We are launching this blog in the midst of a raging political campaign. Since there are few things that irritate me more than supposed experts saying really stupid things (and hence, one might think, further embedding their inane ideas in the national psyche) this means I’ll likely have quite a lot to comment on in the weeks and months to come. But don’t worry, if campaigns aren’t to your taste I’ll write about other things too (Death Cab for Cutie, the Preakness, and Buffy for example).
The first topic I want to skewer is the reluctance on the part of many media talking heads to acknowledge the fact that decisions come from more than one influence. I understand the appeal of bright-line explanations. They are easily understood and easily conveyed. Being snappy they are likely to get you air time, maybe even speaking fees. But it all just contributes to the one-liner and/or histrionic tone of much political “debate” today, without actually conveying the multiplicity of factors that shape any noteworthy political decision. If you really want to say anything meaningful about why politics works the way that it does snappy ad copy will rarely suffice.
In American politics there are many examples of this. Hey, there are even whole careers built on it (yeah, I’m looking at you Bill Schneider). But few events bring out this unfortunate tendency more than the selection of the vice presidential nominees. The blather that that produces is deafening. Supposedly Kerry must pick a Southerner. Or he must pick someone who’ll win him a swing state. Would it kill the people who say this to actually make an argument for these statements? Yeah, I know they’ve heard these things from Bill, Cokie, etc. but when was the last time they read new studies on these matters? There is research on this question - is it too hard to crack a book?
If they could get beyond their deafening, insulated world that all too often just repeats what they read in an undergrad text in 1972 they might learn something. For example, the political science literature on the vice presidential selection process is pretty clear. In the first place, presidential candidates almost never win votes through their selection. The simple fact of the matter is that almost no one votes on this. They vote for president, not vice president. Nominees can be marginally helpful in winning their own state, but usually that’s due to them having preexisting political machinery that they put into overdrive, people aren’t voting out of fealty to someone who lives nearby. This is important in that governors and some senators are the people who have these kinds of statewide operations, so if you want to win a state through your selection it makes much more sense to pick one of them than a mayor or member of Congress. But it is also important in that it conveys that who is chosen is not likely to win you a lot of votes from any one state, no matter how popular the vice presidential nominee is at home. This really opens up the selection process, and it’s perhaps worth noting that it is pretty clear that in the last few decades most candidates have not selected their nominee on the basis of that person’s ability to carry a state. While it is repeatedly discussed, it has rarely been seen in practice.
This is not to say that electoral considerations in a swing state will not guide Kerry’s choice. But the actual evidence for that having mattered in the past is pretty slim, no matter how much cocktail-party chatter there is about the idea.