A good friend of mine likes to say “it’s more important to be effective than to be right.” I have been thinking about this a fair bit recently. John Adams on HBO is depicting him as someone who struggled with this a lot. When he felt something to be right he would come on strong even if that turned the very people he was trying to convince against him. The idea here is not that the “ends justify the means” but that you are trying to achieve an outcome rather than win a debate. Insisting on a point no matter how convinced one may be about its correctness is usually not an effective way of getting people to do something. In fact it’s a no-win proposition. If you turn out to have been right, the other person will feel bad about “having been told” (even if you can supress any display of “I told you so”). If you turn out to be wrong, you look like an idiot. It’s easy to fall into this trap, especially if one cares about something and let’s one’s emotions (the sense of being right) take over. I have certainly done it many times myself. Barack Obama has just done it in a big way.
