Politics is Everywhere, Even in the Brackets

Brad Smith, a UNC undergrad who is currently making his mind up about IR grad schools, writes:

Stated explicitly, the question I hope to answer here is: "Does Obama systematically favor teams from "swing states" when filling out his NCAA bracket?" My theory is that Obama does, indeed favor teams from swing states because, by doing so, he only stands to gain. As long as his predictions are not absolutely outrageous, Obama can favor a battleground state's team over the team of a state that he either expects to win outright or expects to have no chance in in order to curry favor with that state's voters. This might seem like a silly political move at first, but if you think this wouldn't make a difference in the way people might vote, you've never met someone from rural North Carolina. On a more serious note, it makes an intuitive sort of sense that during an election year a presidential candidate should waste no opportunity to squeeze out a little more favor from voters in strategically valuable states. I think that's exactly what Obama's doing here, which leads me to my hypothesis:

Hypothesis: Obama will predict more wins for teams from swing states than the "average" individual who fills out an NCAA bracket.

He has a little toy stats model and (surprise!) finds some basic support for the hypothesis.

My bracket got screwed by Mizzou and -- to a lesser extent -- Duke, but I'm totally fine with the latter.

Cain's Foreign Policy Statements Aren't About Foreign Policy Either

At least I hope they aren't:

Cain replied, “I’m ready for the ‘gotcha’ questions and they’re already starting to come. And when they ask me, ‘Who is the president of Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan?’ I’m going to say you know, ‘I don’t know. Do you know?’ And then I’m going to say, ‘How’s that going to create one job?’ I want to focus on the top priorities of this country. That’s what leaders do.  

“They make sure that the nation is focused on the critical issues with critical solutions,” Cain said. “Knowing who is the head of some of these small insignificant states around the world, I don’t think that is something that is critical to focusing on national security and getting this economy going. When I get ready to go visit that country, I’ll know who it is, but until then, I want to focus on the big issues that we need to solve.”

Via Nathan Hamm, who adds:

I’ll give most people a pass for being ignorant about Central Asia. It doesn’t even surprise me that someone aspiring to be the US President would be ignorant of the region. But to be so epically ill-informed about a supply route that that both the Bush and Obama administrations thought important that runs right through a country he so bluntly calls “small” and “insignificant,” well… that’s just funny. (And not for nothin’ but surely at least one American job has to have been created by GM’s factory in Uzbekistan.)

Smirking aside, I actually think Cain's pretty much correct about this. There is a supply route that runs through Uzbekistan, but it's hardly essential for the US to pursue its geopolitical interests. And while the GM factory may have created a job or two, the total number won't be much higher than that. In any case, that sort of "gotcha" question has no bearing on the presidential race.

Cain is obviously all but irrelevant, but its more worrying is that no major political candidate seems to have much understanding of, or interest in, international political and economic dynamics. Secretary Clinton may be the furthest along the curve, and she has a new article in Foreign Policy that looks like it's dedicated to the topic. I haven't had time to read it in full yet, so perhaps I'll have more to say later. But if it contains sense it will be the exception.

Romney's Foreign Policy Statements Aren't About Foreign Policy

I don't disagree with any of Drezner's critiques of Romney's white paper, nor with his overall grade. But I think that it's mostly irrelevant. Here's what Drezner says:

Similarly, for someone who says that, the Obama administration is "undermining one’s allies (p. 3)" in contrast to you, who will "reassure our allies (p. 13)", you don't actually talk about America's treaty allies much at all. True, you do talk about expanding America's allies to include India and Indonesia. Mexico gets some face time. Israel gets a lot of face time. On the other hand, NATO is not mentioned once in this entire document. Neither is the European Union. Japan and South Korea get perfunctory treamtment at best. Turkey is a major treaty ally but you treat it like a pariah state. For someone who's claiming that the U.S. will reassure its major allies, you didn't talk about them much at all. This is a really important problem, because Japan and Europe have been crucial allies in a lot of major American initiatives -- and they're getting weaker. Even in discussing new possible allies, I'm kind of gobsmacked that Brazil is never discussed. 

Another big problem is that your approach to China is so shot full of contradictions that I don't know where to begin. ... 

If the section on China is contradictory, then your discussion of Pakistan is worse. ... 

One final point, should you choose to revise this draft strategy -- you need to prioritize the threats you discuss in the paper. You list a bunch of them -- rising authoritarian states, transnational violence, failing states, and rogue states. If you have to prioritize, which threats merit greater attention? This should actually be pretty easy, since you absurdly overhype the threats posed by some of these countries (Venezuela, Cuba and Russia in particular).

But I suspect that these inconsistencies are exactly the message that Romney intended to convey. After all, he's not trying to convince the FP wonkosphere that he's got a consistent grand strategy that would get an exceptional grade in a graduate class. He's trying to convince GOP voters to nominate him for the presidency. And what do those voters want to hear? It seems likely that they want hyped-up threats from Cold War baddies, a blank check for Israel, and mixed feelings on China. I doubt they care much about Brazil, and they take Japan and Europe for granted. And, as Drezner noted previously, they (presumably) want someone who has thought about foreign policy for more than 15 seconds and has some coherent vision for how it should be conducted. Unlike Perry. Romney's tossing them the red meat that he hopes will convince primary voters that he's more serious and knowledgable about foreign policy than his competitors.

In other words, the audience matters. Romney's audience is the contemporary GOP, which is endlessly hawkish but only in some directions. He's signaling to them as hard as he can that he's hawkish in those directions too, but no others. Everything in the document makes sense when viewed in that light, even if it doesn't make sense as actual policy platform.

I'm not trying to knock Drezner at all; his job is to take these kinds of policy statements at face value and evaluate them. He is obviously aware of Romney's motivations. But it's worth remembering the context.