Commenting on the rapid fall from electoral grace of an apparently promising politician, a news story cited a “communications professor” as saying the politician “erred by setting expectations too high” with a “first 100 days” promise of “concrete results on housing, health care, the environment and public safety.” Which struck me as getting the whole mess characteristically backwards.
I won’t identify the politician or commentator because the issue here isn’t the failure of an individual, it’s the failure of a political culture. Just for starters, surely if one is going to aspire to high office, one ought to set high expectations on key policy files. If you’re not up to the job, why on earth are you seeking it?
I have some qualms about the “100 days,” which refers, consciously or not, to the frenetic burst of activity by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, his top aides, and his key congressional allies on taking office in 1933 in the depths of the Great Depression. It was a characteristically modern discarding of prudent stewardship for endless high-speed, intense, transformative bursts of changely change, even “permanent revolution.”
Personally I sympathize with the alleged sentiment of Lord Melbourne, Whig Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1835 to 1841, that “the only good change is a change for dinner.” But nowadays, even if one regards the main governance problem as the state doing far too much rather than far too little, as a preposterously large proportion of activists, aspirants to office, and even citizens still evidently thinks, there is value in the maxim that one should move quickly on assuming office before a rising sea of short-term troubles and bureaucratic inertia reduce you to one more swamp-dweller.
So why did this golden child turned hapless bumbler err in promising to do big things on files that matter? Ah, here’s where the story really starts. Because the error, which again is not about one individual, their advisers, or some particular news story or pundit, was the characteristic one of making such a promise without any real idea how to carry it out, and of widespread failure to probe that vital question.
Naturally, there was a program. I used the “golden child” metaphor, but the people involved are of course adults with long experience in politics. So they had lots of ideas. But they had the wrong kind of ideas.
I don’t mean left rather than right. I mean they were full of “what” ideas and essentially devoid of “how” ideas. And in doing so they exemplified rather than departed from the prevailing approach. (And incidentally, FDR and his associates did many silly things in their “100 Days,” from the AAA to the NRA to debauching the currency, but at least they had bad ideas about how the world worked, not no ideas.)
If you, dear reader, were to aspire to high political office you’d be bombarded with advice about tactics. Political tactics. How to identify and court key electoral microsegments, do an interview without coming across as a buffoon, etc. But you’d get very little advice even about administrative or policy tactics, let alone strategy. And they wouldn’t waste five minutes on principles.
By principles I don’t mean do not steal, bear false witness, or do murder, crucial as they are. I mean the principles of political economy, a coherent set of logically and empirically valid rules about how policy works, what sorts of things are effective or ineffective, and how we know. (For instance, “incentives matter.”) And by strategy, I mean how to apply those principles to current problems effectively.
If, for instance, someone promised rapid concrete results on Canadian health care, the appropriate response would not be “Good, good, that will appeal to older voters in rural areas.” It would be, “Given that talented, dedicated people have promised them for generations and failed, what did they do wrong, what would you do instead, and how would it work?” And for bonus points, “What do they do differently in places whose health systems meet your aspirations better?”
You see the problem? Journalists don’t ask such questions of politicians. Politicians don’t ask them of one another, in debates, legislatures, or cabinet meetings. Pundits (with commendable exceptions) don’t either. Instead, it’s all treated as a communications problem, and when you fail you get advice on how to communicate success, not how to achieve it.
Decades ago, I got swiftly and discourteously fired by a political party for posing such questions just as they were perfecting their cunning plan for getting elected. But it seems to me that it keeps getting worse, which is why each new crop of politicians urgently raises high expectations, then face-plants.
So let’s not wait for them. Let’s set our expectations high, and demand coherent principles and an explanation of how they’ll deliver better results.
