Nothing But Words

Well that didn’t take long. Barely a week after will.i.am released his “Yes We Can” video in support of Obama, there’s now a hilarious (if not disturbing) spoof of it, facetiously touting McCain’s candidacy.

It’s a sign of real progress in American society that, for the first time, we have a woman and a black man as leading contenders for the Presidency. But I don’t see it as a sign that we have left racism and sexism behind. Clinton is a viable woman candidate because she portrays herself as tough as nails on national security matters. She sought (and received) a seat on the Armed Services Committee upon joining the Senate, and she has consistently espoused a very hawkish foreign policy. Whether these views are sincerely held or are the result of political calculation is beside the point. The point is that it’s safe to say, for example, that if she had espoused the notion of unconditional talks with Kim Jong-il and leaders of other “rogue” nations, as Obama did, it would have damaged her candidacy much more than it did Obama’s. Similarly, Obama is a viable black candidate because he is a non-threatening black candidate. He consistently employs a soaring rhetoric of hope and unity. It’s safe to say that if, for example, he instead employed angry, combative rhetoric like John Edwards, his poll numbers would be lower than Edwards. American political reality demands that both Clinton and Obama follow certain strategies, whereas white male candidates do not have those same constraints.

I believe that the next President’s greatest challenges will be in the realm of foreign policy. And, given the current, utterly fractured condition of the Republican coalition, I believe the next President’s greatest opportunity will be to forge new coalitions and change the dynamic of the bitterly corrosive politics that have dominated our discourse since the Lewinsky scandal. The divisive legacy of the Clintons and Bushes puts Clinton in a poor position to build new political coalitions, and the political need forced upon her to always come across as tougher than anyone else in the room when it comes to foreign policy puts in her in a poor position to turn the page on Bush’s policies. In contrast, Obama’s message of unity is well timed to the current mood of the electorate, and I believe he is well positioned to take our foreign policy in a much more sane direction.

First, it’s important to address the most common points of criticism made against Obama – that his rhetoric of unity indicates he’s some sort of naïve political neophyte, and that’s he’s more flash than substance. Anonymous Liberal takes on these criticisms directly:

…Obama has served for over a decade as a legislator (the last three in the U.S. Senate); he’s intimately familiar with the legislative process (and, by all accounts, quite skilled at working within it) and well aware of the obstacles any major progressive legislation will face… It seems to me that Obama’s critics are interpreting his rhetoric at an absurdly literal level… He talks about transcending partisanship because he perceives–correctly I believe–that that’s what much of the electorate, particularly the independents and swing voters who decide presidential elections, want to hear. As I wrote the other day:

The real trick in politics is to be strong, assertive, and demanding while appearing reasonable, conciliatory, and open to compromise. There is no question that, at times, you have to be willing to bear down and fight, but the rest of the time, it’s far better to come across as a uniter, as someone who is willing to work with all sides to reach the right outcome.

If you look at Obama’s career, you don’t see a Broder-esque, split-the-difference pattern of legislating. Rather, you see someone with pretty standard liberal views on most issues who has tried to reach across the aisle on issues that don’t break down along traditional partisan lines. Before Obama had even declared his candidacy, Hilzoy described his legislative style this way:

. . . I do follow legislation, at least on some issues, and I have been surprised by how often Senator Obama turns up, sponsoring or co-sponsoring really good legislation on some topic that isn’t wildly sexy, but does matter. His bills tend to have the following features: they are good and thoughtful bills that try to solve real problems; they are in general not terribly flashy; and they tend to focus on achieving solutions acceptable to all concerned, not by compromising on principle, but by genuinely trying to craft a solution that everyone can get behind.

His legislation is often proposed with Republican co-sponsorship, which brings me to another point: he is bipartisan in a good way. According to me, bad bipartisanship is the kind practiced by Joe Lieberman. Bad bipartisans are so eager to establish credentials for moderation and reasonableness that they go out of their way to criticize their (supposed) ideological allies and praise their (supposed) opponents. They also compromise on principle, and when their opponents don’t reciprocate, they compromise some more, until over time their positions become indistinguishable from those on the other side.

This isn’t what Obama does. Obama tries to find people, both Democrats and Republicans, who actually care about a particular issue enough to try to get the policy right, and then he works with them. This does not involve compromising on principle. It does, however, involve preferring getting legislation passed to having a spectacular battle.

Obviously all problems cannot be solved this way. But this kind of bipartisanship is nevertheless constructive (and very different than Broder-style centrism). It helps establish relationships and trust with members of the opposition–which can be helpful when the big fights come–and it helps establish a reputation for reasonableness among the media and the public (which will also help when the big fights come).

Other than the party composition of Congress, the factor that most influences a president’s ability to accomplish his legislative goals is his popularity, as measured both by his approval rating and (especially) by his margin of victory in elections. Obama understands this, which is why he tries so hard to project an image of reasonability.

I agree with those who say that the Democratic party needs to be more partisan, that it needs to be more willing to act like a party and present a more unified front in legislative battles. But politics at the presidential level is very different than politics at the Congressional level. A presidential candidate who comes across as strongly partisan is unlikely to do anything more than eek out a narrow victory, at best (thereby foreclosing any hope of achieving a real electoral mandate), and a president who is perceived to be strongly partisan is unlikely to enjoy anything more than a modestly favorable approval rating (thereby making it hard to pressure the opposition).

Krugman points out that an increasing majority of Americans support the progressive position on the major policy issues of our time. This is true, but it also overlooks the reality of presidential elections. To a degree that you just don’t see in congressional elections, presidential elections hinge on perceptions of character. In 2004, polls showed that a majority of Americans sided with Kerry on most major issues (like they had with Gore in 2000). But, like 2000, a sizable contingent of voters–enough to swing the election–voted for George W. Bush based almost entirely on their perceptions of the candidates’ characters…

This brings me to my point on forging new political coalitions. As Obama said in response to Clinton’s dismissal of the significance of his rhetoric, “words matter.” The Republican party is in disarray, the outlook of Americans is generally gloomy, there’s widespread frustration with the current administration, and there’s a groundswell for change. It’s a lot like 1979. Ronald Reagan ran an upbeat campaign during those gloomy times, and won. From that campaign the “Reagan Democrats” were born. That term refers to not only traditional Democratic voters switching to Reagan, but also to Reagan’s sway over the House of Representatives, where he was largely successful at getting his legislation passed despite a Democratic majority. A similar opportunity now exists for the right Democratic candidate. I can see the possibility of Obama’s rhetoric and approach to issues leading to “Obama Republicans” and the shaping of a new Democratic coalition that could very well leave the GOP in shambles for at least a decade. I cannot, however, in my wildest imagination, foresee the possibility of “Clinton Republicans,” and I bet you can’t either. What I fear in a Clinton Presidency is a replay of the politics of the late 90s, where we have a segment of the electorate and the media that goes apoplectic at the mere mention of the name Clinton, and the Clintons trying to survive through their trademark politics of incrementalism and triangulation. Frank Rich nails this point perfectly:

Mrs. Clinton’s vision, so far anyway, is exactly the reverse of her opponent’s big picture: a long itemized shopping list of government programs (few of which any Democratic candidate would disagree with) that are nakedly targeted to appeal to every Election Day constituency… Every politician employs pollsters, but Mrs. Clinton, tellingly, has one, Mark Penn, as her top campaign strategist. As Sally Bedell Smith reminds us in her book about the Clintons, “For Love of Politics,” it was Mr. Penn who helped shape the 1996 Bill Clinton campaign in which “soccer moms” were identified and wooed with such Cracker Jack prizes as school uniforms and V-chips to monitor TV violence. For Mrs. Clinton’s Senate campaign four years later, it was also Mr. Penn’s market testing that, in Ms. Smith’s telling, “crafted anodyne, bite-sized messages for Hillary.” The overall message uniting the small-bore promises, such as it was, remains unchanged today: competence, experience, wonky proficiency.

But we’re no longer in 2000, the lull before the 9/11 storm, let alone 1996. Nonetheless, Mr. Penn, who remains the chief executive of the corporate P.R. giant Burson-Marsteller even as he works for the Clinton campaign, still peddles the 1.0 edition of his philosophy. In his business tome “Microtrends” published in September, he glories in “the niching of America,” observing that “there is no one America anymore” but “hundreds of Americas.” He postulates that “Americans overwhelmingly favor small, reasonable ideas over big, grandiose schemes.”

As a theory for marketing Burson-Marsteller corporate clients like Microsoft and AT&T — or for selling a third Clinton term — Mr. Penn’s vision may make sense. What Mr. Obama is betting on instead is a hunger, however dreamy, for one America, not hundreds of niches, aspiring to the big, grandiose scheme of finding a common good…

In Mrs. Clinton’s down-to-earth micropolitics, polls often seem to play the leadership role. That leaves her indecisive when one potential market is pitched against another. Witness her equivocation over Iraq, driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants and even Cubs vs. Yankees. Add to this habitual triangulation the ugly campaigning of the men around her — Mr. Penn’s sleazy invocation of “cocaine” on MSNBC, Bill Clinton’s “fairy tale” rant falsifying Mr. Obama’s record on Iraq — and you don’t have change. You have the acrimonious 1990s that the Republicans are dying to refight, because that’s the only real tactic they have.

Clinton has shown a worrying habit of coming out with “I was before it before I was against it” types of comments in the debates. In addition to the examples Rich mentions, in the Nevada debate, when she was asked about her vote for the (incredibly draconian) bankruptcy bill, she said she “was happy that it never became law.” Edwards and Obama let the contradiction pass, but in a debate with a Republican you know she would be eaten alive for making a statement like that. In contrast, when Obama was asked in the same debate about his vote for the 2005 energy bill (a bill which had some good and some really bad aspects to it), he didn’t respond to Clinton’s criticism by trying to have it both ways – he highlighted what he saw as the good aspects of the bill, and moved on. The Democrats don’t need another candidate who will fall into the easily laid trap of not having any core beliefs.

The area of greatest concern to me is the next President’s approach to foreign policy. Clinton’s key votes – for authorizing war in Iraq, and her more recent vote for officially labeling the Iranian Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization (which Bush could conceivably claim as sufficient authorization for military action) are worrisome. Unlike Obama, who unambiguously opposed the invasion of Iraq, and Edwards, who recanted his vote for the war, Clinton has never admitted any mistake in her vote authorizing Bush to invade, and that could very well mean this:

Perhaps she still endorses the rationale behind the war… If all Hillary has learned from the Iraq war is that the Bush administration botched the execution, if she remains convinced that the ideas that fueled the war were sound, then we could see even more foreign wars under a future President Clinton than we have under her predecessors. That can’t be much comfort to Americans anxious for a new direction in U.S. foreign policy.

Her Senate votes need to be seen in the larger context of who her advisors are, and how they compare to Obama’s:

It’s true that a number of Obama’s key advisers–like former National Security Adviser Tony Lake, former Assistant Secretary of State Susan Rice and former Navy Secretary Richard Danzig–held prominent positions under Bill Clinton. At the same time, Obama’s team includes some of the most forward-thinking members of the Democratic foreign policy establishment–like Joseph Cirincione and Lawrence Korb of the Center for American Progress, the party’s leading experts on nonproliferation and defense issues, respectively, along with former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke and Carter Administration National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski. Added to the mix are fresh faces who were at times critical of the Clinton Administration, like Harvard professor Samantha Power, author of “A Problem From Hell”, a widely acclaimed history of US responses to genocide. These names suggest that Obama may be more open to challenging old Washington assumptions and crafting new approaches.

Hillary Clinton’s camp, meanwhile, is filled with familiar faces from her husband’s administration, like former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and former UN Ambassador Richard Holbrooke. Unlike Obama’s advisers, the top Clintonites overwhelmingly supported the war in Iraq. From the march to war onward, Clinton and her advisers have dominated foreign policy discussions inside the Democratic Party. After largely supporting the war, they resisted calls for an exit strategy until 2005, when the situation had become unmanageably bleak. After turning against the war the Clintonites argued retroactively that Senator Clinton had voted, in Holbrooke’s words, “to empower the President to avoid war.”

In the debate last July, Obama was aggressively criticized by the Clinton camp as naïve and inexperienced for saying he would consider meeting with leaders from countries such as Cuba and North Korea without conditions, and that he would not use nuclear weapons to attack terrorist targets. To me these criticisms are absurd, and demonstrate how warped our conventional, “serious” foreign policy thinking has become. His adviser Samantha Power released a memo in response to the criticisms:

…Diplomacy: For years, conventional wisdom in Washington has said that the United States cannot talk to its adversaries because it would reward them. Here is the result:

* The United States has not talked directly to Iran at a high level, and they have continued to build their nuclear weapons program, wreak havoc in Iraq, and support terror.
* The United States has not talked directly to Syria at a high level, and they have continued to meddle in Lebanon and support terror.
* The United States did not talk to North Korea for years, and they were able to produce enough material for 6 to 8 more nuclear bombs.

By any measure, not talking has not worked. Conventional wisdom would have us continue this policy; Barack Obama would turn the page. He knows that not talking has made us look weak and stubborn in the world; that skillful diplomacy can drive wedges between your adversaries; that the only way to know your enemy is to take his measure; and that tough talk is of little use if you’re not willing to do it directly to your adversary. Barack Obama is not afraid of losing a PR battle to a dictator – he’s ready to tell them what they don’t want to hear because that’s how tough, smart diplomacy works, and that’s how American leaders have scored some of the greatest strategic successes in US history.

… Nuclear Attacks on Terrorist Targets: For years, Washington’s conventional wisdom has held that candidates for President are judged not by their wisdom, but rather by their adherence to hackneyed rhetoric that make little sense beyond the Beltway. When asked whether he would use nuclear weapons to take out terrorist targets in Pakistan and Afghanistan, Barack Obama gave the sensible answer that nuclear force was not necessary, and would kill too many civilians. Conventional wisdom held this up as a sign of inexperience. But if experience leads you to make gratuitous threats about nuclear use – inflaming fears at home and abroad, and signaling nuclear powers and nuclear aspirants that using nuclear weapons is acceptable behavior, it is experience that should not be relied upon.

Barack Obama’s judgment is right. Conventional wisdom is wrong. It is wrong to propose that we would drop nuclear bombs on terrorist training camps in Pakistan, potentially killing tens of thousands of people and sending America’s prestige in the world to a level that not even George Bush could take it. We should judge presidential candidates on their judgment and their plans, not on their ability to recite platitudes…

As Glenn Greenwald put it, from the perspective of conventional wisdom in the Beltway, “there is no such thing… as ‘unserious war advocacy’; that term is an oxymoron… argue for the U.S. to start a war now with Iran and you are Serious; but argue that we should take off the table nuclear weapons when attacking a terrorist camp or that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was illegitimate, and you are an unserious leftist.” I strongly believe that nothing is more urgent than dramatically reshaping our foreign policy, and Clinton’s record suggests she is not the one who will bring about substantial change.

My sense is that Obama is the most likely to bring real, positive change to our foreign affairs, and that he’s the most likely to win the broad support here at home that will be needed to bring about that change. You win that kind of support not by sacrificing your principals in the name of compromise, and not by engaging your political opponents in debilitating, head-on conflict. You win decisively by changing the rules of the game and marginalizing your opponents, which is how I foresee him approaching a general election campaign. Obviously there’s no guarantee Obama can pull it off, but I see it as the right strategy for reshaping the political map, and for ushering in a new definition of “serious” foreign policy.

Post caucus update below

When I got up this morning, I read this embarrassing bit of journalism from Reuters – “Clinton holds lead as Romney slips in Iowa”:

Clinton, a New York senator, maintained a stable four-point edge over Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, 30 percent to 26 percent, in the Democratic race. Former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards was in third at 25 percent, down one point overnight. Huckabee, a former Arkansas governor, widened his lead over Romney among Republicans to 29 percent to 25 percent. Romney, a former Massachusetts governor who has been on the attack against Huckabee, slipped two points overnight.[then, further down in the article] …[the poll] has a margin of error of 3.3 percentage points…

The poll’s margin of error erases any notion of a lead by anyone. The article should instead say something along the lines of: “polls indicate a statistical dead heat between Clinton, Obama, and Edwards for the Democratic race, and between Huckabee and Romney for the Republican race.”

This is explained nicely in this fictional polling example from What is a Survey (PDF), available from the American Statistical Association:

In the case of the mayoral poll in which 55 of 100 sampled individuals support Ms. Smith, the sample estimate would be that 55 percent support Ms. Smith—however, there is a margin of error of 10 percent. Therefore, a 95 percent confidence interval for the percentage supporting Ms. Smith would be (55%-10%) to (55%+10%) or (45 percent, 65 percent), suggesting that in the broader community the support for Ms. Smith could plausibly range from 45 percent to 65 percent.

The margin of error is actually even greater if you intend to use the numbers as a means of comparing one candidate’s support to another’s:

In more technical terms, a law of probability dictates that the difference between two uncertain proportions (e.g., the lead of one candidate over another in a political poll in which both are estimated) has more uncertainty associated with it than either proportion alone.

Accordingly, the margin of error associated with the lead of one candidate over another should be larger than the margin of error associated with a single proportion, which is what media reports typically mention (thus the need to keep your eye on what’s being estimated!).

Until media organizations get their reporting practices in line with actual variation in results across political polls, a rule of thumb is to multiply the currently reported margin of error by 1.7 to obtain a more accurate estimate of the margin of error for the lead of one candidate over another. Thus, a reported 3 percent margin of error becomes about 5 percent and a reported 4 percent margin of error becomes about 7 percent when the size of the lead is being considered.

The whole thing gets even goofier in the case of the Democratic Iowa caucuses, where a candidate must pass a viability threshold:

After 30 minutes, the electioneering is temporarily halted and the supporters for each candidate are counted. At this point, the caucus officials determine which candidates are “viable”. Depending on the number of county delegates to be elected, the “viability threshold” can be anywhere from 15% to 25% of attendees. For a candidate to receive any delegates from a particular precinct, he or she must have the support of at least the percentage of participants required by the viability threshold. Once viability is determined, participants have roughly another 30 minutes to “realign”: the supporters of inviable candidates may find a viable candidate to support, join together with supporters of another inviable candidate to secure a delegate for one of the two, or choose to abstain. This “realignment” is a crucial distinction of caucuses in that (unlike a primary) being a voter’s “second candidate of choice” can help a candidate.

The Reuters article I quoted at the beginning also noted the popularity figures for voters’ second choices, but those numbers are not particularly helpful. This is because the general set of second choices isn’t what’s interesting – what’s interesting is the second choices of those who support the candidates who are likely to be non-viable (Dodd, Paul, etc). It would be hard to get those numbers because you’d have to conduct a much larger poll to get reliable numbers for the small subset of people who support the likely non-viable candidates.

Having said all that, the media is going to do a huge disservice to the American people by trumpeting a Republican and a Democratic “winner” tomorrow night. Whoever wins is likely to do so only because of their “second choice” support, and whoever comes in third in the Democratic race is likely to be doomed (except for perhaps Clinton), even if it’s by a trivial margin. (The dynamic is different in the Republican race, since both McCain and Giuliani have not campaigned substantially in Iowa, whereas the top 3 Democratic candidates have campaigned intensely.) Remembering Kerry’s virtual coronation by the media as the inevitable nominee after winning Iowa in 2004, Anonymous Liberal wrote an excellent piece yesterday:

…if Iowa had a primary (like most other states), we could be pretty confident that the final tally would resemble the poll numbers we’re seeing now. Any one of the top three [Democratic] candidates could win, but it would likely be a very narrow victory, with the other two candidates just a few percentage points back.

In a rational universe, that kind of outcome–particularly in a small, unrepresentative state like Iowa–would be virtually meaningless. We’d call Iowa a draw and everyone would move on to the next state, their prospects unchanged. After all, why should we just hand the nomination to a candidate who only bested his rivals by 1 or 2 percentage points in one state?

…We know already that after a year of campaigning, the level of support for the three major Democratic candidates among Iowans is roughly the same. That will be true regardless of the final delegate count there. I wish journalists would keep that in mind when covering the results Thursday night, but I know that they won’t.

As a result, the Democratic nominee will again be chosen through a bizarre game of red-rover played by roughly 5% of the population of Iowa.

UPDATE: Just like trying to predict the weather, it’s awfully easy to make the wrong predictions in politics, no matter how knowledgeable you are (not that I’m staking a particular claim on knowledge ). Now that the Iowa caucus results are in, my prediction that the winner would be put over the top by “second choice” voters was wrong. It looks like Edwards got the lion’s share of the second choice votes, which means this was a solid win by Obama:

…According to the entrance poll, which only measured first preferences of the participants going in, the numbers were: Obama 35%, Hillary 27%, Edwards 23%.

If we assume that the final state delegate numbers actually approximated the votes of the caucus participants, this means John Edwards was the big second-choice winner, as he boosted his final score by seven points, compared to only three points for Obama and two for Hillary. It was enough to just overtake Hillary for second place, but not enough for first — because it turned out that Obama entered as the clear winner from first choices alone.

The other key aspect to Obama’s victory was the huge increase in Democratic caucus turnout (almost 90% higher than 2004), and his impressive numbers among these new voters:

Here’s another figure from the entrance poll: An astonishing 57% of caucusers were first-time participants. And how did they vote? Barack Obama carried them with 41% of the people going in and before second-choice reallocations, followed by Hillary Clinton at 29% and John Edwards at 18%.

And among the returning caucus-goers? Edwards was carrying them with 30%, with Obama at 26% and Hillary with 24%.

This tells us two things. First, Obama’s strategy of bringing in new caucus-goers worked, the first time in recent history where such a strategy actually did so in the caucus. It’s a big change from when Howard Dean tried it with less than impressive results…