A Meaningful Moment Through a Meaning(less) Process – Stars of the Lid
Karen Tumulty says:
The deal now known as the “Cornhusker Kickback” may have been one of the biggest blunders in modern political history. Normally, you’d be surprised if people in Massachusetts even know who the Senator from Nebraska is. But the number of people I talked to who brought up Ben Nelson’s name, unprompted, was striking. I’m also told, by some who were doing phonebanking, that they got an earful about it over and over.
This struck me as profoundly mistaken when I first read it, but I couldn’t quite articulate the problem. I’m positive that plenty of people were complaining about the Nebraska thing, and I have no doubt that it generated a narrative that was toxic for the Democrats.
I had the impulse to just make this a dig at the media. Namely, the only reason why this ended up being a Big Deal is because the media decided that it was going to be one. This sort of legislative dealing is totally commonplace and they were already working on a patch to give the Nebraska deal to everyone when the final bill came out.
That’s all true, but it doesn’t quite grasp the deeper issue. Fortunately, Jonathan Bernstein wrote exactly what was fluttering in the back of my mind but couldn’t quite find a way out:
Tumulty says that “[t]he deal now known as the “Cornhusker Kickback” may have been one of the biggest blunders in modern political history.” What that misses is that if it wasn’t Nelson’s deal that the talk radio yakkers were gabbing about, it would have been the deal with Louisiana, or if not that then perhaps it would be death panels, or something else.
Here’s the point: Politics, in one respect, has really changed over the last two decades. Both parties, but especially the Republicans, now have highly efficient ways to get their talking points out to the rank-and-file, without confusing things by also informing them of the larger context. That’s really different than things were in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Back then, politically attentive people would watch the network news and the local news and look at the occasional newspaper, and maybe Time or Newsweek, and on top of that they would also be exposed to party talking points. Now, to a great extent, people’s only exposure to the news may consist of the party’s talking points (again, especially on the Republican side). So the old job of finding out how well those talking points are resonating by hearing whether ordinary folks use them to talk about politics is no longer a useful task. Increasingly, the only language to which people — once again, especially Republicans — are exposed is those talking points. For a Rush/Beck listener, there isn’t another language available to discuss the health care bill.
Quoted at length because, well, it’s smart and I think it’s spot-on I disagree to some extent that this is a particularly new phenomenon. You can see a variation on this in Douglas Arnold’s Logic of Congressional Action – which is 20 years old at this point. Some of his essential points were based on the idea that what people say they’re voting for is a lot different than what actually drives their vote, and the content of the spin matters a lot less than it’s style. But there’s no denying that this process is a lot more developed now than ever before.
What does this mean for health care reform? Well, it’s just another example of the general point I’ve been making for a long time. The legislative process is slow, arduous, and poisonous to the policies that are run through it. All of which makes it difficult to get things done. But the REAL problem is how this gets portrayed.
When the story is constantly about which group is being forced to sacrifice, which deal of the week is getting spun as toxic, and process public opinion is ALWAYS going to shift against the underlying policy. The public sphere is simply not a place where ideas get debated in the abstract. They are pushed and pulled by deep and powerful interests. In our current context, those interests are predominantly framed through the lens of the talking points Bernstein talks about.
All of which means that the longer things drag on, the less disposed people will be to the policy – not because of an intrinsic and a priori opinion, but because opinions are far more malleable than we’d like to believe.
The “process” story is fascinating in the moment, but has relatively little long-term pull. Even more, process stories only ever drive opinion in one direction: down. No one votes for a party because they’re honest and fair and use nice process, but they vote AGAINST what they perceive as corrupt or illegitimate all the time.
The effect: a bunch of weak-willed Democrats appear to be on the verge of falling into the trap I warned about quite a while ago. At the moment of the final push across the goal line for health care, it’s not going to be popular. It never was. This is not unexpected. It’s how the system works. The way you deal with it is, you just pass the bill anyways and you wait for the overwhelming majority of process critics to move onto some new shiny thing.
If you don’t think that the American people actually want health care reform, then WTF are you doing as a Democrat anyways?