Thursday, April 25, 2019

As "Mayor Pete" Shows, Some Democrats Just Keep Looking For JFK

An extremely long presidential nomination process, when combined with a large number of aspirants, is fertile ground for a series of boomlets in which successive candidates attract a burst of positive attention and upward motion in public opinion polls. The first such boomlet of the 2020 Democratic contest seems to have arrived right on schedule, though its specific beneficiary is more of a surprise. In a field crowded with members of Congress, it's Pete Buttigieg, the 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Indiana (population: 102,000), who has managed to capture the most early momentum.

Several recent polls have found Buttigieg running in third place behind Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders (the only two Democratic candidates who have previously run for president), both nationally and in the early nomination states. Buttigieg also raised more than $7 million in individual donations during the first quarter of 2019, more than all but three of the other Democratic contenders (Biden, of course, was not yet a declared candidate).

It seems strange that a measurable segment of the party would already be throwing its support behind a midsize-city mayor rather than any of the many federal or statewide officeholders in the race. But Buttigieg projects a Kennedyesque persona, and a Kennedyesque persona is a valuable asset in a Democratic primary contest.

Kennedyesque politicians are youthful, personable, and confident. They compensate for their relative inexperience with well-hyped intellectual credentials: Ivy League diplomas, pet policy passions, authorship of "serious" books, public displays of erudition. Their bouts of earnestness are balanced by expressions of humor and self-awareness. They are masters of the rhetoric of idealistic generalities, leading audiences to find them charismatic or even inspirational, but they don't insist on doctrinal purity when it comes to the details. Indeed, the hope they offer—and "hope" is often what they explicitly promise—is that electing them will allow the nation to shed its messy ideological and partisan conflicts, progressing unencumbered into a new, brighter era of reason, civility, and mutual understanding. (One of the reasons why the Kennedy style doesn't have the same appeal within the Republican Party is that in the Republican version of utopia, political enemies are simply defeated, not converted.)

For decades, Democratic politicians with the capacity to do so have adapted themselves to the Kennedy model. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama both found considerable success in Democratic presidential primaries by emulating Kennedy's approach, and even losing candidates like Gary Hart (1984) and John Edwards (2004) rode elements of the Kennedy persona to advance further in the nomination process than their other political virtues would likely have carried them. The fact that Clinton and Obama are the only post-JFK Democrats to be elected twice to the presidency reinforces the perception among electability-minded partisans that the Kennedy style can offer a strategic advantage that persists even after the primaries are over.

There are other recurrent archetypes in Democratic politics: the scrappy pugilist (Harry Truman, Howard Dean, Bernie Sanders); the just-the-facts technocrat (Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, Paul Tsongas); the political veteran who can work the levers of power (Lyndon Johnson, Walter Mondale, Hillary Clinton). But it's hard to imagine any of these other profiles being sufficient to launch a midwestern mayor into presidential contention against a raft of better-situated opponents. Buttigieg's electoral chances will depend on his ability to keep this precious persona intact as he weathers the added scrutiny that will inevitably follow his recent bump in the polls.

The interest that Buttigieg's campaign has already received is a testament to the warp speed at which today's political world operates. Except for Biden and Sanders, the other, more conventionally qualified Democratic candidates in the 2020 race are new faces on the national scene by traditional standards—yet much of the journalistic and social media realms are currently treating them like yesterday's news. It really wasn't all that long ago, in fact, that there was this other youngish candidate who suddenly emerged from obscurity to inspire Democratic activists across the country by seeming to personify a new, more hopeful kind of politics.

Had kind of a Kennedy look about him, too.

Beto something?

Whatever happened to that guy?

Tuesday, April 16, 2019

Donald Trump and the Electoral Benefits of Presidential Weakness

I recently argued that Donald Trump has been, so far, the weakest of the modern (i.e. post-FDR) presidents in exercising the power of the office on behalf of policy goals. Moreover, the Trump presidency does not appear to be gaining in capacity over time. Rather than learning from early failures and bringing in experienced Washington hands to steady the ship, as previous presidents like Bill Clinton did, Trump has opted instead to retreat further into a skeletal executive branch increasingly bereft of managerial talent and substantive expertise. The power of presidential speech has also been diluted to an unprecedented point, since attentive audiences within the political system—members of Congress, journalists, bureaucrats, even the president's own subordinates—have learned through experience that Trump's words often bear no relationship to his actions or those of his administration.

This is a prescription for nothing much getting done. Indeed, it seems as if progress on the president's agenda has either slowed or stalled on nearly every major policy dimension. Such a development is bad news for anyone invested in those policies. But it's probably good news for Trump's re-election chances.

One of the major lines of attack on Trump in 2016 was that he represented a potential threat to the survival of the nation, or even the globe. Jeb Bush called Trump a "chaos candidate . . . [who] would be a chaos president," while Hillary Clinton argued that "a man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons." Some otherwise persuadable voters may have declined to support Trump over these concerns; as Clinton advisor Mandy Grunwald recalled after the 2016 election, "I don't think we ever had a focus group where somebody didn't say, 'He's going to blow up the world. I just can't do that.'"

Trump's administration may indeed be fairly described as chaotic, but he hasn't introduced the kind of visible instability to the nation, or the world, that swing voters might easily perceive and punish in 2020. The weakness of his presidency has prevented him from accomplishing major policy objectives that would also have been politically treacherous. For example, both the repeal of the ACA and the instigation of multi-front trade wars would have resulted in economic disruption within a significant segment of the national electorate, and it is surely to Trump's electoral benefit that neither goal has (yet) been achieved. Mass deportations of DACA beneficiaries would likewise have caused a political firestorm from which judicial intervention has, at least up to this point, helpfully protected the Trump re-election campaign.

Though he has failed to deliver on many other promises as well—he did not get Carl Icahn to negotiate new trade agreements with China and Japan, or end birthright citizenship, or bring back the coal industry, or invest an additional $1 trillion in infrastructure, or enact a federal child care plan designed by his daughter, or prove to be so dedicated a president that he was too busy to take vacations—Trump has remained overwhelmingly popular among his 2016 supporters. In addition, the president has benefited from a solid economy and strong record of job growth. Here, too, the frustration of his greater ambitions may have worked to his political advantage—what would have happened to the financial sector in the wake of, say, a hard exit from NAFTA rather than the quiet negotiation of a near-identical successor agreement?

Trump is now positioned to run for a second term less as a transformational figure continuing his project to remake American politics and society than as a defender of the status quo against what will no doubt be characterized as a radical socialist alternative. If he loses, it will be due more to his existing unpopular personal qualities than to any particular act that he committed while in office. The enduring weakness of his presidency may well prevent Trump from making much of a mark on history, but he could earn a second term if he's able to convince enough voters that they don't have much to fear from more of the same—and that it's the Democrats, instead, who offer a risk America can't afford to take.

Monday, April 08, 2019

A Historically Weak Presidency Just Keeps Getting Weaker

Donald Trump dominates the popular, electoral, and media landscapes of American politics like no other figure in living memory. Trump remains a ubiquitous presence in the daily press coverage of current events. The 2018 elections were almost entirely a referendum on Trump, with the various individual candidates running for Congress serving merely as proxy vessels for voters to register their approval or disapproval of the president amid record national turnout for a midterm. Many of Trump's supporters view him in admiring terms as something of a national savior, while his detractors accuse him of being a uniquely potent villain leading America down the road to authoritarian rule.

But in terms of actual effectiveness in using the tools of the office to achieve policy ends, the Trump administration so far ranks at the bottom among all the modern presidencies. Trump the political personality is historically strong, yet Trump the president is historically weak.

The evidence for, and reasons behind, this weakness have been catalogued by my political scientist colleagues Jonathan Bernstein (here, here, and here) and Matt Glassman (herehere, and here). One set of difficulties concerns Trump's personal qualities. This president is bored or impatient with most substantive policy questions or discussions. He seems unfamiliar with many aspects of how the government operates and uninterested in becoming educated on this point. And, crucially, he has repeatedly demonstrated that he cannot be trusted to keep his word either publicly or privately, which reduces his ability to negotiate productively with other power centers within the political system or around the world.

Another source of weakness is the executive branch surrounding the president. Trump promised during the 2016 campaign that he would select the "best people" who were "truly, truly capable" to serve at the senior levels of the government. But he has been unable to attract, or to identify, consistently skilled deputies across the various cabinet departments and within the White House itself; personnel choices frequently seem to reflect preoccupations with perceived loyalty or "looking the part" on television rather than actual talent. The high turnover rate of presidential appointees, extraordinary number of unfilled positions, excessive dependence on "acting" officials who lack the clout that comes with permanent status, and absence of a coherent policy-making process make it even more difficult for the Trump presidency to gain the deference from bureaucrats, judges, members of Congress, and other actors that is usually necessary to implement significant policy change.

Finally, Trump's unpopularity in the mass public—and the toxic levels of antipathy that he provokes among Democratic voters in particular—means that even ideologically moderate or electorally vulnerable members of the opposition party see little benefit in cooperating with the president. Trump's mediocre job approval ratings also led directly to the Democratic victories in the House last November that have further curtailed his legislative influence and handed investigative power to his congressional critics.

Some presidents suffer from a rocky start but get the hang of the job as they go on. The Trump presidency seems only to be getting more ineffective over time. Trump's greatest strength up to now has been his power within the Republican Party; other Republicans have generally been reluctant to become enmeshed in public disputes with the president for fear that their own party's voters will take Trump's side and wreak punishment on dissenters. Recently, however, Mitch McConnell responded to Trump's suggestion that Republicans turn their attention (yet again) to health care reform by flatly shooting down the president's declaration in the pages of the national press. Imagine Harry Reid doing such a thing to Barack Obama, or Bill Frist to George W. Bush, and it becomes clear what an unusual act this was for the Senate majority leader, who was surely speaking for his caucus as a whole.

It's also clear that the executive branch's management of immigration policy—a rare subject on which the president demonstrates substantial personal investment—is an outright mess. The forced resignation of Homeland Security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen is merely the latest development in a chain of events that also included a lengthy federal shutdown that failed to secure border wall funding from Congress, the damaging revelation and subsequent public reversal of the practice of separating families seeking entry at the southern border, and the indefinite judicial suspension of the president's unpopular withdrawal of DACA protections in September 2017. Rather than identify hard-line aide Stephen Miller as a common element in his repeated failures to achieve lasting policy gains on the issue, Trump has apparently sided with Miller over Nielsen in one of many internal administration battles as Miller seeks to consolidate influence over DHS from the White House—which does not bode well for future success.

While Trump seems by now to have grasped that the job he has isn't the same as the job he thought he was running for in 2016, he hasn't managed to figure out what to do about it. If media impressions are accurate, the cacophonous frenzy of this presidency's early months—memorably marked by a parade of colorful characters constantly barging on- and off-stage—has evolved into a quieter, though not necessarily less chaotic, atmosphere structured (if that's not too strong a word) around the uneven energy of the president himself, who seems to oscillate between bursts of acute, though often unproductive, engagement and increasingly lengthy periods of retreat to television and Twitter. Even Trump's aggressive verbal taunting of potential Democratic opponents in a re-election contest that's well over a year away gives off the impression that the incumbent is somewhat unfulfilled by his governing responsibilities and yearns for the prospect of electoral competition to really get his blood flowing.

In other circumstances, a president who fails to deliver on major initiatives—and who prefers not to even show up at the office on the weekends, or in the evenings, or in the mornings—would inspire murmurs of discontent within the party whose platform forms the basis of his policy to-do list. Yet Trump has proven that the demands of today's Republican activist and voter base can largely be satisfied by symbolic appeals rather than substantive achievements. If his supporters ask of him only that he says the right things, and angers the right opponents, then it's possible for him to do the job they want him to do from the comfort of his couch at Mar-a-Lago. But as long as Trump himself continues to promise major policy change without demonstrating any idea of how to attain it, the strength that he so conspicuously attempts to project through his words will not be matched by his deeds.