Politicians: Cowards, Morons, or Liars?

Image by Sarah G... via Flickr

I am not a member of any organized party — I am a Democrat.

— Will Rogers

Today seems as good a day as any to dig out that old chestnut.

I, too, am not a member of any organized party — though, I mean that seriously. I’m technically registered as a Democrat, I’m a libertarian / classical liberal, and I generally hate everyone. So, I don’t particularly give a damn if health-care reform passes. I don’t seek spiritual fulfillment in politics. And I don’t think the fate of the world rests in Washington, D.C., unless someone’s starting a nuclear war.

Nonetheless… I find myself feeling an inexplicable, visceral anger watching the Democrats fold like an origami duck after a special election in America’s worst state shifted the balance of power in the U.S. government as such:

(excellent chart by Joshua Tucker)

If I were a committed Democrat (or a blonde!), I can’t imagine how angry I’d be. Pretty freakin’ angry, I guess.

Were I to guess, though, the anger I do feel stems from one source: the inability to decide whether politicians are bigger cowards, liars, or morons. While that may sound like unreasoned vitriol, it’s actually a serious question — one that I think political science could probably answer.

Are politicians primarily cowards?

Nothing stands in the way of the Democratic majority in Congress passing health-care reform. The House Democrats could pass the Senate bill, as I understand it, on a party-line vote, the president would then sign it, and Democrats would have accomplished something they could call “health-care reform.” It wouldn’t be perfect to any of them, but it would do a number of things progressives like and it would certainly be more progressive than whatever else might be accomplished between now and 2012 or 2016.

Yet, the Democrats in Congress seem to have settled on another strategy: Panic and surrender.

Why? Maybe it’s all some brilliant jujitsu, and they’ll come back and pass something in a week. But common sense says they’ve metaphorically — or perhaps literally — wet themselves. Facing a perceived mandate, research shows [PDF], leads politicians to abandon their regular voting patterns and move in the direction they think voters want them to go. The paper linked above, which looks at data from “mandate” elections in 1964, 1980, and 1994, gives us a graphical representation of this effect, which looks roughly like this:

Congresscritters, that is, freak out for a while and then eventually go back to business as usual — well before they’re next up for election. The authors of the paper peg the “half-life” of this mandate effect over the three elections they studied at roughly 150 days.

Are politicians primarily morons?

So, the politicians are scared. We know this from their behavior. And we could have guessed it anyway from some simple biases built into the human mind: the availability bias (a Democrat just lost because people are angry; Democrats always get tossed out when people are angry!) and the bias to believe that current trends will forever persist (people are getting angrier at Democrats; soon they will be hunting us down in the forest and mounting our heads above their fireplaces!).

But this “cowards” explanation quickly leads to the question: Are they morons?

Sure, it’s understandable one might get spooked. But it’s less understandable that people who are politicians seem to understand so little about politics. The response to a “mandate” is ultimately dependent on believing that there is a mandate to respond to. Political scientists aren’t even sure mandates exist — and I’ve certainly made the case that economics has a lot more to do with election results than anything else — but even if they do, what’s behind the belief that one exists here and now? As Nate Silver lays out, there were a number of factors pretty clearly at play in Coakley’s loss — not the least of which was Coakley absolutely sucking as a candidate. Sure, the national environment for Democrats has deteriorated, but it’s not that long ago President Obama was elected with a pretty strong mandate. And, if you believe mandates exist, he surely had a mandate to enact health-care reform.

And, so, the mandate of a presidential election has been overridden by some declining poll numbers and a special election? Because Matt Drudge and Politico say so? And the Democrats will be helped by not enacting the signature piece of legislation many voters sent them to Congress and the White House to enact?

Like Sarah Palin reading a Clifford the Big Red Dog book, I can’t quite follow the logic.

Are politicians primarily liars?

All of this, however, leads to one more question: Assuming that fear and stupidity aren’t enough to explain all of the Democratic collapse, musn’t a lot of Democrats simply be lying? They don’t particularly want to pass health-care reform, and now they have an excuse not to.

Politics, as they say, is the art of the possible. And it’s more than possible for the Democrats to pass this bill. But it looks like they won’t. There’s no hard, cold, numerical reality stopping them. Just the soft reality of panic, lily-liveredness, stupidity, and dishonesty.

Again, I’m not particularly rooting for health-care reform to pass. But it’s always annoying to remember that when it comes down to it, politicians pretty much have one goal in life: to preserve themselves. Even on an issue where many have worked toward reform their whole careers, they’re not willing to risk the ultimately trivial cost of not being reelected.

Power is always, in the end, it’s own end.