Friday, September 30, 2011

The Lessons of "Hardball"

1. It's not who you know, it's who you get to know.

2. All politics is local.

3. It's better to receive than to give.

My favorite story from this chapter is when Tip O/Neill was still in college and ran for the Cambridge City Council. On the day of the election, he ran into a neighbor who said she was going to vote for him even though he hadn't asked her to. O'Neill was flabbergasted, saying "I've lived across the street from you for 18 years, I shovel your walk in the winter and mow your grass in the summer. I didn't think I had to ask you for your vote." The neighbor responded, "Tom I want you to know something: people like to be asked." The lesson here is that people don't mind being used; what they mind is being taken for granted.

Matthews quotes the sage advice from the sage himself, Ben Franklin: "If you want to make a friend, let someone do you a favor."

4. Dance with the one that brung ya

5. Keep your enemies in front of you

6. Don't get mad, don't get even, get ahead

7. Leave no shot unanswered.

The big example here is the inept campaign of Michael Dukakis in 1988. He let Bush paint him as a liberal who was out of touch with mainstream America, and refused to respond to the scurrilous attacks.

Four years later Bill Clinton took the exact opposite approach. His campaign had a "war room" whose job it was to immediately respond to any attacks. The results were spectacular. Clinton had way more negatives (draft-dodging, womanizing, etc.) than Dukakis ever had, but he was able to neutralize them with his skillful responses.

There is a principle of evidence in the law called "admission by silence". When someone says something negative about you in your presence and you remain silent, this can be taken as an admission that what was said about you is true. In other words, "leave no shot unanswered.

8. Only talk when it improves the silence

9. Always concede on principle

This one seems counter-intuitive, but Matthews explains it with detailed examples. He quotes Edward Bulwer-Lytton as saying, "Yield to a man's tastes, and he will yield to your interests". Reagan's support of the MX missile is given as the major example. Reagan deftly acknowledged all the flaws in his proposal, and thereby got Congress and the country to go along with a plan that had seemed dead.

An example some of us may be more familiar with is Reagan's support of the Contras in Nicaragua. After the hard sell failed miserably in the spring of 1986, he went to the soft-sell. He acknowledged the concerns, and said he shared them. These included: the sorry history of the U.S. in the region, the brutality by the rebels, the need to end the Somoza connection, and that his critics were patriotic. Matthews concludes by observing that the smart politicians focus on the objective, and not on the principle.

10. Hang a lantern on your problem

The idea here is that it is always better to be the bearer of your own bad news. One example is after the first debate in the 1984 presidential campaign, Reagan seemed to be showing his age in that debate and talk abounded of his poor performance. He squelched all of it with one great line in the second debate; when asked about his age, he said, "I will not make my age an issue in this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent's youth and inexperience." Mathews says that with this one line, the election was over.

Mathews says the principle holds in one-on-one settings as well. For example, if you've done something your boss isn't going to like, tell him youself before he has to find it out from third parties.

Teddy Kennedy ran into a line in a debate during his 1962 Massachusetts race for the Senate, when his
opponent claimed Teddy had "never worked a day in his life". The next morning, or so the story goes, Kennedy met an old worker at the factory gates who asked, "Hey Kennedy, are you the one they said last night never worked a day in his life?" When told he was, the old guy said "Well let me tell you something young man, you haven't missed a thing." Kennedy told this story repeatedly and won handily.

Some people may forget that Bill Clinton's first foray into natinal politics was an unmitigated disasster, when he droned on and on at the 1988 Democratic Convention. The only applause he got was when he said "In conclusion". Clinton hung a lantern on his problem by wangling an appearance the following week on the Tonight Show, where he played the saxaphone and poked fun at himself. Now he is remembered as a two-term president, not the boring orator of 1988.

11. Spin

12. The press is the enemy

13. The reputation of power

The idea here is that leaders in a democracy rarely have any real power. Rather, they have to create the illusion that they have power. Mathews discusses a number of techniques politicians use to do this: play your strengths, lowballing, sandbagging, creating new commandments, passing the buck, and Inchon landings.

14. Positioning

Wednesday, September 21, 2011

On Palestinian Statehood

I am a strong supporter of Israel, as my previous post of 5/24/11 makes clear. However, this business of Obama putting the US out front by vetoing Palestine's application for statehood in the UN is completely out of line.

Anybody who has analyzed the history of terrorism can readily see that terrorism is a tactic used by those who feel so powerless, so helpless, so oppressed, that they see no other avenue to make their grievances heard. If Palestine is granted statehood, it stands to reason that the Palestinian people will have less need to resort to terrorism because they are more likely to feel that they finally have a voice, and are no longer completely powerless.

Obama risks being isolated in the realm of public opinion. Already the Republican candidates on the right are assailing him for not being supportive enough of Israel. And if he exercises the veto as he is threatening to do, he will subject the US to additional hatred and isolation in the realm of world opinion, which of course means additional terrorist attracks. Obama is again showing his lack of leadership here.

Friday, September 16, 2011

How Sick Is Our Politics?

Audience reactions at the last two Republican debates gives insight into just how sick our politics has become. Four instances stand out.

First, Brian Williams prefaced a question to Rick Perry by saying "Texas has executed 234 death row inmates while you were governor". The audience started applauding at the mention of this.

Second, Ron Paul attempted to answer a question about 9/11 by saying the terrorists did this because they didn't like our policies. He got booed, even though he spoke the truth.

Third, Ron Paul was asked whether someone without health insurance who had been badly injured should just be left outside of the hospital to die. Several in the audience yelled out "yes".

Fourth, Rick Perry attempted to defend his policy in Texas of offering in-state tuition to children of illegal immigrants, and got roundly booed.

One could look at all this as showing how far right the Republican party has become, and see it as a hopeful sign for success next year for the Democratic candidate. However, a more realistic view is that it represents the coarsening of our politics, and a trend towards a genuine lack of compassion in our country, and, quite honestly, a rejection of Christian values.

Monday, September 5, 2011

Rick Perry and the Battle for the Soul of the Republican Party

Rick Perry has jumped into the race for the Republican nomination and promptly shot to the top in the Gallup Poll of likely voters, beating Mitt Romney by a tidy margin. This sets up yet another battle between the moderate and right wings of the party.

It is fascinating to consider the history of these battles. It all started 100 years ago, when Teddy Roosevelt challenged WH Taft for the nomination in 1912. TR was favored by most Republicans, but the convention machinery was stacked against him. The Rules Committee was dominated by Taft people, and the disputed delegates in several states all went to Taft. When it came to a floor vote challenging the Rules Committee decision, the disputed delegates chosen by the Rules Committee were allowed to vote on their own cases, causing the Taft delegates to be seated, and he then got the nomination. The irony of all this is that the machinery which caused TR to lose the nomination was put in place for years earlier by TR himself, to ensure the nomination of his hand-picked successor, Taft!

Now fast-forward 40 years to 1952, and we had the exact same scenario unfolding, with the conservative Robert Taft (WH's son) challenging the mdoerate Eisenhower for the nomination. Again, several states had disputed sets of delegates, and the convention was called upon to vote on which delegates were to be seated. But this time, the delegates whose seats were in dispute were *not* allowed to vote on their own cases, and the Eisenhower delegates got seated, giving him the nomination in a close vote.

The 1964 race saw another interesting battle. Goldwater was the clear frontrunner, and when the liberal Nelson Rockefeller faded, moderate forces made a last-minute effort to draft the moderate PA governor, William Scranton. Scranton finally allowed his name to be put into the race (on 6-12-64, an unheard-of late entry by today's standards, when multi-year campaigns are the rule), but the conservative Goldwater prevailed.

1976 saw the conservative Reagan challenging the unelected incumbent, Jerry Ford, for the GOP nomination. In fact, it was so even that the result was in doubt until the actual balloting, the last time this has happened in US convention history. Despite being weakened by Reagan's strong challenge, Ford almost prevailed in the general election against Carter.

In 1980 Reagan became the frontrunner after his famous "I paid for this microphone" comment. George H.W. Bush represented the moderate challenger, but lost out to the Gipper. The other moderate challenger was John Anderson, who ran in the general election as an independent after finishing third to Bush and Reagan for the GOP nomination.

The point of all this is to show that the battle between these two wings of the party has been an ongoing struggle over these past 100 years. The problem for the moderate wing, which has often been based in the Northeast, is that the New England Republicans have almost all disappeared. Some have changed parties, as did Vermont senator Jim Jeffords, who famously stated, "I didn't leave my party; my party left me." Others have been defeated by conservative primary challengers. Only the two Maine senators remain of the many New England moderate Republicans.

Another problem for the moderate wing is the growth of Republicanism in the south. The south used to be solidly Democratic, but in the past 50 years has grown to be just as solidly Republican. Hence, the South now has the largest say in who the nominee will be, which does not bode well for Mitt Romney.

Thursday, September 1, 2011

The Risk of Terrorism

A great article came to my attention, discussing what constitutes "acceptable" and "unacceptable" risks. It is found at

Professor Mueller surveys the regulatory practices of developed countries and finds there is general agreement on what constitutes an unacceptable risk. A death rate of 1 in 10,000 per year is generally considered unacceptable, as in a 1980 U.S. Supreme Court case in which the death rate from workers inhaling gasoline vapors was deemed to be unacceptable at 1 in 40,000.

Similarly, a death rate of less than 1 in a million is considered acceptable.

The risk from terrorism is way lower than what is considered in other areas as acceptable, so obviously the vast funds spent are out of line. Mueller states: "Compared with dying at the hands of a terrorist, Americans are twice as likely to perish in a natural disaster and nearly a thousand times more likely to be killed in some type of accident."

To get up to the upper border of what is unacceptable, which is 1 in 100,00 deaths, even after accepting the dubious DHS proposition that lives lost to terrorism are twice as valuable as lives lost otherwise, Mueller states that "the number of fatalities from terrorist attacks in the United States and Canada would have to increase 35-fold; in Great Britain (excluding Northern Ireland), more than 50-fold; and in Australia, more than 70-fold. For the United States, this would mean experiencing attacks on the scale of 9/11 at least once a year, or 18 Oklahoma City bombings every year."