National Review’s Rich Lowry has a mess of an op-ed in the New York Times this week. It actually sets up an important topic, but alas (or not) there a whole lot of garbage to wade through to get to it. So if you enjoy beating up on Lowry, I have you covered; if you want to skip all that and get what I have to say about politicians, ambition, and more, just pick up after the bullet points.
So first of all…
Lowry frames the whole thing as advice to Donald Trump on campaign themes. Which is fine as far as it goes, but Lowry talks as if every election is basically a contest between campaign themes, so that e.g. George W. Bush beat John Kerry in 2004 by labeling Kerry as a flip-flopper. But that’s nuts. We can argue about how much “fundamentals” such as peace and prosperity matter to election outcomes and exactly how to measure them, but they surely make some difference! Quite a lot, in fact.
And what’s more, 2004 is a terrible example of Lowry’s point. Kerry lost, but not by much, and he almost certainly beat the fundamentals that year — with the economy doing well and Bush still somewhat enjoying the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. What 2004 actually demonstrates is that pundits assume that the winner must have run the better campaign, including messaging.1 It ain’t so.
Lowry says Trump should run on “character,” which he bizarrely defines as “is he or she qualified, trustworthy and strong, and does he or she care about average Americans?” Look, this is basically just semantics, but surely there’s a better word for what Lowry is saying that ignores what most of us think of as character, which would include such questions as whether the candidate had a habit of engaging in (and bragging about) sexual assault. I suppose that’s what the kids call trolling.
Nor is there any evidence whatsoever that Trump bests Kamala Harris when it comes to caring about “average Americans.” One of them, after all, has had a long career in public service; the other one has a long record of engaging in fraud against people, including “average Americans,” who have been foolish enough to attend Trump University, or go to his casinos, or expect him to pay for work he contracted for.
Lowry’s claim that Harris didn’t do enough “to secure the border or to address inflation” probably should have at least somehow grappled with the facts that both problems are currently way down from earlier peaks. Also he’s just wrong about real wages.2
Also…”trustworthy”? Ha!
Okay, that’s enough. Won’t fisk the whole thing, because I actually do have point to make here.
Lowry’s overall argument is that Harris “is a shape-shifting opportunist who can and will change on almost anything when politically convenient.” And that such a person should not be president. Well, technically I suppose he’s only saying that people don’t want a shape-shifting opportunist as president. That part may be true — but if so, they’re wrong.
Here’s the thing: We, as voters, don’t actually have any access at all to what Lowry professes to care about, which is whether the candidates care about people. What candidates, from president down to dog catcher, do usually care about is winning elections.
Ambition is a tricky topic. The way I talk about is that all politicians are ambitious, but the content of that ambition varies, so that one politician might be interested in one or more policy goals, another in fighting for a group, and another mainly in enjoying “power” — that is, bossing people around. Yet another may just be chiefly interested in the general idea of public service. Or many other possible things.
Whatever the content of their ambition may be, at first blush they (again, usually) try hard to win elections because winning office is a necessary step to every other goal. So as long as winning doesn’t directly conflict with the content of their ambition, we can usually expect politicians to adjust their policy agenda so that they have a better chance of winning. Which means, all things being equal, that they’ll support popular policies when they run for office — and attempt to achieve popular outcomes such as peace and prosperity if they hold office. That’s good! In a democracy, we want politicians to support popular policies and work to achieve popular outcomes!
Even if that means they can fairly be described as “shift-shaping opportunists.”
Indeed, the real question is why all some politicians deliberately take unpopular positions or do things that produce outcomes people won’t like.
One healthy reason is that running for office, and especially winning party nominations, involves taking otherwise non-optimal positions. Parties like to win. But they also have policy goals, and to win a nomination candidates often have to take positions that aren’t all that popular in the general election — and it’s not always easy to shed those positions down the road, either during the rest of the campaign or in office.3 A lot of democracy happens through the process of politicians trying to please party actors.
The other big reason that politicians wind up doing unpopular things is that they really believe in them. And that’s not necessarily bad, but it’s a problem.
There’s often nothing democratic about it. Oh, there can be, or at least one can make a case for it if the candidate vigorously runs on some unpopular or ill-fated policy. But generally voters don’t vote on policy, and often don’t even know about the campaign’s policy positions outside of at best a few highly publicizes areas.4 Even if voters wanted to, they couldn’t, given the hundreds of policy questions at hand.
Even more serious is there’s just no reason to think that politicians dedicated to their own positions on relatively obscure policy questions are making good decisions. After all, most politicians are not actually experts on most policy questions. Again, they can’t be; there are simply too many policy areas, with too much complexity.
Take, for example, Trump’s well known distaste for wind power. A good politician would get over a personal grudge (or whatever it is) against one power source. But with Trump, you get his grudges and his half-assed opinions and his heard-it-somewhere-and-massively-misinterpreted-it. Sure, he may be consistent over time with what I think of as his “Donald from Queens” positions. But there’s no reason to expect good results from any of it, because politicians, whether they’re Trump or Harris or whoever, don’t actually have magical insights that are any different from the cranks who call in to talk radio.
In short: We shouldn’t want politicians to think for themselves when it comes to policy. But when they start listening to others? That’s when democracy can work to produce good public policy.
That’s because what politicians can to be experts on isn’t policy, but politics. Electoral politics, governing politics, institutional politics, you name it. Which means, as Richard Neustadt said about presidents, that they should be good at seeing the warning signs of policy disasters in the ways that people when they have strong interests in particular questionst. Politicians should also be good at using experts to inform them, which includes a healthy skepticism for the dangers of relying only on neutral expertise. Sure, politicians need to know enough policy basics to understand what they’re hearing, but what they really bring to the table is understanding, for example, what a group really means when it lobbies for something. Or what bureaucrats really mean when they say that something can’t be done a new way.
Presidents, in particular, have an enormous amount of information available. If, that is, they are aggressive in seeking it out and smart in how they interpret it.
Political experts are hardly infallable. But using the policy clues that the system provides in the form of how other politicians, interest groups, parties, and others react to situations is the best that politicians can do. And it is also a lot more democratic than just trusting a Dear Leader to always know what’s right.
From this perspective, political opportunism and the ability to shape-shift as circumstances change are very good signs in a potential president. Sticking with positions that are basically based on hunches and prejudices while resisting new evidence is a very, very bad sign. I’m not sure yet whether Kamala Harris is really to be a master politician and therefore a good president. But we do have plenty of evidence that Trump is terrible at the job.
Things can actually be complicated. Even if we could confidently be certain that Kerry beat the fundamentals despite falling short of winning, that wouldn’t mean that each part of his campaign was a net plus. It’s possible (hypothetically) that Kerry trounced Bush in get-out-the-vote operations, in the quality of campaign ads, and in the candidates’ public speaking abilities…but Bush had the edge in messaging. I don’t know! The point is: Neither does Lowry.
Lowry also treats it as obvious that Harris’s tax proposals (raising them on rich people and corporations) would kill job growth. This is, however, not obvious at all. My position is that the relationship between policy, policy enactment, and short or medium term growth is far too complex to draw any simple conclusions from the clear fact that the economy has grown much better with Democratic than Republican presidents for…well, pretty much forever. But the idea that anyone supporting seemingly effective Democratic economic policies must therefore not care about most citizens takes more chutzpah than I have.
The flip side of this is that if the party changes, then party politicians change if they want to stay on the party’s good side; see, for example, Joe Biden’s long career of re-jiggering himself and finding the center of the Democratic Party.
For a thorough look at how policy works in elections and more, there’s a brand new explainer from Alexander Kustov and James Dennison over at Good Authority.
Your response to the op-ed is so much better than the original piece! I see gender all over this -- and maybe Machiavelli is helpful (sorry, I am a theorist). Shape shifting (bad) v. "virtú" (good)? Is it "weak" or (for Machiavelli) womanly to change your mind? OR, is the true ability leaders need the ability to adroitly read a political situation and adapt? What bothers Trump and others about Harris is that she is virtú in a pantsuit. She supported Biden when he was the candidate. She changed her presentation as soon as SHE was the candidate. She has a record and she is selectively emphasizing what she thinks will be most legible to the voters she needs. She read the political moment better than a lot of pundits -- and she has not made a big mistake yet.