There’s a new country that didn’t exist last week, all the worry and wonder about post-Castro Cuba is now in the present tense (Linguification! It’s actually in the present imperfect! No, wait, it’s in the same tense that it was originally written in. In which it was written. In. Which. That. Mood. Voice. Whatev’s), and a crazy military dictator has completely failed to rig a presumptively phony election in South Asia. Since anything YHB would have to say about the specifics of those events would be at best useless, I’ll steer the direction into a different one, about one of YHB’s pet peeves Presidential campaigns. But there is a connection, really there is.
In the 2004 campaign, when I expressed a certain ambivalence about the candidates, liking many of them for different reasons, several people pointed me to one of the sites that asked a series of questions about policy preferences and lined up the candidates in a sort of spectrum of near-to-far from my own platform. I hate those. They came back for this campaign, and I hate them all over again. I know, I know which candidates are to the left and which to the right. It’s not a secret. It also is not how I would pick a candidate.
And I’m not just talking about electability. I do take electability into account, but that’s a separate issue. I’m talking about the fact that candidates are not position papers, and that we elect a person to govern, not a platform. To paraphrase Mark Schmitt, which I’ve probably done a lot here, it’s not what the candidate says about the issues, it’s what the issues say about the candidate.
Or more than that. Sticking for the moment with policies, if Gov. Jones has a policy that is absolutely perfect on revising intellectual property law (and wouldn’t that be nice) but a crap policy on climate change preparation, and Sen. Robinson has a crap policy on IP but a fairly good policy on climate change, then Sen. Robinson wins on policy grounds because climate change is important and IP law is not. Particularly for the President, who is not in the Legislature. So those questionnaires that try to line people up with their policy-preference candidates would need to take into account which policies I actually care about (because some other voter may think that IP law is the more important one). And then they have to take into account which policies the candidate actually cares about, because there’s a big difference between putting out a position paper and spending political capital. When the President tells the Minority Leader that he’ll put one issue on the back burner if they can get together on the other, I want it to be IP law on the back burner, not climate change.
More important than all of those policies, though, are abilities. When the President tells the Minority Leader about this possible deal, I want that President to command the Minority Leader’s attention, her sympathy, her loyalty and her respect. I don’t want that President to get rolled. And when the Minority Leader can’t agree to that deal, despite all that attention and respect and whatnot, I want a President who can make a better deal, a clever deal, one that doesn’t give away the store but that the Minority Leader can take back to caucus claiming some sort of victory. And then, if that doesn’t work, I want a President that can ram the deal down her throat anyway.
Does that show up in the questionnaire?
I want a President who can seize a moment of instability to both avoid disaster and to sow the seeds of new growth. I want a President who will not necessarily be bound by her position papers, either. I want someone in the White House who can think on his feet. I want someone who has the knowledge to make judgments, and the judgment to make good ones. Also, good advisors. And the sense to take their advice. And the judgment (and knowledge) to spot the times when the advice is crap, too.
Is that all about character? Yes, it is all about character. It’s not about honesty, or authenticity, or marital fidelity, or who I would want to have a beer with if I started drinking beer with Senators and Governors. But it is about character. And we make guesses about the characters of the candidates by their actions in the past. We gauge their abilities, their priorities, and their advisors. And we come to different conclusions, which is how it is.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s also important to get things right. A candidate who has great ability to implement bad policy would not get my vote. Sometimes there is a real and substantial difference between the policies of the candidates within a party, and if you think that’s the case this year, and make your decision based on those policies, then that’s fine. But there’s more to it than that. You are not voting for a policy platform. Nobody’s health care plan will be passed in the form it is on the campaign web site. Do you know what Barack Obama’s Pakistan policy is? Whatever it was last week, it’s worthless now. So is Hillary Clinton’s. Most of their policies will be like that, come events.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.
When I played around with one of those candidate position graphs, it let me interactively select which positions I wanted it to pay attention to and moved the results around so I could get a feel for where I agreed and disagreed with various candidates. But it still didn’t have a character attribute.
I like your description of character, what it is and why it matters. I do think their current positions matter, particularly comparatively, because they do indicate how the candidates respond to the current knowns and unknowns (channeling Uncle Rumsfeld) to formulate policies, and I hope that they spend more time in their speeches talking about the topics they are most passionate about, so that we can get a sense of what those topics are by listening to their speeches. Sure, they’ll spend time on topics they think will resonate with voters, but that same sort of calculation will happen when they govern as well, and they can come to quite different conclusions about what topics they should talk about. Ultimately character (if I understand your usage of the term) provides the wellspring of all of that.
i like this, i like this. character also shows up in their choices for department heads and advisors.
you know how i feel about the inadequacy of the current conception of a separable energy/climate policy. you can’t talk about pakistan or even israel/palestine without talking about spaceship-earth stuff but people do and it’s scary.
(looking at AIDS drugs and GMO seeds and such, i think IP law will be central, but not how it’s domestically framed.)
Yes, both of you. Michael, you’re right that policy positions do tell us something about the candidate’s character and priorities, and double-right that there’s every historical reason to believe that even if a candidate is just pandering to a particular group, if elected the office-holder will continue to pander to that group, so sincerity makes little difference.
And yes, hapa, about how the looming climate change stuff connects with everyfuckinthing to the point where sensible foreign policy is impossible without sensible energy policy, because what are we going to do about all those refugees, but then we are comparing candidates, all of whom will always suck in lots of ways, different one to another. And double-yes about how character will affect the cabinet and advisors, who is picked and how well they are used. That’s one reason why I am more comfortable with candidates who have Executive experience and a record of picking cabinets and so on, but there’s stuff to look at in the Senate as well.
Thanks,
-V.