“The Dead End That Is Public Opinion”: Action Works Best When It Makes Politicians Afraid
As the effort to enact new gun legislation hobbles along, liberals have noted over and over that in polls, 90 percent or so of the public favors universal background checks. In speaking about this yesterday, President Obama said, “Nothing is more powerful than millions of voices calling for change.” Then Jonathan Bernstein explained that opinion doesn’t get political results, what gets results is action. I’d take this one step farther: what gets results is not action per se, but action that produces fear. I’ll explain in a moment, but here’s part of Bernstein’s argument:
See, the problem here is equating “90 percent in the polls” with “calling for change.” Sure, 90 percent of citizens, or registered voters, or whoever it is will answer in the affirmative if they’re asked by a pollster about this policy. But that’s not at all the same as “calling for change.” It’s more like…well, it is receiving a call. Not calling.
Those people who have been pushing for marriage equality? They were calling for change. And marching for it, demanding it, donating money to get it, running for office to achieve it and supporting candidates who would vote for it, filing lawsuits to make it legal. In many cases, they based their entire political identity around it.
Action works. “Public opinion” is barely real; most of the time, on most issues, change the wording of the question and you’ll get entirely different answers. At best, “public opinion” as such is passive. And in politics, passive doesn’t get results.
Politicians are constantly assessing public opinion in ways both formal (polls) and informal (talking to folks, reading the paper, etc.). From their perspective, opinion is complex and multi-dimensional. It has a direction, an intensity, and a relationship to action. It can’t be reduced to one number. And the most important question for them is when opinion can turn into something that threatens them. Right now, that 90 percent figure doesn’t seem to be making too many politicians scared.
If you’re an interest group or a voting bloc, it’s far, far better to be feared than loved. If a politician loves you, he’ll say, “Hey guys, you know I love you, but you’re just going to have to wait on this priority of yours. I promise we’ll get around to addressing it next year.” If a politician fears you, he’ll say, “OK! OK! I’ll do what you want, just don’t hurt me!” The NRA has understood this well, which is why it has spent years working to convince everyone that it can destroy any politician it chooses (as you know, I’ve argued at length that that image is a myth, but the myth’s existence is undeniable). It spends far less time convincing politicians that being in line with the NRA produces wonderful benefits. It’s basically a protection racket; when the local mobster comes into your shop and says, “Nice place you’ve got here. Shame if someone were to burn it down,” the shop owner doesn’t say, “At last! I’m so glad you came to keep me safe!” He isn’t happy about it, but he pays up.
So action works best when it actually makes politicians afraid. It’s a way of getting politicians’ attention, and convincing them that if they don’t go along, they might be risking their jobs. Right now, for instance, politicians in both the Democratic and Republican parties are becoming afraid to be on the wrong side on marriage equality. It isn’t just because of poll results showing a majority of the public in favor; that’s just a number, albeit a significant one. The reason they’re afraid is that they understand this is going to become a culturally defining issue that before long will have the power to end people’s careers. They fear that their position on marriage equality could come to define their entire identity, carrying with it a whole set of judgments people will make about them. You’re seeing all this movement now—Democrats coming out in favor of marriage equality, Republicans stumbling around without a clue as to where they should position themselves—because there’s a collective realization that this is a key moment. And they’re afraid. There’s no question that in the wake of Newtown, members of Congress are less afraid of the NRA than they have been in the past. But the real question is whether they’re afraid of not passing something like background checks. And the answer so far is, not yet they aren’t.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, March 29, 2013
“Shifting Tectonics On Guns”: It’s No Longer The Simple Question Of Doing What’s Right Versus Doing What’s Expedient
As the Senate moves towards a vote on Harry Reid’s gun violence package, which now (after the excision of a renewed assault gun ban and high-capacity ammo clip restrictions) centers on a quasi-universal background check system for gun sales, there are a lot of shifting techtonics to keep in mind:
First, public opinion remains overwhelmingly in favor of universal background checks across just about every subset of the population. The opposition may be noisy and influential, and benefits from the perception that this is a “voting issue” only for opponents, but this is at present not a close call in terms of where the public stands.
Second, the near-unanimity of public opinion probably reflects the ironic fact that for many years a stronger background check system was the default-drive alternative offered by the NRA to every other gun measure. Yes, the gun lobby has been fighting to protect the “gun show loophole” to background checks for some time, and has quietly worked to undermine the system as it exists, but it’s still difficult for Lapierre and company to pretend it represents a deadly threat to the Second Amendment.
Third, we are in a period where the once-powerful force of red-state Democratic reluctance to make waves on “cultural issues” is waning. There are fewer red-state Dems to worry about, for one thing. For another, voter polarization and reduced ticket-splitting have made the route to survival for red- (and more often, purple-) state Democrats depend more on base mobilization than has been the case in the past.
This last factor remains important in the 60-vote Senate, however. Plum Line’s Greg Sargent runs the numbers this morning, and identifies five Democrats and three Republicans who are being cross-pressured by the usual NRA threats–but also by Michael Bloomberg’s lavishly funded upcoming ad campaign pushing back.
How individual senators, the two parties, and the White House calculate all these factors will largely determine what happens after the Easter Recess. But in this installment of the Gun Wars, it’s no longer quite the simple question of doing what’s right versus doing what’s expedient that it used to be.
By: Ed Kilgore, Washington Monthly Political Animal, March 25, 2013
“Portrait Of A Powerless Man”: The Tracks Of John Boehner’s Tears
Why does John Boehner subject himself to this?
Not for the first time this year, and probably not for the last, the speaker allowed to the floor on Thursday a major piece of legislation that a solid majority of the Republican Conference voted against, that passed mainly on the strength of Democratic votes, and that the Obama White House will now trumpet as a major achievement. The bill at hand was the Violence Against Women Act, which had easily passed the Senate only to meet with fierce resistance from conservatives in the House. In the end, 138 House Republicans went on the record against it, while 87 backed it. Among Democrats, meanwhile, there wasn’t a single “no” vote.
We saw this same dynamic at the start of the year, when the fiscal cliff deal passed with just 85 Republicans voting “yes” – and 151 voting “no.” And we saw it a few weeks after that, when a $50.5 billion Sandy aid package cleared the chamber with only 49 Republicans supporting it, and 179 opposing it.
The common thread in all of these instances is that true-believer conservatives imposed politically toxic positions on the GOP conference and Boehner had embarrassingly little ability to put a stop to the madness. It was only when the power of public outrage, poll numbers and pressure from members in marginal districts grew just strong enough that Boehner had the ability to allow floor votes and resolve the issues without losing his speakership to a coup of angry conservatives.
Really, this has been the story of Boehner’s entire tenure as speaker. In the 112thCongress, Boehner famously negotiated to the brink of a deficit reduction “grand bargain” with President Obama, one that would have exchanged modest revenue increases for serious cuts to safety net programs. But even that was giving away too much in the eyes of the Tea Party crowd, forcing Boehner to walk away from the table. Back then, Boehner could mostly settle for not striking deals with the administration and leaving most issues to fester. In the minds of most Republicans, the lousy economy would knock Obama out of office in 2012 and deliver the Senate to the GOP too, empowering the party to impose a true-believer agenda in 2013.
But then Obama won a resounding reelection victory, Democrats added to their Senate majority, and the GOP lost seats in the House. This has created a new dynamic in the 113thCongress, with an emboldened second-term president more confidently pushing his agenda and ratcheting up public pressure on Republicans to meet him halfway. It’s also helped that Obama has had public opinion on his side, and that in the case of the fiscal cliff, Republicans were facing the prospect of being blamed for automatic across-the-board tax hikes if they failed to compromise. So in this Congress, unlike the last one, there is serious pressure on Boehner, for the overall good of his party, to make some deals.
But he’s hamstrung by the fact that what’s good for the GOP’s overall image isn’t necessarily good politics for individual Republican members. Many of them represent deeply Republican districts, where there’s no such thing as a serious general election challenge. That moves all of the action to the GOP primary, which has two effects: 1) It increases the likelihood that a Tea Party-type will win the seat; 2) it forces Republicans who aren’t truly Tea Party-types to behave like Tea Party-types so that they can win primaries. This pressure exists in non-safe districts too, but there’s a little more tension for these Republican members, who have to worry about potential primary challenges along with the general election. And then there’s Boehner, who is deeply distrusted by the conservative movement, thus forcing him to consider the possibility of a revolt by restive conservatives before making any major decisions.
Thus, the only real option for Boehner is what we keep seeing this year. When there’s a major piece of legislation where public opinion is on the Democrats’ side, Boehner has to wait until enough pressure and outrage has built that a healthy number of Republicans from marginal districts who value their seats and Republicans from safe districts who value having the majority decide it’s in their interests to resolve the issue. Only then can Boehner move the bill to the floor. And even then, the majority of Republicans will feel compelled – either by their genuine ideological views or by fear of a primary challenge – to vote against it.
Which brings us to the sequester that’s now kicking in. This is hardly a surprising development. Obama has made his negotiating position clear: He wants to get rid of it and enact a “balanced” fix that includes entitlement cuts and increased revenue from tax deductions and loopholes. There is absolutely no way that Boehner could sell anything along these lines to his conference right now. Conservatives in the House and across the country are still smarting from the fiscal cliff deal, so anything involving more revenue – even if it’s not actually from tax rate increases – is a non-starter. For now.
But what happens as the sequester is implemented and Americans begin to see the impact? And as the defense industry, which still has real clout within the GOP, even if it’s not nearly as much as it once did, begins to feel the impact? And what happens as the prospect of an ever worse situation – a government shutdown triggered by the March 27 expiration of the continuing resolution that now funds the government – approaches? What if polls show voters breaking hard against the GOP?
That’s the kind of political toxicity that Boehner needs to sell any kind of a deal to his fellow Republicans – one that would give some ground on revenue, incur the wrath of the right, pass mainly with Democratic votes and (ideally for Boehner) allow the speaker to hold onto his title. In fact, as best anyone can tell, this basically is Boehner’s strategy right now. As Politico reported earlier this week, he seems to be “aiming for a hefty dose of spending cuts and reforms like a change to calculating government benefits called chained CPI and closing a few tax loopholes.”
Chained CPI or some other serious cut to the safety net could prompt anger on the left that could complicate the new Boehner strategy of passing big bills with Democratic support. But that’s not his worry right now. For whatever reason, he likes being speaker, even though he’s an unusually powerless one, and he wants to keep the job. So he’ll take the sequester and wait.
By: Steve Kornacki, Salon, March 1, 2013
“Short Memories”: If Only The President Would Make Speeches, Everything Would Be Different
The bizarre idea that Obama never tried to convince the public on health care reform.
Yesterday, psychologist and political consultant Drew Westen had yet another op-ed in a major newspaper (the Washington Post this time) explaining that all of Barack Obama’s troubles come from a failure to use rhetoric effectively. Don’t get me wrong, I think rhetoric is important—in fact, I’ve spent much of the last ten years or so writing about it. But Westen once again seems to have fallen prey to the temptation of believing that everything would be different if only a politician would give the speech he’s been waiting to hear. There are two problems with this belief, the first of which is that a dramatic speech almost never has a significant impact on public opinion. The second is that Barack Obama did in fact do exactly what Drew Westen and many other people say they wish he had done.
This is only one part of Westen’s piece, but I want to focus on it because it’s said so often, and is so absurd:
In keeping with the most baffling habit of one of our most rhetorically gifted presidents, Obama and his team just didn’t bother explaining what they were doing and why. To them, their actions were self-evident. But nothing is self-evident when your opponents are spending millions of dollars to defeat you. Instead, the White House blundered around with memorable phrases such as “bending the cost curve,” which didn’t speak to the values underlying the need for health-care reform.
My God, do people ever have short memories. They “didn’t bother explaining what they were doing and why”? Oh sure, if only Obama had, say, given a major speech about health-care reform, explaining to the public the principles behind his plan and the practical steps he would take! That would have changed everything! Oh, but wait—he did. Multiple times. Here‘s a speech he gave on it in June 2009. Here‘s a speech he gave on health-care reform to a joint session of Congress that September—maybe you’ve forgotten about it, but it was a pretty big deal at the time. Here‘s another speech he gave on it. We could go on.
Any time you’re tempted to say, “The President has never said X!,” you really ought to take some time to see if it’s true, because chances are he has. And in this case, the president made the case for health care hundreds of times. He did it on an almost daily basis for an entire year. The fact that his campaign of persuasion wasn’t as successful as many of us wanted it to be doesn’t mean he and his administration just forgot to talk to the public about health-care reform.
In fairness, when President Obama himself was asked about his biggest mistake in an interview not long ago, he said it was that he had spent all his time on getting the policies right and hadn’t spent enough time communicating with the American people. But that’s the presidential version of the job interview response, “My greatest weakness? I guess it’s that I work too hard.” The fact that he says it, and the fact that you might like to believe it’s true, doesn’t make it so.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, July 30, 2012
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