Matrix time, people. Remember the scene from the first movie where they're having the fight in the dojo?
Morpheus is trying to teach Neo that fighting in the Matris isn't about muscle or physicial strength. He keeps challenging Neo to hit him if he can. At some point he tells him that he's better than he thinks he is. Don't think you're faster, know you're faster, he tells him.
It's not just movies. There's a difference between abstract knowledge of what you could do, and real world use of those capabilities.
Bush has beaten us so many times in legislative battles because we let our caution get in the way of being willing to take risks. It's not that we should be anymore blindly confident than Bush; he takes this blind confidence so far that he has almost no capability to redeem his own mistakes. On nearly every level, Bush's arrogant believe in himself and the dogma of his party has ruined his legacy.
That, though, is not our problem just yet. Yes, we should be watchful, and careful in our policy when we're constructing it. In fact, good work on policy should be one element of the confidence we bring to the table: we should have policies that we don't have to use bullshit spin to defend.
Still, if we're communicating about our policy, we should do so in an active, confident way. We should show up to debates and show up on television with talking points and arguments prepared to assert our strength. We should show up with the kind of presence that belongs to people who actually believe what they're saying.
I know that after Bush and Clinton, such confidence may seem scary to us, but we're not obligated to tolerate candidates who lie through their teeth. Confidence and telling the truth are not mutually exclusive. While we select against the dishonest, we should keep in mind that the people we really have to convince in an election will be approaching it, wondering which candidate knows what they are doing.
Our sense of a leader's ability to lead, emotionally speaking, lies partly in our judgment of their confidence. It's not a completely irrational thing to look for. We look for a lack of confidence as a sign that the person doesn't have the experience or the grounding in the subjects at him such that they're talking about. Even if a person's right, delivering their message without confidence can make things less persuasive.
Now, let me stop for a moment and tell you that I'm not saying confidence is a magic solution, or something that should be employed all by itself. It is only part of a good candidates way of giving a positive impression to the public. It is, however, important to selling everything else that a candidate wishes to put forward.
So as we go forwards, lets keep in mind that confidence in liberal principles, if we've been conscientious in keeping to what's true within them, is no sin. Nobody's politics are perfect, and not everything we think up will be good either. We will make mistakes. However, if there's enough good and truth in what we believe, we should make an effort to relate what we feel about such things to the public, and not cautiously hold back in fear of being misunderstood or thought too irrational. Like it or not, irrational feel is part of how people judge a complex world that doesn't sit still for deliberate, rational thought.
Let's not merely move forward thinking we are right, let's move forward knowing we are right, with the evidence and argument to back up that confidence.