No readings or events are currently planned. Anyone interested  in hosting one in the San Francisco Bay Area should email decca@psussman.com. Thank you.

The police officer who arrested eminent Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. is said to be an excellent and sensitive cop. He teaches a class in racial profiling. Here are a few discussion points he might want to add to the syllabus. They come from a white layperson who has written often about criminal justice issues and given a good deal of thought to the sort of ambiguous confrontation that led to Gates’ arrest.

These suggestions for the lesson plan are occasioned by the incident in which Gates became embroiled, but none is specifically intended as a comment on that case since there is no way for outsiders to accurately determine what occurred during the confrontation inside that house in Cambridge. They are advanced as points worthy of consideration in similar situations.

First lesson: If an officer arrests a citizen for an offense that is not the one he or she was investigating at the outset and arises solely from the officer’s interaction with the arrestee, then there is an extra burden of proof on the officer. When the arrest results from such a personal interaction, in the absence of imminently dangerous and overt threatening activity such as the brandishing of a weapon, it likely represents a subjective and suspect assessment on the officer’s part

There was no crime until the police presence itself created one.

and not a clear-cut violation of the law.

Second lesson: Officers who enter a home or a tense encounter suddenly, as most do at some point, must realize that their presence will heighten animosities that have no necessary relationship to illegal activity.

Third lesson (an elaboration of the second): People get angry. When angry enough, they are likely to swear or shout or verbally abuse the officers whose very presence sets off such outbursts. This anger and acting-out are understandable (albeit not commendable) emotional responses and are not an indication of illegal activity. It is not illegal to be angry or to shout. The First Amendment protects speech, and there is no law mandating citizen politeness to authorities. It is the officer’s duty to defuse tense situations with calming talk or such other means as would be helpful (see next lesson).

Fourth lesson: After the original cause for an encounter has been resolved — as it apparently was when Professor Gates proved he was the resident, not a burglar, in his own home — then the officer must urgently consider the
 friction his very presence is likely to engender … and leave the scene promptly. His or her job after the original reason for the encounter is resolved is to avoid escalation or the creation of a new issue.

Fifth lesson: Altogether too many people who have been cleared of suspicion in a crime are nevertheless arrested for resisting arrest or disturbing the peace or interfering with an officer in the performance of his or her duty. An officer’s hurt feelings may be legitimate and infuriating to him or her, but they are not an indication that a crime has been committed. The burden is on officers to do everything in their power not to incite such crimes or they become complicit in the infraction.

Sixth lesson (and the first to address race or class at all): When dealing with a member of a race or class with an ingrained distrust of police officers, based on past, individual police behavior or historical social-control practices — and even contemporary practices in some areas — it is incumbent on officers to understand the reasons for the residual hostility they are likely to encounter and take extraordinary measures to calm the resulting tensions peacefully and sensitively. Whether the distrust is merited in the circumstances of the current encounter is irrelevant.

Seventh lesson: When officers are white and suspects are not, there is an even greater chance that extraneous resentments may greet even the best-intentioned officer. It’s not fair that conscientious officers bear the burden of historical resentments engendered by others, but it is a fact that they must be prepared to address with a sensitivity that is based on imaginative as well as practical training techniques. They must be taught empathy, not just control, if they are to perform their duties equitably. And, once again, this is even more true when there is no longer evidence that a crime has been committed requiring any police presence.

Eighth lesson: With effective training comes a recognition that instinct is often suspect in dealing with “other” race and class groups, so methodical reasoning is all the more essential. For example, a reasonable assessment of a burglary suspect would certainly take into account that a middle-aged man who walks with the aid of a cane, wears rimless glasses and has a slight paunch — and no professional burglary tools in his possession — is most unlikely to be the culprit in a residential burglary. The burden of proof shifts to the officer, to prove his or her case.

These lessons are not a comprehensive list and they are not rules, but the kind of awareness they exemplify might have defused the tense Gates encounter short of arrest and would significantly reduce arrests of other innocent civilians nationally. Officers need to take continuing classes to familiarize themselves with the social divisions in a multicultural nation; they need to understand viscerally, not just intellectually, what their presence represents to others. Unless the police department itself is diverse, individual officers will not develop the deep cultural understanding they need to fulfill their professional responsibilities.

In the broader picture, Professor Gates’ reported anger and hostility are unfortunate but irrelevant. There was no crime until the police presence itself created one. Therein lies an urgent problem that law enforcement must address … urgently.

Meg Whitman has a problem with our right to marry, but it’s not at all clear what that problem is.

The billionaire former eBay boss, now running as a Republican for governor, spoke to a gathering of “high-profile high-tech Silicon Valley women,” reported Chronicle columnist Leah Garchik. According to Garchik’s source, Whitman said she’d voted for Proposition 8, banning same-sex marriage, based on her religious convictions and her emotions.

Whitman added, as if to stake out an “above-the-fray” compromise position: “You know, I just wish there were one term for everything: civil unions.”

Here’s where I started getting lost, because there is currently

I won’t interfere in their religious affairs. I ask only that they don’t interfere in our civil affairs.

 ”one term for everything.” It’s called “marriage.”

For some reason, Whitman apparently prefers her own “term for everything,” as a substitute for the one that has been universally recognized for ages, in this country and elsewhere.

Under Whitman’s system, Garchik reports, “government would grant civil licenses only. It would be up to individual churches to decide who they would marry.”

Again, that’s the current system exactly: Government grants civil licenses, called marriage licenses. They are civil documents only, with no religious significance whatsoever. If churches wish to perform their own rituals using the civil marriage license, they are welcome to, and most have chosen to do so. They are free to perform that ritual for any gender combinations they wish. Civil authorities have no right under the Constitution to control how churches use the civil license in their rituals.

Similarly, couples who wish to be married outside a church, using the same civil marriage license, are entitled to do so, receiving the same civil benefits and responsibilities as those who “consecrate” their marriages in a religious institution.

Whitman’s essential point seems to be that, although she wants to retain the nationally recognized civil license, she objects to it being called what it’s always been called: a marriage license. She apparently wants all of us who were married years ago, as well as those who will be married in the future, to change the name of the license that was or will be issued for us. Why? Is she trying to disrupt traditional marriages like mine by changing the name of the license that first bound us 
 legally and gave us and our children certain civil rights, privileges and obligations?

If any religious denominations want to discriminate against same-sex couples in their religious rituals, that is their right. However, it is everyone’s right, including same-sex couples, to have equal access to the same civil marriage license that my wife and I had when we were married 38 years ago.

I see no reason why churches should be allowed to expropriate for their exclusive use the term that civil authorities have used for their license for centuries: a marriage license. If that name is too tainted for people in Whitman’s church, they are free to change the name they use in their rituals. “Holy matrimony,” perhaps? Whatever; it’s their choice. I won’t interfere in their religious affairs. I ask only that they don’t interfere in our civil affairs.

“Render unto Caesar …”

Huffington Post is a noble and necessary experiment in citizen journalism — and indeed in journalism itself — and I have been pleased to be a contributor, however infrequent. But like all path-breaking experiments, it can be led astray by its very success, and I wonder if it is now in danger of being blinded by the dazzle of one of its own innovations.

Citizen journalists at Huffington Post recently received an email crowing, understandably, that “More than 2,500 of you helped make our tea party coverage the biggest distributive reporting success since the election.” As evidence of that success, the email noted that Huffington Post’s citizen journalism “caught the eye of the blogosphere, on both conservatives and progressives [sic]. Rachel Maddow of MSNBC was among those watching your reports, broadcasting your photographs live on her show last Friday.”

Attention garnered is certainly one measure of success, but is that the best measure of journalism excellence? Is the volume of the reporting an adequate gauge of good journalism?

To get more specific: Should we not also ask whether the high-wattage attention focused on a series of fringe protests dreamed up by some p.r. wizard with an ideological agenda by itself distorted the importance of those protests?

Too often, in this celebrity-crazed nation, the attention paid to a subject is both self-justifying and self-reinforcing, and many of the errors of the mainstream media — even on issues far more important than a blonde beauty’s latest drunk-driving arrest — follow a similarly dangerous trajectory. That is,

Too often, in this celebrity-crazed nation, the attention paid to a subject is both self-justifying and self-reinforcing …

the unrelenting attention of “pack journalists” gives a credibility and importance to an event that it did not merit. (The reverse is also true: The paucity of attention paid to a topic marginalizes that topic and can help push it down to the bottom of the national agenda.)

The spin may vary from one news organization to another — one cable channel to another — but the attention itself may be what most people remember though it can be every bit as misleading as the crazed rant of a verbal bully posing as a journalist. (”Of course it’s important; it was the top story on the 6 o’clock network news.”) It is a symptom of the perversity of the human mind
that, as social scientists have argued, even the repetition necessary to debunk a myth can give it a measure of credibility, by the sheer act of repetition alone.

Examples are easy to find in the mainstream media, on issues of supreme importance — from Saddam Hussein’s complicity in the 9/11 attacks to the prevalence of the most recent headline-hogging crime. Misleading or not, stories like those have lasting impact in the real world: Hussein’s inflated “guilt” was a key part of the narrative furthering the war in Iraq, and those crime-of-the-moment stories often lead to ad hoc legislation that further distorts our crazy quilt of criminal sanctions.

All too often, such saturation coverage conditions public sentiment for quick and easy solutions. Those solutions may be as specific as “remedial” legislation or as general as the validation of “conventional wisdom” or as stubbornly pernicious as the reinforcement of racial, class and other stereotypes.

All of this may seem like a heavy burden to place on the coverage of an inconsequential fringe event like the “tea party” protests, but the level of coverage was not inconsequential.

Journalism is essentially anecdotal. Such coverage reinforces the reservoirs of anecdotal knowledge from which most of us draw our policy conclusions. In this instance, the public was likely to conclude from the attention paid to these p.r.-driven pseudo-events that the prevailing mood of the country has swung to angry grassroots advocacy of balanced budgets, lowered taxes and a reduced role for the federal government in financing systemic reforms of healthcare, the economy and the environment. There is no evidence that that is true, despite the excessive attention paid to a bunch of people at isolated locales parading around in tea-bag hats.

So what’s the antidote? Citizen journalism certainly has a valuable role to play in leavening news coverage with local perspectives and with the insights of experts outside the “usual suspects” featured on Sunday morning news shows. But massive, unfiltered exercises in citizen journalism can tilt public understanding as surely as the rush of passengers from one side to the other can threaten the stability of a small boat.

I used the word unfiltered intentionally. Despite the scorn heaped on the role of the MSM as filters of the information that reaches the public, we may be losing something important by so completely ditching the old model. The solution for information that has been inappropriately filtered may not be opening the spigot full-force.

Another word for journalism filters is editors. They are critical to the process of shaping the chaos of public events into some coherent form, including a rough hierarchy based on importance. Without them we are left with little more than the accumulation of data measured more by volume than significance.

By all means, let’s keep the citizens in citizen journalism. Let any interested reader find the raw data from hundreds of localities if they wish. But the measure of our success should be the perspective and understanding we provided for our readers, not how much data was accumulated by how many people or how much of it reverberated elsewhere in the national news echo chamber.

Of course, feeling the need to define its category before posting it under the heading “Previous Blogs” also betrays the mild discomfort of a longtime print journalist dipping his toes into the blogosphere.

* * *

For decades the voters of California have been freezing their peeves of the moment into constitutional permanence. Now the state’s voters are asked to solve the ensuing budgetary mess by once again creating a rigid, permanent constitutional fix for a transient fiscal crisis. Before Proposition 1A becomes yet another failed experiment in the politics of outrage, we should examine the dynamic that has brought us to our current fiscal impasse.

Among the primary culprits in restricting our ability to respond to extraordinary economic pressures are three constitutional mandates approved by the voters long ago that have placed legislators in a straitjacket as they try to resolve the pressure of extraordinary spending burdens and plummeting revenues brought on by the current depression.

The three measures most directly tying legislators’ hands are Proposition 13, which permanently distorts our tax base; the three-strikes initiative, which promotes unsustainable growth in our expensive prison system; and the two-thirds budget vote requirement that restricts legislators’ ability to respond to the other two pressures. Let’s review them briefly:

Proposition 13, a 1978 measure that was billed as the “homeowners’ tax revolt,” has ironically shifted more of the tax burden from businesses to homeowners. Its rigid formula for property assessment and taxation capped property taxes by an arbitrary numerical formula; starved many local services such as fire departments, police, schools and libraries; and generally tied revenue allocation into such knots that legislators and local officials had to raid other kitties to fund functions once financed by property taxes.

It also set a two-thirds vote requirement for legislative and local tax increases. Over the years, it has perpetuated – and even worsened – inequities among neighboring property owners and helped fuel a sense of

It’s a budgetary cure in the same sense that drinking a morning eye-opener will fix an alcoholic hangover.

the irrational burdens of taxation.

The three-strikes mandate, passed by voters in 1994, took many criminal sanctions out of the hands of judges and other professionals and subjected the nuanced art of sentencing to – once again – rigid arithmetic formulas that fail to reflect the gravity of the crime, the degree of individual culpability or the possibility of human change or rehabilitation. As a result, California has become one of the global capitals of lifetime incarceration, resulting in an ever-more-bloated prison system of increasingly geriatric (hence inordinately expensive), unthreatening prisoners.

The two-thirds budget vote mandate (with origins in Proposition 1 in 1933, during the mother of all depressions), combined with a polarized political system, has forced legislators to achieve virtual unanimity to resolve complicated budget problems. Politics and

governance are, above all, the arts of compromise and coalition-building. The two-thirds vote requirement and partisan ideological purity, whether on taxes or on spending, have made compromise and coalition-building next to impossible.

Certainly other factors contributed to our current fiscal stalemate – including the loss of institutional memory and personal working relationships in Sacramento caused by yet another voter mandate, term limits (Proposition 140, passed in 1990). But what the three constitutional measures emphasized here have in common are their profound effect on the governance of this large state and their inflexible, permanent dictates driven by transitory voter outrage that was stoked by political opportunists.

One-size-fits-all formulas virtually never solve the problems they were designed to, and they create unforeseen problems that restrict the options available to future generations confronting changed circumstances. But the simplistic political messages that gave birth to such measures endow them with an almost religious validity that insulates them from future revision as unforeseen circumstances demand.

So how are we asked to solve such dislocations in our body politic in 2009? With yet another arbitrary solution imposed on future generations: Proposition 1A, which creates a rigid budgetary process embedded, yet again, in the concrete of arithmetic benchmarks. It’s a budgetary cure in the same sense that drinking a morning eye-opener will fix an alcoholic hangover.

It is certainly understandable that beleaguered Californians, with falling incomes, uncertain employment status and heavy housing burdens, would be fearful for the future. It is fear that drives the politics of outrage. “We’re mad as hell, and we’re not going to take it anymore.”

Before we react out of anger and fear to endorse permanent mandates for our descendants – mandates dreamed up under midnight deadline pressure by legislators who were incapable of coalitions and compromises – let’s vote to amend or repeal the previous arbitrary, voter-approved solutions that got us into this mess: our ungainly prison system, our dysfunctional political process and our rigid tax structure.

The invitation to join SFGate’s new corps of bloggers called City Brights offers the opportunity to reach a substantial audience, a prospect no journalist or professional writer turns down easily. But it carries troubling implications.

The Gate, the online arm of the San Francisco Chronicle, compensates its bloggers in the currency of the web, hits and links, instead of dollars and cents, which is how writers used to be compensated for similar commentaries on the Chronicle’s OpEd page. “Hits and links” is another way of saying “for free,” and blogging for free for a news business that has just announced plans to lay off or buy out scores of paid staff journalists feels uncomfortably like scabbing.

What the Gate is offering its bloggers is the norm in the online world, but the timing of its offer is fraught with irony. The Chronicle is in deep trouble, groaning under accumulated losses caused, in part, by

Blogging for free for a news business that has just announced plans to lay off or buy out scores of paid staff journalists feels uncomfortably like scabbing.

competition from online sites, including its own.

The Gate will increasingly serve as the Chronicle’s face to the world, and if the paper folds, as currently appears possible, the web site may well be its only outlet. My blogging colleagues’ distinguished credentials notwithstanding, the Gate will likely substitute some of the amateurs’ free musings for the more informed, better researched news and analysis published in the newspaper. One-shot flashes of emotion and insight can never adequately replace the professional journalist’s persistent but less glamorous news coverage, day in and day out.

“Information wants to be free” is the Net’s rallying cry, but the traditional content providers and their families expect real remuneration for their labors. As for the readers … well, you get what you pay for.

Therein lies the tragedy of American journalism today. It’s a tragedy both for journalists, who were able to earn a living by holding a mirror up to their world, and for the nation that relied on those newspapers, however misguided at times, to help establish our communal agenda and provide much of the data by which we (bloggers and the rest of us) could define our culture and assess the operation of our governments. Even for its critics, in whose ranks I often found myself, the Chronicle has been the closest institution we have to an area-wide forum. It was a place where — in potential, if not always in execution — this gloriously diverse and inventive area could show it has more in common than a shared spot on the map.

The Chronicle served as an uncompensated wholesaler. Other local news media — including those on the web — based much of their local news coverage on what they read in the Chronicle. In the media food chain nationally, commentary, which makes up an ever larger share of our online diet, feeds on news stories usually developed by print journalists. As those print publications cut back and, increasingly, go out of business, the bloggers will be feeding on an ever more impoverished diet.

The Chronicle, like most other newspapers, has handled poorly the transition from print-only to a more varied information environment. Overwhelmed by an epochal information revolution — and often burdened by the debts of acquisitive media conglomerates — newspapers seem intent on acting out to the final curtain an outmoded economic model.

I share the sadness of those who mourn the layoff-by-layoff decline and potential demise of the Chronicle, more for what the newspaper sometimes has been and what it could have become than for what it seems fated to be with a fraction of its news staff.

Without the Chronicle, and barring the emergence of an independent, local white knight or a new killer app for

In the end what emerges from an excessive reliance on amateurs is still amateurish.

news, the people who live here will have to subsist increasingly on McNews — perhaps served up by short-order cooks at a franchised fast-food outlet like Dean Singleton’s MediaNews Group. The MediaNews chain has already gobbled up most of the local suburban newspapers and seems intent on realizing “economies of scale” by pruning staff and publishing the same generic, centrally edited news stories in all its local papers. MediaNews appears to be the ultimate beneficiary of a monopoly exemption favored by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

The disappearance of the dominant metro paper is likely to atomize the local population further into islands of special interest, probably in the form of competing and little-trafficked web sites, each with its own formula, bias, subject areas and constituency.

Those of us who have felt that too few local voices — of all races, interests and income levels — were reflected in the Chronicle must now face the prospect that without the paper we will have convenient, common access to still fewer voices. Although those voices will find expression somewhere on the web or in print, we will lose the forum where they could most constructively meet.

The cult of the amateur blogger is satisfying to the amateur — and in many ways informative for the reader. Amateurs serve as a crucial check on the corps of officially sanctioned “authorities,” and many have undeniably useful expertise. I celebrate the two-way pipeline that the Net facilitates. But few bloggers have the resources to research stories in far-flung areas or to dig deeply into affairs of state and local governance. In the end what emerges from an excessive reliance on amateurs is still amateurish.

I start my SFGate blogging with the hope that more of us will realize that we have a stake in the Chronicle’s survival and the retention of as many as possible of its skilled professionals. And I hope that both the newspaper and its web site come to realize that they stand a better chance of thriving by engaging openly with the community in devising strategies to preserve what used to call itself “The Voice of the West.”

Ultimately, the solution to newspapers’ woes, both locally and nationally, lies in finding new ways of merging print and web, new ways of becoming relevant and essential to their communities and new ways of “monetizing” news and informed analysis, not in “demonetizing” those who provide it.

It may have been the most important product placement in history, surpassing the American colonists’ dumping of crates of East India tea into Boston Harbor 235 years ago. When journalist Muntadar al-Zaidi crystallized world opinion by hurling his shoes at American President George Bush during a news conference in Baghdad in December, sales exploded at the Istanbul shoe company that identified the projectiles as its “model 271.”

Other shoe companies have also claimed paternity, but the only known evidence — the shoes themselves — is said to have been blown to bits as a security measure.

Huffington Post Istanbul Footwear Correspondent Anthony Giacchino forwards exclusive photos of the shoe heard round the world, which the company has recently renamed the “Bye Bye Bush.” And in less than a week, the shoe will attain still greater international renown when al-Zaidi’s traditional Iraqi gesture of contempt serves as inspiration for a Washington peace demonstration known as “Shoes for Bush.”

At Baydan’s Shoes, Ramazan Baydan’s factory in the nondescript outskirts of Istanbul, where the international furor unwittingly began, Baydan has told interviewers that he has been overwhelmed with international orders since the

lone journalist’s shoe-hurling during yet another of Bush’s “mission accomplished” press conferences, his last one in Iraq.

Nearly a month ago, Baydan told Bloomberg news that he had received more than 300,000 orders for what he has now renamed the Bye Bye Bush shoe — more than four times the company’s previous annual production of model 271. Ten days later, the number was up to 370,000 as orders that had started coming in from Iraq (120,000 initially) began to flood in from the rest of the world.

The shoemaker was sending advertising posters for model 271 throughout

the Middle East. The poster’s message was simple: “Goodbye Bush, Welcome Democracy.”

Baydan told Bloomberg that he was hiring 100 more employees to handle the added workload. Baydan said he had also received orders for 19,000 Bye Bye Bushes from the United States, as well as requests from distributors in other countries.

Huffington Post correspondent Giacchino traveled to Kucukcekmece, a dreary neighborhood about 40 kilometers from the center of Istanbul, to see Baydan’s small and hectic workshop. He was taken through the showroom, where model 271, now the Bye Bye Bush, has a prominent place.

Giacchino reports that model 271 is the talk of Istanbul’s shoe industry,

where opinion is split on whether the shoe was actually manufactured by

Baydan or whether he is simply a clever businessman with a brilliant marketing campaign. Many competitors in the Istanbul shoe business don’t believe Baydan could have recognized his shoe from the Baghdad video of the shoe hurling. Although a few have claimed the celebrated footwear was theirs, said the wife of one shoe wholesaler, “Baydan claimed the loudest.”

Although shoe makers as far afield as China have leapt to claim credit, Baydan will have none of it, telling the Christian Science Monitor: “I have a sensitive relationship with this shoe. I designed it myself, so it’s like a father and a child. I was very happy when I saw it on the video.”

Turks of a more philosophical bent, says Giacchino, are quoting a Turkish proverb: “The rich man’s money makes the poor man’s mouth tired.”

Giacchino, an Emmy- winning documentary film maker whose last film was The Camden 28, reports that it’s full steam ahead at the Baydan shoe factory. The film maker/footwear 2009-01-14-BBB2.JPG correspondent, who has just completed “Beltway Unbuckled,” a two-hour special exploring the cross of sex and American politics (scheduled to air March 15 on the History Channel), is considering doing a video himself on the famed Istanbul shoemaker.

Meantime, the shoe’s paternity is a trivial detail to the millions around the world who were inspired by the shoe-hurling to vent their suppressed anger at the commander-in-chief of the Iraqi invasion. Numerous shoe-related protests have already occurred, and the celebrated gesture of contempt is coming home to Washington on January 19, President Bush’s last full day in office. [See update here.] A coalition of peace groups is planning a “shoe hurling action” at the White House.

Organizers, including the Washington Peace Center, After Downing Street, Code Pink and other organizations, plan to rally at 11 a.m. at Dupont Circle and then march to the White House “with shoes.” Organizers, who have set up a web site at www.shoebush.org, say some war veterans will be traveling to Washington, prepared to hurl their combat boots.

Organizers promise a “cathartic shoe hurling action … in the spirit of journalist Muntadar al-Zaidi and for the widows, orphans and all those who have lost their lives in Iraq.”

Before participating in the first presidential debate of the campaign, John McCain dropped a bomb on the political process by announcing unilaterally that he was suspending his campaign activities and canceling his debate participation until he could help fashion a “bailout” agreement. That he ended up doing neither is immaterial; what mattered was the shock and awe his announcement provoked. McCain’s week of theatrics was more instructive than anything he or his opponent, Senator Barak Obama, said during the debate itself.

Presidential candidates talk a lot about management experience, but we know from recent presidencies that MBAs and traditional resumes are misleading guides to White House management. The presidency is not a routine executive position. The best available gauge of executive qualifications may be the way the candidates conduct their own campaigns, which are, after all, multimillion-dollar

McCain, faced with unfavorable public responses, has many times previously in his career detonated his policy payload and headed back to base, hoping to find a better result in the rubble.

management challenges administered on the fly in full public view. In the hothouse of a presidential campaign, temperament and decision-making style are critical. That’s why McCain’s pre-debate tactics matter more than his rehearsed responses during the debate itself.

Before the long-scheduled debate, as the economy spiraled downward, there were indications that John McCain was slipping in the polls, and adding to his distress, was doubtless the fact that his vice presidential pick was, he knew, about to embarrass herself on nationwide television in a series of appearances with hand-picked interviewer Katie Couric.

As a career-long free marketeer, McCain had reason to be concerned about the impact of the Wall Street tailspin on his presidential ambitions. He responded, as he has so often in his career, not by a careful recalibration of his economic ideology but by throwing his cards in the air and hoping that the next random reshuffle would give him a better hand. Finally, in apparent frustration, he upended the card table and provoked organizational chaos by announcing he would suspend his campaign and debate participation.

There has been an orderly process in place for 21 years for negotiating debate schedules and formats. The two contenders do so in private, through aides, with the participation of a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization called the Commission on Presidential Debates. Arguing economic exigency, John McCain abandoned that established framework (as well as his previous negotiated agreement with the commission).

We know that the reason McCain gave publicly for his attempted debate cancellation made no logical sense. The Republican presidential nominee, who had not participated in Senate deliberations in many moons and had no role whatsoever in the bailout planning, could certainly have spared a few hours on Friday night to fulfill his commitment to the electorate, as proved by his later reversal. But first, he chose melodrama over logic.

One can only guess that he didn’t see the debate as advantageous to his campaign, for whatever reason. It could have been that he sensed it came at a time of slippage in public support; it could be that he thought the drama of a unilateral announcement would demonstrate to worried American workers his heartfelt concern for their economic distress; or it could be that his hidden

The best available gauge of executive qualifications may be the way the candidates conduct their own campaigns.

motive was to reschedule the debate to the slot set aside for the vice presidential debate, giving floundering Governor Sarah Palin a reprieve from any more immediate unscripted public scrutiny in her own scheduled debate this week with Democratic counterpart Senator Joe Biden.

Whatever McCain’s motivation, his response was to jettison orderly process and hurl his cards in the air, watching from the sidelines as others reacted to his management-by-chaos style. He seemed to hope, somehow, for a better hand than he apparently felt he had to begin with, but his later equally abrupt and unexplained reversal demonstrated that his initial decision was made without consideration of potential adverse reactions.

All this sounds familiar. Remember when McCain was committed to Senator Joe Lieberman as his running mate? Told, apparently, that his personal choice would never fly at the Republican convention, the then-presumptive nominee didn’t embark on a detailed exploration of other ideologically compatible candidates. Rather, he once again threw his cards in the air, gambling on a woman he’d apparently met or spoken with twice, briefly. Her domestic policies and international experience couldn’t have been further from those of the man she replaced in McCain’s affections, Lieberman, the veteran pro-choice Democrat-turned-independent. Policy was obviously not the governing reason for McCain’s new choice. Nor were findings from his research team, which had done only a cursory vetting of the Alaska governor. McCain’s gut instinct was to settle impulsively on Palin, without regard for policy concerns, personal principle or the need for meticulous research.

We’ve seen this before in his career. Maybe it’s an occupational characteristic of the fighter pilot, who drops his payload on a target far below his plane and then makes his escape, hoping that the unpredictable mayhem inflicted on a city or military installation in that quick and dramatic strike will somehow change the dynamic of a campaign that was faring poorly on the ground, day by plodding day. As ground troops slog along, inching their way through brutal, grinding combat toward immediate tactical goals, the flyboys try to change the war’s course from high above the battlefield, in a series of brief, explosive flashes.

That’s all highly speculative. What isn’t speculative is that McCain, faced with unfavorable public responses, has many times previously in his career detonated his policy payload and headed back to base, hoping to find a better result in the rubble. Immigration, tax breaks for the rich, Supreme Court appointment criteria, torture, Confederate flags, right-wing evangelists … on any number of issues in the past, McCain has not merely compromised with opponents or modified his position but jettisoned all at once years of advocacy and apparently cherished principles to take a diametrically opposite position. These aren’t simply “flipflops,” they’re more like a form of explosive redefinition. Perhaps they also demonstrate a kind of sublimated anger — the visible signs of McCain’s legendary temper. The process certainly bears more resemblance to passive-aggressive behavior than it does to measured policy formulation.

So what does this form of management style bode for a McCain presidency? Congressional relations and international diplomacy both depend on nuance, mutual, laborious and incremental accommodation and trust. Management by chaos works, if it does, by exploding previous trust and established procedure, hoping against hope to come out of an instant of explosive upheaval with a better, if unpredictable outcome when the dust settles. The United States, isolated as it has become these past eight years, would waste still more of its international trust capital and its domestic political bipartisanship — with dangerous and unknowable consequences — if Congress and foreign governments were treated by John McCain the way the American public, the Commission on Presidential Debates and Barack Obama were last week.

We have witnessed a dynamite lesson in the management style John McCain hopes to take to the White House.

Dear friends, relatives, colleagues, Decca fans and the just-plain-curious,

Because of a health emergency I have postponed all readings and other events for my book “Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford.” Here’s a quick and simplistic update on a very complex series of procedures:

The fusions for my previous spinal operation, performed six years ago, have been degrading for some time. In recent months — and days — new problems have developed that are compressing my spinal cord and dramatically increasing my pain and limiting movement. The pain has now become excruciating and intolerable.

Therefore, early on Thursday, April 19, I will be entering UCSF Medical Center for what is expected to be a full day of back surgery. I am scheduled for a smaller, follow-up operation on Tuesday, April 24, and will be released about the weekend of April 28-29 for a lengthy period of rehab and physical therapy.

Because of the speed with which this has happened, I am taking this impersonal means to notify all those who should have been notified in person but could not be. I do not know yet if or when I will have access to computer or phone while I’m in the hospital.

Thank you all for your interest and support.

Peter

Update – May 9, 2007

I returned home yesterday, weak but elated, from the second of two hospitals — a week at Alta Bates’ capable rehab hospital in Berkeley. I am weak and unable to contact all well-wishers in person, but I am very grateful for your support throughout. There will be a several-month period of recuperation and further rehab, but so far there have been no untoward surprises and I have no reason to expect any.

Thanks again to all for your support during the rapid onset of this month of horrors.

Peter