February 01, 2004
Electability
With all due respect to Al Giordano, whom I greatly admire for his reporting on the drug war, I'd like to know what right the Democratic party leadership has to lecture people about electability. After losing congress in 1994, the presidency in 2000, and the senate in 2002, I think they have some nerve to tell anyone that they know best. But that's what John Kerry did in Iowa and New Hampshire.
In Iowa, Kerry (and Edwards) caucus volunteers overwhelmed first-time and youthful caucus goers by scaring them away from voting for Dean by telling them they were throwing their vote away because he couldn't win. They won not by building up their guy, but by gutting Dean and building up Bush. In New Hampshire, Kerry ran this full page ad in Manchester's Union Leader business section the day of the primary:
November 2000 was a nightmare for many, but especially for Florida. It's time for the nightmare to end.
WAKE UP NEW HAMPSHIRE!!
*Kerry 49%
Bush 46%*Newsweek's latest nationwide Presidential Poll.
How badly do you want a 2nd term for G.W. Bush????
You have the power to decide.
Howard Dean cannot beat G.W. Bush, no matter how much you like him or how willing you are to overlook the Iowa fiasco.
Others, like Karl Rove and Robert Novak won't be so kind...
Dean's Scream is George W.'s dream.
Send us a candidate who can win, please.
Vote wisely, vote Kerry!Paid for by Fla. Women for Kerry
In this context, electability means that you shouldn't vote for who you like, but who you are told that others like. These mythical other people who don't find Senator Kerry at least mildly tedious. Looking back at that Newsweek poll, none of the major candidates is more than five points away from Bush, whose re-elect numbers are very soft. At this point, virtually anyone could beat Bush if they play their cards right.
But the Kerry campaign is winning by doing its level best to build Bush up into a nearly unbeatable figure. Someone who can only be taken on by a candidate that has as impressive a military record as Michael Dukakis, and has served a long time in the Senate like Ted Kennedy. Maybe he forgets that the last Democrat to win the presidency was an unknown governor with a good economic plan who'd got a deferrment from Vietnam. A governor who was seventeen points behind Bush Sr. in the polls taken in early 1992.
And when anyone says "record", I'd say "Max Cleland." A decorated Vietnam veteran who lost three limbs in the service of his country, voted for the Iraq war, the PATRIOT act, and Homeland Security. He was ousted by a Republican ad campaign that put his picture next to Bin Laden's and claimed that he was soft on terror. An ad campaign not dissimilar to the one run against Dean in two states by a group staffed by 'former' Kerry and Gephardt people. (I've never bought the denial of attachment, less so after seeing the above advertisement in NH.)
And it's in this context that it's clear why Kerry is beating Dean, and why his campaign is probably reducing its chances of winning in the general. He's selling fear of Bush, propped up with pilfered bits of Dean's platform. And no one sells fear better than conservatives, they are (to lift a phrase) the real deal when it comes to petrifying the electorate. When we buy into it, it cedes the entire debate. Democrats all around the country have lost to Republicans when they got into the fear business, which they like to call centrism.
But we'll see. It's possible that, for once, left of center voters might display as much fear driven behavior as right of center voters. Even if the record shows that attempting to run on fear of the right wing, especially absent a message of liberal progress, leads to the kind of mild lunacy in progressive voters that leads them to mark ballots for Nader in swing states.
Too many people seem to forget that before Dean showed up with his complete lack of reverence and fear for Bush, it would have been hard to find a Democrat who believed anyone could oust him. The DLC approved campaigns are dragging all of us right back to where Bush is the 800 lb. gorilla that can't be touched except by the very lucky and curiously meritorious. Thanks guys. Thanks a bunch.
When the Democratic party finally gets the Dean campaign's donor list, they'll find that they already had my name. And they'll find that I haven't given them a cent.
Posted by natasha at February 1, 2004 12:06 PM | TrackBackMy greatest fear is that the appropriate comparison for the 2004 election is not Dukakis or McGovern but Hubert Humphrey. The parallels between Humphrey and Kerry are striking:
Both are:
* Decent men with solid "liberal" reputations
* Windy, non-charismatic campaigners
* Apologists for supporting problematic, unpopular wars
* Long-term senators from liberal states without much in the way of their personal legislative portfolios to point to (can you name one important piece of legislation known as the "Humphrey XXY law" or the "Kerry AABC law" or 1 legislative issue that either was synonymous with the way, say, Kennedy is known for championing healthcare, Moynihan welfare or Claude Pepper Social Security?)
* Favorites of the Democratic establishment, called on to save the party from populist upsurges, particularly among youth
* Face street smart, smarmy Repubs who will stop at nothing to gain and maintain power, shameless at motivating their base and relentless money machines
Haven't we been here before?
Posted by: on February 1, 2004 04:23 PMGo natasha, your comments are right on.
Posted by: Hubris Sonic on February 1, 2004 06:26 PMThe invocation of Humphrey as a comparison to Kerry is a gross disservice to Humphrey's memory. I certainly can name one legislative issue with which Humphrey was synonymous: civil rights, and well before it was popular. The deeper LBJ got his claws into Humphrey, the more of a wimp he became, but he fought the good fight 1948-64, whereas Kerry's been avoiding making tough stands his entire career.
Posted by: schwa on February 1, 2004 08:29 PMNatasha, you are a true fighting liberal!
Miss you. It was a pleasure meeting you in Iowa.
We remain undaunted here in TOKYO and I am going to share this recent post with our dems abroad caucus goers this week.
*Lauren
The concept of "Electability" is one of my bete noirs. I consider it a corrupted meme that nowadays is used solely in rhetorical contexts. It is meant to persuade rather than as a statement of objective fact. it is also a self-fulfilling prophecy: a tautology of sorts. Once a person has been deemed unelectable they more or less become such.
"Electability" tends to weed out and disqualify our best candidates: we are all familiar with the thought chain that starts "I would vote for____, but he/she is unelectable so I won't." Obviously, if we are all making the same private assessment of candidate X, then we will all end up voting for candidate Y and the true choice of the people, pre-"electable" meme, never gets the call.
There are several such memes floating around in contemporary political discourse-most favor the republicans as luck would have it.
Beware "conventional wisdom", "electability", "negativity", and "mainstream". These are all attempts to channelize our political behavior.
Posted by: michael the wanderer on February 1, 2004 11:13 PMIn this context, electability means that you shouldn't vote for who you like, but who you are told that others like.
I was trying to channel my thoughts on this, but I kept coming up with econobabble phrases like "multiple equilibria" and "non-transitive preferences." The former refers to the way people behave in a stock bubble, like the famous Dutch Tulip Bubble business students are required to read about in Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.. Basically you make decisions based on what you think a particular group of other people will do, and they are all doing the same thing.
The latter refers to the idea in Game Theory / Welfare Economics that you're supposed to have transitive preferences. So, e.g., my friend prefers Kucinich to Dean and Dean to Kerry. Logic would suggest that she prefers Kucinich to Kerry, if it came to that. In Welfare Economics, we're "not allowed" to consider the alternative. But of course, if my friend is obsessed with electablity, her preferences may be intransitive (which leads to the problem, in economics, that the "market" will not make any progress towards the best public choice.)
Jus' sayin'.
Really? You mean that Kerry supporters were "tearing down" Dean? My god, this is a big story. These folks acted like it was some kind of crazy political campaign!! I really wish Dean got in, because he and his supporters never "tore down" anybody.
And I'm sure, absolutely sure, that the 40 million Dean spent was very well spent. After all, as a Governor he's the only one who can balance budgets.
And those insiders, they really do have too much power. The people know better. That's why the people's favorite candidate gets 18%....those are real people who know what other people want. Kerry, Clark and Edwards voters are all fake people. How dare they accumulate more votes?
I'm so glad this blog exists as a place where we can get the real truth out! Fight On!
Posted by: SanityManagement on February 2, 2004 06:28 PMNatasha, I'm with you. The Democratic party has been lacking balls for too long. I'm sorry to see the liberals reacting like dittoheads to all the trash piled on Dean by the SCLM. I wish he had fought back.
Posted by: vortex on February 2, 2004 06:54 PMnailed it, Natasha. Ignacio would be proud.
Posted by: Terri in Tokyo/afam4dean on February 2, 2004 09:46 PMre James MacLean's post.
Actually we should run elections on what would be called a super-Borda rule. Electability becomes meaningless in that regime......
Voting preferences are a game of rational expectations with a very simple sort of utility table: the problem of factoring in a meme like "electability" is that it messes up the table and makes voters lose track of their preference ordering.
As a thought experiment try this: take two equal blocks of voters A and B. Block A prefers the candidates in this order n1 n2 n3. Block B prefers the candidates in this order n2 n3 n1. If we aggregate their votes we expect the outcome N2 preferred over N1 preferred over N3. Now block A is given the instruction "assign max utility to n3 and min utility to n1" (i.e. n1 is unelectable and n3 is electable) Now give Block B this instruction "assign max utility to n1 and min utility to n2" What happens when 1/2 of each
block follow the meme and 1/2 of each block stick with their original preferences? Adding their votes? Memes are blatant attempts to monkey with the preferences. Too bad so many times they achieve their purposes.
Notice how Joe Lieberman is consciously trying to take advantage of the "electability" meme. He keeps telling his listeners to move the utilities of his opponents down to zero! So far it hasn't worked.
Posted by: michael the wanderer on February 2, 2004 11:18 PM