On Hillary Clinton, Wall Street, and 9/11

So, in what might have been the single most memorable moment of the debate (other than that time when I was genuinely shocked to hear that Sanders actually wants to let the states run his single-payer health care program, like, actually), Bernie Sanders impugned Hillary Clinton's integrity over her donations from Wall Street (despite his protestations that he did no such thing) and then Hillary responded by invoking 9/11. It was pretty cringe-worthy. In no way is this post meant to deny that. What this post is meant to do, however, is suggest that Hillary has at least a very plausible argument for why those campaign contributions shouldn't be held against her the way Sanders wants them to be.

Let's start with getting at what Hillary was actually trying to say, or at least the coherent argument behind her (again, admittedly) facepalm-level 9/11 framing. The donations from Wall Street are on the record, and they almost entirely date from her tenure as Senator from New York. Sanders' hypothesis is that the bankers gave her this money because they know that, no matter how tough she might talk on financial regulation, she won't actually do it. Hillary's suggestion to the contrary is that these were essentially donations of gratitude for her service to the state and city in the wake of 9/11. That's... that's very plausible, right? Especially bearing in mind that when we say "Wall Street donations," we don't just mean donations from the corporations themselves, or even from their executives. Donations from any of their employees count for this purpose. And it sounds pretty plausible to me to think that a lot of Wall Street bankers might have donated to any and every politician who played a meaningful role in the 9/11 rebuilding efforts. It might not be true that that's what motivated the donations, but it's a valid and on-point argument to make.

And really, she didn't even need to get that specific. She was a Senator from New York! I have a feeling that anyone in that position is going to get a lot of donations from Wall Street. I'm sure Chuck Schumer has a long trail of such donations to his name. You donate even to candidates who are relatively speaking not on your side, especially because New York is a solid blue state with little hope of electing Republicans to the Senate. And, sure, you're probably hoping for some measure of access and influence, but, contra what the moderator said, candidates aren't actually indebted to their donors. Again, it's genuinely possible that Hillary went around to various Wall Street potential contributors and said, give me some money and I'll keep an eye out for your interests going forward. That would be bad! But it's also genuinely possible that a bunch of Wall Street bankers gave her money just because she was the only game in town, and she didn't outright reject their donations.

This sort of ties in with another dimension of this whole thing. She was Senator from New York. All the financial types from Wall Street were among her constituents. There are many valid theories of representation on which it would have been proper for her to promote Wall Street's interests, insofar as they were New York's interests, as against the rest of the country. This would have to be within reason, of course; politicians shouldn't support the interests of every scumbag who happens to live in their jurisdiction. But we don't think there's anything weird about Senators from Iowa promoting corn interests or whatever. It's natural, if slightly unsavory.

The question is whether this works for or against Hillary. And that depends, I think, on whether we think that a person who has once favored a certain interest because they represented that region will always be beholden to that interest, even if they now represent a broader constituency. I tend to think the answer here is "no." Kirsten Gillibrand, Hillary's successor in the Senate, is an interesting example. She used to be a Representative from a reasonably conservative district in upstate New York, and her record in the House was reasonably moderate. That led people to be concerned that she wouldn't be as liberal as a Democratic Senator from New York ought to be. But in fact, she's been great! Because now she's not representing a constituency that requires her to be more moderate. By analogy, even if Hillary did take Wall Street contributions, and aye, even if she did take relatively pro-Wall Street stances when she was Senator from New York, that doesn't mean she would do so as President, representing the whole nation.

Now, Sanders and his supporters could try to argue it the other way. That, a candidate's once having been willing to pander to a local interest, we should always view them with suspicion on that issue. But I really don't think he wants to open up that can of worms. Because he's confessed, more or less candidly, that his relatively moderate record on guns was largely a pander to his rural Vermont constituents. Which would look an awful lot like Hillary's purported record on financial regulation--if we grant the assumption that Hillary has been soft on financial regulation historically. If we get into playing this game, it's just not at all clear that Sanders is categorically more pure than Clinton. And that's not even getting into all the companies whose employees he's received donations from over the years, a list which is less than wholly devoid of what we might think of as villains. The sum totals are a lot lower 'cause he represented Vermont, which has about as many people in it as like a city block in Manhattan, but the logic would seem to apply reasonably well.

There's also an additional level as concerns Hillary: she's a lawyer. She went to Yale Law School. (Woohoo!) She knows a lot of people in the world of law, which has a lot of overlap with the world of finance. A lot of these people probably gave to her campaign because they know her, and (perhaps unlike their bosses or the corporate entities for which they work) they honestly don't care that much about the public policy dimensions of politics.

The bottom line is that there are an awful lot of genuinely good reasons to think that Clinton's past Wall Street donations do not mean that she will be in any way beholden to the financial industry if she becomes President. Again, it might in fact be the case that she would be beholden to them. But there are good reasons for thinking otherwise, and it's basically a matter of contestable fact. And while, again, I agree that her invocation of 9/11 was extremely poorly done, there was an argument at the heart of those remarks, one that fits into the basic pattern of the more general arguments for why we shouldn't be troubled by her donations. So yes, it's totally fair game to call her out for her heavy-handed, Giuliani-esque flag-wrapping, but it's wrong to pivot from that to simply assuming that she is in fact vaguely corrupt in the was Sanders was insinuating.

Lingering Effects of First Debate Almost Gone

According to tonight's FiveThirtyEight forecast, or the most recent version of it in any case, Barack Obama has an 83.7% chance of winning Tuesday's Presidential election. The last day on which he had a higher chance of victory was October 5th, at 84.9%, a very similar state of affairs. The day before that, October 4th, was Obama's highest odds of victory ever, at 87.1%. The day before that, October 3rd, was the date of the first Presidential debate in Denver, Colorado, which essentially everyone thought Obama lost. Obviously, the October 4th forecast didn't yet reflect Obama's decline, as the polls released that day didn't include any post-Denver interviews. But starting on the Fifth, Obama plummeted, dropping all the way down to a measly 61.1% chance of winning on October 12th. But the Vice Presidential Debate, on October 11th, was seen as a win for Obama's running mate, Joe Biden, and Obama won the second and third Presidential debates rather handily, and ever since the 12th of October he's been inching his way back up in the forecast. For a while this had looked like basically a point a day, though it's accelerated of late. Long story short, Obama has clawed his way back to roughly the same odds of victory that he had after Romney's debate victory had only been processed by the polls for a single day. One more good day of polling tomorrow could easily get him back to his highest victory odds yet.

Of course, that's just the "percent chance to win" forecast. Since we've gotten a lot closer to Election Day, the implicit margin of error in the forecast has gone way down, so the actual margin that's giving Obama these same odds of winning as on October 5th is much smaller than the margin he held on that date. Specifically, right now he's projected to win 305.3 electoral votes, and to win the popular vote by 2.2%, numbers which shift just slightly to 306.3 and 2.3% if you switch from the forecast to the now-cast. On October 5th, Obama was forecast with 317.7 electoral votes and a 3.9% popular-vote margin, and had a 4.7% lead that equated to an average of 327.7 electoral votes in the October 5th now-cast. So Obama's margin has been declining in more or less lock-step with what I like to think of as the cone of declining uncertainty. (Visualize the lines from any point on the electoral-vote or popular-vote forecast graphs at date X to the point that would, if it were the November 6th forecast, give the same odds of victory. If you do this for the leading and the trailing candidate from the same date, it's a cone.)

Still, the fact remains that Mitt Romney is very close to having failed to increase his odds of winning this election over the last month, including what was by far the best night of his political life.

Early Returns on the Debate Look Good

The day or so after a major news event is a really frustrating time for poll-watchers. There's a sense that the event has probably shaken up the political landscape, but because all the polling being released was conducted before that event, it doesn't reflect it yet, not even one tiny bit. The first indications you start getting are the movements of tracking polls on the second day after the event, and even this is tricky because you have to try and guess at single-day samples from the trendlines. Still, since it's the first evidence you get, it's worth giving it a go until better evidence comes along.

So, with that in mind, Barack Obama gained two points on the margin over Mitt Romney in both the registered-voter and the likely-voter models of Gallup's tracking poll today. That would be the poll that's shown wildly better results for Romney than any other for a good long while. Obama's taken a 1-point lead in the RV model, while still trailing by 3 in the LV version, but it's two points of improvement on either end. Now, this is a seven-day tracking poll, which means among other things that getting into the weeds of the one-day samples is extra treacherous, but the simple math suggests that a 2-point shift from a new one-seventh part of the sample means a net 14-point improvement yesterday over the day it replaced, last Tuesday. That's, um, big. Even with the enormous error bars on that estimate, it's a really good sign.

Even better is the fact that Obama's net approval went up by 5 points today. Since that's a three-day tracking poll, unlike the head-to-head, the simple math suggests a 15-point improvement over the day being dropped. That's basically the same number. So we have two different data points suggesting a roughly 15-point improvement for Obama over the status quo ante. If the actual shift was one-quarter that size, it's a huge deal.

In other words, today's Gallup tracking poll results are a big deal, and they're massively bullish for Obama.

The Continuingly Narrow Focus of the Debates

So, that debate was a lot better than the previous one. The moderator, more or less, knew what she was doing, both candidates actually said things (okay, granted, one of them didn't say very many true things, but still...) and, most importantly, the Democrat is widely perceived to have won. You know this because the Republicans are saying, well, the moderator was biased and Biden was smiling too much, but Democrats are just saying, hey, we won big. As David Roberts put it, "the GOP complaint...is that Joe Biden smiled & laughed too much while kicking their candidate's ass."

But, but, but... I'm not completely happy. You see, we're now two debates in, and this one had no particular area of focus, it was just the two Vice Presidential candidates discussing the election at-large. And yet, we've basically only had questions on the "to warmonger, or not to warmonger?" part of foreign policy, taxes, health care, the budget, and "the economy" in the sense of whether or not the labor market has been good under President Obama. That's, um, a narrow set of issues. Okay, last night had one late question about abortion, by far the worst framed question of the debate (in that it didn't just ask the candidates about abortion policy or whatever, but framed it around some nonsense about the candidates' personal religious beliefs). But, here's some stuff we haven't yet had a debate question on:

• Immigration
• Climate Change
• Gay Rights
• Women's Issues
• Criminal Justice
• Poverty
• Medicaid (and, you know, Medicaid is a health-care entitlement, we spent a lot of time hearing about other health-care stuff and entitlements, but nothing on Medicaid)
• Affirmative Action, which is in the news these days
• Labor Issues
• Campaign Finance Reform

This stuff is important! It was important when the first Presidential debate, allegedly on domestic policy, didn't talk about any of it. It was still important when the Vice-Presidential debate, allegedly without limitations on subject matter, didn't talk about any of it. It will still be important next week, when Obama and Romney meet for a town-hall debate. I dearly hope we get something about some of this stuff, but I'm not remotely optimistic it will be more than a small percentage of the whole time. Probably we'll just keep rehashing the same old budget-y economics stuff. And then, this stuff will still be important the week after that, when the "foreign policy" debate won't really provide an opportunity to talk about any of this stuff.

And then it will still be important two weeks thereafter, on election night.

Elections as Arguments and the Debate

One way to view any electoral contest is as an argument. As to each candidate there are a number of different proposed reasons why they should be elected and a number of different proposed reasons why they should not be. These reasons can relate to the candidates' policy platforms, what kinds of judges they'd appoint, their moral character, their appearance, whatever. They can, in other words, be good reasons or bad reasons. And then you see how all the various reasons weigh with the polity, and what balance they eventually reach. Of course, the balance within the polity is really just the aggregated sum of all the balances in each member of the polity, each of whom can have their own individual weighting scheme among the various lines of argument.

I've had the feeling all throughout this election that political analysis pays insufficient attention to this argument-based model of an election, and treats elections more as some kind of point-scoring contest, where if X happens and X makes candidate A look good, then it adds points to candidate A's score, etc. So, for instance, we find the almost unanimous view that one of the few things that could materially damage Obama's rather robust lead at this point would be an economic collapse in Europe that spread to the United States. Why would this help Romney? Because political science literature suggests that the "vote for the incumbent because the economy is good" argument and the "vote for the challenger because the economy is bad" argument are among the strongest arguments out there, exerting disproportionate force over even those elections which are not viewed as being about the state of the economy. So, the thinking goes, anything that makes the economy worse is bad for the incumbent. In my view, it's harder to say.

In my view, that's a bit of a premature judgment. Sure, a new economic crisis might help Romney, if only because a new crisis should introduce greater variance and chaos into the whole process which will generically give the trailing candidate more of a chance than he had before. But the "European economic policy has screwed up in a truly massive way, so vote Romney" argument is pretty much incoherent on its face. At least, it's incoherent until and unless anyone develops a reason for thinking Romney would be better at dealing with the consequences of such a crisis, or until Obama displays poor judgment in his handling of the crisis. Either of those things could happen, but their opposites could just as easily happen. And if Romney reacted with a panic of the variety that affected the McCain campaign in September of 2008, the opposite probably would happen, and Obama probably would benefit politically. (Note that the "vote Obama '08 because of the financial crisis" argument is not incoherent, because that was a home-grown crisis that pretty much everyone felt was substantially the fault of the policies of the incumbent regime, and McCain was running on a platform virtually identical to Bush's.)

Now, the counterargument to my view is that I'm taking an overly charitable view of the electorate. I'm giving them too much credit for being smart, or for understanding the issues in some meaningful way that there's really no justification for. I don't mean to be. Remember what I said about how the arguments can be good ones or bad ones. Plenty of voters can give weight to silly arguments, like that one should vote for the candidate with the better speaking voice or whatever. But I do think that it's important to analyze events in the course of the campaign not just in terms of who looks better during them but in terms of how they reinforce existing arguments for or against each candidate or provide new such arguments.

About That CNN Snap Poll...

So, the main thing I'm happy to observe in the CNN snap poll about the recently-completed Presidential debate is that, though the respondents overwhelmingly said they thought Romney won the debate, the two candidates' favorability numbers didn't budge an inch between the initial round of calls before the debate and the follow-up after it. Specifically, Barack Obama went from 49% favorable, 50% unfavorable to a 49%/49% split, while Mitt Romney went from 54% favorable to 42% unfavorable before the debate to 56%-42% afterwards. So Obama gained one net point, and Romney gained two net points. Big effing deal.

But, uh, notice anything funny about those "before" numbers? They show Romney quite popular and Obama only sort of middling. That's not what any other poll has found for the general electorate these days. I'll let the pollster.com polling averages speak for themselves: Obama's got a 51.9% favorability rating in the aggregate, against just 44.0% unfavorable, while Romney's sporting just a 43.6% favorable score against 49.1% unfavorable. So in most polling heading into this debate, Obama is a net 13.4% more popularly perceived than Mitt Romney, but in the group of debate watchers in the CNN poll Romney was 13 points more popular than Obama. That's a skewed poll for you.

Now, that doesn't mean the poll is meaningless. Among people who watched the debate, most thought Romney won. But the poll is also telling us that "those who watched the debate" may well have been a Republican-leaning bunch. But that very fact is deeply informative, or should be anyway, of our analysis of the reaction to this debate. Regardless of who's more energized to vote this year, Republicans were far more energized about this debate. And this debate still doesn't seem to have changed very many people's minds about either of the candidates. So it looks to me like, while the debate was unquestionably a "win" for Romney, it may have been sort of a trivial one. And right now, he doesn't need trivial wins, he needs wins that he leverages into big swings in the polls. So far, it looks like he didn't get one. (Of course, that statement can neither be confirmed nor rebutted until about next Monday, when the first batch of post-debate polls will start coming in.)

There's More to Domestic Policy than the Economy

The "domestic policy" debate just concluded, and in my opinion, forgetting for a moment the question of who won it, is was just a stupid as hell debate. The biggest reason for that is that the entire debate was about what are considered in political contexts "economic issues." Nothing about the environment, gay rights, women's issues, immigration, etc. "Domestic policy" means "the economy." Now, okay, sure, the economy is important. It's probably the main issue in this election. But that doesn't make it the only issue. All those other things matter! A lot! Taken in the aggregate "domestic policy but not the economy" is probably as important for the welfare of the United States of America than "economic policy" by itself. Honestly I'm kind of offended that the people putting this debate on considered taxes and budgets and deficits and "the role of government" by which they mean the economic role of government the only meaningful domestic policy issues in this election. And not just because it's an enormous softball to Romney, given that Obama is an incumbent presiding over a mediocre economy. Because it buys into the view of life that denies the importance of anything besides money, that considers material goods the only goods that matter.

I think I'll close this blog post with Robert F. Kennedy's famous quote about the failings of the Gross National Product:

"Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it tells us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans."