The cult of decisiveness in U.S. politics

On March 28, 1899, the Los Angeles Times took Mayor Frederick Eaton to task over, of all things, his handling of the city's Library Board. "FLIP-FLOP," the paper trumpeted in capital letters. "The mayor executes another back somersault."

For more than a century, the term "flip-flop" has been deployed derisively in politics to indicate a particularly odious offshoot of indecisiveness. If you change your mind to suit the circumstances, the thinking goes, you're not only indecisive but sullied by the very act of mind-changing.

Presidentially, the act of flip-floppery predates the term. Jefferson opposed executive power; he even wanted to strip the federal government of its ability to borrow money. But he changed his tune when Napoleon decided to sell the Louisiana Territory. Nothing gave a president the power to buy land, but Jefferson went ahead anyway. He flip-flopped.

Lincoln, too: In the 1860 campaign, he promised he wouldn't interfere with slavery in states where it existed. We know what happened there. And Ronald Reagan, who ushered in the conservative revolution, was a Democrat for decades and headed one of the country's most prominent unions.

Flip-flops or evolved thinking? History already has made the judgments.

Certainly, flip-flopping can reflect political expedience. Yet the blanket condemnation of changing one's mind remains a major narrative of modern presidential politics.

FREE VIDEO Miller attacks Kerry Sept. 1, 2004: Sen. Zell Miller, D-Ga., assails John Kerry as indecisive and weak on defense. Watch his entire address. NBC News

In 2004, Republican guns were trained on Kerry to cast his about-faces as character flaws. "His back-and-forth reflects a habit of indecision and sends a message of confusion," Vice President Dick Cheney said at the 2004 Republican National Convention. Hours later, Sen. Zell Miller of Georgia, a Democrat backing Bush, said Kerry would offer up a "yes-no-maybe bowl of mush." "Right now," Miller said, "the world just cannot afford an indecisive America."

Flip-flopper or opportunist?
Is that entirely fair, though? The message seems simplistic: that changing one's mind is an effective indicator of being unfit to lead.

While flip-flopping is often framed as indecisiveness, the word masks uglier innuendoes. Implied in the charge is that a flip-flopper doesn't know what he believes or, worse, is an opportunist.

"This actually gets at something that is fairly distinctively American — the peculiarly moral language of our politics," says Bruce Schulman, a Boston University history professor who studies decisiveness and the "flip-flop" in modern American politics. "It's not so much decisiveness that is prized as it is commitment to principle. That's what we think we like. Flip-flop is bad, such a danger for candidates today, because it's seen as evidence of a lack of principle."

NBC video   Romney tries to prove he's authentic Oct. 28: Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney is courting conservatives and fighting perceptions he's flip-flopped. NBC's Ron Allen reports. Nightly News

That made it easy earlier this year for Mike Huckabee to highlight Mitt Romney's change of position on abortion as not only indecisive but amoral. "I think you can't just have a change of opinion on fundamental issues over and over and wait until you're running for president to do it," Huckabee said.

Indecision 2008
By that point, Romney had been defending himself for weeks. "I think people respect someone that acknowledges mistakes," he said. "And instead of trying to defend wrong decisions year after year after year, I'm a guy that's learned from my mistakes."

But if the electorate can't deal with even a whiff of "Indecision 2008," as Jon Stewart frames it on "The Daily Show," where does that leave our discourse? Fine to be a nation of action, but a continuous appearance of decisiveness, demanded to the nth degree in a live-news-conference, sound-bite world, undermines evolving thinking — and, indeed, permits very little thinking at all.

"The sense of `I know what needs to be done and I'm ready to go do it' is very important to voters," says Natalie Davis, a 1996 U.S. Senate candidate who is a political scientist at Birmingham-Southern College in Alabama.

"I don't think a candidate for president can say, `I haven't thought about that' or `We need to study that more,'" she says. "I don't think you can come before the voters and say, `You know, I don't know.'"

In other words, the appearance of decisiveness — no matter what the actual decision may be — always trumps saying nothing. "And," says Davis, "it is killing our politics."

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