Florida and the War Chest

Nate Silver offers the following logic: winning Florida is essentially for Romney but not Obama; Obama has more paths to victory than Romney; Romney is currently winning in Florida; therefore Obama should concede Florida and re-direct his attention (and campaign spending) elsewhere.

If winning Florida represents a high-upside case for Mr. Obama, however, it also comes at considerable expense. 

Florida, because of its large population, is an expensive state to advertise in. And it is a state that probably does require a considerable advertising expenditure. Florida’s population is large, but not especially dense, spread out in a number of exurban and suburban communities throughout the state. It’s easier to reach voters through the airwaves there than by knocking on doors or appearing at campaign rallies. ... 

All of this should call into question whether Florida represents a wise use of resources for Mr. Obama. ...

Mr. Romney certainly doesn’t need Pennsylvania to win the election, but going for broke there is arguably a better strategy for him than having to pick off 4 or 5 states that are now tied or where Mr. Obama holds a small lead.

Mr. Obama, conversely, just needs to hold is ground in those same states. Trying to pull Florida back into his column would represent a heavier lift — and probably an inferior strategy given the recent polls there.

I'm not sure this is correct. Perhaps Obama should focus more on Florida because he's losing there, and because he has so many other ways to win the election. This may be true even if Obama expects that there is a pretty high probability he will lose Florida.

Why? Because Romney has to win Florida and Obama doesn't. If Obama dedicates a bunch of resources to Florida he can force Romney to do so the same to counteract Obama's move. Any money and time Romney is spending in Florida is money and time he isn't spending in Virginia, Ohio, Iowa, New Hampshire, Colorado, Nevada, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Because Obama is winning in most of those states, and only needs to carry some of them to win the general election, anything he can do to prevent Romney from gaining in states other than Florida gives Obama an edge in the general election. Forcing Romney to expend resources defending his lead in Florida is one way to do that.

This only makes sense if Obama can credibly threaten Romney in Florida of course. But he probably can. Romney's lead in Florida is only a few points (Silver mentions a spread between 1-5% depending on the poll, so let's say 3%). If Romney loses Florida the election's all but over, so Obama would need a relatively low probability of victory there to force Romney to expend a lot of resources to guarantee a Florida win. Obama should force him to do it.

If Obama concedes Florida he's inadvertently putting other states in play by allowing Romney to divert resources from defending Florida to attacking Obama's advantage elsewhere. Obama should do whatever he can to prevent that from happening. Fighting in Florida means not fighting in Ohio, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. That's good for Obama, as he currently leads in all those states and will win the election if gets them all.

Those who have an education in game theory should recognize this dynamic as similar in some ways to a more complicated version of the "War Chest" game. The gist is that Obama should not expend his resources try to win the most states. He has an advantage: he's winning the election right now, and he gets no advantage from winning with 300 electoral college votes rather than 275. Instead, Obama should focus his efforts on preventing Romney from making further gains in states Obama currently leads. That involves strategic considerations that go beyond allocating resources to states where Obama has the best chance of winning the state. Instead, Obama should allocate resources to states where he has the best chance of winning the whole election.

Romney and the Language of Entitlement

I'm interested in the reactions to Romney's "secret video". My initial thoughts on it were not the same as most. I was first impressed by Romney's campaign playbook. He recognizes that to win the election he has to get 5-7% of the electorate who voted for Obama in 2008 to vote for him this time. He knows that he can't get those votes from the 47% or so that are strict Obama partisans; he has to attract those in the middle. He understands that the best way to do this is not to vehemently attack Obama from the right -- as right partisans wish him to -- but to say "Obama's a nice guy and all, and he means well, but he's just not up to the job and I can do better". This, to me, explains quite a lot of Romney's campaign so far.

And it explains why partisans in both camps, and the partisan media on both sides, are puzzled by elements of the Romney campaign. It's because they think he should try to win over everyone (left) or speak primarily to the base (right). And he's not. He's not trying to persuade the unpersuadable. He's ignoring those on both sides who are partisans. He's targeting a very specific, very narrow audience. In purely strategic terms I think this is the right way for Romney to campaign. I think his understanding of the political space is actually pretty savvy. His crassness in targeting that middle group reinforces my priors as a materialist, so I like that too. He's basically admitting that his campaign strategy is only about getting the median voter on his side.

At first I didn't understand why Obama partisans were so offended by Romney's characterization of the voters that are off-limits to him. I read him as saying "They have a fundamentally different ideology from mine, one which believes that the government is well-suited to solve the problems of the day and which is based on an understanding that everyone is entitled to health care, food, and housing." I didn't read him as saying that the 47% of the population that are in Obama's camp are literally the exact same 47% of the population that pays no federal income tax. (I agree with Gelman's assessment that there is a correlation between the two variables, but nowhere near 100%.) Perhaps I was giving Romney too much benefit of the doubt. I see now that many Obama supporters in one 47% but not the other felt that they were being called free-riders. Since they're not they feel that they are compassionate. Hence, offense. Fair enough, I suppose, but for me that's the least interesting part of his remarks. It only sets up the rest, which is about campaign strategy. I found the outrage to be at least somewhat manufactured, as Twitter and Facebook got whipped up into a frenzy and "fact-checkers" worked overtime to parse the semantics of an improvised remark. This missed the broader point.

As the discussion has evolved -- in my case on Facebook and Twitter, but also on blogs and MSM -- I've become more interested in something else: why the right revert to the language of entitlement so quickly, and why the left gets so angry about it. It is my understanding that a central plank of the Obama platform is that the social safety net is defensible not only on grounds of economic utilitarianism, but on grounds of social justice: humans have a fundamental right to food, to housing, to health care, to education. Any just society will ensure a minimum standard of living for the worst-off among them. To make this argument is to claim that every member of a society is entitled to a minimum standard of living by virtue of being a member of that society. If this is true, then Romney's characterization of the ideology (rather than composition) of Obama partisans might be inelegant, as he said, but it isn't fundamentally wrong.

The left tends to hate it when the right accuses them of supporting entitlement programs. This I cannot understand. It seems to me that the appropriate response to this is not "Who does Romney think he is, calling us 'entitled'" but "Damn right we believe we're entitled to health care and food. Oh, and a living wage too". This is not only sensible philosophically, but pragmatically: Hayek and Friedman believed in the same thing. Rather than getting defensive, the left should use this to go on the offensive: "You don't believe in a minimum standard of living? You don't believe people are entitled to a safety net when capitalists like you blow up the economy?"

This is especially perplexing, to me, because that argument has already been won. The Romney-Ryan attack on the Affordable Care Act is now that it cuts too much from Medicare. Alright, the left should say. Let's increase Medicare spending too. The Romney campaign has now pledged to keep the biggest parts of the Affordable Care Act intact, repealing outright only the mandate tax. The Romney-Ryan campaign is not pledging to cut Social Security -- or even privatize it -- or end the food stamp program or cut education spending or in any other significant way reduce the size of the welfare state. So why not declare victory on "entitlements"? Why not own the term?

The other interesting thing about the Romney video is that he put all his cards on the table. He knows that he's the underdog. He knows which groups he has to win over. He knows he has to appeal to Hispanic voters. He knows he has to attract women voters. He knows that Obama has 40-something% of the voters locked up, and that he (Romney) has 40-something% of the voters locked up. He knows that he has to get 5-7% of voters in play to vote for him, and he knows that's going to be hard because many of them were previous Obama voters. He knows he can't win on foreign policy. He knows that Obama's signature policies -- health care, tax cuts for poor/middle class, tax increases on the wealthy -- are popular. So he's not even going to fight against Obama on the merits. His entire campaign rests on a non sequitur: the country isn't perfect, therefore I should be president.

He just gave the left his playbook, and the left complained about the font used on the title page. That strikes me as being short-sighted.

Finally, I agree with Gelman's conclusion: "I continue to be disturbed by claims that all or even most voters or one party or another are fools, dupes, moochers, bitter, etc etc, the idea that Democrats are a mix of deadbeats and trustfunders, or that Republicans are a mix of fat cats and religious fanatics."

On Obama, Race, and Political Survival

Ta-Nahisi Coates has been (rightly) given a lot of praise for his thoughtful essay on how race relations has affected Obama's presidency and the current political environment. He does a good job of highlighting some key political science research demonstrating that Obama's race cost him a non-negligible number of votes in 2008 -- roughly 3-5% of the popular vote overall -- and that race has shaped his presidency in powerful, if subtle, ways.

Most of the attention both in the article and surrounding it has focused on the broader American culture, histories of black political participation, and the reasons why Obama has largely declined to discuss race at all during his presidency. I find that interesting, but I find it interesting less as an endpoint of discussion and more as the setting for a bigger topic: politicians' quest for political survival. Coates plays around with this a bit in the essay, and ends up critical of Obama for not directly taking on difficult issues regarding race in America. But in the interview above, Coates admits that while this makes him angry it is almost surely the correct decision. That is, if Coates' argument about current race dynamics in American politics is true, then Obama could not gain or maintain power by emphasizing race. Coates concludes -- literally -- by saying that Obama's supporters in the African American community (and elsewhere) understand this, so they are willing to overlook or at least forgive his inaction on issues they care about.

In ending the essay there Coates missed an opportunity to have a broader discussion about the politics of reform and change. Because this issue is not limited to Obama, nor to race. It affects all politics, and all politicians. Coates' mission in writing the article was to comment on race in American politics as it relates specifically to Obama, and he did a good job in that, but thinking more broadly can help us identify similar dynamics elsewhere. It can also prevent us from making conclusions like this one, the only part of the essay in which Coates deals directly with foreign policy:

The political consequences of race extend beyond the domestic. I am, like many liberals, horrified by Obama’s embrace of a secretive drone policy, and particularly the killing of American citizens without any restraints. A president aware of black America’s tenuous hold on citizenship, of how the government has at times secretly conspired against its advancement—a black president with a broad sense of the world—should know better. Except a black president with Obama’s past is the perfect target for right-wing attacks depicting him as weak on terrorism. The president’s inability to speak candidly on race cannot be bracketed off from his inability to speak candidly on every­thing. Race is not simply a portion of the Obama story. It is the lens through which many Americans view all his politics.

Italics added. This may indeed be true, but it doesn't have to be true to explain Obama's behavior. It is well established that Republicans "own" foreign policy as an issue; that is, voters tend to believe that Republicans manage foreign affairs better than Democrats. This was true before Obama, and it will likely be true after Obama. The question is whether they'd trust a black Democratic president less than a white Democratic president. This is a different question than any Coates asks, and he can't answer it. (Note that Obama is up 12 points over Romney on foreign policy.)

And even if it is true, we don't know how this would motivate Obama toward more aggressive behavior. After all, if Obama wanted to be seen as "getting tough on terrorism" there are more public ways of doing that than sending flying robots over remote parts of Yemen to take out individuals that Americans have never heard of.

What we do know is that, whatever his race, Obama has an incentive to consolidate power. We know that he has done very little to roll back the expanse of executive power conceived during the Bush administration, and has continued that expansion in at least some areas. We know -- as Coates says in the interview -- that Obama's first motivation is to win elections. Unless he first does that nothing else is possible. There are many bones to pick with selectorate theory, but at its core it's pretty hard to deny that the logic of political survival is sound at its core. So if we were hoping to explain why Obama has chosen to expand the drone program, continue assassinations of questionable legality, renege on his campaign promise to close military prisons, further derail the Doha round, and violate Pakistan's sovereignty in pursuit of bin Laden -- all policies that would have been likely under a McCain presidency, much less that of another Democrat such as Hillary Clinton -- Occam's Razor would dictate that we rely less on race dynamics than Coates suggests, even if that is precisely where we should look to explain Obama's actions in other policy areas.

In other words, the fact that Obama is a black president in a country with a complicated past (and present) of racial politics might go some distance in explaining why Obama say less about race than any other Democratic president since 1960. But to make that explanation cohere we can't just leave it at that and then complain, as Coates does, that "a total submission to [prejudiced voters] is a disservice to the country". What matters is that Obama wants to keep power, and he'll do what he needs to do to keep it. Service to the country, which means nothing at all when stripped of its normative assumptions especially in this context, is not Obama's concern.*

What does this mean? It means that while Obama may be different from every other American president in one respect, he is exactly the same as his predecessors in another. It is the latter fact that best explains his presidency, including his approach to racial politics, and not the former.

*And if "service to the country" could mean anything with any substance, "total submission" to the voters -- whether prejudiced or not -- seems like the most likely candidate to me.

Poetry, Prose, Propaganda, Policy, & Paradigms: Drezner vs. Drezner (And Me)

A few weeks ago Dan Drezner called me "curiously lazy" for writing that we shouldn't pay much attention to what presidential candidates say about foreign policy during campaigns, especially when they say things like this:

At some point Romney will be asked direct questions about foreign policy. When he [is] asked those questions he will say things like "I will get tough with China to make sure they play by the rules and stop stealing American jobs" and "I will not let terrorists kill American citizens, and I will do whatever is necessary to keep Americans safe" and "I will keep America strong by not cutting our military budget" and "Screw Russia".

While Drezner acknowledged in that post that campaign rhetoric is just campaign rhetoric, he suggested that Romney still needed to talk more about foreign policy in order to "demonstrat[e] leadership" over his campaign, whatever that means. Now Drezner says:

So, does it matter for policy? Well.... no. 

Mario Cuomo once said "You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose." Now, Mario Cuomo was clearly the world's worst poetry connoisseur. Still, to update his observation for our current needs, we can say, "You campaign as a mercantilist; you govern as a free-trader." The reason that Romney has seemed so discombobulated by the Bain attacks is that he's been China-bashing since Day One ofhis campaign, so it's tough to then flip-flop pivot to a free trade stance. ... 

As stomach-churning as I find this kind of ad, I must reluctantly agree with Yglesias and Brooks that it doesn't matter all that much for governing. ... 

I don't think the mercantilist campaign rhetoric will amount to much.

Right. So: Romney's gonna say nationalist stuff, he's gonna say mercantilist stuff, and you shouldn't pay attention to any of it because it won't have an effect on policy or the election. Same for Obama. This is pretty much exactly what I said in my "lazy" post, which concluded thusly:

This is not meant to say that Romney's foreign policy decisions will not be important. They will be. It's just that we won't learn much about what they will be from any campaign statements.

Drezner is so chagrined by all this foreign policy talk (which he asked for) that he anticipates the next few months of the campaign will be "nauseating". Perhaps. If so, and assuming he's not a masochist, he might be well-served to take my initial advice: just don't pay attention to it. It's not lazy; it might even be wise.

(The only other similarity between our two posts? Drezner refers to "campaign bluster" where I write "campaign blather". I also refer to "bloviating". I prefer my choice of 'b'-words, but I suppose that's a matter of preference.)

(One last little thing: Drezner argued, contra me in my "lazy" post, that Romney -- being a smart guy -- surely knows the difference between neoconservatism and realpolitik. I know of no reason to believe this is true. Certainly Romney himself has given us no reason to believe this is true. James Joyner sees Romney's foreign policy as "realist". Jacob Heilbrunn sees it as neoconservative. Romney talks about a "new American Century" -- neocon -- but thinks we'll bring that about by balancing against the rise of China and Russia (!) -- realist. Mostly he seems to think that the U.S. should be strong, which is congruent with both neoconservatism and realpolitik. So you tell me.)

A Presidential Reading List

Like everyone else, Dan Drezner picks up on the fact that Obama's early foreign policy reading list, erm, leaves something to be desired. He seems to have pulled a couple of FP-related books off the NY Times best seller list -- Zakaria and Friedman -- and that's it. So Drezner lays down a challenge:

This raises an interesting question, however -- if a newly-minted U.S. Senator did want to seriously bone up on foreign affairs, what books should he or she read?

[I]f you're educating a politician from scratch, you need something relatively pithy, accessible, relevant to current events, and America-centric. Given those criteria, Friedman's oeuvre makes some kind of inuitive sense, no matter how wrong or ripe for satire it is. I mean, what's the alternative -- Three Cups of Tea?

Aspiring leaders of America can and should do better than Friedman, however. I therefore call upon the readers of this blog to proffer up their suggestions -- if you had to pick three books for an ambitious U.S. politician to read in order to bone up on foreign affairs, what would they be?

In more recent years I'm sure Obama's read Samantha Power and Anne-Marie Slaughter, or has at least been exposed to their ideas sufficiently to bring them into his administration, so we should probably cross them off the list. Drezner's commenters tended toward the obvious: Khanna, Mearsheimer/Walt, Kaplan, Brzezinski, Kissinger, and Drezner. Excepting the last (of course), I think I'd rather him read Zakaria and Friedman.

I'd like to put a little meat on those bones, but I understand that heavily formal theory and complicated quantitative stuff is off the table, so I'd lean towards stuff that emphasizes history, but with a bent for theoretical explanations -- rather than descriptions -- of phenomena.

My three:

1. After Victory, by John Ikenberry. It gives a good account of the how the world we live in today was shaped by World War II, the importance of institutions and multilateralism in maintaining order, and the difficulties that power transitions present. All of these seem to be very relevant today. The historical narrative in engaging but rich in both theory and evidence.

2. The Strategy of Conflict, by Thomas Schelling. The previous administration seemed to think that many world leaders were crazy, undeterrable, or otherwise worth not engaging in any strategic way. This book (and most IR scholarship) forcefully argues otherwise. I think a foreign policy leader should have some exposure to rationalism as a paradigm of thought, and this book provides that without being technical. Schelling was a master at communicating counter-intuitive ideas in a clear way. For a game theorist, he's amazingly readable.

3. Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the 20th Century, Jeffry Frieden. Something on the economy, suitable for the times. This book not only covers various 20th century crises, but also has a longer-run view of the broader threats to economic stability and growth. In my opinion, a lack of global economic policy has been Obama's biggest presidential weakness so far, and it was predictable. His campaign rhetoric skewed protectionist, and while that stance has softened since he's been in office, the U.S. Federal Reserve has arguably been the most important global economic institution since 2007. It has coordinated with other central banks, extended liquidity to foreign firms, refused to engage in competitive currency devaluations, and otherwise helped stabilize a teetering the global financial system and broader economy. How has Obama responded? By leaving numerous Fed chairs unfilled (and also under-staffing Treasury). Many have criticized the Fed for not doing enough (some have criticized it for doing too much), but part of that may be due to Obama's unwillingness to get the needed personnel into the right spots. Obama seems to have little grasp of the interworkings of the global economy, and this book can help with that.

UPDATE: Stephanie Carvin has her own list here, and Phil Arena whines about how stupid this all is before offering up a suggestion here.

Genius from The Onion

Instant classic:

WASHINGTON—According to a poll released Tuesday, nearly 20 percent of U.S. citizens now believe Barack Obama is a cactus, the most Americans to identify the president as a water- retaining desert plant since he took office.

Obama Finally Talks About Trade

Yes, there was the pie-in-the-sky "double exports in 5 years" talk during the SOTU address, but in a meeting with House Republicans today Obama got a bit more specific:

On the specific issue of trade, you're right, there are conflicts within and fissures within the Democratic Party. I suspect there are probably going to be some fissures within the Republican Party, as well. I mean, you know, if you went to some of your constituencies, they'd be pretty suspicious about it, new trade agreements, because the suspicion is somehow they're all one way.

So part of what we've been trying to do is to make sure that we're getting the enforcement side of this tight, make sure that if we've got a trade agreement with China or other countries, that they are abiding with it -- they're not stealing our intellectual property or making sure that their non-tariff barriers are lowered even as ours are opened up. And my hope is, is that we can move forward with some of these trade agreements having built some confidence -- not just among particular constituency groups, but among the American people -- that trade is going to be reciprocal; that it's not just going to be a one-way street.

You are absolutely right though, Peter, when you say, for example, South Korea is a great ally of ours. I mean, when I visited there, there is no country that is more committed to friendship on a whole range of fronts than South Korea. What is also true is that the European Union is about to sign a trade agreement with South Korea, which means right at the moment when they start opening up their markets, the Europeans might get in there before we do.

So we've got to make sure that we seize these opportunities. I will be talking more about trade this year. It's going to have to be trade that combines opening their markets with an enforcement mechanism, as well as just opening up our markets. I think that's something that all of us would agree on. Let's see if we can execute it over the next several years.

Read one way, this would seem to indicate that Obama would prefer a multilateral approach with built-in enforcement mechanisms to a series of bilateral agreements that leave more wiggle room. But if that's the case, then why hasn't he spent any time trying to jump-start Doha?

There's also some cognitive dissonance going on here. Take this part: "And my hope is that we can move forward with some of these trade agreements having built some confidence that trade is going to be reciprocal; that it's not just going to be a one-way street."

Well, it's pretty difficult for trade to not be reciprocal (it is trade, after all), but his point is that he doesn't want to enter into agreements where other states can manipulate the U.S. As someone in the blogosphere (can't remember who) recently wrote, Obama seems to only like exports. But imports are good too, especially when incomes are falling!

I don't find this encouraging or reassuring. Obama is signaling that he will put domestic interest groups at the forefront of his trade agenda. Which means, I think, that there is little hope for progress on the trade front during his administration. That's too bad.

Extra! Extra! Obama Is a Politician!

Wow. I voted for Obama for president, and I assume that Ryan Avent did too, but we must have had very different views of what we were buying because he is shocked (SHOCKED!) to learn that Obama responds to political incentives:

Through bad times and good times for the president, there was one word I never associated with him and his approach to the challenges facing the country: gimmick. But this is a bright shining gimmick that advertises a lack of seriousness to both near-term economic weakness and long-run budget problems. This is decidedly not what is needed right now. If this is the best the president can do, Democrats, and the country, are in for a very long few years.

Look. Obama never campaigned on a platform of "Elect me and I'll slash entitlement spending and the defense budget because we've gotta get serious about our long-term budget constraints." He campaigned on "We'll expand health care and save money, we'll 'get serious' about climate change without raising energy prices, we'll support American workers without actually restricting trade, we'll restore America's standing in the world without actually spending resources to curry favor, etc.". His entire campaign was a gimmick: we'll fix everything by hoping and coming together and changing the culture of D.C., and all the programs we want won't cost anything at all! We'll create jobs in green technology, and we'll save money on health care administrative costs, and we won't have to sacrifice anything at all! We'll take control of Wall Street and give everything it has to Main Street and there will be no downside! We'll 'get tough' with China and then they'll do everything we want! We'll play nice with Europe and then they'll also do everything we want! New Deal 2.0, except this time without the war!

And then the CBO scored it. Turns out it's hard to have your cake and eat it too.

I voted for Obama because he's smart, he surrounds himself with smart people, and I hoped that that would lead to better outcomes than under a McCain/Palin administration that took pride in how willfully, proudly stupid and ideological it was. I also hoped he would be willing to look into the medium- and long-run future of the country and enact entitlement reform and cut the defense budget in order to shore up America's finances, but I never actually expected it to happen because he never said he was going to do it. (Or, more specifically, he never said what he would do to do it.)

So I'm not surprised that he's resorting to gimmicks in an attempt to curry favor. He did it during the campaign, too. I have no idea why progressives expected so much; it was never going to happen they way they imagined it.

True Words

What the matrix says is that if you look at today's American politics, you have to either support central planning or support a political party that hates intellectuals. If you are an intellectual who believes in decentralized markets, it's not an appealing choice.

That is Arnold Kling, describing why his two new books are important. By "central planning" Kling does not mean the Politburo (at least I don't think that's what he means), but rather a too-strong faith in the ability of technocrats.

Over Thanksgiving, I had a conversation on this topic with a family member who has also worked for the Republican Party. I described to him why the McCain/Palin ticket was so abhorrent to me that I ended up voting for Obama/Biden despite much trepidation. What I said was that while I disagreed with Obama on a great many issues, and hoped he was lying about others, at least he was surrounding himself with very smart people who could give him good advice. People like Goolsbee, Furman, Cutler, the Romers, Summers, Thaler, Blinder, Galbraith, Tyson, and Volcker. I don't agree with all of these people on everything, but I do think that they approach economic analysis honestly and with real care. If Obama took these people seriously, I thought, the economy would be in pretty good hands.

McCain, on the other hand, surrounded himself with ideologues with little or no formal training in economics (and was forthright about his own lack of understanding). People like Gramm, Hassett, Fiorina, and Luskin. The only actual economists that McCain consulted were Holtz-Eaken and Laffer. The former embarrassed himself in the campaign while the latter's views have been routinely distorted by McCain and the rest of the GOP. By the end of the campaign, McCain was mostly relying on Joe the freaking Plumber for his supply of economic policy platitudes.

In other words, to me the choice was between sensible, smart people who had some views that were somewhat different from mine and dangerous ideologues who had proven themselves wrong about nearly everything over the past 10-20 years. My vote went to the group I thought would be better technocrats, and nothing McCain or Palin have said or done since then has made me regret it, despite the fact that I have not been especially happy with all of Obama's decisions.

That said, I'm not actually sure that Kling has his matrix exactly right. Despite a lot of talk about the virtues of decentralized markets, the recent record of the GOP shows a strong pattern of susceptibility to corporate and other lobbyists. This is certainly true of Palin (Kling's example of an anti-intellectual supporter of decentralized markets), and not how a true believer in the virtues of decentralized markets would legislate. To be sure, Democrats are also successfully lobbied by interest groups. Since the political scientist in me expects lobbying to always be somewhat successful no matter which party is in control, the choice (in this case) was simply between the intellectuals and the anti-intellectuals, and that's not much of a choice at all.

Until the GOP can fill in the bottom-right blank in Kling's matrix, they'll have a difficult time winning votes from people like me, and I suspect there are a lot of us.

(ht: MR)

Mmm... Chicken

During a discussion of the use of game theory in IR last week, one of my students asked me "How do we know whether we're in a game of Chicken or a Prisoner's Dilemma?" Well, that's a good question. We can't just place a collect call to Tehran and say "Hello, Mahmoud! Listen, I'm just calling to make sure... we're playing Chicken, right?" And yet what game we're in has quite a lot to do with the strategies we should play because it effects the payoffs of those strategies. For example, John Bolton (and many in the Bush administration) saw nearly every political interaction as a game of Chicken. Obama, on the other hand, doesn't agree:

The question that I'm asking right now is to our military, to General McChrystal, to General Petraeus, to all our national security apparatus, is-- whether it's troops who are already there, or any troop request in the future, how does this advance America's national security interests? How does it make sure that al Qaeda and its extremist allies cannot attack the United States homeland, our allies, our troops who are based in Europe?

That's the question that I'm constantly asking because that's the primary threat that we went there to deal with. And if-- if supporting the Afghan national government, and building capacity for their army, and securing certain provinces advances that strategy, then we'll move forward.

But, if it doesn't, then I'm not interested in just being in Afghanistan for the sake of being in Afghanistan or saving face or, in some way-- you know, sending a message that America-- is here for-- for the duration. I think it's important that we match strategy to resources.

Obama views American resources as valuable, and thinks they should be spent only when they are likely to achieve specific ends. In other words, the payoffs in Afghanistan are asymmetrical so it isn't a game of Chicken. This is the realist position, and folks like Stephen Walt say similar things in reference to Afghanistan all the time. Bush viewed American prestige as valuable, and thought it should be sacrificed only when necessary. The differences in foreign policy (to the extent that they exist) are about how they view the game.

Is Obama Mimicking George W. Bush on Trade?

I'm a bit late to the party, I know (I've been busy), but apparently there's a trade skirmish going on that could escalate. I don't know... something about tires and chicken? Here's a bit of a recap: Ben Muse gives 11 reasons why this is bad, DeLong thinks Obama is doing something stupid, Emmanuel is practically gleeful here (and here and here), IELPB has had about 10 posts on the topic in the past half-week, and Drezner's freaking out.

That's just a slice of the running commentary, so what could I add to the discussion at this point? Maybe a bit of context. In 2001, during his first year in office, George W. Bush also raised tariffs in a similarly reckless and illegal way. Drezner noted this on his blog, but argued that this time it's different for two reasons:

1. Bush raised tariffs on a sector (steel); Obama raised tariffs on a country (China).

2. Bush didn't have general protectionist leanings, so it was never likely that widespread protectionism would be a feature of his regime; this is not true of Obama (or at least we don't know that it's true).

So why did Bush raise steel tariffs in 2001? He never wanted to, but doing so got Congress to give him fast-track negotiating authority in the Doha round of WTO talks. As Drezner notes, the Bush administration knew that the tariffs would be ruled against in the WTO, so they weren't actually having to compromise anything (and he should know; he was working in U.S. Treasury at the time). Instead, they were making an end-around Congress and public opinion. Pretty clever.

Why can't Obama do the same thing? Drezner says it's because he's more wedded to Big Labor than Bush was. Really? Big Labor is always going to vote for Obama against any Republican, while Bush knew that his re-election fight would be difficult, so appealing to voters in Rust Belt states could mean the difference between winning and losing. Like W.J. Clinton, Obama likely has more latitude than a Republican in a similar position would have; like W.J. Clinton, Obama could probably get more done on trade than any Republican facing an a Democratic Congress.

If he wants to. He may not, of course. I've expressed frustration at his lack of attention paid to trade so far, and I've previously tried to parse his mixed signals on trade. Supposedly he'll give a speech on trade on the 17th that could clarify things, but he hasn't been consistent on trade over the past few years, and I don't expect him to start now.

What I do think is that Obama very much values expert advice, and his approach to economic issues is mostly technocratic. Surely Summers and Geithner and Goolsbee are yelling into his ear on this. In fact, both Geithner and Goolsbee have been sent to reassure nervous trading partners before. And remember how Obama was for "Buy American" provisions in the stimulus bill before he was against them? He's been cagey on trade for awhile, and I think there's probably a reason for that: his supporters think that NAFTA was a mistake and that China is killing them. Obama doesn't share that belief, but he can't/won't say that (though he will hint at it). Especially not until something gets done on health care.

Which makes me think that there may be more to this than is immediately obvious. Perhaps Obama wants to signal to Big Labor that he's on their side, but do so in a way that doesn't handcuff him.

The wild card here is China. In 2001, the U.S. was taken to the WTO and smacked down by the Dispute Settlement Court. In fact, I think they were banking on that. This time, China started dispute settlement proceedings but didn't wait for the completion of that process; it retaliated immediately. Obama might not have been counting on that. But now Obama is facing more pressure to revoke the tariffs: those adversely affected by China's retaliatory tariffs, and those who generally prefer an open trading system (and/or don't want to anger China just now). In other words, Big Labor might be on his side, but Big Agriculture won't be.

In short, I'm not sure how this will play out just yet, but I don't expect a wide-ranging trade war between China and the U.S. (sorry Emmanuel). That's the M.A.D. of international trade, and there's just too much at stake for either side to push the button. Doesn't mean they won't butt heads or test each other from time to time, but a return to mercantilism just isn't on the table.

Obama's Realism

Kenneth Waltz famously claimed that states are "functionally undifferentiated" and that the internal characteristics of states (e.g. the type of regime) are irrelevant for understanding state behaviors. In other words, states act according to capabilities rather than characteristics, and so all states may be viewed as unified entities seeking roughly the same goals.

This realist view of the states as undifferentiated unitary actors has come under fire from many quarters, and with good reason. Empirical evidence shows that internal characteristics of states can have large effects on their foreign relations. For example, democratic states do not fight each other (but fight non-democratic states with gusto). Internal characteristics of states can make signals more or less credible, can give national leaders more or fewer tools for statecraft, can limit or expand the range of foreign policies from which leaders may choose, and otherwise differentiate the behavior of states in a number of ways. Still, Waltz's idea travels far enough to be helpful for understanding many international interactions.

Take the formation of Obama's policy towards Iran, for example, as Roger Cohen does in an extensive article in the NY Times Magazine:

“Who [Iranians] select as leader is their prerogative, and there’s nothing we can do to control that,” Ray Takeyh, an Iranian-born adviser to Dennis Ross, the veteran Mideast negotiator who has been working on Iran for the Obama administration, told me before the election. “We’re trying to deal with Iran as an entity, a state, rather than privileging one faction or another. We want to inject a degree of rationality into this relationship, reduce it to two nations with some differences and some common interests — get beyond the incendiary rhetoric.” Takeyh’s words reminded me of Ross, who in his book “Statecraft” defined the term’s first principles as, “Have clear objectives, tailor them to fit reality.”

(bold added)

This comes as something of a departure from previous administrations, and other factions within the American government and even Obama's own State Department. President Bush preferred to see things in more moralistic terms (democracy = good; authoritarianism = Axis of Evil), while Senator McCain -- Obama's rival for the presidency -- famously proposed a "League of Democracies" to police the globe. Secretary of State Clinton -- perhaps inspired by her husband's belief in the necessity of humanitarian interventions -- preferred taking a stronger line against Tehran after the crackdown on protestors following the recent disputed Iranian election, and Vice President Biden agreed with her. But Obama, taking a page from Kissinger's realpolitick, clearly prefers rapprochement to rhetoric.

Still, the rest of Cohen's article is thick with individual personalities, philosophies, and strategies that are vying for influence in the American, Israeli, Russian, Chinese, Saudi Arabian, and Iranian administrations. As some approaches win out over others, the foreign policies of states shift; and as policies shift, so do outcomes. So perhaps we can score one for the argument that just as capabilities matter, so do interests, identities, and institutions at the national level.

Finally, as an aside, what in the hell does this mean?

Indeed, what looms for the Obama administration is a core test, over Iran, of its new foreign-policy doctrine. This was defined by Hillary Clinton as follows: “We will lead by inducing greater cooperation among a greater number of actors and reducing competition, tilting the balance away from a multipolar world and toward a multipartner world."

Whatever that is, it isn't realist.

ADDENDUM: Drezner sees less realism in Obama's foreign policy, or at least fewer realistic hopes for that approach. But when I read the passages he cites (about Ross' humiliating meeting with King Abdullah), I got the impression that Ross was simply unprepared for the questions Abdullah asked. This may be more a function of the fact that the administration had been in office for a mere 99 days when Ross took that meeting (apparently the Saudi King doesn't believe in 100 Day honeymoon periods for new presidents); Obama's positions on every possible contingency may not have been fully-formed yet, or they might not have been known to Ross (who was himself in a state of flux in late-April: unwanted by Clinton at State, but not transferred to NSC until June). Ross could simply have been out of the loop. Perhaps that's a lame excuse, but whatever the reason I don't think it alters Obama's fundamentally realist orientation towards Iran. Whether or not it works is another matter...

Obama's New International Poll Numbers

During the presidential campaign last fall, many observers as well as candidate Obama himself, predicted that his election would go a long way in repairing America's relations with its major allies in Western Europe, as well as elevate the position of the United States in the minds of people throughout the developing world. The Pew Global Attitudes Project just released its findings on this issue.

Mr. Obama, according to the survey by the Pew Global Attitudes Project, enjoys greater confidence among Germans than does Chancellor Angela Merkel, and among the French than President Nicolas Sarkozy. His election in itself, pollsters found, helped restore the United States’ image abroad to levels unseen since the Clinton years.

Improved attitudes toward the United States were most marked in Western Europe, but also evident in Asia, Africa and Latin America, as well as some predominantly Muslim countries.

In Indonesia, where Mr. Obama spent part of his youth, no fewer than 73 percent of those polled said that his election had directly improved their opinion of the United States.

Europeans, in particular, seemed to be responding positively to Mr. Obama. The number of Britons saying that they trusted the American president to do the “right thing” in world affairs soared to 86 percent this year, under Mr. Obama, compared with just 16 percent last year, under President George W. Bush. The increase was slightly larger in both Germany and France.

For the first time since Pew began making the comparison, people in Turkey, Egypt, Nigeria and Indonesia — all predominantly Muslim nations — expressed greater confidence in the American president than in Osama bin Laden.

This finding is without a doubt a good thing for the United States. I expect these numbers to decrease with time, much like we have seen Obama's poll numbers dip in the United States as the honeymoon has worn off and the battles over health care and the economy continue. But, even if the global numbers do fall off from the current highs, it's clear that the United States has regained a lot of its ethical legitimacy in the eyes of its allies and people in the developing world. This change alone, increases the probability of American success in issue areas pretty dramatically.

I don't know how far back the Pew project data on global presidential approval goes, but if the data is available, it would be interesting to see if higher poll levels abroad correlate with greater success in American diplomatic efforts. Intuition tells me that this should hold, but I've noticed lately that intuition can be pretty damn wrong quite often. It'd be great to see some hard data on this topic.

Obama's Summer Vacation

There is no doubt that Obama is media-savvy, so when he chooses a somewhat curious venue for a major speech, it is worth examining why. His speech at the New Economic School in Moscow on Tuesday is no different. A professor at that university speculates about Obama's reasons for choosing NES over more high-profile sites:

First, it is important that NES is a new institution, founded in 1992. Similar to the way Obama represented a new political paradigm for Americans who voted for him, NES also represents a new paradigm for the modern study of economics.

Second, Obama is the first U.S. president in many years to have built his political career not by dividing voters into separate ideological camps, but by searching for pragmatic and nonpartisan solutions. After 70 years of ideological domination by the state, the NES is continuing the traditions begun by such great Russian economists as Yevgeny Slutsky, Nikolai Kondratyev and Nobel Prize winner Leonid Kantorovich, whose work rose above ideological or national boundaries, as it should be in any scientific field.

More at the link, but maybe a more simple explanation is that Obama wasn't invited to a more prominent stage. After all, Obama has not shied away from grandiose settings for past speeches, and the Russians didn't seem interested in attracting a wide domestic audience for Obama.

Via Joshua Tucker at The Monkey Cage, who has more reactions to and context for Obama's trip to Russia.

American-style "Socialism"

This is from Conor Clarke over at the Atlantic. Pretty interesting post:

Have you heard that the United States is headed toward socialism? Jonah Goldberg says it is. Alabama Senator Richard Shelby says it is. Phyllis Schlafly says it is. Richard Viguerie says it is. The Republican National Committee says it is. We must be getting pretty close.

How close? This is what socialism looks like:The hot-pink portion of this pie chart is the percentage of listed American business assets that have recently been nationalized by the American government (ie, General Motors). Obama's version of socialism is so sneaky you can hardly see it!

(And there is some reason to think this actually overstates the portion of the corporate landscape that's been nationalized, but more on that at the end of the post.*)

There is a serious discussion to be had here, and I think Jon Henke is having it: Socialism, like farenheit, comes in degrees. Sure, a government that nationalizes GM is "more socialist" than one that does not, even if it doesn't mean we're living "under socialism." But differences of degree shouldn't obscure differences of kind, and as Tim Fernholz says, "it's clear that putting the government in charge of private production is not the Obama administration's guiding philosophy."

If it were, 99.79% of the American corporate assets that existed at the start of the Obama administration would not remain in private hands. The differences of degree are so small that they aren't worth mentioning. And yet, somehow, they keep getting mentioned.