Kludgeocracy and Representation

My column today over at TAP is an argument with Steven Teles, who has been writing important things about the US policy-making process as a "Kludgeocracy." Generally, I think his diagnosis is correct, including the causes of kludges, but I think it's mostly a good thing, not a bad one. I'm somewhat skeptical about how much of a net bad thing it is in terms of policy efficiency, but I'm confident that it's a good thing in terms of democracy.

I want to highlight my argument about democratic accountability, which Teles argues would be enhanced if "constitutional norms forced government to act directly and transparently or forgo action altogether" because it would be easier to see what government does and therefore easier for voters to reward or punish. Here's my response:

I think this is largely a myth. Modern government, even the streamlined version Teles wants, is still going to do far too many things for this kind of accountability to work. Voters, after all, have only one ballot. They can’t possibly use it to hold politicians accountable for multiple successes and failures, even in the unlikely event that they are attentive enough to properly assess those policies...

On the other hand, kludgeocracy increases accountability—dramatically. Individual politicians have a real opportunity to make significant policy changes on many occasions. The very fact that there’s no one who is “in charge” is exactly what can make it hard for politicians to entirely duck a constituent’s demands. And we have plenty of evidence that politicians do respond to constitution demands, even if failure to do so probably wouldn’t show up as a significant electoral effect.

I really want to emphasize the point that to the extent that democratic accountability is about the voters, it's just an incredibly blunt instrument. Voters, and especially swing voters, simply are not going to flip their votes in most cases over policy choices. Instead, this sort of accountability functions mainly as an imperative to incumbent politicians: avoid doing things that anger voters! That's especially the case with policy outcomes; presidents know, for example, that they really don't want to be up for re-election while the nation is losing a war or suffering through a recession.

(Yes, there's a problem that a lot of liberals worried about in 2012 of incentives for the out-party to deliberately attempt to produce negative policy outcomes, along with sufficient institutional means for the "out"-party to affect policy which the "in" party would then take responsibility for. I tend to think it's a real, albeit overrated problem...but it's not really the problem that Teles is concerned with).

The "no policy disasters!" impulse is a good and healthy one in a democracy. It's crucial. But it's also very, very, limited.

What I think does a lot more of the work of real democracy falls, in my way of thinking of things, under the broad category of representation, which I think is far more more nuanced than electoral accountability. Representation isn't just about policy congruence between representative and constituents. It's also about what those representatives actually spend their time working on -- what they actively attempt to accomplish, as opposed to just how they vote on the House or Senate floor (for more on representation, see here and here). But for that to be meaningful, there has to be more that legislators can do than merely voting. Thus the current US system; thus kludges.

In other words, I believe that what the US system discovered is the incredible capacity of representation; and what that system, with its multiple veto point and initiative points, can do really well is to take advantage of that capacity.

And that's why I care about this argument. To me, the successes of democracy are in large part about groups or even individuals pushing politicians, and politicians responding by making promises and then attempting to carry out those promises. But while everything can't be about individual politicians (and this is on of the reasons that parties are important, and that it's important for parties to be permeable so that newly interested citizens can at least potentially affect party positions on questions of public policy), it's important that those individual politicians do have the tools available to tap into the full capacity of representation.

As I argued in the piece, I'm not even convinced that the resulting messy policy is a net negative. But even if it is, I'm generally willing to accept that price for meaningful democracy.

Yeah, This Doesn't Work

Chris Cillizza, on why Chris Christie is a strong candidate:

As Mitt Romney, John Kerry and Al Gore can attest — and not in a good way — being, or at least seeming, like an average Joe is critically important to your chances of winning.

Except...well, you know what Romney, Kerry, and Gore have in common? They won major party nominations! And that's where things such as candidate personality are actually important. As...George H.W. Bush can attest.

Or maybe Cillizza would say that Michael Dukakis failed "average Joe" too. But then...well, Bob Dole was no average Joe, and neither was John McCain. And you know who else was no average Joe? Ronald Reagan. Maybe there's a movie star exception.

Does Barack Obama seem like an average Joe? Republicans don't think so...I don't know. But even spotting him the last three presidents, for whatever that's worth, he's still not getting there. Far more nominees fail that test than pass it, and before the Clinton/W/Obama group, I'm not sure when the previous average Joe showed up. Truman, I suppose. Surely not FDR, and he seemed to be just fine as a presidential candidate.

For that matter, thinking about FDR, or McCain, or Reagan, or perhaps Obama, reminds us that in fact "average Joe" is only one of a number of politician personalities that can work just fine. That's part of what Richard Fenno talks about in Home Style -- part of a politician's promises have to do with the type of person he or she will be, personality included, but there are a wide variety of choices. What's important isn't picking the right one; what's important is acting, after the election, how one "promised" to act.

In other words...it's just another one of those things that some political reporters and pundits are used to saying, but five seconds of thinking about it reveals that it's pretty much nonsense.

Representation Works (Weirdly Enough)

Jordan Ragusa has a very nice post today using the business about PolitiFact ratings to write about research showing that, yes, Members of Congress keep their policy promises.

As I've discussed at length, but not recently, there's more to representation than just policy promises. That's on of the main findings of Richard Fenno's work: promises also include all sorts of things, including style of representation. Among other things, that to me, is the "solution" to the question of whether representatives "should" be delegates or trustees; the answer is that they should do whatever they said they would do when they were campaigning. But that's just one of the many things that can go into representative style and the representative relationship that politicians develop with their constituents.

At any rate, one of the things I find most interesting is why any of this happens. Ragusa is good on this:

Finally, if citizens are (a) unaware of who their elected lawmaker is and (b) as a result woefully ignorant of their representatives’ position on key votes, the question is: what keeps lawmakers honest?  The answer is that while private citizens may not know how their representative or senator voted, general election opponents and interest groups sure do.  Thus, while the electorate is generally inattentive to lawmakers voting record, the reelection incentive—and the threat of attack ads from one’s rival—keep lawmakers honest.

Indeed, in the underlying paper, Tracy Sulkin argues that risk-averse politicians will likely attempt to keep their promises as if they would get in trouble from abandoning them. That sounds right to me, as is her argument that politicians are probably likely to make promises in the first place that they have an interest in keeping.

What fascinates me about this, however, is that I really don't buy the idea that politicians, no matter how risk-averse, are really keeping promises because of electoral incentives. It just doesn't wash that it's a significant enough constraint. Especially when it comes to promises about representative style. What we know about the ignorance of voters is just very hard to square with the idea that they will punish their representatives' misbehavior.

Sulkin's suggestion that politicians may choose to emphasize particular issues (and presumably style) for personal reasons, rather than for electoral reasons, is promising.

But overall, I think it's one of the more puzzling problems in representation, and therefore in democracy. I have an old paper in which I try to get to it (it involves political parties, Arendt, and the "touch of Harry in the night" scene, and yes, I suppose I should try to do something with that paper). I do think that representation is real, and really "works," and that the fact it works is central to how democracy actually does what we want it to do...but the whole topic is filled with difficulty.

Q Day 9: Big House?

Writer asks:

At what point does the growth of the population demand (require/suggest/whatever) that the House expand? What logistical challenges exist? I see that politically, there would be little chance of anything but a doubling to 870, but that would require a massive increase in office space in an already crowded area of DC. Still, the number of constituents per Representative has to peak at some number, right?

Ah, an old Plain Blog favorite. My position on this is that a Big House (of Representatives) is an intriguing idea, but ultimately a bad one.

Basically, once you have over 100,000 constituents in your district, I'm not sure how much it matters for representation whether it's 500K or 500M. Well, at least whether it's 500K or 5 million. Either way, you're not going to be personally interacting with very many of them.

What a big House would do to the governing of the House, however, isn't any good. It would mainly produce more backbenchers -- folks who would have no real responsibilities (or opportunities) for legislating beyond just showing up to vote. That's already a problem with the House, and it's one that increasing the size would almost certainly make worse.

American democracy works best when individual Members of Congress do serious legislating; that's the whole point, the whole advantage, of having separated institutions sharing powers. Much better to have a huge district with a Member who actively tries to represent the district and has some capacity for action than a much smaller district with a Member who can do little more than vote with the party on the floor or in committee.

Representation and Change

I have one up at PP today about the question of change coming from the "inside" or the "outside." Just to add on to it a bit...

I see most of this through the lens of representation. Obama and Congressional Democrats made promises in 2008; they interpreted them; and those interpretations guided what they tried to do in office. “Promises” here means not just specific public policy choices, but also governing style, priorities, and all the rest of behavior in office. Different campaign in 2008, different promises, different interpretation, and therefore different behavior in office.

Getting back to Ezra Klein (who emphasized the limits on presidential-led change, especially from "going public") and Andrew Sprung (who emphasized the way the 2008 election did really produce results): the answer, then, is that they’re both right. No, Obama couldn't go over the heads of Congress in summer 2009 to force action on health care, or over the heads of Congress later to force action on his jobs bill. Any presidential action of that sort is at best going to produce extremely limited success in normal times, and can easily backfire.

But it's also true that elected officials in democracies generally try to keep their promises; they try to have healthy representative relationships with their constituents, which really does seem to involve taking seriously the job of making promises, interpreting them, and acting while in office with that interpretation in mind. It doesn't mean that there's an absolute one-to-one correspondence between everything a politician ever says and what they do; that's not how it seems to work. It's more that they try to be who they say they are, and that creates a situation in which they do, or attempt to do, more or less what they said they would do. Or at least some version of it.

Thinking this through turns out to be extremely difficult...we know both that politicians really do seem to take their promises seriously, but also that most actual, real-world constituents don't pay very much attention to this stuff at all, and that even for those who do it's hard to see how the interpretations of the constituency are related to the interpretations of the politician. I do have an answer to it; it has to do with party politics as the practical real-world link between politicians and constituents (well, that's some of it; it also has something to do with Act 4 of Henry V, the "little touch of Harry", but I'll save all the explanations for some other time). The shortish answer is that, yup, campaigning and electioneering -- the "outside" part of it -- matters a whole lot.

Hey, it's Friday late afternoon; I'm sure I'll get back to this some other time. As you can see, I have a lot of thoughts on this one, even if this post is a bit scattered. Sorry about that. The quick answer to how Klein and Sprung are both right, at any rate, is: representation.

Elsewhere: Sex Scandals and Representation

Just one item today: over at Post Partisan, I have a post on Bill Clinton, John Edwards, and representation; in particular, about the nature of "promises." I'm arguing that the reason (former) supporters are so bitter about Edwards but not about Clinton is because the Edwards family was really central to his 2008 campaign, and so lying about the nature of the family meant breaking a promise that was central to his relationship with his supporters.

I think it's a good piece. As longtime readers know, representation is one of my big interests, but I haven't written about it for awhile. The way this one happened is that Ryan Lizza tweeted a comment about the different reactions to their seemingly similar transgressions, and I answered "Representation. Edwards broke an implicit promise to supporters; Clinton was semi-honest from the beginning", and he said "???." At which point I realized that I really needed to explain it, and it was going to take a lot more than 140 characters. So there you are.

Representation, Governing, Elections, and Deceit

I'm a big Andrew Sprung fan, and of course I'm always flattered when anyone bothers to critique what I've said, so I owe a response to Sprung's weekend post concluding that I'm a bit inconsistent on representation, and generally continuing his critique of how I deal with the subject.

This all goes back to my view of representation (which owes a lot in turn to Hanna Pitkin and Richard Fenno, but of course I take responsibility for my interpretation of their work and my synthesis of it). The gist is that I want to say that good representation involves politicians making and keeping promises to their constituents, and that those promises can be not only matters of public policy but also all sorts of questions of behavior and style. As Sprung says, I also follow Richard Neustadt in suggesting that presidents who look out for their own interests in building influence (Neustadt's "power") will tend to have the side effect of producing viable public policy.

So: last week I attacked Luntzism, although I didn't use that name at the time...Luntzism is the fallacy that if you find the words that poll well and perform well in focus groups that you can slap them on any policy and then mistakenly believe that the underlying policy will be successful. Sprung asks why Luntzism is wrong:

Wait a minute. Suppose a pol's "contract" with her voters consists of 'promising' always to push their hot buttons -- pandering to their prejudices, regardless of policy outcomes? Suppose voters repeatedly reward such rhetoric irrespective of policy...In other words, suppose poll-tested terminology works, either by asserting a distinction between the attacker's policies and his opponents where none exists, or by effectively lying about the opponent's policies? In some cases, it may not matter whether the underlying policies are popular. Is Bernstein suggesting that such manipulation of language -- say, excoriating "regulations" to create a space for gutting regulations that voters would support if they knew their content -- will not work in the long run, that voters will sniff out the truth? Or that poll-tested language deployed to mislead will work in the sense of helping to get the smearer elected, but not work in the sense of serving voters' interests?

I'll say a few things in response. One is that as a practical matter, I'm convinced that Luntzism just doesn't work. Since neither side has a monopoly on political information, the other side is going to undermine whatever happy talk you come up with to describe your policy proposals. Of course, in many cases it just doesn't matter, since in many cases people aren't voting on the basis of specific policy proposals. But if the policy in question is one that people do focus on, I just don't think it will work. See, for example, the Iraq War after the insurgency started and the Bush Social Security proposal. The second, again as a practical matter, is that my stance against Luntzism isn't so much about attempting to fool constituents as it is about mistakenly fooling politicians. During the Contract for America period, we have stories of GOP Members who were assured that various Republican proposals were wildly popular and supported them on that basis, when in fact all that was popular was the question wording.

More broadly, and this holds whether I'm right or wrong about all of that: we shouldn't, in my view, assume too close a link between representation and election outcomes. Both are really complicated, and they overlap, but they're not the same thing. A politician, in my view, can have an excellent representative relationship with his constituency and still be defeated, for example if a national partisan tide has a massive effect on a local constituency. Or the other way around: a politician who has a weak representative relationship can still hang on for years. And then there's the additional problem that we know very well that much (most? nearly all?) of the constituency is not actively engaged in their side of the representational relationship. Which I've written about, but I don't think blogged about...it's a very difficult problem.

And then...well, I do think Sprung is pushing it a bit. I just watched the one where Buffy tells Giles to lie to her...it's a wonderful scene, and Giles is indeed doing what Buffy requests when he lies to her and tells her how easy the world is. We have no evidence, however, in the case of Luntzism that either side is actually building a relationship based on "lie to me." I'm open to saying that a "lie to me" representative style could be a healthy one, but I really doubt that such a thing is very common. Now, could a politician "promise" (as Sprung says) to always push constituents hot buttons, regardless of policy? Sure. But that sure sounds like a very partisan representation style -- which is fine (as far as my view of representation is concerned), but it implies weak connections outside the partisan core, and at any rate it's not usually a winning formula for a district featuring a partisan balance.

Again: part of this is that I think Sprung is trying to link three separate things I've said, things that I would agree can go together, but which I don't believe are quite as tightly connected as he takes them to be. Good representation is about making and keeping promises and about explaining actions in office. For presidents, and perhaps for other elected officials, a positive side-effect of seeking to increase influence is that it tends to create viable public policy. And viable public policy and good representation help in re-election. I do think all of these things are true, and together they do a lot of the work of real democracy...but the latter two are tendencies, not absolutes, and the links between all of them are tricky indeed.

Let me put it another way...one can, for argument, entirely separate elections and representation, and think separately about how they constrain politicians. Elections give pols a general incentive to keep constituents happy -- to produce policy that works (yes, I know about mixed incentives from divided government in the US, but put that aside). Produce a recession, and voters will vote against you, end of story, end of career. Good times? Everyone gets re-elected.

Representation works by constraining politicians to explain what they're up to and to keep their promises. As long as pols want to have strong representational relationships, and we have good evidence from Fenno and others that they do (perhaps for electoral reasons, perhaps not), then they stay within those constraints.

Both of these are factors in making representative democracy work, even with an electorate that's only minimally engaged. Which is, and has been since at least Madison, a terribly difficult problem.

Promises

What are campaign promises?

I mentioned earlier Jonathan Cohn's post pointing out that Democrats in 2008 put together carefully constructed, expert-vetted policy proposals (on health care, at least), while Republicans in 2012 are tending towards gibberish and nonsense. Matt Yglesias says the GOP path might be the better way to go:

[T]he main consequence of that business was to raise unrealistic expectations and lay the groundwork for unfair backlash when it turned out that in the United States of America laws are written by congress. To me, I learned from Tim Pawlenty what I wanted to know. His speech made it clear that he agrees with the George W. Bush approach and will seek to push tax revenues to the lowest legislatively feasible level, with a special eye toward the tax burden on high-income individuals and corporations.

What I think Yglesias is getting to here is the complexity of the concept of "promises" made by candidates to their constituents. On the one hand, there are policy promises: if I'm elected, I will do the following specific things. As he notes, fulfilling policy promises can be especially complicated in a Madisonian system since no single elected official has the authority to do, well, anything (yes, presidents can sign executive orders, but it's often politically impractical for them to do so even if they really want to enact a policy; once you get beyond that, it's of course even worse for presidents who need legislation or for any single Member of Congress to guarantee that anything will pass, or even come up for a vote).

But policy promises are only one of the many types of promises candidates make. There are also process promises: if elected, I'll consult with voters, or with particular interest groups; if elected, I will use some particular decision-making method. This is, by the way, the better way to think of the mandate/independence debate: the question isn't whether in some abstract sense it's better for politicians to do what constituents say or to think for themselves -- what we really want our politicians to do is to keep their promises, which makes them good representatives, and so they should generally keep their process promises, too.

And then there are identity promises. If elected, I'll stay "one of us." If elected, I'll be an expert on arms control. If elected, I'll be black, or Jewish, or a woman, or Catholic. For the latter, it's not just that a candidate belongs to some demographic group; what matters especially is that she runs on that identity. That makes it "count" as part of the candidate's political identity. It's a promise that she's making. Or, one that she doesn't make.

I think that the kinds of policy talk that Cohn correctly, in my view, believes divide the parties is best looked at in that sense. Democratic constituents want policy wonks and Democratic organized groups want detailed policies, or at least campaign professionals think they do; Democratic candidates therefore promise to be policy wonks. Or at least pretend to be, which is generally the same thing. On the Republican side, what they appear to want is ideological fealty and intense identification with a set of cultural and political stuff, and so they get candidates who find ways to show those things.

Be careful: no candidate makes only one promise, or even one type of promise. So don't interpret this as saying that Republicans only have to give the correct social signals and their constituents will support them regardless of what else they do. Policy and process (and perhaps other types of) promises matter, too. But I do think it helps understand what I agree is a real difference in how Democrats and Republicans right now run for presidential nominations.

Getting back to what Yglesias said: I agree that all of this has consequences for how they act in office -- because politicians really do try to keep their promises, whatever, and whatever type, those might be. But if the candidates and the people who run their campaigns are correct, there's not much that can be done about it. Democrats want someone who acts wonkish, and so all the candidates scramble to respond. What would be interesting is for a candidate to deliberately counterprogram...a Republican running primarily as a wonk, or a Democrat running on social and cultural identification. Jesse Jackson was the last major candidate, I think, who did that on the Democratic side. Perhaps someone with a better shot at the nomination coming in will attempt it in 2016.

Why Republicans Go After Unions and ACORN First

Kevin Drum agreed with my post yesterday about Republicans and Democrats, and has more:

I just finished a short piece for the next issue of the magazine about Republican efforts to push through structural changes that either permanently defund the left or reduce its voting strength. In the past, that included efforts to defund public interest law groups, ongoing battles to degrade the power of private sector unions, promotion of "pack and crack" redistricting that limited the influence of minority voters, and support of tort reform rules that hurt trial lawyers. More recently, it's included their assaults on public sector unions, the defunding of ACORN, and tenacious efforts to pass voter ID laws aimed at making it harder for minorities, the young, and the poor to vote.

I'll definitely look out for that article.

But then he asks: why?

I don't know the answer, but I'm willing to speculate a bit. I have two plausible explanations, one based on representation and one based on politicians and learning.

The representation answer is pretty straightforward: it's about promises. As Richard Fenno explained, the "promises" that politicians make when they run can be about policy and public policy, but they can also be about behavior ("I'll listen to the district"; "I'll use my business expertise") or even about identity. Of course, pols don't explicitly promise to "be" African American or Polish-American or a "real" Yooper, but that's the implicit promise many politicians make (and, by the way, I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing at all). To the extent that GOP politics has become identity politics (and I thought the comparison of Sarah Palin to Al Sharpton was nice), then Republicans are mainly running on vague notions of "taking the country back" and their campaign promises have little to do with policy; indeed, policy, for such candidates, becomes symbolic of identity, rather than substantive. The next step is pretty obvious: if they've promised to their supporters that the other side is not legitimately entitled to share in governing, then the way to fulfill that promise is to focus on politics, not policy.

Learning? This explanation would center on two alternatives of how to take advantage of a good electoral cycle. One would be to focus on enacting as many policy priorities as possible while large majorities last; the other would be to begin by trying to lock in majorities, and then pass policy priorities only once those majorities are as safe as possible. I'd argue that neither strategy is necessarily the correct one, and that neither is inherently liberal or conservative. However, perhaps just as a chance result, the two most prominent Republican electoral strategists of the last thirty years -- Karl Rove and Newt Gingrich -- both happen to have been strong believers in locking in majorities. You'll recall that Rove was always yapping about William McKinley and the "permanent" GOP majority that he (and Mark Hanna) supposedly created. Newt, too; if I remember correctly, Newt was quoted repeatedly in John Barry's terrific "The Ambition and the Power" talking about his fear that Speaker Jim Wright would "consolidate power." Politicians learn from same-party experts, even if, as in this case, the claim of expertise is pretty dubious. So it's not surprising, then, that Scott Walker and other GOP politicians in 2011 are following the beliefs of Rove and Gingrich.

Again, this is speculative, but I suspect that the answer is found in some combination of those two possibilities.

Read Stuff, You Should

There are two things that people do wrong with numbers. For that matter, there are two kinds of things that people do wrong with any sort of serious research, but it seems to be even worse with quantitative research. One thing people do wrong is to believe in numbers too much; the other is to believe in them too little. What should you do with numbers, or conclusions based on numbers? Treat them like you would any other kind of evidence: don't accept it uncritically, but also don't dismiss it out of hand. All of which is a lead in to a link to Andrew Gellman's nice post about a study about public vs. private jobs in Wisconsin and how much they pay.

On another topic, I have a new column on the likely shutdown over at TNR, in which I argue that the open rule on the CR wound up making John Boehner's position even worse than it was before.

The good stuff:

1. Alexander Hart on why the Feds should be helping the states. Also, Scott LeMieux on majoritarianism in the states.

2. Smart comments on descriptive representation from Matt Yglesias.

3. Why Hannah Arendt helps us think about Egypt, from Jeet Heer. Also, Andrew Sullivan explains why movement conservatives seem lost and confused by turmoil in the Middle East.

4. Ann Friedman tells who is accountable. And does something about it.

5. You probably don't need more evidence that John Yoo is an embarrassment, but Julian Davis Mortenson has plenty, just in case.

6. Glenn Kessler tracks down the myth of the Obama apology tour. Never happened.

7. I'm afraid I now believe that a government shutdown is being underhyped; it's very likely, and very well could be gruesome. That means if you haven't been reading Stan Collender regularly already, you should start now. Here's a sample.

8. Probably wouldn't have read this excellent piece by Molly Lambert if she hadn't put Kim Deal's name at the top of it. Just saying. (If she had dropped Kristin Hersh, I'd have read it twice. Seriously -- the 50 Foot Wave album alone is That Good. Oops -- sorry, got distracted there for a minute).

9. Okay, I can't actually evaluate the quality of this post at all, but I have to link to Alex Massie's attempt at All-Live vs. All-Dead for his sport. And not just because he called my post "jolly." I do know who Sutcliffe, Bradman, Lindwall, Miller, Hassett, and Benaud are, though -- Hails of derisive laughter, Bruce!

Enjoy!

Obama In Tucson

What happened in Tucson on Saturday was an attack on democracy.  What the President of the United States did in his speech in Tucson was democracy fighting back.

If you want to read reviews, I have three links for you, at least so far.  All raves.  First of all, the expert: James Fallows gives Barack Obama high grades indeed.  Second, perhaps the person I follow who listens to Obama most carefully, Andrew Sprung.  Third, Andrew Sullivan, for once more subdued than excitable, as he live-blogged. And I'll toss in two quotes, both tweets from Adam Serwer:

this speech reminds me that the criticism I find most incomprehensible is the idea that the president does not love his country.

Everytime POTUS actually talks, it makes the version of him you hear about from Limbaugh or Beck sound utterly ridiculous.

Now, I have to say something that might sound a little crass. I'm sorry about that.  Hang on, and you'll see that it's not crass at all.

What I have to say is that these type of speeches are really easy.  Yes, presidents have been known to get them wrong...yes, we can think about how to rank them against each other, and I won't argue with Fallows about where this one ranks.

But this is easy.  And not just because he had the good luck to have wonderful news to disclose, that Gabrielle Giffords opened her eyes for the first time.  Or because, and I'm trying to find a gentle way to say this, but the facts of the horror are, purely from a speechwriting perspective, almost made to order.

No, that's not it.

It's an easy speech because everyone watching wants the president to succeed.  It's an easy speech because that's how representation works, at its best.  He's not only Barack Obama speaking; he's speaking on behalf of the American people.  Mind if I get a bit technical?  Hanna Pitkin says that representation is "the making present in some sense of something which is nevertheless not present literally or in fact" (The Concept of Representation, 9, her emphasis).   In my view, political representation, then, is a process in which a representative and his or her constituents collectively decide in which ways the constituents will be made present by the actions and behaviors of the representative, even though they will not really be present.   Of course, we don't actually, all 300 million of us, sit down and collectively figure out what exactly we should all say to ourselves just now.  But because we're engaged, all of us who do engage in politics, in an ongoing relationship with our elected officials, it's sort of like that, in a way. 

So when a president speaks to the nation on this kind of occasion, an occasion in which we all agree that he should be speaking for us, he's not just speaking for us; in a sense, we're there, present, speaking, even though we are not there.  And we're always willing to give ourself the benefit of the doubt, and so therefore in these sorts of times we're willing to give the president the benefit of the doubt.

Of course, that's not true for all of a president's speeches.  And it isn't, in the end, true for all of us, as some partisans reject the relationship entirely, while others are indifferent to the whole thing and ignore it.  But that, I think, is one of the ways that democratic representation works.

This is why, I think, that folks such as Matt Yglesias and Alex Massie who argue that the United States would be better splitting the roles of head of state and head of government are, in my view, wrong (near as I can tell, the argument is sincere, although I'm not sure how serious either is about actually selecting a King of America).  Of course, royalty does represent the nation, to some extent.  But it's a narrower representation; a less political version.  And the US has always opted for politics, in its best sense (which sometimes means, of course, that we often get politics at its worst).  After all, this is a nation founded in politics, not in a particular people or a particular landmass.  It is a nation dedicated to a principle, as our version of sacred texts tell us.  In that sort of nation, ceremony has to be of its politics for it to be meaningful.

Obama or any president represents us -- makes us present even though we are not present -- because we have contended with him, because he's had to make so many promises to us about what he will do, how he will act, who he will be.  Barack Obama is, as we all know, a talented speaker.  The Barack Obama who gave the speech in Tucson, however, is one who has built himself through his interactions with the electorate, who has become our representative in a rich sense, not a narrow one. That's why even the worst of them, even a Jimmy Carter or a George W. Bush, are usually able to deliver when the occasion calls for it.  Put a little oratorical skill into the mix, and, well, you're going to get what you heard last night in Tucson.

Politicians Wanted

Here's something for election eve.  We're about to put a new set of politicians in office, and we're going to hear a lot about two things: the party swing, and the oddball winners.  They're both good stories, and should be covered.  But we're going to hear a lot less about the overall quality of the newly elected pols, and why that even matters.  So, as I join others in pointing to a new venture over at YouGov called Model Politics, in which political scientists run and then analyze interesting poll data, I'm going to talk about one piece in particular, to eventually get around to thinking about political skill. 

The article I want to highlight, and then throw a bit of caution on, is from Larry Bartels, who interprets survey data on the expiring tax cuts.  We've known for some time that the tax cuts for high-income taxpayers are unpopular.  Bartels finds, however, that the minority who favor high-income tax cuts are far more intense than those who favor tax increases on the rich.  Not only does that go a long way towards explaining why these tax cuts happen, but it also (in my view at least, and if we accept the survey results) makes them democratically justified; that is, in cases of an intense minority and an indifferent majority, there's a very strong case that the proper democratic outcome is for the minority position to be adopted.

That said...

Larry Bartels is one of the very last people I'd ever want to question, but I'm left with a lot of skepticism about the politics of this.

Some has to do with budgets and trade-offs.  When it comes to the budget, there are limited moving pieces: taxes, spending, deficits.  Presumably the best short-term move is always going to be to cut taxes and raise spending, on the assumption that people don't actually care about deficits, but mainstream Democrats may have good policy reasons for making responsible choices with the federal budget.  Certainly, Democratic presidents since at least Carter have acted as if that's the case.

If the deficit is regarded as a fixed target, then the question is which moving piece will be less costly.  Presumably, no matter how intense minority preferences may be, raising taxes on the wealthy isn't going to be worse politically than middle-class tax increases.  No?  And then there are spending cuts.  How do the intense preferences for low taxes on the wealthy compare to preferences about slashing Social Security?  Medicare?  My guess, without looking at any numbers (and the YouGov poll doesn't appear to have asked about trade-offs) is that Democrats are better off antagonizing those who really hate tax increases on the rich.  What about defense?  That's a harder call, but there are both political (certainly) and policy (perhaps) risks in significant Pentagon cuts. So while it's nice for Dems to know the landscape, to know that intensity is with the tax cutters, it's not clear at all that Democrats should therefore believe that tax cuts are the politically safe choice, on that level.

That's where some of my skepticism comes from.  The rest...well, I need to think about how this plays out.

First, I'll note that Republicans have decided that they're going to accuse incumbent Democrats of raising taxes no matter what they do, and voters who listen to GOP pols and yakkers are going to believe it.  Thus the National Taxpayer's Union counted the stimulus (which, you'll recall, cut taxes), as a tax increase; thus most voters believe that Barack Obama and the Democrats have raised taxes.  So Democrats actually have a complex question.  If they support and pass extension of the tax cuts, what's the size of the segment of the electorate that are even open to the possibility of Democrats being for lower taxes?  How many of Bartel's intense opponents of high taxes for the rich will be affected at all by any actual policies that Democrats adopt?

To some extent, good survey evidence can help with that sort of question.  But then it gets more complicated.  Democratic politicians are balancing a lot of things when they make budget choices.  In this case, it may include: raw majority preference (pushes one way); intensity (pushes another way); and commitments to constituency groups.   That last one matters!  Bartels concludes:

Of course, the president and his allies in Congress could still push to implement the proposal in a lame duck session. If they do, it will be a principled choice rather than a politically expedient one. For expedient politicians, an energized minority trumps a tepid majority every time.

Perhaps.  But Obama would clearly be breaking a promise if he flipped on this one.  How would his strongest supporters react?  How would party elites react?  Would it harm his reputation?  Shake his connection with them?  Even if tax cuts on the rich don't poll as something that Democrats at the mass level care a lot about (now), it's certainly possible that flipping on it would provoke strong reactions from Democratic opinion leaders, which then would spark the intensity of opinion missing now.

More layers: presumably, on at least some issues, politicians take the positions they do because they're convinced that the policies they choose to support will actually work.  If that's the case, then they may have a reasonable belief that immediate public opinion, even if measured and understood correctly, may prove ephemeral.  After all, if a group of citizens wants tax cuts for the wealthy because they believe it will produce economic growth (and not just because they like low taxes for rich folks), and elected Democrats believe that in fact such tax cuts will not produce economic growth, then they might think the correct political play is to take the public opinion hit now, on the assumption it will pay off in the medium or long run.

That's just taxes, but it's going on with every issue, all the time.  It informs the debate that continues to go on about the effects of passing health care reform on the 2010 election cycle.  We will, eventually, get good estimates after the fact of the effects of support for ACA on House vote, to update the early estimates from Seth Masket.  But those are always going to be static effects that assume one context, and we can imagine many other contexts (such as Jonathan Cohn's parallel universe).

What I mean to emphasize in all of this is just how complex are the choices faced by politicians, especially presidents, even if all they care about is re-election, and even if they get good polling.  They are the ones who must choose: how important are my commitments on this issue? What is the likely effect of breaking those commitments?  How will policy implementation change the political universe?  How will retreat change the political universe?  How confident am I in the policy forecasts?  What kinds of uncertainty are in all of these equations, and how should one deal with that uncertainty (what kinds of downsides are absolutely crucial to avoid risking)?

Think about health care reform again.  As I've argued in the past, it's very possible that ACA when fully implemented will rapidly become an untouchable sacred cow -- and still not help Democrats at all (among other things, the more successful it is the more it removes health care as a high-salience issue that plays well for Democrats).  At least, I think that's the logic of it...the problem for pols is that they need to get a sense from one sense of specialists how the legislation will work, and also have a sense of how it will be attacked and what future votes might have to be taken, and also have a sense of how all of this will play with swing voters, with strong supporters, with relevant interest groups. 

And then there's the point that Matt Yglesias makes, that "the point of winning elections is to pass laws."  Good point, but that leaves (as he implicitly points out) the question of which laws are worth losing.  I'd agree with those who argue that (sort of) universal health care, a primary goal for the Democratic Party for half a century, is worth losing an election over...but even there, one has to be careful, since losing an election could wind up getting things repealed or undermined, and then you're back at square one, or even worse.  And that's an easy call!  What about the upper-income tax cuts?  Is that worth losing an election over?  What about financial regulation?  Does the answer to that change if you think the bill that was available was only 20% of what was needed?  40%?  10%?

The people with the skills needed to answer these questions are professional politicians.  If they're good -- the Bill Clintons, the Ronald Reagans, the Nancy Pelosis, the Bob Doles -- they'll learn when to trust their policy experts, and when not to.  They know which coalition bonds are strong, which are weak; which commitments must be honored, and which can be ignored, and how to keep relationships strong when a commitment can't (or won't) be respected.  They know when to listen to their pollsters, but they also remember the time that the Iowa Caucus was a few months away and the pollsters could find no hope, but they strung together the coalition that was just barely enough to go on to the next round, and they'll know that even the best polling only shows what people think right now.  Without, of course, falling into the trap of assuming that they always know more than the pollsters, the policy people, and their political advisors. 

They'll know how to balance "win to pass laws" with knowing when to live to fight another day.  They'll see the opposition arguments coming, and have a sense of when to move to counter those arguments, and when it's best to just bull ahead because those arguments are coming whatever happens.  They'll have a sense of timing.  They'll know, or at least be aware of, the differences between what plays in Washington and what plays back home, and they'll realize that both are important.

And this is where Jim Manzi really gets it wrong when he writes about expertise, politicians, and the Progressives.  He's right that the Progressives wanted experts to run things.  But that didn't mean politicians, to them; it meant neutral expertise, the kind that one can test for in civil service examinations.   That's what Manzi is against, too, I think, but he conflates those sort of experts with politicians.  Pols are not Buckley's much-maligned Harvard faculty, but they're not the first 2000 names in the Boston phone directory, either.

They are experts, but not in public policy -- or, if the latter, only incidentally.  Their expertise, if they have it, is in representation.  That requires a politician to deal with the sorts of questions and have the sorts of skills I described above: not what a particular piece of legislation will do, but how to reconcile what the experts say it will do with what her constituents and constituencies want, or say they want, or will want in the future, or how they want her to behave in office.  Who she's promised to be.

And for that, neither the policy experts Manzi doesn't like nor the markets he does like -- and certainly no poll, no matter how sophisticated -- can give safely correct answers.  For that, we need those who are skilled in the art of politics and the tending of representational relationships.  We need politicians.

Sterner Stuff

There must be something about hitting the end of a campaign cycle: two writers, David Brooks and Christopher Hitchens, both wrote despairing items this week about, well, as Slate subtitled the Hitchens piece: "What normal person would put up with the inane indignities of the electoral process?"  Here's Brooks:

[P]eople who run for public office put themselves in a position in which everybody is inclined to believe the worst about them. The things that are ripe for ridicule become famous. The accomplishments fade from view. The cynics of the world, which includes almost everybody when it comes to politics, write you off as a sleazeball because it feels so good and superior to do so. 

Both cover similar ground: the indignity of having one's whole life (or some weird version thereof) open to the pettiest of attacks; the need to approve of equally brutal attacks on one's opponent; the mind-numbing requirement of message discipline.  The need to pander (Hitchens on populism: "All politics is yokel").  The humiliation of constantly asking for money.  What all of that does to the people who are willing to submit to it.  Of course, the classic treatment is Robert Redford in "The Candidate."  I also picture Bob Dole on the presidential campaign trail, departing from his text to tell jokes that no one in the room but the appreciative press corps understood and enjoyed -- after which they would file their stories about how Bob Dole would never win because he couldn't stick to his talking points.

And that was all pre-Macaca, before every candidate at every level had to be fully on every time.  Hitchens is quite right: normal people won't put up with it.  Only someone intensely ambitious, someone desperate to have the job, is going to do it, especially once we're talking about the higher and highest levels of politics. 

Fortunately!  Because that's what makes the system work: intensely ambitious politicians who are desperate to get and then keep their jobs.

(Ah, but you saw that coming, didn't you, regular readers).

The system needs -- is dependent on -- people who crave election and re-election so badly that they're willing to do whatever it takes.  Madison recognized the downside of that in Federalist 51, but he also realized that all that energy could be an enormous positive as well, because it could be harnessed.  Ambitious politicians are going to work hard to figure out what voters really want, and deliver it to them. They're going to want a healthy economy...because that will get them re-elected.  They're going to take the nation to war reluctantly and only when positive outcomes seem very likely at low costs (or if avoiding war will be highly costly)...because it will get them re-elected. 

They're going to take representation seriously.  That's not actually guaranteed in a democracy  It would be very easy for politicians to accept that most constituents don't pay attention to most things that pols do, and so one might as well just ignore them -- and after all, there's always a job as a lobbyist if things don't go well.  But fortunately, most of our actual real-life pols want to stay in office, whatever the indignities, and so they give in to the paranoid belief that The People Are Watching at all times.

(Yes, it's a weird paradox: virtually no one in the district is paying attention to whatever their Members of Congress are doing, and yet everything's on camera and all it seems to take is one moment of rudeness or disrespect or some other break in the representative relationship to doom a career).

Here's some wild speculation: of the modern presidents, the one that was least ambitious was probably George W. Bush, and that's a good part of why he was a terrible president.  It's rare to reach the presidency without aiming at it one's entire life.  Bill Clinton, as far as anyone can tell, was aiming for the White House from at least high school on.  George H.W. Bush was ambitious for a long time.  Ronald Reagan, remember, ran for president for about fifteen straight years before finally achieving it.  And one could argue (indeed, I would probably argue, although as I said it's pretty speculative) that lack of intense ambition was a real problem for the younger Bush in the White House.  Would a more ambitious president, one who was really desperate for the job, have found himself fighting two wars in a haphazard way in an election year? Would a more ambitious president have been so apparently indifferent to the fate of New Orleans?  Now, ambition isn't foolproof, as a quick look at Richard M. Nixon will show.  But the greatest presidents were certainly quite ambitious.  In my opinion, you can't be a great president without it.

Sure, I wish that pols didn't have to spend so much time doing so many stupid things.  I'd like to figure out reforms that reduce the amount of time they spend raising money.  I wish that voters would reject pols that dig up meaningless dirt, especially on their opponents' private lives.  I'd love it if message discipline wasn't necessary, and that complex thinking was rewarded over sound bites.  But I'm glad that the system has evolved some hurdles that weed out the less interested.  Give me the ambitious pol every time.

Where's Captain Kirk?

Seth Masket gives me a great opportunity to both plug a recent column he wrote with Steve Greene on the electoral effects of the health care bill, and to talk about one of my favorite topics, representation.  Seth calculates that voting for the ACA seems to be costing Democratic Members of the House about three points in the polls, and speculates:

[S]hould we be thinking of these representatives as heroes?  After all, they cast a vote based on what they believed was right even though they knew it might cost them their jobs.  Isn't that something we should celebrate?  Are they like Jeannette Rankin, who refused to vote for American engagement in either WWI or WWII, and subsequently shattered her political career?  Or Gov. Ralph Carr, who gave up his future in Colorado's Republican Party by opposing the internment of Japanese Americans?  Or Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky, whose vote in support of Bill Clinton's first budget ended her political career?

Jonathan Bernstein has written extensively on this subject, arguing that politicians should worry more about being good representatives than doing "what's right."  And we should be particularly wary of politicians who are trying to do "what's right," if for no other reason than the definition of "right" is rather vague.  This also goes to the more complicated question of whom exactly representatives are supposed to be representing.  Every person in their district?  Every voter?  The people who elected them?  Their party?

That's right -- I think that pols should try to be good representatives.  That doesn't necessarily mean, however, simply polling the district and doing whatever the pollster says.  Theorists of representation say that we should think of it as a relationship, in which politicians make "promises" to their constituents -- not just promises of how they'll vote on specific issues of public policy, but promises about who they will represent, how they will represent those people, how they will act.  One might even say, who they will be.  So to Seth, I would say that there's no "supposed to be" in the equation, no "should" about how that relationship should be structured.

So a pol who runs for office saying that she's going to be the candidate of the Republicans, or the Tea Partiers, or the Polish-Americans, should be exactly that in office.  A pol who says she's going to represent the entire district, well, that's a different candidate, a different representation relationship, and a different elected official with different obligations if she wins.  None of those are inherently "better" or "correct" representation -- what counts for good representation isn't which promises you make, but whether you carry them out once in office.  That you explain what you're doing to your constituents in terms of those promises, implicit and explicit.

The same thing is true about the question of whether elected officials should "do what the people want" or "do what's right" (which, as Seth mentions, really means doing what the politician thinks is right, which may not be the same thing).  Some pols run for office as servants of the people, who will do whatever the people tell them to do.  Others run by promising to possess specific skills, traits, or qualities that they will use in office.  They say, in effect, "Vote for me because I know what's best" (of course, not in those words). Neither of these promises is better or worse; neither promises more or less representation.  They are, just, different.  Someone in the first group should do exactly what the people want because that's what he said he would do.  Someone in the second group, however, would be a poor representative if, after promising that he would bring special expertise or judgment to his job, then abandon that for the wisdom of the crowd.

And then it does get more complex, again not in terms of what's right or wrong, but in the ways that all real-world relationships get complex.  I won't quote the whole thing, but Richard Fenno has a wonderful piece on the way Senator Claiborne Pell's representative relationship evolved in Rhode Island.  Eventually, Pell saw himself as promising loyalty to the interests of his state on economic issues, but independence beyond that: "On broad issues of war and peace, abortion, prayer in the schools, I vote my conscience...even if it's contrary to my constituents."  And, Fenno says, Pell believed that his constituents supported that division, which Pell himself emphasized in his stump speeches.  Of course, that doesn't mean Pell was doing the "right" thing on abortion, or not doing the right thing on the economy; in my view, at least, that sort of characterization just isn't very useful.

So, the title of this post notwithstanding, I think we're better off not thinking about courage and heroism (although, in the broader sense, I consider most of those who run for office at any level to be great patriots).  We're better off thinking about good and bad representation, but keeping in mind just how complicated representational relationships can be.

(The Pell quote is from Fenno, Senators on the Campaign Trail, 250-251.  See also Hanna Pitkin, The Concept of Representation, and if you're really interested, my posts here and here, plus the one Seth linked to above.  Also, if you don't know the title reference, you need to get yourself educated, and I'll highly recommend Urgh! A Music War.  I thought about using Nena, but I don't speak any German at all.  Unlike Hillary Flammond, who knows a little German...).

Defending Hack Politicians

I've been thinking about Ross Douthat's case against Charlie Crist that he presented after Crist jumped last week.  Douthat basically says that rather than a case in which the rabble knocked off a good man, this was a case of a hack pol getting what he deserved.

I do think that one can overdo the meaning of all this.  While Crist is a sitting governor, that certainly doesn't make him entitled to a Senate nomination, and Marco Rubio isn't chopped liver; he was briefly the Speaker of the Florida House of Representatives.  And just because Florida Republicans chose (at least in enough polls to matter) their very conservative former Speaker over their sitting moderate governor doesn't mean that Crist was necessarily "purged."  It's just an election (well, sort of) outcome.

However, that doesn't get to Douthat's case against Crist. 

The Florida governor may be a moderate in some sense, but his real loyalties are to cynicism, self-interest (though this time, I’m pretty sure that he’s misjudged where those interests lie), and the persistent pursuit of the budgetary free lunch.  At a time when the country desperately needs politicians who are equipped to make tough choices, Crist’s record suggests that he’s the last person that anyone — conservative or liberal — should want to see in a position of responsibility in Washington D.C.

For Douthat, Crist and Arlen Specter, along with Dede Scozzafava, are "time-servers, trimmers and party hacks" that everyone, and not just conservative Republicans, are better off without.

So, what's his case?

Well, first of all, he says that Crist is ambitious (motivated here by "self-interest," and earlier Douthat quoted at length an article about how unusually ambitious the governor supposedly is).  I'm sure Crist is ambitious; they're all ambitious.  Surely the difference in "ambition" between any two people running for the same office has to be slim at best.  They may have different agendas within their ambition; they may have other things going for them or lacking; but ambition?  They want to be United States Senators, and after that virtually all United States Senators want to be president.  So I'm not buying that part of it.

Second, Douthat gives a range of issue positions.  In one post: "Fiscally irresponsible on taxes and spending alike, and eager to use bailout dollars to delay the hard choices that Crist’s own profligacy created."  In the other, we get links to people complaining about those same things, and a claim that this is a "a time when the country desperately needs politicians who are equipped to make tough choices."  The one other specific "tough choice" that Douthat does talk about is that Crist is against cutting Social Security benefits, while Rubio supported such cuts (by slowly raising the retirement age).  That's it.  So the case against Crist is that he was "eager" to use stimulus dollars, as opposed to other GOP governors who railed against the stimulus package, loudly proclaimed their intention to reject the money, and then quietly accepted whatever they could get.  Is that an "easy" vs. a "tough" choice?  I don't know.  Politically, it was obviously the wrong choice if he wanted the GOP nomination; that might make him a poor judge of politics, but it's hard for me to see it as taking the "easy" choice. 

OK, what about Social Security?  Here, I think it's fair to say that Crist's call is, in fact, the easy (that is, popular) one, while Rubio's is politically far more risky.  The question then becomes: are easy choices bad?  What does it mean for a politician to make an "easy" choice?  Generally, what it means is that whoever is talking thinks that he or she is correct, but that the pol's constituents are wrong -- no one calls something unpopular an easy choice, and I've yet to see anyone seriously commend a pol for doing something the observer thinks is a stupid, but unpopular policy.  Such as, for example, Crist's decision to take stimulus money.

So then the question becomes: why should Crist's character come into question because he sides with his constituents against Ross Douthat?  Maybe his constituents are right!  In that case, he's doing the right thing, "easy" or not.  Maybe neither is "right" in any absolute sense, but as their governor and would-be Senator, Crist will choose the interests of Floridians over the interests of the rest of the nation.  Is that wrong?

Well, now I get (yeah, I know: finally!  Sorry.) to the main point, which is that I don't think it is wrong, in the abstract.  Or right, in the abstract.  It is a legitimate representative style, no more, no less.  There is no "correct" thing to do when a pol must choose between the narrow interests of her constituency and the broader interests of the nation.  At least, not across all districts and all representatives.  Instead, the best way to think about these things, as I've argued before, is in terms of the representative relationship that a pol has with her constituents, and not about "representation" as some sort of abstract, unchanging rulebook.  Thought of this way, what matters are the promises that pols make to voters: specific promises, such as a promise to reform or to protect Social Security, but even more importantly promises about representation, such as a promise to fight for one's state or ideology.  So if Crist claimed to be a strict conservative but then accepted stimulus money and hugged the president, that's a failure of representation -- but if he promised to fight for Florida regardless of the partisan consequences, then it's probably good, solid, representation.  Even if it's a position that Ross Douthat doesn't hold.  The same thing is true, in my view, of true partisan hacks.  If a pol basically promises to be blindly, unthinkingly loyal to the party above all else, and then carries that out in office, he's done what he said he would do -- and that's probably good, solid, representation.

Now, there is one accusation Douthat levels that I do think is a serious one: that Crist is a "time-server."   In fact, I think that's a reasonable charge against Arlen Specter.  Beyond his comical repositioning to enable him to win reelection (which is a lot of fun to ridicule, but I think can be defended on grounds of representation), I think Specter has remarkably little to show for his century or two in the Senate (not quite thirty years?  Go on, tell me another one).  If Crist really has nothing to show for his time in government, then that's a good reason to feel that he's no loss to the nation should his campaign collapse.  But if he's actually fought for the people of Florida, even if it was motivated purely as a means to the end of his own career...well, in my opinion, we can never have too many of that sort of politician.  Now, I have no idea which of these is true about Crist, and of course whether one votes for him is a whole 'nother kettle of fish -- for example, I'm a dead partisan, so I'm not voting for independents or candidates from the other party even if I think they're terrific pols.  But as far as the Republican Party being better off without Crist, I don't think that Douthat has made a convincing case so far.

Represent

E.D. Kain opposes DC Statehood on three grounds, against Andrew Sullivan's insistence on representation for the citizens of the District.  One, I think, is based on a misguided reading of the politics of statehood; the second is nothing more than a prejudice; and the third, based on principles, I think is wrong.  My main interest here is the third one, on representation, but I'll take them one by one.

First, he thinks that it would be an unfair advantage:

DC is at the very heart of the country’s power structure. It is the part-time residence of every one of our federal elected officials. While voters may indeed lack proper representation, giving DC the added clout of two Senators and a number of representatives, plus all the other perks that come from statehood, would vastly tip the scales in DC’s favor.

The problem with this theory is that the interests of Members of Congress as part-time and temporary residents of Congress often clash with the interests of the people who actually live in the District.   So if anything, permanent District residents are bound to be in worse shape, not better shape, than residents of Alaska or North Dakota if they want to govern themselves without Federal government influence.  This is easy to see, since the District is not currently (nor has it as far as I know ever been) a paradise overflowing with government spending or any other clout-derived benefits. 

Second, Kain doesn't like the idea of a city-state:

[I]f DC can be its own state based solely off of the size of its population, why shouldn’t other cities also become states? New York City has far more people than DC. Perhaps each of the Burroughs could become a state. 

Well -- why not?  Makes as much sense as having large mostly empty states, to me.   Obviously, for various historical reasons, the fifty states are what they are -- but there's no underlying logic or sense to them.   After all, prior to 1960 there were no states remotely like Alaska or Hawaii, but those have worked out just fine.    There's little question in my mind that current residents of the District think of themselves as citizens of a politically separate jurisdiction, certainly more so than people in "North Dakota" presumably thought prior to their statehood.   Thinking that a city can't be a state is just prejudice, not argument.

Third, Kain believes that there's a principle at stake here:

Then again, the representative system in this country was never meant to be entirely based on population. As with every other aspect of our government, our electoral system acts as a set of checks and balances. That may be frustrating, but it is what it is...This is why we have two bodies in Congress – the House and the Senate. Each state gets equal representation in the Senate, but not in the House. Granting DC statehood makes sense if we’re going to base our representative structure on population alone, but that’s not how this country works, and that isn’t likely to change any time soon.

Here's the thing about representation, something that is I think fairly little known: political representation is a really, really new idea, historically speaking.  For example, you won't find it in Shakespeare, because it hadn't really been invented yet.  By 1776 it was an established and recognized fact in England, but there was very little systematic thought about it yet (Burke's famous speech to the Electors of Bristol was in November, 1774)..  So in large part, the Framers were making it up as they went along; Madison's insights into democracy and representation were really very new, really original.  It wouldn't be surprising at all if their understanding of representation was not fully mature.  Folks back then thought that women didn't need to vote, and they had ideas about representation to support that notion, but they got that wrong -- and they got representation of arbitrary pieces of land wrong, too, to the extent they believed in it.  Anyway, as we know, the House/Senate distinction wasn't made on principle; it was a compromise forced on everyone by political necessity.  So while we're stuck with it, we don't have to embrace it as a virtue or a founding principle. 

The truth is that the American political system has rejected representation of places, not people, at every other stage of the political process, ever since the "one person, one vote" Court decisions of the early 1960s.  And as far as I can tell, everyone is pretty much OK with that in virtually every context.  No one is arguing that states would be better off -- more democratic -- if they had upper chambers apportioned by counties, not population.  The Senate is an unfortunate anachronism, one that we're stuck with, but not one that can be justified with any recognizably contemporary democratic theory.

(And don't even think about trying the old Reagan saw about the states creating the Federal government and not the other way around.  Perhaps 13 states could make that argument (against 37 the other way), but even there a map a 1770 Virginia isn't going to remind anyone too much of 2010 Virginia...and the Constitution is authored by We the People, not We the States).

None of this demands that representation of the citizens of the District can only be achieved through statehood, as opposed to the Maryland option. But Kain's arguments against statehood in principle strike me as wrong or misguided.   In reality, as with all statehood decisions, it comes down to political expediency, but in my view supporters have nothing to be embarrassed on the merits, certainly not the merits on democratic grounds, of DC statehood.

Forget Your Conscience

Marjorie Margolies is on everyone's mind this week (mine included), and she has an op-ed in the Washington Post today telling Dems to vote their conscience.  But her evidence isn't that she voted her conscience in her famous vote in 1993 -- it's that she voted her district.  Alas for her political career, her district didn't agree (in the short term), but her defense of her vote after all this time is entirely district-based:

Is it possible that, while 55 percent of my reliably Republican district opposed the Clinton budget, a vote in favor of that budget was, in fact, in the best interest of my district? Can a member of the House of Representatives ever vote with a minority of her district and still be voting in the district's best interest? Is it possible that a majority of your constituents could be -- dare I say it? -- wrong?
Of course -- and that's why you're there. Otherwise, we'd vote everything by referendum.
My constituents in Montgomery County, Pa. -- the ones so adamantly opposed to the legislation for which I became a cautionary tale -- reaped some of the greatest benefits during the years immediately after passage. 

There's no great principle here that she was fighting for.  If her conscience was involved, it was only telling her to do things that would help her district -- or to keep her campaign promises to help her district. 

That's OK!  If she promised her constituents that she would look after their economic well-being, then she was being a good representative if she believed she was doing exactly that -- she believed, and probably correctly, that she knew more about it than they did.  She may have believed that if they sat where she sat, they would vote the same way.  If that's what she promised, then that's good representation. 

More on Representation

After I said that politicians shouldn't try to do what's right -- instead, they should try to be good representatives -- Andrew Sullivan fired back:

The entire job of a politician is to discern what he or she thinks is right at any particular moment on any particular question. And of course they have a way of knowing what's right: it's called judgment and practical wisdom. For Jonathan to say that this is somehow not part of their role seems to miss a core part of human conduct and nature. 

I'll apologize right at the start for going on at some length here...it's a topic, as regular readers probably have noticed by now, in which I have quite a bit of interest.  I should also say that while I do lean here on theorists and empirical students of representation, this is a case where I'm certainly not, er, representing political scientists here (sorry). 

I certainly agree that politicians should use, as Andrew says, "judgment and practical wisdom."  The question, however, is to what purpose those human attributes are put.  For the writer, the banner "Of No Party Or Clique" is, in my view, an honorable one.  What writers owe to their readers is the truth as they see it, and they have no master but their own beliefs tempered by reality.

Not so for politicians elected to office in a democracy.  They do have masters -- they serve their constituents.  They are in office, as Hanna Pitkin says, to re-present those constituents: to make them present, even though they are not present.  In doing so, they are guided by the contract they have with their constituents, which is composed of the promises the politician made while campaigning for office.  Some of those are about public policy: I will oppose abortion.  I will support a public option.  Some are partisan: I will be a Democrat.  Or, I will be a Democrat, but I'll side with the district if there's a conflict. 

The most interesting promises to me, however, are about what type of representative a politician will be.  My favorite contrast is between two Senators from New York who served together, Al D'Amato and Daniel Patrick Moynihan.  D'Amato was "Senator Pothole."  He promised to look out for New York, whether it was finding every last dollar of pork, or seeing every foreign policy question strictly in terms of ethnic rivalries and loyalties within the Empire State.  Moynihan, on the other hand, was a "national" Senator.  New Yorkers expected him to weigh in on important issues of the day, whether it was the proper role of the CIA or how to make Social Security work better.  The idea here is that these two Senators promised very different types of governing -- not (only) in terms of their positions on the issues, but in how they go about representing their constituents. 

Now, given their promises, Moynihan had far more independence in his actions than did D'Amato.  His representational relationship with New Yorkers would allow him to stand with Burke when he said, "Your Representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgement; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion."  


But that doesn't make him a better representative than one who promised, and then delivered, specific votes.  Good representation, following Richard Fenno, is about having a strong representational relationship.  And (and here I'm on my own, I think) it is not for me, or Andrew, or Burke, or Pitkin to say what sorts of representation are best.  That's a matter for each individual elected official and his or her constituents to work out for themselves.  Moreover, I argue that the ability to do this, to make promises, interpret them, govern with those promises and future explanations in mind, to explain what one has done, and then campaign again, is the real skill of politicians.  Of course that takes judgment, and it certainly takes practical wisdom.  A particular kind of judgment, however -- political judgment that helps a pol know how public policy decisions are related to what they've promised.  

I think I'm being too abstract here...take a pro-life Democrat.  Take Bart Stupak, for that matter.  What exactly has he promised?  How central to his campaign was abortion?  Health care?  Did he promise to reduce abortions (in which case a strong argument could be made that supporting health care reform would do that), or did he promise, above all, to toe the line on right-to-life issues, in which case all that matters is what the bishops or other authorities say.  How do promises about health care reform rank against promises about abortion?  How has he said he would make decisions?  Has he promised to always listen to the district?  To hold town hall meetings?  To vote his conscience, regardless of the consequences?  To support the president?  To consider what's best for the district?  Each of these are different promises, and may very well point to different choices (and sometimes very difficult choices) for the representative, and almost certainly will point to different ways of explaining his actions.  


And, again, my point is that as long as a politician fulfills her promises, and explains what she's doing in a way that strengthens her constituents' trust in her, then she's a good representative.  That's as much as we can say, at least as far as evaluation is concerned. For Edmund Burke to be a good representative, he must do as he promised the electors of Bristol, and act as he thinks best.  For a representative who promises to slavishly follow the whims of her constituents, well, she must do exactly that to be a good representative.*  And I suppose what I'm saying is that for politicians, from their point of view, there is no "what's right" beyond good representation.  Excepting, of course, the cases in which a representative has promised only to do what she thinks is right, and is elected to do so (in which case...ready?...doing "what's right" is right not because it's right but because she's fulfilling her promises by so doing).  To get back to Saletan -- yes, sometimes good representatives will lose elections, because of course there's more to elections than how much constituents have come to trust their Members of Congress.  But to the extent that voters do reward their politicians for fulfilling (all kinds of) promises, doing the right thing means doing just that.  And in the long run, that should tend to be good politics.



*My favorite examples of promises are gender and ethnic promises, generally made by "firsts" to hold some particular office.  Sometimes, it seems as if that's the only promise such a candidate makes -- to "be" Jewish, or Polish, or African American, or female, or gay.  Breaking that promise could be a matter of wearing the wrong clothes or eating the wrong foods, much more so than any particular "wrong" vote one could cast.  Often, by the next generation, those descriptive traits -- while still just as much there as before -- are no longer the subject of promises.  There are other kinds of promises, too...how bound is Scott Brown to that pickup truck?

Hey, Pols: It's OK To Want Re-election

I'm talking about William Saletan's column this week in Slate in which he tells Democrats to do what they think is right regardless of the electoral consequences (I think he and I agree that those consequences are a lot harder to predict than Republicans seem to think, but I'm interested here in the theoretical points).  He makes two points, the first of which I tackled in a previous post.

OK, on to the second point.  Saletan, again, to Members of Congress:

From the standpoint of a campaign strategist, everything you do in Congress should aim at re-election. That's one reason why our government has become dysfunctional: Lawmakers spend less time completing the work they were assigned in the last election and more time preparing for the next one. They inflame or placate the public when they should be serving it. Elections were supposed to be a means to good legislation. Instead, legislation has become a means to election. The polling mentality has turned democracy upside down.

Saletan and plenty of others would say that politicians should do whatever is right, regardless of the consequences. He complains about what he calls "politicization of the legislative process," and that "this is too big a vote to cast on the basis of politics."  I'm sure this sounds correct to many people, but it really isn't.  The political scientist Richard Fenno writes about a representation as a process.  Politicians make promises when campaigning, then interpret those promises after the election, then govern, then explain to their constituents what they've done, and then go back and campaign again, and the cycle repeats.  When they govern, however, they do it with two things in mind: what they've promised (as they've interpreted it), and how they will explain what they're doing (in the context of those previous promises).  What Fenno describes is a smooth, continuous flow from one election, to governing, to the next election, as politicians try to build strong representative relationships with their constituents.  That doesn't mean polling the district on everything, but it does mean taking promises seriously, and trying to keep them -- whether they are substantive promises or style promises.  Democracy works, from this point of view, because politicians try hard to build those relationships -- they try hard, that is, to get re-elected.

To put it bluntly: Saletan and others would have politicians do what's right.  What I'm saying is that politicians have no way of knowing what's right.  They aren't trained for it.  They aren't selected for it.  And that's true whether one thinks of it in terms of policy that works, or in terms of what's ethically correct.  If you want the former, get rid of democracy and hire some technocratic experts; if you want the latter, go find yourself a philosopher-king, I suppose.


What we have is a democracy, which means we have politicians.  And what they know, or at least what they're trained and selected for, is representation.  The good ones know how to keep their promises to their constituents, how to act in Washington with an eye to what they said in the last election and what they'll need to say in the next one.  They work hard at figuring out what they're constituents want, learning to balance the kinds of things that show up in polls and the kinds of things that you only learn by really knowing your district, and studying important legislation with your district's needs and preferences in mind. 


Now, in my view, a Democratic Member of Congress who is trying to get re-elected will want the health care bill to pass, because that's going to help her win re-election.  More Fenno: he talks about different constituencies within one district, and Members of Congress are more responsive, for example, to those who voted from them than to those who opposed them, and to their strongest supporters more than to those who just vote for them.  And of course, for almost every Democrat in Congress, their strongest supporters want this bill to pass.  But a Member unconcerned about re-election wouldn't care about that.  He would be open-minded, and seek out neutral information, and follow that information wherever it took him.  But, since he's not actually an expert, the results would be fairly random -- despite what Saletan thinks, people are capable of sincerely believing that the health care bill is a bad idea.  For a Democratic Members of Congress to come to that conclusion and act on it, however, would be ruinous to them electorally, so they don't do that; what they do, instead, is try to represent their districts well so that they can be re-elected.

And that's what makes the system work.   The democratic system work.

Saletan and Representation

William Saletan has a piece out that I think is going to be very popular, but I also think is very wrong.  It's about the proper role of politicians; it's about representation, and democracy.  It's about, that is, important stuff.  And while I've seen others make the assertions that Saletan makes over the last few months, I think he has the full argument, so I'm going to dwell on it a fair amount, with a two-part response.

Before I start -- I can say on the plus side that I think Saletan is correct about the claims of Republicans (and Pat Caddell, whatever he is these days) about the public opinion polls.  It would be foolish to assume that the polls are a result of careful consideration of the health care bill, and foolish to assume that the polls about the bill, and especially just the top line numbers from the polls, are a good predictor of how people will feel about the bill six months, or six years, into the future. As I've said before, politicians will need to use their judgment on this one.

Now, however, I get to the main argument.  Saletan says:

Democracy isn't about doing what might sell in the next election. It's about doing what you promised in the last one. If you're in Congress, and if you think this bill is good for the country, vote for it. Even if it costs you your job.

There are actually two serious ideas here, and he develops them over the course of the piece.  One is that a politician should do what's right, not what's popular.  I'll take that on in a second post.  The other is about representation; Saletan believes that only Burkean "trustee" or "independence" representation is in accord with the Constitution. That's what this post is about.

Saletan, again, to Members of Congress:

Your job description is in the nation's founding documents. The Constitution specifies representative democracy, not direct democracy. The Declaration of Independence explains that to secure citizens' rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, "Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." The consent authorizes powers, not bills. And it precedes the exercise of those powers. Your job now is to use your powers wisely.

Yes, the Constitution does create a system of representative democracy, not direct democracy.  But how are those representatives supposed to decide?   The Constitution is silent about that.  We can suppose (and here I'm following Hanna Pitkin) that Saletan is correct at one extreme; if Members simply take a poll about everything and do whatever the poll tells them, then they're not really "representing" them.  But, Pitkin argues, the other extreme -- in which the elected official does whatever she wants, regardless of what the people say they want -- isn't really "representation" either.  For her, representation is a way of making present someone (the constituents) who aren't actually present.  And so they have to be with the politician, in some sense, but not completely overwhelming him.

The next step is where to draw that line, and for me the place to go for that is the political scientist Richard Fenno, who has made a career of following politicians around and listening to what they say, watching what they do.  What he finds, at least as I see it, is that what counts is the representational relationship developed between each politicians and her constituents.  Within that relationship are all sorts of promises about how a politician will act in office, and that's where one finds the answer to the question of where to draw the line.  It's not a universal answer (such as: "Elected officials should do what the voters want except in cases in which the pol is certain that the voters are wrong").  It's an answer that is specific to each representational relationship.  It can be simple ("we just trust her to do what's right" or "she does exactly what we want"), or it can be complex; Fenno writes about pols who had virtually no leeway at all on some issues, but could pretty much do whatever they wanted on others ("as long as I always vote pro-life and pro-gun, they really don't care what I do on foreign affairs").  (All quotes here are made-up, but not far from what one can find in Fenno's work, or from any observation of politicians).

So, I think Saletan is wrong to say that there's anything in the Constitution, or in the concept of representation, that specifies what kind of representative a Member of Congress should be.  What they should do is to keep their promises, whether they are substantive or style promises.  And for more of that, see the next post.