jawfish

General Motors Wake part two
john posted in politics & culture, rides, technologies on November 19th, 2008

In part one I laid out the situation with the pending Big 3 carmakers collapse, as I see it. I think its fair to say I am just representing a widespread consensus.

What’s to be done?

The choices:
	The ice floe: Let them die with the polar bears. Suppliers will crash and burn, and who knows how Michigan will survive.
photo by Reason	Show them the money: Nobody will buy their assets in this market. ( Solarworld offered to take Opel as a freebie today) Bankruptcy isn’t going to provide quick revenue to support the whole rickety framework, so the Feds would have to provide some kind of guaranteed market like Federal fleet sales and buyer rebates, and support for R&D, and try to get a rapid program in place to retool.

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The problem with letting them die, is that they may drown us too. A huge number of jobs and businesses depend on the Big 3 car businesses. Numbers are quoted as high as 10% of all jobs are indirectly affected by the car business. Cities will be besieged with falling taxes, failing business, collapsing housing. Unemployment will soar, and Federal costs will too as the safety net gets hit with a wave of the jobless.

The problem with bailing them out is that it may be throwing good money after bad. The basic problem with pumping money into failing behemoths is you are using a very expensive, blunt instrument to do surgery. It very well may not work, and political pressures could easily pollute the Congressional effort with giveaways. Bickering between the Democratic leadership in Congress and the lame-duck Bush administration is not helping. The folks in Richistan have long ago taken their money out of manufacturing, and indeed out of the country, so they don’t care.

The long view:
Either the prognosticators are right and the Big 3 are already zombies, or they aren’t and there is some hope for restructuring of one or two. In both cases it’s the suddenness of the collapse and the terrible timing that make it so awful. The Big 3 have been giving away market share for decades and the Republic is still standing, sort of. So if you could slow the demise, and at the same time strongly encourage lightweight, modern cars and trucks, with a frantic race to hypercar manufacturing, it might be possible to avoid the worst effects of the collapse, and use the direness of the situation to push through much-needed restructuring of labor and management.

The greatest obstacles to this approach are the blockheads in management, the blockheads in Congress, and the desperate UAW. Bankruptcy of some sort is so attractive because it means some judge, and not an elected representative, will be telling the UAW folks that 50% are laid off and the other 50% are getting wages cut in half. Presumably the same judge would seize control and clean house in the white-collar departments, sell off the fancy buildings, cancel the golden parachutes, and generally machete his way through the mess. It still might not work, because car sales are so slow that competing with the healthy carmakers is a daunting prospect. It would take a big discount to get a sensible buyer into a Ford Focus/Chevy Cobalt over a Toyota or even Hyundai, when everyone knows Ford and Chevy may go kaput, taking their dealers with them.

The ugly:
I think a lot of the pious declarations of free-market discipline are fueled by irrational anti-union sentiment. It is clear the UAW is dying, but union inefficiency does not mean jobs ought to be wasted. Sure a Democrat really can’t deliver the death sentence to a unionized industry, but they might well allow the lame-ducks to do it.

What if:
What if a benevolent industrial dictator from the WWII era were given the nationalized hulk of GM? Leaving Chrysler to die, and Ford to try it alone, he could forget profits while revamping the company from top to bottom. Of course this presumes there is something worth saving.

My guess:
Stretching out the process may be the best that can be done with the Big 3. Facing extinction, might, just might, startle them into serious change. Ford is most likely to survive. The most important long-term goals for the nation are restoring our manufacturing capability, and providing 21rst century green transportation as soon as possible. The Big 3 and the UAW can get on the train or be left behind. For the computer-biz kids from the coasts the idea of re-starting an industry from scratch may seem commonplace, but if that’s the way it goes, then surely those people in the Midwest are in for some cascading failures of small business, and some really tough times.

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CSPAN coverage of the CEOs futile testimony

Harsh, but accurate blog entry from WSJ

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Pictures of River Rouge, the famous 1100 acre factory built by Henry Ford.

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General Motors Wake part one
john posted in politics & culture, rides, technologies on November 18th, 2008

First lets dispense the cliche’s:
Whats good for GM is good….
GM, which will lose global number one sales….
Perfect storm….
Too big to fail…

The Problem:
GM, Ford and Chrysler are spending more money than they take in. The burn rate is fast enough to leave GM penniless in a few months. No one, except possibly the taxpayer, will lend them money, figuring it would be good money after bad. The stock market is devaluing GM to the point than a billionaire could simply buy all the stock (which is really buying the debt).

GM falling stock price chart There is not much value left there….

A good article at Seeking Alpha

	Two truly stupid models.
Pontiac Aztec		Ford Excursion

The Money Situation:
The market seems to think privately-owned Chrysler is a goner. Ford has a little more money than GM, but is essentially in the same boat, even if it could take over GM’s domestic market share. Vast numbers of vendor and related jobs depend on the Big 3, 2-3 million has been quoted. Its easy to guess that a sudden loss of that many jobs would tip us into a depression. Worldwide, manufacturing and transportation businesses are in deep trouble, from Boeing and Airbus, to the world-wide shipping industry, to China itself.

The Political Situation:
It’s hard to see how any President, let alone a Democrat who just carried the Midwest, can suck it up and let GM die. And then there is that Depression looming. Nobody wants to be Herbert Hoover.

The Design Problem:
American companies have once again ( see 1970’s) failed to plan for rising gas prices, and are caught with aging designs that weigh too much, push too much air, and consume too much. They have not diversified with small vehicles, in spite of having successful off-shore small-car companies. They have not invested in in-house powertrain research, like hybrids and batteries. Their bit of fuel-cell research is pie-in-the-sky stuff, with no path to manufacture. The one bright spot is the Chevy Volt, not yet ready for manufacture, and never intended to be sold in large quantities.

The Culture Problem:
In four decades while the Japanese and Germans were optimizing their labor-hours-per-car, time-to-market, and reliability, Detroit was selling SUVs and trucks as commuter cars, with haphazard work on future manufacturing. With a few loss-leader exceptions like the Dodge Viper and Ford GT40 and long-running Chevrolet Corvette, Detroit made cars carelessly for people who are careless about cars, neglecting both the Apple Computer (cars as digital appliances) end of the market and the performance end (import tuners). They did great with the size-is-status market.

The Labor Problem:
The labor problem is partly the healthcare and pensioner problem. The Big 3 hourly employees are still dependent on the mother company for healthcare ( there’s an unfunded plan to transfer to UAW) and so are the pensioners, whose healthcare and pensions are not fully funded either. Further, the future is not with the UAW, so it may end up fighting the greater communal good in favor of its own survival.

The Rewards Problem:
The short-sightedness of Detroit has long been publicly discussed. Foreign manufacturers seem to be planning design changes in sync with changing market conditions with success, though all will be hurt by the sudden downturn in world-wide sales. Rewarding dismal failure just ain’t American somehow.

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Technologies That Will Change the Worldcomment
john posted in memes, technologies on October 10th, 2008

Sometimes when the criminal antics in Washington and Wall St. are too much to bear, you just have to make a list of optimistic things. Some people may want to list how many ways love changes the world, but I go for bits of technology.

Past Examples

examples of the kind of thing I mean:
Switch from whale oil to petroleum
The rudder
Industrial steel
Aniline dye and the synthetic chemical industry
Packet switched computer networks
Semiconductors
Telegraph and so on…

Past successes look obvious from the future, but it is inherent in the nature of disruptive technologies that the really important ones solve problems that aren’t obvious at all. So by this measure whatever is not on this list could be a real whiz-bang idea. But I’ll plunge forward anyway, heedless of the cost.

Future

With the looming greenhouse gas crisis, and massive over-population, energy ideas top the list. But some think that water and good agricultural dirt may be the scarcest resources in the future.

Energy

Most obvious:
Cheap and efficient solar cells. Solar roofing, thin flexible films, solar paints and printing. Current glass-mounted cells cost roughly $700 for 100W, which is too much to pay back even with $0.15/kwh grid power. Many researchers are working on the problem, and new announcements come weekly. For example catalytic breakup of H2O.

The low-tech route: cheap parabolic solar and MIT group builds a low-cost reflector to generate steam.

infra-red solar power Useful for both daytime, and nighttime, plus waste heat recovery.

Everybody’s favorite, fusion power:
Imagine multi-megawatt generators without pollution. Commercial success is still decades away, though the Europeans and the Brits are spending on research.

One attempt to commercialize fusion.

Small energy harvesting:
Various schemes have been proposed for reclaiming small amounts of waste energy. Just as hybrid vehicles recover some motive energy from braking, we could recover energy from waste heat at air conditioners, auto engines, sun-heated paving. Medical researchers are proposing to generate electricity from body chemistry, and from movement. More radical are the self-powered sensors that harvest enough energy from their environment to forgo batteries.

Using radio signals to power sensors
Parasitic power devices.

Artificial photosynthesis
The grand pattern for harvesting solar energy is photosynthesis. An understanding of how it works could lead to genetic manipulation, and creations of more efficient bio-fuels.

One of many starts

Small scale wind power without tall towers:
Efficient wind turbines need to be well above rooflines and trees. This is a problem for residential generation. Some have proposed tethered kites and blimps. Windbelt. There are pilot projects that use harmonic vibration in wires to make small amounts of power. These do not require complex turbines or towers, and so may be useful in the third world.

Clean, sustainable bio-fuels:
Bio-fuels are already being made from all manner of organic materials, from sewage and manure, to algae, to waste agricultural products, crops, even coal. The problem is that none of these processes are truly carbon-neutral and most have other negative side-effects like disruption in agricultural markets.
Craig Ventner has announced that he will produce carbon-negative fuel from genetically-engineered bacteria that feed on CO2.

Efficient hydrogen storage:
Hydrogen is extremely clean, and good for fuel cells, even internal combustion engines, but it is devilishly difficult to store. Current technologies use extreme pressure, liquification or chemical matrices, none of which are suitable for cars. Some work is being done with ammonia and catalyzed water, as liquid fuels are ideal for transportation.

Efficient hydrogen production:
Hydrogen is extremely common, but bound up in compounds which are expensive to break down. Researchers are working on various biologic methods of producing hydrogen, similar to those for methane and the alcohols. This gets into artificial photosynthesis, where the bio-fuel research is also headed.
Here is a very interesting development.

Cheap powerful batteries:
Today’s Lithium batteries today are expensive, and extremely awkward to make into usable packs for electric cars. Researchers are working on nanotech methods of improving the weight, cost, and maintenance, though the power density may not go up much. And today’s power density isn’t high enough for gasoline-like range at low weights.

Low power lighting
Low power lighting has been with us since the 1980’s, but in the form of compact flourescents that use mercury and have an awkward package. LEDs are reaching the same efficiency, their price is coming down, and they are wondefully small and long-lived. For instance, Toshiba makes white LEDs at about 51 lumens per watt (a 100 w oldfashioned lamp is 17 lumens per watt) and is comparable with CFLs and even with the best gas discharge lights like automotive HID.
Cree may be even better.
More data.

Materials

You can argue that much of the quest for new materials is just the flip side of the quest for cheaper energy. After all, the problem with current materials is that they are too heavy or they require too much energy to mine, process, or machine. But Nanotechnologists may also claim that they are making materials that do things that couldn’t be done at all before. There are two basic patterns for new materials: lighter-stronger-cheaper-less corrosion, and chemically or electrically active.

Cheap wiring:
Electrical wiring is almost exclusively copper. It is expensive and environmentally unclean in production, prone to corrosion, heavy, and inelastic. A cheap, elastic, conductive alternative could save money and weight in all kinds of machines.

High temperature superconductors:
(see cheap wiring)
Transmission wires for the electrical grid that have little to no resistance at room temperature.

Smart mulch:
An agricultural mulch that generates electricity from sunlight to power irrigation pumps, and controls moisture loss, rain penetration, insects, and diseases.

Structural composites:
Composites to substitute for aluminum and steel, with less weight, more elasticity, more corrosion resistance, lower manufacturing costs, Carbon fiber and its relatives already hit some of these points, but it is inelastic and very expensive as a material and in the manufacturing process. Amory Lovin’s Rocky Mountain Institute has been developing a carbon-reinforced plastic that can be mass-produced.
Here’s a patent.

Spider silk:
Spider silk is famously the strongest fiber known. It is also bio-degradable. Various genetic engineering and nanotech approaches are being used to copy or duplicate it in industrial form. Tensile strength is one of the most important qualities in hundreds of products, from tires to structural composites to cables and ropes, so success here will make all manner of light, strong products available.

Resources

Water purification and desalinization:
The third world especially will need small, cheap, low-energy ways to clean water for drinking and irrigation. Global warming changes are accelerating damage done by over-pumping and polluting.
Deka generator/purifier

Farming without soil degradation:
The Romans knew how to do it, but failed to execute. So too the Mayans and virtually every other agricultural civilization. Soil is produced naturally from rock, but the process is much slower than the erosion cuased by bad tillage, and the ecologic depletion caused by hyper-cultivating monocultures.

Robots

The harder problems in robotics - machine vision, autonomy, voice recognition and speech synthesis are finally yielding to sustained research. ( see jawfish ) The first widespread use of mobile robots is in the military, where the cost equation is very favorable. Surely just as cheap IEDs defeat expensive Humvees in Iraq, there will be a tidal wave of cheap, disposable, attack robots used against expensive complex and human targets. I can’t see any good coming out of this prospect, but I can see disruptive change.

But civilian robotics could restore some manufacturing to first-world countries, making supply-chains shorter, and re-invigorating the economy. But don’t expect a good house-cleaning bot any time soon.

Medicine

There may be more innovation coming in health and medicine than all the other fields listed combined, and so I’ll just focus an a couple that might have very-wide reaching effects.

Brain science:
Suddenly, teams of biologists, physicists, doctors, and engineers are building an empirical science of the how the brain works. While the anecdotal guesses of Freud are long behind us, understanding of even the most basic brain traits is a long way ahead. At least we know and agree that we still don’t understand very much, but we do know some things about brain performance. It’s not unreasonable to think that great advances in brain-drugs and brain-training are possible, leading to greater happiness and intelligence, however unmeasurable. Simply learning to control our metabolism to keep neurons strong and fat low would be a huge boon in the developed world. The dark side is also always there, though, development of these drugs will also target addiction pathways and abuse.

Long range birth control:
Pure Speculation Department- if the political will existed, use of cheap, long lasting implantable birth control would be a huge boon. We seem so close to this, and yet we still can’t have programs that pay girls to avoid pregnancy.

Who’s holding up the train?

What’s stopping all this innovation? In some cases nothing, for instance, the cost of petroleum is now high enough to create a bio-fuel industry. Lack of capital and researchers may hinder many projects, though venture capital is finding its way into many of these ideas because the commercial prospects are huge.

But there are many technical solutions that require infrastructure changes, or market regulation, or temporary subsidy. There are many powerful entrenched Luddites who deny the science of global warming out of ignorance or for political ends. American governmental capital has been re-routed into war in the oil-fields for more than five years, and now into the Wall St. bail-out. Many solutions require global cooperation, which is increasingly difficult across the developed vs developing vs undeveloped divides. In short, while our mechanical and chemical and computing skills increase every year, our human skills and institutions barely change. And the very worst of all the human problems, over-population, is not up for discussion in the fastest-growing parts of the world.

Over-population is like a rising flood that will eventually negate the ability of third-world countries to develop, and will continue to plague first-world countries with intractable immigration issues.

So the technology that is going nowhere is human-management. We don’t seem to be much better at making group decisions based on rationality than we were as cavemen or even chimps. And our innate aggression has been outrun by our technical ability to make weapons. The coming robot revolution in the military may make that dilemma even worse.

The Spawning Ground of the New Know-Nothings
john posted in politics & culture on October 8th, 2008

Beware the apprenticeship of your politicians: its lessons will follow them to Washington.

Politicians who grew up in the sterile suburbs are bringing their slash-and-burn practice to Washington. It’s no wonder they treat the public weal as if it were an ATM with their name on it.

It’s been obvious for quite a while that the Gingrich and Reagan revolutions brought with them a host of Republicans who weren’t just small-government free-market libertarians like the old school, but who doubt that government does anything worth managing. These are not the tuxedoed club members of the Yale aristocracy, these are exterminators, beauty queens, and Jaycees. They are quoting Limbaugh not Adam Smith, and wearing JC Penney, not Brooks Brothers.

see this article in Harper’s by Tom Frank for a reference…

Their attitude can be seen in numerous examples of hackery and inefficiency in the Bush administration, from overtly political appointments at Justice to hack-placement at FEMA, to re-writing science at EPA. The Katrina relief disaster was directly related to the assumption that everything FEMA did was just window-dressing. So too with the management of the economy, where banking regulation was seen during the Reagan administration and again during the Bush administration as a feeble and ridiculous governmental gesture which shouldn’t be allowed to interfere with the mighty hand of the market. Of course the mighty hand of huge contributions, to both parties, also had a lot to do with the non-existent oversight.

..Grover Norquist

Grover Norquist, owner of “…I’ll drown government in the bathtub,” is the titular leader of this gang. Grover’s gang seems to look at the gigantic federal budget, and the enormous federal workforce and see only opportunities for looting, and expendable clutter. Never mind that whole industries like defense and aerospace depend on federal spending, and whole states like Alaska and Wyoming would collapse without federal subsidies. Few sitting governors or mayors or county supervisors are included in this mass useless-government delusion. Real governmental executives, as opposed to legislators, spend their time making sure trash gets picked up, sewers run, and policemen get paid. Yet another hurricane has hit the Gulf Coast, and I am guessing there are no anti-government-spending politicians in Galveston right now.

Like creationists, who think they can brush off the science behind biology but still live in the luxury created by science, these modern barbarians think that ships will dock, planes will fly them home, and trucks will deliver bananas for their morning Froot-Loops, without government planning and funding. It’s a risible world-view, but then why is it so common and where does it come from?

Flooding after Hurricane Ike	Unusable formaldehyde-laden Fema Trailers - AP

So whence cometh the notion that government is not only wasteful, it can be wasted? I’ve an idea I’d like to try out on you.

Assertions:
In recent years the vast majority of US residential growth has happened in new suburbs and ex-urbs.

Guess which picture is in which state:	Is it Texas, Kansas, California, or New York?

These ex-urban bedroom communities are built by large developers of residential tracts and shopping malls. Streets, stop signals, sidewalks, storm drains and the like are built by the developers as part of their project. Local political campaigns are almost entirely funded by developers, and builders, and sometimes retailers like Walmart that want to build and get tax deals. Often fire and police services are provided by the county, schools by a non-contiguous school district, and others services are minimal and frequently funded by federal drug or terror grants.

The overwhelming political culture of these no-there-there places is developer dollars buying the local pols.

Pattern:
So a young wannabe politician in one of these interchangeable non-communities sees very little buck-stoppage, a lot of public and private money changing hands and some slapdash wealth generated. There is hardly any adult supervision as the suburb grows into an incorporated city, the years tick over and tawdry strip malls decay as newer ones are built, and everybody puts off the day when streets and infrastructure have to be rebuilt.

No wonder they think government is useless. These non-cities contribute nothing but consumption to the economy, they are built on un-planned growth, with no plan to fund police and schools and parks for the future, and they will wither and dry up when commuting costs get too high. Getting elected in these suburbs is a matter of taking the right money, and not rocking the boat. There is no incentive to call for beautification, or planning, or conservation for the future - that sounds like taxes to the voters who moved there to get away from all that. There are no universities there, no orchestras, no headquarters, no museums, often no agriculture. Local jobs are largely minimum wage retail for immigrants and teenagers. Medical care and new construction may well be the biggest businesses.

So is it really surprising that politicians who cut their milk teeth on the school boards and city councils of big-box mall America, think infrastructure, economic management, diplomacy, and even compassion are vestigial gestures?

I’d like to see somebody test this theory. I can name three pols who fit: Sarah Palin, Elton Galleghy of Ventura CA, Dana Rohrbacher of Orange County CA.

I wonder how many other scorched-earth Republicans come from the empty suburbs?

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Just Tell Me Why Part Two: The Cut of His Jibcomments
john posted in politics & culture on August 4th, 2008

The first part of this post back in September lamented that a friend, who is a level-headed sort of fellow, will still vote Republican even though he highly disapproves of the Iraq Mess and most of the other Bush Administration boondoggles, fiascoes, and self-imposed disasters. The disconnect between his policy views and voting seems surreal to me, and yet as I said, he is a wise and kind fellow.

Reading over this I am struck by the notion that I am arguing with myself and my political friends here. I’ll bet your average cynical campaign strategist will see the points I make below as trivially obvious and the need to discuss policy as naive. So yes, I need you to bear with me as I try to figure out why mere tactics win elections, even though they are juvenile, even demagogic. And after the last eight years, that does sound like a naive argument.

Political science courses will teach you that the vast majority of voters in national elections, sadly about half the adult population, vote according to party rather than platform. Only about ten percent consider themselves independent of party, and are willing to vote for either party in a national election. (these percentages may be in flux) But being independent in the 2000, 2004, and 2008 Presidential election means being unable to choose between very different parties and policies. It’s as if you can’t decide whether you want to wear a hawaiian shirt or a shirt and tie. This seems bizarre on the face of it: the people who care about policy stick to one party no matter what it does, and the people who prefer to choose a candidate across parties don’t care much about policy. Plus, there is a huge group of the indifferent who stay away altogether. Yet there are still many voters who watch debates avidly and soak up speeches, policy, and commentary.

This seems crazy!
Do registered Democrats think that health policy should be radically overhauled, or do people who think so register as Democrats? And what about the fringe candidates who claim that both parties are essentially the same, isn’t that a view echoed widely among non-voters? What could possibly motivate independents, who are wavering between two very-different alternatives lately? Are they idiots who can’t make up their mind? If so why do they vote at all? And why then does the basic demographic makeup of parties sometimes go through a seismic change?

What we all agree on:
Let’s start with the facts we pretty much all agree on. First, we have the voter groups given above. Let’s stipulate that lately the parties are quite different and highly partisan. Parties do change their basic make-up from time to time, and yet voters usually prefer allegiance over policy.

Here are some theories:

It’s not rational.
Never mind what voters say, the vast majority vote on something other than policy.

Tribalism.
They vote on tribalism: trying to match an atavistic standard of tribal leader against current fashion and available candidates.

It’s personality.
Voters belong to parties and sometimes to personalities ( see tribalism ) rather than policy.

Some are just louder.
Some voters, the intelligentsia, vote on policy. Because their voice is far louder - bloggers, policy wonks, special interests - they seem to be a larger group than they actually muster.

Just tell me why again:
Well my friend is not much involved with personalities, he would see attraction to personality as childish and naive. He’s seen a lot of politicians come and go, and has a jaundiced view of them. But he identifies with the daddy-party, the Republicans. Voting Democrat is too union, or female, or black, or pro-welfare … just too mommy.

Maybe policy wonks have it all wrong:
Just for a minute, let go of your attitude that Republicans stand for this and Democrats stand for that. Step back and try to find a post WWII President who predicted what he would do in office and followed up by doing it. And before we list them, let’s acknowledge that many Presidents aren’t allowed to do much at all due to partisan gridlock in Congress.

Truman:
The Kansas City machine pol becomes the ultimate straight-shooter, you knew just what you were going to get in 1948. Or not. You wouldn’t have known about the Korean War. When he was Vice-President it would have been hard to see him as an Internationalist or Cold Warrior.

Eisenhower:
The non-egghead, the military man. He started federally-enforced desegregation in the South and quite prophetically warned against the military-industrial complex.

Kennedy:
The handsome young guy with the best and brightest. Barely kept American and Russian hawks from starting World War Three, launched Bay of Pigs fiasco and Vietnam adventure.

Johnson:
The consummate underhanded back-room pol, election-stealer, Texas cracker, and Southern power-broker initiates the Civil Rights Act, the Great Society and the full-blown Vietnam war, and then quits in a fit of conscience.

Nixon:
The main street Republican who unpredictably started the EPA, went to Red China, plotted with Henry Kissinger of all people, installed wage and price controls, and then predictably indulged in paranoia, crime, and cover-ups. A Californian, he remade the Republicans into a party of disgruntled white Southerners.

Carter:
An odd small-town teetotaling guy who became an international diplomatic leader, after he fumbled at the presidency.

Reagan:
Unpredictably willing to negotiate with the Russians, oddly disconnected from a job he tried to get for years. Nancy’s influence may be underrated.

Bush Sr:
He was predictable, once you understood his compromise with the supply-side and fundamentalist wings of the party.

Clinton:
After the initial years utterly unpredictable due to the escalating battles with the Gingrich conservatives and with his own nature. A Democrat who balanced the budget and cut welfare ( which he said he would do).

W:
He was billed as the compassionate conservative, he hated nation-building and involvement in foreign wars. The Supreme Court appointments and foot dragging on financial regulation and environmental issues were predictable. A saber-rattling Republican who wallowed in debt. Well, that might have been predictable after Reagan.

So my point is these presidencies were overwhelmed by international events, fiscal crises, personal demons, partisanship, infighting, and court intrigue. They are often represented as unable to deal with two crises at once, and their staffs are over-worked and under-prepared. Frequently the President has only the power of the bully pulpit. The veto works if you don’t want government to provide services and manage the economy ( Republicans) and is clumsy or unusable if you are trying to get things done ( Democrats). It’s not such an outlandish idea to suggest that Presidents’ personality and instincts have more to do with their successes than their carefully crafted policies. True, ideologues don’t change position as much in office as pragmatists, but even the dogmatic Reagan and W changed quite a bit. And we have never had a left-wing ideologue: it’s easier to govern as a rigid right-winger because you generally want government to not do things on the domestic front.

It’s the cut of his jib:
Maybe the real path to understanding voters is to ignore all the platforms and just look at the personalities? Comparing Eisenhower-Stevenson, or Kennedy-Nixon, Nixon-McGovern, Reagan-Carter, Clinton-Dole, and Bush-Gore you can see sharp personality differences that in hindsight seem significant. But what about Johnson-Goldwater, Carter-Ford, Reagan-Mondale, Bush-Dukakis? The policy differs, but the personality isn’t so obviously in contrast.

Personality?
You may be countering here that personality, especially as the average voter sees it, is a superficial and heavily manipulated quality, indeed it may be entirely manufactured. Quite true, but what matters to this investigation is not what policy-wonks and historians think, but what the voters think. Since we can’t find a consistent policy thread behind voting, the Whats the Matter With Kansas problem, I think we have to look at the ineffables. Sure I thought Nixon was a crook, liar, and general scoundrel in 1968, but that clearly wasn’t obvious to the voters as a whole until later.

Policy counts after all:
But just using the Bush-Cheney administration as example, there is a vast difference between what we got, and what might have happened. On policy after policy, you can’t ignore the differences. Three trillion dollars and over a hundred thousand dead later, can you deny that Gore would have saved money and lives compared to Bush? The neo-cons came to office with an imperial agenda, and Cheney had his own agenda for vast Presidential power. The failed handling of 9/11 appeared to be personal incompetence, and for W that probably did signify, but we can now see that policy was behind the War on Terror. But its was a secret policy, unknown to main-stream Republicans and Democrats, perhaps that counts as yet another example of unpredictable outcomes that confuse voters. On environmental policy, the differences between what we got and might have had are obvious. But in 2004 you can argue that the reality of Bush-Cheney was in the open for all to see. A depressing thought, that.

Parties count too:
So I return to that undeniable difference between parties. In spite of what the Nader-nuts and the disaffected non-voters say, there is a difference.

Issue	Vote for Them
Deregulation trumps regulation	Republican Red
Regulation is required for stability	Democratic Blue
Enormous effort against immigration makes sense	Republican Red
Laissez-faire prevention of immigration and some social services for illegals	Democratic Blue
Do nothing about healthcare	Republican Red
Try to do something about nationalized health care	Democratic Blue
Maximize defense spending using debt	Republican Red
Emphasize science, research, economic development over defense	Democratic Blue
Resist all attempts to involve government in environmental regulation, control, and planning	Republican Red
Start regulating the nation out of oil era	Democratic Blue
Emphasize military in foreign policy	Republican Red
Emphasize diplomacy in foreign policy	Democratic Blue

and so on…

Judgment versus instinct:
Voters must be widely willing to give up their own analytic judgments, in favor of their instincts. Business Republicans can’t llike the anti-European, debt-burdened, do-nothing Bush-Cheney tenure, however much the financiers loved the hedge-fund and derivatives free-for-all. It’s clear the monkeys were in charge of the zoo, and the grown-ups weren’t watching.

Another factor may be that the personal outcomes of elections are often different from the civic outcome. People, like monkeys, will sometimes vote for what they see as civic welfare over their own. The twentieth century mass movement from farm to city life has left vast numbers of people stranded in economic and moral backwaters, unable to cope. In What’s the Matter with Kansas Thomas Frank argues that Republican voters ignore their own best interests and lash out against a straw target of liberal Democratic elites. Wall Street abhorred Clinton, but the 1990’s were a great time for Wall Street; they loved Bush, but they are hurting now.

It can be worked just the opposite too. People may say they are concerned about this or that abstract policy ( illegal immigration, reforming healthcare, free trade ) and end up voting their wallet first. Hence the no-new-taxes mantra of Republicans, and farm politics in general, where whole states of rugged individualists vehemently defend their federal hand-out.

Scandal is sometimes good, and I hate the Yankees:
So on certain well-publicized policies there are clear differences between parties, no matter what candidate is running. But on difficult and complex issues, particularly foreign-policy issues that suddenly appear - Muslim terrorism I am thinking here - the personality matters more. The electoral process does not lend itself to reasoned discussion or thoughtful, flexible policies - understatement alert - and neither does the current partisanship in Congress. However, while candidates strive for a homogenized image in the campaign, strategic crises in a candidate’s campaign, even if largely artificial and banal, may show up a candidate’s backbone. This is the only good thing I can see in the ridiculous length of American political campaigns. How the future President will react has a lot to do with the personality traits uncovered by these campaign crises. See some propaganda clips” I can’t remember anything I did wrong.”

Join the club:
Even if you feel that you are immune from the tribal-leader attraction, or emotional appeals ( I don’t believe you ), you can’t get away from the clubbiness inherent in being of one party or the other. Inside your party you can hang with people you like and loathe the status symbols and style of the opposite party. It’s easier to dump on the platform of the other party when you just plain hate they way they carry themselves.

It’s not so different from Cubs fans versus Yankees fans. Democrats are just not going to start liking Remington bronzes, big-haired ladies, and Hummers, and we’ll say it’s all because of that damn Milton Friedman. Republicans are not going to suddenly begin liking Red Grooms, Priuses, and Lightnin’ Hopkins, and its all because of those damn welfare cheats, foreign aid, and illegal aliens. So I think allegiance to the political club is even more important than the candidate’s personality. Party allegiance allows you to go with your gut and dress up the choice with the rationalization of policy.

Sometimes policy will trump clubbiness and personality, especially on hot-button issues. Crossover moments have happened, when there were re-arrangements of the party demographics. I am thinking Nixon’s Southern Strategy, and the subsequent alignment of blacks with the Democrats, and crackers with the Republicans. But even there you can argue that the style of the club changed- imagine if Steinbrenner bought the Cubs. Suddenly the Clarence Snopes of the south migrated over to the party with hate-Negroes code words, and the Democrats started talking affirmative action.

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Just Tell Me Why:
It’s just because those Republicans seem more like your kinda guy than those Democrats. Your talk about policy is like the eternal complaints about Steinbrenner and his over-paid prima donnas of the diamond, yet you still remain a Yankees fan because they are fundamentally winners. No wonder it gets my blood pressure up - those damn Cubs will never win the Series, and those damn Yankees will again.

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