New York Times

12/29/03

Aesop's Fabled Fox

By William Safire

WASHINGTON - A psychopolitical challenge voters will face in the coming year is how to deal with cognitive dissonance.

A cognition is a bit of knowledge or belief. When it disagrees with another cognition in our head, theorized Prof. Leon Festinger of Stanford a half century ago, a nasty jangling occurs. To end this cognitive dissonance, or C.D., we change the weak cognition to conform to the stronger one.

Take Aesop's fox, who could not reach a lofty bunch of grapes no matter how high he jumped. One foxy cognition was that grapes were delicious; the other was that he couldn't get them. To resolve that cognitive dissonance, the fox persuaded himself that the grapes were sour - and trotted off, his mind at ease.

Here's how this insight can help political decision-making in Election Year 2004.

Six years ago, one of my most tenaciously held cognitions was distrust of the Clintons. When Hillary's health care task force met in secret, I was seized with cognition No. 2: that she and her handpicked advisers would come up with a hugely expensive and regimented scheme for universal coverage. Both cognitions fit; no dissonance. In the subsequent court decision that discredited Hillary's penchant for secrecy, followed by the legislative rout of her plan, my mind was serene.

Contrast that with my clashing cognitions about Vice President Dick Cheney and his similarly secretive energy task force, probably lopsided with oil-cat lobbyists.

I've known Cheney since our Nixon days. He's thoughtful, calmly conservative, nonpompous, decisive and was accessible to me over the phone on the hectic morning after 9/11. Cognition No. 1: he's one of the good guys.

But he's fighting to keep secret the identity of his outside advisers on public policy clear up to the Supreme Court. Cognition No. 2: big mistake. And so I wrote a couple of weeks ago [first_safire_column.html] that Republicans were out of their minds to make this a federal case to be decided at the height of the 2004 campaign. To be consistent on principle and thereby avoid heavy cognitive dissonance, I chose to stray off the Bush reservation. For this instance of political disloyalty, I was afflicted with mild C.D.

But this mental tintinnabulation was exacerbated by the roar of unwelcome laudatory correspondence. Readers who regularly smite me hip and thigh with peem (politically excoriating e-mail) hailed what they discovered to be my newfound independence, high-mindedness and sagacity. (Lefties are especially adept at left-handed compliments.)

I can take it. Libertarian conservative pundits know what it is to suffer the consequences of praise from the vast move-on conspiracy. But what of my well-meaning Internet tormentors, whose cloying encomiums begin with "Though I usually skip over your right-wing drivel"? Are they even aware of their own C.D.?

There goes their hero, huffy Howard Dean, clamping a full-decade lock of "executive privilege" on the records of his years of governing Vermont. Why did he lower a granite curtain on public records? Dean admitted a year ago that "future political considerations" drove his stonewalling: "We didn't want anything embarrassing appearing in the papers at a critical time."

That leaves Democratic primary voters to guess at what he's going to such great legal lengths to hide. Does an unsavory connection to an Enron subsidiary exist in his correspondence? Are there minutes of his meetings about same-sex civil unions that could come back to haunt him, or a pardon recommendation he wants sealed until he can laugh at voters' remorse? What could be so "embarrassing" at this "critical time"?

Consider what must be happening within the minds of Dean enthusiasts. A portion of their anti-Bush anger has for years been directed at the covered-up advice of oil lobbyists to the administration's energy task force - but now they must be dismayed at the more egregious refusal of their standard-bearer to reveal his Vermont papers. Didn't a Democratic governor named Al Smith campaign against President Hoover on the slogan "Let's look at the record"?

They could deal with C.D. by (1) suppressing their cognition about executive-branch secrecy, or (2) changing their cognition about Dean or (3) calling on their hero to tear down that stonewall. There is also the choice of emulating the shrewd action of Aesop's fox: deciding that the grapes of wrath are sour.