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Hooray for HypotheticalsObama doesn't dodge "what if" questions. Good for him!

By John Dickerson
Posted Thursday, Aug. 2, 2007, at 6:42 PM ET
Barack Obama. Click image to expand.

To hide the fact that they're hiding something, candidates elevate their refusal to a virtue. "One of the jobs of a president is being very reasoned in approaching these issues," Hillary Clinton said to a hypothetical question about sending ground troops to Darfur. "And I don't think it's useful to be talking in these kinds of abstract hypothetical terms." Two days later, Mitt Romney cried hypothetical when asked in a debate whether, in hindsight, going to war in Iraq was a mistake. To give the dodge extra weight, he criticized the question in Latin (calling it a "non sequitur"), on fairness grounds (saying it was "unreasonable"), and, finally, mathematically (labeling it a "null set"), as if to suggest there was some immutable arithmetic law that made entertaining the whole notion absurd.

These were not personal questions, such as the hypothetical posed to Michael Dukakis in 1988 about whether he would support the death penalty for a man who murdered his wife. Nor were they the late-night stoned variety of hypothetical. When someone asks a candidate what super power he'd most like to have, or whether Bruce Lee would win a fight with Muhammad Ali, then we can cry foul. The hypotheticals that candidates have been avoiding are the interesting, substantive ones. Anyone running for president should have thought through those questions, and if they haven't, we should know about it.

Fortunately, one candidate is answering hypotheticals. For the last two weeks, the Democratic political conversation has been consumed with hypothetical questions. Last week, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton engaged in a multiday set-to over whether they would meet with nasty dictators. This week, Barack Obama doubled down on hypotheticals by raising his own hypothetical situation in his sweeping speech on foreign policy. If he found actionable intelligence about al-Qaida leaders hiding out in the mountains of Pakistan, he said he would send in troops whether the Pakistani government liked it or not. When asked the next day about using nuclear weapons in Afghanistan and Pakistan, he said he never would use them.

Perhaps as a former law professor, Obama isn't afraid of these kinds of questions. Law school is nothing but hypotheticals. Or perhaps Obama is comfortable because his answer to the 2002 hypothetical about whether he would vote to authorize force against Iraq has worked to his political advantage. If he'd ducked then, he couldn't gloat now.

It's too early to tell if Obama is benefiting politically from all of this risky public thinking. Joe Biden has now joined Hillary Clinton in calling him naive (audio) for expressing his hypothetical views. Sen. Chris Dodd has called him "confusing and confused." And it must be said that there is a certain pileup quality to his hypothetical scenarios. He said he would attack al-Qaida targets in Pakistan even if President Gen. Pervez Musharraf didn't give his OK. That might very well unleash a backlash that would overthrow the Pakistani leader and put the country's nuclear arsenal in the hands of extremists. In an answer to a hypothetical in 2004, Obama said that eventuality would lead him to very seriously consider launching missiles.

But what might not be great for Obama politically is great for us, so we should thank him for taking the risk. These kinds of questions let us see how candidates' minds work, glimpse at their capacity for imagination, and assess their ability to survey and understand the landscape before them.

We've all been asked to imagine how these candidates will behave in office—the grandest hypothetical of them all. It's only reasonable to ask that they imagine it, too. Hypothetical questions are a fundamental part of being president. You need to know how to pose them to your colleagues and have the set of skills necessary to answer them. They are required in thinking through almost any issue that faces a president. If I make this promise or pledge, what will the reaction be from the public, our allies, and Congress? If I change the program, how will that change the reaction? If my CIA director says it's a slam dunk that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction, how many hours will I spend thinking through the hypothetical: What if it isn't a slam dunk?

Perhaps the greatest argument for insisting that candidates answer hypothetical questions is that George Bush hates them. He refused to entertain most plausible scenarios as a candidate. As president, the dodge is like his seal of office: He brings it to every press conference. The irony, of course, is that Bush launched an entire war based on the hypothetical scenario that al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein might form a partnership. In the end, the weapons stockpiles turned out to be hypothetical, too. "That's a hypothetical question," Bush said, answering a typical question from before the Iraq war about what the American people should expect. "They can expect me not to answer hypothetical questions." Of the next president, the American people should expect just the opposite.

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John Dickerson is Slate's chief political correspondent and author of On Her Trail. He can be reached at .
Photograph of Sen. Barack Obama by Tim Sloan/AFP/Getty Images.
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Remarks from the Fray:

How is it that the only people who can say, "I'm not going to respond to hypotheticals," and be allowed to get away with it are public officials? Does nobody remember their job interviews?

Presidential candidates have a lot of leeway with this because they're all doing it. If none of them answer the most relevant questions asking them how they would govern under crisis, then voters really don't have any choice.

One would wish the Senate would figure out that they have power: If the candidate refuses to answer hypotheticals, then the candidate is refused appointment. That's the point behind a confirmation hearing, after all: To find out how the candidate would behave in difficult situations.

If they aren't willing to tell us how they would carry out their jobs, detailing the decision-making process, then why on earth do they think we should give them the job? Ah, but to answer would mean you have to take a stand and indicate you have a real position. That makes it difficult to pretend to be all things to all people.

--Rrhain

(To reply, click here.)

Ironically, I recall thinking the exact opposite after seeing a "Barack Will Invade Pakistan" on the evening news last night -- hypotheticals are so unfair and misleading. I agree that they can be useful questions, but only if we are cautious enough to distinguish between how a person thinks, and what they will actually do. I don't think this is true of the media and general public.

Answering a hypothetical is a two step process: we must first construct, for ourselves, the details of a scenario (a test of the imagination); and then decide what we would do (a test of the problem solving skill set). But the human imagination is notoriously unreliable (for a compelling argument, I'd suggest Dan Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness). Mental constructions of a hypothetical scenario are painted with broad strokes. The importance of various factors are distorted. Important details are left out. Now this is probably less a problem for the answerer (Obama should -- as a presidential candidate -- be spending considerable time on these scenarios and getting them, more or less, right) than it is for those judging the answer. As an audience, we too must use our imagination to construct our own details of a scenario by which to assess the answer. Looking backward in time is manageable (e.g., the Iraq war question), but looking forward, our imaginations are likely to fail us. If the candidate is at risk for wrongly predicting his/her future scenario, we are even more likely to get it wrong when we judge them on it.

Sure, the hypothetical is a great way to see how someone thinks. But when (and this is sad) was the last time that a president was elected because he had a great imagination and superb analytical skills?

--gvillain

(To reply, click here.)

Much like last week's Obama argument over diplomatic relations with enemy nations, I think this little ditty reflects Obama's opposition to tactical nuclear weapons, vis-a-vis Bush's outright support for their deployment.

The administration, particularly in the Rumsfeld days, made a couple oblique remarks about using tactical nuclear weapons as bunker-busters, mostly in regards to Iran. They also made efforts to restart research and development of smaller, as they say, "usable" nuclear weapons.

Now all that may be old news now, which brings us back to Obama. I think he has stated his opposition to nuclear weapons as a tactical option as a means to further differentiate his policy from Bush's. This technique of "Bush likes A so I like B" was even more in play in regards to speaking with our enemies.

I'm with Obama on both of these, as I think it represents a return to a sane foreign policy focused on reestablishing Americas proper place as an international leader. Point being, I don't think Obama has some sort of huge "anti-nuclear weapons agenda", but rather, he's making his divergence with the current administration's policy on this clear and explicit.

--jwschmidt

(To reply, click here.)

Obama's generosity with hypothetical answers may very well come back to bite him in the backside. Currently he may be portrayed as a media darling, but eventually Ms. Rodham will issue order 66, and all media will turn to assassinate all of the remaining candidates, a la Star Wars Episode III. Once that directive begins, his hypothetical answers, repeated sans question, will be used to the Exalted One's advantage. He will be hung out to dry in ropes he wove himself. The net he cast to draw in voters unraveling into a hangman's noose.

--regibbons

(To reply, click here.)

This article was refreshing for me to read against the backdrop of a national political climate which most often resembles something between a circus and a Roman-gladiator-style blood sport. I feel most American people have detached themselves from any significant sense of the impact that politics have on their lives, and even worse, the impact their lives can and should have on politics. Only with this sense of futilism and detachment can a populace continue to accept blatant cowardice from candidates in the face of questions. Why are we not aghast that a candidate would pick and choose the questions they want to be expected to answer. And far worse, why are candidates successfully able to use this question-dodging technique to paint themselves as "strong-minded"? Because most of our political candidates no longer have the courage to have personal opinions, stances and beliefs that they may have to stand up for.

We cannot expect any one candidate to have all the right answers all the time. But we can and should expect them to have the fortitude and integrity to know where they stand, be willing to discuss it, debate, reexamine it, perhaps learn and change it when shown their own errors, and most of all, be honest with us about all the whys. Naturally, some candidates will have more right answers than others or more popular stances than others. But that's what the electoral process is all about - for us citizens to give enough of a darn to choose for ourselves who we want. Not by their level of bullheadedness, but by their honest answers to all the questions we find important.

--silvernymph

(To reply, click here.)

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