Say What?
Posted on April 20th, 2008
by Daniel Larison |
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In 2004, torture and beheadings were the norm in Iraq and America was still stunned by the bloated bodies floating through flooded New Orleans [bold mine-DL]. ~Michael Crowley
Now I know that some parts of New Orleans weren’t exactly a picnic before Katrina, but I’m pretty sure the flooding and the general disaster took place in the summer of ‘05 following Mr. Bush’s re-election. What’s strange about this is that Katrina wasn’t that long ago, but all of the failures of the Bush administration are here being shoved into the first term, as if to drive home the perversity of Bush’s re-election. As much as I agree with much of Crowley’s article, this jumped out at me as not just obviously wrong, but bizarrely so. After all, who could forget when Katrina hit New Orleans?
It would make the argument that voters care more about character than issues (a generalisation I endorse, by the way) much stronger if you could show that the public ignored both the folly of Iraq and the disaster of the government’s post-Katrina response and put Bush back in office, except that the first time that Americans went to the polls for federal elections after Katrina was in 2006. Don’t get me wrong–there was more than enough incompetence in the first term to prove the point that a majority will back a terrible incumbent on “character.” The picture is complicated a bit by the fact that Bush won re-election by one of the smallest margins for a sitting President on record, but he did still win when he had no business doing so.
In presidential elections, I do think character tends to trump issues, and this is something that I don’t like admitting, because it makes the worst parts of politics–the “atmospherics,” the trivia, the obsession with biography–into the most important parts, while the things most important to governing are given short shrift. This is a reminder that most of the people complaining most loudly that the media is ignoring “the issues” and focusing on trivia are really just saying that they want to hear about “the issues” to the exclusion of everything else, which makes them unlike a large number of voters. (This also makes clear that when journalists claim that this kind of trivia matters to the public, they aren’t just engaged in self-serving rhetoric.) No one can explain why McCain and Huckabee were the most viable Republican candidates if we believe that “issues” are decisive and take precedence–one candidate had no “issues” except the “surge,” and the other one had the FairTax and that was about it. The biggest failure among the major GOP candidates was the ueber-wonk who was thrilled at the prospect of laying out his policy proposals in PowerPoint format. It’s true that there are “issues”-oriented voters, quite a few of them, but they are consistently outnumbered by the others.
Filed under: politics
Agree, unfortunately. Here’s a question from the peanut gallery. Are candidates comfortable with complexity (such as Obama, definitely, and Romney, maybe) damned as elitists partly because they don’t think in one-note sound bites? If a JFK came along — witty, well-educated, and smart — would he have to dumb himself down to become acceptable to the populace today? And if so, why now and not then?
I don’t think it’s a bad thing that people vote based on the personal character of the candidates. The problem is that people often don’t get the character of the candidates right – not because they are stupid, necessarily, but because modern candidacies have become incredibly good at making bad characters seem good.
Bush II is an excellent case in point. He was sold as a straight-talking no-nonsense blue-collar cowboy with good sense and no desire to make an radical changes in the US or the world. In reality he was a blue-blood elitist, a dry-drunk radical with no basic sense himself and easily swayed by influential advisors into embarking on messianic vision-quests. Oh, well.
I don’t think people are wrong to want someone who’s a genuinely sensible, down to earth character opposed to radical changes, it’s just that they have a hard time telling who’s who. But issues don’t change things much either. Bush certainly took stands on the issues in 2000 that seemed to back up his character claims. He was against interventions in foreign countries, against nation-building – you know the litany. So maybe people are feeling a little burned right now, which is why they may be giving Obama a break on these remarks, and on his overal elitist attitudes. They think in spite of all that, that he’s a pretty good bloke, with a basic degree of common sense.
The real problem in politics isn’t issues vs. character, but the ancient problem of knowing who to trust in either respect. I think McCain got the nomination because Republicans felt that at least he seemed trustworthy, unlike Romney. He may only have had one issue, the surge, but at least he seemed to really believe in it, rather than merely taking a stance for political purposes (again, like Romney). If McCain had been against the surge (and the war in general), not only would he have still been the Republican nominee, he might have been the Democratic nominee as well.
Likewise, Obama clearly appeals on character issues, but if he’d been for the war he would have had no chance at all. Some issue really do matter, and in this election the war really, really matters.