Former Spanish Foreign Minister and NATO Secretary-General Javier Solona points out just how big of a week next week is for global politics. He writes:
On November 6, either Barack Obama or Mitt Romney will emerge victorious after an exhausting electoral race, setting the wheels in motion for the coming four years. An ocean away, on November 8, more than 2,000 members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) will gather in Beijing. Approximately a week later, the members of the Politburo Standing Committee will walk out in hierarchical order, preparing to take charge of a growing country of 1.3 billion people.
Jason Brennan’s excellent The Ethics of Votingdispatches a number of familiar arguments for a duty to vote and provides grounds for a duty to vote well or not vote at all. I’ve been mulling over an argument for voting that J doesn’t address (probably because it is crazy). But let me try to work it out and see what you think. It’s complicated, as the argument is based on Newcomb’s Paradox and resolving the paradox in favor of the “one-boxer” position. As such, I’ll call this The One-Boxer Argument for Voting. If you get to the end, I think you’ll find the conclusion interesting.
He concludes:
OK, so here’s my conjecture:
(1) If you are a voter whose inclination (i) to vote and (ii) to vote for either Obama or Romney is a reliable indicator of the outcome AND,
(2) If you have justified beliefs about (1) AND,
(3) If on your view, the outcome matters enough to exceed the disutility from voting, if you get net disutility from voting AND,
(4) If you have no countervailing moral reasons (not counted in your disutility) to vote, THEN:
(C) Despite the fact that you will have no causal impact on the outcome, and that you get mild disutility from voting, it is rational for you to vote.
To put it simply, if you have reason to think that your inclination to vote for your candidate is a bellwether for whether he will be elected, and you care a lot about the outcome, then it is rational for you to vote for your candidate, in the absence of countervailing moral reasons and despite the disutility you get from voting.
History shows that candidates have different ways to score through presidential debates: the forceful put-down, the surprising show of skill, the opponent’s fumble, superior post-debate tactics. But it also shows that to fundamentally alter the direction of a campaign, a candidate usually has to accomplish all of those things.
Politico has a very good article summarizing the nine most importance battleground states and, more interestingly, the perceived campaign strategies around those states. The states are:
Earlier I wrote about rhetorical misuse facts and truth; this political strategy is contributing to some of the ruptures in society. There is another separation though that David Brooks highlights in his column today. He writes:
[T]oday’s Republican Party unabashedly celebrates this ambition and definition of success. Speaker after speaker at the convention in Tampa, Fla., celebrated the striver, who started small, struggled hard, looked within and became wealthy. Speaker after speaker argued that this ideal of success is under assault by Democrats who look down on strivers, who undermine self-reliance with government dependency, who smother ambition under regulations…
…But there is a flaw in the vision the Republicans offered in Tampa. It is contained in its rampant hyperindividualism. Speaker after speaker celebrated the solitary and heroic individual. There was almost no talk of community and compassionate conservatism. There was certainly no conservatism as Edmund Burke understood it, in which individuals are embedded in webs of customs, traditions, habits and governing institutions…
…The fact is our destinies are shaped by social forces much more than the current G.O.P. is willing to admit. The skills that enable people to flourish are not innate but constructed by circumstances.
Fact: The unemployment rate is higher now than when President Obama took office.
Truth: There are underlying economic conditions that caused this that started before Barack Obama even took office in the Senate.
This, I believe, is a great example of the disconnect that can exist between facts and truth. Jake made some excellent observations earlier today about recent political statements made during speeches at the RNC. He is exactly right that they are, “all intended to distort the president’s record.” However, the video below shows that this is not a one-sided strategy.
Was Vice President Biden actually attempting to make underhanded slavery references? Probably not, but the tone of his statement suggests some level of confidence that the GOP actually hates those not on Wall Street. I don’t believe this is true.
Truth and fact don’t marry up quite as well as we’d like.
Priorities USA, an Obama-supporting SuperPAC, recently launched this ad implicating Mitt Romney in the death of the wife of a laid-off steelworker, Joe Soptic. By Soptic’s own telling, his family lost their health insurance when Bain Capital closed his Kansas City plant in 2001. His wife couldn’t afford to visit the doctor, so by the time they discovered her cancer, it had advanced to terminal Stage 4. (As the late Christopher Hitchens was fond of saying of his own Stage 4 prognosis, “There is no Stage 5.”) She died weeks later.
The fired workers from Romney’s private equity dealings have become familiar subjects in Obama ads, but this latest Priorities USA spot — produced without the president’s knowledge — took the attack to an excessively morbid level. What the ad portrays as a simple cause-and-effect (cause: Romney fires the steelworker; effect: his wife dies) is anything but. Mrs. Soptic died six years after her husband’s layoff, and for at least one year she was covered by her employer’s insurance. It’s not even clear that Romney was involved in the decision to close the plant, which happened after he had left his day-to-day duties at Bain to run the Salt Lake Olympics (though his campaign has never been able to clarify the extent of his involvement during those years.)
The Romney campaign has every reason to be outraged. Priorities USA took a legitimate critique about the human cost of Romney’s business practices and turned it into a scurrilous personal assault. Priorities should pull the commercial and apologize for the insinuation that Romney’s actions were responsible for Mrs. Soptic’s death.
They should then recut the ad to make the point they missed the first time: Mrs. Soptic died because of the policies that Mitt Romney supports. Not the universal health plan he enacted as governor (as Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul helpfully pointed out) but rather the retrenchment in coverage he would support as president: no insurance mandate, no free preventative care, no one-stop online insurance marketplaces, no subsidies to purchase private coverage, no Medicaid expansion, no ban on abuses such as the denial of coverage for preexisting conditions or lifetime expense caps… All are included in the Affordable Care Act, which Romney has pledged to repeal as his first act of office.
An estimated 45,000 Americans die annually from lack of health insurance, which, not coincidentally, is 45,000 more than the combined total of every other industrialized country in the world. The ACA, when fully implemented, will extend coverage to most of the 44 million Americans without insurance, like the Soptics, and prevent the denial of care for the rest of us.
Mitt Romney’s opposition could not be more emphatic. Even taking him at his word — not always the easiest thing to do — to replace the ACA with his own plan, tens of millions of Americans would be left without insurance. Romney led the nation by implementing universal coverage in Massachusetts. He shares no such goal for the country; the plan on his website makes no mention of universal care or the expansion of access. Any decrease in the ranks of the uninsured would come indirectly through his vague promises of “increasing efficiency” and “lowering costs.”
Perhaps Romney thinks that’s good policy. He definitely thinks it is good politics. Regardless of one’s opinion of the ACA, fewer Americans will have health insurance without it. Some of those Americans, like Mrs. Soptic, will die as a result. Mitt Romney may not be personally culpable, but his policies certainly will be.
In the midst of a tight campaign for Congress, Lyndon Johnson famously told an aide to leak to the press that his opponent, a pig farmer, had been having sexual relations with his swine. The aide was appalled and asked LBJ if it was true. “Of course not,” Johnson replied. “I just want to see the bastard deny it!”
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s allegations about Mitt Romney’s tax avoidance feel Johnsonesque in many ways. The accusations, damaging if true, are based on unsubstantiated hearsay that would never pass muster in a court of law. It’s likely that even Reid himself doesn’t believe them.
But he still likes watching Romney deny it!
Like a good boxer, Reid — once an amateur fighter himself — flashed his jaw, inviting Romney to take a swing while Reid set up a devastating counterpunch. Mitt leapt at the opening created by Reid’s comments, calling for Majority Leader to “put up or shut up.” But Reid never claimed to have any evidence other than chatter from a former Bain investor. Reid’s riposte trapped Romney in the corner where Democrats want him, defending his own refusal to “put up” the documentation.
I wrote in this post that until Romney submits his tax returns for public review, his opponents will have carte blanche to tar him with wild speculation and innuendo. Repeated often enough — as Reid’s claims have been — and they will take the semblance of fact. This is why many people still think there are death panels in the healthcare law and weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. (For the Fox News viewers reading this, both are false.)
Romney continues to hope that he can hang on the ropes long enough to be saved by the bell, but the past few days of political sparring have reinforced the inevitability of the returns’ eventual disclosure. Until then, Romney’s delay will only give more credence to the outlandish allegations of Reid and others.
In other words, the best thing that Romney can do for the Democrats is to keep on denying it!
Jake
Tyler
