A Rational Choice?

Most voters will vote based on either their ideological stance (Republican, Democrat, liberal, conservative) or on the basis of some emotional appeal from one candidate or the other that happens to be a concern of theirs, whether the appeal is realistic or not.  But if one wanted to be a “rational” voter in this dismal election, how might one think about the choices?

First of all, the president’s powers really are fairly limited. Most effective actions have to be enacted by Congress as laws.  Presidents can promise all sorts of things – Obama promised to create a million jobs in his second term (he is still about 700,000 short of meeting that promise), but in fact he really has almost no control at all over job creation in the short term. So the first filter might be to ignore candidate’s positions and promises on issues they really don’t control.

For example, gun control. Yes, it would be nice to take assault weapons off the streets and get guns out of the hands of criminals, but realistically it isn’t going to happen. First of all this nation (and the world in general) is awash in guns, and large sections of the country would rebel if anyone tried to take them away. Background checks are reasonable, but they won’t stop criminals and drug gangs from getting unregistered guns, nor will it stop the occasional nut from getting a gun one way or another if they want it.  States and local communities can manage to get some restrictions through because they can accommodate to the local values (ie - liberal urban areas can pass local gun restrictions that would never fly nationwide). But the federal system isn’t going to manage to do anything effective nationwide, so one can simply ignore any candidate’s promises or positions on this issue.

And job creation. Candidates can promise whatever they like – manufacturing jobs lost to automation or cheaper overseas labor are for the most part never coming back, whatever promises are made. And in fact the president has almost no direct control over job creation, which is a function of large scale economic pressures in the private sector. Which means really that presidents deserve neither blame nor credit for most short term economic conditions, so one can ignore most such proposals.

And climate change.  Yes, man-made climate change is real and a rational species would do something effective about this issue. But it isn’t going to happen. All the recent international agreements are nice political window dressing, but actually they don’t do anything effective. Nations will always act in their own interests, and that means the big polluters will never agree to the economic pain and dislocation that a really effective line of action would require.  The US is doing better in recent years, but not because of any agreements – it just happens that cheap fracking gas, which pollutes less, is displacing coal for strictly economic reasons. So although this issue gets a lot of press, one can largely ignore the candidate’s positions on this.

And Supreme Court appointments. Yes, the president nominates candidates for the Supreme Court, but they have to get past Congress. So really it is the ideological balance in Congress that controls the nominations, not the president. And besides, history shows that presidents and Congress are remarkably bad at predicting the stance of Supreme Court judges once they are on the bench. (Conservatives thought Chief Justice Roberts would be one of theirs, but he turned out, once appointed, to have his own agenda).

So what issues does a president have some power to control?

Foreign policy in general, and military deployments in particular, are controlled to some degree by the president, so the candidate’s positions on these issues matter.  It matters what they might do in the Middle East mess – get more involved or get less involved.  It matters if and how they might handle confrontations with countries like Russia and China.  It matters if they favor a strong military or not. It matters how they handle our allies.

The budget. Yes, Congress makes up the budget, but the president can veto it, so she/he has some leverage to control what goes into the budget and how big it is. So a president has some control over whether our national debt grows or shrinks, and over what programs get more funding. This is a situation where it matters how good the president is at negotiating with Congress. Obama wasn’t very good at it, even with his own party.

Cabinet appointments. Political appointees have limited effect on the agencies they head – the bureaucracies have their own momentum – but they can steer the agency focus to a certain extent.  Obama’s attorney generals, for example, have focused the Justice Department more on black civil rights issues than previous administrations, but have been remarkably lenient on the Wall Street abuses that led to the economic crash.

This is just a sampling, but it suggests an approach a “rational” voter might take – ignoring issues the president really doesn’t control and focusing on the candidate’s positions on issues over which the president actually does have some significant influence.