The Perils of the Low Information Voter

The bailout plan fails in the House. And hey, the Dow closes in -700 territory. So that’s exciting.  

On the political side, I can understand the behavior of representatives who claim to be receiving calls 100:1 against the bailout. They’re worried about protecting their seats and watching as their vote is painted as a taxpayer giveaway to billionares. But this is the one of the real-word consequences of the the “low information” voter.  The bailout is a complex and confusing morass that requires a lot of technical knowledge.  So we’re asking the voter–who hears “bailout” and “fatcat” thrown around like CNBC is covering a national game of Monopoly with the Fed playing the roll of Mr. Moneybags, complete with Depression-era monocle–to smile and put their faith in unelected technocrats. 

This is, in part, a trust and information problem. If more voters understood the problem, they might be inclined to support the bill. (I’ll also note that some of this blame could be shared by Congress and the Bush administration for not selling this better). If some voters had more information, they’d know enough to understand…that they don’t know enough. 

Instead, they call and complain to their local representative, allowing the House GOP to cry partisanship. Best comment comes from a friend in investment banking:

LOL. No! They’re [the Republicans] protecting the little guy by insisting on tax incentives for speculative investment. Wheeeeeeee! We’re all doomed!

Live-Blogging the Debate: The Blogs to Read

I’ll be busy at one of the last Fall For the Book readings tonight so I won’t be following the debate as closely as I’d like.  You, however, should follow along with these fine bloggers who will be giving you some of the best foreign policy and political commentary as they live-blog the event:

• Ned Resnikoff and Charlie Eisenhood at NYU Local: Sweet political barbs from the Big Apple’s progressive, hipster capital.
• Democracy Arsenal hits you with a right hook of wonkishness and lays you out with a southpaw of firece foreign policy analysis.  Or some other such boxing/defense policy metaphor-combo.
• Dan Drezner: The man boasts political economy and foreign policy bona fides. If you mess with him, he will cut you.
• Think Progress: It’s a virtual room full of wonks and twenty-something Beltway progressives, including Matt Yglesias. You don’t have to drink to hang out, but you will have to provide your own booze.

I’ll weigh in with a (hopefully) substative take post-debate, but until then enjoy your Friday.

What Obama’s Economic Argument Should Look Like: The Great Risk Shift

One of the things that seems to be missing from the Obama campaign’s economic rhetoric is a coherent narrative under which he can group his policy proposals .  Citing deregulation, the influence of lobbyists (with strong ties to the Republican party and John McCain’s campaign), and tax cuts for oil companies is a scatter-shot of political sins and policy failures.  But as Ezra Klein observed recently when critiquing an Obama ad, these things don’t really go together in the minds of voters:

But the substance of the ad, the solutions, are a string of disconnected, and fairly unconvincing, sentences. “Reform our tax system to give a $1,000 tax break to the middle class, instead of showering more on oil companies and corporations that outsource our jobs.” This would be fine if McCain were publicly advocating the “Oil Companies and Outsourcers Tax Cut of 2008,” but as he won’t admit to favoring these things, it just sounds like Obama is another politician promising Good Stuff, and no one really believes in Good Stuff. 

Jacob Hacker’s idea of “The Great Risk Shift” would be one, I think powerful, way of thinking about the current crisis and forming a positive argument.  It also has two major political messaging benefits:

1. Like Bill Clinton’s 1992 message, it tells the voters what the Republicans are doing wrong (they’re shifting the burden of financial risk from other players in the system–who can and should assume their own risk–and shifting it to the middle and lower classes).  It’s the worst features of both Big Government and free-market fervor: regulatory capture, corporate patronage, and bailouts for those at the top combined with little to no oversight to keep markets running smoothly (even if you favor a “night watchmen” for regulatory oversight, it’d be best if that watchman wasn’t asleep on the job). 
2. It offers a flexible range of policy responses.  The campaign doesn’t have to adopt all of Hacker’s proposals to make the case against McCain’s plans.  You could offer a more populist, John Edwards inspired package under the narrative of restoring safeguards for the American worker as easily as you could a more limited, “iPod government” initiative.

The message of the late 80s and early 90s was that “trickle-down economics” had failed to actually trickle down.  The message for the remaining days of this campaign should be that average voters deserve a governemnt that makes all players in the system assume their fair share of risk.

I Believe in Dylan Matthews

You’ve got to support a guy who is fake-running to be a UC representative at Harvard and references Thomas Carlyle as part of his biography:

In fact, if Thomas Carlyle were to have met Dylan, he would have hanged himself in despair at the impossibility of achieving such greatness. And Thomas Carlyle was a total baller.

Walt Whitman would agree, and Whitman was the OG of American poetry in addition to being a super-pimp¹, so he would know.

¹When you think about it, a good 50% of Leaves of Grass says as much.

Worst Case Election Scenarios: Not So Bad

Jamelle thinks that a popular vote loss for Obama would mean Very Bad Things:

It would – in every possible way – be an utter disaster for our politics.  In fact, I’d rather see McCain win the popular vote and the Electoral College; just so we could avoid the poisonous attacks and Republican accusations of illegitimacy* which unquestionably would follow in the wake of an Obama electoral college win, but popular vote loss.  If Obama wins this election, I want it to be a clear and convincing win; ideally, he’d break fifty percent.  But if that doesn’t happen, fine.  The most important thing is that he comes away from the election having won the more votes than John McCain. 

Although I agree a popular vote routing would be a heavy political stone to carry right out of the inaugural gates, I don’t think it would be the disaster Jamelle predicts , regardless of Republican rhetoric.  It’s useful to remember here that Bill Clinton only won only 43% of the popular vote–that’s 57% of the electorate who voted for someone else.  It didn’t seriously inhibit Clinton’s early policy goals (a good case can be made that the bungling of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” hurt Clinton more in his first 100 days than his lack of popular support). And four years later Clinton captured just under 50% of the popular vote.  

Politically, if not tempermentally, the country is still relatively split, and this election is going to be close like the past two presidential elections.  I think it’s safe to assume that neither Obama nor McCain would win with a large enough margin to be called a “mandate.”  Obama is still favored to win, but not by much more than 3-5% of the popular vote.  If McCain wins it’s likely to be even closer, so either candidate will have to make some sort of bid for public political unity.  I think Obama is in a stronger positon to do this than McCain, whose “maverick” brand has been tarnished and would come to Washington trailing a Republican establishment heavily invested in Nixonland politics.  The Democrats will certainly have their work cut out for them, but Obama’s political skills and charisma–not to mention disaffected moderate Republians and Bush fatigue–would go along way to greasing the legislative wheels in his favor.

Two Quick Takes on Canadian Politics

Well, not Canadian politics exactly, but the politics and views of Canadians.  From time to time, I like to click through the Canadian political blogosphere.  It’s an interesting contrast to the terms of debate in America–both the literal terms (the Conservative party is more moderate than the Republican right; the Liberal party is further left of center ) and which issues are a priority north of the border.  And then sometimes there’s a bit of dissonance:

If I am being branded a social neo-liberal, then I suggest the right do their homework a little more. I am a small “c” conservative, and I utterly reject social progressivism, except perhaps in the case of hereditary rights. I do not believe in progressive taxation, nor social security for employment, nor government control of free markets. I do not agree with surrendering 33% of my income toward social progressivism. As a classical liberal I believe in the free market, with restrictions only on collusive interests and foreign manipulation of domestic controls.

That’s right, free markets for everyone except in the case of”foreign manipulation,” because markets stop at the imaginary line we call borders.  And domestic controls, which might be things like safety standards or, well, I’m not sure what–sounds like nasty market regulation stuff to me.  And “bah” to foreigners and this “multiculturalism” drivel.  I mean, is labor really subject to market forces? Free markets for me but not for thee.

This isn’t really classical liberalism; this is favor for some open markets at the expense of others (as a corrective, see: all the work of Will Wilkinson).

Then there’s Jason Cherniak asking “What’s Obama scared of?“:

My concern is that the supposedly charismatic man of change seems, ultimately, scared of competition. When he ran against Hillary Clinton, he successfully destroyed her campaign by arguing that she would somehow be cheating if she were to follow the rules and try to win the votes of what we call “ex-officio delegates”. Now, when it came time to pick the number 2, he went with bland and boring. It is as if Mr. Obama wants absolutely nobody to ever forget that he is the star and whomever else might be around him is all but meaningless.

Bland and boring?  Evan Bayh is closer to Mr. Vanilla.  Kathleen Sebelius, despite her impressive perch as a Democratic executive in Republican leaning state, isn’t exactly a rousing figure.  Joe Biden, on the other hand, has that uniquely Washington problem of occasionally stating exactly what he’s thinking.  Biden is a pretty strong and well-established figure in the Democratic party–and yet Obama chose him to be his running mate (a man who also, as the McCain campaign has reminded us, said that Sen. Obama wasn’t ready to lead).  Hardly the behavior of a primadonna.

That Was Fast

From a comment by Obama that Republicans “Take pride in being ignorant”, to a post on TNR’s The Plank, to a website, courtesy of one of TNR’s regular commenters.  That’s pretty quick, even by internet standards.

Memo to Obama

In his latest article, Fareed Zakaria proposes some things Senator Obama should say about Iraq.  Key excerpts:

All today’s gains could disappear when American troops leave—and they will have to leave one day. The disagreement I have with the Bush administration is that it seems to believe that time will magically make these gains endure. It won’t. Without political progress, once the United States reduces its forces, the old mistrust and the old militias will rise up again. Only genuine political power-sharing will create a government and an Army that are seen as national and not sectarian. And that, in turn, is the only path to make Iraq viable without a large American military presence.[...]

[...]My objective remains to end American combat involvement in Iraq and to do so expeditiously. At some point we are going to have to take off the training wheels in Iraq. I believe that we must have a serious plan that defines when that point is reached. If we define success as an Iraq that looks like France or Holland, we will have to stay indefinitely, continue spending $10 billion a month and keep 140,000 troops in combat. And that is neither acceptable nor sustainable. We will have to accept as success a muddy middle ground—an Iraq that is a functioning, federal democracy with a central government and an army able to tackle the bulk of challenges they face.

Defining what victory looks like is the key policy metric here.  Any politician who won’t tell you what victory looks like (or what sort of state–roughly–Iraq should be when we leave) is asking for us to spend lives and resources based on vaguely defined goals like “security” and “stability”¹.  Loosely defined terms do not a foreign policy make.

¹ Or your personal (but not publicly defined!) concept of an ideal democratic state. Your actual Iraqi democratic results may vary.

And Yet the Democrats Aren’t Perennial Winners

I have to admit, not knowing statistics very well, this Op-Ed by Neil Degrasse Tyson made me nervous:

If the general election were held today, Mr. Obama would win 252 electoral votes as the Democratic nominee, while Mrs. Clinton would win 295. In other words, Barack Obama is losing to John McCain, and Hillary Clinton is beating him.

But, oh trickiness, the numbers take some turn in the light of historical context (it has graphs and everything):

As you can see, polls this early are in many cases not even close to the outcome.

I’m sure that Dr. Tyson means well, and I’m a big fan of Nova, but, really, he should talk with some political scientists before glibly writing about politics and concluding, “The political analysts need to take it from here.” We’ve taken it pretty far already, dude! Tyson has every right to speculate about politics–I wouldn’t claim that you need some sort of political science affiliation as a “union card” to do political science research–but it would make sense to ask around a bit, right?

(Hat tip: The Monkey Cage)

Der Spiegel’s Strange American Political Coverage

One of the more bizarre and frustrating reads of the 2008 presidential race has been Gabor Steingart’s “West Wing” column for Germany’s Der Spiegel.  It’s not because Steingart has been a strong skeptic of an Obama nomination since the beginning of the primaries, it’s that his skepticism is symptomatic of a larger misunderstanding of the American political scene.  Consider this from last week’s column in which Steingart begins sensibly enough by admitting that Obama is the likely nominee:

The right to make mistakes has been exercised extensively during this campaign, at times also by the author of this column. “All of those people who’ve been dreaming of America’s first black president now have to slowly wake up. It’ll happen one day, hopefully, but not in this election,” it was claimed after Barack Obama’s losses in New Hampshire and Nevada. The column was entitled “The End of the Obama Revolution.” (more…)

The chances that the next US president will be black and a Democrat are better than ever before in American history. The revolution continues — even if the skepticism remains.

What we are talking about here, though, is not a series of mistakes. It’s betrayal. During this election campaign, a large part of the American media has neglected to carefully follow the principles of the profession. In fact, some were about as loyal to those principles as Eliot Spitzer to his wife.

Okay, so contra Steingart’s earlier ananlysis, Obama isn’t too black or inexperienced for American voters.  And why was Steingart mistaken?  Had he misread the current political moment? Nope, it’s because the American electorate (and by implication, Steingart) were betrayed by journalists who are less interested in subtantive policy discussions than style and gaffe reporting:

Many questions could be posed that are hard to beat in terms of drama. What would happen if the Democrats really were to withdraw the US Army from Iraq? How does Barack Obama plan to address the threat that the killing fields of Cambodia could be repeated in Basra and Baghdad? Does he have a plan or even an idea for dealing with the day after?

How do the Republicans plan to end the scandal of the uninsured? Some 47 million people in America now have no health insurance. Around 9 million have been added to that total during the seven years George W. Bush has been in power. This is the greatest market failure since the invention of modern capitalism.

Will Steingart be doing more than rhetorically asking about either Obama’s Iraq plans or McCain’s healthcare proposal, as if neither of these things exist?  No, he will not. But these questions are relatively easy to answer. Former Obama adviser Samantha Power made it clear (as Jonathan Chait recently noted) that any withdrawal plan will be shaped by facts on the ground, not on some months-old campaign speculation.  And John McCain does indeed have a plan–just not, as Ezra Klein (another journalist!) has pointed out, not a very good one.  Granted, there are problems with the coverage of campaigns and policy issues (something that Ezra Klein also covered incisively in this LA Times op-ed).  But Steingart’s problem stems from a confused perspective of the American political landscape.  Take this comment from his latest column suggesting that conservative parties worldwide are heading left:

Fake Policy Commentary

[Subtitle: Of Course You Need Another Blog Post About Foreign Policy and Comic Books]

I’m in general agreement with this Spencer Ackerman article about imperialism and Iron Man, but the concluding sentence leads to some unintentional policy consequences, at least in the comic book world:

America either needs to submit the Iron Man armor to a series of institutions to govern its just use, or it needs to take off the suit once and for all.

I wonder what a series of institutions governing Iron Man might look like.  Perhaps a superhuman registration act?  Uh oh.  That can’t lead to good things.

Policy Memoir Bleg

Noam Scheiber’s TNR piece about Obama’s policy shop has got me thinking about the policy affairs of the Clinton years. So I’ve compiled a short list of the personal and political memoirs that, I think, cover most of the major policy issues and key players in the Clinton White House. In the foreign policy arena, Madeline Albright’s Madame Secretary and Dennis Ross’s The Missing Peace cover the major conflicts and diplomatic endeavors (i.e. Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, Camp David). Robert Rubin’s In an Uncertain World and Robert Reich’s Locked in the Cabinet cover both sides of the economic and trade disputes from the Rubin/Summers and the Reich/Thurow wings of the Democratic party. The last two are a bit different: George Stephanopoulos’s All Too Human is the quintessential political memoir of the 1990s, and seemingly de rigeur for understanding how the White House went about crafting its messages and playing full-contact politics. Benjamin Barber’s The Truth of Power: Intellectual Affairs in the Clinton White House looks at Clinton’s relationship with ideas and academia.

I’ve chosen personal memoirs because they give the reader a view of both the policy issues and the behind-the-scenes management from an on-the-ground perspective. I’m less interested in a dispassionate wonkish monograph than an account of policy in action–and perhaps ideology in action (and I can find those pretty readily). But I feel like I’m missing some big issues; I don’t have anything on the 1993 health care reform (probably the biggest domestic policy failure) nor anything from a singular military perspective. Any suggestions for books to round out the list?

The Classroom as IR Theory

I’ve been asked to think about who my students are for my pedagogy of teaching literature. Which of these crude IR theory/economic/comparative politics analogies about general education classrooms (at the college level) seems more apt:

1. The neoclassical model: Students are all rational actors (but not perfectly rational) that maximize their utility, which is expressed via grades. They respond to incentives (such as quizzes) which will improve their grades, but won’t read as closely (or sometimes at all) if there is nothing at stake. Grades–and not the information or experiences imparted in the classroom–are the measure of utility.
2. The Malamud-Goti experience: Students are the citizens of a post-authoritarian regime: in this case secondary (and likely public) education. They have been socialized to accept the teacher as the arbiter of What is Right and wait to be filled with knowledge. Given more freedom, they will default to rote learning–living an educational life of “oppression,” they will choose a “banking” approach to learning.
3. The realist theory: The default condition of the classroom is anarchy. Students are self-interested and respond to grades rather than an ideology of educational enrichment. (You can substitute other IR theories here at will).

This isn’t only about college classrooms–it’s also about making tortured and entertaining connections between totally disparate disciplines. Comments welcome (including ones about classroom experience in general or high school pedagogy.)

Addendum: I freely admit these are cynical takes on the classroom experience, but that is part of the difficulty of a general education class; students with no real interest (at least not as part of their major) are asked to take classes that are unconnected to their discipline.  Of course, a college or university offers these classes as part of a “complete education” (however they conceive that) and many of the skills that make one a successful student in one area of study overlap with another.  But at bottom you’re teaching future engineers and MBAs how to read Robert Frost poem.

A Call For Open Campaign Events

The Center for Political Participation at my alma mater Allegheny College has started a new initiative called the Soapbox Alliance to promote open political events as an antidote to the staged and restricted “town hall” gatherings and rallies. Allegheny is asking other colleges and universities to join them–spurred in part by a 2004 on campus rally featuring Dick Cheney:

The College’s practice had been to welcome private groups to use its facilities with or without charge, depending on availability and circumstances. Without a relevant policy in place, it had no sound basis to deny this request despite its strong distaste for the idea of a closed “town meeting” and frustration with the increasingly prevalent practice by both major national political parties of selecting receptive audiences to enhance the likelihood of generating upbeat media coverage.

The CPP is asking that “at least half of the available seats must be made available to the general college community through a non-biased distribution,” with the rest going to an organization’s supporter (or whoever they decide to invite).

Although I’m supportive of greater openness and participation in politics, I’m skeptical that many colleges will sign on. Do colleges really host that many “closed” events? Why agree to limit a particular type of event that might generate some press for your university–a type of event that rarely occurs anyway–except to signal your support for civic responsibility and “good citizens”?

The Future of Iraqi Democracy

This NY Times op-ed by former Iraqi prime minister Ayad Allawi highlights the drawbacks of quick democratization–press for elections too soon and you may end up with a dysfunctional government sorely lacking in public support:

Accordingly, the vast majority of the electorate based their choices on sectarian and ethnic affiliations, not on genuine political platforms. Because many electoral lists weren’t made public until just before the voting, the competing candidates were simply unknown to ordinary Iraqis. This gave rise to our sectarian Parliament, controlled by party leaders rather than by the genuine representatives of the people. They have assembled a government unaccountable and unanswerable to its people.

Though I recognize the problems a transitioning democracy faces in producing a stable government, Allawi underscores the primary benefit of free elections: legitimacy. A country needs some form of the population’s consent to construct a government in a post-authoritarian regime, or at least a mechanism for keeping the people from turning against the process. But I’m not sure the measures Allawi is proposing are either realistic or likely to confer more legitimacy:

Furthermore, a new law should ban the use of religious symbols and rhetoric by candidates and parties — these have no place in democratic elections. In order to prevent interference from militias and to ensure transparency, the United Nations must supervise all these elections district by district. And these reforms should be supplemented by other preconditions of national reconciliation, like general amnesty to all those who have not engaged in terrorism.

I have a hard time believing a country that is currently split along ethnic and religious lines is going to accept a general ban on religious symbols. An Iraqi politician need only point to the Republicans in the US, christian democrats in Europe, or even the president of secular Turkey and say “Look, religion is a part of the democracies of the west and our neighbor Turkey–why should we eliminate it from our political discourse?” It’s hard to sell people on the liberty granting benefits of democracy while telling them you have to enact illiberal measures to achieve them.

And although amnesty will have to be a necessary part of any nationwide political reconciliation, it will likely have to include those who have engaged in terrorism, to say nothing of the difficulty of sorting out those who have been part of the insurgency but not engaged in terrorism and those that have committed terrorist acts.

Ultimately, the problem is that Allawi’s plan sounds tailored to the concerns of an American audience: don’t allow Islamic extremists to win elections, prevent shari’a from being put into law, don’t let insurgents who have killed American soldiers get away with it. But these aren’t the same concerns for Iraqis or for putting together a working political consensus.  Serving as another reminder that democracy promotion is a difficult and flawed policy to begin with.