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Obama’s Last Years Will Be His Most Interesting

Obama’s Last Years Will Be His Most Interesting

By Cass Sunstein, Bloomberg News (TNS)

Here’s a quiz. Why did President Barack Obama take steps to normalize relations with Cuba? (a) To polish his legacy. (b) To improve the position of the Democratic Party for the 2016 election. (c) To weaken the Cuba lobby. (d) To show leadership. (e) None of the above.

If you answered anything other than (e), you’re wrong.

Here’s another one. Why did Obama initiate immigration reform on his own? (a) To punish the Republican Party, which repeatedly blocked legislation on that question. (b) To improve his sagging approval ratings. (c) To secure the Hispanic vote for the Democratic Party. (d) To polish his legacy. (e) None of the above.

Here again, (e) is the right answer.

On both Cuba and immigration, Obama isn’t taking action out of concern for politics or for his legacy. He’s taking action because these are things he actually cares about, and time for action will soon start to become scarce. In the 2008 campaign, he made it altogether clear that he wanted to start normalizing relations with Cuba. Immigration reform has long been among his highest priorities. No one should have doubted that, if Congress failed to act, he would do whatever he could to achieve that reform.

Obama is now entering the fourth quarter of his presidency and, as he recently said, “Interesting things happen in the fourth quarter.” In politics as in football, what makes the fourth quarter interesting is straightforward: an increased sense of urgency.

Especially in his early years, any president has to engage in a lot of priority-setting in order to decide what to press today, this month, this quarter, or this year, and what to put on hold. (Every White House has its own shorthand for this process, such as “mañana” or “kick the can.” I worked in the Obama administration during the first term, and I certainly heard both phrases.) If the preparatory work or negotiation isn’t yet complete for a desired policy — as it apparently was not, until recently, with Cuba — postponement will be inevitable. And if political constraints, such as imminent midterm elections, seem to counsel delay, then there might well be delay (as was apparently the case with immigration reform).

As a result, those who support particular causes are often greatly frustrated, accusing the president, or influential people within the administration, of not caring about those causes. They’re often wrong. The problem typically lies not in indifference but in the constraints imposed by priority-setting and politics.

With two years left in a presidency, both of those constraints start to weaken. If you have ten things do, you are less likely to delay five of them if “later” means “never.” And if you don’t have to worry about your re-election, or about working to keep a house of Congress in your party’s hands, short-term political calculations recede in importance.

To the extent that the Obama administration has recently focused on environmental issues, above all climate change, it isn’t because of a desire to appeal to the base, to retain the presidency in 2016, to punish the Republican Party, or to create a legacy. It’s because reducing the risks associated with climate change is a high priority for the president, and if significant further steps are to be taken (such as regulation of power plants), they must be taken soon.

To the extent that the administration is now focusing on college education, manufacturing and housing, it’s because those are also high-priority issues, and time for significant initiatives is limited.

When a quarterback increases his focus in the fourth quarter, and marches his team down the field, he’s unlikely to be focusing on his legacy. In fact, that would be a ridiculous and probably self-defeating thought. He’s in the moment, and he wants to win the game. Any president, faced with an ever- shortening time in office, seeks to do the political equivalent, which is to try to put policies in place that fit with his deepest convictions. That’s what we should expect in the next two years.

Cass Sunstein is a Bloomberg View columnist. Readers may send the author email at csunstein1@bloomberg.net.

Photo: President Barack Obama talks on the phone with Alan Gross, who was en route to the United States from Cuba, in the Oval Office, Dec. 17, 2014. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

Political Party Prejudice Is Bigger Than Racism

Political Party Prejudice Is Bigger Than Racism

Sept. 22 (Bloomberg View) — If you are a Democrat, would you marry a Republican? Would you be upset if your sister did?

Researchers have long asked such questions about race, and have found that along important dimensions, racial prejudice is decreasing. At the same time, party prejudice in the U.S. has jumped, infecting not only politics but also decisions about dating, marriage and hiring. By some measures, “partyism” now exceeds racial prejudice — which helps explain the intensity of some midterm election campaigns.

In 1960, 5 percent of Republicans and 4 percent of Democrats said that they would feel “displeased” if their son or daughter married outside their political party. By 2010, those numbers had reached 49 percent and 33 percent. Republicans have been found to like Democrats less than they like people on welfare or gays and lesbians. Democrats dislike Republicans more than they dislike big business.

Consider one of the most influential measures of prejudice: the implicit-association test, which is simple to take. You see words on the upper corners of a screen — for example, “white” paired with either “good” or “bad” in the upper left corner, and “black” paired with one of those same adjectives in the upper right. Then you see a picture or a word in the middle of the screen — for example, a white face, an African-American face, or the word “joy” or “terrible.” Your task is to click on the upper corner that matches either the picture or the word in the middle.

Many white people quickly associate “joy” with the upper left corner when it says “white” and “good” — but have a harder time associating “joy” with the left corner when the words there are “black” and “good.” So too, many white people quickly associate “terrible” with the left corner when it says “black” and “bad,” but go a lot more slowly when the left corner says “white” and “bad.”

To test for political prejudice, Shanto Iyengar and Sean Westwood, political scientists at Stanford University, conducted a large-scale implicit association test with 2,000 adults. They found people’s political bias to be much larger than their racial bias. When Democrats see “joy,” it’s much easier for them to click on a corner that says “Democratic” and “good” than on one that says “Republican” and “good.”

To find out whether such attitudes predict behavior, Iyengar and Westwood undertook a follow-up study. They asked more than 1,000 people to look at the résumés of several high-school seniors and say which ones should be awarded a scholarship. Some of these resumes contained racial cues (“president of the African-American Student Association”) while others had political ones (“president of the Young Republicans”).

Race mattered. African-American participants preferred the African-American candidates 73 percent to 27 percent. Whites showed a modest preference for African-American candidates, as well, though by a significantly smaller margin. But partisanship made a much bigger difference. Both Democrats and Republicans selected their in-party candidate about 80 percent of the time.

Even when a candidate from the opposing party had better credentials, most people chose the candidate from their own party. With respect to race, in contrast, merit prevailed.

In a further test of political prejudice, Iyengar and Westwood asked 800 people to play the trust game, well known among behavioral scientists: Player One is given some money (say, $10) and told that she can give some, all or none of it to Player Two. Player One is then told that the researcher will triple the amount she allocates to Player Two — and that Player Two can give some of that back to Player One. When Player One decides how much money to give Player Two, a central question is how well she trusts him to return an equivalent or greater amount.

Are people less willing to trust people of a different race or party affiliation? The researchers found that race didn’t matter — but party did. People are significantly more trusting of others who share their party affiliation.

What accounts for the explosive growth of political prejudice? Modern campaigns deserve some of the blame. Iyengar and his colleagues show that when people are exposed to messages that attack members of the opposing party, their biases increase. But the destructive power of partyism is extending well beyond politics into people’s behavior in daily life.

Photo: Frank Vest via Flickr

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Greatest Win For Gay Marriage Is Just Two Words

Greatest Win For Gay Marriage Is Just Two Words

The movement for marriage equality last week received its greatest legal victory. Judge Richard Posner, of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, wrote a powerful opinion ordering Indiana and Wisconsin to recognize same-sex marriages. In the process, he eviscerated the states’ efforts to defend their discriminatory laws.

The author matters in this case. Posner was appointed by Ronald Reagan, and he isn’t known for favoring an active judicial role or for thinking that courts should promote social change. He is also widely admired, and probably counts as the most influential lower court judge of the past 50 years. When he speaks, people listen.

To understand his opinion, it is important to distinguish among three quite different objections to laws forbidding same-sex marriage.

The first is that they interfere with the right to marry. On this view, under the Constitution’s due process clause, that right is fundamental, so states can’t interfere with it without a “compelling justification” (for example, to prevent marriages between parents and children).

The second is that because gays and lesbians have been subject to pervasive prejudice and hostility, and because sexual orientation is immutable, any form of discrimination against them is “suspect” under the equal protection clause — which means, again, that it can’t be allowed without a compelling justification.

The third, and simplest, argument is that laws against same-sex marriage lack any reasonable basis, so they violate the equal protection clause for being “irrational.”

Judge Posner embraced the second argument, but in the end, his opinion rested on the third.

Indiana offered just one rationale for limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples: essentially, that marriage is meant to enhance the welfare of children by reducing the risk that, in cases of “accidental births,” men will avoid taking responsibility for them. Marriage, Indiana argued, channels “unintentionally procreative sex” into a legal relationship, in which the biological father is required to assume responsibility. Because same-sex relationships can’t produce accidental births, there is no reason for marriage.

Posner had a field day with that argument. “Heterosexuals get drunk and pregnant, producing unwanted children; their reward is to be allowed to marry. Homosexual couples do not produce unwanted children; their reward is to be denied the right to marry. Go figure.”

Indiana’s argument was undermined by the fact that the state allows infertile couples to marry. Indeed, it allows first cousins to marry if they are over 65 years old, apparently because by that age, women are infertile.

If Indiana really wanted to address the problem of accidental births by ensuring that children are in stable homes, Posner added, it should promote, rather than forbid, same-sex marriages. After all, same-sex couples adopt children, and the state already presumes that children’s prospects are improved when their parents are married.

Wisconsin, for its part, emphasized that its prohibition was the product of the democratic process (a popular vote). Posner’s response was crisp: “Minorities trampled on by the democratic process have recourse to the courts; the recourse is called constitutional law.”

Wisconsin pointed as well to tradition, but in Posner’s view, a tradition is a fact, not a justification. Wisconsin added that it wanted to “go slow,” because same-sex marriages might transform a “cornerstone of civilization and society.” But the state provided no evidence, or any reason to believe, that allowing such marriages would transform anything.

Posner emphasized that forbidding same-sex couples from marrying “imposes a heavy cost, financial and emotional, on them and their children.” In the most original part of his opinion, he turned the child-welfare argument on its head: “By denying marital rights to same-sex couples it reduces the incentive of such couples to adopt unwanted children and impairs the welfare of those children who are adopted by such couples.”

Posner’s opinion is uncharacteristically lengthy, but its most memorable words are just two: “Go figure.” With each decreasingly plausible effort to defend prohibitions on same-sex marriages, that may remain the best response.

AFP Photo/Scott Olson

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How To Spot A Paranoid Libertarian

How To Spot A Paranoid Libertarian

Jan. 30 (Bloomberg) — In a recent essay in the New Republic, Princeton University historian Sean Wilentz contends that Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald and Julian Assange reflect a political impulse he calls “paranoid libertarianism.” Wilentz claims that far from being “truth-telling comrades intent on protecting the state and the Constitution from authoritarian malefactors,” they “despise the modern liberal state, and they want to wound it.”

Wilentz gives credit to Richard Hofstadter for the term “paranoid libertarianism,” but he is being generous. Although Hofstadter wrote an influential essay called “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” he didn’t call special attention to its libertarian manifestation. Wilentz has performed an important public service in doing exactly that.

Most of Wilentz’s essay focuses on Snowden, Greenwald and Assange, and he offers a lot of details in an effort to support his conclusions about each of them. But let’s put the particular individuals to one side. Although Wilentz doesn’t say much about paranoid libertarianism as such, the general category is worth some investigation.

It can be found on the political right, in familiar objections to gun control, progressive taxation, environmental protection and health care reform. It can also be found on the left, in familiar objections to religious displays at public institutions and to efforts to reduce the risk of terrorism. Whether on the right or the left, paranoid libertarianism (which should of course be distinguished from libertarianism as such) is marked by five defining characteristics.

The first is a wildly exaggerated sense of risks — a belief that if government is engaging in certain action (such as surveillance or gun control), it will inevitably use its authority so as to jeopardize civil liberties and perhaps democracy itself. In practice, of course, the risk might be real. But paranoid libertarians are convinced of its reality whether or not they have good reason for their conviction.

The second characteristic is a presumption of bad faith on the part of government officials — a belief that their motivations must be distrusted. If, for example, officials at a state university sponsor a Christian prayer at a graduation ceremony, the problem is that they don’t believe in religious liberty at all (and thus seek to eliminate it). If officials are seeking to impose new restrictions on those who seek to purchase guns, the “real” reason is that they seek to ban gun ownership (and thus to disarm the citizenry).

The third characteristic is a sense of past, present or future victimization. Paranoid libertarians tend to believe that as individuals or as members of specified groups, they are being targeted by the government, or will be targeted imminently, or will be targeted as soon as officials have the opportunity to target them. Any evidence of victimization, however speculative or remote, is taken as vindication, and is sometimes even welcome. (Of course, some people, such as Snowden, are being targeted, because they appear to have committed crimes.)

The fourth characteristic is an indifference to tradeoffs — a belief that liberty, as paranoid libertarians understand it, is the overriding if not the only value, and that it is unreasonable and weak to see relevant considerations on both sides. Wilentz emphasizes what he regards as the national- security benefits of some forms of surveillance; paranoid libertarians tend to see such arguments as a sham. Similarly, paranoid libertarians tend to dismiss the benefits of other measures that they despise, including gun control and environmental regulation.

The fifth and final characteristic is passionate enthusiasm for slippery-slope arguments. The fear is that if government is allowed to take an apparently modest step today, it will take far less modest steps tomorrow, and on the next day, freedom itself will be in terrible trouble. Modest and apparently reasonable steps must be resisted as if they were the incarnation of tyranny itself.

In some times and places, the threats are real, and paranoid libertarians turn out to be right. As Joseph Heller wrote in Catch-22, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.”

Societies can benefit a lot from paranoid libertarians. Even if their apocalyptic warnings are wildly overstated, they might draw attention to genuine risks, or at least improve public discussion. But as a general rule, paranoia isn’t a good foundation for public policy, even if it operates in freedom’s name.

(Cass R. Sunstein, the Robert Walmsley University professor at Harvard Law School, is a Bloomberg View columnist. He is a former administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, the co-author of Nudge and author of Conspiracy Theories and Other Dangerous Ideas, forthcoming in March.)

AFP Photo/Mandel Ngan