Holding Out For A Hero

Our church's sermon yesterday was oddly political for a Christmas message. The general theme went something like this: Jesus was born to be a moral leader, and clearly amoral liberal culture is brainwashing us all and killing kittens, so we need a moral leader now. Elect Huckabee as President, QED.

This is something I've noticed for years in discussions about politics: they're never framed as discussions about politics. They're discussions about morality, or about safety, or about anything other than the actual policies that the future President/Senator/dogcatcher in question intends to enact. America cares more about who's holier when electing its President than about who has a substantive plan to prop up Social Security.

Why is this, and does this impulse that we have towards electing happy heroes rather than policy wonks actually have a place in representative democracy?

The reasons for this impulse are plentiful, I think. One of the main ones is that people like to measure candidates based on their own experiences. Precious few of us have ever had to think deeply enough about energy policy to craft a coherent national strategy, but we've all thought about whether the death penalty is good at some point. We relate to candidates' thoughts about topics like the death penalty or abortion, because they're something that Joe Ordinary, sitting in his desk chair and drinking his coffee, can figure out or at least think deeply about. Energy policy, on the other hand, would require Joe Ordinary to do quite a bit of research, and isn't something that he can come up with opinions about on the fly.

Now, ease of contemplation should not be a measuring stick for how important an issue is. The death penalty affects only a very limited portion of the population at any given time, while energy policy affects all of us every minute of the day. Nonetheless, I'd bet anything I own that more people can describe a given candidate's stance on abortion or the death penalty than can describe their proposed energy policy. People fixate on issues they can understand, whether or not those issues are representative of what will constitute a good leader.

Another reason that the electorate focuses on issues that don't matter in lieu of questions of importance is that we aren't electing a Chief Executive. Sure, that's the actual position that the victorious candidate will end up filling, but that's not how the electorate conceptualizes the position when they vote to fill it. No, when America goes to the polls to fill the position we call 'President', most people are in fact voting for Figurehead in Chief. They are choosing someone who will represent them, and the emphasis is placed on 'represent' in the figurehead sense rather than in the policy-making sense. America wants a President who is like them, who represents the electorate in the sense of being the same as much of the electorate. That's why Romney's religion is such a sticking point: most Americans aren't Mormon, and are reluctant to elect someone who is unlike them. Romney's speech addressing the issue was indicative: there was very little actual Mormon doctrine in the speech (something to the tune of two sentences worth), and a whole lot of generalized solidarity. Romney knows where his bread is buttered: he needs to be as like the electorate as possible if he wants them to elect him.

Is this a useful approach to electing a President? Not particularly. The sad fact is, the vast majority of Americans are fundamentally unsuited to holding the most powerful office on the planet. Electing someone who resembles these Americans seems like a poor method of getting someone who will be competent. But national political strategists figured out over a century ago that emotional appeals (and the knowledge that a candidate is desirable because he is like you in some way is a form of emotional appeal) are far more powerful than logical ones. Logical appeals take time, take effort and consideration on the part of the electing public. Emotional appeals bypass the effort and time, and produce instant attachment to a candidate. So national political strategies are crafted around the idea of keeping policy out of debates, while focusing them on how similar a candidate might be to you, the potential voter.

If similarity to the voting public doesn't seem like a reliable way to elect a leader who's good at the things that would make for an outstanding President, why do people so consistently use that criteria as the primary one in making their decisions? Well, there is one argument that gives the impulse a little traction. The idea is that a voter can't possibly know what decisions a President will have to make, so it's best to elect someone very similar in values and life situation to the voter, in hopes that the candidate will make decision in the same way that the voter would when faced with these hypothetical situations. If we elect someone who is enough like us, maybe that person's decisions will accurately track our own decisions in situations that we can't know about.

It's an interesting selection strategy, because it relies heavily on the idea of the grand unknown. The key to making this selection strategy more appealing than a strategy that chooses a candidate based on known values like issues positions is the idea of the unknown. The situation that would come up to make a selection strategy like this plausible would need to be:

a) vitally important, even more important than issues like energy and Social Security on which candidates can produce platforms in advance.
b) completely unforeseeable to the electorate in advance. Basing a selection strategy on choosing someone whose decisions you hope will track yours is only useful if you think they'll be making decisions that there was no way you yourself could foresee (if you could foresee it, you could ask them about it, and the 'trust that they're like you' strategy starts making less sense).

Granted, some decisions like this do arise. Wars are usually unforeseeable. Terrorist events are likewise unpredictable, though I would argue that a candidate's general security strategy is probably enough to give a good idea of how they'd respond to such eventualities. Upon considerations, though, I would guess that there are fewer situations that would fit both of those criteria than one might imagine. The big domestic issues that a given President will face are generally foreseeable by the electorate before the election. If that's indeed the case, why choose a candidate based on how similar they are to us, when we could choose a candidate based on what they actually think?

... I don't know. There aren't easy conclusions here. I only know that people do it, in spite of logical evidence that such a strategy might reliably produce less-than-fit candidates for the job. Can we stop people from doing it? Would a massive, nationwide "Think about Issues!" campaign successfully get Joe Ordinary to take a break from his coffee and decide which candidate can actually present the best plans and policies, and not just a vague sense of moral feel-good?

Probably not.