Courage of Convictions vs. Hard-headed Practicality: Where Should Pols Draw The Line?

Great Debates
1

I’ll draw an example from the Democrats, but I am well aware that this is an issue that happens on both sides of the aisle, and I’m sure it’s just as prevalent amongst the donkeys as the elephants.

A campaign aide to failed Massachusetts Senate candidate Coakley sent a memo to the DNC, complaining about the problems foisted on Martha from the national scene. Two comments in particular have struck me, as much for their existence as for the lack of attention they’ve gotten:

And:

Both of these statements show, in an alarmingly blasé way, how little Coakley’s actual opinion about the merits of the issues seemed to come into play. She had no opinion of the Afghanistan plan herself, apparently; she had to take a position to win the primary, but then got slammed in the general election because of it. She had an opinion on the abortion restriction amendment, it seems, but it got subsumed by the political necessity of agreeing with Senator Nelson.

And this happens all the time, to Red and Blue alike. Undoubtedly there are people who are True Believers, and would say, “This is my position on X, and if it means I lose, then I lose.” But they seem to be few and far between.

What’s the right mixture? Would the nation be better served with a legislature stocked with True Believers? Would we do better by upping our current (already high, IMO) quotient of Machiavelli’s Princes? Is the right answer just leave things to sort themselves out? How much attention should a voter attach to this issue?

2

I suspect that a lot of pols are true believers on some things, & going along with dominant opinion on others. An election selects for someone who will say what the voters like to hear, or appear as what they’d like him to be, whether he’s a true believer or not.

The primary election will select for X, the general election will select for A, & if they don’t match, they don’t match. So it may be that in a given year an apparent believer in Afghan war opposition had to win the Dem primary & would have to lose the general–whether she was a true believer or not.

It’s not that politicians are always lying to us; it’s that we look for someone who appears to embody what we want–even the true believer is a product of the polls, he just happens to agree with the dominant opinion rather than pretending. And he will have the same problems as the posturer by and large.

3

Realpolitik always wins out in the end. Politics, in theory, is about compromise. If you are forced to compromise, how can you stand on your principles? If you are so principled that you cannot take half of what you want instead of 100% of nothing, what good are you?

4

I think it helps politicians if:
(1) they have a coherent set of political beliefs;
(2) they make it clear what those beliefs are; and
(3) they gather enthusiastic supporters around those beliefs.

Martha Coakley doesn’t seem to have achieved any of those things.

Of course, the better aligned their personal beliefs are with their party and its supporters, the better off they will be. However, deviations from the party line do get accepted: Joe Lieberman got re-elected by Connecticut voters in spite of the disconnect between his beliefs and the Democrat position; and Scott Brown got elected as Senator for Massachusetts even though his position on issues like abortion and gay marriage are not exactly the general Republican position.

5

That’s probably because, all too often, they do lose.

Are you going to tell us what you think?

6

I don’t have a good answer, and I’m hoping that this discussion help solidify my thinking.

My naive reaction is that politicians ought to hold thier own views, period. But I recognize that’s unworkable in a 435-member legislature. Some compromise needs to exist.

7

In my ideal world, every politician would have clear strong views, which they would state honestly and clearly and constistently at all costs.

If this does not happen, then people are electing illusions, and you don’t have a truly representative democracy.

If this happened, would this mean that no laws would ever get passed? No, it would mean that only laws that actually have support on their own merits would pass. Oh noes!

Of course, this will never happen. An honest man is less electable than one that will lie in order to please everyone, and an honest man will make less money than one that lives on lobbyists and pork, making the job itself more attractive to the corrupt.

8

I think each pol has to make peace with his own decisions in this regard. For me, I’d just stick by my guns. But then, I’d probably make a terrible politician. One reason my own choice of careers was in the physical sciences and engineering is a desire to deal as closely with factual information as possible. But someone has to be a politician, so I’ll leave it up that person. But I’ll base my vote on my own assessment of him or her.

9

I think it’s important to take positions that you can defend. Coakley took two simplistic positions on two complicated issues and suffered for it.

What is wrong with arguing that you are against abortion restrictions, but are voting for it because you want health care to pass? Of course if you never think about your positions on these issues, then you don’t know what to say when they are challenged, or when circumstances in the real and complicated world make your simplistic positions untenable.

Good politicians like Obama can easily defend themselves when they have to compromise. Obama made and excellent case for escalating the war in Afghanistan and he hardly suffered politically for it.

However, on some fringe issues where you know you’ll have no impact you have to be practical. I suspect Obama would want to legalize marijuana, but he always dismisses the idea mockingly. There is just no point for him to endorse it.

10

Any politician should stand by the courage of his convictions to the extent that his views match my own. To the extent they do not, practicality should dictate that he go along with my opinion anyway.

And I think I speak for the majority here. :wink:

11

I think that it’s somewhat dangerous for politicians to have stong views, at least in the sense of being a true believer. I’d prefer them to have strong core values, and then good critical thinking skills, so that they can examine a given issue, dissect it, compare it with their core values, and then make reasoned decisions. Even if this means occasionally changing one’s mind/position. Unfortunately the opposition then seizes on this as “flip flopping” or “waffling”.

What I think we get too often, on both sides of the aisle, are two extremes: politicians who pander to win votes but have no true vested interest in an outcome that provides good governance or are true believers without the possibility to see all sides of an issue.

12

What follows is my answer to what I think the “right” mixture is. I realize in the real world it works nothing like this for various reasons. More’s the pity.

I think ideally each candidate should approach the electorate and say, “I believe in X, Y & Z.” A different candidate can say, “I believe in V, W & X.” And so on.

The voters then choose who most closely represents the opinions of their constituency.

The advantage of this is then that a politician pushes what they believe and represents their constituents the best with no need to waffle on core issues.

Now, some would say politics is the art of compromise and such staunchly adamant people have no room for that. I do not think this is necessarily an issue though. A different congresscritter may be married to opinions A, B & C. So, on issue “X” the politician can tell the other person they will back them on issue “A” if they support “X” since “A” is not really an issue to them or their constituents. The horse trading can ensue.

Now, one may say ALL the issues are important but this is more which go to the core of a particular person. Perhaps an Iowa Senator cares deeply about farm policy while an Ohio Senator cares deeply about manufacturing issues. There is overlap to be sure.

Occasionally it may be an issue of importance to everyone (like abortion). In that case every pol takes a stand and the chips fall where they may.

13

I can feel some sympathy for Coakley on the first issue. Had she been in the Senate, she could have tried to drive a harder bargain with Nelson, and would have been able to legitimately claim that she did everything she could to fight abortion restrictions. Due to the timing of the matter, all she could get a choice on was whether to approve the whole thing after the deal was done. It wasn’t so much of a matter of whether she’d stick to her convictions, but rather which one she’d be willing to sacrifice. No real way to look good there.

14

I’m comforted by politicians being empty vehicles for public opinion and the institutional priorities of the present.

Of course in school we’re taught about citizen legislators, sent to DC from their small town back home who independently think through issues based on their values and come to an enlightened opinion that drives their vote. It’s almost Platonic in conception and would make for a rad utopian government.

But in practice we don’t have that setup, and there are reasons we don’t. No individual representative or Senator has the capabilities to think through all the issues and consider the interests of all involved parties. And a Senator who did try to do that would add elements of uncertainty and arbitrariness to the process, which doesn’t make for good governance.

If votes are just bought and sold either by power brokers and existing institutions, that circumvents the problem. It allows for marginal, controlled changes where each group has the opportunity to invest in their case.

And it also clarifies things for voters–it’s pretty much impossible to predict how a candidate will vote in a model where “principle” is the thing that drives legislative votes. Will Olympia Snowe be a voice for or against healthcare reform? In 2006, no one really had a fucking clue. Whereas if legislators simply voted with their Party’s platform, that cuts down on uncertainty and allows voters to vote for the candidate who most aligns with their values.

15

I think that what’s missing from this debate is the idea that politicians have a duty to listen to their constituents. Yes, we want politicians to have core values and opinions, but one of the functions of a representative democracy is to allow the people to express their values and opinions to their representatives, through the electoral process. And, I think we want the politicians to take that into account.

That means that a political party and individual politicians may have to change their views. It’s like that old joke: Patient says, “Doc, it hurts when I do X.” Doctor says, “Stop doing X.” If a particular party keeps hitting the hustings with a certain policy, and keeps getting clobbered, and the polls all show that that policy was the reason for the clobbering, the members of that party have two choices. They can say: “Stupid voters. They just don’t understand!” Or, they can say, “The voters have consistently rejected this. Maybe it’s time we re-considered our position on this issue. If we don’t, we may become irrelevant and shut out entirely.”

Bill Clinton was a prime example of this, along with that Democratic working group he was on, prior to getting elected Prez. (Name of the group escapes me at the moment.) He wanted to pull the Democrats more to the centre, and worked on that goal. He was successful, because he convinced enough Democrats that it needed to be done to gain power. That might be seen as crass opportunism.

But, if we take seriously “Vox populi, vox dei,” then what he was doing was principled. The basic organizing principle of a representative democracy is that the people choose. Moving a political party closer to the choices of the majority of the voters is a principled stand to take, even if it means that cherished party policies get watered down or abandoned.

So, getting back to the two examples Bricker quoted in his OP, I don’t see anything wrong with them. Parties and politicians should do post-mortems after an election. They should identify where their platforms and positions worked, and where they didn’t. And if that ultimately builds up enough impetus to force a party to re-examine one of its issues, in response to a consistent pattern of rejection by the voters, that’s a good thing.

16

I think that every politician, like every human, has varying priorities. While a politician will generally have opinions on all of the issues, some of those issues will have higher priorities than others, and it’s only natural for a politician to compromise on what he considers low-priority issues in order to get what he wants on high-priority issues. And in fact the very fact that politicians have different priorities is what makes compromise possible. If Alice is very much in favor of mopery, but weakly in favor of dopery, while Bob is very much opposed to dopery, but only weakly opposed to mopery, then Alice will be willing to compromise her position on dopery while Bob is willing to compromise his position on mopery, and we end up with a situation where mopery is allowed but dopery isn’t, and while neither politician gets exactly what they wanted, both get what they consider to be the most important parts of what they want.