The Washington Post and the New York Times may have missed it, but the New York Sun got it. The key moment for the Democrats as a party during last night’s debate came when Barack Obama stumbled on the same question about driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants that had tripped up Hillary Clinton two weeks earlier.
For two weeks Obama and Edwards had attacked Clinton for her flip-flopping “politics of parsing” because she seemed both to support and oppose the licenses. (Obama spokesman Bill Burton said Clinton had taken “two weeks and six different positions to answer one question.”) But last night Clinton, having pushed New York Governor Eliot Spitzer into entirely abandoning his plan to issue driver’s licenses, responded with a crisp “no” when CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, the moderator, asked for a straight up-or-down answer on whether the candidates supported licenses for undocumented workers. Last night it was Obama who wanted it both ways. Asked the question, Obama launched into a discussion of how “When I was a state senator in Illinois, I voted to require that illegal aliens get trained, get a license, get insurance to protect public safety. That was my intention.” But when Blitzer pressed him for a yes-or-no answer, the usually exquisitely articulate Obama froze. Visibly off-balance, he replied that “I am not proposing that that’s what we do.” He then went on to say, “I have already said I support the notion that we have to deal with public safety.” A frustrated Blizter responded, “This is the sort of question available to a yes or no answer.”
Mistake of the Day
As an avid chessplayer–along with my day job at COMMENTARY, I am a coauthor of the New York Sun’s weekly chess column–I have had a lifelong fascination with blunders, of which I have made more than a few.
This interest has extended to domains far afield from the 64 squares of the chessboard. Mistakes of all sorts, from the trivial to the serious, from typographical errors to the misdesigns that lead to collapses of bridges, from slips of the tongue to intelligence failures, have been a subject that has gripped my attention and is reflected in some of my writing (see, for example, How Inept is the FBI? and Could September 11 Have Been Averted?).
Why do mistakes occur, and what can we do to avert them? One good starting place for answers is the work of Charles Perrow, author of Normal Accidents, which explores mistakes in industrial settings. As the aviation industry, among others, has demonstrated, there are numerous ways to reduce the accident rate (i.e., the mistake rate), but it cannot be brought down to zero. As the clichéd maxim has it: to err is human. There are limits to the functioning of human cognition, and the impact of these limits is magnified inside organizations of all sorts.
�
Today’s Mistake of the Day is on the decidedly trivial side of the spectrum. It involves the Army, Navy, and Airforce. As reported by USA Today, despites its “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, the military has been unwittingly seeking recruits on glee.com, a website where you can connect with others who are “gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or everyone else.”
Subjects for further inquiry: how many “advertising branch chiefs” does the U.S. military have, how are they recruited, and what are the limits on their cognitive functioning?