Speculations about confidence are everywhere in the news. Do we have confidence that Obama and his team can resolve the economic crisis? Will investor confidence rebound? And what about consumer confidence? Does each of us have confidence in our ability to survive the downturn? Will banks have the confidence to resume extending credit to businesses? Will businesses have confidence to plan for the future?

Confidence dwells in that shadowy place between fact and opinion. If we know something is true, we don’t need to have confidence it is. It’s a fact. On the other hand, mere opinion lacks the sturdiness and stamina of true confidence. Optimism is all too fragile. And yet, as our current economic and political situation constantly reminds us, confidence is essential to our recovery. So what is confidence? And how does it come about?

These are the questions that preoccupy me as I prepare for my three week vacation in the remote Buddhist kingdom of Bhutan. My plan is to post a series of reflections on these topics, starting now but continuing on my return. In the meantime, any questions or observations on the topic are very welcome. It would be great to have a lively dialogue on this topic.

But let me begin now with a few thoughts on self-confidence to get the ball rolling.

There is so much hope and fantasy surrounding Obama now, so much emphasis on his historic role, so many comparisons to Lincoln and FDR, such a stress on the mountain of problems he faces as he prepares to be sworn in, the person himself has been lost to view.  Through the welter of projections, the layouts, the interviews, the cover stories, the punditry, he has been rendered invisible.  And when he emerges, with or without his Blackberry, he will be safely encased in the Presidential bubble, his acts and statements endlessly spun, he will be invisible in yet other ways.  

Clearly we are in the midst of a national celebration.  He has become a totemic figure, an idol, a superman.

So what can we do about it?  To be sure, we will all — myself included — succumb to our dreams and join the celebration.  But then I think it will be important to keep reminding ourselves that we actually do not know him anymore — if indeed we ever did.  The focus will shift to the job:  the actions and the projects he undertakes, what he uses his power and influence to accomplish, what he actually does.

The really important thing is that, as the real Obama disappears from view, he himself does not get seduced into believing that he is more than he is.  Recent history suggests that this easily happens to Presidents.  Most advisors have their own agendas, their ways of using those they advise to bring about their own ends.  Few people speak truth to power.  And then few powerful people retain the capacity to believe in their own limitations and ignorance.

That will be the real thing to watch for.

No doubt it will, and the anticipation is mounting.  But the idealization — the glorification, in some places  – is mounting as well.  Some can’t wait for it to happen, some dread the moment, some believe it will never occur.  Obama, as Newsweek put, is “the one,” inheriting the legacy of every great historical figure:  Lincoln, FDR, Kennedy.  We seem to need a Saviour right now, and he is the inevitable candidate.

He himself, I suspect, it too smart to go for this, and consciously we are too.  But I suspect we don’t know how much we are coming around to buying into into it.  A number of pundits thought his choice of Hillary Clinton to head the State Department was the mistake, but that has died down amid the choruses of praise for most of his appointments.  More recently, his invitation to the evangelical minister Rick Warren to speak at his inaugural aroused a storm of protest among gays, but that too has died down, as we are reminding ourselves of the importance of tolerating a diversity of voices.  In one way, of course, Obama is showing really thoughtful leadership, but how long before he stumbles?  Or we allow him to stumble?  Or we want him to stumble?

Perhaps I am not the only one to have wondered if the widespread anxiety about his being assassinated masked an underlying desire for him to fall.  To be sure, inspiring and charismatic leaders have been assassinated, including, of course, Lincoln and Kennedy.  But it would be a mistake to underestimate the role of envy in politics, or simply the underside of idealization and hope.  In investing so much in Obama, we might wonder who are we protecting?

He will make mistakes, and we will be disappointed.  That simply can’t be helped, and with so many overwhelming problems to solve it is likely to happen soon.  But it is not too late now to think about protecting him and us from the backlash of denigration and rage that will accompany those failures and, perhaps, spoil the realistic leadership he is able to offer us.

There is so much criticism of Obama’s choice of Hillary for Head of the State Department – and of others in his new team. Many believe he was influenced by Doris Kearn’s book about Lincoln’s cabinet, and very possibly he was. There is an argument to be made for keeping one’s rivals engaged and close to the decision making process. On the other hand, rivals can and often do fight to the death, or at least undermine their leader.

The key is strong and determined leadership — and that may be what Obama has confidence in being able to assert in bringing such powerful people into his cabinet.

There is another precedent and analysis that is relevant to this discussion: the role of Kennedy’s advisors in preparing for the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion, and a few months later their response to the Cuban missile crisis. As analyzed by Irwin Janis, the Yale Sociologist, the team of advisors went way off course by virtue of “groupthink,” a process in which differences and debate were silenced and a consensus emerged without adequate testing. The next time around, as Soviet ships carrying missiles to Cuba approached, Kennedy encouraged vigorous debate in his team, a process that allowed him to think the problem through more thoroughly and arrive at an effective solution.

The team that Obama is putting together is very strong, a group of capable and independent thinkers – every bit as strong as the team Kennedy had around him over 45 years ago.  Obama appears to have confidence in his ability to tolerate conflict and dissent and to learn from it. Bush is notoriously conflict averse, no doubt a key reason he allowed Chaney essentially to take over his administration by operating behind the scenes and suppress dissent. Obama may see the benefits in the frank and full display of opinions as the run up to good decisions.

Maybe he wants a real team.

It did seem as if the so-called “Bradley effect” did  not come into play in the election after all.  Why?

Leaving our of account the possibility that there really is no “Bradley effect,” no racism in our electoral politics, which seems impossible to accept, given the ubiquity of racism in our culture, what happened to our racism in the polling booth?

Benedict Carey argued in The New York Times on November 7th:  the election illustrated that  ”mutual trust between members of different races can catch on just as quick, and spread just as fast, as suspicion.”  Clearly we would like to believe this — and there is some truth to it.

On an individual level, person to person communication goes a long way towards mitigating prejudices.  But to a very large extent, racism is a group processes that involves the identities of group members.  One can hold to virulent racist views and still like and even enjoy friends who fit into those categories of  hate.  It isn’t even that people make exceptions so much that these are two different types of experience, the experience of the personal and the experience of one’s identity group.  They can exist side by side.

I know this from my own experience.  My father was an anti-semite who grew up in post-WWI Germany, but he loved and admired my jewish wife and he adored his jewish grandchildren.  No conflict, no contradiction — except, of course, for me.

Obama, of course, never became a “friend” to the electorate, never established a personal relationship.  He was and remained “Black.”

What happened, I think, is that over the course of the election he lost his strangeness. Repeated exposure in debates, interviews, advertisements, public appearances made him familiar to us, less threatening.  To be sure, many remained “uncomfortable” with him, as they said, but many more lost their feeling that he was too different to understand.  And, then, increasingly, Palin and McCain himself became strange, impulsive, intolerant, negative.

The process was a good example of how consciousness can, over time, and in the right circumstances, override unconscious prejudice.

Thank god!