Presidential debate review: Obama v. Romney at Denver

Thursday morning (Australian Eastern Standard Time), Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and Mitt Romney (R-Mass.) went mano a mano in the first of three presidential debates, held at the University of Denver’s Magness Arena. My thoughts:

1) Obama sometimes stumbled with his words and looked ordinary, but he did much better in split-screen mode than Romney. When Romney is speaking, Obama looks down respectfully, whereas when Obama speaks, Romney gives him a slightly contemptuous look. But I agree with most commentators, who say that Romney was the winner on the basis that he exceeded expectations.

2) The gender gap was very noticeable on CNN’s ‘worm’ graphic; I don’t think I saw Romney leading among women or Obama leading among men for the entire (one-and-a-half-hour) debate. This fits into the whole ‘Republican War on Women’ narrative that the Democrats have been using this year.

3) What a pair of un-ideological technocrats the candidates are! ‘An independent study says my economic policies will reduce the budget deficit’. ‘I’ve got another independent study that says your independent study is wrong’. Whatever happened to this ideological rancour that the Very Serious People say is paralysing Washington?

4) The debate won’t be any sort of ‘game changer’ that wins the election for one of the candidates – it probably won’t shift the polls more than one percentage point either way. Romney’s slipperiness regarding which tax loopholes he plans to abolish to help balance the budget, however, is something which could spiral out of control for him. Without providing something resembling a detailed answer, the Obama campaign could keep hitting him and make him look evasive.

Corona the Vote!

My favourite recent bit of political news from across the Pacific comes in the form of this chart at The Monkey Cage, which shows the partisan preference and propensity to vote of drinkers of different types of beer. The key takeaways: Democrats tend to win among full-strength beers and Republicans among light beers, and my own preferred ale, Corona, leans Democratic but its consumers suffer from low turnout (possibly due to them being disproportionately Latino).

America the Unequal

In a recent series of posts at The Monkey Cage, Princeton political science professor Martin Gilens discussed the effects of economic inequality on political outcomes. The key findings of his research are that income levels can predict Americans’ policy preferences on about one-half of the issues he studies, and that elected officials overwhelmingly listen to their higher-income constituents; indeed, they generally only pay attention to lower-income Americans at election time.

Gilens finds that wealthier Americans lean to the left on social issues (especially religiously-charged ones such as abortion) and to the right on economic issues. The issues on which rich and poor Americans agree include defence policy, environmental protection, and social issues less tied to religion (such as drugs, parental leave, and neo-liberal restructuring of welfare policy). The federal government is never as responsive to the policy preferences of lower-income groups as it is to those of higher-income ones, but the gap is lessened during closely-contested presidential election campaigns. (Note that he specifies presidential elections – midterms are decided by an older, whiter, and richer electorate.) Naturally, parties tend to the interests of the core supporters when they can, except when the threat of electoral defeat disciplines them into appealing to a broader base. However, this levelling doesn’t last, and the later years of a president’s term see the policy preferences of the elites rise again in importance.

The most striking part of Gilens’ findings is that the influence of wealthier Americans is not due to their education, civic awareness, work on campaigns, willingness to contact representatives, or more intense preferences about the issues. After controlling for these factors, they still have much more influence; politicians simply heed their concerns because of their money. A person in the ninetieth percentile in terms of income but only the tenth percentile in terms of education has the same influence on their representatives as someone in the fiftieth income percentile and the ninetieth education percentile. Likewise, turnout and work on political campaigns correlate with income levels, but political donations rise rapidly with increased income. All this suggests that efforts to reform American democracy by encouraging such things as voter registration, voter turnout, and fair redistricting are doomed to fail unless the question of money in politics is addressed head-on.

In his third post, Gilens makes perhaps the most important observation: that in modern-day American politics, money is increasingly more effective than other resources. He uses the example of television advertising, which requires more money and fewer warm bodies than, say, door-to-door canvassing. I would add that the decline of patronage has had a similar effect; without the lure of a government job afterwards, there are fewer rewards for participating in a political campaign, with the result that modern campaigns look less plebeian than those of previous eras. (Compare the rustic, backwoods feel of Andrew Jackson’s support with the iPad-using bourgeois hipster demographic which propelled Obama into office.) In both cases, the process has been helped along by the Supreme Court; its conservative wing has been hostile to campaign finance reform (eg. Buckley v. Valeo and Citizens United) while its liberal wing dealt the final blows to old-school patronage politics in cases such as Elrod v. Burns (which barred the firing of political appointees for political reasons) and Rutan v. Republican Party of Illinois (which prevented officials from denying government contracts to companies which donated to their opponents). It is no wonder, then, that the class of people who fund the television ads and whose Ivy League-educated ‘best and brightest’ staff the campaigns and the permanent bureaucracy are the only Americans who matter to politicians.

Gilens’ work gels with that of Larry Bartels, who shows (in Unequal Democracy) that the votes of members of Congress reflect the policy preferences of the top one-third of income-earners. Another interesting analysis of what drives Americans’ political views is that of Bryan Caplan, a denizen of the über-libertarian economics faculty at George Mason University. Caplan (in his 2006 book The Myth of the Rational Voter) compares economists and non-economists, and after controlling for race, income, and ideology, finds that economists’ support for free market policies are merely a function of their superior knowledge of economics. To that end, he suggests various measures to increase their political influence: extra votes, an economic equivalent of the Supreme Court to strike down anti-free market legislation, and the delegation of fiscal policy decisions to the Fed. Where Caplan goes wrong is evident in his title – even if lower-income Americans support protectionist and welfare-statist economic policies at the ballot box once every four years, it is the policy preferences of their affluent compatriots which politicians heed in the intervening years.

Gilens’ findings paint a disturbing portrait of a nation increasingly in the grip of a narrow, plutocratic elite. But what can be done to make the United States government better reflect the policy preferences of the 99%, instead of those of the elites?

First, as Gilens suggests, sometimes needs to be done about the power of money in American politics. A constitutional amendment overturning the Supreme Court’s decisions in Buckley v. Valeo and Citizens United is necessary, and should be followed up by a federal campaign finance scheme such as the ‘democracy vouchers’ proposed by Bruce Ackerman.

Second, in order to make warm bodies count for as much as cold hard cash, the spoils system should be revived. In the nineteenth century, it allowed ordinary Americans to hold offices that the Federalist/Whig gentry had tried to monopolise and treat as their personal property. At the state and local levels, patronage helped the Irish, Italian, Jewish, and Polish poor of America’s cities to capture a share of power, integrate into American society, and launch themselves into the middle class; its demise has prevented African-Americans and Latino/as from doing the same. The enthusiasm for a meritocratic civil service was historically driven by anglophile northeastern WASPs, who calculated (correctly) that government jobs would come to be dominated by themselves. Apart from positions that are merely clerical or administrative in nature, all civilian federal employees should be political appointees subject to dismissal on political grounds. The proposal advanced in the 1840s and 1850s by future President Andrew Johnson, that they be subject to an eight-year term limit, might also be adopted. Parties should be able to collect a percentage of their appointees’ salaries, lessening the need to go cap-in-hand to hedge fund billionaires for funding.

Third, the structure of the federal government could be reformed to promote a less plutocratic politics. If elections make politicians more responsive to the policy preferences of lower-income Americans, let’s have more elections and more elective offices. Some ideas:

*shorter Senate terms and an end to its malapportionment in favour of sparsely-populated, non-urban, white-dominated states;

*separate elections for the heads of executive departments, as is the case to varying extents in all fifty states (would the 2008 electorate have elected a Wall Street insider like Timothy Geithner as Treasury Secretary?);

*elections for the federal judiciary (historically, merit selection of judges has been implemented at state level at the behest of corporate interests outraged at the election of pro-labour and minority judges);

*elections for federal regulatory bodies (authorities such as the FTC, FCC, SEC, NLRB, and Federal Reserve are rendered toothless and subject to institutional capture due to the behind-closed-doors appointment process; twelve states elect public utility regulators, and the adoption of the practice at federal level would force the likes of Ben Bernanke to justify their policies to the electorate).

With this package of institutional reforms, the government of the United States could once again be one of the people, by the people, and for the people.

The Kosovo Precedent

(Also posted at the United States Studies Centre blog.)

In the diplomatic negotiations that followed the First World War, Woodrow Wilson ushered in a new era in international relations by committing the United States to supporting the right of national self-determination. That principle still plays some role in the formulation of U.S. foreign policy, but its application has been inconsistent. A more forceful defence of self-determination might win America more respect around the world.

In the 1950s, Eritreans were told by John Foster Dulles to put their national aspirations on hold, as Ethiopia was an American ally whose sovereignty over part of the Red Sea coast was crucial to control of the world’s arterial water routes. A similar situation presented itself in the 1970s, when Washington backed Pakistan’s control of its rebellious eastern region (now Bangladesh). And in August 1991, the elder President Bush delivered the ‘Chicken Kiev speech’, in which he warned the peoples of the Soviet Union, some of whom had spent centuries under Russian domination, to think twice before adding new names to the General Assembly roll call. Even Wilson himself was not immune: his closeness to Britain during Ireland’s struggle for independence had devastating consequences for his party at the 1920 elections. On occasions such as these, realpolitik has made the United States the defender of regimes trying to put down revolts within their borders (and an unsuccessful one – Eritrea, Bangladesh, Ukraine, and Ireland all won their independence in the end).

The 2008 decision of the U.S. (and its allies) to recognise the independence of Kosovo, and its support for South Sudan’s separation in 2011, were thus something of a break with the practice of recent decades, whereby the U.S. has leant toward preserving existing national borders (a principle known in international law as uti possidetis juris). The results of these decisions can be seen in the politics of places such as Iraq and Bosnia-Herzegovina, where mélanges of warring of ethnic groups who would undoubtedly be happier living apart are forced into complex power-sharing arrangements. The cases of peaceful secession (such as Slovakia’s ‘velvet divorce’ from the Czechs or Montenegro’s split from Serbia) are overshadowed by the fear of ‘balkanisation’.

The recognition of Kosovo was quickly denounced by Russia, which backs separatist rebels in regions such as Abkhazia and South Ossetia (in Georgia) and Transnistria (in Moldova). In the intervening years, the Kremlin has become more assertive about the issue, and has used its veto on the Security Council to prevent Kosovo’s acceptance into the UN. Its official recognition of the two breakaway Georgian regions explicitly cited the Kosovo precedent, and some have speculated that it will allow for the normalisation of Kosovo’s status only in exchange for the West doing the same for Abkhazia or South Ossetia.

In the early days of the Cold War, American talk of human rights abuses in the Soviet Union was characteristically dismissed with the retort ‘and you are lynching Negroes’. Today, Moscow defends its support for its client states with a similar comeback: ‘and you are recognising Kosovo’ (shamelessly ignoring the hypocrisy of its own stance on Chechnya). Just as the mid-1960s victories of the civil rights movement allowed the U.S. to regain the high moral ground and force the world’s attention onto the human rights records of its enemies, Washington might consider the benefits of granting recognition to more aspirant states: not just in the Caucasus, but places such as Palestine, Somaliland, and Northern Cyprus. The downside of such a shift might be a thaw in relations with countries like Georgia, but the potential upside is worth thinking about: the U.S. would be seen as supporting self-determination everywhere, not just for regions and peoples with whom it is allied; indeed, it would find new allies among the beneficiaries of its neo-Wilsonian stance.

Thoughts on Paul Ryan

1) Romney has done what he needed to do – not choose another Sarah Palin. Most American political observers seem to subscribe to the Game Change narrative of the 2008 election, in which John McCain threw away any chance of winning by an impulsive and desperate choice of running mate. This narrative has its faults (i.e. it overlooks the fact that it wasn’t the Republicans’ year regardless of who was on the ticket, and feeds into the conservative narrative that America is a ‘centre-right country’ and therefore Obama’s election was some sort of temporary aberration), but conventional wisdom is often at variance with the facts. As one of the Very Serious People adored by the professional centrists/bipartisans/post-partisans in Manhattan and D.C., Ryan won’t be treated with the same class- and gender-inflected contempt that Palin was.

2) For those keeping track of the religious and ethnic affiliations of presidential and vice-presidential candidates, Ryan will be the eighth Catholic on a major-party ticket, the second Catholic on the Republican ticket (after Barry Goldwater tapped William E. Miller in 1964), the fifth Catholic vice-presidential nominee (after Miller, Sargent Shriver, Geraldine Ferraro, and Joe Biden), the seventh Irish-American on a major-party ticket, and the third Irish-American running mate (after Miller and Biden). He is also partly of German-American heritage; I believe he is the first to appear on a major-party ticket since Eisenhower’s re-election in 1956 (Walter Mondale was nicknamed ‘Fritz’, but was actually Norwegian-American). Thus, we have the first presidential election ever in which none of the four major-party nominees is a white Protestant.

3) Choosing a sitting member of the House is certainly unusual – apart from the sui generis case of then-Minority Leader Gerald Ford’s double elevation, the last House members to be elected President and Vice-President respectively were James Garfield (R-OH) in 1880 and John Nance Garner (D-TX) in 1932. From the Republicans’ perspective, it makes sense. Ryan can only do so much as Budget Committee chair, there are other young talents (such as Eric Cantor) blocking his path to the Speakership, and Wisconsin doesn’t provide any Senate openings in the near future. By nominating him for V-P, even if the ticket loses, he would have to be pencilled in as the favourite for the presidential nomination in 2016; the intervening four years having been spent developing credentials on foreign policy and social issues to match his economic ones.

Thoughts on the Chick-Fil-A Controversy

1) The cities of Chicago and Boston would not be violating any law or constitutional provision, as far as I am aware, if they were to refuse to grant planning permission to a Chick-Fil-A outlet based on the political beliefs of the company’s President. States and their subdivisions (which include municipalities) have wide latitude under the Tenth Amendment to use their police power (which includes planning and licensing); the only barrier would be an Illinois or Massachusetts state law limiting what actions the city can take.

2) There are plenty of historical precedents for corporations being targeted for special regulation on account of their owners’ political activities. Companies which did business with Nazi Germany had assets seized and fines imposed under the Trading with the Enemy Act, and France’s state-owned rail company, SNCF, can’t bid for a contract to operate on California’s proposed high-speed rail network because its trains were commandeered by the Vichy Regime to transport French Jews to the death camps; California law requires companies doing business with the state to disclose any involvement in the Holocaust. There are also various federal laws governing industrial relations which deny access to arbitration by the NLRB to labour unions led by communists.

3) As a writer at the Nation has noted, the fact that the corporation donates money to anti-gay organisations means that this is not about the First Amendment rights of Chick-Fil-A’s President. Those who defend Chick-Fil-A are defending corporate personhood.

4) Denying planning permission to build an outlet of a fast food chain somewhere is not a violation of anyone’s rights. Glenn Greenwald poses a few hypothetical examples in this Salon piece to illustrate the dangers that would ensue if Congress were to criminalise the spending of money to advocate liberal causes. They aren’t relevant, because no-one is proposing sending the President of Chick-Fil-A to jail (or depriving him of any civil rights) for his views; planning permission to build a chicken franchise is an entitlement, not a right.

(Don't) Hail to the Chief

Of all the constitutions enacted by the thirteen colonies upon their emergence from British rule, the most democratic was that of Pennsylvania. Its features included a unicameral legislature elected annually, a plural executive consisting of one member elected from each county and possessing no powers to veto or initiate laws, a Council of Censors elected every seventh year to investigate corruption and propose constitutional amendments, and an extensive bill of rights. It made no pretensions to establishing a separation of powers – the legislature was clearly dominant over the other branches, a natural reaction to the pre-1776 colonial authorities’ control of the executive and judiciary. Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin helped to create the constitution and vigorously defended it, while the elite classes across the fledgling United States were horrified, preferring the scheme described in John Adams’ Thoughts on Government, which provided for an upper house and a governor to check the will of the lower house.

The preference for a weak executive was due to the influence of Country Party political thought in the American colonies. After the mercantile classes took power in England with the Glorious Revolution in 1688, they set about using the public purse to fund the development of capitalism. They established the Bank of England, passed enclosure laws to dispossess poor farmers, and stepped up the colonisation of North America and India. To keep the money flowing, the Crown needed an ally who could command the support of the House of Commons, and thus control its traditional right to initiate supply bills; thus, the informal post of Prime Minister, usually synonymous with that of First Lord of the Treasury, came into existence. Country Party ideology developed in opposition to the domination of the legislature by the executive, which it viewed as a recipe for enriching the Crown and the City of London at the expense of the people. To Americans in 1776, the legislature was synonymous with democracy and economic equality, while a powerful executive meant tyranny and mercantilism.

In the years between 1776 and the Constitutional Convention, colonial legislatures passed laws which threatened the privileges of the elites. Primogeniture was outlawed, preventing the emergence in the United States of a hereditary aristocracy, paper money was issued to redress economic inequalities and assist poor farmers and labourers in paying their debts, and land was confiscated from Loyalists. The Articles of Confederation, which came into force in 1781, replicated Pennsylvania’s preference for legislative supremacy, and lacking a single executive, the Congress divided executive authority among a plethora of committees. The elite backlash against the radical-democratic political culture of post-revolutionary America culminated in Philadelphia in 1787, where a constitution providing for an unelected Senate, President, and federal judiciary was presented to the nation.

Across the Atlantic, the spirit of Pennsylvania in 1776 was keenly felt by the partisans of the French Revolution. A series of constitutional proposals littered the years between 1789 and 1793, providing for constitutional monarchies, upper houses, British-style cabinets, and other anti-democratic devices. The Montagnards rejected all these in favour of making the executive subordinate to the legislature. In practice, they used their control of the National Convention to sideline the ministerialist Executive Council in favour of a Committee of Public Safety. Although this body was dominated, with tragic consequences, by the personality of Robespierre, its purpose was to turn the executive branch into a mere committee of the legislature. In their constitutional theory, the Montagnards designed a model of legislative supremacy – the proposed constitution of 1793, in which the relationship between the legislative and executive branches was modelled on that of Pennsylvania. The preference of French radicals for legislative supremacy (known as the régime d’assmblée or régime conventionnel) was again exhibited in the Paris Commune (famously described by Marx as “a working, not a parliamentary body”) and the first Constituent Assembly of 1946.

The propertied men who drafted the Constitution sometimes let their guard down about the anti-populist intent of their document. In Federalist No. 10, James Madison assures readers that the “rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project” generated by legislative supremacy would be blocked under his design. At the convention, he proposed a ‘Council of Revision’ with the power to veto laws, consisting of the President and a number of Supreme Court justices, the effect of which would be to harness the power of the other two branches to combat the legislature. The undemocratic features of the constitution were mostly ironed out – the Senate, controlled by the Slave Power and then Wall Street throughout the nineteenth century, became elective, and the Supreme Court moved away from its historic role as the protector of Loyalist gentry (Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee), cosy academic elites (Dartmouth v. Woodward), and corporations (Lochner v. New York), to become a champion of individual liberty (Roe v. Wade, Miranda v. Arizona, etc.). The presidency, though it has come to be elected on a democratic basis (notwithstanding Electoral College malapportionment), has usurped the democratic legitimacy which should rightfully lie in the legislative branch.

In the early decades of the republic, Americans were in no doubt that the will of the people resided in Congress (particularly in its popularly-elected House of Representatives), and that the President’s role was to merely execute its laws, though he was granted some leeway in conducting foreign policy and using his veto pen to stop pork-barrelling or the passage of clearly unconstitutional laws. Beginning, arguably, with Andrew Jackson, the idea of the presidential mandate began to develop, and the direct election of presidential electors gave Presidents the democratic legitimacy to position themselves as tribunes of the masses, in opposition to the local interests represented in Congress. With the increase in the size and power of the federal government, and the increased media attention on presidential elections, the ‘chief magistrate’ gradually assumed the mantle of ‘Leader of the Free World’. The question posed by John Jay to George Washington during Shay’s Rebellion (‘shall we have a monarchy?’) has been answered in the affirmative.

The modern U.S. President can veto laws duly passed by Congress for whatever reason, declare parts of them inoperable with a signing statement, and impound funds which they require to be spent. He can initiate military action, restrained only by the War Powers Act, whose constitutionality is dubious. Then there’s the abuses of power – Watergate, Iran-Contra, Fast-and-Furious-gate. The counterpoint to the imperial presidency is the personal invective levelled at Presidents. The rise of ‘birtherism’ during the Obama Administration is not a new or unusual phenomenon: Martin van Buren was said by his opponents to engage in orgies in the White House, Lincoln was apparently ‘Abraham Africanus’ whose presidency would lead to miscegenation, and Chester A. Arthur was singled out for his supposed Canadian birth. The personal nature of the office invites critics of its occupant to forgo policy-based criticisms in favour of personal invective.

The existence of a presidency elected separately from the legislature has many adverse consequences for American politics. By strengthening the effects of Duverger’s Law, it inhibits the growth of third parties. The desire of Presidents to be seen to be above the partisan fray retards the growth of strong political parties and encourages the selection of cross-party running mates (which, in turn, leads to unexpected changes in party control of the White House when a John Tyler or an Andrew Johnson succeeds to the nation’s highest office). Most importantly, the presidency encourages Americans to think of themselves as dutiful servants of an elected monarch. MSNBC host Chris Matthews’ recent request that Obama “give us our orders” illustrates perfectly how individual agency is suppressed in favour of deference to the Commander-in-Chief. Americans have come to see the presidency as the focus of all political power – liberals greet every new Democratic administration with dreams of a re-run of FDR’s first hundred days, while conservatives want the Oval Office to be filled by a macho figure who’ll make ‘No Apology’ for torture, the Patriot Act, or American exceptionalism.

Amazingly, some Americans want to replace the imperial presidency with a parliamentary system, which would remove all traces of independence from Congresspeople who would be obliged to support their party’s government (or oppose that of the other party). The prominent advocates of parliamentarism (such as Carter Administration official Lloyd Cutler, blogger Matt Yglesias, or, most famously, Woodrow Wilson) want the legislative branch to surrender more aspects of policy-making to the executive. The increasing presidentialisation of the office of prime minister in parliamentary countries shows that such a change wouldn’t rein in the bonapartiste nature of the presidency, and the reverence for the Westminster system among American parliamentarists (as opposed to the world’s numerous parliamentary republics) suggests that their preferences are grounded in the anglophilia of America’s coastal elites.

The United States would benefit from a rediscovery of the constitutional principles of the post-revolutionary era: the primacy of the legislative branch, short terms of office (Benjamin Franklin: “where annual elections end, tyranny begins”), the undemocratic nature of malapportioned upper houses, and the danger to liberty posed by an executive with a greater popular mandate than individual legislators.