Immediately after the first Bush/Gore debate in 2000, preliminary polling showed that Gore had won the debate (56% to 42%). But Bush’s surrogates hit the airwaves like a hurricano: Bush had performed well considering that he sucked at debating. And did you notice how Gore was sighing a lot? How disrespectful!

By the end of the week, Gore’s debate win had been flipped and he found himself completely on the defensive going into the second debate.

It’s hardly shocking to point out that televised Presidential debates have always been about more than making strong and compelling arguments based in fact. You don’t have to look any further than the poll results which showed that people listening to the Kennedy/Nixon debate on the radio thought Nixon had won while people watching the same debate on television thought that Kennedy had won. And while that poll has been disputed, the belief that visual presentation is an important factor has nevertheless shaped the media’s coverage of the debates.

The media’s coverage has two significant effects: First, it defines the criteria that people use to determine whether a debate was won or lost. Second, the media’s “consensus narrative” of the result of the debate will reshape the opinions people have of the debate. (The Bush/Gore debates are the most pertinent example of that effect, but it’s really a manifestation of the same psychological factors that contribute to peer pressure. Ever known someone who saw a movie and liked it, but then decided it sucked after discovering that Rotten Tomatoes rated it at 15%? Same thing.)

The recent conviction has been that Sarah Palin is destined for an epic failure when she goes to debate Joe Biden. But even if we assume that Palin’s shortcomings in knowledge and experience on the national stage will manifest themselves, there are still three ways in which she could achieve a significant upset.

First, there’s the Expectations Game. It seems absurd to me that the candidates should be graded on some kind of personalized curve, but that’s nevertheless the reality of it. (“Well, Candidate A is clearly not as intelligent or insightful as Candidate B. But, frankly, Candidate A is a complete idiot and he did manage to walk to the podium without walking into a wall… so I think that’s an A+ performance. Candidate B, on the other hand, mispronounced the name of a the Vice President of Paraguay, so I give him a C.”)

And could expectations be any lower for Sarah Palin at this point?

The McCain campaign’s decision to sequester Palin from the press has met with ridicule and criticism. The clear narrative that has developed is that the McCain campaign has decided that they can’t let her answer questions because they don’t believe she can answer them. And I’ve heard plenty of people express the idea that she must be “even worse than we think” because the McCain campaign apparently believes that the damage it’s taking from sequestering her is better than the damage it would take if it didn’t.

But it’s also possible that the McCain campaign has simply decided that this is the best way to lower the expectations for Palin going into the debate.

Basically there is a strategic advantage to making Sarah Palin look like the Uwe Boll of politics. If you go to a Uwe Boll film you can easily find yourself saying, “Well, that wasn’t so bad. I mean, it didn’t make blood actually run from my eyes.” Whereas if Steven Spielberg had made the same film, the words “that wasn’t so bad” wouldn’t have even crossed your mind.

Similarly, with expectations set so low, Sarah Palin has a pretty low hurdle to clear. They did the same with Bush in 2000: Set the bar as low as they possibly could and then deliver a decent debate that looks positively amazing compared to the expectations.

Second, there’s the matter of Looking and Sounding Presidential. This has absolutely nothing to do with actually saying anything insightful or intelligent. It’s a matter of visual presentation; a smooth speaking style; and not saying anything that’s factually incorrect.

It’s very clear that Sarah Palin is good at delivering a canned speech. But she’s also apparently very good when it comes to political debates. Her opponent in the Alaskan gubernatorial debate cites her performance in that debate was the turning point in the campaign. And a large part of her success lay in delivering simple answers in an authoritative fashion.

The McCain campaign has forced changes in the format of the VP debates in order to simplify the questions and shorten the answers. You can rest assured that they are spending all of their free time coaching Palin in short, canned responses.

Finally, there’s the Post-Debate Spin. This is where the campaign surrogates try to establish the narrative of what happened in the debate. And this is crucial because (a) more people will see this post-debate narrative than will actually see the debate itself and (b) as we’ve discussed, even people who actually saw the debate can have their opinion of it re-shaped by the media’s narrative.

My point with all this? Simply that we shouldn’t be setting our own expectations too high in hoping for a complete Palin meltdown at the debate. And that, in some ways, by exaggerating our own expectations of Palin’s failure we end up feeding into the anti-intellectual process that Republicans use to “win” these debates.

I’m hopeful that we will see Palin screw-up and become an even bigger millstone around McCain’s neck when it comes to independent voters. But I think that the growing consensus that this is some sort of guaranteed slam dunk certainty is about as naive as the certainty everyone had that Gore would use the debates to solidify his 3-5% lead over Bush in the national polls.

I’m actually much more hopeful about this Friday’s debate on foreign policy between Obama and McCain. The expectations game favors Obama; Obama looks and sounds more presidential; and if Obama can win that debate it will end up establishing a narrative that will be almost impossible for McCain to overcome as they move towards the final debate on domestic policy.

First: She’s liar.

Second: She’s horrendously unqualified.

Third: She has revealed the seedy hypocrisy of the Republican party.

But probably the most impressive thing about Sarah Palin is that she is, in fact, the entirety of John McCain’s economic policy, health care policy, tax policy, education policy and foreign policy:

He said so himself when he claimed that, whenever Barack Obama is talking about John McCain’s economic policy, health care policy, tax policy, education policy, and foreign policy, he’s actually talking about Sarah Palin.

And did I mention that she’s using the same shady tactics of Richard Nixon and George W. Bush in her attempts to impede lawful investigations into her misconduct as governor of Alaska?

So if you want corrupt, unqualified liars, hypocrites, and smear-artists in the White House — Vote McCain-Palin 2008.

Yesterday I wrote about the role the agricultural revolution played in oppressing women. While exploring that subject, I ended up wandering off on a rather large tangent that I eventually deleted when it became large enough to sufficiently defocus the essay. But I think it’s a sufficiently interesting to discuss it here.

Jared Diamond has made the argument in several books and essays — most notably Guns, Germs, and Steel — that the move from hunter-gatherer societies to agricultural societies was the “worst mistake” in history. To support this conclusion, he cites various evidence which indicates that the larger families of early agricultural societies actually resulted in poorer nutrition, hygiene, and even longevity compared to the hunter-gatherer societies they replced.

But Diamond’s thesis makes little sense: No one would willingly choose a less appealing lifestyle. Diamond argues that these societies were “forced” into this lifestyle due to their inability to control their birth rates. But this contradicts the known facts: For tens or hundreds of thousands of years, mankind was able to regulate their birth rates just fine while continuing to live in hunter-gatherer societies. And, in fact, modern hunter-gatherer societies manage to similarly regulate their birth rates.

I suspect the reality is that the agricultural lifestyle was preferred specifically because it allowed for larger families. This is a point of view which is probably difficult for a scholar from the latter half of the 20th century to understand, given that contemporary western society puts a very low premium on children compared to previous epochs of history.

Oh, we still like our children… we just tend to like them in moderation. The idea of a single woman bearing 20 children seems unspeakably alien and even slightly distasteful to most of us… but would seem incredibly desirable to most cultures of recorded history.

So those early farmers may have been hungry, dirty, and short-lived… but it wasn’t a mistake. They were gaining something that they valued even more.

Recently I’ve been reading The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir. The book, as a whole, attempts to provide a universal overview of women — biologically, historically, culturally, and socially — from the dawn of time down through the mid-20th century (when it was written). It’s a stunningly ambitious project and, to its credit, succeeds far more often than it fails.

In the historical section of the book, Beauvoir analyzes how and why women came to be subjugated in almost every culture from the beginning of recorded history until the present day. If it was a matter of pure chance or a cultural artifact, she argues, we would not expect it to appear so reliably in cultures with little or no connection to each other. Nor would we expect to see the subjugation continue with such unmitigated persistence in all of these disparate cultural traditions while every other aspect of those cultures could be seen to shift dramatically.

Beauvoir makes a rather worthwhile argument that the key moment of change lies in the shift from hunter-gatherer societies (in which women are frequently seen as societal equals or even superiors) to agricultural societies. In short, no matter where agriculture arose, women were almost simultaneously subjugated. This indicates that the subjugation of women is neither a biological imperative nor some cultural oddity, but rather the result of something systemic to early agricultural societies.

Unfortunately, Beauvoir ends up muddying her argument rather thoroughly with heavy doses of mysticism, existentialism, and bald assertion. (These features may also be the result of a poor translation.) So, to try to straighten this out in my own mind, I wanted to put it down in a clearer form and then expand upon it.

THE PREMISE

Prior to the invention of agriculture (roughly 10,000 years ago), women were mythologically venerated. The degree to which this translated to daily life is somewhat unclear, but based on a variety of information (including the study of primitive tribes) it seems clear that men and women in hunter-gatherer societies were generally considered equals. There was a division of labor in these societies (usually with the men hunting and the women gathering) based on the physical differences between the genders, but not subjugation.

But with the invention of agriculture, things shifted. Mother goddesses were shoved out of power and replaced with male gods. And by the time written records begin to appear, women have almost universally been shoved into a second-place status.

Something had changed.

CHANGE #1: PROPERTY

Agriculture created a sense of ownership in the land. And I think, from that, a stronger sense of property in general developed. Property is a form of power and allows for the extension of the personal will. The desire for control seems pretty deeply ingrained into humanity, and property is one way of asserting control.

This expansion of the concept of property eventually led to other humans being controlled as property. Slavery is the most egregious form of this concept, but the concept is also expressed in the idea that a daughter belongs to her father and is given to her husband.

What determines the difference between master and slave? Power. And in a society ruled by physical strength, who gains the power and who becomes the object to be owned? Statistically speaking, it’s the male who has more physical strength than the female.

In this way, the expansion of the concept of personal property leads to the opportunity for the subjugation of women.

CHANGE #2: LEGACY AND IMMORTALITY

The expansion of property rights also created the ability to pass on a greater and more meaningful legacy to your children.

The nascent desire to achieve immortality through our children (so that some part of us might continue throughout eternity) is a pretty basic building block of human psychology. But being able to give our children property acts as a kind of force magnifier on our genetics: Now we’re not just passing on our flesh and blood, but also all that we have achieved in the course of our own lifetimes.

(The ultimate futility of this is demonstrated by Ozymandias, for example, but that doesn’t stop us from wanting it.)

But there’s a catch here: Without property, we’re perfectly happy to spread our genetic material far and wide and hope that some of it will endure. With property, however, there’s suddenly a desire to give it to the most worthy of our heirs. And, even more importantly, make sure it goes to one of our heirs and not somebody else’s heirs.

Unlike women, however, men have no surety of paternity. Which means that they have no inherent surety that they’re giving their property to their own kid or to the kid of some guy just down the street.

In order to gain that surety, the female mate must be controlled. And this creates the motivation for the subjugation of women.

CHANGE #3: FAMILY SIZE

There is plenty of evidence — both archaeological and anthropological — indicating that the movement from a hunter-gatherer society to an agricultural society resulted in larger families. This is either because the agricultural lifestyle required a larger workforce (which was obtained by having a larger family) or it was because the predictability of the agricultural lifestyle allowed for more children (which was desirable because of the legacy and sense of immortality they created).

However, for women having more children means spending more time in the non-productive state of biological reproduction (i.e., pregnant or recovering from pregnancy). Because women become less productive, they become more dependent on the production of men.

There are two edges to this sword: First, dependence allows for control. To put it in crude terms, if leaving your husband means you’ll starve to death, you effectively can’t leave your husband.

Second, because men are the breadwinners, they have a natural inclination to believe that the resulting wealth belongs to them alone. (Even if, in point of fact, their own productivity is heavily ennabled by their wife’s partnership and the children she is sacrificing her own productivity to bear and raise.) Since it is their wealth — not their wife’s wealth — the desire to make sure it goes to their own child (and not the progeny of cuckoldry) becomes even stronger.

(These impulses, it can be noted, explain the common laws prohibiting women — particularly married women — from owning property. It is a simple and expedient way to make sure that they can’t lay claim to any of the wealth which their husbands believe belongs rightfully to themselves and to their sons.)

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

This is all simplified to its most basic components, of course. But that’s pretty much inherent in the exercise: We’re looking at the broad similarities created in society and economy by the agricultural revolution. Those broad similarities result in certain cultural patterns, of which the oppression of women is one.

And that’s why the oppression of women appears in tandem with the agricultural revolution, even when cultures are discovering agriculture independently.

On the flip-side, this does lead to the interesting observation that women’s liberation groups first began meeting with widespread success right around the time of the industrial revolution. In other words, the oppression of women appeared with agricultural economies and began disappearing as the agricultural economies gave way to industrial economies.

Is that mere coincidence?

From a philosophical standpoint, the women’s liberation movement is commonly understood to grow out of the Enlightenment-era focus on liberty. But were those philosophies only able to find fertile soil because the economies created by the industrial revolution de-emphasized inheritable property, reduced the need for large families, and made it possible women to obtain gainful employment?

This, ultimately, opens a much larger discussion of whether culture influnces economy; or if its the economy that influences culture. I suspect that, to one degree or another, both are true. I also suspect that it’s probably more insightful to look at how the necessities of an economy create certain social structures, and then look at the cultural impact those social structures have. (For example, the agricultural revolution may have subjugated women, but that subjugation manifested itself in very different ways across a wide swath of cultures and classes.)

If you’re politically progressive — if you support civil rights; a clean environment; a fair economy; a well-run government; and the like — then Sarah Palin is dangerous. She has the right look, the right voice, and the right personal narrative to craft a political persona for herself which can resonate with a lot of people. Like Reagan before her, she can tool the power of perception to her advantage. And the power of perception can be very powerful in politics.

On top of that, she’s demonstrating a keen instinct for the jugular and the ability to articulate Republican talking points. Whether she’s writing the speeches or not is truly immaterial. She’s not Barack Obama or Bill Clinton, but she’s one of the best public speakers the Republicans have had in years.

I expect that Palin wil be a major mover-and-shaker in the Republican party for years to come. She will be a highly visible and highly effective spokesperson for the party. And she’ll probably be a very viable candidate for a Presidential run in 2012.

With all that being said, however, Palin has several key weaknesses:

(1) She suffers from a profound lack of experience. The Republicans are trying to spin that away by saying that she has more experience than Obama (she doesn’t) or by claiming that only executive experience counts for anything (a standard which means that John McCain is has no relevant experience). It’s very important that they don’t win this battle. Palin is inexperienced and she needs to remain defined that way through this election cycle.

(2) She has given two major speeches since being named as the VP nominee… and each of those speeches has been riddled with blatant lies. Those lies (and any lies she chooses to tell in the future) need to be repeatedly emphasized so that her credibility can be (quite rightfully) destroyed.

(3) She has several rather significant scandals hanging over her. Troopergate, her involvement with the secessionist Alaskan Independent Party, the book-bannings, and the politically-motivated “loyalty” firings cannot be allowed to fall to the back-burner.

(You’ll notice that none of the pregnancy nonsense or “mommy shouldn’t be allowed to go back to work” foolishness is mentioned above. That’s because those are, frankly, red herrings that provide nothing but a distraction from the more meaningful and substantive narrative.)

The next week is going to be fairly crucial. If Palin can be defined in terms of her failures, her lies, and her scandals then she’ll be effectively neutralized in this election cycle. (Although her ability to fire up the Republican base is not irrelevant, particularly if it frees McCain to finally skew back towards more moderate positions.)

But even if she’s neutralized in this election, she’s not going to go to away. She’s a young Republican politician who has been thrust into a party leadership role at a time when the existing leaders of the party are aging their way out of politics. There are only two ways she doesn’t assume a major role (including that possible 2012 run for President):

(1) One of her scandals breaks big. If Troopergate were to result in a criminal conviction or impeachment or if a video were to emerge of her explicitly endorsing the AIP’s secessionist platform, that would probably be sufficient to tarnish her political reputation in a way that would take years to recover from (if she ever could).

(2) The McCain-Palin ticket is blown out by the Obama-Biden ticket in the kind of humiliating display of political impotence that destroys careers. We’re talking about the kind of political whipping that McGovern received in ’72; Mondale and Ferrara received in ’84; or Dole and Kemp received in ’96.

However, I don’t consider either of those scenarios to be particularly likely.

In any case, I’ll be keeping a close eye on the polls over the next couple of weeks. I’m hopeful that the trends from earlier this week will persist and that the selection of Palin will be defined as the point where the McCain campaign finally shot itself irrevocably in the foot. But if she can somehow slip out from her inexperience, her mendacity, and her scandals, then Palin could become a very dangerous factor over the last 50 days of this campaign.