Elections, Political Parties and Thinking Outside the (Comfortable) Box

I watched the first Presidential debate and the first Massachusetts Senate debate this month, and after listening to the candidates in both Republican and Democrat tickets, and listening to the kinds of scrutiny that friends, family, and peers provided, that the questions that are being asked are missing an important quality to elections, and an important line of inquiry that's been observed as lacking in politics for quite some time now: Leadership skills.

Often when people think of leadership skills, the thought turns to how well someone is at rallying people to their cause. We see people like Obama and Romney successfully rallying their constituent base toward a goal, and point to leadership. Is this truly political leadership however? What of the leadership that a President needs to show in working with a hostile (read: of a different political party) Congress? What of the leadership that a Senator needs in working within such an environment? Isn't it the role of these positions to be national leaders, not just leaders within their party?

In watching both debates, I see others critique policy and/or ideology between candidates, reading between the lines to discern facts and data, to identify programs and laws that may be at risk or may benefit, and to dissect rhetorical styles. Despite this, the discussion of who shows leadership skills is absent from these critiques. I would argue that for positions such as these it is probably more vital for a successful President or Senator, or any representative, to show leadership.

I argue this with the following logic: Is the president a data analyst? Sort of. Any president must show an ability to understand information presented and select among various options. I would argue that a President has many staff who's job it is to provide data, and explain that data, so this is a delegatable responsibility. Does the president make decisions impacting programs and policies? Again, sort of. Outside of ideological reasons, a President needs data to decide how to change programs, and that data is supplied by... yep, that's right, staff members. There are also staff who make program recommendations too, another delegatable task. Even if we have a president who's acting ideologically, regardless of data, there still exists two very big power blocks, Congress and the courts. Since government decisions, and even political rhetoric, is very seriously data-driven, and politicians aren't really coming up with data or recommended actions on those data by themselves, it's safe to assume that any president has access to information on all the various information and recommendations to make a decision.

So then what of that decision? Isn't that capacity to choose part of the reason we vote for a candidate? Again, sort of. What about implementation? What about political process? If it was just a matter of making the decision then there really would be no need to speak of leadership beyond galvanizing the electorate, that's the only group that would matter. This would also be consistent with a parliamentary system, something we distinctly don't have in the United States.

Ok then, what about implementation, what's required in implementation? This is where the broader concept of leadership comes in. A President can't just say to Congress 'I want this legislation.' and it happens. This has been tried numerous times unsuccessfully. Obama's administration is about as repeat with this as can be. Since Congress serves as the first gatekeeper for a President, then it makes sense that a President must work with Congress in creating legislation (also since the President has the veto, more on later). If Congress is of the same political party majority as the President, this doesn't tend to be a problem, as the President's already galvanized his own party behind him. What of the current setup? We have a split Congress. Ut uo, now the President needs to work with someone outside of the political party. Existing leadership fails here, and new leadership skills are needed. This is the 'between the isle' leadership that is often spoken of, but I would argue rarely seen.

Let's start dissecting leadership then, beginning with a definition: For simplicity's sake I'll use a somewhat political, and fairly simple, definition. The ability to bring together people and direct them towards a common goal. This was exceptionally clear in Obama's 2008 campaign, he galvanized the voter base for a very strong victory. The rhetorical style was addressing Democrats, clearly, as that was his core audience. However it was also addressing moderates in a persuasive way. One thing I can say with complete confidence, it wasn't addressing Republicans. Obama wasn't trying to show leadership with Republicans, just Democrats and moderates. The same can be said of his competitor, McCain, in that he was trying to lead Republicans and moderates, and not Democrats. This is clear in how issues are addressed ideologically, stylistically, and what issues are raised within each group. Common themes among Democrat rhetoric: Taxes on big business up, middle class taxes down. Common Republican rhetoric: Military spending and job creation incentives for businesses. Democrats respond much better to democratic rhetoric than Republicans do, and vice versa. In many ways they're like different languages.

That's where this key point comes in with leadership. How does one lead both their own party, and the opposing party? Since we're in a gridlocked Congress there's no way around the need to address both parties. Likely over the next few years there will be a similar gridlock, and in future presidencies this is unlikely to change altogether that much. Oh sure a few may be all one party, but that's more an abberation than a regular occurance. Well, building off my previous example, how one communicates with a group helps to drive how much leadership one is allowed to have. Yes, there are other qualities here, but they all hinge on a single skill: communication.

Quick dissection: communication is the art of sending a message to a recipient, they translate it, send a return message which you translate, and reply to their message. It's cyclical, and dependent on the communication skills of both (or multiple, the model is scalable) parties. The interesting thing about communication is that both parties have influence to help the process at any stage. A sender can work with a receiver in helping the process of translating the message, and vice versa. This becomes more challenging the less effort and/or the less that either party wants to communicate with the other, assuming that language barriers aren't even a problem. Probably the most interesting quirk of communication is how it rests outside of the realm of fact. Facts can be brought in to a communication circut, but the communication is about the exchange, not the information being exchanged so much.

So, let's recap for a moment here: Leadership's an established necessary component for a President (and Senator, will get back to later) to have, and leadership is contingent on communication. Well, let's see how our Presidential candidates stack up in regards to this communication test. Based purely on face value, after the first presidential debate it seems pretty clear that both Obama and Romney have hit what can only be described as epic fail on basic communication. Evidence: both parties made statements that the other refuted very directly, multiple times, but was never addressed. Obama regarding the $5 trillion tax cut, which Romney refuted multiple times, and Romney on the committee that makes decisions on people's medical care, which was refuted by Obama multiple times. Now let's set aside issues of what is the factually correct information for a moment, this is about communication, not fact-tallying.

Again, I'm taking this whole thing at face value, I'll get into another rant on the Presidential debates another time.

So, let's look at this from a communication-based perspective, and qualify my 'epic fail' remark earlier by creating something of a rubric. If leadership, in galvanizing people in support of a common goal, is the objective, and communication is fundamental to achieving this end, then it strikes me that choices in communicating should reflect a furthering of the kind of communication that will create leadership. Well, I could just arbitrary throw stuff out there that sounds good, but let's be more logical about this. In the most basic sense, communication fails as soon as either party ceases to want to communicate, this can be a ceasing of either broadcasting a message, or of receiving a message, or of putting effort into translating the message, as any significant break in this chain from either party will de-rail the conversational cycle. Or put more simply, in order to even be communicating with you, I need to be willing to pay attention to what you're saying, try to understand it, and say something back to you. If I want to have a conversation that is successful on the most basic level, then I should be saying something to you that will motivate you to repeat this same process for me, and you will want to say something that will motivate me to repeat the process again for you. For simplicity's sake, let's call this successful process conversation.

Ok, we have a rubric now, each party must not only be motivated to receive, translate, and send information, but also must be willing to send information that motivates the other party to repeat the process for them. Remember how I said that the sender can influence the receiver's translation of material? This is one way how.

With this rubric, let's go back to the Presidential debate. Obama talks about a $5 trillion tax cut, Romney rebuts it, Obama repeats the same information about the $5 trillion tax cut, Romney repeats the same information. Repeat about 3 or so more times. Were I Romney I'd start to get pretty pissed off at Obama for not responding to what I was saying, and would be discouraged in communicating with Obama, at least on this issue. Fail: motivate continued communication. It's a little harder to tell where the fail was with Obama, as he clearly responded to other parts of Romney's responses but not that one. It likely wasn't some sort of reception problem. Was there a translation problem, did Obama not understand what was being said? Again, not likely, Obama responded quite directly to other statements that Romney had made through the debate. So the issue was likely in transmission, or put simply, Obama chose not to respond to that issue. Once, maybe even twice, this can be chalked up to random error. This was recurring within just a few minutes, so it's hard to qualify this as just a simple mistake or error on Obama's part. Erego, deliberate. This isn't a failure of transmission, but a failure of the transmission in a way that motivates a response. The deliberateness of it is what moves this from a simple communication fail to the colorfully expressed 'epic fail.' It's one thing to mess up a conversation, something else entirely to deliberately mess it up like that.

Remember though, Romney did the same thing to Obama later in the debate. Yes you can argue post hoc, but that's a fallacy I'll dig into another time.

So, let's bring this back around to the leadership issue. We have two Presidential candidates who, on national television, deliberately messed up their lines of communication with each other. This seems ominously familiar… I think I’ll make a bit of a leap here and say that what was observed here parallels the same dialog that has been occurring in Congress, and between the President and Congress for as long as I can remember. Recollecting from many of the house committee hearings I’ve had the (mis)fortune of watching, the same communication snafu shows up regularly.

So, let me bring this full circle here, and assert why this was a such a big fail for both candidates. We have here two people who are representing themselves AND their party, to the entire American audience, and even world audiences. They are both role models, for those within their party, and windows, for those outside. The common criticism is that politics have broken down. I present to you the above analysis of communication in the presidential debate as to a likely source of that breakdown: failure of basic communication, and through that failure of a capacity for us to witness, in a very real and substantial way, for the two people currently bestowed with the responsibility of representing themselves and their party to the American people, modeling a complete failure of across-the-isle communication skills.

With the connection between communication and leadership, this boils down to a failure of bipartisan leadership skills that are being nationally modeled. The danger here is in assuming that either candidate even has this capacity, which I can’t say there’s any strong evidence for through the debate, either of their campaigns, or their political careers.

I really shouldn’t have to explain why this is a bad thing.

But wait, there’s more! Returning to the beginning of this rant, I said I watched not just the Presidential debate, but the Massachusetts Senate debate too! Lo and behold, much to my (non)surprise, the same pattern was there too. Repeat everything I just said about the Presidential debate to the Mass. Senate debate.

*sigh*

So, what’s the solution? Well, this is where I change gears a little, and start to move into problem-solving mode. I would first generally state that I assert it’s important for scrutiny of a political candidate to include an assessment of their leadership and communication skills to those outside of their party.

Then, in addressing the actual behavior of the candidates: It’s easy to jump to the conclusion that both of them have some sort of personal defect, or ulterior agenda, and with their behavior outside of the debate, this would seem supported. However, let’s remember that the Presidential debate is one of the few instances where the candidates really do become much more than just this speech here, or that proposal there. There’s a level of national representation that the debate communicates to the nation, and the influence that the candidates can have on the electorate is probably at its highest at this point. I.E. it matters what they do in general, but it really matters during the debate. So what can be done differently?

Well, that’s where I have to draw in from elsewhere for inspiration. The little known of Third Party Debate (thank you NPR! Link here: http://www.npr.org/2012/10/06/162438686/the-npr-third-party-candidate-debate). Here we have two people running for President, rather seriously too (they’re both on the Mass. Ballot, and many other states too), having a debate along similar lines (albeit much shorter) to what we saw in the regular Presidential debate, yet what’s missing here? The candidates aren’t failing to communicate with each other.

This is probably why it goes so much faster than the Presidential, and the Mass. Senate, debate.

Ok, let’s be fair, that’s really a format issue. The questions in the Third Party debate aren’t designed to solicit cross-talk between the candidates. Is this really a bad thing though? They’re not modeling bad leadership… just not modeling good leadership either.

Let’s look at this from a broader perspective though: debate format, especially around the kinds of questions asked. The questions in the regular Presidential debate were intentionally contentious, asking specifically about what the differences in policy were between the candidates. The Third Party debate was just asking about the individual candidates policy. That’s quite a difference in response based on a fairly small change in the question! (Survey and interview researchers, take note here J)

Well, it can be argued that it’s more to do with the character and communication skills of the Third Party candidates. I’m skeptical on this, but won’t refute that possibility straight-up. I’m not sure their communication skills are any better than Obama or Romney, as they seem to actually be less clear in some more basic mass-audience communication than either of them. Since we don’t see cross-party communication, it’s hard to gauge there, but considering there’s really only room upward from the examples we have elsewhere… that they didn’t break format and turn it into a communication fiasco at least gives some hint that there’s some communication aptitude there. Not really much to go on, so I can’t really rule it out.

In regards to their character, again I’m not sure, both candidates speak with the same passion, zest, and enthusiasm as the major party candidates. I’m not convinced here, but won’t rule it out.

What’s that leave then? Well, what about motivation? Perhaps the main party candidates had ulterior motives for communicating in the way they did. This starts to get into Presidential debate politics, which could fill more pages than I’ve written here, and as much as I’d love to get into it, I must draw the essayist line somewhere, and address it another time. To summarize my thoughts on this issue (for elaboration another time), I’m strongly in favor that this is a major contributing factor to the reason that the debates are showing such epic failure of leadership.

I would return to my original thesis, though, that perhaps they just don’t know how to lead from across the aisle, and/or the existing format encourages communication fail. I can’t speak much to altering people’s character, so perhaps then, a good start would be to consider alternative debate formats? If the current format encourages poor cross-aisle leadership, then perhaps a neutral, or positive debate format would at least not be such a bad example for the nation?

If nothing else, I really want to see some good examples of people working together, not tearing each other to shreds. We see plenty of that already.

-         Jason Cherry