“…Amazon also said that three newspapers, The New York Times, The Boston Globe and The Washington Post, would begin offering devices this summer at a reduced price to subscribers who sign up for long-term subscriptions. But few details were available, and both Amazon and the newspapers described it as a pilot program.”

Since the new Kindle is very expensive at $489 list, I doubt this meets the necessary price point, but I’ll be looking at the deal as a way to supplement the fast- evaporating LA Times.

The discussion about what to do about the death of newspapers has been marked by futile hand wringing from obsolete newspaper people, and silly statements from the internet Pollyannas, with a few interesting experiments in hyper-local news coming online. But it comes down to the fact that reporters and editors need to be paid , and so news organizations need a revenue stream.

On the hardware side, newsprint will be replaced by something. Laptops, iPhones ( yes, really) , and desktops, are not comfortable for sitting around reading, especially for the over 40 set who actually read newspapers. The technical problem is the screen. Size, weight, resolution, power need, and color are all issues to be solved. In the small formats, like the Kindle and Sony eReader, the E Ink screen is said to be quite good, but lacks size, and color. Large format screens like your desktop suffer from weight, power, portability, and illumination issues. Laptops fall into the barely good enough for a work-around category. News reports have been saying that larger color versions of the E Ink screen will solve the hardware problem. And today stories appeared saying just such a screen is near delivery, and deals are being made with newspapers ( see references below).

Stretched Kindle Image by Gizmodo

Selling the new screen will not solve the news organizations’ revenue problem, even if they get some of the profit from screen sales, which is doubtful. Until and if ad revenue fills the gap, they need subscription sales to fund the business, and likely thereafter. The Wall St Journal and Bloomberg have had some success at selling content, but few if any other services have attracted subscribers. (and Bloomberg uses dedicated terminals)

Proposed: Subscribe the Screen

News organizations could rent you a reader, as cable companies do now with set-tops and DVRs. Twenty to forty dollars a month should be quite a nice sum over three years hardware lifetime say, and subscribers would be tied, but not locked-in, to the supplier, in the way they are tied to cable companies. Subscribers wouldn’t have to worry about getting stuck with an unusable reader, or repairs. Because they would have hardware and software control, news orgs could figure out the marketing balance of exclusive content ( perhaps lasting 24 hours) vs free internet. Obvious tie-ins would be available like click-through ads to generate more revenue. There are many angles to be worked out in this model, but the elegance of it is that it removes the two essential problems: the initial cost hurdle of the $300+ readers and reinstates control over content distribution ( like the Bloomberg terminal), yet leaves an open platform that can be upgraded. Additional services can be tested later in the market because the basic platform would be there, and generating income.

Less Appealing Alternatives:
Google and the other companies with major internet ad revenue could set aside some percentage of their take for a non-profit AP-like version of NPR and PBS, without government support, or corporate interference. Or we could have a BBC, funded by a tax on devices. Or we could have ad-funded internet sites and flabby TV news as we do now, with virtually no local coverage (hooray! say the local pols until they realize “no coverage” means invisibility) and reality-show news aimed at the ninth-grade set.

What Amazon May Be Planning:
The Kindle costs over $300 and requires a monthly subscription, and creates a locked-in market for Amazon e-book sales. If Amazon lowered the initial cost for the new large-format reader to compete with monthly newspaper subscription costs, they undoubtedly would get a huge customer response. But if this is Amazon’s model, it won’t feed the reporters who create the content. In effect it feeds the weakest link in the delivery system, the aggregator, where the actual value is created by the device maker and the content provider. It is being reported that News Corp, Hearst and Plastic Logic are also planning to market large-format readers soon, so we might see multiple strategies.

So count this as gallows humor.

AIG has been given roughly $185 billion.

Zero electric motorcycles announced today that they are selling a street legal version of their electric dirt bike at about $10,000 less a ten percent federal tax credit.

Zero street legal lithium-powered supermotard

Tesla automobiles has already sold a few of their all-electric high-performance sports cars at about $100k.

Tesla electric roadster

If we had used the money from the AIG bailout to actually support American companies that make things, it could have funded:

9,250,000 Zero electric motorcycles or equivalent.

(Honda sold about 15 million units world-wide in 2008. All makers sold about 1 million motorcycles and scooters in the US in 2008.)

Plus,

925,000 Tesla cars.

(BMW sold about 1.4 million cars in 2008 world-wide.)

So with one bailout package we could have created an American motorcycle company selling electric bikes as the second-largest motorcycle manufacturer in the world. And we could have jump-started an all-electric car manufacturer to nearly two thirds the size of BMW. Not to mention establishing a dominating presence in the clean transportation industry of tomorrow.

Somehow I’m not laughing all the way to the bank.

references:
motorcycle sales
Zero
Tesla
AIG bailout

Accounting methods which shortsightedly neglect maintenance across all types of private infrastructure, causing future breakdowns and vast repair costs.
The declining maintenance and investment curve of oil companies as they see increasing taxation, and reduced assets into the future.
A nasty interaction between fluctuating oil prices, supply, credit, and infrastructure maintenance.
Yet another example of simplistic free-market economics failing to handle long-term community issues.

Clump it altogether under Peak Oil, and the interrelationship of a pessimistic oil future ( POV: oil companies), unpredictable supply vs demand and hence price, plus a crashing world economy, the general failure of political institutions to plan for the future, and the complete failure of macro-economics to guide us though this change from an oil economy to some other energy source(s).

Unlike almost all other Web2.0 sites, the comments are a must-read. In an area ripe for conspiracy theorists, actual oil industry engineers weigh in. Just like grown-ups. Imagine!

by sicasu

My comments: Just yesterday articles ran on the anniversary of the Exxon Valdez spill pointing out that Exxon still runs the same type of tanker today. If Exxon thinks that a fresh fleet of tankers won’t be have enough oil in future to carry to full amortization, then this makes a lot of financial sense for them, but not for us. In fairness to the oil companies, their supplies outside the developed world are more and more being controlled by governments, including China, their distribution and sales in the developed world are likely to be squeezed harder and harder by various carbon taxes and environmental rules, and the two great growth markets, China and India, are closed or government controlled. Yet they sell an absolutely essential product, one that will remain essential for decades. Perhaps just knowing it will all come to an end in their childrens’ lifetime is enough to deflate them a bit.

One point rarely covered in the economic press, but with almost daily comment on The Oil Drum, is the connection between the end of the petroleum economy (Peak Oil) and our current financial meltdown. Failure to plan our energy infrastructure worldwide is central to our current crisis. Later on we will be hit with the costs of global warming, and right now we have to spend immense sums to retool for more sustainable energy sources. The few billion allocated in Obama’s first budget is just a trickle of what’s to come.

If Reagan had not been elected to wipe out the nascent Carter-era sustainable energy subsidies, we in America might be 10 or 20 years ahead of our current situation. If Bush had not wasted eight years… but that’s all the past now.

bad banks

I’ve been wondering, probably most people have, just why we need to support these elephantine vampires, The Banks, while they’ve been run into the ground by sociopaths. I mean, what have they ever done for me? Well this very pleasant episode illustrates what they are and how big they are, and what might be done about them, and whats been done the last few times this has happened. I recommend it, but since I heard it once, and have the special privileges of the convalescent, I am going to watch some Rocky and Bullwinkle DVDs instead.

Listening to NPR today ask a pundit about the proposed shut-down of Saturday mail service, I went through the usual 3 steps of techno-guy reaction.
First I sneered at snail mail. Second, I questioned the value of Saturday mail and mail delivery in general. Third I thought of one entity that would be hurt, the biggest single user of the US Mail, Netflix.

But then it hit me: ending Saturday mail delivery will save one sixth of the greenhouse gases and nasty pollution and fuel use and depreciation caused by that huge fleet of mail trucks. It might also have a tiny, but measurable effect on traffic, which would also save a little pollution and fuel. Plus all those workers won’t be commuting, and those long-haul trucks won’t be delivering to the distribution centers.

Then I thought: what if all non-retail non-essential business shut down on Saturday, wouldn’t that have the same positive result, only much larger?

Last I realized that the very best way to do this is just have a voluntary 4 day work week. Sure, some large segment of the economy can’t do this, but I bet the majority of firms could. We could run the stock exchanges 4 days, the government offices 4 days, office workers could go 4 days. It doesn’t need to be enacted into law, that’s too rigid and inefficient. But here’s a chance to ask for a nationwide sacrifice that might actually have personal benefits, like more time with children, more time to help others, more time to learn new skills. More time for relaxing would itself pay dividends. Employers would save money on energy, at least.

Victory gardens and war bonds may come later in this down cycle, but for now, I think a four-day work week would be a good idea.

here are three of thousands of sites that have also suggested it:
MotherJones on a 4 day school plan
Utah tries it
a blog discusses the ramifications

The Situation
Many of us have been stunned by the size of the banking collapse and bailout. First, old pinstripe investment banks turn out to be mountains of toxic paper and leverage, run by con men, then vast amounts of taxpayer money are thrown at the banking system overnight to no effect, only to be followed by literally trillions of unaccounted dollars from the Fed. Then, when actual manufacturing businesses, the automakers, come to Washington, the New York set couldn’t care less.

Without repeating the details covered elsewhere, let’s just say that the heretofore academic and obscure critique of American business as too little manufacturing and far too much F.I.R.E. ( finance insurance real estate) has become a commonplace in the media. Now we are in real danger of losing the domestic part of the auto industry to bankruptcy.

Some Introspection
Who are we, this nation whose wealth is based on financial transactions? Where is the economy built on farmers, ranchers, and mechanics? Who are these frightened fat people who buy buy buy at Walmart, and have no town pharmacy or clothing store? When did bankers become PT Barnums running a gigantic Ponzi scheme? Is there really no one left outside the Berkshire-Hathaway empire and the computer biz that builds a business year by year?

We Need a Standard
Clearly there are jobs that must be done, like firefighter, cop, and doctor. There are jobs that can make other jobs more efficient or valuable, like sales, accounting, and insurance. There is a powerful fast-moving global financial system that can underwrite world-wide trade. And then there are jobs that make something. These are the jobs that produce real wealth. These are the jobs that provide the raison d’etre for the supporting jobs. The current crisis makes it clear that runaway FIRE business not only detracts from real wealth and prosperity by rerouting resources that should have gone into valuable jobs, but can actually reach a toxic level where it destroys the financial infrastructure. Put differently, we can afford a few residents of Richistan, but turning over the whole banking sector to them leads to a looting of the nation’s wealth.

The nation is in for some tough times restructuring the economy. We need a value standard to use when planning new business and government spending. What jobs are valuable and what are a drain on the society? We can’t go with my personal list or with yours: we need a general way of evaluating work that we can all agree on. For instance, we have to decide what banks will be allowed to do, and what they will be required to do.

Value Added
Here’s a simple way of looking at the value of economic work: Value Added. Value Added simply means that your work took some raw materials and made them into something more valuable. Whether you added dollar value or social value is irrelevant, you made something better. It’s as simple as that, value added is good, value consumed is bad. Any individual job is hard to quantify, and all of us backslide some days and march forward others. But maybe when you are deciding to call your next meeting, you might think, ” Will we lose more production by taking these people off-line, than we gain by meeting?” When you invest, ask, ” Is this a company that makes something, or are they just moving paper around?” When we examine governmental health care proposals, lets ask, “Will this help us compete with foreign sources, will it make health delivery more efficient, will it allow people to work for small companies and start-ups with no insurance?”

Parasitic Work
There has been a ubiquitous de-coupling of wealth from value-creation. We folks outside the inner financial circle hardly knew how much before this collapse, but people of real wealth no longer feed it like the Founding Fathers on trade and agriculture, or like the rust-belt barons on steel and cars. Real wealth today is built like the Robber Barons, on sleazy governmental give-aways and land deals and stock manipulations, and now complex computer-generated pseudo-money-contracts. And giant retailers like Walmart are just growing by squeezing out the smaller competitors, they aren’t making anything new. Or making anything at all.

“The Kept Dollar is a Stinking Fish”
This free-floating wealth is parasitic, it is not beholden or dependent on a region, a nation even. It does not rely on a workforce or raw material. And worst of all, it’s not available capital for businesses: it’s locked up in credit-default swaps, insurance on insurance on paper, and other abstruse and dubious entities. When the wealth has no social ties, it naturally encourages a kind of rich-man’s anarchy. In the past, wealth was based on agriculture, manufacturing, and trade. Sure there were plenty of sleazy deals, swindles, and usury, but they weren’t the majority of the economy. Now, wealth is based on swooping in, and making a bet, gathering up the chips and vanishing.

Let’s test the idea of Value Added:
Farmer – takes soil, and seeds and makes food. Value added.
Hedge fund manager – takes capital, borrows more capital, and risks it all in an attempt to make more capital. The capital never goes to work, nothing is created, so this behavior is parasitic. Value depleted.
Venture capitalist – takes capital and funds new business with it. Value added.
Traditional banker – Lends for housing, construction, manufacturing plant and equipment. Businesses are built, jobs created. Value added.
New style bonus-driven banker – Constantly searching for new and bigger short-term wins to make his annual bonus bigger. Never invests in long-term projects. Nothing created except risk. Parasite. Value depleted.
Corporate raider, CEO, investment banker – they may improve efficiency of system by reorganizing sick companies, but almost always they just spend on non-productive mergers, or loot current value-added assets. Usually parasitic. Value depleted.

Conclusion:
Sure there are lots of edge conditions where its hard to say what value is added or subtracted. Environmental and social costs are not well accounted for in our system, but that’s a subject for the Green Economic Revolution. But two simple words express the general idea- Value Added. If you are not adding value, you are a net cost rather than an asset. Think about it.

References:

Niall Ferguson article on the immense size of F.I.R.E
Chris Martenson series on the whole enchilada of financial upheaval.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.