Systems-Generated Carefully-Packaged Pandering

Martin L. Gross, in his rather forgettable book, A Call for Revolution (1993), did say something clever – “We live in a world in which politics has replaced philosophy.”  But the observation, nicely turned here, is flat and old.  We don’t expect politicians to have a “philosophy” – some sort of principled and well-thought-out conservatism, or some sort of progressive, liberal-humanitarian views basic on consideration of the thoughts of everyone from Erasmus to Gandhi, or severe libertarian views based on reading and rereading Ayn Rand and a lifelong effort to be exactly like John Galt.  No one who seeks national office can afford to have a firm “philosophy” – it’s best to have a vague “political philosophy” and a winning personality.  A “political philosophy” is more like presenting coded signals to key voting blocs, hinting at how you’d “tend” to act given a crisis or a long-standing problem – but it’s not a rigid philosophy.  You cannot rely on the key voting blocs alone.  You need other votes – so flexibility is the key.

 

And too, you need the financial and organizational support of one of the two major parties, and political parties are about gaining power, consolidating power and rewarding those who have paid for access to that power.  That’s structural – it’s inherent in the system we have – although both parties dress it up with what in the business world they call “mission statements.”  But those “mission statements” are added afterthought – the “party” was created as a complex organizational tool with a quite specific purpose, and not as a philosophic forum of like-minded people.   Candidates do their “what we believe” speeches for the party, and may be as sincere as Luke Skywalker, but that’s another matter – as Alexis de Tocqueville once put it – “There are many men of principle in both parties in America, but there is no party of principle.”

 

All this can make you a bit cynical.  See Frank McKinney “Kin” Hubbard – “We’d all like to vote for the best man, but he’s never a candidate.”  No, you don’t get the best man – you get the best possible candidate the complex organizational tool can pop out at the end of many processes, including focus groups, careful and tightly controlled polling, demographic analyses of all sorts, and negotiations with the major donors.  He may not be the best the world has to offer for the task at hand, but he can get elected.  And who knows?  Once in office he might do some good, if we’re lucky.

 

It is, then, a systems problem, where all the interlocking bits and pieces of the processes determine the outcome, not bold decisions by a few thoughtful people – or by any people at all, really.  See Albert Einstein – “All of us who are concerned for peace and triumph of reason and justice must be keenly aware how small an influence reason and honest good will exert upon events in the political field.”  That man knew how things work.  And Plato long ago noted just what would be the result of thinking only of what is politically possible – “Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber.”

 

So be it – but it is early in the 2008 presidential race, each party with eight or ten potential nominees for the office, and each party is in that odd situation where it is time to play to the base – to send overt signals to that key voting bloc.  You can always tone it down later, in the general election – that is a quite different audience than the one in this part of the process.  In the general election you can worry about what might offend a lot of people who are undecided and middle-of-the-road types, and you should.  At this point in the process, however, you play to the base.

 

So, on the Republican side you get the rip-roaring talk about just which one of the nine or so white men is most willing to ignore the rules, break the law, and get us into a few more wars.  The thing that matters most is stopping another terrorist attack, so we must be feared, so no one messes with us.  Romney is proud to say he’d double the size of Guantanamo, and he’d make sure no one detained on suspicion of anything would ever see a lawyer.  Giuliani keeps saying he wholly approves of the use of torture as official policy – there would be no rules.  And everyone needs the “values voters” – so we must do something about the evil of homosexuality, and make abortion a crime again, this time a felony, and we must make sure the poor know their place.  And there are the economic givens – taxes must be lowered, especially taxes paid by the very wealthy, as that keeps the economy strong, and we must close the border and make sure no one sneaks in to do work in the fields and in construction, and so on.

 

For those not part of the base (in Arabic, al-Qaeda) all this might make you a bit uncomfortable, but that’s not the point at the moment.  Your comfort doesn’t matter at the moment – you probably vote in the “other” primary.  But even some in the base, or who used to be in the base, are getting spooked.  See John Cole, former Bush supporter, former war-supporter and life-long Republican.  He has some questions for the Republican candidates

 

1.) Would you have sex with a man to stop a terrorist attack?

2.) If lowering taxes results in increased revenues then would lowering taxes to zero result in infinite revenues?

3.) If you had a time machine, would you travel back in time and abort Bin Laden?

4.) Would you torture and kill Jesus to ensure mankind’s salvation? And how does that work?

 

He’s collecting these.  He’s a bit fed up – even political philosophies should hang together, even just a bit.  And even what some think of as part of the Republican base, active service military members, is shifting away from the party line – campaign donations from active service military members show that in first place we have Ron Paul, the one anti-war Republican hopeful, and in second place, Barack Obama, the one Democrat who is not saying the our leaders carried out a noble idea badly, but rather that the idea of “doing” Iraq instead of dealing with the real problem was insane, so we ought to deal with the real “bad guys” for a change.  Andrew Sullivan – “Those tasked to actually fighting this war get it, don’t they?”

 

Yeah, they do, buy they are not really the base.  The base has other priorities.  Harold Meyerson notes the lack of substance from the current crop of Republican presidential candidates

 

President Giuliani, Romney, McCain or Thompson can reliably be counted on to be against whatever Clinton is for. Beyond that, if we total up their domestic and economic policy proposals, they intend to do almost nothing at all.

 

Romney will punt to the states the problem of the decreasing willingness of employers to provide health insurance. Giuliani says everybody should just buy their own policies — and if the insurance companies don’t want to sell to the sick or middle-aged, that’s just too bad. John McCain focuses on the rising costs of treating chronic diseases rather than the declining level of coverage. Fred Thompson wants to take a whack at Medicare.

 

Kevin Drum concludes some things just aren’t important

 

I thought maybe Meyerson was being unfair. So I went to Mitt Romney’s website to look at his healthcare plan. Here it is: “The health of our nation can be improved by extending health insurance to all Americans, not through a government program or new taxes, but through market reforms.”

 

That’s the whole thing. The rest of the page has a pair of quotes from two years ago, a single short video taken at a campaign event, and a couple of outside links. Sounds like it’s a real priority for him, isn’t it?

 

The base has other concerns (see Cole, above) and anyway, the candidates must be careful.  John Dickerson explores that in Romney’s Achilles’ Heel – on all the different positions he’s taken over so much, and how he won’t discuss his religion, as the Mormon question has to be managed very, very carefully.  Dickerson asks, “Can Mitt convince voters he believes anything?”

 

Maybe not but buried in the item is a cool “We live in a world in which politics has replaced philosophy” paragraph that captures what we have now –

 

On the stump, Romney’s much-discussed stiffness also reinforces the caricature of a calculating automaton. His teeth are on message, and no hair grows without a plan and a briefing. He is a stainless-steel candidate who gets excited about details and policy, but this doesn’t play well in the theater of politics. The irony is that his wonkiness is one of his most authentic characteristics. His aides and friends insist the geeky, data-obsessed guy is the authentic Romney. He’s not the one you’d like to have a beer with – he doesn’t drink, anyway – but he may be the best candidate to share a PowerPoint with.

 

The system produced the perfect candidate.  The issue is efficient electability.  All he has to do is manufacture some sincerity and passion.  When you can display a convincing facsimile of those regularly, and at the precise moment they are necessary, you’ve got it all in one package.

 

Dickerson says that might not matter –

 

In the end, Romney may survive his authenticity problem because of the opponents he faces. He is a compromised candidate in a compromised field. Fred Thompson’s dream candidacy has not materialized, McCain is damaged from his support for immigration reform, and Rudy Giuliani is fundamentally at odds with his party’s largest voting bloc and has his own problem with contradictions. So, while Romney hasn’t solved his big problem, the men he’s running against haven’t licked theirs, either.

 

Well, there is Rudy and the evangelicals.  At salon.com there’s the Michael Scherer item noting that soon evangelical leaders will be holding a follow-up to their September meeting, the one where they threatened to support a third-party candidate if Republicans nominate Rudy Giuliani –

 

“There will be further exploration of what is to be done,” said Howard Phillips, the president of the Conservative Caucus, who participated in the Salt Lake meeting. “And there will be some discussion of who would be a viable independent candidate.”

 

… Ever since the September meeting in Salt Lake, conservative Christian leaders have been increasing their public protests of a Giuliani candidacy, arguing that it would sever the coalition between evangelical voters and the Republican Party that dates back to Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign. “The establishment just doesn’t get it,” said Dr. Richard Land, a leader in the Southern Baptist Convention, in a recent interview. “I cannot vote for a pro-choice candidate as a matter of conscience.”

 

Kevin Drum

 

The Land quote is especially telling. Despite the fact that (a) presidential candidates are chosen via primary and (b) opinion polls all show wide rank-and-file GOP support for Giuliani, Land is convinced that it’s “the establishment” that’s screwing with evangelicals. These guys just can’t escape a mindset in which they’re a besieged minority constantly battling powerful elites who are determined to shut them down.

 

Of course, what really terrifies Land and the others is that they know, in their hearts, that just the opposite is true. The power brokers of the Republican Party are desperate to keep evangelicals on board. They’d dump Rudy in a heartbeat if they could. But the grassroots, after six years of George Bush, is no longer quite so happy with the devil’s bargain they made with evangelicals all those decades ago. It is ordinary voters, not the establishment, who have gotten tired of the single-minded obsession over abortion and gays that the evangelical leadership has foisted on them. It’s no coincidence that a socially moderate candidate is their favorite right now, and that’s way more threatening to the evangelical stranglehold on the GOP than the opinions of a few party leaders.

 

That is a problem.  Matt Yglesias comments on the dynamics of the whole thing

 

There’s really something bizarre about the growing number of constituencies to which your modern-day Republicans must pander in order to succeed in primary politics. That’s all I think you can conclude from something like Mitt Romney calling on the US to boycott a UN panel we’re already boycotting.

 

Drum says this has always bugged him

 

Ever since the 70s, Democrats have had a reputation for being more a collection of special interests than a real party. Basically, if you wanted to win you had to check off all the right boxes: abortion groups, environmental groups, labor unions, trial lawyers, various ethnic minority groups, etc. etc. There was, needless to say, more than a little truth to this reputation.

 

For some reason, though, Republicans never shared this reputation, despite the fact that they had plenty of special interest checkboxes of their own: tax cutting groups, the NRA, pro-life groups, evangelicals, the chamber of commerce, etc. etc. I was never quite able to figure out why, but Republicans managed to make it look like all these groups were somehow related by a set of core conservative principles, while Democratic box checking somehow always looked like pure pandering.

 

But such things happen when Democrats are winning elections for a change –

 

With Dems looking like big winners, liberal interest groups are all willing to settle down and just work for victory. Divvying up the spoils can come later. On the GOP side, it’s just the opposite: with the party doing so poorly, every group is suddenly way more worried about getting its own scrap of attention than in the past. This means that subtle, dog whistle appeals aren’t enough. Conservative interest groups are insecure enough that they want full-on panders, so that’s what the candidates are giving them. There aren’t any more conservative check boxes than there have ever been, but the pandering demands are so much greater that their existence is way more obvious than it has been in the past.  It doesn’t help that many of the leading candidates really aren’t natural allies of all the conservative interest groups, which means that they have to pander even more obsequiously than usual in order to prove their bona fides…

 

Elsewhere, Drum asks another question.  What did Rudy Giuliani mean when he told an Iowa audience, “If we are not careful and you don’t elect me, this country will be to the left of France?”  Is THAT still going on?

 

It’s easier at the moment with the other party.  The UCLA Public Policy professor, Mark Kleiman, asserts that the slogan of the Hillary Clinton campaign seems to be “Resistance is futile.” But that Barack Obama seems to have come up with a good counterpunch – “Hillary is not the first politician in Washington to declare mission accomplished a little too soon.”

           

Hey, there’s a smart guy running, who seems to be centered and focused, and have principles.  And there’s Ron Paul on the other side – even if you disagree with him on a raft of issues you know he’s smart and has some beliefs.  Of course neither of them have a chance.  Thing just don’t work that way.

 

About Alan

The editor is a former systems manager for a large California-based HMO, and a former senior systems manager for Northrop, Hughes-Raytheon, Computer Sciences Corporation, Perot Systems and other such organizations. One position was managing the financial and payroll systems for a large hospital chain. And somewhere in there was a two-year stint in Canada running the systems shop at a General Motors locomotive factory - in London, Ontario. That explains Canadian matters scattered through these pages. Otherwise, think large-scale HR, payroll, financial and manufacturing systems. A résumé is available if you wish. The editor has a graduate degree in Eighteenth-Century British Literature from Duke University where he was a National Woodrow Wilson Fellow, and taught English and music in upstate New York in the seventies, and then in the early eighties moved to California and left teaching. The editor currently resides in Hollywood California, a block north of the Sunset Strip.
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