I will cut to the chase. However you feel about Obama, I write today to change the way that you think about voting.
You think that you vote for someone who will "represent" you. You don't. Stop thinking that way. It gets in the way of what you want to achieve by voting.
In this series
Tuesday: The Motley President
Today: Representatives vs. Targets
Thursday: How to Primary Obama
Friday: (as yet unclear)
If you think you are voting for a "representative," you feel complicit in what they do in office. To avoid that feeling of complicity, you want not to vote. You don't want "blood on your hands" -- that's understandable, even admirable.
But, most of the time, casting a ballot doesn't leave blood on your hands. You're just doing the best you can in the situation you're given, one of limited choices and limited influence. Voting for someone does not make you responsible for their every choice. It makes you responsible for figuring out how you can influence them and then doing it.
There'a a clever saying that I hate:
"Don't vote, it only encourages them"
This is "empowering" in allowing you to embrace disempowerment while seeming wise. It is the wrong mindset. Politicians don't need your encouragement. They just want power -- for good or for otherwise. You can't evade responsibility for what is done in your name; you can only evade the power to determine it. That, frankly, is just fine with our opponents, who don't want you to vote.
You vote for one reason: to decide who you want to influence in office.
When you protest, when you complain, when you struggle, when you call, when you march, do you want to be trying to influence a Barack Obama, or a Michele Bachmann, or a Mitt Romney, or a Rick Perry? Do you want someone who will feel disturbed at betraying you, perhaps a bit dissuaded, or someone who will love it?
That, stripped to its bare essentials, is why you vote.
Voting just became easier for you. It's not an "expression of your values." It's a cold-blooded, practical decision about who you think you can most likely push around.
Don't vote to pick someone to represent you. Pick the candidate that you think you can best make represent you. Don't try to choose a champion. Choose a target.
How people who care about results think about politics
"People" involved in choosing who to elect and what they will do -- "natural" and "corporate people," independent thinkers and paid agents -- who care about results don't care about politicians. Politicians are a distraction, a necessary inconvenience. "People" don't care about whether someone "represents their views." They care about what a legislator or executive can be made to do.
If you hope that the people for whom you vote will "represent" you in governance, you will always be disappointed. They won't. They can't. They aren't you. You're only one person of many who would have voted for them. They can't represent everyone who supported them.
That doesn't mean that you shouldn't feel passionate about politics. It means that you must temper your passion with cold-blooded realism. You must care about results as well as means.
I will free your soul with this sentence: voting for someone does not make you responsible for their every choice in office. You should demand fundamental honesty and integrity in politicians for a simple reason: it helps us get what we want. (For one thing, we Democrats do better in a political environment that will attract selfless idealists who have such integrity.) For Republicans, like the ones sending out misleading ballot information in Wisconsin, honesty and scruples in politicians often gets in the way.
Elected representatives are targets. They are always targets, for us and for our opponents. This isn't news to them; they already know that they are targets. Before, during, and after elections, treat them as targets.
That is what the Tea Party does. That is what large corporate interests do. Unions, doctors, racists, overlords, underdogs -- it is what any successful pressure group does. You don't have to treat politicians like dirt -- and you shouldn't, because they have feelings too and spitting on them generally doesn't help you get what you want (although it can) -- but your love for them cannot be unconditional. They're not family. Their vendors. Vendors of policy.
The notion that we should treat politicians as targets rather than as representatives can bring all Democrats together, because then none of us ever have to be some politician's credulous "chump." You say that you don't want to "pick the lesser of two evils." That means that you're investing your ego in the process. A vote isn't an endorsement, it's a decision -- and you can, should, must be cold-blooded about it.
A Brief Note to Obama Devotees
How are you doing? Do you like the diary so far? Nothing objectionable? Great! I'm helping to convince people to vote for Obama -- you like that, right? Wonderful. Sit down a spell.
Many of you will disagree, I know, with what I'm about to say about President Obama. I ask you to consider for a moment that I and many others here (and even more who are not here on this website!) hold the belief I will mention truly and after substantial contemplation. We do not hold this belief (at least not necessarily) because of our character flaws or emotional problems or mental illnesses or anything else that you posit would have to be so. We just disagree with you on the merits.
OK, brace yourselves, because I'm going to say it now:
Many of us believe that Barack Obama has not treated progressives all that well.
I know -- you're shocked. Compose yourself. May we go on? Here's another bit:
Many of us believe that Barack Obama treated progressives -- and Democrats generally, and his own electoral chances -- particularly badly in this whole recent "debt ceiling" crisis.
We can get into why -- it about time someone wrote about it here on this website, right? -- but we don't need to here and now. Let's just recognize it as a fact and try to get past it.
I can see that you're uncomfortable. I see that you're eyeing the exits. Please hang around, though, because I think you're going to like most of where this diary goes.
I've been clear about two things over the past month: (1) I really don't like what Obama has been doing (and, now, has done) regarding the debt ceiling, among other issues, and (2) I have every intention of voting for him in November 2012.
Does that seem like a contradiction? It isn't.
So settle in and enjoy what comes next, because I'm going to try to convince those people who are upset like me that they should vote for him too. And it won't be because we like him or trust him. It will be because we can use him.
Progressives: you are not Obama's mark, punk, dupe, or chump
You, my fellow progressives, might feel a little smugly superior when you see people falling in love with the President, in luxurious color and moody black-and-white, in diaries all over the site much of the time that demand that are celebrations of love, love, love. You're not in love with the President, after all!
Ah, but you are more similar to your opponents in these site battles than you want to be -- if you are angry with him because you want to be in love with him.
Give it up. Give up your yearnings for love.
He's not a guru or a shaman or a celebrity crush. Think of Obama as your shift supervisor at work.
He can make your life better -- or he can make your life worse.
You can appreciate him for the former -- or resent him for the latter.
If you, because you're such a good egg, were given the choice between two shifts at work with different supervisors, your ego would not be reflected in the choice. You would not be endorsing, or expressing your love, for one person or the other.
You would, simply, be choosing whose crap you are more willing to put up with.
You would be choosing, even more so, whom you think you could more readily get to do things that you want him or her to do. These things aren't frivolous; they include the likes of: treat you with respect. Value your opinion. Improve your working conditions.
None of that is "love." It's the real-life choices that we all make. Do you choose to work for the shift supervisor who is "the lesser of two evils"? You're damn right you do -- and then you work to make him or her less evil.
I'll smack that "Obama is not your boyfriend" right off your face
I see what's happening in the Obama Fan corner. What I said just resonated with you. It reminds you of something you want to say, I can see the words forming on your lips:
"Obama is not your boyfriend!"
Yeah -- and what does that mean? "Don't get so emotionally invested in Obama?" You first, my friends.
I think that maybe what it it means to you is this: "Obama can disappoint you in his actions -- and it's OK!"
No, it's not OK. It's inevitable, and one should deal with it like an adult, but it is not "OK."
Obama is your shift supervisor. If you have ever worked on a shift, if you've ever had a boss of any kind, you know that it is not "OK" if your boss treats you like crap. Wanting Obama not to treat one like crap is not immaturity or over-emotionality, it's the same kind of response to negative behavior that gets us through our daily lives.
No one, but for a few twisted souls, likes to be taken advantage of. The wise shift supervisor -- like the wise parent, the wise mate, the wise friend, the wise politician, the wise website owner -- knows that they are better off if they don't make people think that they are being played for chumps.
Dammit, now I have to talk about game theory. This is going to totally throw me off. Let's go.
The Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, yadda yadda yadda
When I went to graduate school at the University of Michigan, one of the stars on the Political Science faculty was the "game theorist" Robert Axelrod, whom I got to know somewhat. (He still might recognize me, I'd guess -- and probably walk off briskly in another direction.) Axelrod's fame derived from his research on something called the "Prisoner's Dilemma." Axelrod took this "game" -- meaning a strategic exercise with rules governing "moves" and "payoffs," as in "war games" -- and changed the way we thought about it.
All you have to know about this "game" for present purposes is that you could cooperate with your opponent or defect (that is, betray, or refuse to cooperate with) your opponent. The rules of the game are set up so that if both "players" cooperate, both win and if both defect, both lose. But if one cooperates and one defects, the betrayer wins big and the cooperator becomes a chump and loses big.
The Prisoner's Dilemma was, before Axelrod, an interesting conundrum, because while both "players" of the game are better off if both cooperate, it turns out that the lure of profiting from (and the fear of being subjected to) betrayal are so strong that both players end up defecting -- leader to a lower joint payoff. The rational individual choice, in a single Prisoner's Dilemma, leads to an irrational collective outcome.
What Axelrod did was to hit on the idea of making the game iterative: having people play the game over and over again with the same opponent (or a series of them), to see what happens when one has the chance to develop a reputation, a relationship.
Doing this with real human being as players would require paying and/or feeding them, so he invited to submit computer programs (it's not a complicated game) to be pitted against each other. Well, one program outperformed the others: a game with the rule "whatever your opponent did last time, do that this time." Once both players of the game cooperated even once, this rule would bind them to eternal cooperation. (Well, at least until more complicated programs were developed, which they were.)
Lots of people know that story. Many fewer know the story that follows.
I moved on from Michigan and eventually joined my then-wife in Pittsburgh, where she still teaches, and became a cordial acquaintance of a man who had long been one of my favorite-ever cognitive psychologists, Robyn Dawes, author of the classic-everyone-should-read "Rational Choice in an Uncertain World: The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making," which is social science at its finest.
As I was technically then a social scientist on leave (and, later, an underemployed one), I saw Dawes speak a few times at Carnegie-Mellon, beyond the times we met in and around his office or a class. In one such lecture, Dawes raised the topic of Axelrod's work, saying something like: "Axelrod totally misinterpreted his results. The rules is not 'Do what your opponent did last time.' The rule is: 'try to cooperate, and then Defect If You are One Down.'"
"Defect If One Down." This phrase is not, until this diary is published, even in Google. I don't know if he ever published about it, or if I was just lucky enough to be listening to him on the right day. It's worth our knowing.
"If someone else has taken advantage of you, stop cooperating. Once you're even, once you're treated fairly again, try to cooperate again."
Dawes was a great old liberal as well as one of the smartest scientists on the planet, and he knew that this was the rule that made society work. We want to cooperate but we will not abide being treated as chumps. Evolution has selected against genes that make one perfectly happy to be a chump. We resist it. Or, we console ourselves with feeling superior to others and try not to think about our chumphood. (That is "What's the Matter With Kansas.")
That, in a nutshell, is the major problem that I and many other progressives have had with President Obama. He has had a chance to resuscitate the great civic principle of "Try to Cooperate, Then Defect If One Down" -- by investigating the previous administration, by sending criminal conspirators in the financial industry and beyond to prison -- and, for whatever reason, he largely hasn't done so. But this essay is not supposed to be about my problems with the President, but about why all progressives should support him in 2012. Here's why.
Obama is a Tool
That, I realize, sounds a little bit off. I don't mean that in a bad way -- although it's fine it you laughed. I mean it literally. He is a means to an end, a tool that we can use for social betterment. He's not a handy or a good tool, in some ways, though he's a very useful one in others. But he, like every other potential officeholder, is a tool, through which we can do our political, social, cultural, and economic work.
Mitt Romney, Michelle Bachmann, Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich -- they also are all tools. (And now everybody laughs!) And the question we have to ask ourselves is: which tool is more useful to us.
You can make a case that Obama is a worse tool. The strongest arguments against Obama are that he has accomplished wrongs that Republicans could not -- the "Only Nixon Could Go to China" notion. And, certainly, he's given us some reason for worry and anger along those lines. But -- a worse tool? Do we think that a President McCain or Perry or Bachmann -- or even a Tea-Party-spooked Romney -- would not be doing the same? I think that they would. And, in other areas, I think that they would do much worse.
Unless my memory fools me, I once wrote something pretty cool on this website (or maybe on Eschaton or Docudharma, it's now misplaced in any case), along these lines, and it is the distilled message of this diary:
Choose whom you want to listen to you protest -- then elect them and start protesting.
Do I feel like a chump for supporting Obama despite everything? No. I'm choosing the best tool for the work at hand.
Am I disappointed, angry? Yes, I am. But I'm doing something about it. You'll see what that is in tomorrow's diary.
What Obama Should Understand About Progressives
Obama has a significant stake in making progressives not feel like chumps. He thinks that it's up to us to realize that he's right, to put up with being rolled by the conservatives even while they give up pretty much nothing. He does not understand, but must come to understand, how important it is to treat us in ways that don't leave us feeling like chumps. I don't refer here primarily to those of us who grouse on Daily Kos; we reflect, rather than create, larger social currents. People who supported Obama are feeling like chumps. If he loses re-election, that will be why. He needs a stronger and less discouraged opposition from the Left. Its absence allows him to drift away from the people, who will be less readily seduced if they feel they have once been abandoned.
We are upset because we feel that, in the strategic games Obama has been playing with the Left, he has defected. He has, in too many areas, make us feel like chumps. I feel that we need to recover ground. I believe devoutly that, for lack of a better tool, we will have to re-elect him. But I also feel both the atavistic desire and the cold-blooded rational interest in punishing the President as well; not in swinging at him blindly, but in applying pressure so that he'll do more of what we want. I feel, moreover, that the general public feels it. I feel, furthermore, that Obama and his advisors do not "get it." He is poorly served.
"Punishing." That word. Some of you, I'll bet, stopped right there. Some of you can see nothing else now -- the whole diary has leaked out your ears while you mull over those words, "punishing the President." Temerity! Do I think he's my child or something? Do I think he needs to be spanked?
No, I don't. "Punish" is a technical term of art within behavioral psychology. It's the right term to use here. "Punishment" means either introducing something noxious into his environment or taking away something that he values.
I have figured out what I want to take away from the President.
I do not want to take away my vote; Obama remains a useful tool for progressives; better than any others in the box. And, lest anyone think this even for a moment, I do not want want to take away his dignity.
I want to take something away from him to strengthen him -- which, for me, means pushing him in a progressive direction. Part of what I want to take away is his excuse for being so anti-progressive. I want to take away the advantage he derives from making us feel like chumps. But that's all abstract; what I want to take away from him is quite concrete. What Obama should understand is that we're angry and we have the means to make our anger felt. That is for tomorrow's diary.
What I want to take away will require primarying him. But, I realize, we have the superstition, since LBJ and Ford and Carter and Poppy Bush, that to primary an incumbent is to doom them to failure.
Maybe so. And yet, I think I've figured out how to do it without it having that effect. And, I certainly don't think that the alternative, our cowering and simply accepting whatever he does as he moves further, further, further to the right and away from the good graces of the American people, does him any favors. He needs to know that we are angry, righteously angry, and that we will act on that anger. He's been asking for a fight; we'll give him one. It will be a fair fight, within the rules.
That diary, on how to primary President Obama, will appear tomorrow. I ask that you hold your fire on the concept of primarying the President until you've heard the specifics. I know that it probably doesn't look like I can pull this off -- a primary challenge, supporting his re-election, and our not looking like ineffectual idiots -- all at once. Wait and see.
Copyright 2011 by the author. License granted for non-commercial use with attribution.