The "gotcha" question

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Back during the 2008 election period – especially after the selection of Sarah Palin as McCain’s VP candidate – I became exceptionally sensitive to the issue of the “gotcha question.”  A reporter asked Sarah a question about (I think) Pakistan, and she gave an honest and unguarded answer (which happened to coincide with Candidate Obama’s stand on the issue).  She later retracted her answer angrily, saying that she’d been asked a “gotcha” question by the media.

 

 

Speaking as someone who interviews people from time to time for a living, here are some comments on this, and on the current election cycle:

 

 

1)     There is no such thing as a “gotcha” question.  If you’re thinking of something like: “Have you stopped beating your wife? Answer yes or no!”, then you are living in a Marx Brothers universe.

2)     Asking a presidential candidate a question about politics, or foreign affairs, or economics, is perfectly fair.  All of these fall within the job requirements, you see.  Presidents have to work in all of those areas.  If you’re hiring someone for a job, you want to see how well they’ll do under stress, and if they know their stuff.  Sometimes you ask them hard questions.  “Why are you so great?” is a pointless question.  So is “Why is your opponent so wrong-headed?”  Both questions are just opportunities to let the candidate recite his/her talking points. 

3)     Tough questions are what it’s all about. Presidents get asked tough questions all the time.  Presidential candidates who whine about being asked tough questions aren’t really thinking about the job they’re seeking.

4)     Presidents are noted for handling tough questions with good humor and candor.   Really good presidents are able to defuse their questioners with charm and tact.  Roosevelt did it; Truman did it; Kennedy did it; Clinton did it; Reagan did it.  This is a valuable skill (see foreign relations, above).

5)     This one is for Herman Cain: being asked the capital of Uzbekistan is maybe a little bit of a Jeopardy! question, and not so much a foreign-policy question (although, ahem, even I know the answer to that one).  However: being asked about American flyover privileges or airbases in Uzbekistan is perfectly okay, since it has to do with what you will (maybe) be doing for the next four years.

6)     Only stupid people want a stupid president.

7)     Why would a clearly unintelligent / uninformed / untrained candidate (like Rick Perry, for example) run for the Presidency?  Presumably because someone told him that he could learn as he went along.  He’d be able to rely on his advisors and staff for the stuff he didn’t know, and he could rely on his gut for the important stuff.  Sound familiar?  Yes, I thought so. 

8)     Watch the Funny Or Die GOP Presidential Debate.  It says all this better than I ever could.  With Patrick Warburton and Leslie Jordan and Larry King yet.

9)     Presidents work for us, not us for them.  We’re the supervisors; we get a say in hiring them.  We get to ask the hard questions in the interview process.

 

 

I hope I live through this election year.  I honestly hope Romney gets the GOP nomination; he’s not electrifying, he’s like the Republican John Kerry.  If it’s someone (god forbid) like Santorum or Gingrich, I may have to drink strychnine. 

 

 

But don’t worry, everyone – the world ends in December, only a few weeks after the election!

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Herman Cain and Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan

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As of last weekend, the Republican presidential primary race lost a contender: Herman Cain dropped out.  It wasn’t his fault, blah blah blah, it was the media, those women’s accusations were just a distraction, blah blah blah, you will be hearing more from him soon.

 

 

Yes, of course, whatever.

 

 

The Ed Show last night had a nice mini-documentary on the Cain mini-campaign: 99.9 seconds of Cain’s various presentations and speeches, mostly in chronological order, including all of his most famous (and infamous) pronouncements.

 

 

I shivered with embarrassment through most of it.  Nine-nine-nine.  Trying to remember what, if anything, he remembered about the Libya conflict.  Saying that, for every woman who’d accused him of harassment, there were a thousand others who hadn’t.  It was a combination of hubris and ignorance which will not be outdone anytime soon.

 

 

But there was one statement that made me boilingly furious, and when I heard it again the other night, I started fuming all over again. 

 

 

I will pull it from a news story, so that I don’t make any transcription mistakes:

 

 

In an Oct. 8 interview, Cain announced his strategy to combat what he called "gotcha" questions, such as who are the leaders of foreign countries. 

 

 

"And when they ask who is the president of Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan, I'm going to say, ‘You know, I don't know. Do you know?' And then I'm going to say, ‘How's that going to create one job?'" Cain declared. 

 

 

He later added: “Knowing who is the head of some of these small insignificant states around the world — I don’t think that is something that is critical to focusing on national security and getting this economy going.”

 

 

This angers me for so many reasons.  Here are a few:

 

-        Evidently there are candidates who believe that they can win an election by making a virtue of their own abysmal ignorance.  

-        Evidently there are voters who, out of sheer stupidity, would reward this kind of ignorance. 

-        Saying “I don’t know” is fine, if it’s said with humility and with the intention of learning more about the subject at hand, especially if it concerns what you do for a living.  And – here’s the thing – geopolitics are a big part what an American president does for a living.   

-        We will assume that Cain was talking about Uzbekistan.  I can name that tune in four notes, without even Googling: the president’s name is Islam Karimov, and he’s been president of Uzbekistan ever since its independence in the early 1990s.  He is a pretty horrendous tyrant.  Uzbekistan is by no means a small country, and its population outnumbers that of the state of Texas (okay, I had to look that one up, but I’d guessed it had around 30 million people, and I was pretty close).   It, and its various stan-stan neighbors, are rich in resources and control vital strategic locations in Central Asia.  We are not talking about San Marino or Liechtenstein here. 

 

 

(It is interesting to note that, when Hilary Clinton visited Afghanistan a bit later, President Hamid Karzai actually asked her about this.  Word gets around, doesn’t it?)

 

 

Okay.  Cain’s out of the race, so I can stop ranting. 

 

 

But others just as stupid – hmm, could I be thinking of Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann? – are still in the running. 

 

 

And they may actually have a chance.

 

 

And that scares the living bejeebers out of me.

 

 

Sometimes Partner and I half-joke about making a run for Canada, if things get bad enough.

 

 

I do believe it may be time to make sure my passport is in order.

 

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Herman Cain

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So I notice Herman Cain seems to be embroiled in a bit of a controversy lately.

 

 

There is really nothing like watching a CEO flounder like a lungfish out of his local pond and into real life.

 

 

CEOs are not like the rest of us.  They are a strange and rare breed, like unicorns.  They breathe a purer thinner air, full of self-approbation and the praise of underlings.  They can do no wrong.  Their decisions are always right.  Their jokes are always funny.

 

 

This is why they get so blinky and irritable when you get them out into the light of day.  Without their flunkies and minions to support them, they get downright cranky.  I’m thinking Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling.  I’m thinking of Steve Jobs, rest his soul, whenever it was pointed out that an Apple product was less than perfect.  I’m thinking of Raj Rajaratnam snarling at the press.  I’m thinking of Jamie Dimon being nasty to the governor of the Bank of Canada only a month or two ago.

 

 

And I’m thinking of Herman Cain misspeaking about China’s nuclear capability – evidently he didn’t know they had A-bombs – and then saying, in effect, “No, I said the right thing.  I just said it in a way that you didn’t understand.”    And saying that women have the right to choose, but not to choose abortion, which is a form of genocide.

 

 

Not to mention all of those sexual harassment cases, which he has recently said he will no longer discuss.  (Poor baby!  Poor innocent!)

 

 

These allegations, to me, are especially telling.  If I had to guess, I’d hazard that Herman had no idea he was doing anything that could be considered offensive.  He probably thought he could say and do pretty much what he liked, and laugh it off later. 

 

 

Noblesse oblige, right?

 

 

Except that this kind of reasoning doesn’t work outside the boardroom. 

 

 

You and I (voters!) don’t have to do what Herman Cain tells us to do, or believe what he tells us to believe.  We can make up our own minds, and not worry about whether or not he’ll fire us for insubordination.

 

 

So what do you think of that, Herman?

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