What Did Speckie Do?

In our reading we have been examining the arguments presented by Morris Fiorina, and comparing it to the one presented by Thomas Frank in his book, 'What's the Matter with Kansas?' The central theme of the discussion is Fiorina asserts that the major points of contention in American politics are socially rooted and not economic. This contrasts sharply with Frank's book, because frank examines the takeover of the south by the republican party, and asserts that the economically challenged farmers were duped by the GOP's stance on social issues and subsequently convinced into voting for a party that would be against their economic interest. As we can see here, these two authors disagree at a fundamental level what politics stems from. this is not by any means a complete summary of the two arguments - as you can imagine they are far more detailed. Since this week's incarnation of class focuses more on Fiorina, he will get the attention.

With regard to Arlen Specter I think his party hopping implies that elites are not as polarized as we had once thought but are primarily focused with getting re-elected. Fiorina would say that Specter and his constituents are so rooted in their social ideals that they see a shift in the way that the parties define themselves, justifying the jump. Aldrich would say that the policy plans of the democrats made the switch more viable because it made economic sense to the median voter in Specter's district. In the end i think that this kind of activity really is an outlier and that the reality is that the parties are very polarized. In addition, ifthe parties were not then we might see more switches? who can say? I am just postulating

What's the matter with you, America?

This week we have read a discussion on the subject of an argument presented by Thomas Frank, who asserts midwestern poor farmers have been "tricked" by the Republican party to vote against their economic interest. He argues that the policies that republicans enact favor the rich and not the poor and middle class. The so-called "fooled" voters support, however primarily because of the Republican's campaign on morals and family values. in effect they create a populist appeal while actually putting into place elite favoring policy. Frank calls this the "backlash" effect. there is a greater impact of the backlash effect. it represents a "partisan dealignment" which is in effect when voters break rank with what their economic interests and create an inconsistency with the indicators we use to determine partisan preference. Bartels, another author argues that this is wrong, and that frank is guilty of what could be effectively considered to be sampling bias, and that he is in actuality measuring activists, rather than the actual public opinion. Bartels claims that southerners who are typically poor have become more republican and are thus accounting for the partisan spread.

I personally think that Bartels is wrong. I think that conservatives have done very well in the "bible belt: and that it is a relatively poor area. also when we examine local governments, I believe that the partisan dealignment manifests itself best there. all over the midwest even in our state here, we see many local governments in the more rural and less affluent counties and communities lean more to the right. as Tip O'Neil said "all politics is local" and if we want to measure a substantive partisan shift it would be best expressed across the full stratification of government - national voting rates, state, county and municipal.

Planning A Party? Where is my Invite?

If one of the major parties were to fall, it would present a very interesting set of opportunities for a new parties to rise. for one thing the remaining party would become the center, leaving it open to re-definition by the new party. we define our parties primarily in relation to each other, so some swift political maneuvering would allow the new party to knock the old one around in how it defines itself. Another option is to create a new party with similar stances on some of the issues as the remaining party. Doing this would cause the old issue set that the two previous parties used to distinguish eachother, and raise new topics to re-define the parties, thus forcing political progress, and a mashup of the political scene. This would probably be most easily done by creating a party based on the "moderate" stance before the fall o the previous party. this would give rise to let representatives who are more moderate from the remaining party to jump ship. if the new party seems to rise and do well in your area, the wise politician would jump ship in order to stay in office. as far as who i would choose for my leadership, it would depend on the party that fell. In a way it may be easier to choose new leaders who can establish themselves as "moderates" rather than have to contend with a long history, and peoples preconcieved notions about the candidates. the voting blocs and electorate would be the ones supporting the moderates. I call this whole process "stealing the middle" it allows the rising party to appeal the the previous extreme without having to follow the old failed agenda. a plan like this would expect high electoral success and the capacity to knock the old party around and cause it to reshape. this could leave the doors to the white house open very rapidly.

A bit of perspective

I thought this was profound. We focus a lot on what is happening here, it is interesting to see what is happening abroad. This video, if not downright shocking is interesting to say the least. I am suprised at the manner Hannan addresses Brown with, and more astounded with the numbers he lists off.

Party ID ... leave it at the exit poll

The 2008 congressional election was candidate centric not party centric because of low congressional approval during the voting week. you ccan find this info here and here. the week of the vote, congressional approval was between 17 and 21 % yet members were elected by large margins. if we look at our own data, from wisconsin it might help narrow things down a bit. I can't find any data regarding congressional approval from WI, but i can look at the voting data for our congresspeople. remember the national approval of congress is pretty stinkin low. the winning percentages however are pretty high the lowest win percentage is 54% - you can see the representatives vote percentages here. Why is this? why are the approval ratings ranging from the mid 50 to the high 70's if the congressional approval is low? in 7 of the 8 districts that we have here, the incumbents won. the 8th district had no incumbent. this bucks the trend that was displayed by a democratic takeover of congress, because the seats didnt change, even though we all thought congress was doing a pretty craptacular job! how can this be? I think that we have to separate the congressional races from congress as a whole. when people vote in congressional races, the focus is on the candidates, not the entire body. gerrymandering aside, if the district voters vote sincerely, and they feel their particular congressperson is doing a good job, then there would be little cause to change the rep. hence the incumbency advantage. but if this is the case, and people do get frustrated with congress as a whole, why do we see national shifts in party majorities? are some voters different than others? do some take their frustration with the majority party out on their congressional rep? that's not very nice. how can we explain this duality? i find this interesting, however unsolved by my data. I will muse on this more and update this.

I'll out minority you ... oh wait this is congressional politics, not grad admissions

... too far? there's no limit to sarcasm ... anyhoo

This week's installment:
"Focusing on the US Congress, what is the role of a minority party in a democracy? In particular, you might consider trying your hand at an explaining the seemingly unending calls for bipartisanship from certain corners of the chattering class OR consider why 214 of the Republicans even bother to show up to work every week since they can't really stop the legislative juggernaut that is the Democratic coalition."

I think that the role of a minority party in a democracy, very simply, is to prevent tyranny from a majority party. Afterall, just because a party is in a majority does not mean that it represents the entirety of the country. Furthermore a minority party can be expected to generally be a voice of comparable "reason" to provide opposition to the majority party. one reason, if any is that the majorities in congress have always been narrow meaning that for a majority to rule uncontrolled would mean to alienate half of the country. furthermore, should we look at the structure of congress, we have to realize that congress is not a majoritarian body, but in effect a super majoritarian body of sorts, because of the senate. the senate needs a supermajority of votes in favor to pass a bill, while the house only needs simple majority. because a bill has to pass both the house and the senate the bill needs to reach a supermajority to pass. a minority party can still block a bill by preventing the supermajority vote in the senate. that's where the calls for bipartisanship come from, that;s why the republicans bother showing up to work.

Finally! a simpler set of questions! a shorter blog! holy crap!

Doc

I will admit I am a HUGE fan of Battlestar Galactica and since we are talking about presidential campaigns and candidates and their paraphernalia i though i would contribute these nice pictures to the mix.

Happy

Also ... Tip O'Neil has one of the funniest smiles in congress. (it was brought up in my Congressional Politics lecture today)

Dopey

I think the word "lumpy" sounds funny.

also, I found this and i thought it was entertaining so i thought i would share it ...

Campaign tastes like Champagne ... When you Win

This week we are discussing campaigns, in particular the 2008 election. We will answer and discuss such intriguing questions as:

• Did the candidates of the 2008 presidential elections seem like agents of their parties?
• Were they constrained by their netroots (and was this different than being constrained by the electorate)?
• how has the balance between candidate centeredness and party-centric campaigns been affected by recent technological innovations and advances in communication?
• with so much attention focused on the recent string of close presidential contests in the readings, where do congressional candidates stand with respect to vulnerability posed by the internet

So I'm sure most of you readers (all 2 ... maybe 3 of you ... maybe I'm having delusions of grandeur at this point) are probably getting kind of sick of my rigid structuring of these insufferably boring posts around these questions, but hey I'm not here to make you happy, or to be consistently gramatically correct. I'm getting graded on this crap so it ends up being closer to a paper and i am sorry. I will try and keep this somewhat interesting but in case i don't, well ... it kind of sucks to be you ...

anyhoo ... on to this week's assignment

Did the candidates of the 2008 presidential election seem like agents of their parties? well, what does it mean to be a agent of a party? furthermore what would we call a candidate who is not an agent of the party?
I think that we can define a candidate who is an agent of a party as a candidate who centers the party line in their campaign. A candidate who does not do this, is said to run a candidate centric campaign. I think if we examine both nominated candidates as well as the non-nominated ones, we can see that they all play to the party line before the party primary in order to win the nomination. because of this, I would contend we should throw this part of the campaign out from our examination of party agency amongst candidates, because all of the candidates act like party agents to win the nomination, including this would make us guilty of a sampling bias were we to try and draw any graphs on this data. ( in addition ... i know i cutting out a lot of the candidates, but that's the point ... i'm being lazy and this is a BLOG!!!!!)

In one corner of the ring we have junior Sentator from Illinois, the democratic party nominee ... Barack Obama! His post nomination campaign is regarded pretty middle of the road his stances on issues such as socialized health care withdrawing from the war in Iraq, and economic reform are pretty close to the democratic party line stance on these issues.

Annnnnd in the other corner we have Senator John McCain from Arizona. Weighing in with 19 years of expierence as of 2006, the Republican heavyweight ran a campaign where he called himself a "maverick". McCain provides us with what is quite possibly the greatest example of what a candidate centered campaign looks like.

DING! DING!

Round 1: Campaign Slogans
Campaign slogans in my opinion are really the simplest way to figure out what the campaigns are really all about because they by their nature take what a candidate is all about and distill it down to a modicum of words. perhaps from thi we can gain some insight into the nature of the campaigns. Let us examine:

• Obama: "Hope" or "Change" or "Change we can believe in"
• McCain: "Country first" or "A Leader we can believe in" (suprisingly hard to find!!!! damn you interwebs!)

Ok, so we can pretty clearly see that McCain and Obama's slogans are somewhat similar, but also pretty different. McCain's slogans clearly emphasize himself more than Obama's do. From this early step, we can see already a big difference between between the types of campaign. McCain's campaign message is more focused on him than Obama's. Im calling it for this round: McCain is the more candidate centered of the two.

DING!

Round 2: Technology

This is where things start to get a little bloody ... we are going to compare the use of technology and the impact of technology on both of our competitiors.
I found an article in the British tabloid the telegraph that looks at the way technology impacted both of the candidates. You can see it here.

• Obama: technological impacts aside, Obama is definitely the contender with the greater understanding of technology. He was seen all over his campaign touting his handy-dandy crack, err blackberry.
• McCain: Definitely had a weak spot here ... he kind of proverbiably shot himself in the foot when he said he doesn't use the internet.

DING! Match over. short, i know, but well im running out of time, and lets face it, as if Feb. 25th 2009 we all know who won the campaign.

Some Final Thoughts

One Impact we can examine is how the internet affected the campaigns with regard to their candidate centeredness or party centricity. I think that the internet has definitely made campaigns more about the candidates because it provides a greater access to individual voters about the candidates. in addition to that, i think that an individual is much easier to sell to the average person than a party is, which further impacts the effects of the internet.

Beyond this I think that Obama definitely had the upper hand with technology - his campaign hit the internet early and hard with a "grassroots" style of fundraising, much of it done over the internet. McCain did not do so so much. as far as the impact of the internet on both campaigns and candidates, it's hard to honestly say how much it helped or hurt either candidate because anyone can put whatever they like on the web, regardless of it's credibility or certifiablilty.

Lastly I think that the advent of communications technology has really affected candidates in the area of vulnerability - on the web anyone can smear a candidate and more people that see the smear and it can cause more damage. as a result the internet has made candidates more vulnerable.