Game Theory is a branch of mathematics devoted to the study of games and strategy. "Games", in this sense, should be taken to mean any competitive contest from chess to economics to the nuclear brinksmanship of the Cold War, which latter was arguably its first serious application under the leadership of John von Neumann, one of the fathers of the computer age. Most people are probably unaware of game theory, but many of its core ideas have seeped into public awareness, such as the "zero-sum game", a game in which, like elections, contestants can only benefit by harming their opponent. If game theory is a new topic to you, you can rest assured that it's not news to political strategists. (We make an exception for some of the loonier Tea Party candidates, who would be better understood in the light of Spastic Flailing Theory, if there was such a thing.)
Game theory is germane to the current hubbub over President Obama's performance to date for obvious reasons: elections are games in the theoretical sense, and the contestants -- political candidates, in this case -- compete in a zero-sum game for the votes of their constituents. Even absent full mathematical rigor, strategists for candidates are thinking in terms of game theory: what statements and actions will attract votes to them, energize their supporters, and demoralize their detractors?
The President's strategy appears to be an effort to court swing voters by appearing reasonable and "bipartisan". The cold shoulder he's giving to the progressive wing of the party rests on an assumption that the Democrats have long made, and which at this time appears to have more substance than it usually does: given the choice between a houseplant and a serial killer, the rational voter will choose the houseplant. The rational voter almost certainly doesn't want a houseplant, but he or she desperately wants to avoid the serial killer.
If the formula seems familiar, it's because it's the approach that the Democrats have, since 1965, taken toward African-American voters. Our black brothers and sisters do not need any reminding of this routine, which works like this: during elections, candidates make a few nods to the African-American vote, attend an NAACP event, scoop up some votes on election day, and then forget that black people exist until the next election. And they do this, secure in the knowledge that even if they do absolutely nothing to benefit black people, the alternative is a Republican who will screw them into the ground.
There is a problem with this approach. That problem has long been obvious to anyone who was paying attention, but the elections in 2008 and 2010 should have caught the attention of those who weren't. And that problem is the same problem that mathematical game theory has always faced: it assumes the participants in the game are all rational actors. Unfortunately, no human being is a rational actor all the time, and relatively few of them are rational actors very much of the time.
Voter turnout has always been low among African-American voters, minorities generally, the poor, and the young. Rationally, these are the very groups that should never miss voting, because they generally get the short end of the stick from society and the government, and flooding the polls is one of the few things they can do to change things. (This is especially true in the primaries, where voter turnout is incredibly low across the board.) But with the exception of the historic 2008 elections, they don't.
Why? Because unlike the abstract competitors of game theory, humans aren't motivated mainly by rational thought. Their motivations come from their emotions, and the emotions that come from being stomped on by society are despair, depression, and hopelessness. African-Americans and other minorities take a tremendous amount of abuse, but it doesn't take those extremes to get a citizen to waive his or her right to vote. White Democrats stayed home in 2010 because of their dissatisfaction with Obama, and you can bet that a lot of them were sitting out the election in affluent neighborhoods without suffering anything that could be remotely described as hardship. Conversely, in 2008, African-American voters turned out in unprecedented numbers because of the hope inherent in an African-American candidate who actually had a real chance of winning -- and win he did.
Those of us here at dKos and the rest of the political blog scene, wingnuts included, whether we are male or female, white, black, hispanic, or other, straight or gay, all have one thing in common: we are much more engaged politically than the bulk of the population. Despite the occasional "I'm not going to vote if Obama doesn't (whatever)" diary, we are in fact going to vote. We're highly motivated, and even when we're not, we're well-informed enough to recognize the rational answer to the choice between a Democratic houseplant and a GOP/teabagger serial killer, and even if we are completely disaffected with Barack Obama, we'll hold our collective noses and vote for him again.
The problem is that the rest of the population isn't like that. And I don't mean to rehash last week's argument about whether we are or aren't the Democratic base. There are quite likely a lot of potential voters who would feel quite at home here, but they just aren't that engaged, and they're not going to be. Ever. Getting them to vote is a major effort, and discouraging them into staying home is not difficult at all. The houseplant vs. serial killer scare tactics won't work on them, partly because they aren't paying attention, but also because most people aren't consistently rational actors of the sort expected by game theory. They're just muddling along on their feelings.
The president's political strategists are quite correct in their assumption that "the middle" wins elections. After all, the other two-thirds of the population, though variable in turnout, generally stick with their parties from election to election. Where they are wrong is in their assumption that "the middle" consists of centrists who want a nice happy medium between the ideological positions of the parties. That presumes both a high attention level and rational (if flawed) thinking. Moving the middle requires appealing to their passions and inspiring them. Like it or not, that's just how a huge chunk of the human race works, and appealing to a purely hypothetical, rational version of the human race won't work, at least unless we find some way to get hypothetical votes to count in elections.
Much is made of how intelligent Barack Obama is. I'm not going to try to guess his exact IQ, but he's plainly on the far right side of the bell curve. But you know what? In a country of 300+ million people, there are several million -- perhaps tens of millions -- of people who are as smart as he is, and a smaller but not insignificant number who are as well-educated as he is. You'd probably love to have them as candidates in any election. But you don't hear about them because they aren't out there appealing to both reason and passion. The ability to appeal to passion and motivate people is leadership; to do it rationally is good leadership.
And that brings us back to the houseplant and the serial killer. There are a superabundance of people who can appeal to passion and do it without a rational thought in their heads, hence the unusually serial-killer-ish lineup of GOP presidential candidates. There are also a lot of really smart people who couldn't move an audience with a bulldozer, and a substantial number of them are former failed Democratic presidential candidates. John Kerry, Al Gore, Paul Tsongas, Michael Dukakis, and so on.
The real shame here is that Barack Obama has the ability to do both, but he has decided to stake his presidency -- and the future of our country -- on the ability of a hypothetical electorate to get out and vote for a houseplant again.