The Ask a Politician Thread

Apologies to @Herculite for copying his concept, and even his opening paragraph.

I've been giving political advice for a good number of years now, but that's usually to people who decided to take the plunge and run for office. What I've seen out there is that most people really don't know how much about how the political world works, what it entails, what's acceptable, that sort of thing. I've seen plenty of comments posted about politics which more like mythology then reality.

My own experience is mainly in politics at the state and local level, but I have had enough contact with presidential and congressional politics to make informed comments.

 

How well does House of Cards portray US political deal-making?

PS: Had to.

 

I'm not familiar with House of Cards. Is that a novel or a movie? How does it portray US political deal-making?

 

Back in the day it was possible to stand up to big money with dedicated manpower.
Nowadays they can throw so much money into even small local elections that no matter how many feet you have on the ground you're screwed.
In this age of Citizens United and the Koch brothers what are some of the tactics for a smaller candidate?

 

The independent power of money in electoral politics is hugely overrated.

Money is a lot more effective at buying politicians than at buying elections.

I will explain this a little more when I have some time.

 

First of all, mere money doesn't really go very far.

Remember Ron Lauder? He's a billionaire, the heir to the Estee Lauder cosmetics fortune. In 1989, he ran for mayor of New York City, in the Republican primary, against Rudy Giuliani.

Now, Giuliani was no slouch at fundraising, and he had a lot of help: then-president George H.W. Bush came to New York to help raise money for him.

But Lauder opened his checkbook, and outspent Giuliani by a margin of eighteen-to-one.

Giuliani won by a landslide.

Second, political money is almost invariably attracted to winners, and to people who look like they might be winners. When you hear that the winning candidate spent more than his opponent, consider that the expected victory probably drove the fundraising, rather than vice versa.

Third, if a candidate is considered to have a serious chance at winning an important race, the money to do it will be there. Almost no matter who you are, there are donors out there who want to give you money. It may not be as much money as you really want, but it will be enough to run (more about this later).

Fourth, when two opposing candidates each have enough money to put on serious campaigns, a bunch of additional money on one side changes things very little.

As one advertising guy once told me, the dirty secret of his industry is just how little impact it has. We live in a noisy world, and most ads are just lost in the noise. A political campaign can sink a huge amount of money into media, and see it disappear without a trace.

My rule of thumb: the more money a political campaign has to spend, the larger the portion that is wasted, that is, not spent on voter contact. A well-funded campaign has a nicer headquarters, lots of topnotch catering, lots of paid staff, and lots of useless polling. Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign in 2008 was a great example of this.

Shoestring campaigns beat well-funded campaigns all the time, because a shoestring campaign is really all you need.

 

I think Washington is different because the stakes are higher, and the news media is usually paying attention.

But I'd like to start by defending it a little bit.

Certain things are very blunt and mercenary. For example, if somebody wants to run for Congress, and seeks support from the partisans and interest groups in DC, they will always be told, "Come back when you've raised $100,000." Or the way that members of Congress spurn seats on committees like Veterans Affairs in favor of committees of more interest to interest groups that have well-funded PACs, like Energy & Commerce. Or the way that every presidential administration since Andrew Jackson almost literally sells ambassadorships to major political donors.

There's thousands more stories like that, each one appalling in its own way.

But at the same time, TV shows wildly exaggerate for dramatic purposes. Cop/crime shows portray a new criminal mastermind/serial killer sadistically wreaking havoc week after week, as if these cases were the routine work of the criminal justice system. Murder mystery novels are the same thing. It's fun, sure, but it's not remotely realistic.

If House of Cards portrays Washington as a deeply corrupt and amoral place where murder and blackmail are routine political tools, where political power and influence can do literally anything, then it's just as misleading as those crime shows.

Slight tangent: I once got involved in watching a TV series called "The Event", which featured a completely secret ongoing war between extra-terrestrial creatures (who looked exactly like humans, right down to their ethnic diversity), and a brutal secret organization, led by a shadowy Hal Holbrook.​

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Hal Holbrook and his people could do anything at all, with no consequences. At one point, one of his lower-level henchmen needs to go somewhere, so he casually shoots and kills a random guy and drives off in his car. At another point, at night, they take over a police station, kill all the actual cops, and replace them with stooges, so as to capture one of the heroes who wanders in. This stuff goes on and on, and yet nobody ever seems to take any notice.​

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Washington may run on power and influence, but it's not really drenched in amoral cynicism from top to bottom. Indeed, it's pretty straitlaced and judgemental, and the loss-of-face suicide rate is very high. Politicians discredited by scandal are shunned and rejected, not just as a public display of piety or a fear that stigma is contagious, but out of at least some moral sense that those people did something wrong. Practically all of the political actors are idealists on some level, fundamentally well-intentioned, and their patriotism is mostly not feigned.

The hallmark of the American system of government, versus most every other democracy, is the commitment to an ideal of rigid procedural fairness (treating everybody exactly the same way whether they need it or not -- see James Q. Wilson's Bureaucracy for much more about that). This value is inculcated into every American law student. And nowhere is it stronger than in Washington, which of course is chock-full of lawyers.

 

Some years back, I heard an anecdote about one of our state senators.

By virtue of his position within the body, he was a kind of gatekeeper who decided which legislation would go forward, which meant he had effective veto power over state laws and budgets.

There was a bill which had passed the House unanimously, but he had not allowed onto the Senate floor for a vote.

I forget the substance; I think it made the state eligible for some Federal grant. Or maybe it was just to accept the grant. The money was to be used for some undisputed public good.

Like I said, it had sailed through the House with no opposition whatsoever.

Baffled as to why this bill had never been put on the Senate schedule, someone went to ask the senator about it. He explained the good it would do, essentially at no cost to the state.

The senator wasn't interested in hearing arguments about the bill. "Who wants it?" he asked.

And, it developed, what would they be willing to give up to get it? The bill was not going to move without chips on the table.

In other words, he was only interested in making deals. The public interest meant nothing to him. Paying attention to the substance of a bill was a waste of time.

This particular senator went on to become Governor, so obviously he prospered with this approach.

But I wouldn't say that kind of attitude is typical at the state or local levels.

Another wrinkle (in Congress, state legislatures, and some city councils) is the notion of "constituent service".

Someone in the district has a specific, individual problem with the government, and the rep or senator (or really the staff) goes to bat for that person (or company).

Obviously the people who carry out this kind of advocacy are not likely to really care about the substance of whatever the complaint is. But they certainly take pride in their personal ability to make things happen (a big ego boost), and make the constituent happy (a small political boost).

And it goes beyond making a few hundred voters feel grateful and more likely to vote for you. There is a big value in being known for providing "good constituent service". It inhibits opposition in future elections. It gives you some cover to cast unpopular votes. It often prompts the media to treat you more positively.

If you're the constituent, it means that solving your problem gets aligned on the same axis as strengthening the congressman. The staffer may only pretend to care about your issue, but they probably do care about getting their boss re-elected.

 

One of the things about being a public figure is that everyone knows when you've made a mistake, or specifically, when you and people working for you miss a small detail that becomes a big embarrassing public mistake.

It's hard to explain how much anxiety this generates. It's very hard to keep in mind that it's trivial in the overall scheme of things, something fixable that will be completely irrelevant and forgotten in a few weeks. Your illusion of being perfect is shattered.

Talking to the media, you need to accurately explain who did (or didn't) do what, without dodging responsibility.

What happened?

(1) A remote contract programmer, working for a vendor, accidentally deleted something important.

(2) We noticed that, and told her to put it back.

(3) When she put it back, she undid a previously applied fix.

(4) Nobody noticed this until too late.

Bluntly, if I had bothered to look at it, I would have caught the error.

Four other very competent folks had a chance to catch it, but also missed seeing it.

(That programming used to be done in-house; outsourcing it was done very reluctantly, when we had no other good options.)

All we can do is focus on fixing the problem, which is a time consuming and complicated task.

Only when the dust settled, this afternoon, is it clear just how little attention this little tempest attracted.

 

But if you had tried to cover it up and got caught than the news would have carried it for months.
I'm often surprised at how so many politicians don't seem to understand that.

 

Bones isn't real? No way! Next thing you will be saying is some nonsense like they film in LA and and have the second unit shooting establishing shots in D.C.

 

Yeah, even supposedly DC-based NCIS is filmed in Los Angeles.

Sometimes the landscape and flora gives it away, which is awfully careless considering they spend $millions per episode.

(Note, for example, the weird only-in-California trees in the park where the guy on the phone gets shot, at the beginning of the episode where Lily Tomlin appears.)

 

Makes sense from the $$$ perspective considering many if not most of the major studio and production companies on the west coast are based in LA, and I would guess the focus area back east is more around NYC or Chicago perhaps.

 

You and I probably think very different things when we hear the word "politics".

At the local or state level, political people make up a kind of subculture -- like the legal profession, or science fiction fandom, or the hip-hop music scene, or NASCAR.

Like any subculture, it has its values and its jargon. People participate in all kinds of ways, and with all kinds of agendas. Very few of them make their living, or any money at all, from political activities, rather, they are motivated by their political views and a general sense of "public-spiritedness" or "taking part" in "the community" (a term which gets defined in many different ways). Participants feel validated in their activism, which I think is entirely legitimate. The politicos are part of the social infrastructure, just as critical in their way as the plumbers and engineers who manage the sewage.

It's a milieu I move easily in, despite my natural shyness, because it's a world where specialized knowledge and intelligence and experience get noticed and taken seriously.

A successful political campaign is a ruthless meritocracy -- see the opening few chapters in Jeff Greenfield's book Playing to Win, which portrays all this quite accurately (the rest of the book is just filler). It's a temporary ad hoc project, with a huge task and an absolutely immutable deadline; the time pressure and uncertainty about the outcome makes it inherently exciting.

To pull off that kind of trick, get lucky, and win an election, garners respect, far beyond the mere powers of whatever position was gained. But this kind of regard is fickle: if you are unlucky enough to lose, or lead a losing campaign, it's all your fault.

(At the national level, remember the wild excess of scathing post-election ridicule for unsuccessful candidates like Mondale, Dukakis, Dole, Gore, Dean, Kerry, McCain and Romney. Even their supporters turn on them, and make losing an election into a deep personal failing. This same dynamic applies at all levels.)

 

Well, let me start with the post-election politics I deal with most often.

I work with a nine-member local government legislative body. Among other things, they control my budget.

They are elected from nine distinct territories, each with its own unique population and politics and economics. But those considerations drive their decision-making a lot less than you might expect.

The group has surprisingly little collegiality -- they usually see each other only at formal meetings. More than that, they each have only limited understanding of where the other members (especially the less vocal ones) are coming from.

I have a huge head start with these people: they all know, like, and respect me. Every one of them thinks I am doing a fantastic job. I also have nine times the number of constituents that each member does. They rarely quarrel with requests I make on behalf of my office.

If I am very concerned about a pending issue, I get in touch with each member by phone to discuss it. Another surprise: this is hardly ever done, even by the members themselves. When I do it, I get an almost giddy sense of power, because I alone know what's going to happen.

They are, on the whole, a smart and well-intentioned group of people, far above the national average for local government leadership. Still, balancing a $100 million budget is not something they could manage without a lot of help.

Lately, I have been among those providing necessary help, that is, political support for doing the fiscally responsible thing.