Urbane Sprawl

I was intrigued today by an item from Details Magazine‘s “Know and Tell” page — basically, their attempt at a Harper’s Index.

The item was on contributions to presidential campaigns from “U.S. troops deployed abroad as of June 30, 2008, according to campaign-finance filings released in August.”

The three amounts shown in the Details “infographic” are:

– $60,642 for Obama
– $45,512 for Ron Paul
– $10,665 for John McCain

The clear implication is that troops abroad prefer Barack Obama to John McCain — and even prefer Ron Paul to John McCain. This is supposed to be surprising given the stereotypical alignment of the GOP and our armed forces and given the supposed Republican advantages in matters of defense.

But these implications are suspect.

Most importantly, these numbers reflect contributions from the primaries, not the general race. So really all we’re seeing is that servicemen and women overseas were more engaged in the race for the Democratic nomination than in the race for the Republican nomination. And, really, who wasn’t?

Moreover, there were many more serious candidates on the Republican side — McCain, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, Ron Paul — while the Democratic race was really a two-way contest, or three if you include John Edwards. So, it makes sense that contributions from trops for any given Republican candidate would’ve been smaller than for any given Democratic candidate.

An important number we’re missing is contributions to Hillary Clinton. If that number is near Obama’s receipts, than we know that these numbers really just reflect greater engagement with the Democratic race.

Also, let’s do a thought experiment: say these contributions were from after the nominees were determined. Would that mean that service-people actually preferred Obama to McCain?

I’d argue that the answer is no.

It’s possible of course that a majority of troops support Obama. But more giving to Obama than to McCain might only reflect a lot of giving from a still-minority segment of troops abroad who are Democrats or who support Obama.

How could this be? Maybe there are economic differences between troops who lean Democrat/Obama and troops that lean Republican/McCain, making the former group more able to contribute to the candidate of their choice.

Or, more interestingly, maybe, for Democratic service-people, contributing to their candidate is a salient way to express their Democratic identity in a milieu where the men and women around them all prefer Republicans.

In any case, that’s all thought-experiment speculation. What’s important is that these numbers don’t really tell us anything.

The vice presidential debate last night was the closest thing to event television we’ve had since the American Idol finale, but I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as I think many people did.

Beyond the unsettling post-debate punditry that gave Governor Palin props for speaking in semi-coherent sentences — even when those sentences had little content and blatantly ducked the questions asked, questions on topics about which she was clearly uninformed and inarticulate — I was put off by the very fact of the debate’s “event” status.

We kept hearing Brian Williams and the others say that this was the most highly anticipated vice presidential debate in modern times. (Of course, I’d be hard-pressed to think of a more pressing vice presidential debate in “pre-modern times,” whatever those might be.) But the vice presidency really should not be so important, and its candidates should not be so distracting. John Adams was right when he said that the vice presidency was “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.”

Really, the essential role of the VP is to be able to assume full responsibility for governance in a time of national crisis (after the death or assassination of a sitting president). This idea was summed up expertly by Nate Silver of The New Republic.

It’s obscene how much time and energy the media — and the electorate — spend thinking and talking about the VP. The choice of a VP nominee is the ultimate horse-race, all about personalities and electoral maps, little about policy substance, and so of course it’s exciting to talk about around the water cooler. But the media ignores the solid social science that assures us that no one votes for a candidate because of their VP; when election day comes, it really doesn’t matter whose name is below the nominee’s.

So, the vice presidency isn’t really important, it’s distracting, and — as Joe Biden said of the current administration, in which the VP seems to hold more ideological sway over the course of policy than the president himself — it can be dangerous. What do we do?

The answer is actually elegantly simple. We can add meaning and purpose to the office of the vice presidency while also restoring it to its proper place as topic of minimal concern during elections and position of minimal importance during administrations.

How? Repeal the twelfth amendment.

If you’ve forgotten, that’s the amendment that makes us vote for a president and vice president as a ticket. In 1804, that system replaced the constitution’s original design that made the second-place finisher in a presidential election the vice president of the United States.

If we repealed the amendment now (with just a 2/3 vote in both houses of Congress and ratification by 38 states), then come January we’d have either President McCain and Vice President Obama or President Obama and Vice President McCain.

It might sound absurd when you first think about it, but after a little reflection it makes perfect sense:

Our winner-take-all electoral system is institutionally designed to breed rage. Just think: 49.99% of the electorate can vote for a presidential candidate and still see their man or woman lose — resigned to a simple Senate seat or, gasp, public life. Hell, a majority of voters can elect one candidate (Al Gore) and be left with nothing when the Supreme Court gets around to deciding the winner.

It’s no surprise that RAND reports rising partisanship or that there’s an increasing resentment that accompanies the in-party/out-party polarization: Gallup reports that only 26% of Americans have confidence in the presidency and a pathetic 13% in Congress.

With the twelfth amendment repealed, half the nation would still get to see their party represented in every administration, albeit with a role that would surely be diminished with respect to policy design and implementation. But that’s the role as it should be — the president has tons of advisors and staff; the vice president is symbolic and is only meant to be able to take over in a crisis.

Surely that’s what the founders intended: who better to be next in line to take over the presidency than the person who almost half of Americans think is ready to be president? Why allow someone plucked from obscurity, who gets no vetting by the American people, be — as they say — a heartbeat away?

Historically, the twelfth amendment is seen as having been a necessary solution to adapt the electoral system to the party politics that sprung up around 1800, surrounding the fierce race for president between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. (Before that, George Washington had been elected unanimously — twice.)

I’ll spare you the full history, but suffice it so say that after Adams won and Jefferson became vice president, Jefferson’s ideological distance from Adams made him unwilling to play any role, and so he walked away from the office completely. By the time 1804 rolled around, the parties were using de facto tickets in which men clearly meant to be the vice presidents for the major candidates (again, Adams and Jefferson) had their names entered into consideration for president, with one elector on each side dropping his vote for the VP candidate to make the intended ticket finish one-two.

A historical fluke — someone forgot to drop their vote for Jefferson’s VP pick, Aaron Burr, and so the two men tied for the presidency until the House of Representatives finally anointed Jefferson — sprang Congress into motion to create the amendment which has ensured that such a snafu never happens again.

So, really, the amendment served only to reify the nascent partisanship in the country — not to address it. Rather than forcing us to throw representatives from different parties into office together and heal their wounds, we have an electoral system that gives a big stamp of approval to the fierce separation of parties that now seems unbridgeable. And, indeed, as Arthur Schlesinger so clearly articulated in 1974:

The Twelfth Amendment sent the vice presidency into prompt decline. The first two Vice Presidents had moved on directly to the presidency. After the amendment was enacted, the vice presidency became a resting place for mediocrities.

What would change for the worse if we got rid of the twelfth amendment? Not much, I think.

We wouldn’t have to think about the veepstakes, and we could focus on the men and women at the top of the ticket. We’d know that no party would suffer a total loss on election day — with their voices totally shut out from government — because the nominee from the losing party would still hold office.

Sure, there’d be pundit chatter about how McCain and/or Obama is really more suited to the vice presidency because of X, Y, or Z — but likely that wouldn’t change anyone’s mind about who they wanted the true leader of the nation to be. The VP could become a national symbol for bipartisanship, put in charge of non-partisan initiatives that they have expertise in — for example, VP Obama could rally youth to service, while VP McCain could be the face of services for veterans.

Of course, it would be a job that no one really wanted. But, that’s how it’s been for over two hundred years.

What do infomercials and many political attack ads have in common?

They both change the way we think even though they employ words and imagery we all know to be blatantly false.

Last week, Saturday Night Live did a fake commercial based on my favorite infomercial convention: making simple everyday tasks, from peeling a potato to doing a sit-up, look Sisyphean. In the SNL commercial, Kristen Wiig just CANNOT get a jar open! In trying, she ends up accidentally killing her husband, burying him, lying to the cops, getting arrested, being convicted, then getting chased by dogs after breaking out of jail. “There’s got to be a better way!” she cries. Then in a clear color shot, she uses the “jar glove” to easily remove the lid. “Jar glove. The better way!”

Infomercials all seem to use this tactic: in black and white dramatizations, we watch unfortunate people with contorted faces flail this way and that in a desperate attempt to get the knife to move straight or to get their chests to meet their knees. We all know that these tasks are not this hard. We know these dramatizations are absurd. And yet they do seem to make those Tater Mitts and Ab Lounges more attractive.

George Orwell described the “schizophrenia” of “holding simultaneously two beliefs which cancel out.” And though we’re not schizophrenic when we watch infomercials, we do seem to inhabit a double consciousness, knowing that our lives are not the black and white ordeals we see onscreen but still feeling that they could be easier.

And we inhabit this same double consciousness when seeing, hearing, or reading malicious political attacks.

Two months ago, John McCain said that Barack Obama would “rather lose a war in order to win a political campaign.” This is a statement that no reasonable person, even a McCain supporter, would believe. Add to this other scurrilous rumors — Obama is secretly a practicing Muslim; he was childhood friends with Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — that are either conspiratorially unbelievable or quickly, easily falsified. Yet these clearly false attacks persist — probably because they are effective. We’ll likely see even more attacks like this in next six weeks; Fact Check is a good place to keep track.

Why are they effective? As John Bullock writes in his article “The enduring importance of false political beliefs”:

Much work on political persuasion maintains that people are influenced by information that they believe and not by information that they don’t. By this view, false beliefs have no power if they are known to be false…But findings from social psychology suggest that this view requires modification: sometimes, false beliefs influence people’s attitudes even after they are understood to be false.

Negative associations change our attitudes, even if these associations are as transparent as false rumors or impossible sit-ups.

The producers of infomercials know it’s true. Clearly, so do politicians.

It’s intriguing that simple lying might be as effective as aggressively spinning the truth. The conventional wisdom is that bullshit is much more invidious than bold-faced lies, being harder to refute. The manipulation of words and images, subtly misleading statements (like President Bush mentioning Iraq and 9/11 together, giving the impression that Iraq was somehow involved in the terrorist attacks), the framing of issues, etc., are supposed to be the most dangerous form of political maneuvering. But maybe the conventional wisdom is wrong.