Hey, Hey, LBJ
In my previous post, I argued that Matt Yglesias should know better than to criticize the press for asking process-oriented questions. As an example, I cited Marc Ambinder's prescient question about the debt ceiling, which was entirely procedural (it was all about leverage, not about a substantive issue). Sarang commented:
So this reminds me a little of the argument that you should pay attention to technical analysis, not because it's anything other than chicken scratches, but because everyone is paying attention to those chicken scratches, so they move markets.
Today I dug up the Yglesias post I was thinking of but couldn't find. It spells out the point I am attacking a little more clearly. The title says it all: "Nobody Cares About the Press Corps' Process Questions."
So anyway I think Sarang and I are talking past each other. Sarang basically says, political maneuvers don't matter because elections are determined by macroeconomic factors, so you should pay attention to political maneuvers only inasmuch as politicians irrationally believe them to matter.
I think you should pay attention to political maneuvers because they are the means by which wars are launched, debts are defaulted on, and gays are barred from adopting children. Or to use a recent and ongoing example, Congress now uses pro forma sessions to prevent Obama from making recess appointments. Pay no attention, says Sarang. Obama's election will depend on macroeconomic aggregates.
I say pay attention: a huge number of executive branch positions remain vacant, and this matters. Maybe not as much as the 2012 presidential election, but enough that it is worthwhile for political reporters to note the issue. This is why I used the Ambinder example: if the safest financial asset in the world suddenly stopped making scheduled payments, it would be a very big deal, electoral impact or no. But since Ambinder's question was procedural, by Yglesias's stated logic (which I doubt he actually believes), it shouldn't have been asked in the first place. (One reason I doubt Yglesias thinks procedural questions are irrelevant is his longtime campaign against the filibuster, as well as posts like this, which addresses congressional hostage-taking - a classic procedural issue.)
So I stand by my point: paying attention to the accumulation and deployment of political power is a worthwhile endeavor.
It's worthwhile to separate out two points. One (MY's point) is that it is bad for politicians and politics junkies to use these process issues to determine how elections will play out because they only affect outcomes indirectly through their influence on policy; to predict whether someone will get reelected the best thing to do is to predict the growth rate and stick it in the Hibbs model. This is largely true, but it runs into the other point, which is that everyone esp. Obama is in fact perceptions-driven and therefore to predict what policies they are likely to enact it is beside the point to ask what a rational person in their place would enact. MY's target audience is some mix of policy makers and pundits, so he is being descriptive on the first point and prescriptive on the second. This seems internally consistent.
So this reminds me a little of the argument that you should pay attention to technical analysis, not because it's anything other than chicken scratches, but because everyone is paying attention to those chicken scratches, so they move markets.
Today I dug up the Yglesias post I was thinking of but couldn't find. It spells out the point I am attacking a little more clearly. The title says it all: "Nobody Cares About the Press Corps' Process Questions."
So anyway I think Sarang and I are talking past each other. Sarang basically says, political maneuvers don't matter because elections are determined by macroeconomic factors, so you should pay attention to political maneuvers only inasmuch as politicians irrationally believe them to matter.
I think you should pay attention to political maneuvers because they are the means by which wars are launched, debts are defaulted on, and gays are barred from adopting children. Or to use a recent and ongoing example, Congress now uses pro forma sessions to prevent Obama from making recess appointments. Pay no attention, says Sarang. Obama's election will depend on macroeconomic aggregates.
I say pay attention: a huge number of executive branch positions remain vacant, and this matters. Maybe not as much as the 2012 presidential election, but enough that it is worthwhile for political reporters to note the issue. This is why I used the Ambinder example: if the safest financial asset in the world suddenly stopped making scheduled payments, it would be a very big deal, electoral impact or no. But since Ambinder's question was procedural, by Yglesias's stated logic (which I doubt he actually believes), it shouldn't have been asked in the first place. (One reason I doubt Yglesias thinks procedural questions are irrelevant is his longtime campaign against the filibuster, as well as posts like this, which addresses congressional hostage-taking - a classic procedural issue.)
So I stand by my point: paying attention to the accumulation and deployment of political power is a worthwhile endeavor.
posted by James | 4:15 PM
2 Comments:
I think you're just misreading MY on "process." I take his main point to be that, since the public is not interested in process issues, a politician whose sole desire is to get reelected should disregard norms of process, and esp. should avoid "positioning." (E.g., they should not be guided by what would "look bad" as no one is looking.) The extension of this critique to the press is that instead of viewing process issues through a consequentialist lens, they see them as moves in an imaginary inside-baseball game that in fact has no electoral rewards.
But the question "does X have the authority to do Y" or "did X just give up the ability to demand concessions" is not a process issue in this sense at all, any more than "does Congress have the votes to pass this budget" is a process issue. The distribution of political power is an entirely objective thing, as is the structure of Congress; and obviously these things have real implications for the economy and therefore for the electoral chances of incumbents.
Also it is perfectly reasonable to pay attention to Congress blocking appointments because the appointments are connected with general govt. performance which is connected with electoral results. This is so even on the technical analysis theory.
Finally, if your point is that, in some general normative sense, people should pay attention to hostage-taking etc. as this would lead to a better incentive structure, that might be true but it is irrelevant. Undecided voters are on the whole low-information and cannot be made to care.
Here's what Matty G said in the original post:
"It quantifies precisely the phenomenon James Fallows noted a long time ago — professional political reporters ask a lot of political process questions. Fully 24 percent of questions at briefings were about congressional negotiations as opposed to just two percent of the questions from Twitter."
He was speaking of this graphic. I guess there's more than one way to read "congressional negotiations," but it seems to me it must include the debt ceiling.
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