Be Wary When the Polls are on Your Side

In this essay I wrote for the American Thinker, I argue that by over-relying on public opinion polls in making the case against Obamacare, Republicans painted themselves into a strategic corner, now having to defend Paul Ryan's plan despite public opposition to its core components. Polls are transient and leaders have to occasionally fight for legislation that is at the time unpopular. Excerpts below. Read the complete essay here.
                                

While ObamaCare remains unpopular, Republicans now find themselves in a strategic quandary over the Ryan budget. Polls show that Ryan's plan, like ObamaCare, is unpopular with the majority of the American people. Herein lies the folly of over-relying on fickle polling to buttress an argument...How do Republicans counter the Democratic talking point that the American people have rejected Paul Ryan's agenda when this was a central argument Republicans employed against ObamaCare? The short answer is that they can't without being exposed to charges of hypocrisy. If ObamaCare was wrong for America in large part because the American people didn't want it, then Ryan's plan is bad for America for the same exact reason.

It is of course imperative for Republicans to lead the charge to win hearts and minds. Persuading the public to support a set of policies or ideas is a centerpiece of democratic governance. But when fierce opposition mounts, it is unclear which side will win the tug of war for public opinion...It was indeed short-sighted for Republicans to make polling data a central weapon in their fight against ObamaCare. They should have anticipated that at some point in the future, some Republican plan would meet stiff public resistance. It would have been more prudent to criticize ObamaCare almost exclusively on substance, and occasionally -- perhaps only in passing -- reference polling data.

It is precisely this feature of republicanism--the recognition that leaders are often called to undertake unpopular endeavors--that makes the over-reliance on short-term opinion polls so problematic. Perhaps through leadership and an effective marketing campaign, Republicans can quickly turn the tide of public opinion. But if the public remains skeptical, Republicans can expect Democrats to highlight the hypocrisy of railing against ObamaCare while promoting the unpopular Ryan budget.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/05/be_wary_when_the_polls_are_on.html

No Republican Frontrunner is Good for GOP

With no obvious Republican frontrunner and lagging enthusiasm among Republicans with the current GOP field, Democrats are hoping that there may not be a strong Republican contender to challenge President Obama. Many Republicans are understandably nervous; the longer a candidate waits to enter the race, the less time he or she will have to raise money, establish a brand, and sell his message to the voters.


Not to worry. All these disadvantages are relatively easy to overcome and there are significant advantages to entering the race late.

Because the election cycle now lasts two years, early frontrunners risk losing the initiative. It is simply too difficult to maintain momentum over a protracted period. Inevitably, the novelty of your candidacy fades, you run out of original sound-bites, and voters become increasingly desensitized to your message. The more you talk, the less they listen. Even if you win the primary, the loss of momentum does not bode well for the general election.

Another risk of being the early frontrunner is that you give the opposition more time to research and define you. As you give stomp speech after stomp speech, interview after interview, the other side exploits every gaffe, every inconsistency in your message. Your opponents have ample time to discern your weaknesses and strengths, and to experiment with different talking points to see which lines of attack work and which don’t. Eventually, you’re forced to spend precious time and resources fending off attacks from every direction. This is exhausting and can distract from the message you want voters to hear.

Finally, the more time a candidate spends on the campaign trail, the more mistakes he’s likely to make. In a 24-hour news cycle, absolutely no gaffe, no controversial comment, will go unnoticed and unreported. Campaign blunders are inevitable and the longer you campaign, the more blunders you’re likely to make.

Given the pitfalls of running a two-year campaign, running a shorter race offers notable advantages that if shrewdly exploited can be decisive.

A candidate entering a race with the presumptive frontrunners already in place will instantly dominate the news cycle, at least temporarily pushing the leading candidates out of the spotlight. By seizing the momentum, the candidate has a golden opportunity to redefine the race and to excite a segment of the electorate that may have become complacent or is lukewarm about the current crop of candidates. The opportunity to redefine the race so late in the game presents a critical strategic advantage, giving your opponents limited time for opposition research and to plan an effective counterattack. When they finally do respond, they will do so on your terms. A hallmark of effective strategy is to force opponents to fight on the battlefield of your choosing. You achieve this by shaking up the field and forcing opponents to react to the new dynamic you injected into the race.

A strong campaign kickoff forces opponents to regroup, to alter their message to address the new threat. Going off message can cause confusion and chaos, exposing gaps and weaknesses in their positions. Meanwhile, you build momentum through aggressive and disciplined campaigning.

In essence, by entering the race late, you can change the dynamic of the campaign. Entering late also gives you the advantage of flexibility. While your opponents have already established a relatively fixed campaign narrative after months of campaigning, you have several branding options to choose from. You can maneuver to the right, left, or center; focus on leadership, experience, or change, depending on the others’ strengths and weaknesses.

There are exceptions to the pitfalls of running a long campaign. Barack Obama entered the race early and never lost momentum. But his was a unique case. Obama was the first African American candidate who had a real chance of winning the Democratic primary. Backed by a press core infatuated with his candidacy, his momentum and novelty never faded. A candidate with such unique attributes isn’t likely to emerge again anytime soon. Moreover, Barack Obama was not the early frontrunner. That honor belonged to Hillary Clinton. Obama’s underdog status helped him sustain momentum throughout a grueling campaign.

In order for the late entrant strategy to work, the candidate has to be highly credible, competent, and politically savvy. Above all, he has to be interesting. The candidate cannot be someone like Fred Thomson, who entered the 2008 GOP primary late with significant fanfare, but his rather boring and uninspired platform--not to mention inconsequential governing record--failed to energize voters. The right candidate must immediately inject excitement into the race through powerful rhetoric and a demonstrated track record of bold governance.

The Unnecessary Battle

This week, Paul Ryan unveiled a historic budget proposal that cuts federal spending by trillions of dollars, reforms Medicare and Medicaid, and appears to shift the trajectory of federal spending away from insolvency. The budget--whether or not you agree with all its provisions--represents real fiscal reform.

Yet Ryan’s 2012 fiscal year budget did not steal the headlines or command the undivided attention of conservative activists and party operatives. That is because another, more immediate fiscal matter, remains unresolved and is still being fiercely debated on Capitol Hill and across the political spectrum: the stalemate over the 2011 fiscal year budget.

The outcome of this battle is less important than the fact that Republicans are waging the battle in the first place. Bolstered by the conservative grassroots, the GOP leadership is fighting tooth and nail over whether to cut roughly $30 billion or $60 billion from the current fiscal year budget. In other words, the GOP is spending political capitol in hopes of reducing the current fiscal deficit by approximately two tenths of one percent as opposed to four tenths of one percent.

The difference is a rounding error, and more critically, the battle’s outcome does nothing to advance the far-reaching objectives set forth in Ryan’s budget. It is for all intensive purpose a dangerous distraction. Dangerous, because it diverts political resources from the real war over the size and scope of government to be waged during the 2012 budget debate and the 2012 election.

I am sympathetic in theory to grassroots conservatives who are pressuring elected Republicans to obtain maximum cuts and to not compromise with a Democratic leadership that has demonstrated an utter inability and unwillingness to reign in out-of-control spending. I get it: the current spending levels are unsustainable and we need to cut now and cut everywhere.

But this is short-term thinking and can have negative long-term implications. The Republicans may indeed get all the cuts they seek, but at what cost?

This fight has already undermined if not overshadowed the historic rollout of Ryan’s budget. Instead of concentrating all available political and media resources on winning the support of the American people for the ambitious agenda laid out in Ryan’s plan, Republicans are haggling with Democrats over trivial spending cuts, which have little or no long-term budgetary implications. Moreover, the left-wing media happily touts the fact that Republicans are recalcitrant and unwilling to “meet the Democrats half way.” Whether this is fair criticism--and it probably isn’t--it is one more talking point, email blast, press conference, or facebook post that is not focused on the 2012 budget.

Skillful political leaders understand the folly of fighting every political or policy battle. The art of political strategy is knowing when to fight, when to retreat, and when to negotiate a cease fire. The prudent strategist resists the temptation to fight and win every battle, only fighting battles that move him towards his ultimate goal. Fighting trivial battles depletes and dilutes resources, energizes opponents, and distracts from the big picture. The Republicans should ask themselves if getting an additional $30 billion in cuts for this fiscal year is worth jeopardizing the outcome of the 2012 budget war.

I suspect Speaker Boehner understands the risk of digging in his heels over a rounding error. He is, however, in the difficult position of pursuing big ticket items, while having to simultaneously placate the tea party base, which made him Speaker in the first place. This is a difficult dilemma, but if Boehner caves in to every demand made by the citizenry--no matter how short-sighted these demands are--he may derail the prospect of enacting significant long-term reforms.

It would serve the tea party well to take note of the big picture, because at times, this great and powerful American grassroots movement has shown a lack of long-term strategic savvy. It has demonstrated a tendency to fight every battle and not focus on long-tem goals--a potentially catastrophic shortcoming in any competitive environment.

This might be expected from a genuinely organic, spontaneous, grassroots organization. The tea party is leaderless, and as such, it does not have a built-in unity of command or the structural discipline to design and implement strategies that advance key objectives, while not getting bogged down in essentially irrelevant skirmishes.

Instead, all too often, the tea party fights pointless battles without regard as to how this might impact long-term success. Such a haphazard approach to strategy jeopardizes the outcome of the war. In many ways, it is refreshing that the tea party is “leaderless,” but if it chooses to throw itself headlong into every policy battle, it inevitably disrupts the long-term planning of elected representatives, who should have their eyes on much grander objectives.

The tea party is more effective and influential in its role as an ideological bulwark, not a policy micromanager.

The Recurrent Rejection of Liberalism

In the aftermath of last November’s Republican landslide victory, President Obama has made a widely publicized shift to the right. He hired a pro-business centrist Chief of Staff, compromised with Republicans on Bush-era tax cuts, and in other rhetorical ways indicated his willingness to abandon hard-left ideology in favor of a more centrist, pragmatic approach to governing.

On the other hand, the professional left scoffed at this rightward shift, with many liberals blaming the Democrats’ historic defeat on poor messaging, not on liberal governance. The problem was not that Obama was too liberal, but that he didn’t do a good job of communicating the benefits of his liberal policies, the argument went. Some liberals even argued that Democrats lost because they weren’t liberal enough, citing the failure to include a public option in the healthcare bill, not passing cap and trade, and the failure to shut down Guantanamo Bay.

It comes as no surprise that marketing is a popular scapegoat of electoral defeat. It requires less agonizing self-reflection to attribute losses to poor marketing, than to failed policies. Certainly, no one expected liberals to reject liberalism in the aftermath of one unfavorable election. But in light of the broad electoral mandate given to liberals to govern following the 2006 and 2008 elections, is it really plausible that a communications mishap is the primary reason for the left’s reversal in fortune?

The enthusiasm on the left following Obama’s victory was palpable. Finally the left had an ideological liberal, one of their own, in the White House, reinforced by a Democrat-led Senate and House. It appeared as though most road blocks to liberal governance had been removed. Until Republican Scott Brown’s upset victory in Massachusetts in January 2010, Democrats even enjoyed a rarely seen filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. Great Society 2.0 could now finally take root. Democrats succeeded in passing the Stimulus, investing taxpayer dollars in GM and Chrysler, nationalizing student loan programs, enacting a centralized healthcare reform bill, and pushing through far reaching financial regulations. To be sure, the left didn’t get everything it wanted; in part because of public opposition, and in part because centrist Democrats at times refused to fall in line. But the fact that the government made a dramatic leftward shift following the 2008 election can hardly be disputed.

Unfortunately for Democrats, voters don’t measure success by the number of bills signed into law. Persistently high unemployment, out-of-control debt and deficits, and the perception that the country was headed in the wrong direction led to dismal approval ratings for Congress and a precipitous drop in the President’s popularity, especially and most significantly, among independents. Americans had had enough and voted out the liberal majority in favor of a tea-party driven conservative one.

To accept the theory that poor marketing sunk the Democrats, one has to believe that Democrats did nothing wrong policy-wise (except maybe not govern even further to the left, as some would have us believe). The path to reestablishing a Democratic majority, therefore, is to continue full steam ahead with a left-wing agenda, while tweaking marketing techniques.

There is at least one liberal leader who appears to have serious doubts about this theory.

President Obama’s decisions to reshuffle his cabinet and extend the much maligned Bush-era tax cuts belie the notion that messaging was at the root of the Democrats’ defeat. Obama’s overhaul is an implicit admission that his rigid, left-of-center governance ushered in the conservative majority.

Not surprisingly, many liberals resent President Obama’s newly found centrism. With Obama’s election, liberals were hoping for a new and vigorous era of liberal governance, unimpeded by Republican obstructionism. But a Republican House, a narrow and politically vulnerable Democrat Senate majority, and Obama’s move to the center, appear to have dashed liberal hopes for radical transformation. Whether Obama’s cabinet changes will lead to sustainable centrist governance, and are not merely ruses to appease a disaffected electorate, the moves by themselves affirm that President Obama and his advisors understand that governing from the far left is politically untenable in the long-run.

This should not come as a surprise. When American leaders steer to the far left, voters rebel at the ballot box. Americans rejected the Great Society’s economic programs that promised and ultimately failed to reduce poverty, electing and then reelecting Richard Nixon. Jimmy Carter’s dramatic leftward shift was resoundingly rejected, paving the way for the conservative Reagan revolution. After Bill Clinton pursued a left-wing agenda during his first two years in the White House, Republicans won control of Congress, forcing the politically shrewd President Clinton to abandon left-wingism and embrace the now famous triangulation strategy.

By shifting rightward, President Obama is sending a message to voters that he is through being a rigid liberal ideologue. That in itself is recognition that Americans have once again rejected hard-line liberalism.

The Libertarian's Fatal Conceit

Over the last several years, I have been closely affiliated with the libertarian movement. I worked for the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, a wonderful organization that supports free-market groups around the country. During my time with CGKF, I had many opportunities to communicate with prominent libertarian thinkers, who were highly intelligent and persuasive. I continue to be active in the free-market movement.

Although there are numerous strands of libertarianism, all libertarians are united by the belief that a just government exists to protect individual rights and do little else. On matters of political economy and philosophy, I see eye-to-eye with most libertarians on most issues. However, there is one area that continues to be a major point of contention.

At the risk of generalizing, most libertarians have a special disdain for Republican politicians who do not fight for transformational change. By transformational change libertarians mean a radical departure from our current mixed-economy that boasts a massive welfare state and is constrained by burdensome regulations. Libertarians vehemently oppose the strategy of incrementalism, advocating major leaps in policy instead.

The brilliant libertarian scholar and historian David Boaz, Executive Vice President of the libertarian Cato Institute, once said that he did not think Ronald Reagan was a very good President because he did not abolish the Department of Education or privatize Social Security. The free-market conservative scholars, activists and politicians who helped drive the Reagan Revolution supported these libertarian proposals in theory, but the President and his Cabinet did not attempt to implement them--and as we shall see, for good reasons.   

To my shock, David Boaz also noted that many libertarians feel like Thomas Jefferson betrayed the libertarian cause by purchasing Louisiana from Napoleon and waging war against the Barbary pirates of North Africa who were terrorizing and hijacking American merchant ships, and often killing or enslaving the ships' crews.

David Boaz represents the majority of libertarian thinkers who believe that any departure from a pure libertarian ideal is a betrayal of that ideal. Furthermore, libertarians believe that political compromise and pragmatism are convenient cop outs that hinder progress towards greater liberty.

I strongly disagree with this view and it is the primary source of my beef with the libertarian movement.

To begin with, impugning Thomas Jefferson for expanding and significantly strengthening the young and fragile republic is naive, for if it wasn't for Jefferson's vision of an American navy that ultimately subdued the menacing Barbary pirates, America might have been fatally vulnerable to British aggression in the War of 1812. Moreover, do libertarians really believe that the Constitution prohibits the Commander-in-Chief from deploying the military against an enemy with a track record of murdering and enslaving Americans? The Constitution is not a suicide pact and neither the Louisiana Purchase nor the just war against the Barbary pirates violated the Constitution or betrayed America's founding principles.

To castigate Ronald Reagan for not achieving transformational libertarian change seems to me equally foolhardy. The political process is highly complex, and all politicians are constrained by precedents, rules, and procedures that make transformational change very difficult if not impossible. We are witnessing this first hand as the Health Care legislation nears its final stages. Barack Obama (and I would venture to guess most Congressional Democrats) supports a single-payer healthcare system. But due to a plethora of political constraints, neither Barack Obama nor Democratic leaders dared to even seriously consider single-payer. In fact, it appears almost certain that even the so-called public option will not be included in the final healthcare bill. And this is despite the fact that the Democrats have a super-majority in the Senate and a significant majority in the House.

Had Ronald Reagan committed political capital to the goal of abolishing the Department of Education or privatizing Social Security, he would have been thoroughly defeated by the Democrat-controlled House and humiliated. Such an ambitious goal would have made the failure all that more dramatic, and rendered Reagan largely inefficacious for the remainder of his term.

Foregoing this political suicide mission, President Reagan instead chose to eloquently defend the principles of liberty, while fighting for significant, but non-transformational change. He succeeded in lowering taxes, growing our economy, stimulating entrepreneurship, and reining in some wasteful spending.

President Reagan wisely differentiated between idealism and pragmatism. What good is idealism if it doesn't affect positive change? Libertarians resent what they view as Reagan's lackluster efforts to rein in the welfare state, but would the country have been better of if President Reagan unwaveringly embraced idealism at the expense of failing to push through any pro free-market initiatives?

The axiom that we shouldn't make the perfect the enemy of the good should teach libertarians an important political lesson: it is better to fight for incremental change than to stubbornly perpetuate the status quo just because the ideal is unattainable. Libertarians cannot ignore the constraints imposed by the political process, and should not view politicians who compromise in order to advance pro-free market change as spineless, or worse, perfidious. The freedom movement should continue to defend the virtues of laissez-faire capitalism and attack the folly of the welfare state. But libertarians ought to accept the immutable law that in politics, if you allow idealism to trump pragmatism, you will not advance the ideal.