Krugman this morning has an interesting piece on the difference between getting results and being perceived to get results. The former matters to the electorate; the latter to the Beltway courtiers whose thinking is muddled because captured by what he calls the "pundit delusion." His point is that "winning the news cycle" is an insider's game that only insiders care about because most people aren't paying attention or just think it silly:
Suppose, for example, that you believed claims that voters are more concerned about the budget deficit than they are about jobs. (That’s not actually true, but never mind.) Even so, how much credit would you expect Democrats to get for reducing the deficit?
None. In 1996 voters were asked whether the deficit had gone up or down under Bill Clinton. It had, in fact, plunged — but a plurality of voters, and a majority of Republicans, said that it had risen. . . .
The best way for Mr. Obama to have avoided an electoral setback this fall would have been enacting a stimulus that matched the scale of the economic crisis. Obviously, he didn’t do that. Maybe he couldn’t have passed an adequate-sized plan, but the fact is that he didn’t even try. True, senior economic officials reportedly downplayed the need for a really big effort, in effect overruling their staff; but it’s also clear that political advisers believed that a smaller package would get more friendly headlines, and that the administration would look better if it won its first big Congressional test.
In short, it looks as if the administration itself was taken in by the pundit delusion, focusing on how its policies would play in the news rather than on their actual impact on the economy.
Republicans, by the way, seem less susceptible to this delusion. Since Mr. Obama took office, they have engaged in relentless obstruction, obviously unworried about how their actions would look or be reported. And it’s working: by blocking Democratic efforts to alleviate the economy’s woes, the G.O.P. is helping its chances of a big victory in November.
The Dems and their wonkish defenders think they are so sophisticated to understand this insider's game while the rest of us poor slobs who care about the quality of results are just so naive. The irony is that the Republicans kick their ass at this insider's game, and that the Dems are fools to play it on the Republicans terms. Obama the candidate understood this, and seemed also to understand that the only way the Dems cam win is if they change the rules or decide to play a different game. Obama the president has shown he is as clueless as every other Dem in D.C. who thinks the insider game is the only game to be played.
The Republicans will always win the Insider's game; the Dems' effectiveness has always depended on its outsiders' game–its power lying in broad popular support because its policies are designed to benefit most Americans. Without the outside threat, it has no inside game. But it has shown that it doesn't know how to play that game either. The Dems will continue to be unimaginative losers despite the fact that 70% of the electorate is theirs for the taking if they would just take it. They will win only when the country becomes disgusted with Republicans. Why? Because they don't get anything done that matters to enough people that would compel them to vote consistently for Democrats.
That's Krugman's point. The Dem victories are technical, the kind only a wonk can appreciate. But wonks are wonks precisely because they are aficionados of the insider's game, which the Dems are fools to play in the first place. It's as if the Dems have this huge army that is ready to fight a battle against a Republican army half its size, and the Dems are persuaded in the interests of fairness to let its special ops fight an equal number of Republican special ops in a fight that, historically, Dems lose four times out of five. That's just cricket, eh, what what.
So, there are two political games that are being played–the one played for the benefit of the electorate and the one played for the benefit of the insiders. We're not at that point yet where the first one is completely irrelevant, and if the Dems lose their congressional majority in November, we'll see why it matters. If you think the right wing noise machine has been over the top for the last two years, just wait until the Republicans get Congressional subpoena power back.
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