No, Social Issues Are Not A "Distraction"

It's always really easy to make parallels between the current Presidential campaign and any ol' previous campaign, because there are usually lots of similarities between any two complex things and if you just ignore the non-similarities, well, there you go. Of course, it's easier to compare this election to some previous ones than others; I have a hard time seeing the 2012-1912 parallel, for instance. One previous cycle a lot of people have compared this year's election to is the 2004 race, often noting a supposedly ironic antiparallel. That year, the thinking goes, a Republican incumbent who had been presiding over a mediocre economy and had middling, polarized approval numbers faced a rich man from Massachusetts considered unlikeable by most. The opposition party felt that the only priority was to beat the incumbent. The incumbent party wanted to talk less about the disappointing state of the economy and more about cultural issues and national security. Flip the parties, and it sounds very similar.

One particular sub-genre of the 2004/2012 comparison is when people, typically moderate-ish pro-Romney types, I think, talk about how, well, in 2004 the Bush campaign was desperate not to talk about the economy, but instead to use gay marriage and abortion as "wedge issues," and now Obama's in the same position of trying to distract from the lousy economy with social issues. The Romney campaign, of course, makes the second half of that complaint explicit, and are very adamant that everything except the continued mediocrity of the unemployment figure is a distraction. So can I just say, for the record, that this is not the case? Yeah, proper macroeconomic management is important. A lot of other things are important, too. Public policy on sex ed/birth control, a category I consider to include the morning after pill and therefore the recent Akin controversy, is tremendously important to aggregate human happiness. So, of course, is the structure of the welfare state, as Republicans are often in a mood to keep reminding us. So, actually, are gay rights, a "fringe issue" in that they only directly affect the lives of a small-ish number of people but they affect those people's lives to a very comprehensive degree.

Now, there's a sense in which the major problem with American public policy right now is the poor macroeconomic management. Matt Yglesias loves to pound that theme, and I think he makes a persuasive case both that this mismanagement is inexcusable and that it does tremendous harm, both by causing immediate suffering and by lastingly impoverishing the future. So yes, maybe in a certain way "the economy" deserves to be the #1 issue of this campaign. But that doesn't mean it deserves to be the only issue, and if we didn't live in a world where one party happens to be more wrong than the other party about almost everything all at once, I could easily imagine voting for the candidate who I thought, on balance, would do a worse job of managing the economy, if I also thought that they had a clearly better policy platform in general. The Romney campaign wants to convince people that this is wrong, and at times seems to me to be making an odd jump from political science literature suggesting that people typically vote against the incumbent if the economy is poor to the idea that people ought to do this. You can make a good case, though, that the mechanistic "economic determinism" voting pattern political science claims to uncover is a bad thing, and that people ought instead give more weight to overall ideology and policy preferences.

So stop complaining about Obama trying to "distract" us from the economy. Maybe his campaign likes it when we talk about things that aren't one of its relative weaknesses, but there's nothing wrong with that, and there's no good reason for thinking that weakness is the only thing that matters just because we call it "the economy."


Post-Script: There is another sense in which literally everything about public policy except for stuff about global warming is a distraction from global warming, which continues in my opinion to be the single biggest issue of our time. In fact, the recent economic troubles have distracted people from global warming to a comically exaggerated degree. But getting climate policy wrong in the next few years means that humanity is irreversibly screwed for centuries, whereas getting macroeconomic policy wrong for the next few years just means a bit more suffering over the next decade or so.