Weening the American Voters off Reliance on the Media in Selecting Candidates

How well do voters (i.e., an electorate) know and thus are able to assess people running for public office? As the proportion of people who know a candidate firsthand decreases, the importance of the campaign ads and debates increases. In other words, the candidate's marketing plays a greater role in who wins. At an empire-level, such as the U.S. Government, an overwhelming percentage of people in an electorate (e.g., voting in a U.S. Senate race, or that of the federal president) are significantly influenced by the candidates' respective media campaigns for lack of real knowledge. In a U.S. presidential campaign, financial contributions are vital in being able to orchestrate an empire-wide media campaign. Also, how a campaign manipulates the media coverage of the candidate is very important. The case of Sarah Palin, who ran as John McCain's running mate in 2008, illustrates the extent of distance that can separate what the public "knows" of the real person from the media-made candidate. When people learned of her shocking ignorance of government, the distance was suddenly transparent, and yet no electioneering reforms were subsequently put into effect. Americans still had to rely on presidential debates to get a glimpse of the "man behind the curtain." 

In the election of 2012, I had the sense in the second presidential debate that Barack Obama looked smug, even arrogant, as if he were running the debate in virtue of his office. His tone directed at the moderated seemed to say, "Ok Candy, you may proceed with that." Perhaps the two labels are unfair, though people who have had contact with the president in person tend to provide similar feedback. I suspect the average Joe (not necessarily "the plumber") voter is turned off by conceit. Watching the debate, I had a subtle sense that whispered in my ears, "American viewers might be reacting negatively to his personality, as if saying to themselves, 'now we see how he really is . . . hmmm.'" There is the brand and the man. In other words, apart from the speeches and the orchastrated ads, Barak Obame might not be someone we would necessarily want to get to know, after all. I wonder if this recognition or awareness was occurring for the American people only then, during the debates, as we observed Obama interact with a rival in real time. "So this is how he plays with others . . . hmmm."

In divining what prompts the electorate's leaning one way or the other in a given election, we would be wise not to leave out "comfort level" with seeing and hearing the candidate at issue. Mentality or attitude is relevant because we know that whoever is elected president will be a regular fixture in our lives, albeit vicariously through electronic means. I am not referring only to whether we like the guy; the matter extends to our comfort with his attitude. This is a very subtle thing. Personality and attitude can thus be understood to play a role, albeit a subtle one, in how a candidate for president is "evaluated." An election is not simply about policy, which is a reason why the latter should be included on a ballot separately. 

Of course, Obama's attitude was not the only one on display during the debate. I have in mind Romney's duplicity, even lying, in his claim, "I care about all Americans" during the debate after he had said in private that it would not be his job to worry about 47 percent of us if elected no doubt turned many people off (at least those of us who follow politics). As he looked straight into the camera and made his statement as though sincere, I wondered whether the highest politicians have such an astonishing ability to act. That is to say, the true gift of a politician could be the ability to come off as incredibly sincere when he or she is simply acting the part. "Wow he's good" was what came to my mind. Of course, the excellence of a skill is of little value if the skill itself is a vice. Perhaps what we are left with is a fleeting glimpse of how little we know about either candidate, and yet we presume we know so much about both. "Obama cares" and "Romney is compassionate" may turn out to be marketing-driven rather than real, yet we cannot be wrong about what we believe to be the case, right?

To offer a less sensitive example illustrating the distance between a person and his character on television, Andy Taylor, the nice, common-sense sheriff in The Andy Griffith Show, was easy for millions of viewers to like. From this viewing experience of  the character, many Americans doubtlessly felt a loss when Andy Griffith died in the summer of 2012 even though the man was reportedly not "good with people." He even fought with the actress who played Aunt Bee, a kind, motherly character (how many viewers could say the actress playing her was so nice?). The actor who played the sheriff was not as kind in person as is his character, yet people with just the character in mind mourned as if they had lost the man himself. This, I submit, is a problem that also impairs political elections. For some reason, the human mind is susceptible to viewing acting as if the actor were the character (i.e., no distance between them). In mourning President Reagan as his funeral was broadcast, the vast majority of Americans had only the actor's presidential character in mind, for they could not get to the man himself. How many knew that he called his wife, Mommie? Where most of an electorate do not get to meet the candidates in person, as in the case of the election for an empire-scale office such as the U.S. Presidency, the susceptibility is particularly strong because the contact comes only through the media and the candidates' own respective media campaigns. As debates can become unscripted, they are perhaps the best means of catching of glimpse of the real persons who would use judgment in office on some very important matters. To the extent that an electorate relies on the real people in offices so far away, getting to the real persons who mask as candidates is important, and yet little if any progress has been made in at least the United States. The European Union is a better construct for this, as more power in the E.U. resides with state-level office-holders. In general, less distance between the voter and a candidate is within states than at the empire-level (i.e., the Congress and the federal president). The sizes of the electorates for federal offices are a leap greater than those within the states. Less distance is involved in the latter, for the electorates are so much smaller. Hence it is easier for proportionately more of such electorates to know the "man behind the candidate." Other things equal, better candidates should be more likely to beat the bad ones. 

I suspect that in 2012 after the second debate, many independents (and perhaps even some Republicans and Democrats) had the sense that better people could have been selected as candidates. This suspicion was confirmed for me when I learned after the third debate that the candidates  to discuss took liberties in discussing domestic policy even though the debate was to be on FOREIGN policy. Such a lapse can itself be a red flag respecting boundary issues or problems with "keeping within the lines" (i.e., as in coloring books). At the very least, it evinces self-centeredness. In short, the debate gave the electorate a glimpse into the man behind the candidate--for both candidates, but should a democracy founded on popular sovereignty--the voters as a group--be satisfied with just glimpses?  They can trigger unfounded inferences, which in turn can lead a voter to use bad judgement in voting. At the very least, then, the American electorates should have better access behind the candidate. For example, release of President Trump's tax returns should have been mandated so voters could get a better sense of how he ran his company, as such an executive role is arguably related to how he would be the chief executive of the U.S. Government. Mandated disclosures could also have pointed to the man himself--his judgments and character. Generally speaking, the People should demand that their government require more along this line. Put another way, the People have a right to be informed even if it means that political media campaigns must deviate from their respective scripts and even have to play defense, losing control of the narrative.

BP and MMS: A Case of Regulatory Capture

In the U.S. Constitutional Convention, James Madison in particular stressed the nepharious quality of faction in relation to the public good. He argued that if a republic is extended in scope sufficently that there are more factions, none of them would be able to dominate and the public good would emerge. In a republic in which there are only a few major parties, the people's perspectives can become delimited by the parties' paradigms in an either-or dual macro-framework. That is to say, societal blind-spots can exist. To the extent that both BP and the relevant U.S. Government regulatory agency, MMS, were both culpable in the Deep Water Horizon rig explosion in 2010, both the Republican defense of business and the Democratic defense of government fall short. Even so, these respective defenses went on undaunted in the wake of the disaster and in the next year. To be sure, old paradigms die hard.

Albeit an oversimplification, it can be said that the Democratic party in the United States stresses the power of business as the problem, whereas the Republican party there views the problem as being government.  In campaigning for President in 1980, Ronald Reagan bluntly said that government was indeed the problem.  Deregulation ensued and industry self-regulation was like a fad. The idea was that the checks and balances in goverment that protect the liberties of the citizens could be applied at the industry level such firms would provide a check on eachother automatically. Lost in the buzz was the extent to which an industry would be willing to sacrifice its own long-term viability in order to protect even the bad among its own.

In 2010, the Republican paradigm whereas business is good and government is bad resulted in some Republican office holders defending a piriah (BP) and continuing to urge deregulation in order to excoreate against the US Government and frustrate the Obama Administration.  The ranking Republican on the US House Energy and Commerce committee apologized to BP’s CEO for the “shakedown” by Obama in extracting a $20 billion fund for the claims in the Gulf region. Meanwhile, Democrats were hard-pressed to admit that a goverment regulatory agency, namely MMS, could be so inept and corrupt.  It was not so much a matter of more regulations being needed; rather, the problem was government regulation itself.

Democrats could point to the encroaching nature of big business over the regulators, but absent a shakedown in the size of the biggest companies, the wherewithal of the regulators not to “partner up” with the regulatees may be an intractable problem in government regulation.  The traditional argument in capture theory that regulators depend on their respective industries for information doesn’t even break a sweat in what is needed to explain the extent of the power of big business over government regulatory agencies.  The imbalance of power is systemic: government officials being too feckless and corrupt. and big business being too powerful for the good of the republic.  In their letters, Jefferson and Adams agree on the need for a natural aristocracy of virtue and talent, rather than the artifical sort of wealth and birth.  Absent a natural aristocracy, systems whether business or government, cannot but be ineffective and corrupt.

In 2010, BP’s sordid safety record and its explosion in the Gulf of Mexico challenged the paradigms of both parties.  In actuality, business and goverment, as well as business and government, contain problems that exceed and transcend a particular paradigm. In treating the two party paradigms as a dichotomy, we miss the interaction effect that exists among the respective sectors’ problems.  It might be that the founders were correct in their suspicion of factionalism, as it does indeed detract from the common good.  Where a paradigm keeps one from acknowledging problems that are in the radar of an “opposing” paradigm, a person is not apt to serve the public interest.  In other words, both paradigms are limited.  The BP-MMS interaction and the subsequent explosion and responses exposed the delimited nature of the partisan paradigms.

For more on MMS, see Cases of Unethical Business, which is available in print and as an ebook at Amazon.

Business CEO’s Overstating Political Uncertainty in the United States

The impact on business of political uncertainty in countries that are seized by revolution can be substantial—so much so in fact that CEO’s and board directors are motivated to avoid the uncertainty itself. I submit that business analysts of political risk tend unwittingly to routinely overstate the uncertainty arising from incoming U.S. presidential administrations. If I am correct in this claim, CEO’s and board directors pay too much heed to political uncertainty itself in the making of major strategic decisions involving operations in the American context.

Although American culture welcomes and even encourages leaps in technological development capable of transforming daily life, another sort of change—one more subject to societal control—is tolerated only if made incrementally. Otherwise, the change is dubbed as radical, which is a charge made more out of fear than according to any objective measure. Clutching at the status quo unduly translates politically into the tyranny of the status quo as powers both in business and government that profit as things are hold back all but incremental change that does not threaten the current basis of benefits. The many points of access into the federal legislative and executive machinery enable the stultifying influence a virtual veto over proposals of serious, or “real,” change. Such change tends to be pulled back until only the tolerated incremental change remains.

A few examples reveal the pattern. In 1986, amid large budget deficits caused in part by the tax cuts of the early 80’s, Ronald Reagan pushed for a wholesale change in the federal income tax, ridding it of its myriad of deductions. Yet as the U.S. Senate debated the tax code, individual senators came forward with rationales for all of the major deductions. The “powers that be” were exercising their prerogatives to continue their respective benefits, which Reagan’s vision for change would put at risk. Business practitioners anxiously pointing to the political uncertainty of a revised tax code were in retrospect overreacting, and thus putting too much emphasis on the uncertainty itself.

In 2008, Barak Obama campaigned under the slogan of “real change.” After his election, political risk analysts were doubtlessly impressed with the sheer uncertainty latent in the very notion of real change. Yet when Congress was considering the Affordable Care Act, Obama dropped his proposal for a public option, which would be useful should private insurers leave the planned exchanges. The president gave into pressure from the insurance industry lobby, the members of which stood to lose benefits should Obama’s healthcare plan instantiate real change even just in terms of there being a public health-insurance option. The resulting law was incremental because the private health-insurance companies were still to be relied on. The anticipated uncertainty regarding the American health insurance system turned out to be much less. The analyses of CEO’s making strategic decisions based in part on avoiding the American context due to the uncertainty would have been distorted, and thus not optimal.

In 2016, when Donald Trump was elected president, the uncertainty in terms of political risk must have been palpable in corporate boardrooms. Trump’s proposal of a substantial tax, or tariff, on American companies that take advantage of lower labor-cost countries and import the resulting products back into the large U.S. domestic market undoubtedly stocked the uncertainty without much thinking-through of how political compromise could take its toll on the proposal as it moves through Congress. Similarly, fears of trade wars resulting from the proposed tariff may have been overblown. That American companies would be subject to the penalty means that foreign companies manufacturing outside of the U.S. and importing into the large domestic market would have a competitive advantage. Pressure from Chinese companies could mitigate the likelihood of a Chinese-stoked trade war even though the pulling out of American companies (i.e., the loss of some manufacturing plants) would have a detrimental impact on the Chinese economy. Of course, such a scenario assumes that the actual tariff is enough to motivate American CEO’s to return their manufacturing to America; the political compromise that may be needed to pass such a tariff might reduce it to an insufficient level and thus effectively discredit the very idea of using public policy to alter the financial calculus of American companies such that they have a financial incentive to return voluntarily in line with maximizing profit.

The American preference for incremental over systemic change puts any genuinely new political proposal at risk of being shrunk to fit through the contours of the status quo, which is so dear to the vested interests. The uncertainty typically thought to exist in the advent of a new presidential administration tends to be overblown in retrospect. The American economy suffers from this bloated condition to the extent that CEO’s and corporate board directors move operations away from the geographically delimited hyper-uncertainty.