milopa's blog

As health care reform lurches around the last corner, there is increasing evidence that voters care more about the process of reform than its substance. Voters want elected officials who focus on solving problems, who are honest and who are strong. We do not want those who publicly hem and haw, who try to cut deals or finesse, or who appear to be more concerned with elections than with solutions.

A new poll and memo from the Berenson Group via Politico finds (among many other things):

“Among both groups [Democrats and Independents], dissatisfaction is not focused on the broad outlines and goals of the Democratic agenda. Instead, it centers squarely on perceptions of a breakdown in the legislative process, exemplified by deal-cutting and special deals for the constituents of key swing Senators….

Independents’ concerns about health care reform are not about specific provisions in the bills passed by the Senate or House, but instead reflect concerns about reforms’ stagnation and the backroom deal-cutting…

49% were bothered that “Democrats in Congress didn’t show the strong leadership necessary to push a bill through Congress.”

We don’t want the perfect bill with the perfect solution. We want Congress to act in the interest of the nation.

One of the adults who played a major, positive force in my childhood was a guy named Russ Loller. Russ was (among other things) a cop. He sometimes wore a t-shirt with a picture of a police badge and that read “P.I.G. – Pride, Integrity, Guts.” Those are attributes we look for in all people on whom we rely. We want our bosses at work, our police officers on the street, and our elected officials in Washington to be brave enough to do the right thing – even if we disagree with what that thing is.

Members of Congress who are still undecided on the health care bill out of concern for their electoral future (especially those who are undecided now and who voted “yes” last fall) should take note the poll results and learn from my old friend Russ.

As they say on the playground, go hard or go home.

Voters hate to be played for suckers, and we will act against our own self-interests to punish someone we think is acting unfairly. (Footnote fans can see for example here and Stealth Democracy, both by Prof. John Hibbing).

These instincts are on display in the current health care debate – some of the most successful Republican attacks are those that complain of back room deals and closed-door meetings. It is worth recalling that Senator Brown (R-MA) effectively killed health care reform the day he was sworn in – yet as a state legislator he voted for a health care reform bill that was more liberal than the legislation his election tanked. Senator Brown’s election had little to do with the substance of legislation and a lot to do with how Washington is seen as producing that substance.

With this in mind, I offer some unsolicited advice for those participating in Thursday’s health care meeting with the President.

Don’t Rant. Ranting makes you look like you’re more interested in making a point than in solving a problem. Americans hire elected officials to solve problems, we hire pundits to rant. If you want to rant get a TV or radio show, if you want to lead stop ranting.

Agree. Surely there are points of agreement – agree to them. A handful of professional ranters and their fans aside, no one thinks that Democrats or Republicans have a monopoly on good ideas or that the other side is pure evil, plain and simple.

Admit to Agreement. As a corollary to the previous suggestion, if you’ve supported something in the past, support it now or provide a rational explanation as to why you changed your mind. The numbers of ideas that both sides have embraced and disowned is stunning. Senator Lieberman was for expanding Medicare before he was against it, Senator Grassley supported an individual mandate to buy health insurance before he opposed it.

Don’t Aha!. As a corollary to the previous suggestion(s), don’t engage in Aha! politics. The President and Democratic leaders should not waive around transcripts of Fox News interviews and scream “but aren’t these your words, on your network, didn’t we just trap you like a fox in a box?!” That looks, and is, petty. It also doesn’t make anyone confess and result in a Pauline Conversion – it makes them defensive and push back. Instead, ask good questions and listen respectfully to the answers. Keep handing the opposition rope, they’ll do the rest.

Americans want health care reform. Survey after survey finds they (we) like most of the elements of even the liberal Democratic bills. Americans also want leadership that appears to be, and is, honest and forthright. And they (we) will punish elected officials who are seen as school-boy bullies, cheaters, or weak followers. Anyone who wants to win in November will increase their chances by supporting health care reform and behaving like adults. Abandoning either reform or adult behavior will lower the odds of re-election.

I was recently a guest on the The Alyona Show on the English language Russian television network RT discussing the retirement of Indiana Democratic Senator Evan Bayh. You can watch the conversation here.

It may be the only televised discussion of the Senator's retirement that draws on both Winnie the Pooh and the work of University of Nebraska political scientist John Hibbing.

A student at George Washington University recently asked my advice on encouraging undergraduates to fill out census forms. Her argument was students live in DC most of the year and as such would benefit from filling out the forms here rather than having their parents fill out the forms in their home states. She also argued that GW students are public service minded, and filling out the census form is a civic duty.

My advice was a bit different: ignore the students.

She should certainly encourage student leaders to encourage their constituents to fill out the forms, but those folks are both in the minority and don’t need much encouragement. The problem is reaching the vast majority who are not in student government or work at the school paper.

While completing the census may technically be public service it’s not terribly compelling. When most of us think of public service we think of building houses or delivering meals, not filling a form, no matter how important that form may be.

Those with the most to gain by increasing the population of Washington DC are not the students, most of whom will be gone by the time the data works its way into federal funding formulas. Those with the most to gain are the staff, administrators and professors at the university. They are the ones with students in public schools, who commute on local roads and ride the Metro. As such a good approach is to get faculty to encourage students to fill out the forms. Faculty often have more persuasive power than other students do (not as much power as we’d like, but power none the less). Faculty can also make a different kind of argument to a captive audience; rather than encourage students to fill out forms out of a sense of duty or for the promise of benefits they may or may not be around to see, the faculty can argue the students should fill out the forms for the benefit of the faculty member’s family. Most students have at least one professor they feel close to, whose kids they know about and whose lives they feel a part of. Filling out a census form as part of that relationship has a different persuasive appeal.

The other efforts should of course continue – competitions pitting fraternity and sorority houses against each other, working with the athletic department to pit teams against each other, handing out raffle tickets to students who prove they’ve filled out a form, using proof of filling out a form as admission to an event, and so forth. But running directly at the students only gets you so far, smoke and mirrors plus a little guilt can work a bit. But by taking the focus off the students can find a new way to reach them.

A game theoretic glance at the health care reform debate in the Senate offers lessons for advocates.

Attempts at successful persuasion need to take into account how people make decisions – not just what messages or messengers decision makers find compelling, but how those messages are strategically weighed. Decisions are not made in a vacuum; decisions are made in the context of something else. And, as I keep on about, people are not purely rational decision makers, carefully adding up expected utilities and carefully measuring options. We’re bears of little brains who muddle through the best we can.

One way to examine this muddling through is through the lens of game theory. (Think Professor John Nash in A Beautiful Mind). Game theory conceives of the world as a series of games – given an option, how will two or more people rationally respond? A disadvantage of game theory is that is tends to assume strictly rational behavior, something in which none of us engage; any theory of behavior with roots in mathematics will fall short because most of us are bad at math. But the tool can help advocates understand why some decisions are, or are not, being made and potentially how to force decisions in preferred directions.

A recent piece by Christopher Beam in Slate, The Senator’s Dilemma: What game theory can teach us about the fate of health care reform is an example of such an explanation. The essay looks at incentives and disincentives to Senate behavior and tries to explain the fate of health care using two games, the classic “prisoners dilemma” and “the battle of the sexes.” In both games the players want a mutually beneficial outcome, but the immediate or obvious course of action results in one, or both, not getting what they want.

The prisoner’s dilemma is not an ideal fit for political decision making because the preferred outcome benefits both players, but that is rarely the case in politics. As I wrote earlier this week, elections are zero-sum games for the participants. There is no “win/win” at the polls (as there is in prisoners dilemma).

The battle of the sexes is less elegant but more applicable. The game provides cautions about trying to get bi-partisan support (unless both husband and wife agree to go to an opera about boxing or a football game). What one wants necessarily denies what the other wants. There is no such thing as a sort of public option, or semi-mandates. A better strategy for both the spouses (and the Senate) is to find a third thing that is so far uncontested – find a place where there is no conflict, but that leaves open the option for conflict later. In this way both parties can work together to solve a problem while continuing to fight to deny the other political advantage. Common ground on health care would leave open the option to engage in partisan attacks on jobs for example.

This new ground may be less than ideal, but it doesn’t require giving up previously claimed gains; the solution might only be 80% of what each side wants, but in getting that 80% neither was required to give up 20%. In the battle of sexes example, one could imagine leaving the opera at intermission and seeing the second half of the game, which requires both sides giving up a lot. Another solution is to go to the beach – neither spouses first choice, but it requires neither partner to surrender either.

Advocates are better off seeking common ground than compromise.

A good compromise is one that creates a shared outcome. The assumption of compromise is that both sides have to give a little to get a little. This works in relationships because in a successful marriage there isn’t a victor and a vanquished but rather people who have to figure out how to succeed together. The reward for successful compromise is the continuation of the relationship itself.

Common ground is different; the assumption is that the parties find a new, uncontested, thing on which to agree. This holds open the possibility of compromise or conflict later, and doesn’t require either person to give anything up.

In our system elections are not relationships, they are conflicts. Elections have a victor and a vanquished (and voters often feel like victims). Elected officials who give something up for a shared gain face opponents and voters who demand full fealty to a position; a greater general gain can result in a specific electoral loss – that itself can result in an undoing of the original deal.

An additional electoral challenge to compromise (and common ground) results from the zero-sum nature of elections. If a deal is struck that is good, someone will try to take the credit; if the deal appears bad there will be attempts to assign blame. In elections, someone wins and someone loses.

These challenges are playing out in the health care reform and jobs debates in Washington. Everyone wants to get something done – no one thinks that the jobless rate is okay or that the health care system is in fine shape – but everyone also faces an electoral need to be seen to have won the solution. Republicans want to fix what’s broken and be able to say they are the ones who made it happen and should thus be rewarded in November. Democrats have the same goal, as does the President. Wins cannot be shared. To argue that politics should be otherwise misses the point that politics is political – in our system people win and people lose.

Seen in this light, advocates are better off seeking common ground, a shared political space from which elected officials can later disagree. For example, those who believe taxes should be cut and those who want to expand social services can find common ground on balancing the budget first; without a balanced budget taxes can’t be cut and more money can’t be spent on social programs. Those who support and oppose capital punishment can find common ground in doing all they can to prevent the execution of the innocent; that may result in a fool-proof death penalty system that is above challenge or it may result in the withering away of capital punishment, either way fewer people get executed (the latter outcome has proven to be the case). The careful selection of common ground can create a policy win for advocates while the plea for compromise rarely does.

Over the past several weeks I have suggested that a smart Republican health care strategy would be to introduce a series of smaller fixes that have broad public support and that are already in the larger Democratic reform package. This would put Democratic lawmakers in the position of having to support Republican health care reform or vote against ideas supported by the public and that are in reform bills that have already passed the House and Senate. The result would be demonstrating that Republicans are the party of responsible reform and that the Democrats are hypocritical insiders more concerned with big government and self-interest than they are in real solutions for real people. Not a good spot for Democrats to be in. (Those who may have missed my posts on health care strategy can catch up here, here and here).

Republicans appear to have adopted that strategy. Kaiser Health News reports (via Politico’s Pulse):

“With health care legislation stalled, Republicans are touting their own remedies, including allowing Americans to buy health coverage across state lines. Currently, consumers can buy policies only from insurers licensed by the states in which they live.

The Republican idea has actually been incorporated into the Democrats' House and Senate health bills, though in a somewhat different form. And it's expected to be included in any legislation that wins final passage.”

The best course for Democrats would be to aggressively move on health care reform. Passing significant reform will demonstrate strength, give the Democrats a victory on which they can run in the fall, and take important steps to solving a problem that is a drain on the economy and wrecks lives. All good things for Democrats going into the fall elections.

Failing to do so would leave unsolved a critical problem that is important to voters, demonstrate to voters that Democrats incapable of leading even with large majorities in the House and Senate (and with a Democrat in the White House), and let the Republicans claim victory for reforming health care even though they are the minority party in Congress. All bad things for Democrats going into the fall elections.

Where a speech takes place can be at least as important to how the speech is received as the content of the speech itself. Location led to a Republican a near-miss in their response to the State of the Union a hit for the President in his appearance before the Republican retreat a few days later.

The location of a speech helps tell the audience what the speech is about, and intentionally or otherwise can effectively become, the contents of the address.

An example of this is President George W. Bush’s third address to the nation after 9/11. A New York Times Magazine story on the address noted that the location of the speech was determined before a single word was written. The options being discussed were the Army War College (the President would look strong), the Oval Office (he would look in control and the setting would be intimate) or an invitation to speak to a joint session of Congress. Without yet anything to say beyond the two speeches on the attack he had already given the decision was made to address Congress because it would present an image of national unity and the President did well when addressing large audiences.

Which brings us to the Republican response to the State of the Union address.

The State of the Union is delivered by the most powerful leader on the planet, before the federal elected and appointed leaders of the world’s leading democracy, in one of the most important deliberative chambers on earth. This year the speech was given by one of the most gifted political orators of our generation. The Republicans saw this strength as a weakness and moved to exploit it. If the President was going to be surrounded by powerful Washington elite and use high rhetoric to inspire the Republicans were going to be surrounded by actual people and talk to them as if there were actual people, thus highlighting the inside/outside, us versus them dynamic that helped elect Republican Senator Scott Brown in Massachusetts. The speech was given from the Virginia House of Delegates to an invited audience of policy makers, business owners and others. A great idea, but the House of Delegates, no matter how impressive, pales in comparison to the House of Representatives. An assembled audience of non-politicians in a political chamber that is not as nice as Congress makes that audience look not as good as Congress. It was the State of the Union – light, a local access version of a network news program. A better option would have been to hold the response in a local diner – same crowd, same words, different place and different message.

On the flip side is the President’s discussion (debate?) with Republicans at their meeting in Baltimore. By going to them the President, in the words of some pundits, entered the “lion’s den.” He demonstrated power and strength by taking on Republicans on their turf and coming out glowing ; it’s the Red Sox beating the Yankees in New York. The exact same conversation with the exact same people in the White House mess or on a meeting room in the Rayburn House Office Building would not have had the same effect – it would have been a different and less persuasive event.

Advocates often use the power of location to their advantage. But too often they either don’t think about the location and thus miss an opportunity to make their point (or even undermine it), or they carefully select a location that contradicts the larger point they are trying to make.
In rhetoric, as in real estate, location matters.

For those who haven’t had enough pre- during- and post-State of the Union Analysis, check out my appearance on The Alyona Show on RTTV, an English language Russian television network. The panel I’m on starts at about 14:30.

Professional advocates, the consultants (like me) who work with them, the reporters who cover them, and the elected officials and candidates at whom they advocate, often become our own echo chamber. We repeat the same things to each other and quickly mistake those things for reality. This is nearly inevitable – we all live and work in the same areas, socialize in the same circles, send our kids to the same schools, and so on. Everyone we know lives in our world, so we assume everyone we don’t know lives there too.

But of course few people live in our world, most live in theirs (and make the same assumptions). Everyone says “well everyone I know thinks….” As a result we can lose touch with those who don’t live in our world and on whose behalf we advocate, cover, represent and so on.
One way to conduct a quick reality check comes via Predictably Irrational. Search engines like Google, Bing and others have an auto-fill function, offering suggested searches based on words that are entered. Predictably Irrational uses this function to demonstrate the differences between what men and women search for in Google. Advocates can use it to get a peek into whether or not people online care about their issue and if so, how.

There are two parts to this check, both of which can be valuable.

First, do people know or care about your issue or candidate at all? As a baseline, type “Barack Obama is” into the search bar and look at the range of suggested searches (the Anti-Christ, communist, Muslim, Mason, etc.). “Harry Reid is” and “Nancy Pelosi is” generate similar results. But “Mitt Romney is” gets only six suggestions, two of which are Israel and Issues. As much as political professionals focus on the former Massachusetts governor and Presidential candidate (past and possibly future) the online world just doesn’t seem to care that much. “Mitch McConnell is” gets two suggestions: “issues” and “is an idiot” – this is the top Republican in the U.S. Senate. “The federal deficit is” has zero suggestions, as do most variations of “campaign finance is/campaign finance laws are/etc.”

Second, what do people think about your issue or candidate? “Global warming is” generates results that should not be shown to your children. “The death penalty is” results in a mix of suggestions, pro and con, while “gun control is” has more one-sided results (hint: “hitting your target” is one suggestion).

Using Google or Bing is not a substitute for actual research into public opinion, but it can provide a quick reality check for all of us who too easily mistake what we do, care about and think for what everyone does, cares about and thinks.