Musings on Losing 1

Always change a losing game.

Last night we spotted the other guys a bunch of points due to a bad economy, and another bunch of points on frakking up the health care strategy. Without those, this would probably have looked like a pretty ordinary midterm election.

But I’m worried about something else here - a structural deficit. I think we've worked our way into a setup where it's easy for Republicans to run successful campaigns, and very hard for us to. We’ve come a very long way in the last decade in recognizing the infrastructure the Republicans created and building one to match. Money, media, volunteers, blogs, recruiting good candidates, standing up for our beliefs - we’ve made huge progress. We could always do all of those better, of course.

It’s still true that if we do everything absolutely right, we win elections in America. That’s not really good enough. We’re going to make mistakes. We’re going to inherit economies crashed by the Republicans. We’re going to have candidates who are good people who would be good officeholders but for one reason or another are not the most electable candidates ever. We cannot accept a system in which we get crushed every time something goes wrong.

Here in Arizona, we had a lot of very good candidates who ran smart, hard-working, funded campaigns, and got crushed by Republicans who said and did immensely stupid things, things that would disqualify any Democrat from even thinking of running for office. The Republicans all used pretty much the same strategy: absentee campaigning. They didn’t come to debates. They didn’t talk to the press. They didn’t really give many speeches. They didn’t talk much about their positions on issues or their personal qualifications; they didn’t really have many positions or qualifications. They didn’t run a big field campaign. They didn’t get endorsements. They didn’t even raise much money.

What they did was put some people up for election, have them make vague statements about freedom and taxes, pass an immigration bill that made no sense but satisfied some voters, and let third parties run a lot of ads with words like “Nancy Pelosi”. That was pretty much it. This isn’t a new strategy, but what’s new to me is seeing it across the board - an entire state where you could scarcely find a Republican candidate to argue with if you wanted to, but where it turned out not to matter that they failed to show up to debates they scheduled, that they knew nothing about the jobs they wanted, that they were known crooks or had made an obvious mess of their last job.

This mode of campaigning is really, really dangerous, because it can be done anywhere, anytime. All you need is some guy willing to put his name on the ballot and then all but disappear, and a corporate interest to run some generic ads. They ran dozens of these campaigns across the country this time; with the success they had, there’s no reason for them not to run hundreds or thousands next time. Yes, we can beat them with perfect campaigns, but if that’s what we’re depending on we’re going to lose a lot.

There are lots of ideas for changing strategy, and of course I have a few ideas for the rest of the Musings on Losing series. But the first step is recognizing we have a problem.

I'm back: On Rallies, Sanities, and the Center

Complaints are sometimes a pretty good tell for what’s actually going on. A lot of self-proclaimed centrists don’t like Jon Stewart’s rally because it co-opts the center, laughs at Important Things, or isn’t liberal enough. It’s pretty tidy when your critics makes the point for you.

The actual center of American political opinion is a pretty good fit for Stewart’s political beliefs. It’s also a pretty good fit for the leftish side of the Democratic Party. A random American chosen off the street is likely to believe that we should do something serious about global warming, that abortion should be legal (though pretty regulated), that single-payer sounds like a pretty good idea, that it’s time to give up on Afghanistan, that it’s high time for gays in the military and civil unions, that the Bush tax cuts for the rich should go, and that you should be able to get pot with a prescription. The left doesn’t win either the public or Stewart on every issue, but it’s a win on almost all of the big ones. On most of them it’s not even very close.

The idea, coming from liberals, that the “center” should be defined by whatever David Broder thinks rather than what a big majority of the voters actually want, is just masochism. Coming from the David Broders, it’s just an attempt to control debate.
The country, and Stewart, both have some negative beliefs about the left as people, of course. They think our politicians are kind of nutty, kind of incompetent, and frequently full of bullshit. Most of us on the left are inclined to be a bit more forgiving, and to declare that the guilty parties are not real leftists, but it’s hard to deny the public kind of has a point. They would also like a bunch of good things to be accomplished without paying taxes, and for Republicans to cooperate with Democrats to provide universal healthcare and save the environment. I would also like these things. In addition, if polled, I will note that I want my freezer to be magically full of zero-calorie gelato at all times and for the bank to routinely make errors in my favor.

Stewart and most of the public think the likes of Christine O’Donnell are ridiculous and should be laughed at. I don’t really understand anyone who disagrees with that. I think that in addition to being laughed at, she should be soundly beaten in the election; I’m pretty sure everyone else laughing does too. It is possible for something to be a joke but not only a joke.

And one more thing: the Tea Party is nuts. When nutcases try to take over your country, having people of pretty diverse non-nutty opinion band together to reject them back is a good thing. The message is very clear: I may think that Medicare for all is the only logical solution, and you may think that a carefully designed and regulated private insurance market will yield better results. But we both think we can talk to each other, and that the guy over there who thinks we’re both trying to kill Grandma rates no place at the table. If you don’t think that millions of people coming together behind those beliefs is a positive development, I don’t know what you’re doing – but it’s not politics, and it’s not helping.

it's not the thing, it's the other thing

The British Parliament has pretty thoroughly vindicated the East Anglia CRU in the e-mail leak “scandal”, agreeing that it didn't amount to much more than a couple of unfortunate turns of phrase and had no bearing at all on the science. This is, of course, very good news, and a fine example of a government body behaving like adults in a difficult political environment. It's also a good moment to put on our political operative hats and evaluate how the scientific and environmental activist communities did with this one.

The short answer: not so good. Sure, Rasmussen reported that we didn't lose any notable ground in public opinion as a result of the story. But we surely didn't gain any, and in the weeks around Copenhagen we spent as much time explaining the meaning of the word “trick” as we did advocating actual policy. With polls finding increased climate change denialism, the weak outcome of Copenhagen, and the general rise in conservative activism, the story helped form a classic media narrative - we're losing. After a decade moving the conversation most of the way from “is global warming real?” to “what are we going to do about it?”, we took a big step back toward having to debate the facts again.

Sometimes that's how it goes. Anyone in politics understands that you have good days and bad days. The thing is this: when the denialists find a gambit that works for them, they're going to use it over and over until it stops working for them. It's already started happening, with the “errors” in the IPCC AR4 report dominating climate change reporting for weeks. Just as with the CRU e-mails, the community carefully looked at the details of the accusations, acknowledged failings where they occurred, and explained the underlying science. The result has been exactly the same: the news story reads “Are there errors in the IPCC report? Scientists argue it's okay.”

So – back to that Parliament report. Committee Chair Phil Willis said:

“Climate science is a matter of global importance. On the basis of the science, governments across the world will be spending trillions of pounds on climate change mitigation. The quality of the science therefore has to be irreproachable. What this inquiry revealed was that climate scientists need to take steps to make available all the data that support their work and full methodological workings, including their computer codes. Had both been available, many of the problems at CRU could have been avoided.”

This is familiar territory. 'If scientists only learned to communicate better - if they were only more careful about mistakes - if they only presented themselves as more neutral - or maybe less neutral – we'd finally get policy to respond to science and convince all those people we're right.'

That's almost entirely untrue.

Climate change policy is under attack by a thoroughly professional, organized, funded, determined group of political interests. We're not in a fight about science, as almost all scientists think. We're in a fight about politics. Better communication from scientists would be great, and the scientists doing everything they can to beat back denialists should be applauded. But scientists can't effectively lead this fight. The political fight over health care wasn't led by doctors. The U.S. didn't invade Iraq because of advocacy from soldiers or experts in Middle Eastern culture.

Modern politics is – just like scientific specialities - a highly skilled and extraordinarily demanding trade. Climate change scientists, right now, are bringing a textbook to a gun fight. It's a losing game. They need to stop wading into political battles, and instead put their support, money and trust into building effective political organizations, headed by professional organizers capable of sustaining serious campaigns.

Exactly what those campaigns would look like is a topic for another post. But I'll tell you this: when there's a massive theft of documents followed by quote-mining accusations from political hacks funded by the coal industry, the pros aren't going to go with “Wait, let me explain what we meant by the word 'trick' there.”

On Savagery

I'm gonna keep posting until I find a voice for this thing.

I was reading a bit on the intellectual origins of the notion that mobs, and individuals without civilization, are savage or bestial - the heritage of Hobbes, who was a terrible physicist, by the way. Rebecca Solnit writes

The belief that we have a besial nature refined by the march of civilization was a key tenet of the nineteenth-century European world, anxious to justify colonization...

We've long since accepted (most of us, anyhow) that "savages" aren't very savage. It occured to me, though, that beasts aren't either - few animals in any normal state are randomly destructive, and most lead rather ordered lives. Doesn't leave much for a Hobbesian view of human nature to stand on, but an awful lot of people persist in thinking that way anyway.