What We Talk About When We Talk About a Second Term

President Obama proved his political skill and resilience beyond any doubt this week when he was re-elected to four more years as President of the United States of America.  That fact cannot be debated.  What is debatable is that great exercise of punditry that pops up every four years, the whole “what does it all mean” thing that everyone will be writing about.  If you are a liberal you probably saw Tuesday night a rousing endorsement of the policies of Obama’s first term and a mandate to do more.  You’d have some strong evidence to back you up; Obama is the first Democrat since FDR to win two elections with a majority of the popular vote.  Indeed, the Democratic Party has now won the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections.  If you are a conservative, well the end is probably neigh (heck someone is emailing James Fallows claiming they are shutting down their business in revenge for this.)  Surely things can only get worse.

In both cases you are wrong.  Obama won a second term not a “mandate” for anything, and he won’t get to do as much as liberals wish or conservatives fear.  But that in itself is a lot, a historic “a lot” indeed.

Political science tells us that Presidents win elections not mandates.  None other than liberal scion Paul Krugman said after election night 2008 that Obama had a “mandate” for health care reform.  Obama then historically passed said reform and the American electorate responded in 2010 by voting in 63 new Republican members of Congress.  In 2004 George W. Bush announced after his reelection that he “had political capital, and intended to use it.”  Which he did by trying to privatize Social Security.  That push failed as was directly responsible for Democrats being swept to power in the midterm elections of 2006.  Bill Clinton ran heavily on healthcare in 1992 with none other than his communications director George Stephanopoulos telling the staff at their last “War Room” meeting on election eve that, “Tomorrow, for the first time in a generation we’re going to win.  That means people are going to get better jobs.  More people are going to get healthcare and get better care and pay a little less for care and more kids are going to go to great schools.”  Clinton’s historic victory hardly got his healthcare plan through a Democratic Congress.  You can take this list back a very long way.

If you want an example of how mandates are more ethereal constructs than tangible political realities just look at the marriage amendment here in Minnesota.  Less than twelve hours after the press reported the marriage amendment’s defeat some DFL politicians announced it was proof, dare I say a mandate, that it was high time to legalize same sex marriage.  Well was it?  You can make an argument that it was, you can also make an argument that it wasn’t at all.  You can argue that legalizing same sex marriage would be a good political move for the DFL or a bad one, or good for some actors and bad for others or something that should be done in spite of political fallout or could done in such a manner that there will be no fallout at all.  In short, the argument over a mandate is really a political argument about legislative agendas, constituencies and values.  Something that has never been and never will be, cut and dry.

So am I saying the election didn’t matter?  Of course not!  Every election—from who’s on the Minneapolis School Board to who is President—matters a great deal.  But wining doesn’t change the fundamental reality of how our political systems work.  What has happened on Tuesday was momentous for two reason; it enabled Obama to solidify the achievements of his first term and to offset the errors of that term as well.

It is popular among regular people and pundits to depict presidents as a sort of elected King (or dictator if you prefer a more modern word).  That is presidents win elections and then for good or for bad enact their will to reshape national life and any failure to change things is their own.  This is of course wrong.  As political scientist, aid to John Kennedy and adviser to Bill Clinton Richard Neustadt argued back in 1960, the Presidency is actually a fairly limited office.  Go back and look at the Constitution, a president cannot spend money, or enact laws or even appoint people.  At best they can only submit a budget to Congress, sign or veto a bill set on their desk and submit nominations to the Senate for their advice and consent.  With that in mind Obama’s real accomplishments, like getting millions of Americans access to health care, are all that more real because of the limitations his position entailed.

Obama cannot go back in time and correct his mistakes any more than you or I can in our own lives. But he now has a chance to offset the errors and oversights of his last four years in the next four. For reasons that defy explanation Obama has been quite slow in doing the truly presidential and crucial work of staffing the government. It’s true that Republicans have fiercely resisted Obama but he has been slow to move as well. If he had lost, the historically high number of vacancies on the federal bench would have been a chance for Romney to remake the federal judiciary, now Obama has a chance to correct this error; a sort of “do over” that can be applied to everything from scaling back drone policy to more buddy buddy photo ops with Netanyahu. As The Atlantic’s James Fallows wrote a year ago about how our perceptions revolve around reelection more than we might realize:

Hard as it is to have any dispassionate discussion of a president’s performance during an election year, it will be even harder once the election is over. If a year from now Obama is settling in for a second term, a halo effect will extend back to everything he did during his first four years. His programs will be more effective in reality, since he will get that many more years to cement them in with follow-up measures, supportive appointments to federal agencies and the courts, and possible vetoes of any attempts at repeal. And, through the lens of history, they will seem more effective, since whatever he did in his first term will appear to have been part of an overall plan that was ratified through reelection. Yet if a year from now a just-beaten former President Obama is thinking about his memoirs and watching his former appointees blame one another, and him, for the loss, the very same combination of missteps and achievements will be viewed as a narrative leading inexorably to defeat…. A failure to win reelection places a “one-term loser” asterisk on even genuine accomplishments. Ask George H. W. Bush, victor in the Gulf War; ask Jimmy Carter, architect of the Camp David agreement.

If he had lost all of his errors would be irreversible and would seem even worse, as his political opponents would have had the opportunity to exploit them even more.  But he didn’t and he now has the opportunity to repair and mitigate them.  In the same way that even George W. Bush, one of the worst Presidents in American History in my humble opinion, did in the last two years of his presidency when he finally (finally!) moved to reign in Chenney’s outsized role.

In that sense Obama’s reelection was “historic” but not in the sense that everything in American life will now change or even change over the next four years.   But he will exact a change on American life that is profound, even if we have a hard time seeing it every day.  As The New Republic’s Jon Cohn put it:

But, whatever happens over the next four years, Obama’s reelection guarantees that the laws passed during his first term stay on the books. That instantly makes him one of the most accomplished presidents of modern times. Already Obama and his allies have shaped this country in ways that will last for generations—making life more secure, and creating new opportunities, for tens of millions of Americans.

For people working in a political movement you always want to keep climbing towards the summit.  But sometimes you should, for perspective’s sake, turn around and look at how far you have come.

Where did the Working Class Go?

Another fall, another TV lineup, with oh so many of those staples of American culture; the sitcom.  But while watching the previews I was struck by something, where did the working class people ever go?  It was quite something for someone who saw all those reruns of sitcoms growing up that are filled with the working class and even downtrodden.  The simple men and women or “Cheers”; the family that lives in public housing in “Good Times”; and who can forget “Punky Brewster” who most certainly didn’t get a luxury car for her 16th birthday.  It reminded me of a great essay I read from the critic William Deresiewicz who had a similar epiphany on his own a while ago:

I was listening to an interview with the choreographer Bill T. Jones, who had just published his memoirs. Jones is gay and black, and when the interviewer asked him what his father had thought about his becoming a dancer, Jones, somewhat testily, said something like this: "You don't understand. This wasn't a middle-class family. The goal wasn't to become a professional: the goal was to better yourself." The first thing that hit me about this was that it had nothing to do with race or sexuality. The second thing that hit me was that it had everything to do with class, specifically the working class—which, I suddenly realized, I never heard anyone talk about.

Exactly. To watch even good television today is to miss any reference to the non-rich.  “Modern Family”, probably one of the funnier shows on TV these days, is a great example. It deals with issues like same sex couples raising children and interracial marriages, and for that it should be commended. But while embracing diversity in some ways, it ignores them in others. Everyone is rich on “Modern Family”, everyone is devoid of any of the material pressures that “Modern” families presumably have dealt with during the great recession.  Totaling (one of several of the) family cars becomes a hilarious inconvenience, not the terrible blow to the family finances it would be to the majority of “Modern” families. Indeed the fact that one of the main characters is a real estate agent during the biggest drop in property values in decades but never is even worried about this says enough.

When the non-rich, non-middle class people do have a sitcom focused about them this uniqueness (dare I say this example of diversity) is ignored.   The comedy “Two Broke Girls” is instructive in this regard.  It’s a show about two young women with no money who have to become waitresses in New York and is typical low brow sitcom affair (although it does have theme music by Peter, Bjorn and John which is awesome.)  But when people wrote about it, especially urban well to do liberals, they focused more on perceived racial slights than on the fact that this was the first TV show in a while to focus on the other eight million people in New York who aren’t rich and don’t take car services to drive to the grocery store.  As Deresiewicz put it, “What we talk about is race and sexuality. (Or in the academy, race, gender, and sexuality, the great triumvirate. The humanities, despite their claim to transformative significance, have all but forgotten about class.)”   “Two Broke Girls” is thus unfair , unlike much praised “Gossip Girl” or the greatest work of drama since Aeschylus, “Sex and the City.”  Even if making a show set in New York with no working class and poor people is as unrealistic as one with characters who only confirm to certain stereotypes.

Other genres of TV only exacerbate this trend.  Just look at the rise of so-called “AspirationalTV” over the past two decades.  Once confined to late night pot boilers like “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,” “Aspirational TV” is now a prime time staple and has all but taken over MTV.  Once upon a time, you know during the Reagan Administration, shows about rich people behaving badly were the exception, think “Dallas” or “Dynasty.”  Now it seems there are desperate housewives (who are rich) and real housewives (who are ungodly rich), with no other housewives, or say wives with jobs anywhere to be seen.

It’s remarkable that perhaps 80% of the American public’s current material conditions are ignored in that most populists of all medias, television.  But it does make some things understandable, like how a man could say he thinks 47% of all Americans are parasites who are “dependent on government,” and still be in the running to become the next President of the United States.

Don't Pay to much Attention to "Professionals"

There was a good Twitter fight this morning between Washington Post bloggers Greg Sargent (the liberal one) and Jennifer Rubin (the conservative one). 

Greg initially tweeted:  YouGov/Economist poll: O 49, R 46. Key is it doesn't include Thurs and Fri after debate. 
Rubin replied: @ThePlumLineGS that would mean it's meaningless
To which Greg replied: @JRubinBlogger uh, no, it would mean that it doesn't include the days Romney had inflated numbers.

Rubin then goes on to yell about Libya, largely because Sargent made her look like an idiot.  Largely because Greg did in fact make her look like an idiot.

Anyway it's a good example of how partisans think about polling numbers.  Rubin is treating the post debate polls like a football game and seems to think that leaving out Thursday and Friday is akin to leaving out a quarter of a football game where team Romney scored a bunch of touchdowns.  But the reality is that if the debate result was only a temporary "bounce" for Romney, and I think that the evidence of this is mounting, what the polls "showed" on October 4-6 is fairly irrelevant to who wins the election.  Essentially Romney's "surge" won't help him out on Election Day, it will disappear, just like the VP bounces McCain and Romney both got when they announced their picks.  In short, all these types of bounces do is add drama about the campaign narrative and make tracking lines or graphs move around a lot.  This is a great example of how uninformed people who make their living writing about politics can be, I mean she doesn't even realize that polls telling us where we are tell us more about who will win than polls telling us where we might have been in the past.  Indeed, it is quite possible that this Romney "bounce" will go away just like Obama's leader after the 47% video came out did.  And don't forget, she gets paid a lot of money to write about this election.  So if you want to know whats going on, go read The Monkey Cage, the links over there on the right.    

Debate Prediction

So let me just get this in here before the big Presidential Debate tomorrow, and feel free to make fun of me if I am wrong.  I predict that Mitt won't do very well and the debate will be in no way a game changer.  Since the Mittster is on trajectory to lose, this outcome would be a strategic defeat for him.

First of all it's important to remember that Political Science has shown that for a variety of reasons debates don't have that big of a impact in a Presidential race.  At this point in a campaign most voters have made up their minds already and will interpret what happens in a debate as simply reinforcing what they already thought.  In fact, most people who watch these things are more like football fans turning in to root their team on, not try and make a decision on who to vote for.  John Kerry probably came as close as you can come to "winning" a debate (all three I'd say), he of course did not win.  Finally I'd add that campaigns spend a lot of time preparing for these things and so like convention speeches they are always "good enough." 

Even with those codifiers, it looks like Mitt is embracing a pretty bad strategy to boot, which certainly won't help him.  As the Pravda of the conservative movement (National Review) put it, team Romney has five big objectives:  "(1) explaining the “choice” between the two candidates’ agendas; (2) modulating his natural “aggressiveness” (which actually sounds like “defensiveness when challenged”); (3) exhibiting “discipline” (i.e., not committing gaffes); (4) using fiscal and economic data effectively; and (5) deploying personal anecdotes to “introduce himself” to people just now tuning in to the election."  Let's go through these priorities one by one.

1.  Mitt has been running for president for six years now.  He's been the GOP front runner since last fall and recently had a speech on national television during his convention to explain this.  He hasn't exactly been doing a good job of it.  If he can't explain why his policies would be better than Obama's during his acceptance speech or during the summer, how' he going to do it in a 90 minute debate?

2.  This is not a bad idea in and of itself, but its more of a method of style than an actual goal to meet during the debate.  Reagan was very good at expressing contempt warmly, Romney just seems to get mad.

3.  Again this isn't much of a goal.  A bad gaffe might make Mitt look bad, and more importantly dominate the post debate media spin wars.  But it won't change the dynamics of the race.  In addition, the fact that Mitt has to pursue five different, possibly conflicting, objectives has got to be a bit confusing, thus raising the risk of the dreaded gaffes.

4.  This has to be a bad idea.  A large section of dwindling supply of genuine undecided voters are low-information voters, the types of people who probably won't respond well to a bunch of statistics about GDP growth targets.  Mitt is running for President not making a pitch to a group of junk bond inventors, he needs a Clintonesque "I feel your pain" moment, not a Ross Perot pie chart moment.

5.  This goes back to point number one.  How is Mitt going to "introduce" himself if he couldn't during his own convention, a multi-day media bonanza he had complete control over?  Obama is not going to sit there the whole time and keep quite, he's got some anecdotes he can pull out to introduce another Romney to the nation too.

In short, a terrible plan.

Can We Just Acknowledge This is the Worst Congress Ever?

The Holier Than Thous in Congress that head up the House Committee for Government Reform and Oversight have declared war on the city of Saint Paul Minnesota and are demanding a massive probe into some slum lords that got shut down under Mayor Randy Kelly (who isn't the mayor anymore) back in 2002. I kid you not. Can we just acknowledge that this is the worst Congress ever? John Slides over at Monkey Cage recently had a graph that showed this Congress has passed fewer bills than any since, well the 1880's (again I kid you not). Oh and 20% of those bills were about renaming post offices and plazas...oh, they also passed a bill to order the United States Mint to mint commemorative baseball coins to help fund the Baseball Hall of Fame, but alas, that bill died in committee in the Senate. Recently the independent investigation of that whole "Fast and Furious" thing came out that showed that Holder was completely in the clear, and the whole "investigation" by Congress was pretty much a joke. Basically some guys in a ATF field office employed some highly dubious investigative strategies with bad results, but no, the Attorney General was not aware of this (there are over 14,000 swore FBI agents in the country, and thousands more of civilian personnel, no the Attorney General is not aware of everything they do every day and that's just one agency he oversees) and didn't do anything wrong. So the whole thing was basically an absurd show trial joke. And now Congress is demanding the City of Saint Paul pony up 180 million smackers, and why? Well because of discrimination against poor slum lords or something. And stuff. And Obama is a socialist. Essentially the City decided not to take a case to the supreme court after the NAACP and a whole lot of other people like former Vice President Walter Mondale said that this Supreme Court could use slum lords getting shut down as a a legal pretense to gut all fair housing legislation passed in the last 40 years. So the City of Saint Paul decided not to risk the role of the dice in front of Tony Scalia and that means they obstructed justice, and that means they need to pay 180 million dollars. And why? Well because of discrimination against poor slum lords or something. And stuff. And Obama is a socialist. Because Congress said so.


Worst Congress Ever.

King for a Day

 I posted this somewhere else earlier today, but I'll cross post it here too.  If only because my friend and co-worker Alex keeps whining at me about how i don't update this thing enough:


So here's a thought experiment, lets say you were named King or Queen (or Caesar or Empress or Czar or Boss of all Bosses) of Minneapolis for a day.  What would you do?  Well I got a list of things, but lets define what I'm talking about.  Being Empress for a day gives you unlimited authority, but you are only in charge for a short time, so you  can't change everything.  Nor can you get rid of a politician you don't like, being Czar means you don't have to deal with school board members or city council persons.  Heck being The Sun King means you don't even have to deal with the Board of Estimate and Taxation!  Now, I said before that I got a list, and I really do, but gah, i can only name one thing so I narrowed it down to a sort of top three--Southwest light rail, getting rid of the silly Board of Estimate and Taxation and having a regular city budget process, or dealing with all those dang parking lots in downtown...so hard to choose...okay...King John, First of His Name, Lord of the Northside and Southside, of Nordeast and Southeast, Defender of the Realm and General Nice Guy hereby issues the following decree:

"From this day forth, the acres of parking lots between downtown and the Metrodome shall be no more, forever and for all time.  They shall be replaced with mixed used development and tall buildings.  Parking accommodations will be seen to with multi-layered parking structures and underground parking garages below said buildings.  It shall be filled with office space, apartments, condos, coffee shops, restaurants, bars and boutiques.  Considerations for affordable housing should also be on the agenda.  Also a charter high school partnered with major Minneapolis corporations such as US Bank and Target that stresses career training and placement and/or another charter school partnered with the University of Minnesota that focuses on math and science.  I would also like to see a nice small park, with a small pond and some ducks.  It shall be known as "Downtown East" or possibly "Johnville."  Let all good men declare their loyalty in the war on parking lots, and let us all bask in the radiance of a nice, cool new neighborhood.  And an increase in our property tax base"

Well that's my plan.  Also I'm going to be unfair and make another ground rule, nothing about stadiums (yeah I know a lot of you guys don't like the new Vikings stadium deal, well okay but lets talk about something other than that {I mean a good majority of posts here are about not liking stadiums, that's fine, but last time I checked with was the Minneapolis Issues Forum not the Minneapolis Anti-Stadium Forum}, like you know the other 99.9% of of issues facing our city that don't involved stadiums).

So what would you do?

The Anatomy of a Lie

On the tenth anniversary of the September 11^th attacks, I can recall a great example of how we are increasingly living in a “post-truth age.”

More than a national tragedy, 9/11 was a national failure.  As outlined in the 9/11 Commission’s Report the entire first nine months of the Bush Administration was marked by senior officials in the White House and Pentagon consistently and repeatedly ignoring growing warning signs that would later become crystalized the most famous presidential briefing ever, aptly titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike US.”  Much and more has come out about Bush’s fumbling of the looming attack, and a great Op-Ed piece in the New York Times yesterday does a great job summing it up.  In the aftermath, the Bush Administration would go into overtime trying first to prevent independent investigation, then defending its failures and finally being forced to tell flat out lies.  One example of this post-9/11 mendacity was leveled by Condi Rice before Congress, where she claimed “no one could have anticipated [that terrorists would use planes as weapons.]”  This is a lie and I can prove it.

This type of plot has repeatedly been used in popular fiction for decades before 9/11.

• In the bestselling Tom Clancy novel “Debt of Honor” an ultra-nationalist Japanese terrorist flies a jumbo jet into the Capitol resulting in Clancy’s protagonist Jack Ryan becoming President.

• The Stephen King novel "The Running Man" written under his pseudonym “Richard Bachmann” ends with a man on the run from a corporation trying to kill him for televised entertainment in a future dystopia getting revenge by flying a plane into its high rise corporate HQ.  It was later turned into the Schwarzenegger blockbuster “The Running Man” (the ending was changed for the movie).

• The entire plot of the 1980 John Carpenter movie “Escape from New York” is dependent on Air Force One being flown into a building in a future New York where Manhattan has become a giant lawless island prison.  The President survives (in a futuristic escape pod that looks like an Easter egg) and Kurt Russell is sent in to rescue him.  This is a popular movie that is on cable pretty much every weekend and also has Isaac Hayes as the marauding gangster lord of the city.

So of course the entire 9/11 plot was in fact “imagined” by whole bunch of different authors in popular creative mediums.  Let alone the fact that this type of attack was in fact tried before.

• In 1974 a man named Samuel Byck tried to hijack a jet to flyit into the White House.  He was shot and killed by police in the airport.

• A commercial pilot in 1994 tried to hijack a FedEx cargo plane to use in a suicide attack.  His motives were not political, he was a disgruntled employee who was going to be fired for lying about his flight experience to get his position.  He severely injured the crew but they were able to fight him off and land the plane.

• One of the Columbine shooters wrote in his diary about fantasizing about doing such a suicide attack.

It’s amazing that no one has tried to point these basic things out in the media.  The fact is Condi Rice said something to Congress that is objectively false.  Yet even when this falsehood is easily knocked down shown to be simple evidence of the Bush Administration’s continuing push to rewrite history and cover up their failings, it is ignored.  Indeed it is treated as Gospel.  In the age of “post-truth” the saying of a lie, can make it true.  And no amount of research can bring the truth to light, at least outside of the world of blogs.