Coaching Lessons: How to Manage Your Reputation

If life coaching is an exercise in self-management, learning how to manage your reputation must be an essential part of the process.

It is also the most difficult part of the process. Compared to the relative simplicity of managing yourself and your relationships, the task of managing how others see you is daunting. As I am sure Tiger Woods would willingly attest.

For businesses, celebrities, and politicians reputation management falls within the purview of public relations.

Reputation involves how other people see you, how they think about you, what they say about you, and how or whether they interact with you.

Unless you have an advanced degree in mind control, you will find it devilishly difficult to control how other people see you. If you respect their freedom, you will discover that you cannot force them to see you in one or another way, but that you can only invite them to do so.

I would guess that the perils of reputation management are a principal reason why people are so interested in mind control. They are less concerned with making people do what they want them to do than in making them see them as they want to be seen.

As I was discussing a few days ago (link here), it does not take a lot to compromise your reputation. And once you have done so, it takes an extraordinary amount of work to set it right.

If you have developed a reputation as the go-to guy for a certain kind of project, and then, when a problem arises, you are nowhere to be found, your years of good work will become tainted by the fact that you were not there. Where everyone thought that they could always count on you, now they are thinking... maybe, not so much.

You may have had a very good reason for not being available, and your absence was involuntary-- i.e., you were in a coma-- it will likely be overlooked. But if you were unavailable because you went out without your cell phone or were caught up in a mid-afternoon tryst, then your reputation will stay compromised.

When you lose something of your reputation people are not concluding that you are fundamentally irresponsible, only that they have to think twice before trusting you again.

On the other hand, if you start making a habit of being absent or of being lazy or of being incompetent, then your reputation will change from sometimes unreliable to fundamentally irresponsible.

Even if you do not have extensive professional responsibilities, you still have a reputation. It might be for fairness, reliability, honesty, or temperance. In all cases reputation involves your good character, especially as you choose to exhibit it in public.

As many young people have discovered, when you expose too much of yourself on Facebook you lose the respect and damage your reputation. The same applies to women, who had out their sexual favors indiscriminately. Young men can develop reputations as players or users, thus, as inconstant lovers, but they only rarely suffer mental anguish for having had too much sexual experience.

I have always been hesitant to blame this all on the internet. While Facebook and other social media sites have given people more chances to be more exposed than is good for their reputations, social media are an instrument, not a cause.

In my view, the precepts laid down by the therapy culture have set the stage for this orgy of overexposure. If you have learned from respectable authorities that you should be open and honest with other people, and that you should express yourself freely regardless of how anyone else feels about it... then why would you not feel that oversharing was the right way to conduct relationships.

We all know that the therapists who expound these ideas do not really want everyone to let it all hang out, literally or figuratively. They do not tell people to go out and write sex blogs. Unfortunately, writing a sex blog fulfills the predicates that they have been setting out.

If therapists had rallied under the banners of modesty and temperance, they would not have to answer for helping produce a tell-all generation.

Once your reputation is compromised, restoring it is like getting the proverbial toothpaste back in the tube.

The first and most important element to reputation management is discretion. I am not saying good behavior; I am saying discretion about bad behavior.

There is a difference between misbehaving discreetly and advertising your bad behavior. Everyone misbehaves; everyone makes mistakes. If you decide to share those moments with the world you are saying that you want to be known as a person of weak character. If you practice discretion you are saying that those bad moments do not constitute who you are as a social being.

The rule applies to job interviews and to new relationships. In both of those places, and in many others, we all need to learn to mete out information about ourselves discreetly, in the service of presenting ourselves as the kind of people with whom others will want to associate.

Some people, however, would prefer to sacrifice their reputations by making themselves into the entertainment.

When a young Harvard student named Lena Chen began to write a sex blog, she discovered that her world did not look very kindly on women who exposed their sexuality in public. However much she truly believed that she was doing the right thing, she still suffered severe anxiety and panic attacks, to the point where she had to drop out of school.

As I have said, shame is not a social construct. Your reputation does not hinge on how you feel about yourself. When others have been induced, by your own behavior, to see you in a less than flattering light, you will have a great deal of difficulty restoring your reputation.

Evidently, you cannot recover your reputation, or save face, without changing your behavior. If a certain kind of behavior has compromised your reputation for integrity, the sooner you start acting with integrity the better it is. If your immodest behavior has damaged your reputation, the sooner you cover up the better you will be.

Without a consequential change in behavior the nostrums that therapy likes to offer cannot produce very much of an effect. Remember, reputation is about how others see you, not how you see yourself or feel about yourself.

If your reputation has been damaged because you behave badly, it makes no sense to put off changing your conduct on the grounds that you have to know why you did it before you can effect a consequential change.

Therapists who tell their patients that they must gain insight and understanding into their problems before they can change their behavior are inducing them to continue to behave badly, thus, to make the task of restoring their reputations that much more difficult.

Lately, we have seen groups of young women renouncing hook-ups in favor of something like sexual abstinence. Clearly they are setting out on the road to reputation recovery. See my posts here and here. I also recommend that you look at Susan Walsh's new post about the topic. Link here.

In one of my posts I commented on Jessica Grose's column about the same Lena Chen, former sex blogger, now running meetings on rethinking virginity. Grose believed, as did I, that Chen was joining those who were reasserting the value of abstinence and was working to recover her reputation.

To which Lena Chen took great exception. See her reply here. Chen refused to accept Grose's point, namely that she has stopped blogging about her sex life because she is concerned about her reputation. She declared that she has higher, more radical feminist motives.

What might that entail? I'm glad you asked. Chen explains her conference in these terms: "The Rethinking Virginity conference... was designed to critically interrogate the socially constructed notion of virginity, which I had studied over the past year in writing my senior thesis in sociology. I determined, through a combination of scholarly research and personal experience, that this virginity business was bunk."

This might make you rethink the value of a Harvard education, but I do not think that that was Chen's intention either.

I would also say that Chen's response demonstrates a level of judgment that inclines me to believe that Jessica Grose knows Chen's mind better than Chen herself.

Be that as it may, this example shows us another way of dealing with reputation loss. You can convince yourself that it does not matter. You can convince yourself that the world is wrong, and that when they look askance at your behavior the reason is that they have a problem.

This would lead us toward mind control. It may enhance your reputation as a radical thinker, but it does reveal a willful disrespect for the freedom of other minds.

More Advice for Jenny Sanford

Who is right: Jenny Sanford or Hillary Clinton? Should the wife of a cheating husband stand by her man, throw him out, or try to find a middle ground. Should she hide from the press, defend her husband publicly, or be interviewed by the AP?

These questions continue to animate intelligent debate, especially today when both Ruth Marcus in the Washington Post and Maureen Dowd in the New York Times entered the fray.

I will begin by saying that I subscribe wholeheartedly to the position Ruth Marcus takes. In her mind, and as I have suggested in several posts, Jenny Sanford has maintained her dignity and has earned our respect. She should be a role model for how to deal with a philandering husband. Link here.

Maureen Dowd sees it differently. She seems to realize that if Jenny Sanford has it right, then Hillary Clinton got it wrong. So she rushes to defend her heroine, Hillary Clinton, even when she must defy reason to do so. Link here.

Dowd seems to base her judgment on the fact that Hillary Clinton survived her husband's scandals and maintained her political viability. I am perhaps not the best to answer this question, but women should ask themselves whether they would want Hillary Clinton's marriage, even if it was compensated by political power.

As I see it, and as Jenny Sanford said, the issue is dignity. If your husband has made a career of having sexual relations with other women, not even very discreetly, then the only real way to preserve your dignity is to leave.

If you stay around to enjoy the political advantages the marriage affords you, then you are involved in a political arrangement, not what most women (or men) would consider to be a good marriage.

Dowd may admire Hillary Clinton's political successes, but they were purchased with her dignity.

As for the Sanfords, I am happy to hear Dowd echoing my point (from this post) that Mark Sanford turned his life into a Harlequin romance. But I am less than encouraged to read her view that Hillary Clinton was exemplary for not getting "dragged into the drama" and for not letting her reputation go down with her husband's.

Remember that Hillary Clinton went on the Today show to defend her husband by blaming it all on the vast right wing conspiracy. She acted like a partner in crime working to maintain her own political career. She made no pretense to be a wronged wife trying to get back into her marriage.

I am also not encouraged to read Dowd explain that Silda Spitzer maintained a dignified silence while Jenny Sanford's willingness to tell her own side of the story compromises her reputation.

Silda Spitzer stood silently by. So did Dina McGreevey. Thus, they presented themselves as part of the problem. Jenny Sanford presents herself as part of the solution. Which is really more dignified?

Dowd seems to believe that since Bill Clinton's extracurricular sexual activities did not involve any love, then Hillary was right to stand with him. She adds that since Mark Sanford was in love with his Argentinean soul-mate, his wife should immediately lock him out of the house and never let him back.

If you are tempted to jump on Dowd's bandwagon, ask yourself this: which of these two politicians showed more respect and true affection for women? Was it the man who was accused of abusing Paula Jones, Juanita Broaddrick, and Kathleen Willey? Was it the man who manifestly took advantage of a White House intern? Or was it the man who fell in love with another woman?

Next, Dowd denounces Jenny Sanford for mentioning her children. She may not have put them on the Oprah show as Elizabeth Edwards, but she did make reference to them, and even pointed to their excellent report cards. For Dowd, this makes Jenny Sanford a "stereotypical harridan."

Jenny Sanford was not defending her husband on national television. She was effectively shaming him. I would say she was trying to shake him up so that he might recover his reason and understand who he is.

Surely, Jenny Sanford had broached the issue in private. Just as surely, her husband had paid no attention to her views. Now, in going public, she was upping the ante and the shame.

Mark Sanford allowed himself to fall into an amorous stupor to the point that he was capable of abandoning his children on Father's Day. This should tell us all that he had completely forgotten himself.

If Jenny Sanford believes that her husband was a chronic womanizer or a whoremonger, that would be one thing. If she feels that he is a man who is capable of loving a woman, perhaps the wrong one, and perhaps too much, then she is dealing with a different problem.

As for who most closely resembles a stereotypical harridan, I will refrain from offering my personal opinion.

Advice for Jenny Sanford

Confucius would have loved public relations. He knew that managing our public reputation is among our highest ethical obligations, one that is extremely difficult to get right.

It is made even more difficult by a culture that keeps telling us that appearances don't matter. How many times have you heard that the most important thing is what we have inside, not the image we show to the public.

Inner authenticity matters more than outward reputation. Inner emotion matters more than decorum, propriety, and standing tall.

By this thinking, public relations is an elaborate cover-up. Companies use it when they want to hide something. People use it when they have something to hide.

We have also been told that what really matters is how you think, not how you behave. Of course, you cannot repair your public reputation by engaging in mental gymnastics.

Only public behavior can restore your public reputation. If more people knew it, then we would not have had to wait for Jenny Sanford to show us how to handle a philandering politician.

All of which to introduce Tina Brown's advice to Mark and Jenny Sanford on her website, The Daily Beast. Link here.

Brown makes two points. One is incisive; the other is not.

First, she suggests that Gov. Sanford's apology was too wordy, too narrative, too full of the love that he was ostensibly saying was a mistake.

Brown is saying that an apology is a formal public ritual. It is a time for abject humility, not for poetic expression.

When you apologize you say that you got it wrong, that you are solely responsible for your mistake, that nothing justifies the mistake, and that you promise not to do it again.

If a man turns his apology for a love affair into a disguised paean to his lover, he is not saying that he made a mistake. He may regret having gotten caught, but Mark Sanford does not regret his love for Maria.

Second, Brown offered some less than helpful advice to Jenny Sanford. Here Brown let her emotions get the better of her, and that always produces bad PR: "Just when she set the table for a big-ticket matrimonial lawyer to have a payday on behalf of all the humiliated wives... the First Lady of South Carolina blew it. She chose instead a pious manifesto that lets the governor completely off the hook: 'I remain willing to forgive Mark completely for his indiscretions and to welcome him back, in time, if he continues to work toward reconciliation with a true spirit of humility and repentance.'"

You have to wonder what there is about that statement that Tina Brown could find offensive. Jenny Sanford chose to split the difference, to seek out a golden mean between the extreme reactions of revenge and silence.

The fact that the other humiliated wives chose silence, even to the point of being partners in crime, does not make Jenny Sanford duty-bound to take up their cause and unleash the furies of divorce lawyers.

Among these wives, Jenny Sanford is the one who did not stand by her man. She had previously asked him to leave home. When asked where he had spend Father's Day, she said she did not know.

She was decidedly not trying to cover for him. She was directing the world's attention to his actions, without injecting her emotions into the picture. Any emotional outburst would have served merely as a distraction.

But Jenny Sanford did not completely close the door to reconciliation. To the chagrin of Tina Brown she offered her husband a way back into his marriage.

Considering that there are children involved, hers was a generous gesture, one that most people will make, but also, one that shifted the onus to her husband and away from herself. She avoided the extreme position of cutting him off completely, and chose to show herself as someone who sought the middle ground.

Also, Jenny Sanford spoke for herself. Had she kept silent she would have been acting as the one who had been humiliated. Had she blamed the vast left-wing conspiracy she would have made herself a partner in crime.

This does not mean that she did not feel humiliated. It does mean that she knew something that escaped the other humiliated wives. That is, how to go about restoring her reputation.

She knew that extreme emotional outbursts, fits of pique and tantrums, and sulking in the corner... solve nothing.

When a humiliated spouse shows herself either to be emotionally overwrought or drained, other people begin saying that they can now understand why Mark Sanford was engaged in an extramarital affair.

After all, many couples like Mark and Jenny Sanford do manage to put their marriages back together. Some do not. At the least, all parties should do everything in their power to retain their dignity and self-respect.

Jenny Sanford Gets It Right

Everyone knew that Hillary Clinton got it wrong. The same applied to Silda Spitzer and Dina McGreevey.

None of them seemed to know how to maintain their dignity while being roundly humiliated by their husbands. Blaming it on the vast right wing conspiracy was obviously wrong. Standing next to him while he was confessing was clearly not right.

Now along comes Jenny Sanford, the wronged wife of the governor of South Carolina, and she has clearly gotten it right. In one of those "I know it when I see it" moments, women recognized the brilliance of her handling of the situation.

See New York Times article here.

And in another article in the Times she says, memorably: "Not only will I survive. I will thrive." Link here.

Perhaps Jenny Sanford is a genius at public relations. As we saw in the case of the other humiliated wives, it is very, very difficult to get it right. Perhaps she has an unimpeachable sense of her own dignity and knows that her goal should be to maintain it at whatever cost.

Mark Sanford's Argentinian siren was, as I suggested, a master of the art of romance. She was especially skilled in making a human life into a Harlequin romance.

Jenny Sanford, however, excels at self-respect, dignity, and good character.

Who do you think will come out ahead in what is surely a culture war?

John Thain and the Inner Sanctum

In a matter of months John Thain went from the hero who had saved Merrill Lynch to the poster-boy for Wall Street arrogance. Surely, Thain was fired for many good reasons. Yet, in the mind of the public, he will now be known as the man who marked the financial crisis by spending $1,200,000 redecorating his office.

Any time anyone tells you that you should follow your bliss or your creative individual and should ignore how it looks to other people, think of John Thain.

Thain's error was thinking that the good old days were going to come marching back, because, after all, they always had.

Evidently, he had never read Nassim Taleb's book on black swans. There and in later writings Taleb argues that bankers got themselves into the current mess by assuming that the past can guide their actions in the future.

We feel confident and in control when we think that we know what is going to happen in the future. When unpredicted and unpredictable events occur, we find ourselves completely at a loss to understand what is happening or to know what to do about them.

The models that economists invent and the stories that we all tell ourselves draw us away from the reality of these black swans.

Blogging and Logging

Perhaps you've seen the ad on television. The one about logging. The one with the police and the protesters and the loggers. For reasons that are far from being self-evident, the ad is trying to convince us to bank at the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank Corporation. To you and me, that's HSBC.

HSBC, the global banking colossus, is rebranding itself for the new globalized marketplace. Considering that it is one of the best-run banks in the world, you would have thought that it could have played up its strengths. If the ad is any indication forging cross-cultural connections is not one of them.

The ad begins with a group of environmentalists, affectionately called tree-huggers. Literally. They have invaded a logging site and have tied themselves to the trees. They are trying to save the trees from the indignity of being turned into newsprint, currency, and greeting cards.

Ominously, a convoy of police cars arrives. The officers jump from their vehicles and forcibly remove the tree-huggers. Several are taken off to jail. Then the loggers go to work.

In a final dramatic twist, one of the woman protesters, having been put in jail, is bailed out by a logger. Apparently, the two are romantically involved. They jump on a motorcycle and ride off into the sunset.

In adspeak, that is called a happy ending.

The ad does not tell us whether she spent the day in jail while he was destroying the forest, or whether he took the day off to spring her.

The tag line suggests that people with different values can still get along if they love each other: "The more you look at the world, the more you recognize that people value things differently. HSBC, the world's local bank."

I do hope that they did not spend too much on this, because it is pure drivel.

If you have not seen the ad, or have not thought too deeply about it, I recommend John Swansburg's article in Slate.com. It provides a link to the extended version of the ad, along with a cogent, and largely correct, analysis of its failings. Link here.

Clearly, the ad wants to show people getting along across large cultural divides. Forget the fact that getting along with other people is not the same thing as hugging them from the back of a motorcycle-- in many companies it would not be allowed.

The problem with the ad, as Swansburg notes, is that it does not understand that different values are not the same as different customs.

Worse yet, when one member of a couple wants to put the other out of business, that is not at all the same as two people speaking a different language, having different table manners, or observing different social rituals.

Globalization has made it vitally important for different peoples from different parts of the world with different cultural backgrounds to work together in common enterprise. Learning how to do this is one of the greatest cross-cultural challenges we face today.

But how, pray tell, will they ever do so if one group is trying to shut down the other's enterprise.

Someone from HSBC and/or the agency did not work hard enough on this concept. HSBC may have wanted to show us how to bridge cultural divides; it showed us that it does not even understand the problem.

It is not alone. In my executive coaching practice, as well as in my relationship coaching practice, I often see people grappling with similar issues. Most, however, have a better grasp of the problem than HSBC and its ad agency.

And what about the way the relationship between logger and tree-hugger is portrayed? Swansburg describes it as: "either irritating or endearing, depending on your taste in such things.... It's like a 21st century version of those Ernst Lubitsch meet-cute pictures, in which the man who sleeps in the pajama bottoms and the woman who sleeps in pajama tops fall in love at the pajama rack."

Here Swansburg goes off the rails. Do you imagine that when this couple gets home-- assuming that they get there together-- they are going to be ready for a romantic romp?

There is nothing cute about one spouse-- let's pretend they are married-- trying to put the other spouse out of business. It is not just a matter of taste, an aesthetic issue, like the difference between sushi and tacos, or between Vermeer and Giotto.

We are not just talking about two citizens in a democracy voting for different candidates. Not at all. We are within the realm of the ethical, not the aesthetic. The true issue here is loyalty.

The ad's message is that if two people love each other enough, then all is well in Relationship Heaven.

Bunk.

The truth is, relationships do not collapse for lack of love. They often wither and die from disloyalty. Add a hint of disloyalty and the truest of true love will instantly turn to gall.

The problem with the tree-hugger's behavior is that it is disloyal. This is not excused because she feels strongly about the issue. Zealotry aside, there is rarely only one cogent position of an issue. Even if there were, this does not excuse her disloyalty.

The least I can say is, don't try this at home. And if you want to help people from different cultures to work together, don't follow the advice implied in this ad.

John McCain's Maverickitis

Last week was a bad week for John McCain... and not just John McCain. The financial system was spinning out of control and McCain was attacking Bill Ayers.

It was the wrong message at the wrong time. The country was sizing up future leaders and McCain was carping.

Obama was proposing higher taxes, less free trade, more unions, and more litigation. Economists, CEOs, and investors seemed to know that these policies would be bad for the economy.

The problem was: even when McCain had interesting policies, he did not seem willing to step forward and defend them. So it looked like he had nothing to say.

As I said in my September 15 and 24 posts, among others, given the choice between the wrong policies and no policies, the nation will tend to go with something rather than nothing.

Today, McCain finally seems to have gotten the message. He proposed a series of policies that are starkly different from those of Obama, based as they are on stimulating economic growth rather than sharing the wealth.

McCain has a point: Obama's plan to reduce taxes is really welfare in disguise. McCain is offering economic growth and jobs, not a return to welfare.

In principle, it sounds like an argument McCain should relish. The problem is: it might well be too little, too late. It may be that McCain became too attached to his maverick persona, to the point that it drowned out his message.

Being a maverick is not the same as providing leadership. At the second debate McCain's proposal was: I am a maverick and I am going to shake up Washington.

In fact, things had already been very seriously shaken up. People are looking for stability and a calm temperament. At the second debate, Obama was more calm than McCain.

McCain's message has been: my persona is better than your persona, and my character is better than your character.

Surely, character counts; without it no one will be able to rely on a candidate's willingness to keep his word. And yet, neither maverick or character are policies, any more than hope and change are.

Maverick and character are assertions of self at a time when the country wants to know what politicians are going to do to restore the sinking economy. It was not a-- Hey, look at me!--moment.

Maverick is not a brand; it is not political high concept. It tells you nothing about what McCain might do as president. It merely suggests that he will be inconsistent and erratic.

By standard definition, a maverick is a stray, a loner, a lost soul, a motherless calf, someone who is not part of the herd or the group.

With a little positive spin you can make a maverick into a rebel or an independent spirit. Spin it as far as you wish and you will not make a maverick into a leader.

That is what the country saw when McCain decided to suspend his campaign and rush back to Washington to help broker a bailout deal between Congress and the White House.

You can say that it was a more responsible position than Obama's-- Call me if you need me-- approach. Unfortunately, it did not work.

McCain was claiming a leadership role. Unfortunately, he had not bothered to check on whether his troops were following him. They were not.

Obama seemed to know that no one would follow him, so he just kept quiet.

You would think that the first lesson they teach at leadership academy is: don't get too far out in front of your troops. If you do, you look like you are posturing, not leading. At worst you have made yourself an easy target.

Where a maverick can fashion his persona by separating himself from the group, a leader must bring the group together around a set of policy proposals. Today, McCain seems to have figured this out. The trouble is: it may be too little, too late.

There's Something About Sarah

So, the shock of Sarah Palin has thrown the Obama campaign off message. Instead of advancing its agenda the campaign has been wasting time trying to demean and diminish the GOP vice presidential candidate. Everyone seems to agree that this is a bad tactic.

Epitomizing this failure is the image of the pig with lipstick. Did Obama mean to slight Palin? Did he intend to insult her?

Take the facts as we know them. Sarah Palin's signature, her brand, even her totem... is the image of the hockey Mom as a pitbull with lipstick.

Any reference to an animal with lipstick in the course of this year's presidential campaign must refer to the Palin brand. Unless you believe that the Obama campaign is being run by a bunch of dimwits, they clearly felt the need to diminish the appeal of the brand, by putting a different image in people's minds. Every time Palin says "pitbull" the Obama campaign wants people to think: "pig." You might have noticed that pig and pit sound alike.

Some have insisted mightily that Obama's remark did not refer to Palin. Relying on a legalistic parsing of the text they have demonstrated that when Obama used the word "pig" the immediate referent was not Palin. But, so what. Given the larger context, given the totemic force of the image, everyone-- and that means everyone-- understood what he meant.

You don't have to be a mind reader to know it. Here's the way you can tell. In normal conversation when you make a slip that might be understood to be offensive, you apologize. If you do not apologize, then the correct inference is that you meant it, that it was intentional.

Last week the issue was not the Obama agenda for change; the issue was the Obama campaign. Obama had claimed that he had demonstrated executive ability by running a flawless campaign. He even managed to say that his campaign was bigger than the city of Wasilla, thereby seeming even more disrespectful for failing to acknowledge that Palin is the sitting governor of Alaska.

The media has chimed in with a barrage of attacks on Palin. The problem with these has been simple: if Obama is really a strong leader why does he need so many media surrogates defending him. The extent of the media attacks on Palin signifies Obama's weakness.

In this regard the media's top gun was Charlie Gibson. Place Gibson's Palin interview in a larger context. Remember that during the Democratic candidate debates Gibson once asked Obama a question that flummoxed him. He asked why Obama was saying the increased capital gains tax rates would increase government when everyone knew that just the opposite was the case. The higher the cap gains rates, the lower the revenue generated.

Obama did not know how to answer. He had never considered this possibility. No one is perfect.

The more important point is that, for his pains, Charlie Gibson was viciously attacked by his fellow media mavens. People who have tossed out their journalistic integrity to promote Obama did not want to see anything like that ever happen again. So they heaped opprobrium on Charlie Gibson as a warning to him and to anyone else who might dare ask Obama a difficult question.

Gibson certainly learned his lesson. The next time he interviewed Obama, one-on-one, his questions were therapy culture softballs: "How does it feel to win?" "How does it feel to break to break a glass ceiling?" "How does your family feel about your winning?"

Obviously, these questions are insulting. Gibson was treating the candidate as though he would melt away if he ever had to address a substantive issue. Clearly, Charlie Gibson had been brought back onto the reservation.

He had a better chance to demonstrate it when he interviewed Sarah Palin last week. Of course, he was looking for a gotcha moment. He was looking to diminish the new phenom, especially for her shaky command of foreign policy. A report this morning also suggested that ABC set up camera angles to make her look smaller in relation to him. The New York Times declared that his attitude was "supercilious."

The ultimate curve ball was the question about the Bush doctrine. Clearly, Palin was not sure what it was, so Gibson could look down his nose at her-- literally-- and explain it.

She did not look good. The problem is: Gibson got it wrong himself. The first person to use the phrase, Charles Krauthammer, wrote an article explaining that there were at least three different interpretations of the Bush doctrine.

Unfortunately, the news did not reach Obama supporters. They spent three days railing about Palin's inexperience, not yet having realized that experience is not a great issue for their own candidate.

While Obama's supporters were throwing up a fog of drama to obscure the McCain message, they were obscuring their own.

Watch the entirety of the Palin interview and you will see that outside of foreign policy she was completely on message and mostly in control of the material. She articulated the campaign agenda clearly and precisely: lower taxes, more drilling, controlled spending, earmark reform, victory in Iraq.

As I said in an earlier post, called Forever Nuance, voters are more likely to prefer a clear policy agenda over one that is more complicated and more nuanced. By this hypothesis clarity matters more than right or wrong.

I will mention in passing that this idea is a variant on what philosophers call Occam's razor. The fourteenth century theologian, William of Occam, posited that if you have two possible explanations for a phenomenon and one is simple while the other is more complex, the chances are that the more simple one is closer to the truth.