

It's useful to look at this decision at three levels: policy, law, and judicial craftsmanship.

As a matter of policy, it is terrific. There is every reason to have marriage equality, and the arguments against marriage equality are frankly pretty darn weak. In particular, the only argument against that has any real force is the argument based on the religious nature of marriage, but that falls apart when you examine it. Nobody is requiring the Catholic Church to perform same-sex marriages-- that would, indeed, be unconstitutional as an invasion of freedom of religion. But the Catholic Church (or other institutions with similar canon law provisions) has no right to have the state enforce its definition of marriage on the people, or for that matter to privilege its definition over the definition of other religious groups (such as the United Church of Christ, my church) that permit same-sex marriage. So yay California at a policy level. It's worth noting that what was at stake yesterday was relatively small-- CA already had a strong domestic partnership statute that provided almost precisely the same rights and privileges as marriage, but with a different name. But even so, getting rid of a second-class label on same-sex relationships is an important step forward, and it will influence (I believe positively) the national debate and progress towards nation-wide marriage equality.

As a matter of law, the opinion is so-so. The court has four important holdings: (1) Proposition 22 banned same-sex marriages within CA, not just the recognition of foreign (i.e. Massachusetts) same-sex marriages; (2) the right to marry, protected under the California Constitution's right of privacy clause, includes a right to same-sex marriages; (3) the ban on same-sex marriage does not violate equal protection on the basis of sex; and (4) discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is subject to strict scrutiny (with the obvious corollary that the ban on same-sex marriages fails strict scrutiny).

Point 1 is, in my opinion, clearly correct. While some groups argued that a law passed by initiative that says that only marriages between a man and a woman are "valid and recognized" within California only dealt with the recognition of out-of-state marriages, that argument is a huge stretch. The plain language of the statute covers all marriages, not just out-of-state marriages. Also, it's hard to imagine that voters thought that they were only blocking Massachusetts same-sex marriages. The odd thing is why the court even reached the issue-- it's really irrelevant, because either the CA Constitution requires marriage equality, in which case the statute has no force, or it doesn't, in which case a pre-existing statute prohibits in-state same-sex marriages. This does tie into the constitutional amendment initiative that is likely to be on the November ballot, which uses the same language as the mini-DOMA initiative, but even so, that issue wasn't properly before the court.

Moving on to the substantive, constitutional arguments, the right to privacy argument seems pretty strong. There is an explicit, textual guarantee of privacy in the CA Constitution, adopted to incorporate the developing right to privacy doctrines of the 1970s into the constitution. A line of prior cases apply right to privacy concepts to protect a right to marriage. Given that, there is a good argument for including a right to marriage equality. However, it is important to note the failings of the court in this regard. Saying that a right to privacy and to define your family as you see fit includes a right to marriage makes sense-- but then how do you deal with the polygamy and incest arguments? The majority relegates this to a footnote (n. 52, for those following along at home), basically saying lots of courts have said that polygamous or incestuous relationships are “inimical to the mutually supportive and healthy family relationships promoted by the constitutional right to marry.” In other words, we think polygamy and incest are bad and icky, but we’re down with gay people (with a likely subtext of because they’re people like us, not like those freaky fundamentalist Mormons). I’m not arguing here that there should be a right to polygamous marriages recognized by the state or to incestuous marriages. My point is just that the court was not very effective at distinguishing them. And its methodology here was typical of its overall approach: the bulk of court decisions, including very old ones (citing two late Nineteenth Century anti-polygamy cases), weigh against polygamy, therefore no right to polygamy, but the bulk of cases weigh against marriage equality, but they’re wrong because we can cite this higher principle of a right to marriage. Very, very sloppy, not very persuasive reasoning. Far better to have addressed the matter more directly and persuasively, or to have punted (that’s not before us, there may be good reasons based on abuse, pragmatic concerns, or power dynamics that are different in those cases, bans on polygamy and incest may pass strict scrutiny, we’re not touching it now).

I’m not a fan of their resolution of the sex discrimination argument. First, I believe that argument is fundamentally right: if A can marry B, but A can’t marry C, and the only distinction between B and C is their sex, how is that not sex discrimination? If you recognize that as sex discrimination, then under California law, you apply strict scrutiny (is the law narrowly tailored to serve a compelling state interest) and the law fails easily. Moreover, miscegenation laws were struck down using a precisely parallel argument, except substituting race for sex. But the court rejects this, suggesting that it’s different treatment, but not intended to oppress anyone (unlike miscegenation law, which the court correctly notes were part of a system of racial oppression). Apparently the court is unaware of the history of patriarchy and oppression inherent in the traditional gender norms of marriage-- oh wait, the court mentioned those doctrines, but just didn’t care. Mostly, this seems to be part of an agenda that says sex discrimination isn’t as pernicious as racial discrimination-- a conclusion directly at odds with settled CA doctrine that strict scrutiny applies to both.

However, the court goes on to break new ground by explicitly declaring that sexual orientation is a suspect class (i.e. like race or sex discrimination, state action that discriminates on the basis of sexual orientation must pass strict scrutiny). That is a profound and important holding, and I think correct based on the standard for determining whether a classification is suspect. And of course, once strict scrutiny (famously referred to as strict in theory but fatal in fact) is applied, the law is unconstitutional.

It’s worth considering the institutional aspect of this. Should decisions like this be made by courts as opposed to the legislature (and the people acting through initiatives)? In general, courts should act with a light touch when invalidating popularly passed laws, especially when those laws are (A) recent and (B) passed by the people themselves. The court’s argument that the initiative process doesn’t matter in this case because various initiatives have been struck down for violating the constitution (mostly the federal constitution, which is a different issue) gives too little weight to majoritarian, democratic concerns. At the same time, two key principles of constitutional review, in my opinion, are that it should act to protect oppressed minorities and that clear textual provisions should be given full force. Both of those apply, to varying degrees, in this case. Moreover, amending the constitution in CA is pretty easy-- petition by 8% of the gubernatorial vote, followed by a majority vote of the (voting) population. So that means that CA courts should be more aggressive about their interpretations than federal courts-- if they get it wrong, the people can fix it. And indeed, there will probably be an anti-marriage equality amendment on the ballot in November. So overall I think this was a correct legal decision, although I disagree with parts of it.

Finally, let’s talk about judicial craft. The majority opinion is terrible as a matter of craftsmanship. It is long and bloated-- 121 pages! That matters, because it makes the opinion ineffective as a persuasive piece. Many newspapers printed the entire opinion of Brown v. Board of Education-- that was intentional on the part of the Supreme Court, which wrote a short, punchy, persuasive opinion. No newspaper will print all of this decision, nor should they. Nor will future courts find this a persuasive opinion in considering marriage equality cases. Yes, the California Supreme Court will have weight based on its decision and based on the respect that the court commands (it’s probably among the top 5 most respected state courts, arguably the most respected). But it won’t persuade based on the force of its reasoning, and that’s a shame. It includes tons of citations, but often over cites the same small number of sources for pages and pages at a time-- not inspiring confidence that the court has fully mastered the field and is being unifying in its treatment of issues, but rather that the court is picking its friends and then blathering on about them. It dodges some of the tough issues-- when they come up, it says dismissive things rather than persuasively engaging with them and responding to them. It relies on biased nose-counting, citing the number of dissents and so forth in prior marriage equality cases as a reason to discount the weight of the precedent against marriage equality, while counting the majority opinions rejecting the sex discrimination argument (and discounting many of the same dissenting opinions it counted for the overall point) as an argument against adopting the sex discrimination rationale. It wastes time on non-determinative side issues-- did some of the litigants have standing? Who cares? It’s clear that at least one litigant on each side did, so it doesn’t matter whether others did. Similarly, the court could have (and probably should have) limited its consideration to the legal issues that ultimately mattered-- sexual orientation is a suspect class and the right to marry includes a right to marriage equality (and arguably the court should have picked one of those arguments, rather than winding its way through both)-- and then stated that the rest of the issues could be left undecided. It would have made for a much shorter, more powerful opinion. All in all, the opinion just isn’t very good or very well done, which is a real loss for the law and for those of us who care about marriage equality. But at least it came out the right way.

Now, time to gear up for the fight in November. It should be close, but winnable.

Why I support Obama

Mon, 04 Feb 2008 20:02:21 GMT

I'm not going to post often on this account, but I wrote an e-mail to some of my Democratic friends encouraging them to vote for Obama. I thought I would repost it here.

I encourage all of you to vote for Barack Obama in the Democratic primary on Tuesday. I start from the belief that either Obama or Clinton would be amply worth supporting over any plausible Republican nominee. However, I think there are strong reasons why Obama is the better choice.

1. A history of accomplishment: Obama has a proven history of accomplishment in his service in the Illinois legislature. One law in particular stands out for me. Obama was one of the first advocates for a law requiring the videotaping of custodial police interrogations in homicide investigations. This is a hugely important reform that dramatically reduces the number of coerced confessions of innocent people, which has the corollary result of increasing the number of actually guilty people who are ultimately prosecuted. However, when Obama began advocating this reform, there was widespread opposition. Almost all of the state’s attorneys (the prosecutors, equivalents of district attorneys in other states) opposed the idea, as did most of the organized police. Obama persuaded state’s attorneys, police chiefs, and his fellow legislators of the importance of this reform. Ultimately, the bill passed with overwhelming legislative support and was signed into law. Now, most state’s attorneys and police recognize the value that taped interrogations provide. They are a useful investigative tool, and they are enormously persuasive to juries, who can actually watch the tape and see that the interrogation was not coercive. And they exist in Illinois because Obama is effective at getting legislation passed.

2. Obama works through effective conflict resolution methods: Obama’s methods of working are highly consistent with a conflict resolution approach. In particular, he does an excellent job of listening; acknowledging respectfully the concerns and interests of other people, including those he disagrees with; and then pursuing solutions that address everyone’s interests. That is a highly effective means of dealing with disagreements. In fact, you can see it in my prior example. The initial position of the police and the state’s attorneys was that videotaping interrogations would interfere with their ability to conduct investigations and secure convictions. The underlying interest there is in successful investigation and prosecution. Obama responded by convincing people that videotaping would in fact serve that interest better, by allowing easier prosecutions in an environment where many jurors distrusted custodial confessions, largely because of a well-documented history of torture in Chicago police stations. By focusing on the underlying interests of law-enforcement personnel, he was able to achieve a major victory without getting locked into a clash between entrenched positions.

While that’s an important approach to getting things done in the legislature or Congress, it is perhaps even more important in foreign policy. We face a perilous world, with a large amount of conflict and potential conflict. To name only a couple examples, North Korea and Iran both pose serious risks because of their nuclear weapons programs and the instability they create in their regions. Conflict-resolution techniques are an important part of how we need to address those problems. By addressing the underlying interests of the countries involved, rather than focusing on their current stated positions, Obama’s approach offers the best hope of a peaceful resolution. It’s not obvious that there is a good solution to either situation. We may not be able to actually convince Iran to dismantle its nuclear weapons program. But a conflict-resolution approach, which listens to, acknowledges, and seeks to address the underlying interests that motivate the other side’s decision-making offers the best hope.

Incidentally, taking a conflict-resolution approach does not mean being a push-over or giving in. It’s perfectly consistent to acknowledge the other side’s interests and to still focus on your interests, and be unwilling to compromise in a way that will prevent you from accomplishing your interests. Obama also sometimes staked out positions where every other member of the Illinois senate took the opposite position. But it means doing things that are most likely to actually achieve your interests, and even when agreement is not possible, disagreeing in a way that makes cooperation and the resolution of other disputes possible.

3. Obama is very smart and thoughtful. Obama is unusually smart and thoughtful for a politician. He takes things seriously, and he takes his responsibility to the Constitution seriously. There were several cases in which he did not vote in favor of bills that passed by overwhelming margins because either the procedure taken by the legislature did not give him the opportunity to adequately consider the bill or because he thought the bill would be unconstitutional. That’s a remarkable approach in a modern politician. Many politicians today cynically support bills that they know would never be upheld as constitutional because they view it as an easy way to score cheap political points. A classic example would be Clinton’s repeated sponsorship of a bill to ban flag-burning, despite the fact that she surely knows that the Supreme Court has invalidated completely identical bills and despite the fact that she opposes a flag-burning constitutional amendment. I think that it is valuable to have a President who actually cares about the limits of the Constitution, especially after the atrocities of the last eight years. I am deeply worried that while Clinton would almost certainly be less authoritarian than Bush has been that she would not push us far enough back.

4. Clinton was badly wrong on Iraq. One of Clinton’s principal claims to be the better candidate is experience. That’s sort of bogus to begin with. It requires considering her experience as First Lady to be worth more than Obama’s longer experience as an elected legislator. But in any event, experience is only valuable if it leads a candidate or officeholder to make the right decisions. Clinton’s track record is not very good. She has had several high profile failures-- most notably on health-care reform. She also got Iraq badly wrong. She, like so many other Democrats, either thought that allowing the Bush Administration to invade Iraq was a good idea or thought that she would take too much political damage if she opposed the war. Either way, she made a bad mistake. (Perhaps an invasion of Iraq to stop the abuses of the Hussein government could have been justified and could have been done right. But even if that’s true, Bush would never have been the President who would have done it right.) Furthermore, she then spent years and years not admitting her gross error. I don’t know if she has finally said that she thinks it was wrong then, but it doesn’t matter. She should have long ago, as Edwards did. Better, she should have voted the right way when she had the chance. In contrast, Obama has been a consistent opponent of the war from the beginning. To be fair, he never faced the situation of having to make a choice in the Senate as to how to vote on its initial authorization. But lacking that “experience” cannot way against having had that chance, gotten it wrong, and then refusing to admit a mistake. I don’t know which candidate will do a better job of extricating us in the least destructive way from Iraq. But I do know that Obama’s record and positions make me much more hopeful about him than I am about Clinton.

5. Obama is much more likely to win in a general election. Electability is not my principal reason for supporting Obama, but it is worth considering. Either Clinton or Obama would be a much better president than Sen. John “I never met a war I didn’t like” McCain or Mitt Romney. But in an election match-up against McCain, in particular, the election would not be a foregone conclusion. And Obama is more likely to prevail than Clinton. Obama is very popular with independents and even draws some Republican support. While Clinton would draw heavy Democratic support, and would even draw the votes of some racist Democrats who would not vote for an African-American candidate, she is unlikely to do well with independents and will in fact turn out a large Republican vote for her opponent. Overall, Obama is much more likely to win. Partly, this relates to the general pattern of being good at listening and at expressing understanding and comprehension (even with disagreement) for other’s positions. Partly, it has to do with history, and the experience of the Bill Clinton presidency. But whatever the reasons, it is a strong, real effect. Notably, Democrats from “red states” or “reddish purple states” have heavily endorsed Obama. I believe that they think, correctly, that down ballot Democrats will win many more races for Senate, House, and state offices if he is the nominee than if Clinton is.

Both candidates face a certain amount of bigotry based on their characteristics-- Obama has to overcome racism, Clinton sexism. That’s deplorable. But I actually don’t think that it is the principal cause of the difference in electability. I don’t think Clinton has very high negatives among non-Democrats (including independents) principally because she is a woman. Rather, I think it is because of a series of mistakes she made as First Lady, including how she handled being a point person on health care reform and some of the public statements she made, as well as the general effect of having been tarred by a long series of attacks on Bill Clinton. So I don’t think that it is a capitulation to sexism to take into account the high negative opinions that will make it difficult for her to win.

I’m all for electing a female President. I was enthusiastic about the idea of Pat Schroder of Colorado running for president back in the day. I think that Gov. Janet Napolitano of Arizona (to name just one example) might make a strong VP nominee and hopefully future presidential nominee. But it’s not inherently sexist to say that Clinton will have a hard time winning, not because she’s a woman but because many people dislike her, and that that’s a good reason to not vote for her in a primary.

6. I’m not convinced that Clinton is clean, and she has run a dirty campaign. Hillary Clinton has a long history of being close to scandals. There were a series of dubious financial deals when she was in Arkansas. A large number of Clinton Administration officials were also, if not directly implicated in corruption, a little too close to it for comfort. While every politician (including Obama) has some unsavory donors who they eventually disavow, Clinton has a disproportionately large number. I don’t know that she’s corrupt-- I hope not. And some of that is the result of having been faced with heavy scrutiny and attack as a result of Bill Clinton’s presidency. But there’s enough of an odor of it to be worrisome. And I have heard second-hand but in my opinion reliable reports of straight-arrow Democrats who worked in Bill Clinton’s White House Counsel’s office who were dismayed by what they saw. Now, perhaps Hillary Clinton would run a cleaner, less questionable administration than Bill did. But if she is going to claim the mantle of the Bill Clinton Administration, she needs to accept the negative aspects of it as well.

Moreover, she has run a campaign that has used lies and crypto-racism. Again, this is somewhat complicated. Most candidates have supporters who lie or say awful things in support of their candidates-- neither Obama nor Clinton is an exception in this regard. But some statements come from campaigns themselves, or from proxies who can be fairly attributed to the campaign. Bill Clinton dismissing Obama’s victory in South Carolina on the basis of the fact the Jesse Jackson won in South Carolina is hard to interpret as anything other than racism. Whether he meant that as belittling Obama as just a black candidate or South Carolina voters as just black voters and thus less worthy of respect is rather beside the point. The Clinton campaign has also engaged in smears and distortions of Obama’s record. They have accused him of not being pro-choice because he voted “present” (rather than “no”) on an anti-abortion bill in Illinois-- notwithstanding the fact that abortion rights groups in Illinois requested a “present” vote. By having clearly pro-choice Senators like Obama vote “present,” they provided political cover for pro-choice Democrats from marginal districts to also vote “present,” and thus to avoid providing political ammunition to their opponents in the next campaign. Technical details to be sure, but the Clinton campaign’s mailers and publicity about it was clearly deceptive and just inaccurate. Likewise, the Clinton campaign (particularly through Bill Clinton) has tried hard to paint Obama as having followed the same “supported the war, then opposed it” pattern as Clinton did, but the facts don’t support their claims. In contrast, I have seen many fewer distortions, slanders, or implicit sexism in the Obama campaign or its close proxies. There are supporters of Obama who say sexist things or distort Clinton’s record, but I haven’t seen that coming from people whose statements can be fairly attributed to the Obama campaign.

The crypto-racism is particularly troubling. The Democratic Party, like America as a whole, has a long history of ugliness on race. By embracing the racism of some Democrats, the Clinton campaign has made itself part of the problem. I’m not saying that I think that Clinton is herself actually racist-- I assume she is not. But I am saying that she has not been being part of the solution, and that her close associates have been contributing to the problem. That should be unacceptable in a Democratic primary.

In conclusion, I think that Obama is the better candidate. He has a history of success. I’m hard-pressed to think of any major accomplishments that Clinton can actually claim credit for. He has a very effective style of dealing with conflicts. Clinton’s style of dealing with conflicts appears to be to escalate them and either lose or reach a stalemate. Obama is unusually smart and thoughtful, with a demonstrated commitment to the Constitution. While Clinton is also very smart, I have been less convinced that she is as thoughtful and certainly less convinced that she values the freedoms embedded in our Constitution as highly. Obama has a much better record on the war-- not the perfect one we would ideally like, but a much better one. Obama is much more electable than Clinton-- and Obama will be more able to effectively use the war against McCain than Clinton, who also voted to support it, will be able to. And finally, the Clinton campaign has lied, distorted the truth, and tried to use racism as a weapon against Obama, and we as Democrats should reject those tactics, especially within the primary campaign. Either candidate will be worth supporting in the general election-- I will donate to and campaign for either. But Obama is the better choice, and I hope that you will join me in helping him become our nominee.

Welcome

Sat, 12 Jan 2008 21:16:26 GMT

Cerebral Paladin is a lawyer, father, husband (of orichalcum), writer, and gamer, among many other activities. His ENWorld Story Hours can be found here at Aphonion Tales, or Journals of a Licensed Diabolist.