Once the news media publishes allegations that you are the ‘Centennial Olympic Park bomber’ or ‘a Russian agent/stooge/tool,’ regardless of your innocence, the scar is permanent.
But that is exactly what happened to security guard Richard Jewell after the 1996 bombing at the Atlanta Olympics and to a host of individuals in the aftermath of the 2016 election. These two independent events illustrate how the U.S. news media can fail at covering important events and how they rationalize their botched reporting by assigning blame to their sources, not reporting standards.
Worse yet, there is no consistent mechanism holding journalists accountable for their botched reporting. To the contrary, if their reporting feeds a compelling and profitable narrative (i.e., attracts audiences), it is handsomely rewarded.
Rachel Maddow today makes around $7 million-a-year for MSNBC and, in covering the Russia-Trump collusion (Russiagate) story, was directly responsible for promoting many of the most baseless rumors about Donald Trump and his campaign.
When small bits of news arose in favor of the dossier, the franchise MSNBC host pumped air into them. At least some of her many fans surely came away from her broadcasts thinking the dossier was a serious piece of investigative research, not the flimflam, quick-twitch game of telephone outlined in the Horowitz report. She seemed to be rooting for the document.
“Seemed to be rooting for the document”? More like cheerleading for its authenticity, I would say.
When Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News, one of the first journalists to report on the infamous Steele Dossier and, to my knowledge, the only major reporter to retrospectively apologize for his mistakes in covering Russiagate, tried to confront Maddow on her reporting errors during the three-year media frenzy, she promptly brushed him aside. In effect, telling him she always said the Steele Dossier was unverified and she won’t be held accountable for failing to prove or disprove the Dossier’s accuracy.
When the Robert Mueller investigation thoroughly destroyed the entire Russiagate narrative along with the Steele Dossier, Maddow could barely find the energy to devote even one full show to Mueller’s final report.
The problem, personified by Maddow but far from exclusive to her, is systemic and rooted in what I call the spot news standard endemic to corporate-controlled news organizations.
Just as Maddow refuses to be held accountable for not substantiating the Steele Dossier, the national news media embraced the same cop out, essentially saying, “What? You expected us to determine the veracity of the Dossier? We just report what our sources tell us.”
Hence, the spot news standard: the type of reporting, typically done in the first few hours/days of a news worthy event, which focuses on information provided by official sources (e.g., police, government officials), victims or eyewitnesses. In contrast to spot news reporting, in-depth investigative reporting usually aspires to not only report the ‘facts’ (often as told by sources), but endeavors to independently confirm the quality of such information.
When the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC) first reported that Jewell was the FBI’s prime suspect in the Olympic Park bombing, they were merely repeating what an anonymous FBI source had told one of their journalists. By the spot news standard, the AJC did its job. And a federal court would eventually exonerate AJC for that very reason from a civil lawsuit over its Olympic Park bombing coverage.
But the AJC got the Jewell story wrong, as did most of the national news media in their Russiagate coverage. In both events, the news organizations fed their audiences little truths (e.g., quotes from official sources), but botched the bigger, more important, truths.
The answer is obvious. Much of what the news media reports today just isn’t true — and this problem cuts across all news media outlets and ideological points of view.
How did the Fourth Estate regress to this lousy state?
In the Trump era, American national media (CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, Fox News, The Washington Post, The New York Times) have self-divided into openly pro- or anti-Trump factions.
It isn’t covert anymore, and many media outlets wear it as a badge of honor.
But when a media outlet is strongly for or against a leader or party, the first casualties are fairness, honesty and accuracy.
Prabhu further notes that partisan-biased news reporting is profitable, in essence, creating a reinforcing feedback loop.
But the problem with today’s journalism may be more systemic than just the economic incentives behind partisan news coverage.
The privately-controlled media serve a different master than what we are taught in high school civics. They serve the sensational to the extent it is marketable and profitable; they serve social conflict for the same reason; and they serve the interests of political and economic elites because it is from this orbit most journalists and media pundits originate.
The deep flaws of our national news organizations were exposed during Russiagate, which is one reason the lessons from Clint Eastwood’s newest movie, Richard Jewell, go beyond just reminding us that the AJC (and other news outlets) did a grave disservice to Jewell during their Olympic Park bombing coverage.
The immediate reaction to Eastwood’s movie is particularly revealing. Before Eastwood’s movie had even been released, lawyers were exchanging letters.
On December 9th, the Monday before the movie’s release, the Los Angeles-based law firm Lavely & Singer sent a letter to director Clint Eastwood, screenwriter Billy Ray, Warner Bros. and other parties, on behalf of The (AJC) and Cox Enterprises, its parent corporation. The letter demands Warner Bros. to publicly acknowledge “that some events were imagined for dramatic purposes and artistic license and dramatization were used in the film’s portrayal of events and characters.”
The central issue is the movie’s portrayal of AJC reporter Kathy Scruggs, who broke the new story, sourced from an anonymous FBI informant, that Richard Jewell was the FBI’s prime suspect in the July 1996 deadly bombing at Atlanta’s Centennial Olympic Park.
We know today that Jewell was completely innocent.
It would take the FBI three months before they would publicly acknowledge Jewell was no longer a suspect. Eventually, confessed serial bomber Eric Robert Rudolph would be convicted for the Atlanta bombing and sentenced to life in prison.
In response to the release of Eastwood’s movie, the AJC editorial board published this defense of their original Jewell story:
“Far from acting recklessly, the AJC actually held that story for a day to develop additional independent corroboration of key facts prior to publication,” wrote the AJC editorial board. “Law enforcement sources confirmed to the AJC their focus on Mr. Jewell, and FBI activity had been visible at the Jewells’ apartment. The accuracy of the story had also been confirmed with an FBI spokesperson to whom the entire story was read before publication…
…Within days of the July 1996 bombing, investigators came to focus on Jewell. The AJC was first to report, accurately, that the FBI considered him a suspect. Authorities questioned Jewell, searched his and his mother’s belongings and kept him under round-the-clock surveillance before publicly clearing him about three months later…
…The AJC was among numerous entities sued after Jewell was cleared, and the only one that didn’t settle. The litigation naming the AJC was dismissed in 2011, with the Court of Appeals concluding that the coverage was substantially true at the time of publication.”
The AJC defense that their coverage was “substantially true at the time of publication” disregards the damage their reporting did to an innocent man (i.e., based on the spot news accuracy standard, the AJC did their job).
Yet, Jewell saved hundreds of lives by his quick response to an imminent threat and the initial thanks for his effort was a three-month horsewhipping by the national media as a law enforcement wannabe that lived with his mother. AJC, as much as any other news outlet, built and cultivated that narrative through the use of anonymous FBI sources.
[InAJC’s defense, they were the first news outlet to report timeline evidence that Jewell did not have time to both plant the bomb and reach a pay phone used by the bomber to make a warning call.]
AJC’s apparent insensitivity to Jewell’s interests must be understood in the context of journalism’s fundamental reliance on the spot news standard: If the facts are mostly correct at the time of publication, journalists have nothing for which to apologize.
This low test for journalists is predicated on our shared First Amendment speech rights which protect American journalists from legal prosecution for their reporting, even if it is later proven to be substantively flawed. Absent malice or the ire of the American security state, U.S. journalists do not face legal jeopardy for inaccurate reporting. And that is as it should be. It never should be easy to jail journalists and news publishers.
The low-bar threshold for our Constitution-backed press freedoms is sufficient to protect MSNBC, CNN, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and other news outlets from any legal consequences for their three-year crusade of careless reporting on the Russiagate myth — a story propelled almost entirely in the mainstream media by anonymous, often government, sources.
We can draw parallels from the Jewell case to the more recent Russiagate coverage. As in the Jewell story, Russiagate coverage was constructed around faulty, uncorroborated intelligence passed on by anonymous government sources to the press. Whether the anonymous sources knew they were passing along flawed or irrelevant information may never be known, as we are unlikely to ever know the identities of those sources (again, as it should be).
But we know from both the Robert Mueller report and the Department of Justice Inspector General report that there is no compelling evidence to suggest the Trump’s presidential campaign conspired with the Russians to defeat Hillary Clinton. This narrative was a complete fiction from the very beginning, first promulgated by Clinton’s bitter minions, spread by her equally bitter collaborators in the national news media and *verified* by a vast, nameless infantry of government bureaucrats and intelligence officers.
Russiagate mirrored a standard intelligence community disinformation campaign, its true origins still largely unknown as the national news media has purposefully avoided seeking such answers.
A baseless conspiracy theory is how Rachel Maddow describes the question of whether Trump campaign operative George Papadopoulos’ chance meeting with Malta professor Joseph Mifsud and subsequent bean-spilling conversation with Australian diplomat Alexander Downer were, in fact, a U.S. intelligence community attempt to frame and perhaps turn the former low-level Trump flunky into a government informant.
Or, as still reported in the mainstream news media, was Mifsud a Russian agent tasked with compromising the Trump campaign through Papadopoulos?
Both theories are unproven (though most of the hard evidence resides with the former) and likely will be addressed in Connecticut U.S. Attorney John Durham’s special investigation into the origins of Russiagate.
Either way, the answers are not coming from the anti-Trump press corps because these answers could undermine the media’s ongoing narrative that the FBI and U.S. intelligence community were objective, upright actors in the Russiagate drama.
Which only further reinforces the bigger question: will the national news media ever be forced to answer for their botched Russiagate reporting.
Just as Kathy Scruggs did in the Jewell story, the national news media did the minimum in covering Russiagate (sans a few adversarial journalists like The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald and The Nation’s Aaron Maté who base their careers on challenging official sources, regardless of partisan affiliation).
The problem is the minimum too often means getting the bigger story wrong (and never needing to say you are sorry).
But if news organizations aren’t going to hold themselves accountable for botching the big stories, who will? It most certainly can’t be the government or an “independent” ombudsman. Putting so much power in so few hands feels like an invitation to unintended consequences.
There is only one irrefutable way to hold news organizations and news entertainers like Rachel Maddow accountable: educated, discerning news consumers empowered to think critically and objectively (to the best extent possible) when consuming news. More importantly, consumers’ judgments will result in palpable carrot-and-stick economic consequences for news organizations.
For the sake of our Fourth Estate, we can hope accountability is making a comeback.
K.R.K.
Postscript: Clint Eastwood’s movie about Richard Jewell and the 1996 Olympic Park bombing is trying to serve the truth. Unfortunately, he should have first gotten his own truthiness house in order.
Why Eastwood and screenwriter Billy Ray decided to imply Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Kathy Scruggs slept with an FBI source in order to extract crucial information is incomprehensible. The specific scene in dispute — featuring Scruggs (played by Olivia Wilde) and Tom Shaw (an FBI agent played by Jon Hamm) — could have easily been replaced with something less sexually overt and the movie would have lost nothing.
It just confirms that Hollywood, like corporate news organizations, are not dependable guardians of the truth.
“Zach, you know what a hijab is, right?” I asked my teenage son, Zach, a few days prior to a recent family trip to Oman and Jordan.
“Yes, Dad. I do.” he responded in a reflexive, annoyed-teenager tone. “We have girls in school that wear them. I see them all the time.”
“Yes, but, especially in Oman, some will cover their entire face,” I said. “I don’t want it to…”
“Dad, I know. I’ve seen that before too,” Zach interrupted me mid-sentence.
“It will be more common.”
“Dad. Stop it. I don’t care.”
For some reason, I always find Zach’s thorough indifference about everything refreshing. I’m even a little jealous. He doesn’t waste a lot of energy worrying about the future or other people’s lives. Greta Thunberg he is not.
And after thinking about my non-conversation with Zach, I realized the problem was more mine than his.
Prior to this most recent trip, I had been to Middle Eastern countries where the burka (a common hijab in Afghanistan) or the niqaab (a usually black hijab that covers the entire face except for the eyes) were common. I found those particular versions of the hijab unsettling and I just wanted to prepare my son. Is that so wrong?
My wife, Christa, and I try to take advantage of any opportunity we can to engage our son in conversations about politics and current issues — in this case, the status of women in the Islamic world (and the world, in general). It is obviously not a subject self-absorbed, 13-year-old boys want to talk about, but it is precisely at that age where, as parents, my wife and I feel we can have the most lasting impact. [We admit we may be deceiving ourselves on that one; but, as progressive Democrats and regular-attending Unitarians, self-delusion is one of our most highly-developed skills.]
We just didn’t want our son to judge the women we’d be meeting on our trip based on their clothing attire. We believe what a person wears (and other daily practices) can only be understood through a deep knowledge of that person’s culture. In theory, we try not to use American cultural norms and values as criteria for judging other people and cultures. In other words, we are the people Rush Limbaugh started warning everyone about thirty years ago: We are practicing cultural relativists.
Poorly executed, cultural relativism in practice often comes across as condescending. Employed with the proper balance between humility and objective judgment, however, and cultural relativism opens up doors and understanding to other places on a level you can never attain when you restrict your analytic lens to the one provided by your own culture.
I tried to explain ‘cultural relativism’ to Zach and wasn’t sure if it really sank in.
“Dad, don’t worry. I won’t say or do anything to embarrass you and Mom on the trip,” was his curt reaction.
He can be charmless sometimes, but he knows how to cut to the chase.
I’m a political scientist and statistician by training and to me, Islam, as with any cultural attribute, is but one variable in a larger explanatory model. In the aggregate, all else equal, does it explain anything substantive in the corporeal world?
Western academics and thought leaders periodically trot out research and essays broadly condemning Islam and the Qur’an for the mistreatment of Muslim women.
One of the most provocative denunciations of Islam’s view on women has come from Mona Eltahawy, the renowned Egyptian writer and journalist who now lives in Cairo and New York. In her 2015 book, Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution, she repeatedly whomps Muslim men by referring them merely as ‘they’ as she summarizes what life was like for her living in Egypt and Saudi Arabia:
“They hate us because they need us, they fear us, they understand how much control it takes to keep us in line, to keep us good girls with our hymens intact until it’s time for them to fuck us into mothers who raise future generations of misogynists to forever fuel their patriarchy. They hate us because we are at once their temptation and their salvation from that patriarchy, which they must sooner or later realize hurts them, too. They hate us because they know that once we rid ourselves of the alliance of State and Street that works in tandem to control us, we will demand a reckoning.”
Eltahawy’s has an uncompromising view of the inveterate misogyny that is prevalent in most Muslim-majority countries today. And backing her perspective are objective data that overwhelming and unforgiving categorize Muslim-majority countries as brutal towards women (see Appendix B for the Freedom House scoring of selected countries on gender-related freedoms).
Few disagree on the problem. In most Muslim-majority countries the oppression of women is pervasive, persistent, codified and institutionalized. Gender bias runs deep in a country like Saudi Arabia where women only recently have been granted the right to drive and to travel outside the country without a male guardian’s permission.
Yet, there is significant variation in gender equality within Muslim-majority countries that should give us pause before accepting any reductive explanation ascribing the oppression of women almost solely to Islam and the Qur’an. If Muslim-majority countries like Tunisia and Senegal can be ranked similarly to the United Kingdom, Israel, Denmark and France in terms of gender-related freedoms, perhaps Islam and gender equality are compatible under the right conditions. If how Islam is practiced can adapt in some countries to the liberation of women, why not in all countries?
Eltahawy puts ‘headscarves’ front and center among the symbols of women’s suffering in the Islamic countries. But there is so much variation in hijab styles, it seems unnecessary to lump the overt symbolism of the burka or the niqaab — which cover a woman’s face — with the more common shayla or al-amira styles which do not cover the face.
Is the hijab really a visible sign of oppression or is it merely an article of clothing motivated by social norms, personal preferences, and/or a desire to demonstrate one’s faith?
“Sometimes a hijab is just a hijab,” a Muslim (Malaysian) friend once explained to us — a group of her graduate school colleagues — when someone suggested her hijab symbolized oppression.
At the same time, stories today of Muslim women and girls being forced to wear the hijab or enter into arranged marriages are real and include examples from Western countries. In her book, Unveiled: How Western Liberals Empower Radical Islam, Yasmine Mohamed, an author and civil rights activist, recounts her own experience growing up in Canada in a household where the rules closely resembled Sharia law and where the hijab was mandatory starting at age nine.
While I prepared for our family trip, I reacquainted myself with the often contentious debate between religious scholar, Reza Aslan, and neuroscientist, Sam Harris, over the roles of reason (science) and religion in explaining various issues in modern society. Inevitably, their discussion miscarries into a dispute over Islam and terrorism.
Where Aslan argues Islam and its guiding text, the Qur’an, is not the cause of terrorist violence, but rather a product of long-standing social conditions and cultural norms (which can change), Harris views the Qur’an itself as a contributing factor to violence against apostates to Islam and to the oppression of women in Islamic societies. “On almost every page, the Qur’an instructs observant Muslims to despise non-believers,” HBO’s Real Time host Bill Maher once said in defending Harris.
While Harris dismisses as false equivalencies any comparisons of the Qur’an to Judeo-Christianity’s OldTestament — which is comparably soaked in violence and misogyny — more disappointing is his resistance to consider the organized violence perpetrated by Western societies against Islamic populations in distant and recent history.
Still, Harris is right when he says ‘the words matter’ and I do consider elements of his thesis as useful, particularly when considering the status of women in Islamic societies. The words we write are important. Major religions codify their rules for a reason — to maintain religious discipline and rules of engagement among their followers.
Nonetheless, my overall impulse is to side with Aslan’s multiculturalist perspective which emphasizes the central role of evolving cultural norms and social conditions in explaining current society.
The hijab is a visible manifestation of the Aslan-Harris debate. Is it the reflection of culture and, therefore, subject to change as cultural norms and rules change? Or, has the garment’s centuries-old existence through the present further evidence that the Koran’s text reinforces and preserves the oppression of women.
In a 2014 Huffington Post article by psychologist Valerie Tarico, Faisal Saeed Al Mutar, a Washington D.C.-based writer and the founder of Global Secular Humanist Movement, tells her why he rejects multiculturalism’s instinct to not judge the hijab:
“I understand the liberal impulse to respect multiculturalism, but aren’t human rights more important than cultures? Humans have rights, cultures don’t, cultures evolve and reform. Liberal friends and allies ask churches and pastors to accept gay rights and women’s rights. It is disrespectful and even racist to ask any less of mosques and Muslim leaders.”
Yet, other Muslim women say the hijab is a symbol of faith, not oppression, and resent the assumption that their personal decision to wear it is forced on them by the men in their lives.
There are no right or wrong answers here. Just a lot of opinions.
Like many of the world’s older cities Amman, Jordan is very walkable. Every daily need is within a short distance from where you might be standing, as self-contained neighborhoods are one of Amman’s defining features.
Leveraging this aspect of Amman, Zach and I decided to make our last day in Amman as simple as possible: walk to a nearby restaurant; wander through a few shops for last minute mementos and gifts; before using the Lyft taxi service to take us to the University of Jordan where my wife and her colleagues were wrapping up their business trip.
After picking us up at our hotel, the Lyft driver snaked at varied, erratic speeds through Amman’s near constant heavy traffic. On the approach to the University of Jordan’s (UJ) campus, my son spotted a McDonald’s near our drop off point — the UJ’s main gate along Queen Rania Street. Annoying our driver with a u-turn request that put us in front of McDonald’s, we stumbled out the Hyundai sedan (which appeared to be every other car in Amman) and texted my wife to announce our arrival.
As we waited for my wife and her colleagues, we felt like pinballs as the high volume of foot traffic passing near the UJ main gate bounced us around. At 31,000 students, UJ is Jordan’s largest university. It is also the oldest and most prestigious.
The University of Jordan’s Main Library ( Photo courtesy of the Univ. of Jordan Library)
While being absorbed into this crowd, I was immediately struck by the high percentage of woman compared to men heading in and out of the UJ campus. It wasn’t even close. Doing a quick headcount (as best I could), I estimated three females for every male student. Just a guesstimate. And, as it turns out, not too far off the actual gender ratio reported by the UJ’s statistical office: Female students at UJ outnumber male students two-to-one. In comparison, females represent 49 percent of Harvard University’s undergraduate population.
Based on their student populations, Jordan’s most elite university is more female-dominated than Harvard. Such is the world we live in today.
More importantly, we are seeing this trend throughout the Middle East and North Africa, not just with respect to tertiary institutions (i.e., higher education), but also with primary and secondary education (grades K-through-12).
UNESCO has created indexes monitoring the status of women in the world’s education system. Since 1995, the evidence is overwhelming: Women in Islamic countries are increasingly being educated at rates comparable to women in economically advanced countries (e.g., the U.S. and Europe).
This fact will fundamentally change the Middle East.
One UNESCO measure is particularly informative: The Gender Parity Index for School Life Expectancy (GPI-SLE). The SLE component is defined as the number of years of schooling from primary to tertiary levels of education. Subsequently, the GPI-SLE is calculated as the ratio of female of school life expectancy to male school life expectancy.
A GPI-SLE equal to 1 indicates parity between females and males. In general, a value less than 1 indicates disparity in favor of males and a value greater than 1 indicates disparity in favor of females.
On this UNESCO measure, women in the Middle East may have already equaled their sisters in the advanced economic world (see table below). For 82 countries with consistent data from 1995 to 2018, each was categorized into one of three categories: Middle East/North Africa, Advanced Economies, Rest of World (see Appendix A for the list of countries and categorization).
The Middle East/North Africa (MENA) countries with reliable data include: Tunisia, Morocco, Palestine, Turkey, Kuwait, Oman, Iran, Jordan and Bahrain.
According to the most recent GPI-SLE, MENA countries have an average GPI-SLE of 1.05, indicating a slight bias in favor of females. This MENA index score is the same as for the advanced economies and slightly higher than all remaining countries (GPI-SLE = 1.02).
It may surprise some that the education systems of Kuwait, Palestine, Tunisia and Oman are more gender biased in favor of females than the United States, Norway, Israel, Denmark, and Finland (see Appendix A). The educational advancement of women in MENA countries defies an arrogant and common assumption about the West’s advantage over Islamic countries in terms of gender equity.
In terms of education, women living in MENA are rapidly catching up to their counterparts in the advanced economies. And its happened relatively fast. In the above table (2nd column) we see that, since 1995, the increase in the GPI-SLE (i.e., the education system has become less biased towards females) has been greater among MENA countries (Δ GPI-SLE = +0.11), than the advanced economics (Δ GPI-SLE = +0.03), or the remaining countries (Δ GPI-SLE = +0.08). The higher magnitude improvements in MENA countries are due, in part, to those countries having started their gender equity efforts with females significantly more disadvantaged at the beginning of the process.
It should be noted that the educational rise of women in MENA countries mirrors similar increases in other parts of the world. It is not an Islamic-thing, it is a world-thing. And this trend is particularly evident in higher education.
“Despite what history across the globe has told us, women now outnumber men at universities — and it is a trend which is accelerating year upon year in the majority of countries,” Isabelle Biltonwrote last year for Study International News, an independent news service monitoring education trends for international students.
Many theories have emerged explaining this worldwide, systemic shift in education attendance and outcomes favoring females. In summarizing the research on this question, Bilton offered this: “There is no answer to why the gender shift occurred but many researchers have speculated problems occur when students are in school. Boys tend to be less interested and less focused on schoolwork, leading to lower grades at all levels of study. As a result, fewer of them choose — or are able — to enroll in universities.”
But something deeper is going on in Jordan and the Middle East more generally. As girls are rising, boys are falling precipitously. As noted by education researcher and author Amanda Ripley in a September 2017 article for The Atlantic, “In school, Jordanian girls are crushing their male peers. The nation’s girls outperform its boys in just about every subject and at every age level. At the University of Jordan, the country’s largest university, women outnumber men by a ratio of two to one — and earn higher grades in math, engineering, computer-information systems, and a range of other subjects.”
This relative trend between males and females in Jordan is not entirely dissimilar from trends in the U.S. where girls do better than boys on standard tests, are more likely to take Advanced Placement tests, more likely to go to college, and will spend more than a year longer in school over their lifetimes compared to their male counterparts.
But, as Ripley’s research shows, something more pernicious may be happening in the Middle East that is (literally) hitting boys hard. In her article, Ripley shared an interview she conducted with a group of teenage girls at an elite Jordanian secondary school. When the girls were asked why they thought girls do better than boys in school, one 16-year-old student, Nawar Mousa, was quick with an answer: “I do my homework, and I read books. My brother, what does he do? He goes with his friends. He plays PlayStation.”
During her research, Ripley also interviewed a Jordanian family with a 15-year-old son attending an all-boys high school. In the course of the interview, the son acknowledged that is common in his boys-only school for teachers to hit students (boys). The boy’s mother added: “Girls’ schools are better,” she said, “less dangerous.”
Whether we can generalize from Ripley’s research to the Jordanian education system writ large is debatable, but her work does conform to other research in Jordan showing academic achievement is affected by violence in the learning environment. Students don’t learn in threatening environments and gender-segregated schools may amplify those threats for boys.
Half of Jordanian primary and secondary public schools are gender-segregated. While there has long been evidence in the U.S. that girls learn better in all-female environments, boys clearly don’t flourish in all-male environments. Quite the opposite. Boys achieve more academically when more girls are in the environment, according to recent research.
In practice, educational strategies that work for girls also work for boys, and vice versa. The research is unequivocal on this point: What drives academic performance is expectations placed on the individual student, regardless if it is a boy or girl.
The progress Jordan has made in the past two decades in building its higher education infrastructure can be seen in the chart below. Where in 2000 few Jordanians aged 25 years or more had a higher education degree, in just 10 years 19 percent of men and 13 percent of women had higher education degrees. While these rates are significantly lower than those observed in the U.S., they are comparable to other Middle Eastern countries. Compared to other Middle Eastern countries, over the past two decades Jordan has among the highest increases in educational attainment for women.
Some observers express caution about the educational advancements of Jordanian women given this fact: women may be getting higher education degrees, but it is not translating into comparable employment opportunities.
In Jordan’s highly patriarchal society where job opportunities for women have been historically limited, the employment rate disparity between men and women is not surprising. However, as more Jordanian women earn college degrees, many will choose to leave Jordan for other countries, such as the United Arab Emirates, where more jobs (and higher paying ones) exist for women.
This brain drain is a critical issue in Jordan today.
Our last activity in Jordan before flying home was to visit with the Chair of UJ’s Political Science department, Dr. Amir Salameh Al-Qaralleh, an imposing figure when standing, but reclined in his office chair with a cigarette in his hand, he was disarming.
Over the course of an hour long conversation, much of it about Syria and the U.S. withdrawal from the Turkish-Syrian border, a number of Dr. Al-Qaralleh’s students popped their heads into his office. One student forgot her notebook for a class and asked if Dr. Al-Qaralleh had paper he could spare. Another asked about a class assignment. And still another asked about an exam.
“Students today,” he said, slightly shaking his head. “They are not self-sufficient.”
But I had a different reaction, first noticing the obvious comfort these students had walking into Dr. Al-Qaralleh’s office, even as he was in a conversation. Where I went to school (University of Iowa, Columbia University), it is unimaginable that I would have walked in on a Department Chair in such a circumstance.
I also noticed that all of the students that asked to speak to Dr. Al-Qaralleh during our meeting were women. That was not random chance, as I’ve seen this pattern before as a college instructor. Of the students that would visit me during office hours, easily three-quarters were women.
When I shared this observation with Dr. Qaralleh, he paused, choosing his words wisely. “Women aren’t afraid to ask for help,” he replied.
Apparently, the reluctance of men to ask for help is a universal phenomenon.
But this anecdotal evidence may also reflect a higher level of engagement found among female students pursuing a higher education in Jordan.
Dr. Al-Qaralleh seemed to agree with this broad generalization.
Apparent is that Jordanian women are getting educated at increasingly higher rates and it is not a transitory phenomenon. Instead, it is proving to be broad-based and sustained, despite the strains put on the Jordanian education system by the influx of over 600,000 registered Syrian refugees into Jordan since the start of the Syrian Civil War.
The rise of women in Jordanian education mirrors similar changes around the globe, but as I’ve documented here, this trend has been more pronounced in MENA countries than in other regions.
In a patriarchal society like Jordan’s, don’t be surprised if in the next decade the question asked among policymakers is less focused on helping Jordanian women achieve educational and economic parity with Jordanian men, but on how to help men keep up with their female counterparts.
Computer engineering graduates Arwa Tarawneh (left) and Suha Habashneh are learning how to work with Intel Galileo (Photo provided by Intel Free Press)
The Democrats now use the terms ‘debunked’ & ‘conspiracy theory’ the way the Republicans and President Donald Trump co-opted the use of ‘fake news.’
All three of these terms should be purged from our working vocabulary until we can demonstrate their proper use.
Perhaps the saddest result of Trump’s three years in office is that today’s Democratic Party shares his disregard for facts and honesty. Some would argue the Clintons pioneered the modern art of dissembling and deception, but that conclusion is indeed unfair to the thousands of deceitful politicians that preceded them.
The evidence is vast about the poor state of our nation’s intellectual curiosity:
CNN (November 20, 2019): “No longer is Volker claiming that the idea of investigations — into the Bidens and into a debunked conspiracy theory that Ukraine somehow had meddled in the 2016 election to help Hillary Clinton and might be in possession of the hacked Democratic National Committee server — ever came up in a White House meeting two weeks before the July 25 call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.”
The Intercept(November 20, 2019): “…the president continued his unlikely attempt to reinvent himself as an anti-corruption crusader, by stating flatly that “Joe Biden and his son are corrupt.” Without offering any evidence to support that debunked claim, the president who has used his office to enrich himself added, “If a Republican ever did what Joe Biden did, if a Republican ever said what Joe Biden said, they’d be getting the electric chair by right now.”
Business Insider (November 19, 2019): “Despite Trump and (Rudy) Giuliani’s allegations, both US and Ukrainian government officials have confirmed there’s no evidence that the Bidens did anything improper. Former Ukrainian prosecutor general Yuriy Lutsenko clearly said he had no evidence of wrongdoing by Joe or Hunter Biden.
“I do not want Ukraine to again be the subject of US presidential elections,” Lutsenko said. “Hunter Biden did not violate any Ukrainian laws … at least as of now, we do not see any wrongdoing.”
On this last example, there is this indisputable point: If your wrongdoing defense ever includes these words or equivalent — “I did not violate any Ukrainian laws” — you probably have an ethics problem.
Together, these false ‘debunked conspiracy theory’ narratives fall into one of two categories: (1) the guilt-by-association debunking, and (2) the straw man debunking.
An example of a guilt-by-association debunk is dismissing the idea of Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election by using one of its genuinely debunked variants — Ukrainians hacked the DNC and Podesta emails which are now stored on a server somewhere in the Ukraine — to justify ignoring more fact-based lines of inquiry.
Until Giuliani and Trump — the GOP’s Hardy Boys —mentioned Cloudstrike and the alleged Ukrainian server, I didn’t even know about that conspiracy theory, much less that there is no substantive evidence to support it.
To the people who closely followed the Russiagate story, the Ukrainian- interference allegation was always about the 2016 election interactions of the Hillary Clinton campaign and a Democratic National Committee (DNC) consultant with Ukrainians linked to their government.
The Ukraine-interference story is not a conspiracy theory and it certainly hasn’t been debunked. It is rooted in original reporting by Politico’s Kenneth P. Vogel (now with The New York Times) and David Stern from their story published on January 11, 2017 (“Ukrainian efforts to sabotage Trump backfire”).
Their key findings were:
Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump by publicly questioning his fitness for office. They also disseminated documents implicating a top Trump aide in corruption and suggested they were investigating the matter, only to back away after the election. And they helped Clinton’s allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers, a Politico investigation found.
A Ukrainian-American operative (Alexandra Chalupa) who was consulting for the Democratic National Committee met with top officials in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington in an effort to expose ties between Trump, top campaign aide Paul Manafort and Russia, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation.
Is that electoral interference? It is nation-state politics on its most fundamental, self-interested level. Its not like the Ukrainians stole private emails (a crime). They merely assisted Hillary Clinton’s campaign in associating one of her political rivals (Trump) with unlawful behavior (Manafort). [It wasn’t hard to do].
The Republicans will rightfully note, however, that information provided by the Ukrainians about Manafort helped cultivate the false media narrative (‘fake news’) that the Trump campaign conspired with the Russians to win the 2016 election.
Foreign governments, acting purely in self-interest, have every incentive to nudge American elections in their favor. Nothing is going to stop foreign influence of American elections. Nothing. And it is naive (and potentially harmful given some of the solutions offered) to think it can be stopped. Minimized? Fine, we should always try to do that. Stopped? Never.
The Ukrainian-interference story is based on real, documented evidence. Do we have a complete understanding of the story? Probably not. Does it warrant Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, sent on a fool’s errand to find evidence of a mythical Ukrainian server containing the DNC/Podesta emails? Absolutely not.
Why is anyone surprised that the Trump/Giuliani brain trust would subsequently confound the Ukrainian server theory with the more substantive Vogel-Stern reporting on Ukrainian assistance to the Clinton campaign?
The second form of debunking is more pernicious: Using a straw man conspiracy theory to debunk legitimate lines of inquiry.
Deemed ‘debunked’ by the mainstream media, the Biden-Burisma corruption allegation is a classic straw man debunk.
First, a little Burisma/Biden background:
Burisma is a holding company for a group of energy exploration and production companies and is controlled by Mykola Zlochevsky through his company Brociti Investments Limited. Charges of corruption by Western governments have followed the pro-Russia Zlochevsky for most of his career — which included a stint as Ukraine’s Minister of Ecology and Natural Resources from 2010 to 2012 under the pro-Russia government of President Viktor Yanukovych. Burisma Holdings is estimated to have had revenues around $400 million in 2018.
A Ukrainian revolution removed Yanukovych in February 2014 and was replaced by a more Western-leaning government eventually led by Petro Poroshenko from 2014 to 2019.
Hunter Biden, along with his legal partner Devon Archer, joined the Burisma board in April 2014, as part of Zlochevsky’s attempt to fend off corruption charges that were likely to be pursued more aggressively under the new political order in Ukraine.
Hunter’s father, Joe Biden, was the U.S. Vice President at the time and was the Obama administration’s point-man on Ukraine policy.
The facts and timeline alone should raise eyebrows among oxygen-breathing journalists. Had the Obama administration been as clean as Barack Obama claims, Hunter’s Ukrainian adventure would have been chop-blocked immediately by the White House ethics office.
And don’t believe the mainstream media when it suggests Hunter’s hiring was a non-issue within Washington, D.C.
Contradicting that assertion is the Washington Post’s reporting that Chris Heinz, Secretary of State John Kerry’s stepson and business partners with Devon Archer and Hunter Biden, opposed his partners Archer and Biden joining the board in 2014 due to the reputational risk. Heinz opposed the Biden-Archer deal because it was unethical, not because it was illegal. Even Vice President Biden asked his son if “he knew what he was doing.”
And this is the essence of the straw man debunk of the Burisma-Biden story: There was nothing illegal, so there is nothing to look at, we are repeatedly told by the mainstream media.
But legality was never the central question surrounding Hunter’s Burisma deal. Private citizens, even those related to vice presidents, are not generally prevented from joining the boards of foreign companies — even those with business interests directly involving the U.S. government. [There are exceptions, such as when the business’ home country is the target of U.S. sanctions, ex. Iran or Venezuela.]
Never mind that recent reporting has shown Burisma lobbied the U.S. State Department regarding the corruption investigations against it, at a time when Joe was still Vice President and Hunter was still on the Burisma board.
Never mind that the business arrangement Hunter Biden crafted with Burisma, where he sat on the board while his law firm was also hired as a consultant to Burisma, would be illegal in this country.
Nothing to look at here, we are told.
“A totally debunked conspiracy theory,” MSNBC’s Joy Reid continues to say about the Burisma-Biden story.
No aid money went from the U.S. government to Burisma while Hunter Biden was on the board, proudly asserts politifact.com. Again, another straw man debunk since few have seriously argued that aid money went directly to Burisma from the U.S. Treasury. The fact that the U.S.-picked Ukrainian prosecutor let Burisma walk away from corruption charges with only $9.5 million in fines (despite evidence Burisma and its subsidiaries failed to pay around $70 million in taxes from 2014–15 alone) is all the payback Burisma ever wanted.
This is what international financial corruption looks like with an assist from the U.S. news media.
And, no, getting Donald Trump out of office isn’t worth condoning the incurious, elite-friendly journalism that now dominates our national news organizations.
Another conspiracy theory debunking does not fit as neatly into the two categories I’ve created.
The chemical (chlorine) weapons attack on Douma, Syria on April 7, 2018 has seen a virtual news blackout since information has slowly emerged suggesting the culpability of the Bashar al-Assad regime is not clear— despite a near universal assumption in the Western media that Assad’s force did it.
MSNBC, CNN, Fox News, NPR, The New York Times, and The Washington Post have all definitely declared the Douma-attack an Assad crime. Any suggestion otherwise has been declared — you guessed it — a debunked conspiracy theory.
In the meantime, the Organisation for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), which investigated the Douma-attack and concluded it was mostly likely conducted by a helicopter drop (i.e., the Assad regime), has seen the release of a dissenting report by one of its staff engineers suggesting the Douma-attack was more likely ground-based, not air-based.
Recently, more potential evidence has been reported suggesting the OPCW may not be the independent watchdog of chemical weapons use it claims to be. [Rogue reporter (her words) Caitlin Johnstone has been reporting on Douma while the mainstream media has been silent. Her latest article on Douma is a must read.]
I wrote about Douma last year and concluded (as if my opinion matters): While the OPCW report (and dissenting report) still leave it unclear who conducted the attack, to state without qualification that the Assad regime did it is a willful disregard for the available evidence.
That is the problem when you let governments and their surrogates control information. They purposely ignore relevant facts so they can, technically, still claim they are not lying.
When the U.S. and its allies attacked Syria with Storm Shadow, MdCN, and Tomahawk missiles on April 14, 2018, the U.S .Department of Defense and its media outlets were still referring to the chemical attack on April 7th as a “suspected” chemical attack. French intelligence would claim they had definitive information that Assad was responsible for the April 7th attack: Judge for yourself the quality of the French information.
That, of course, is the defense and intelligence community’s ultimate fallback position should the full details ever become public: Battlefield information is frequently imperfect and we often need to act on the best information available at the time.
That is especially true when you don’t demand better information. And, naturally, MSNBC, Fox News and CNN didn’t ask for it when reporting on the April 14th missile attack by the U.S. and its allies.
That is how the game is played today and the score is — World elites: 23,265,784 and The Rest of Us: 12. [Glenn Greenwald, our leading scorer, is now mostly playing for the Brazilians.]
At the end of the day, conspiracy debunking is a variation on the Simon Says game we played as children.
If, through their congenital ignorance, Trump and Giuliani misstate a valid point of contention regarding Hunter Biden’s Ukrainian (and Chinese) deals or the 2016 Ukrainian activities of the Hillary Clinton campaign, should these topics be removed from the public debate or no longer the subject of further investigation by an independent press?
Of course not.
But that is exactly the chill the mainstream news media and the Democratic Party has cast over our national dialogue. Instead of arguing on the facts, they hide behind partisan talking points.
This need to kill intellectual inquiry by the U.S. political parties and the national news media is now hard-coded into the system and will be hard to excise from the body politic. It long ago killed from within the integrity of the Republican and Democratic parties and is swiftly killing objective journalism (if that patient isn’t dead as well).
The cure? We all need to stop getting our news and information from a short list of sources. Its OK to watch MSNBC, NPR, Fox News or CNN. It is not OK to get the vast majority of your information from these sources.
Nothing ignites a Democrat faster than saying you watch comedian Lee Camp’s Redacted Tonight on the RT network (a news network partially funded by the Russian government). Or, worse yet, tell them you love jagoff nightclub comedian Jimmy Dore’s YouTube channel. [There should be a required journalism course at Northwestern University titled, “How could Jimmy Dore get Russiagate right and the mainstream media totally f**ked it up?”]
Mention those shows and “Russian propaganda!” is a typical response. Besides the fact it isn’t true in the case of Redacted Tonight or The Jimmy Dore Show, why would that rule out watching something?
Hell yes! I want to know what the Russian government thinks. I want the Chinese Communist Party perspective too. And I want to know what the Iranian Supreme Leader is saying on current events. And, to be fair, I want the U.S. political and economic establishment’s latest propaganda spiel on my subscriber list (the hard part there is choosing between CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, The Washington Post or The New York Times. Usually any one of these sources will do, but, occasionally, genuine internal divisions within the establishment do emerge across those news outlets.).
That is what informed people do. They take in as much diverse information as possible and use their education and experience-informed intuition to sort out fact from fiction, as best as possible.
Its not easy. If it was, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and CNN’s Chris Cuomo would be doing it.
K.R.K.
Send comments and non-physical threats to: kroeger98@yahoo.com
The last destination in our journey through southern Jordan was Petra, an archaeological city that was the capital for the Nabataean Kingdom from about the 4th century BC until a major earthquake in 363 AD led to its eventual abandonment.
One of the best preserved structures in Petra, Al-Khazneh, also known as“The Treasury,” is its most famous, having served as the fictional resting place of the Holy Grail in Steven Spielberg’s 1989 movie, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (Paramount Pictures and LucasFilm, 1989)
Of all the touristy things we planned, for Zach, visiting “The Treasury” at Petra was the trip’s most anticipated event. The drive would be a couple of hours from Wadi Rum and the views along the way spectacular, according to Abo, our Jordanian guide.
He wasn’t kidding. The Jordan-Arabah Valley near Petra is deep and wide, employing a limited color palette ranging from grey pewter to buttermilk tan, but giving it a grim starkness no less stunning than the Grand Canyon or Bryce Canyon. My son described the Valley and the Edomite Mountains that define its texture as South Dakota’s “Badlands on steroids.”
Looking west (from Jordan Hwy. 35) towards the Edomite Mountains in the Jordan-Arabah Valley near Petra (Photo by Kent R. Kroeger)
At one point, Abo pulled the car over so we could take a few photos. To get a cleaner picture without the intrusion of cars, homes or highways, I smuggled myself away from the parking lot as far away as possible (without falling into the Jordan-Arabah Valley). From my vantage point there was no evidence of modern civilization, just the vastness of the Valley and its grey mountains. For a brief moment, I was Christopher Reeve in Somewhere in Time, a motivated time traveler. Moses himself, standing on that same spot, would have seen exactly what I saw on that day.
And, not coincidentally, the tallest mountain in my sight was Jebel Nebi Harun (“Mountain of the Prophet Aaron” in Arabic), one of the holiest sites in Jordan, venerated by Muslims, Christians and Jews as the resting place of Prophet Haroun, Moses’ brother.
But, as spectacular as the scenery was as we resumed our drive to Petra, my attention was drawn to Abo as he told us a story about another entourage he once escorted to Petra on the same highway.
No more than 30 kilometers outside Wadi Musa, the gate city to Petra, we passed a black Bedouin tent, one of many that we had seen in Jordan.
A Bedouin tent (Bait al Sha’er — House of Hair) in Wadi Rum (Photo courtesy of WadiRumRocks.com)
Bedouin tents, called Bait al Sha’er (‘House of Hair’) in Arabic, are made of goat hair, typically black, and are typically divided into two sections separated by a curtain known as a ma’nad. One side is reserved for the men and male guests and is called the mag’ad (‘sitting place’). The other half of the tent, called the maharama (‘place of the women’), is for cooking and female guests.
As we passed this particular Bedouin tent, Abo asked an unexpected question: “Have you heard of Muammar al-Gaddafi?”
In hesitating unison, we all gave a nod, or some indication in the affirmative. Undeniably, I had few positive images of Gaddafi. If we had done a free association exercise, my thoughts regarding Gaddafi would have been: Libyan dictator, Colonel, bombing of a Pan Am flight over Lockerbie (Scotland), gave up Libyan nuclear program, female guards (some taken from their homes as young girls and raped before becoming guards), his execution by rebels during the Libyan Civil War.
I do not have a positive view of Gaddafi…though I do have one quirky remembrance of him: In September 2009, he was scheduled to attend a United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York City. As he often did when he traveled abroad, he took with him a large Bedouin tent that he would set up to receive guests and dignitaries. What I did not know, until Abo told me, was that Gaddafi was born a Bedouin and carried its core tradition of exceptional hospitality with him when he became the Libyan leader in 1969 following a military coup.
In Bedouin culture, said Abo, a family will take in guests — who may be complete strangers — to stay in their home for as long as they need, without question. In fact, the host will not ask any questions of the visitor — even their name — until the fourth day of the stay. [I don’t even let immediate family stay more than three days in my home.]
During Gaddafi’s 2009 visit to New York City, he wanted to set up his tent in Central Park, but objections by the U.S. government stopped that idea. So, instead, somewhat ironically, Gaddafi had to rely on the hospitality of a private American citizen with a soft spot for aggrieved dictators — Donald Trump — to locate a large tract of private land in suburban New York City where the tent could be erected.
That is my Gaddafi memory. Abo had his own.
A little background first.
In October 2000, Gaddafi made his first visit to Jordan since King Abdullah II had been crowned the country’s ruling monarch in 1999.
Gaddafi had a famously icy relationship with other Arab leaders, including Jordan’s King Hussein, King Abdullah’s father. Observers would remark that the only thing Arab leaders ever reached a consensus agreement on was their collective dislike of Gaddafi.
Part of their annoyance with Gaddafi was his uncompromising support of the Palestinian cause and willingness expose Arab leaders when he felt they betrayed the Palestinian people. For that, Gaddafi is still admired by many Palestinians today.
But Gaddafi could sometimes just be rude and, especially when directed towards Arab monarchs not accustomed to such treatment, it caused deep-seeded resentment.
At the 1988 Arab League meeting in Algiers, Algeria, Gaddafi invited the other attending Arab leaders to “go to hell,” and, at one point, pulled a white hood over his head when Jordan’s King Hussein was giving a speech.
Abo’s Gaddafi story started as we passed a black Bedouin tent just outside of Wadi Musa. As Abo tells it, Gaddafi’s entourage passed a similar Bedouin tent in this same area back in 2000, on the way to a luncheon with King Abdullah in the ancient city of Petra. However, after spotting the Bedouin tent, Gaddafi had the entourage’s fleet of cars pull over and stop.
“Gaddafi exited his car and asked everyone to place their cellphones in the trunk of one of the cars,” recalled Abo. “Nobody would be able to contact King Abdullah’s staff to notify them of Gaddafi’s likely late arrive to the luncheon.”
The male head of household greeted Gaddafi and invited him for food and coffee, as would be the Bedouin custom.
“Three hours later,” laughed Abo.
Gaddafi was so moved by the hospitality of this Bedouin family he would later send them money to build homes for the parents and their children, according to Abo, who spoke passionately about Gaddafi’s desire to be “with the people, no matter their status.”
Back in Petra, King Abdullah, who waited for Gaddafi’s arrival at the luncheon, was furious. When Gaddafi finally did arrive, King Abdullah let the Libyan leader know how profoundly insulted he was by the tardiness, softening his admonishment somewhat by calling Gaddafi a “mentor.”
As well-know as Gaddafi was for his legendary rudeness, he was equally well-known for his ability to charm enemies and critics (when motivated to do so), and did exactly that with the young Jordanian King.
Our Jordanian guide, Abo, a middle-aged man of Palestinian descent, greeted us outside our hotel in central Amman.
“Good morning!” he said with a wide grin across his handsome, sun-weathered face. “We have a long drive to Wadi Rum.” A five-hour drive, according to Siri.
As my wife, two of her work colleagues, and my son piled into a white Dodge Caravan, I hurriedly finished a Boston creme I purchased from a Dunkin Donuts next to the hotel. My wife glared back at me, knowing I would mess Abo’s nicely detailed van if I tried to finish my feeble breakfast there.
“I’m sorry, Christa. I was hungry.” Her glare softened somewhat.
“Just finish it outside.”
My teenage son, Zach, in a constant grump since arriving in Amman, especially after our room’s satellite TV feed went dark, jumped into the far back rumble seat with me and put in his earbuds, immediately losing himself in a YouTube video.
Abo gave us a quick description of the route we’d be taking through Amman’s southern suburbs and then south on Jordan’s Route 15.
“Can we stop at a QuikTrip?” Zach barked up to his mother, sounding like a military officer’s command to an XO. Abo, thinking the question was for him, seemed puzzled.
“I don’t think they call them QuikTrip’s here,” I told Zach.
“A 7–Eleven?” Zach clarified, as if that would help Abo understand. “WaWa?” was Zach’s last halfhearted attempt at generating mutual understanding, as his attention returned to his video.
I pulled out my cell phone to plot our trip on Google Earth and wasn’t encouraged when the virtual terrain looked like a mix of Utah’s Salt Flats and Nevada’s Mojave Desert, with a few small villages sprinkled here and there.
I tried to ask Abo about any sights of interest along the drive, but the combination of road noise and my wife’s shoptalk with her colleagues left my question unheard and unanswered.
Perhaps I’ll grab some additional sleep, I thought to myself, but then remembered my wife was in the van. There would be no sleeping.
Among my wife’s best qualities is her limitless curiosity, as she will ask questions and pester hosts right up to their breaking point — and everyone has a breaking point (except for Abo, thankfully).
We were on the road for no more than an hour when we came to an isolated, but sizable town.
“What city is this?” Christa asked.
“Talbieh Camp,” replied Abo. “A Palestinian camp created after the 1967 War.”
Consisting mostly of internally displaced Palestinian Jordanians when it opened, as opposed to Palestinian refugees that crossed into Jordan during the war, the camp today is home to about 9,000 Palestinians living in an area covering roughly 0.13 square kilometers — about three times the population density of Guttenberg, New Jersey (the most densely-populated incorporated municipality in the U.S.).
Entry road to Talbieh Camp near Amman, Jordan (Photo by Kent R. Kroeger)
As we passed the camp, Abo related his own story in which, as a young boy, he was forced to move with his family from Jerusalem to Jordan as a consequence of the ’67 War.
“My family still has a home and property in Israel,” said Abo. “We could sell it, but the Israelis will only let us sell it to the them.”
My follow-up question about whether the property is earning income for his family went unheard as my wife asked why many of the homes in Talbieh had concrete columns with rebar protruding from the top of the dwellings. It was a better question anyway, as it was striking how many homes and buildings in these camps had an unfinished look.
“So they can add a new floor,” replied Abo.
Concrete columns and protruding rebar in Uum Sayoun (Bedouin Village), Jordan (Photo by Joseph Redwood-Martinez)
“Say again?” asked Christa.
Abo explained how the Jordanian government limits the number of floors a home can have, but, under current law, the government won’t make a family tear it down if the additional floor is complete. So, when a family can afford it, the family hires building contractors to come in at night and complete the new floor before morning.
Whether Abo’s story is a complete explanation is less important than the symbolism of these concrete columns. “Necessary incompleteness” is how writer and filmmaker Joseph Redwood-Martinez characterizes this architectural phenomena, which exists in other parts of the world as well, such as Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Mexico, the United States, Jordan, Israel, Palestine and Turkey.
Optimism is a word not often associated with the Palestinians in the Western media. But I heard it many times while in Jordan. Abo’s own story is an exemplar of this outlook. A refugee of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a child, as an adult he helped build a successful Jordanian tourism company and, today, his children are college-educated or bound, including a son studying at a U.S. university. Abo and his family’s story is not uncommon in Jordan.
Just over 2.5 percent of Jordan’s total population is enrolled at a university, a proportion comparable to the United Kingdom, and the percentage of Jordanians 25 years old and older with at least a college degree has risen from 9 percent in 2001 to 12 percent in 2014, according to the World Values Survey. In comparison, 36 percent of U.S. adults in this age bracket have at least a college degree.
Abo spoke with obvious pride about his family, particularly with respect to their educational accomplishments, and about Jordan, in general. But his contagious enthusiasm was also laced with a keen understanding of the country’s realities.
Jordan has a lot of refugees, he would remind us as we drove past smaller, more recently opened refugee camps, usually Syrian’s that had fled the Syrian Civil War.
Jordan hosts over 670,000 Syrian refugees, but has not permitted these refugees to seek asylum, according to Human Rights Watch. The Syrian refugees tend to be isolated in remote border areas within Jordan with limited access to humanitarian aid.
In addition to the existing refugees who are fully or partially integrated into Jordanian society, the Syrian refugees will further increase the financial commitment required by the Jordanian government and the international community to handle Jordan’s refugee population.
And the Jordanian education system is already under pressure.
The recent influx of Syrian refugees (in addition to a large number of existing refugees from the West Bank, Gaza, Iraq, Egypt and other parts of the Middle East) have put tremendous pressure on the capacity of Jordan to handle more students. Adding to the stress, the unilateral decision by the U.S. in August 2018 to stop its contribution to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which in amounted to about one-third of the Agency’s $1.1 billion 2017 budget, has had a devastating impact on Palestinian refugees in Jordan, particularly children.
UNRWA services to the 2.3 million Palestinian refugees registered in Jordan include aid for education, health care, food security and other essential day-to-day services. UNWRA also employs thousands of Jordanians.
“These funds go toward a modern, secular education for 500,000 boys and girls; vaccinations and health clinics that provide services to over three million refugees and a basic level of dignity for millions who otherwise would lead lives of despair,” said Hady Amr, a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brooking Institute’s Center for Middle East Policy, soon after the U.S. decision was announced. “So when UNRWA cuts back services in the impoverished refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, the West Bank, and Gaza, what forces on the ground will fill the void? Whoever it is, they are unlikely to be America’s friends. Even the Israeli military knows that cutting funding for basic services to refugees are a recipe for disaster for Israel.”
While not necessarily linked to the U.S. action against UNWRA, a November 5th knife attack on tourists in Jerash, Jordan by a young, unemployed Palestinian refugee from the UNWRA-run Jerash Camp highlights a subgroup in Jordan susceptible to radicalization and to committing acts of violence.
According to the assailant’s family, the young man grew more radicalized after being unable to attend a higher education institution due to its cost and, subsequently, finding it difficult to find regular employment.
That is a story that may become even more common in Jordan if it cannot adequately support the growing demand for educational and other social services among its most economically vulnerable populations.
The author, his son, a local Bedouin host, and our guide, Abo Yazan Mahfoze
We eventually made it to Wadi Rum, one of God’s geologic masterworks in southern Jordan, where a number of well-known American movies have been filmed, including David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia and, more recently, The Martian, starring Matt Damon.
Wadi Rum’s wind-eroded, sun-drenched sandstone and granite rock formations are beautiful and humbling.
“The Seven Pillars” rock formation in Wadi Rum (Photo by Kent R. Kroeger)
Among the region’s many striking geologic features are The Seven Pillars, which was the inspiration for the title of T. E. Lawrence’s autobiography, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, an account of his experiences during the Arab Revolt of 1916–18, when Lawrence was based in Wadi Rum as a member of the British Forces of North Africa.
Lawrence grew to respect the harshness of the desert environment surrounding and encompassing Wadi Rum, also known as the Valley of the Moon. “By day the hot sun fermented us; and we were dizzied by the beating wind. At night we were stained by dew, and shamed into pettiness by the innumerable silences of stars,” he wrote.
The author, trying to keep his hat on (which he eventually lost to a camel), and his son, in the back of an ATV in Wadi Rum (Photo by Christa Olson)
All the same, from the vantage point of a sporty all-terrain vehicle, Wadi Rum seemed quite hospitable to the human desire for play, almost calling out to have you run up one of its limitless number of sand dunes or scramble to the top of one of its towering, craggy rock faces.
We learned quickly, however. Don’t do that.
While its sad to think mass tourism might someday harm the natural beauty of Wadi Rum, the region has many assets working in its favor to mitigate that problem. For one, its relentless, sand-saturated winds can wipe out evidence of human activity in just minutes. Furthermore, if its hair-roasting, bone-dry heat doesn’t convince you of its hostility towards humans, a presumptuous dash up one of its sand dunes will more than break whatever remaining spirit you still possess.
“Try running up this sand dune,” challenged Abo, as he stopped the ATV in the midst of a relatively narrow passage bordered by two parallel rock formations, each about 200 feet in height with walls of sand drifting up perhaps 20 to 30 feet at their base.
“How hard can this be?” I shouted towards Zach, who was 10 feet up the sand drift before he had a chance reply.
Zach at the top of a sand drift in Wadi Rum (Photo by Kent R. Kroeger)
How hard could it be? Really? Zach was already a few feet from the top, talking smack back in my direction.
“Dad, you’re too fat,” was his encouragement.
It did seem like Zach’s 90-pound frame coasted up the drift; where as, my 185-pound heft seemed to get increasingly swallowed by the sand with every step. And when the sand wasn’t chewing me up, it was pushing me back down the dune.
What took Zach maybe five minutes to accomplish, I needed 20, taking a brief respite at the three-quarter mark, a demarcation I dubbed the ‘death zone,’ seriously wondering if my heart might stop if I took one more step. Combined with the energy-sapping heat, I genuinely entertained the possibility I could die right there, on a nameless sand dune in a place that was beginning to look more like Mars than Earth. The warning that someone lost in this desert on an especially hot day could die within hours was becoming palpable.
A month removed from my attempt to scale what was. objectively, a small sand dune, my back still hasn’t forgiven me and I’m still digging sand out of my fingernails.
Wadi Rum’s natural environment is beautiful but not made with humans in mind. It’s uncharitable ecosystem makes it even more remarkable that a group of people like the Bedouins — a nomadic people that live in the desert — have survived off this land since the time of the Old Testament. Jordan alone has 360,000 Bedouins living within its borders, more than any other country except Syria and Saudi Arabia.
Where Westerners prefer occupying and terraforming hostile environments to fit their wants, the Bedouin’s have, out of necessity, adapted to the challenges of the Arabian desert. And, to a similar extent, the Arabs throughout this region share this accommodative trait with the Bedouins. The Arabic term Naseeb — meaning fate or destiny — is part of the cultural bedrock for Muslims, reinforcing their deference to Allah’s will. In American colloquial language, we’d say the Jordanians and the Bedouins know how to go with the flow.
Has this traditional, almost fatalistic attitude held back economic development and social progress in the Middle East? I’m skeptical, though Western social scientists love using culture-based, Clash of Civilizations-type theories to explain variation in economic and social development across world cultures.
But as I laid on the side of that sand dune in Wadi Rum wondering how long it would take for the wind to completely cover my lifeless body in sand, the last thing on my mind was whether cultural norms centered on self-expression and secular-rational values are best at promoting economic and social development.
I just wanted to get off that sand dune and to our lodging for the night — a tent. A very nice, air-conditioned “tent”…with satellite TV.
The fat author and his son, happy with their “tent” in Wadi Rum (Photo by Christa Olson)
President Donald Trump should familiarize himself with the Jewish Sicarii from the First Jewish-Roman War (66 AD — 73 AD). The Sicarii, a splinter group of the Jewish Zealots, are most revered for their last stand against the Romans on the mountain fortress at Masada (in Israel near the Dead Sea).
Faced with certain annihilation by the Romans in 74 AD, the 960 Jewish Sicarii on Masada took their own lives, thereby denying the Romans the full satisfaction of victory.
In politics, the metaphorical equivalent to suicide is ending your candidacy for public office.
Now is the time for someone Trump trusts to walk the President through the different scenarios most likely to unfold over the next 12 months. None of them end well for the President. But one scenario ends demonstrably better than the others.
First, consider Trump’s worst-case scenario — the path he is on now — in which he is impeached, put on trial by the U.S. Senate, and is either removed from office and/or suffers a landslide defeat at the polling booth on November 3, 2020.
There is no electoral path to victory for Trump in 2020. There will be no surge in Hispanic or African-American votes large enough to give Trump another surprise victory. There will be no backlash over the impeachment hearings and Senate trial large enough to give him the victory either. And the strong economy will not push independents and swing voters overwhelmingly into his corner.
What if the Democrats nominate a deeply-flawed candidate? In all likelihood, they will nominate such a candidate — and Trump still won’t have the votes to win.
Based on the most current polling data, Trump’s maximum potential in the popular vote percentage is in the mid-to-upper-40s. With these numbers, the best-case scenario for Trump is that he doesn’t lose on a Jimmy Carter-like scale.
A strong third-party candidacy from the left or center-left could alter the scenario probabilities. Yet, despite Jonathan Chait’s recent evidence-free rant on the subject, there is no indication that this will happen. It could, but — as of now — not likely.
And the cocksure pundits saying Trump can still win in 2020 are many of the same ones that said he had no chance of winning in 2016.
Rest easy, Democrats. This time around, there really is no meaningful chance of another election surprise by Trump.
Donald Trump will not be re-elected president and here is why…
He has run out of time. One year may seem like an eternity in politics, but in the domain of presidential approval, one year is the blink of an eye.
Like Secretariat’s head-of-the-stretch move in the last quarter of the 1973 Kentucky Derby, relatively unpopular first-term presidents who eventually win re-election are already starting their approval surge by this point in their presidency (e.g., Reagan, Clinton, and Obama).
Trump is not Secretariat. According to the RealClearPolitics.com poll average, his job approval has been stagnant since May 2018 (see Figure 1) and, with impeachment hearings in the near future, the prospects for sustained approval growth are doubtful.
According to the Gallup Poll, at this juncture in his presidency Trump is significantly behind Bill Clinton, G. W. Bush, and Ronald Reagan — all incumbent presidents that were re-elected (see Figures 2 and 3). At 39 percent job approval in mid-October 2019, Trump is 10 points behind Clinton’s pace and 16 points behind G. W. Bush.
Figure 2: Job Approval During First-Term for Trump, GW Bush, and Clinton
At 13 months out from Election Day, Trump most resembles Barack Obama, with a job approval rating of 39 percent (see Figure 4). But that is where the similarity ends.
Figure 4: Job Approval During First-Term for Obama and Trump
Every modern president, except Trump, has experienced significant periods of job approval (among U.S. adults) north of 50 percent. Obama had around 50 weeks above 50 percent during his first term. Trump has spent zero weeks in that territory. As Figure 1 (above) shows, Trump’s job approval appears to have a ceiling at around 45 percent. Only in the first couple of weeks of his presidency did Trump enjoy approval ratings above 45 percent — and then, just barely.
Is 45-percent job approval enough to win a presidential election?
Since it has never happened, the answer is probably ‘No.’ In the modern polling era, the lowest job approval near Election Day for a winning incumbent is Obama’s 50 percent (see Figure 5). Obama did have some margin of error in that regard, as he won the popular vote by 3.9 percentage points and the electoral vote by 62 percentage points. But would Obama at 45 percent approval have won in 2012? Probably not.
Figure 5: Comparison of Recent Presidents on Job Approval and Re-election Outcomes
Figure 5 shows that winning incumbents have one thing in common: Job approval at or above 50 percent near Election Day. The two incumbent losers — Jimmy Carter and George H. W. Bush — possessed job approval ratings of 37 percent at that time. Not a good place to be.
And that is basically where Trump sits today.
Still, Trump is only 11 percentage points short of 50 percent approval. Thirteen months must be enough time for Trump to close the gap, right?
No, not for Trump it isn’t.
Trump’s uncommon problem is his lack of variation in job approval over time. For him to achieve 50 percent approval would require a magnitude of improvement unseen during his administration.
Figure 5 (above) puts Trump’s approval numbers in historical context. With a standard deviation of 2.5 percentage points, Trump has by far the lowest approval variance in of any president in the modern polling era. Second place is Obama with a standard deviation of 5.4 percentage points.
For Trump to achieve 50-percent approval, it would require a shift of four standard deviations from his mean approval level (39.7 percent approval — which is about where he is at now, according to Gallup). Based on his distribution of approval ratings over the past three years, there is about a 0.1 percent chance of Trump ever seeing 50-percent approval.
In other words, there is virtually no chance of Trump seeing approval numbers anywhere close to what he needs to get re-elected.
Even among the one-term presidents, both Carter and H. W. Bush experienced approval rates in excess of 50 percent (see Figure 6) during their administrations. Trump has no such experience and, most likely, never will.
Figure 6: Job Approval During First-Term for Carter, G HW Bush, and Trump
Am I being too pessimistic? Just because Trump has never enjoyed the approval of most Americans, that doesn’t mean it isn’t possible. Did Trump’s electoral victory in 2016 ever feel possible?
Suppose, instead, that Trump leverages the strong economy while turning a strong majority of American people against the impeachment process underway in the Democrat-controlled U.S. House [Right now, that scenario seems unlikely given recent polling data showing 49 percent of the public supports impeachment and removal.)
In months where Trump’s approval increases, on average in grows at about 0.8 percentage points per month. If, over the next 12 months, Trump’s approval grows each month at that rate, he would enter Election Day around 50 percent approval. Conceivably, he’d be a competitive candidate with that approval level— particularly if a third-party candidacy from the left emerges.
Unfortunately, there is no reason to believe that scenario is even remotely possible. Trump has never put together more than three consecutive months of approval growth. To win re-election, he needs 12 consecutive months.
Others point to Trump’s huge money advantage. (If the 2016 election teaches us anything, having more money isn’t always enough. Ask Hillary.)
And others assume the Democrats will find a way to screw up another winnable election.
The problem with GOP optimism is its requirement that Trump’s job approval will increase consistently on a scale unobserved heretofore.
Trump has never sniffed 50 percent approval and there is no evidence to think he will.
There are just too many firsts required for a Trump re-election victory to become a reality. To almost quote Hans Solo, presidential job approval just doesn’t work that way.
For Trump, the impeachment process is a cloudy day that won’t go away. Nowhere does GOP optimism get more delusional than when talking about the supposed backlash the Democrats are going to suffer if they pursue impeachment. Remember Clinton! is their battle cry. The American people will punish the Democrats for trying to remove a U.S. president over such a minor incident (the alleged Trump-Ukrainian quid pro quo deal) is their logic.
I do remember Bill Clinton. The Republicans tried to remove him for covering up an Oval Office blow job after years of trying (and failing) to indict him for financial misdeeds surrounding the infamous Whitewater land deal.
Clinton’s situation bears no resemble to one where Trump appears to — at least implicitly — ask a foreign leader to aid his presidential campaign by investigating Hunter Biden’s relationship with a Ukrainian energy company in exchange for the delivery of U.S. surface-to-air defense systems.
[Trump’s defense materializes in one of two forms: ‘It wasn’t anexplicit double-dog-dare-youquid pro quo’ or ‘The president is just reallyconcerned about Ukrainian corruptionand its implications on U.S. national security.’ Coincidently, when it is soon revealed Obama explicitly approved the surveillance of an opposition party’s presidential candidate, his defense will be similar to Trump’s ‘in the name of national security’ defense.]
The confidence among Trump’s flock begs the question: How could Trump’s approval gain during an impeachment process predicated on genuine evidence when it didn’t grow at all during the course of the Robert Mueller-led investigation of Russia-Trump collusion? An investigation predicated on exceptionally thin evidence for such an unparalleled allegation.
Trump needs to make the best out of a certain defeat. Certain defeats are prevalent throughout military and political history: The Greeks, 7,000 in number, blocking the passage of 70,000 Persian soldiers in the Battle of Thermopylae. The Chasseurs Ardennaisdisguising their numbersagainst the Nazi Wehrmacht in the Battle of Belgium. Walter Mondale picking Geraldine Ferraro as his running mate against Ronald Reagan in 1984.The Jewish Sicarii committing collective suicide on their mountain fortress at Masada rather than allow the Romans the satisfaction of a battle victory.
Despite their defeats, the defeated are remembered more for their heroics than their objective failures. Sure, in Mondale’s case, picking a female VP was more like a Hail Mary than an act of heroism. Nonetheless, history is often kind to losers who go down with honor and flair — particularly when their final act is seemingly selfless.
The words ‘selfless’ and ‘Trump’ are not often used in the same sentence, but a selfless act may be the only “winning” option left for the President. A drubbing at the hands of Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren is not going to help the Trump brand, much less a Republican Party on the verge of losing the presidency, House and Senate.
For the sake of his party and his legacy, Trump would be better served walking away from the 2020 election, giving his party at least a puncher’s chance to keep the presidency. Former UN ambassador Nikki Haley or Texas Senator Ted Cruz are more than capable of taking the baton on short notice and putting forth a credible presidential campaign.
He can do a nationwide tour promoting his greatest and most perfect accomplishments. Throngs of devotees can gush over him with messianic-like adoration. Everything he cares most about — himself — confirmed in a series of uncensored, glorious pep rallies.
Just as the Sicarii denied the Romans their want for a victory in battle, Trump can deny the Democrats their want for his head on the figurative platter.
The Roman-era Jewish historian Titus Flavius Josephus described what the Roman army found when the scaled Masada’s steep walls:
Now for the Romans, they expected that they should be fought in the morning, when accordingly they put on their armor, and laid bridges of planks upon their ladders from their banks, to make an assault upon the fortress, which they did, but saw nobody as an enemy, but a terrible solitude on every side, with a fire within the place as well as a perfect silence.
Battle glory denied.
Trump is not going to win the 2020 election and will likely take down the Republican majority in the U.S. Senate in the process, and probably an innumerable number of state officeholders as well.
For the good of his party and his own self-interest, Trump needs to end his 2020 presidential campaign.
K.R.K.
Praise and insults can be sent to: kroeger98@yahoo.com
This essay documents my challenges, observations and an occasional, unintended interpretation of their broader meaning during my family’s recent travels through Oman and Jordan.
[Note: The names in this essay have been changed to protect identities.]
If the world seems on the verge of exploding, you are probably watching too much news on cable TV.
On the other hand, there may be something real going on. Something so fundamental that even the U.S. can’t alter its trajectory.
In the past few months, we have had protests in Hong Kong, Ecuador, Chile, Lebanon, Iraq, UK and Jordan. Whether it is teachers, pro or anti-Brexiteers, students, or disgruntled commuters, anger appears to be rising among the world’s citizens.
The dark forces exploiting this growing discontent are gaining power so fast, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius is convinced the time is now for the U.S. to extend its regime-change magic to Lebanon. [What could possibly go wrong?]
But is this apparent increase in worldwide protest significantly different from the recent past? The answer is a tentative ‘yes.’
Let us look at the data. According to the GDELT project, the term ‘protest’ in the world’s TV news has been on the rise since January 2018, particularly on Al Jazeera and the BBC World Service.
Figure 1: Frequency the term ‘protest’ used in major news broadcasts
Source: GDELT Project
We are repeatedly told by the news media that, since the election of Donald Trump, the world has become more agitated (and Figure 1 suggests this is true). And this tumult has had profound consequences on countries otherwise free of conflict and violence.
Nowhere more so than Jordan and its capital city of Amman.
Amman, Jordan rests in the middle of it all
Human settlements in Amman, Jordan date back over 9,000 years, but the city today doesn’t look a day over 200-years-old.
Amman is like a pair of old leather shoes that are comfortable. Clearly having seen more prosperous days, the city is ragged but relaxed. It’s worn down but durable.
My son and I had just arrived in Amman from Muscat, Oman, the day before when a hired driver picked us up at our hotel near the old city center.
Our driver, Farouk, a middle-aged Palestinian and father of four, said he was eager to show us his city as he took one last drag on his half-smoked cigarette before snuffing it out. [Everyone in Jordan smokes, or so it seemed. Hookah lounges were everywhere.]
As our hotel was in old Amman, near the former parliament building, we were walking distance to most everything we needed during our four-day stay. Still, an informal driving tour is a useful introduction to any new city.
Farouk’s English was far better than my Arabic so after a few minutes of exploratory small-talk, we settled into a conversational rhythm that seemed to facilitate mutual understanding.
Soviet-era Russian proverb: To learn about someone’s politics, avoid talking politics.
When traveling abroad, it is advisable to avoid conversations about politics, particularly in a country like Jordan which, despite the generally laid back demeanor of its citizens, is still a constitutional monarchy where political speech and press freedoms are significantly constrained. The democracy watchdog group, Freedom House, classifies Jordan as only ‘partly free,’ scoring the country a 37 out of 100 on their Freedom Index. In its 2019 report on worldwide press freedom,Reporters without Borders (RWB) ranked Jordan 130th out 180 countries (Afghanistan ranks higher than Jordan on the RWB’s Press Freedom Index).
Nevertheless, in a region where one’s very existence can be a potent political statement, politics hangs in the bone-dry Jordanian air like a low-frequency hum. You see politics everywhere, if you look for it.
Using an unscientific sampling method (i.e., any taxi cab that passed Farouk’s car), I estimated that about 1-in-20 Amman taxi cabs had Saddam Hussein’s image pasted on the back bumper or window. Not a surprise, considering the former Iraqi strongman was one of the first Arab leaders to embrace the Palestinian cause, at least superficially; but the ubiquity of his image still begged the question: “Why Saddam Hussein?”
“He is admired by many Palestinians,” Farouk said. He didn’t elaborate. He didn’t need to.
During his rule, Saddam Hussein granted equal-rights status to roughly 35,000 Palestinian refugees living in Iraq — most of whom came to Iraq in one of three waves: (1) the 1948 war surrounding Israel’s creation, (2) after the Six-Day War in 1967, and (3) and in the 1990s after many Palestinians were expelled by Gulf states opposed to Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait.
“Portraying himself as a defender of the Palestinian cause for statehood, Saddam gave them subsidized housing and the right to work — rare privileges for foreign refugees that bred resentment among many Iraqis,” according to journalist Ahmed Rasheed.
Not every Jordanian Palestinian keeps warm feelings about Saddam, however. One such person on my Reddit feed (“Samir”) explained the Jordanian fondness for the former Iraqi leader as rooted in his selling oil to Jordan in the 1990s at preferential prices in exchange for the Jordanians helping Saddam escape U.N-imposed sanctions by utilizing Jordan’s Aqaba port.
“Let us not forget that Iraq under his reign tried to blow up some Amman hotels in the 1990s hosting Americans,” Samir noted.
Farouk abruptly merged onto Khaled Ben Al-Walid Street, a major road artery in Amman’s central district, cutting off a taxi cab in the process. As he darted back and forth between lanes of fast-moving traffic, I felt like I was on Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride at Disney World.
As our speed settled into a crawl as we came upon a minor traffic jam, Farouk pointed to some nondescript buildings to our left. “Jabal el-Hussein refugee camp,” he said.
“A Palestinian camp?” I asked.
“Yes,” he responded. “Created after 1948 (Arab-Israeli war). But now also Syrians and Egyptians.”
Built in 1952, the camp originally housed 8,000 Palestinian refugees in a area covering 0.4 square kilometers in northwest Amman, not far from the The Citadel, a Roman-era complex of ruins in the heart of Amman. Today, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) says the camp’s population exceeds 29,000 registered refugees, but unofficial population estimates report the number of people living in Jabal el-Hussein camp is between 40,000 and 60,000 people, including many Syrian refugees who escaped that country’s recent civil war.
Jabal el-Hussein Palestinian refugee camp in Amman, Jordan (Photo by Christopher Lee, Public Radio Int’l)
Jabal el-Hussein Palestinian refugee camp in Amman, Jordan (Photo by: Hasan Isawi)
My first surprise was that the Jabal el-Hussein camp looked like just another Amman neighborhood. The buildings were closer together, perhaps. But, otherwise, it would be hard to know where the camp begins and where it ends.
After over 60 years in existence, many Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan have morphed from transitory tent cities to complex, permanent communities that, by all appearances, seem integrated into the host country’s economy.
“Is it safe for us to walk around the camp?” I asked timidly, not wanting to offend our host.
“Safe?” he said with a smile. “This is Jordan. Of course, it is safe.” A refrain we would hear more than once while in Jordan.
Before starting our driving tour of Amman, I had asked Farouk if we could visit one of the Amman’s Palestinian refugee camps. He didn’t respond at the time, which I assumed was either a function of the language barrier or that I was asking something politically sensitive.
So when in the middle of our car tour he pointed out the Jabal el-Hussein camp, I was surprised. Pleasantly so. And even more so as he continued talking about refugees more broadly — specifically, their impact on everyday life in Jordanian society.
“We have many refugees because we are safe,” Farouk started. “But our government doesn’t have the money to take care of everyone.”
Behind only Lebanon, Jordan has 71 refugees for every 1,000 Jordanian citizens. In third place is Turkey, with 43 refugees for every 1,000 Turkish citizens.
Figure 2: Countries with highest refugee density (2017)
Source: UN High Commissioner for Refugees (2018)
But, factoring in undocumented refugees, one World Bank official estimated that one-out-of-three people living in Jordan in 2015 was a refugee. In a country of 9.7 million, that is around 3 million refugees.
Whatever the true figure, refugees are a major cost factor within the country’s public and private economies.
“Jordan is now hosting just over 650,000 registered Syrian refugees, with some estimating the total number, including unregistered persons, closer to double that,” according to Mark Plant, Chief Operating Officer of the Center for Global Development (Europe), an independent research organization. “At the same time, international partners, notably the International Monetary Fund (IMF), have been insisting that Jordan take actions to bring down government debt to more sustainable levels through increasing fiscal discipline to tame government deficits. These dual imperatives by the international community — host more refugees and tame the budget — seem to put Jordan in an untenable situation as long as the refugee crisis continues.”
In terms of Jordan’s financial ability to handle such a large refugee population, the evidence is mixed. On the positive side, at 30 percent of GDP, Jordan has a relatively small amount of external debt (i.e., total public and private debt owed to nonresidents repayable in internationally accepted currencies). In terms of gross government debt, however, Jordan possesses one of the highest debt levels relative to GDP at 96 percent (for comparison, the gross government debt relative to GDP for the U.S. is 107 percent). For all countries, the average gross government debt relative to GDP is 60 percent, according to the IMF.
Jordan receives substantial support from the international community. But, even with that assistance, Jordan’s government budget is strained…and the people feel it.
More than once Farouk reminded me that the Palestinians in Jordan “are Jordanians.” And he wanted to make it clear that Jordanian support for the Syrian and Iraqi refugees is evidence of Jordan’s strong humanitarian history, but that Jordanian citizens — most of whom are Palestinian — cannot be of secondary importance.
Farouk’s sentiment should sound vaguely familiar to Americans. Replace “Syrian refugees” with “Mexicans” and “Jordanians” with “Americans” and you have Donald Trump’s core immigration platform.
And it is not just working-class Jordanians extending this opinion. Ahmed, a Jordanian academic and former senior government official for Jordan’s King Abdullah told me during dinner, “Few countries have more refugees for its population size than Jordan — and we have expertise on refugees issues that we need to share — but we also have limits.”
Concerned that Jordan’s government budget deficit was too high to maintain long-term, he cited Jordan’s recent teachers strike that resulted in Jordanian teachers getting a 35 percent pay raise. “The government didn’t even get the teachers to accept performance pay standards,” he lamented.
Jordanian Teachers March in Amman, Jordan in September 2019 (Photo by Khalil Mazraawi/AFP)
The Jordanian teachers strike underscores the risk in underestimating the potential for Jordan’s domestic stressors to impact regime stability. Nevertheless, casual conversations with Jordanians leave a strong impression that popular support for the King Abdullah is high and not immediately threatened.
As Farouk dropped my son and I off at our hotel following our tour, I again asked if there were any areas near our hotel we should avoid walking around at night. He clearly thought I was just another overly cautious, misinformed American — but, in my defense, Amman is a big city and like any city it has ‘bad areas.’
“You are safe,” he assured me. “This is Jordan.”
Farouk’s national pride notwithstanding, a variety of crime statistics do confirm that Jordan is relatively safe, at least compared to its neighbors.
According to Numbeo.com’s survey-based Crime index, Jordan is relatively crime-free compared to its Arab neighbors, ranking 62nd out of 123 countries. In comparison, the Palestinian Territories rank 46th, Lebanon 63rd, Iraq 73rd, Egypt 81st, and Syria 114th. Using a more concrete metric — annual homicide rate — Jordan ranks 67th out of 195 countries with an annual murder rate of 1.4 murders per 100,000 inhabitants, compared to 9.9 for Iraq, 4.0 for Lebanon, and 2.5 for Egypt.
But it is not on individual-level crime statistics that Jordan stands out. Saudi Arabia is much safer than Jordan, but at a tremendous cost to Saudi personal freedoms. It is at a more macro-level that Jordan truly looks like a regional outlier.
In Amman, we were only 55 miles from the Syrian border at the Jaber Border Crossing (similar to the distance between Philadelphia and Dover, Delaware) and 130 miles from Damascus, Syria (similar to the distance between Philadelphia and Washington, D.C.). Yet, the problems of Jordan’s northern neighbor could not have felt more distant. Even as news coverage of Turkey’s incursion into northern Syria dominated the regional news channels, there was no evidence that people in Amman were overly concerned. Our hosts occasionally would make glancing references about the Turkey-Syrian-Kurdish conflict, and only as a contrast to Jordan’s general state of peace and generosity in taking in Syrian refugees.
“You can’t blame the Syrians here in Jordan for not wanting to go back to Syria,” commented Ahmed. “They fear reprisals from (Bashar al) Assad’s police state.”
My most vivid contrast to Jordan was the country of Oman, where my son and I had spent the previous week prior to arriving in Amman.
Other than Islam’s omnipresence, Jordan is an antipode to Oman. Modernity has settled into Oman with the subtlety of a Donald Trump applause line. The newness found everywhere in Oman’s capital, Muscat, has a calculated presence amidst a still conservative Islamic society, suggesting Muscat as a ‘future Dubai’ at one moment and, at another, emitting the aura of a stubbornly ancient culture. It’s a tension that may work in Oman’s favor in the long run. Or it may not.
What Oman and Jordan have in common is their status as enclaves of peace and stability surrounded by neighbors that are either being bombed or bombing someone else.
Here’s a quick rundown of Jordan and Oman’s neighborhood:
Egypt’s Sisi regime is facing its biggest domestic protests of its relatively brief reign. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has regressed into an active, never-ending crime scene disproportionately favoring the perpetrator over the victim and showing no signs of changing that dynamic.
Syria is the mess du jour for now. But Iraq always waits in the anteroom ready to take over that role in a moment’s notice.
Lebanon is facing its largest mass protests in decades. And, on Lebanon’s southern border, Hezbollah remains locked in a continuous standoff with Israel while it also support’s Assad’s efforts to regain a tight grip on his people.
Saudi Arabia and UAE continue their cruel proxy war with Iran in Yemen, leaving the most vulnerable in Yemen on the constant brink of death by famine and disease.
And, yet, there is Jordan in the middle of all that chaos, appreciating their relative quiescence, but always aware that it could end.
I asked a prominent Jordanian political scientist what Jordan’s secret is to maintaining stability. It’s not like Jordan controls vast reserves of oil and natural gas to buy social tranquility. They are not a worldwide IT hub like Israel.
How does Jordan do it?
The professor leaned back in his chair, stroking his chin. “If I knew, I’d bottle it and sell it to the world.”
It was the evening of March 31, 1968. President Lyndon Johnson, nearing the end of a televised speech to the nation regarding the Vietnam War and the administration’s accelerated effort to organize peace talks with the North Vietnamese, dropped this political bomb on the American people:
“I have concluded that I should not permit the presidency to become involved in the partisan divisions that are developing in this political year,” Johnson said. “With America’s sons in the fields far away, with America’s future under challenge right here at home, with our hopes and the world’s hopes for peace in the balance every day, I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes, or to any duties other than the awesome duties of this office — the presidency of your country. Accordingly, I shall not seek, and will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.”
Apart from his wife and few close advisers, including Vice President Hubert Humphrey, LBJ’s political denouement was a shock to almost everyone that knew him.
No president loved the art of politics more than LBJ. The journey in passing landmark legislation was, in many ways, more important to him than the legislation itself. The greatest pieces of legislation passed during his administration — Civil Rights Act (1964), Economic Opportunity Act (1964), Immigration Reform Act (1964), Social Security Amendments (1965), Voting Rights Act (1965)—to this day stand as living monuments to this country’s last successful activist president. Almost every substantive domestic policy debate today (Medicare, immigration, voting rights) centers on legislation passed as part of LBJ’s Great Society and War on Poverty initiatives.
Which is why LBJ’s decision not to seek re-election in 1968 surprised many Washington, DC elites. Granted, his approval ratings at the time were in steady decline, sitting at 36 percent according to a Gallup Poll conducted right before the March 31st speech (see Figure 1). His fall with the American public was due, in large part, to the worsening war in Vietnam. Still, as recently as January 1968, LBJ’s approval ratings had stood at 48 percent — a number President Donald Trump would kill for today. (Literally, I believe Trump would kill to have 48 percent approval.)
Figure 1: Presidential Approval for LBJ, Barack Obama and Donald Trump (by weeks in office)
Historians generally explain LBJ’s decision not to run for re-election in 1968 in the growing discontent over the Vietnam War and the political strength demonstrated by anti-War Democrats, such as Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy, who received 42 percent of the vote to LJB’s 49 percent in the March 12th New Hampshire primary. When New York Senator Robert Kennedy joined the Democratic nomination race on March 16th, LBJ knew his path to the nomination was precarious — a nearly unprecedented position for an incumbent president.
Also burdening the 59-year-old LBJ in early 1968 was his health, Vice President Humphrey recalling that the president told him before the March 31st speech that “all of the men in his family had died in their early sixties or before.”
Nonetheless, LBJ had many good reasons to run for re-election. The economy was strong under his stewardship. Since his election in 1964, the U.S. experienced real annual GDP growth rates of 8.5 percent, 4.6 percent, and 2.7 percent; and in the election year of 1968, the economy grew at a torrid 5.0 percent. Economic growth under Trump has been half that as under LBJ (2.6 percent vs. 5.2 percent, respectively).
Besides perhaps JFK, no politician was a more important advocate for the U.S. space program than LBJ. In March 1968, barely a year removed from the Apollo 1 tragedy when three astronauts died preparing for the first Apollo mission, LBJ knew man’s first landing on the moon would occur in Summer 1969. He wanted to be president at that moment.
“No one did more than LBJ to commit the U.S. to landing men on the moon and returning them safely to earth,” writes former President Bill Clinton speechwriter Jeff Shesol. “It was John F. Kennedy, of course, who issued that call, but only after Johnson had led the charge for years.”
Yet, all things considered, LBJ decided not to run for re-election.
And history has remained mixed on his legacy and place among the pantheon of American presidents.
How is LBJ relevant to Donald Trump?
There are major differences between what LBJ faced in March 1968 and Donald Trump faces in October 2019.
For one, LBJ wasn’t facing impeachment. Secondly, Donald Trump is not facing a serious challenge to his nomination. The 2020 Republican candidacies of Mark Sanford, Bill Weld, and Joe Walsh will be remembered for their negligible importance, not their threat to Trump’s control over the Republican Party.
Donald Trump will win the Republican nomination in 2020, if he chooses to compete. But should he compete for it?
The combination of Trump’s pathological vanity and insecurity puts his odds of running for re-election very high. At the same time, he has repeatedly demonstrated enough self-awareness to know when he needs to back down.
When Fox News’ Megyn Kelly confronted candidate Trump on his history of bimbo-laden insults of women, he apologized quickly. Trump is far less confrontational than many assume.
Trump knows when he’s facing insurmountable odds, even if his instincts on the proper tasks he can ask world leaders to do for this re-election efforts may be imperfect.
Trump’s requests of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Chinese leader Xi Jingping to investigate Joe and Hunter Biden are unequivocally over the line of presidential propriety. If Trump doesn’t realize it now, he will soon. His double-down, over-the-top defense of his behavior offers evidence that he already understands the gravity of his mistake.
President Donald Trump will be impeached by the U.S. House and anyone assuming the U.S. Senate won’t convict is living in a thought bubble of their own design.
Which is why LBJ’s case is so important and why President Trump needs to look closely at what the 36th President decided at a critical time in U.S. history.
LBJ took a backseat to no president with respect to his ego and naked audacity. Even so, he knew when he had worn out his welcome in D.C. He knew when to call it quits.
Where Russiagate was built on half-truths, conjecture and innuendo, the Trump administration’s actions with Ukraine and China regarding investigations into the Biden family is based on Trump’s own admissions. The evidence is already stacked against him.
Henceforth, things are not going to end well if Trump decides to ride this political bull much longer. Someone in his inner circle must tell him that. And when they do, Trump will do the right thing to do — at least I can hope.
Trump should follow LBJ’s lead and remove his name from consideration for the 2020 Republican nomination for president.
It’s the right thing to do for his party. It’s the right thing to do for his legacy. It’s the right thing to do for the nation. It’s the only rational thing to do.
K.R.K.
Send comments and criticisms to: kroeger98@yahoo.com
If they can get you to ask the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers. (Thomas Pynchon, author of “Gravity’s Rainbow”)
Nothing exemplifies the dishonesty of the mainstream media and the Democratic Party better than their defense of Joe and Hunter Biden’s relationship with the Ukrainian government and Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian gas company, in 2014.
The most common media narrative defending the Bidens in their dealings in the Ukraine is summarized by Mother Jones’ David Corn, once the majordomo anti-establishment journalism, but who is now mostly a messenger boy for the Democratic Party’s corporate wing:
“(Trump) cites the fact-free conspiracy theory that Biden, when vice president, urged the firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor (who was widely seen as corrupt) to protect a Ukrainian company on whose board Biden’s son, Hunter, sat. (Biden did press for this prosecutor’s dismissal, representing the desire of many Western nations, and there is no evidence it had anything to do with his son’s connection to the Ukrainian firm.)”
The gist of Corn’s Biden defense is that when Barack Obama’s Vice President threatened in late-2015 to cut off military aid to Ukraine if their government did not appoint an anti-corruption prosecutor, he was working against the interests of his son, Hunter, who was already on the board of Burisma Holdings, a gas company founded by Mykola Zlockevsky in 2002.
Biden and the Obama administration wanted the Ukrainian prosecor to go after Zlochevsky, the man paying Hunter Biden $50,000-a-month to “lead” Burisma’s legal team. Case closed on any Biden corruption, right?
Not so fast. Step back. Take a deep breath. And review the basic timeline of the Ukraine-Burisma-Biden story:
Biden-Ukraine Timeline
2002: Mykola Zlochevsky founds Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian energy company.
2012: Since 2012, the Ukrainian prosecutor general had been investigating Zlochevsky (and Burisma Holdings) over allegations of money laundering, tax evasion, and corruption.
February 2014: Yanukovych, widely seen in the West as a Moscow-aligned kleptocrat, was removed from power in February 2014 as a result of the 2014 Ukrainian revolution.
February— March 2014: In late-February, in the aftermath of the Ukrainian revolution, Russian president Vladimir Putin ordered the extrication of the deposed Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych, and told his security service chiefs that “we must start working on returning Crimea to Russia.” Crimea is subsequently annexed by Russia.
April 2014: In an effort to bring stability and transparency to the Ukraine’s lucrative energy industry, the Barack Obama administration and its European partners sent top officials to a forum on Ukrainian asset recovery, co-sponsored by the U.S. government, in London, where Mr. Zlochevsky’s case was cited as an example of ongoing corruption within the country. At this time, Hunter Biden, the Vice President’s son, is named to the board of Burisma Holdings, receiving $50,000-a-month for his services.
May 2014: On 29 May, Poroshenko won the Ukrainian presidential election with 54.7% of the votes. Poroshenko was widely seen as aligned with US-European interests.
Early 2015: Viktor Shokin becomes the Ukrainian prosecutor general, inheriting the Burisma investigation from the previous prosecutor. The Obama administration concludes Shokin is protecting Ukraine’s political elite and considers him an obstacle to anti-corruption efforts.
December 2015: Joe Biden threatens Ukrainian President Poroshenko that if he did not fire Shokin, whose own deputy claimed was “slow-walking” the Burisma investigation, the US would hold back its $1 billion in loan guarantees.
March 2016: Shokin was dismissed by the Ukrainian Parliament.
May 2016: A US-approved prosecutor, Yuriy Lutsenko, was appointed in Shokin’s place.
September 2016: Burisma paid approximately USD $7.5 million in taxes and fines, concluding Prosecutor General Lutsenko’s anti-corruption efforts against Burisma and Zlochevsky. At the same time, a money laundering case against Zlochevsky was closed in a London court, as well as an embezzlement case against him, according to Lutsenko.
Zlochevsky said that the end of investigation of Burisma Group “will allow to increase production, investment in production and to attract international companies to Ukraine.”
April 2019: Hunter Biden leaves Burisma’s board. By all accounts, Hunter Biden performed no tangible or documented services for Burisma.
The most lucrative corruption is legal
If this timeline exonerates Joe Biden and his son, the definition of corruption must be rendered meaningless.
In the timeline, Zlochevsky’s hiring of Hunter Biden appears independent of the appointment of Shokin as the Ukrainian prosecutor general. Instead, its timing is most likely connected to the broader project of protecting Zlochevsky and Burisma Holdings as targets of U.S. and European-led anti-corruption efforts. And to that end, Zlochevsky and Burisma Holdings could not have been more successful.
Why commit a bribery crime when a legal path is equally, if not more, effective? Putting the son of a sitting U.S. Vice President on the board of your company at a time when your company is being accused of corruption is not just common sense, it is a proven business practice.
The defense of Joe and Hunter Biden by the Democratic Party and the mainstream media is predicted on this deliberate and unsubtle imposture.
Is it a crime? Probably not. Is it corruption? Absolutely. And here’s why:
When Hunter Biden became a director at Burisma, ostensibly hired to lead a legal team that would ensure the company followed proper governance norms as it positioned itself for lucrative contracts in Ukraine’s fast growing energy sector, he had no prior experience in the natural gas industry or the Ukrainian regulatory environment. And, by Hunter Biden’s own admission, after joining Burisma, he did not actually lead a legal team.
So why did Burisma hire Hunter Biden (along with his business partner Devon Archer)?
“In April 2014, he became a director of Burisma, the largest natural-gas producer in Ukraine. He had no prior experience in the gas industry, nor with Ukrainian regulatory affairs, his ostensible purview at Burisma. He did have one priceless qualification: his unique position as the son of the vice president of the United States, newborn Ukraine’s most crucial ally.
When Hunter Biden joined Burisma’s board, $23 million of Zlochevsky’s riches were being frozen by the British government in a corruption probe. Zlochevsky fled Ukraine. The younger Biden enlisted his law firm, Boies Schiller Flexner, to provide what The New Yorker describes as “advice on how to improve the company’s corporate governance.” Eventually, the asset freeze on Zlochevsky was lifted.”
If President Donald Trump and his private lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, were a smidgen more sophisticated, they would know there is little new information for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to dig up on the Bidens. For the most part, the story has been thoroughly researched and reported in the news media.
The problem is not lack of reporting. The problem has been the deliberate naivete of the news media in interpreting the story’s facts. When The New York Times declared earlier this year that “no evidence of wrongdoing” had been uncovered in their research into the Biden-Ukraine story, they ignored the naked act of bribery standing right in front of them: Burisma hiring the Vice President’s son to a $50,000-a-month, task-free gig WAS THE BRIBE!
Most lamentable about the Biden-Ukraine story is that such acts of corruption are not just legal, but openly flaunted. George Carlin was right when he described the U.S. economic and political establishment as a “big club and you ain’t in it.”
U.S. law does not prevent the family members of senior administration officials from sitting on corporate boards of foreign companies run by corrupt oligarchs. And while civil libertarians will rightfully protest any attempt to give the federal government discretion on what corporate boards private citizens can sit on, the current system goes to the other extreme, placing few (if any) restraints on the overt corruption on display with the Bidens.
As for the federal government’s ethics rules governing nepotism, the focus in on inhibiting family members from holding senior positions within a chain-of-command inside the same department or agency. Federal law and ethics rules say diddly squat about family members of senior administration officials trading on their name and access for private financial gain.
The result?
“When prominent Americans leverage their global reputations for financial gain, they attract almost no attention today,” writes Chayes. “So when this same Biden takes his son with him to China aboard Air Force Two, and within days Hunter joins the board of an investment advisory firm with stakes in China, it does not matter what father and son discussed. Joe Biden has enabled this brand of practice, made it bipartisan orthodoxy. And the ethical standard in these cases — people’s basic understanding of right and wrong — becomes whatever federal law allows. Which is a lot.”
China? Oh, poor Joe Biden. We haven’t even started to talk about how the Dover Cosa Nostra profited from that relationship.
We’ll save that for another day.
K.R.K.
Send comments and anger-laced missives to: kroeger98@yahoo.com
By Kent R. Kroeger (NuQum.com, September 27, 2019)
Acknowledging the news media is largely responsible for turning Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren’s into the leading challenger to Joe Biden in no way suggests she is not worthy. She is.
But it also reminds us that underestimating the power of the news media to play political kingmaker is unwise.
Some social theorists have even suggested that the nation’s most powerful elites control the political process by manufacturing consent through their control of the mass media.
Using the oft-cited Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky definition, manufacturing consent is the acceptance of government policies by citizens on the basis of incomplete information provided by the mass media; and, denying them access to conflicting information that might challenge the views of those in power.
No conspiracy theory is required in claiming that the cable news networks are manufacturing consent for the ascension of Warren to the Democratic presidential nomination. And we would be having this conversation about Kamala Harris instead, had it not been for the Tulsi Gabbard-spun black hole Harris disappeared into at the 2nd Democratic debate. The news media can make candidates overnight, and kick them to the gutter just as quickly.
As of today, there is one candidate whose rise stands out from the others.
Warren’s status asone of the top challenger’s to Biden is undeniable (she is the dark brown line in Figure 1) and highlights the equally indisputable fact that support for Bernie Sanders (blue line) has run aground at around 17 percent since May.
Figure 1: RealClearPolitics Poll Average for 2020 Democratic Nomination
Sanders came into this race at around 15 to 20 percent support among likely Democratic primary voters, the afterglow from his groundbreaking 2016 campaign against the Democratic Party establishment.
But how did Warren get to where she is in the polls?
If you believe her support is due to her progressive bona fides, political skills and charisma, you may be engaged in wishful thinking. Warren is not a great public speaker, is charisma challenged (certainly by Barack Obama standards), and has not proven herself to be adept at handling tough questions from the media.
“Before presidential candidate Warren starts peddling the ‘success’ of her pet project on the campaign trail, she should consider how an agency that was formed under the guise of “consumer protection” has done more to hurt consumers than help,” argues Jeff Joseph, former head of domestic policy for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce from 1982 to 1997. “Since the bureau’s inception nine years ago, it has become one of Washington’s most unaccountable agencies.”
Still, as of today, Warren is in the strongest position to beat former Vice President Biden for the Democratic nomination. As to why she leads the opposition to Biden is a legitimate question that deserves a quantitative answer.
Warren is a business law and policy expert, as she has demonstrated in the debates
Warren’s deep knowledge of economic and financial policy makes her a formidable presidential candidate, particularly on a debate stage. Bernie Sanders’ own senior economic adviser, Professor Stephanie Kelton, better known for her advocacy of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), praises Warren for her ability to explain why Sanders’ signature proposal — Medicare for All — would likely result in a net decrease in the financial burden of healthcare for the vast majority of U.S. households.
“Warren does an extremely good job keeping the focus on total costs,” Kelton tweeted recently. “We already pay more than anyone in the world, and we pay more than we will end up paying (collectively) under Medicare for All.”
Yet, Warren’s ability to cogently explain the benefits of Medicare for All over our current system only frustrates progressive Democrats who feel betrayed by Warren’s reluctance to make a firm commitment to Bernie’s plan. Twitter gadflies have been out in force questioning Warren’s commitment to progressive ideas.
Kyle Kulinski, a progressive favorite in the podcast sphere, recently detailed his reasons for distrusting Warren, citing, among other things, her willingness to court Wall Street and business executives even as she professes that she will hold Wall Street “accountable” and stop the “main sources of Wall Street looting.”
“One candidate (Warren) waffles on Medicare for All and the other one (Sanders) never has,” Kulinski told his podcast audience. “That tells me she’s less likely to pursue it, and even if she does pursue it, it is unlikely she’s gonna waste a lot of political capital and go to the mat to try to get it implemented.”
The ambivalence of some progressives towards Warren brings to the fore her internal contradictions. Warren, a former Harvard business law professor and registered Republican until 1995, creates genuine angst among Wall Street power brokers when she talks about banking reform with level of authority few others in the Democratic nomination race can match. At the same time, Warren, the politician, is actively telling Democratic Party leaders she wants to work within the current political-economic system, not do a complete overhaul to the extent advocated by Sanders.
In that sense, Warren is cast in the same mold as Barack Obama — an incrementalist at her core — and her rise in the polls has seemingly coincided her growing number of public overtures to former Hillary Clinton and Obama supporters.
Not all candidates benefit from more media coverage — but Warren does
Despite a concerted effort from some progressives to stunt the Warren surge in the polls, the reality is that she is rising faster than any other candidate for the Democratic nomination.
What is the explanation?
Using aggregated polling data from RealClearPolitics.com and cable news coverage data from The GDELT Project, an open source platform that monitors the world’s news media, we uncover evidence that changes in cable news coverage of Warren predicts changes in Warren’s popularity. Whereas, changes in Warren’s popularity does not predict changes in the volume of Warren’s cable news coverage.
Figure 2 shows how spikes in Warren’s public support track line up with spikes in the relative amount of cable news coverage she receives.
Figure 2: Tracking Warren’s Public Support and Cable News Coverage
Figure 3 summarizes Warren’s public support and the relative volume of her cable news coverage by plotting their relationship — which we can see is very strong (the two-variable regression model accounts for nearly half of the variance in her public support).
Figure 3: Relationship between Warren Support and Cable News Coverage
Contrast Warren’s data with the same variables measured for Sanders (see Figure 4). His scatterplot shows no discernible relationship between his public support and cable news coverage. Why would they be related so strongly for Warren and minimally for Sanders?
The quick answer is that Sanders, having run in 2016, is a known quantity and likely 2020 voters do not rely as heavily on news coverage to form attitudes about Sanders — in other words, their views on Sanders may already be firmly established.
Figure 4: Relationship between Sanders Support and Cable News Coverage
While Figures 2–3 indicate substantial common variation between Warren’s public support and cable news coverage, the graphs tell us little about the causal direction. Which causes which? Are they even related once other factors are considered?
Figure 5 is an initial step in trying to answer those two questions. After aggregating the daily data for public support (% support according to RealClearPolitics poll average) and the relative volume of cable news coverage (% of airtime) to the weekly-level, I estimated for each of the top 2020 candidates (Biden, Warren, Sanders, Harris and Buttigieg) a linear regression model explaining public support as a function of past values of public support (t-1) and cable news coverage (at time t and t-1). The linear models are summarized in Figure 5.
The first finding is that public support and the volume of cable news coverage are not related for the best known candidates entering the 2020 race (Biden and Sanders). However, for Warren, Kamala Harris, and Pete Buttigieg, their share of cable news coverage is contemporaneously related with their public support levels.
Figure 5: Does the Volume of Cable News Coverage Relate to Candidate Popularity?
It is also notable that these linear models explain a significant percentage of the total variation in public support, particularly for Warren, Harris and Buttigieg.
Nonetheless, in Figure 5, we still cannot talk causation as the statistically significant relationships between cable news coverage and popularity are all contemporaneous. As we learned in First-Year Statistics, correlation is not causation. Instead, we need time-ordering: When ‘X’ happens at time t, ‘Y’ happens at time t+1, all else equal.
To see the time-order effects, I estimated a vector autoregression (VAR) model using the same variables as in the linear models, but at the daily level and after a first-difference transformation to render all variables stationary. More simply, I compare the day-to-day change in cable news coverage to the day-to-day change in popularity, and vice versa.
And it is here where we finally see the causal path for Warren.
The left-hand graph in Figure 6 displays the impulse response function for the accumulated impact of a one-unit impulse in cable news coverage (1% of total cable news airtime) on Warren’s public support (% support). The graph plots the estimates over seven days subsequent to the impulse. The middle line is the estimate and the outer lines represent two standard deviations above and below the estimate.
According to the VAR model for Warren, a one percentage-point increase in her share of cable news coverage results in a 0.25 percentage-point increase in support for Warren among likely Democratic primary voters by the 3rd day after the impulse.
That may not seem like a lot, but consider that Warren’s support has grown 14 points over a six-month period (March — September) from 7 percent to 21 percent — that is an average increase of 0.08 percentage-points-a-day.
Figure 6: Response of Warren Public Support to Impulses in Cable TV Coverage
Figure 7 is similar to Figure 6, except it is the right-hand-side plot that most interesting as it displays the accumulated impact of a one-unit impulse in Warren’s popularity (1% percentage-point in RCP poll average) on changes in Warren’s cable news coverage (% of cable news airtime). According to the Figure 7, changes in Warren’s popularity on her cable news coverage hover around zero.
Figure 7: Response of Warren Cable TV Coverage to Impulses in Warren Public Support
For Warren, the causal path between public support and news coverage is recursive (i.e., moves in one direction), flowing from news coverage to public support.
And, while the effect is relatively small for any single shock in Warren’s news coverage, over a span of months the total effect can be significant, particularly if large spikes are more likely to be positive than negative — which they have been for Warren.
Since February, Warren has experienced 12 days where the spike in her cable news coverage exceeded +2 percentage-points of all cable news airtime, compared to only six times where it was less than -2 percentage-points — a two-to-one ratio. In contrast, Biden has experienced 70 instances with spikes of those magnitudes, 35 positive and 35 negative, for a one-to-one ratio. Sanders, like Biden, also has a near one-to-one ratio in positive-to-negative cable news coverage impulses.
Interestingly, like Warren, Harris has also witnessed twice as many large positive impulses as negative ones, which is consistent with a common refrain among Sanders supporters that the news media favor both Harris and Warren over Bernie. Figure 8 supports that conclusion.
FIgure 8: Number of Large Daily Impulses (“Spikes”) in Cable News Coverage between Feb. 4 to Sep 17, 2019
Manufacturing consent or evidence Warren is the best candidate?
If Warren were the “best” candidate to challenge Biden, wouldn’t we expect some causal flow from public support to cable news coverage, as that would indicate an independent basis for Warren’s growing popularity?
On the other hand, the data here is consistent with the notion that, out of practical necessity, the news media mediates the public’s exposure to political candidates. It isn’t that the media has some nefarious agenda to make one person the next president; but, rather, the reality of a geographically large country where most people learn about political candidates directly through the media or indirectly through other people that follow politics in the media.
It doesn’t require referencing the manufacturing consent thesis to explain why Warren (or Harris or Buttigieg) might gain more positive coverage in this election cycle than some other candidates that came into the election better known. They are the new kids on the block with the most big donor money coming out of the gate.
It is hard to imagine, however, cable news journalists, producers and executives doing their jobs without imprinting, in the aggregate, their collective judgments and biases into the news when deciding how much to cover some candidates over others.
Neither is it extraordinary or subversive to assert the news media introduces an inordinate amount of influence and institutional bias into the selection process. The mass media controls what most of us see and hear about presidential candidates. Unless you live in Iowa or New Hampshire, you are probably not going to meet a candidate in person during this election cycle — and certainly not going to have a long, interactive conversation with them on tax or trade policy.
And since we get our information through the mass media, it is the mass media that can make or break anybody running for president (except, apparently, Donald Trump — a media creation that got out-of-control).
As former Bill Clinton political strategist James Carville once said, “You can’t turn a frog into a prince, but you can make them president.” [Carville was not sufficiently woke in the early 1990s to add princesses to his assertion.]
Members of the national news media rarely apologize for their gatekeeper role in the presidential election process. Many journalists, in fact, believe they are the most qualified and objective to make the decisions as to which candidates should be covered extensively (Elizabeth Warren) and which candidates can be ignored (Seth Moulton — Who? — Exactly).
“To the degree that media attention causes a candidate to become more popular, there’s a winner-take-all effect here: The leading candidate will get the most coverage, boosting their lead. Meanwhile, the media has the potential to trap a candidate in last place because they can’t get the coverage they would need in order to rise in the polls,” writes Jonathan Stray, a journalist and computer scientist who teaches computational journalism at Columbia. “But what’s the alternative? Should journalists cover every candidate equally? It’s ridiculous to imagine journalists struggling to reach story quotas, so that each candidate gets the same amount of press.”
The bottom line, according to Stray, is that journalists and producers are the most logical and qualified gatekeepers to decide who gets covered and how much they are covered. They are not perfect, but they are better than the alternatives, says Stray.
In a less hyper-partisan world, Stray might be right. But isn’t it equally ridiculous to have talking heads like CNN’s Chris Cillizza saying the current Democratic nomination race is down to TWO candidates, when quite obviously the statement is false? (See Figure 1 above.)
There are too many anecdotal examples of cable news on-air talent offering blatantly false or misleading information about candidates — so many, in fact, that trying to summarize them here would be overwhelming.
Nonetheless, the mass media does have the power to change candidates’ fortunes, independent of other factors (e.g., debate gaffes and other unpredictable events). Elizabeth Warren may be deserving of her top challenger status, but she likely realizes she wouldn’t be in this position had the cable news networks not helped her get there.
K.R.K.
All comments and complaints can be sent to: kroeger98@yahoo.com
The following is the second of two essays about the Electoral College and the initiative to replace it with the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC). The first essays focused on arguments by the Founding Fathers in support of the Electoral College — particularly the writings of James Madison and Alexander Hamilton in The Federalist Papers. The second essay focuses on the NPVIC and details some of its problems (and virtues) relative to the Electoral College and suggests a compromise system — the congressional district method — already employed in Nebraska and Maine.
The Electoral College (EC) was not embraced by the Founding Fathers as a way to encourage the broad geographic support for an elected president. Had that been the case, they would have given each state an equal number of electors.
They did not do that. Instead, they allocated electors based on population size with a small compromise to smaller states by giving them at least three electors.
Yet, today, one of the justifications for keeping the EC is that it encourages presidential candidates to pursue broad, geographically-dispersed support. Hillary Clinton’s failure in 2016 was largely due to her inability to do exactly that.
Independent of the Founding Fathers’ intentions, it is an admirable goal to expect presidential candidates to appeal across a broad section of American society and not simply win the presidency predicated on an attraction to an urban and coastal constituency. Middle America deserves a president’s attention and loyalty.
On the the hand, Middle America should never be able to hold the rest of the country hostage to its specific interests. This is the heart of the EC versus popular vote debate.
Democrats may want to reconsider eliminating the Electoral College
These two facts are often mentioned first when political scientists and commentators discuss the Electoral College: The Electoral College (EC) gives disproportionate weight to low-population states (see Figure 1), and the EC’s state-level, winner-take-all method (with the exception of Nebraska and Maine) frequently distorts the popular vote difference.
Figure 1: Population per Electoral Vote (2010 Census Data)
A third characteristic of the EC is less frequently mentioned: it is impossible for a coalition of low-population states to impose their will on the rest of the country. If every small state were to allocate their electoral votes to one candidate, that candidate would still need Washington, Virginia and New Jersey to secure an electoral victory. Those are hardly small, rural states.
Conversely, large states could impose their will on the country if California, Texas, New York, Florida, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, Georgia, North Carolina and New Jersey were to stand behind the same candidate. Hopefully, it is not lost on the Democrats that they electorally dominate in four of those states (CA, NY, IL, NJ) and are highly competitive in five others (Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and North Carolina).
And if demographic trends continue, Georgia and Texas will both be majority-minority states by 2036 and more politically competitive than they are now.
The irony of the current push by Democrats to abolish the EC is that, if there is a partisan advantage in the Electoral College, it is with the Democrats.
The Electoral College nurtures narrow, sectarian interests
But there are other reasons to eliminate or modify the EC, unrelated to partisan bias. The winner-take-all nature of the EC distorts state-level voter preferences and puts too high of a premium on states where the two parties are competitive (battleground states). For any given election, the number of battleground states typically varies between 10 and 15 states.
Battleground states often have their own idiosyncratic interests, independent of a common national interest (assuming that concept exists). Arguably, Trump’s trade war with China is more a function of the interests of working-class voters in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio than of the interests of the nation as a whole. In that sense, the EC may have contributed to current U.S. trade policy towards China.
But candidate appeals to sectarian interests occur in popular vote elections too, right? Successful politicians often offer policies and campaign promises to specific subgroups in the hope of building a winning popular vote coalition.
The difference is, in a popular vote election, every voter is as valuable as any other voter (though some are more expensive to reach or persuade than others — more on that later). At least in theory, in a popular vote election every voter is a potential target for a candidate’s coalition. In a battleground state election, most non-billionaire voters are at the outset eliminated from ever receiving serious attention from the candidates (I’m talking about states like New York and California).
Going forward, an Electoral College victory might be the only path for the GOP
In a report published last year for the Brookings Institute, Rob Griffin, Ruy Teixeira, and William H. Frey segmented the U.S. population into 32 demographic groups. Forecasting county-level compositions for these segments over time, the researchers were able to generate multiple simulations of the presidential vote in future elections (2020, 2024, 2028, 2032, and 2036) using 16 different voter turnout and support scenarios relative to 2016 (e.g., Equal turnout by race, Black turnout or support like 2012, White non-college-educated voters swing to +5 pts. to Democrats, etc.).
They had a remarkable finding for the 2020 election. Of the 16 scenarios they tested, only one resulted in the Republican presidential candidate winning both the popular vote and Electoral College (Scenario: White non-college-educated voters swing +5 pts. to Republicans relative to 2016). All else equal, according to this research, Trump needs to amp up whatever he did to attract White, non-college-educated voters in 2016. [If you follow Donald Trump at all, doesn’t it feel like that is exactly what he is doing?]
There were, however, three other scenarios where the Republicans could lose the popular vote and still win the Electoral College (EC): (a) Hispanic, Asian, and other races swing +7.5 points to Republicans, (b) white college-educated swing +5.0 points to Republicans, and (c) white college-educated swing to Democrats (+2.5D and -2.5R) while white non-college-educated swing to Republicans (+2.5R and -2.5D).
It is no surprise the Democrats are the most eager to scuttle the EC. With the likely demographic and socioeconomic changes in the future, the only way the Republicans win the White House is through the EC.
Write Griffin, Teixeira, and Frey:
“Republicans face a clear need to enhance their appeal to America’s rapidly growing communities of color — especially Hispanics and Asians. If they do not, Republicans risk putting themselves into a box where they become ever more dependent on a declining white population — particularly its older segment. As the simulations show, GOP electoral fortunes could be linked to a strategy where they repeatedly lose the popular vote but, based on larger advantages among white — particularly white noncollege-educated — voters, pull the electoral vote rabbit out of the hat anyway. This could work for a time, though ultimately it, too, would be undermined by shifting demographics. The prudent course may very well be to adapt now, rather than later, to onrushing demographic change. If nothing else, it would give the party more options going forward.”
The EC threatens the legitimacy of our nation’s highest office. We cannot weather another election like 2016 in which the perception was the winning candidate, Donald Trump, won despite losing the popular vote.
Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren offered a CNN town hall audience in Jackson, Mississippi perhaps the most common argument against the EC when she told them: “We need to make sure that every vote counts…My view is that every vote matters. And the way we can make that happen is that we can have national voting and that means get rid of the Electoral College.”
That’s really what this debate comes down to: The popular vote counts every vote equally and the EC does not.
If only that were true.
A national popular vote is misrepresented by its advocates
New York Magazine’s Eric Levitz mocks EC apologists when he mimics their evidence-free argument: “Abolishing the Electoral College would definitely have this bad effect, for reasons so logically sound I don’t need to provide evidence for them (even though other defenders of the Electoral College insist it would have the opposite effect, which would also be bad).”
Unfortunately, popular vote advocates aren’t much better. Beyond the intuitive logic that ‘every vote should count the same,’ they ignore the inherent problems in implementing a national popular vote when our federal system allows each of the 50 states to implement their own voting laws and procedures.
At least France, a country that employs a national popular vote to elect their president, implements uniform election laws and procedures across its 36,000 communes. The legitimacy of French presidential elections resides, in large part, to the homogeneous nature of their electoral process. The U.S. democracy lacks that essential feature.
Two aspects of a national popular vote are widely misunderstood by its proponents. For one, we’ve never had a popular vote election in this country; therefore, it is not fair to compare the popular vote with the EC result within any particular election. Hillary Clinton did not actually win the popular vote in 2016 — there was no decipherable popular vote in 2016 (or any U.S. presidential election before that).
Campaign strategies and expenditures would fundamentally change in a popular vote election. There is no better example than the 2016 election. California had no competitive statewide races between a Democrat and Republican in that election.
This matters because partisan differentials in voter turnout are affected by the presence (or lack thereof) of competitive statewide races. Unless a California Republican voter had a competitive local or congressional race to draw them into the voting booth, a higher percentage than normal of California Republicans stayed home on Election Day 2016. The data say as much.
“The Senate race in California featured two Democrats, and there wasn’t another statewide race featuring a Republican, except for president (which was a foregone conclusion). In other words, there perhaps wasn’t as much reason for Republicans to turn out to vote. Did this depress GOP turnout? Maybe. In 2012, exit polls showed Republicans were 27 percent of the state’s electorate; this year, they were 23 percent.”
Besides fundraising, the 2016 EC election offered little incentive for either Clinton or Trump to campaign in California. As money and a candidate’s time is a finite resource in any political campaign, it is a waste of resources to spend to focus on a strongly partisan state.
In a popular vote election, however, the incentives change dramatically, particularly for candidacy like Trump’s, who would have needed to shore up his support in historically strong Republican strongholds in California, such as Orange County.
As it was, Trump and the Republicans did not dedicate serious resources to California in 2016 and the state GOP suffered in the voting booth.
The second misunderstanding about the popular vote is the assumption that since every vote counts the same — that is, offers an identical benefit to a candidate — all votes must therefore be of equal value.
But as economists tell us, an item’s value is its benefit minus its cost. In a popular vote election, some votes will still be more valuable than others to a presidential candidate. Why? Because candidates pay attention to the costs associated with mobilizing and persuading voters. For example, some voters are isolated geographically, requiring significant campaign investments to mobilize them. Voters can also have strong loyalties to another party/candidate, thereby lowering the return-on-investment if a candidate wants to persuade them to defect to a different party/candidate.
While the variation in value across voters might be greater within the EC system, this variation doesn’t go away with the popular vote: Some votes will be more cost-effective to pursue.
This feature of the popular vote was revealed in 2008 research conducted by Stockholm University economics professor David Strömberg, who assessed the impact to campaign strategy if the U.S. we’re to convert to a popular vote.
Using state-level presidential election data from 1948 to 2004, Strömberg estimated the effects on campaign behavior (visits) of a direct national popular vote for president relative to a EC election and his findings are summarized in Figure 2 (below). His findings were revealing.
In Figure 2, states above 1 on the y-axis receive more than average visits per capita under the Electoral College system, whereas states to the right of 1 on the x-axis have more visits per capita than average under the Direct Vote system. Therefore, states in the lower-right-hand quadrant will most likely benefit from candidate increased attention should the U.S. adopt a popular vote system.
Figure 2: Equilibrium visits per capita and advertisements, relative to national average (Electoral College versus National Popular Vote)
One finding from Figure 2 is that a direct popular vote still results in significant variation across states in the amount of attention (visits per capita) they receive from presidential candidates, though less than under the EC.
Nevertheless, some states, such as Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, and New Jersey, will benefit from a popular vote system. According to Strömberg, “Because of their average partisanship, these states are rarely competitive when the national election is close. Consequently, they do not receive much attention under the Electoral College system. Still, these states have quite a few marginal (swing) voters, making them attractive targets under Direct Vote.”
A popular vote election will replace the incentive for candidates to concentrate of a small set of battleground states with an increased incentive to mobilize voters where the population is highly-concentrated, particularly if includes an above average proportion of “swing” voters.
If Strömber is correct, a popular vote system may not significantly impact the amount of attention candidates pay to California, as its swing voter density is not as high as in some other areas. Instead, campaigns will prefer to use their financial resources and candidate time in areas with a higher return on investment.
The Electoral College is vulnerable to error and fraud, but the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact isn’t an improvement
The Founders did not think much of direct democracy, and even if the Republicans do operate a nominating process prone to elevating populist, heterodox candidates, it still doesn’t preclude replacing the Electoral College with something more democratic like the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC).
The NPVIC would require signatory states to cast their state’s electoral votes for the candidate who won the national popular vote, even if a plurality of their voters preferred a different candidate. The compact won’t be invoked until states with 270 electoral votes among them have opted in.
Principally advanced by Democrats in order to circumvent the long process of passing a constitutional amendment, the NPVIC has secured the support of 16 states and two more whose legislatures are likely to pass the NPVIC soon, for a total of 206 electoral votes (see Figure 2). Only 64 electoral votes more to go. Unfortunately for NPVIC advocates, those last 64 will not be easy to secure as it will require all of the remaining states that are not Republican strongholds to pass the NPVIC: Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin. As of today, all have a lower and/or upper legislature controlled by the Republicans.
Figure 2: Population sizes and growth of NPVIC and non-NPVIC states
Also working against the NPVIC is its potential constitutionality, as it ‘trades away’ a person’s vote in one state based on voter preferences in other states. Article II, Section 1, Clause 2 in the Constitution places the power in allocating electors to the states (which is consistent with the NPVIC); but, the 14th Amendment (Section 2) explicitly states that when a vote is “in any way abridged,’ the state’s representation in the U.S. House (and, by extension, the Electoral College) can be reduced proportionately.
“Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the inhabitants of such State, being eighteen years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such citizens shall bear to the whole number of citizens eighteen years of age in such State.”
For example, if the majority of Florida voters vote for the Republican candidate but the Democrat wins the national popular vote, all of Florida’s 29 electors would be given to the Democrat under the NPVIC, thereby abridging the votes of roughly half of Florida voters. At risk could be half of Florida’s 29 electoral votes if a federal court determines 14th Amendment rights were violated under the NPVIC voting trading arrangement.
Adding some perspective might help before we completely upend an Electoral College that has, most of the time, worked as designed.
Since 1789, out of 58 presidential elections, only four (1876, 1888, 2000, and 2016) have produced winners in the Electoral College who received fewer popular votes than another candidate. And the 2000 election is debatable if it should be included on that list. Had Florida captured and counted votes accurately, Al Gore likely would have won both the Electoral College and popular vote in 2000.
The argument can still be advanced, however, that the Electoral College makes U.S. presidential elections prone to manipulation, by foreign or domestic sources. The 2016 election is a testament to our electoral vulnerability to small, concentrated shifts in statewide popular votes. Trump won three states (Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin) by a total of 78,000 votes (a half of a tenth of a percent of all votes cast), shifting the Electoral College by 46 electors. A targeted shift of 39,000 votes would have changed the final outcome.
If ever there is an argument for the popular vote, isn’t that it? Well, maybe and maybe not. Where the winner-take-all nature of the Electoral College amplifies the risk for some types of vote manipulation, the popular vote invites others.
Let’s start with the best argument for why the Electoral College needs to be modified or replaced: The 2000 Florida vote. An election where George W. Bush and Al Gore were separated by 537 votes after an incomplete, deadline-constrained recount tally. We will never know the true preferences of Florida voters in that presidential race.
Not only did the vote capturing methodologies in Florida vary by county (some using the infamous “butterfly” ballots, others using “bed sheet” ballots, and still others using computer touch screens.), the recount was limited to a small set of counties and even that process was interfered with by a series of stunts and intimidation tactics by the now infamous Roger Stone of election 2016 fame.
The questionable validity of Florida’s 2000 result would have been mitigated in a popular vote election, the 537-vote difference no more than a historical footnote, forgotten within days. That is the irresistible attraction of the popular vote.
Yet, there are modifications to the Electoral College that also could avoid the 2000 Florida fiasco. For example, if presidential electors were earned based on each congressional district vote (akin to what Nebraska and Maine do today), Florida’s incompetence could have been isolated to one congressional district, not the state’s entire slate of electors.
But a popular vote might have its own problems, potentially as paralyzing and contentious as the 2000 result.
If the objective of the popular vote is to capture the precise, unbiased preferences of the voting population, its validity is already compromised if the voting methods and procedures vary across states and, within states, by counties. A national voting methodology would need to be established where state voter registration laws are uniform and vote capture, processing and tabulation standards are consistent, secure, and auditable at the voter-level.
A recount in a national popular vote election would invite chaos and threaten the election’s legitimacy
In a national popular vote election, every vote is counted and weighted the same (a good result), but each vote also becomes contestable (potentially a really, really bad result). One feature of the Electoral College is that it can handle significant amounts of error (e.g. voting machine errors, voter fraud), the 2000 election being an exception. A close vote within a single state only becomes relevant if that state’s electoral votes determines the election’s outcome.
But imagine a close, contested national election under a popular vote system where the losing candidate (or party) calls for a recount. For an instant-gratification society expecting final election results no later than the next day, it could take weeks to complete a national recount. Where one state (Florida) held up the 2000 result for over a month, a recount in 50 states (plus D.C.) could hold up a contested popular vote election for much longer. Do we recount all 140 million votes, or a selection based on fraud complaints, or do we draw a probability sample of votes? Who coordinates the process? Who makes the critical decisions during the recount?
For better or worse, the Electoral College has most likely papered over vote fraud that may have occurred over our nation’s history, in part, because we’ve rarely had presidential elections close enough to warrant much attention to its existence (the 1960 Nixon-Kennedy election being one of the exceptions; though, in that case, it is hard to distinguish myth and reality with some of the alleged stories of vote fraud from that election).
A recount in a popular vote election has other problems too. Instead of one Roger Stone trying to muck up a vote recount in a few counties in Florida, you could have hundreds of little Roger Stones trying to disrupt the recount from coast-to-coast. The presidency is too important and the incentives too great not to expect an extraordinary level of effort, above and below board, by both parties to ensure they get the outcome they want.
Campaign activities, such as ballot harvesting, introduce significant opportunities for fraud
Add one more complication to a national popular vote election. U.S. elections are implemented at the state-level. We are not France. The U.S. has never held a national election. Rather, we hold 50 different state elections — each state with its own rules and procedures.
State laws on voter registration (e.g. registration at DMV, etc.), voting methods (e.g., vote-by-mail, etc.) and the types of allowable campaign activities all vary across states. None more potentially game-changing in a national popular vote than the practice of ballot harvesting — a campaign activity in which party activists/volunteers collect absentee ballots from specific voters and drop them off at a polling place or election office.
Ballot harvesting is illegal in some states (e.g., North Carolina and Texas) and legal in others (e.g., California and on a limited basis in Arizona). Conceptually, the activity sounds harmless. Just another get-out-the-vote (GOTV) practice that facilitates voting for the elderly, chronically ill, and people otherwise unlikely to vote. What could be wrong with that? Getting more people to vote is a good thing. Evangelical Republicans in Iowa have been busing their constituents to polls for decades with barely a complaint from the Democrats. Why should picking up sealed absentee ballots cause a ruckus?
Speaking at a post-election forum soon after the 2018 midterm elections, House Speaker Paul Ryan said of the California ballot harvesting law: “California just defies logic to me. We were only down 26 seats the night of the election and three weeks later, we lost basically every contested California race. This election system they have — I can’t begin to understand what ‘ballot harvesting’ is.”
Trump lost the national popular vote to Clinton by 2,868,686 votes in 2016, but lost to her in California by 4,269,978 votes. Take away California, Trump won the popular vote in the 49 other states (plus D.C.) by 1,401,292 votes. Making it more frustrating for Republicans, as Speaker Ryan’s comments suggest, almost all of Clinton’s popular vote advantage occurred in the weeks following the Election Day tally when many of California’s absentee ballots began to arrive in election offices.
As Figure 3 shows, absentee voting has become a significantly larger element in California presidential-year elections since 2008. Absentee voting accounted for 58 percent of all California votes in 2016, up from 42 percent in 2008.
Regardless, it is not clear (at least at the presidential-level) that the increase in absentee ballots related to a greater vote share for Clinton, who received 62 percent of the California in 2016 compared to Barack Obama’s 61 percent in 2008 and 60 percent in 2012. If anything, third party candidates may have been the primary beneficiaries of the increased absentee voting in California as votes for the Republican presidential candidate fell from 37 percent in 2008 to 32 percent in 2016.
The question remains: Is ballot harvesting an effective way to boost turnout rates or a prime opportunity for ballot fraud? Most evidence points to the former. Yet, Speaker Ryan’s reaction to the practice in 2016 echoed other Republicans who were more direct, suggesting the Democrats are doing something improper. A common concern voiced about ballot harvesting is that the chain of custody for mail-in ballots does not go directly from the voter to election officials — a party activist handles the ballot a significant portion of its journey from the voter to the election office. What could go wrong with that?
A lot.
In 2016, there was one notable case of alleged election fraud involving ballot harvesting. But it wasn’t a Democratic campaign operation, but a Republican one — Republican Mark Harris’ campaign in North Carolina’s 9th District (which was recently recontested because of that fraud). Among the alleged crimes included a Republican operative collecting ballots from historically Democratic areas and discarding them.
Arizona recently passed a law strictly limiting ballot harvesting after one witness testified about finding thousands of completed ballots in a Yuma garbage dumpster, and another detailed a case where poll workers did not properly label collected ballots, thereby circumventing a signature verification step as required by the law at the time. There was even reports of voter intimidation within Arizona’s Vietnamese community by ballot collectors.
In all likelihood, the Arizona law will end up in the U.S. Supreme Court.
Whatever the legal outcome of the anti-ballot-harvesting law, Arizona’s GOP can be forgiven for having suspicions about the fraud it invites. Their memory is still fresh over Republican Senate candidate Martha McSally losing her election-night vote lead to Democrat Kyrsten Sinema after the mail-in ballots were counted over the subsequent week.
Ballot harvesting, however, has many proponents.
California Secretary of State Alex Padilla aggressively defended his state’s ballot harvesting practice to Politico after the GOP complained at how it affected many California races in the 2018 midterms: “It is bizarre that Paul Ryan cannot grasp basic voting rights protections. Our elections in California are structured so that every eligible citizen can easily register, and every registered voter can easily cast their ballot.”
“For some people, this is a question of convenience and some others are more concerned about security,” according to Wendy Underhill, the director of elections and redistricting for the National Conference of State Legislatures, who studies variations in state laws for ballot-collecting.
Large-scale ballot fraud can often be detected using various forensic techniques such as Benford’s Law, particularly when the fraud results in dramatic changes in turnout. What makes ballot harvesting problematic is not just its vulnerability to ballot fraud but its documented impact on voter turnout. If the NPVIC becomes a reality, both parties will have a strong incentive to significantly amp up their GOTV efforts.
Under a national popular vote, a voter turnout arms race will likely ensue and who knows the unintended consequences of that competition.
The Nebraska/Maine elector system should be adopted nationwide
Interest by Democrats in converting U.S. presidential elections to a popular vote is understandable, independent of Trump’s 2016 triumph. But, the NPVIC is a blunt force way of getting there and probably not going to pass enough state houses anyway.
In the meantime, before we impulsively chuck the entire EC system into the circular file in favor of a popular vote, we may want to consider other options that are less disruptive and not as exposed to unintended consequences.
The national debate largely pivots on these two objectives for U.S. presidential elections: (1) representation of the popular will, and (2) a sufficient geographic distribution of voter support to include as many sectarian interests as possible.
The most discussed alternative to the EC and direct popular vote is a method already in use in Nebraska and Maine — the congressional district method — where electors are awarded based upon popular vote totals within each of the 435 congressional districts. It is a not a direct popular vote, but it is a decent approximation. [Note: Trump still would have won in 2016 under the congressional district method.]
One virtue of the congressional district method is its compatibility with the Founding Fathers’ original intent when writing the Constitution. We don’t live in the United Peoples of America. We live in the United States of America. Spurning King Solomon’s wisdom, the Founding Fathers figuratively split the baby in half when they created a federal system where both the central government and the states share sovereignty. The EC is a 230-year-old institution borne from this compromise.
“Federalism goes beyond states’ rights and powers. Its essence is dual sovereignty — the Framers’ ingenious system of shared authority between federal and state governments with each sovereign checking the other,” writes Cato Institute ChairmanRobert A. Levy of the CATO Institute. “The purpose of that check is to shield individuals from concentrations of power. Federalism is first and foremost a device to safeguard personal freedom.”
The EC is deeply flawed and threatens the legitimacy of our nation’s highest office. We cannot afford many more presidential elections, like 2016, where the EC result differs from an inherently biased but still widely reported popular vote. A crisis of legitimacy over how we elect our president will undermine the effectiveness of the Office of the President, if it hasn’t already.
At a minimum, the EC needs to be modified to the congressional district method as soon as possible. It is too late for 2020. But a bipartisan effort to adopt this method for most, if not all, states before the 2024 election is possible and should be something both parties can agree upon for once.
K.R.K.
Send comments and suggestions to: kroeger98@yahoo.com
About the author: I am a survey and statistical consultant with over 30 -years experience measuring and analyzing public opinion (You can contact me at: kroeger98@yahoo.com)
The following is the first of two essays about the Electoral College and the initiative to replace it with the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC). The first essays focuses on arguments by the Founding Fathers in support of the Electoral College — particularly the writings of James Madison and Alexander Hamilton in The Federalist Papers. The second essay focuses on the NPVIC and details some of its problems (and virtues) relative to the Electoral College and offers a compromise system — the congressional district method — already employed in Nebraska and Maine.
As she has done many times in her short tenure as a U.S. Representative, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) set off a low-grade political storm last month when she followed her Instagram video declaring the Electoral College a “racist injustice breakdown” (what ever that means) with these tweets:
Ocasio-Cortez’ jeremiad against the Electoral College (EC) offers the standard rationale, as in her tweet thread’s first and fifth points concerning the over-representation of voters in small-population states and the subversion of the majority’s will. Her second point, however, is quite flawed and exemplifies much of the misinformation in circulation about the EC’s inherent biases.
The EC does not guarantee that a “handful of states” will determine the president — though, theoretically, a candidate could win the presidency winning the 11 largest states (CA, FL, GA, IL, MI, NJ, NY, NC, OH, PA, TX). But it is the Democrats who would most likely benefit from a large state coalition since they politically dominate four of the 11 largest states (CA, IL , NJ, NY) while the Republican control only two (GA, TX).
In reality, since neither party dominates the majority of large states, the EC encourages (or, rather, demands) the geographic dispersion of voter support, not its concentration, as suggested by the freshman congresswoman from New York.
With that minor disagreement notwithstanding, like Ocasio-Cortez, I also have little affection for the EC. It is an artifact of an old political compromise made by men holding deep biases against some of the political assumptions commonly held today. The Founding Fathers, by creating the EC, commingled their aversion to direct democracy with the unrepresentative nature of the U.S. Senate, itself a compromise necessary to secure support for the creation of the United States andwhich, in the legislative process, givesdisproportionate power to the least populated states.
“Since there now are a greater number of sparsely-populated, mostly-white, right-leaning states than there are heavily-populated, racially-diverse, left-leaning states, the Senate acts to preserve power for people and groups who would otherwise have failed to earn it,” laments GQ political writer Jay Willis. “A voter in Wyoming (population 579,000) enjoys roughly 70 times more influence in the Senate than a voter in California (population 39.5 million).”
Abolishing the U.S. Senate is a bridge too far admits Willis — which is why many critics of the U.S. Senate’s constitutionally enshrined status turn their ire towards the EC, an institution roughly half of American adults support replacing with a popular vote system.
However, preserving the Founding Fathers’ original intentions by keeping at least some form of the EC is worth, at a minimum, an earnest defense, even if we do eventually reform or abolish it.
It is unlikely the Founding Fathers would look at the 2016 election and think the popular vote would solve our problems
I generally resist ‘original intent’ arguments as to why any aspect of the U.S. Constitution needs to be preserved. The Founding Fathers never anticipated our present world, making it crucial that the Constitution and its Amendments be subject to judicious review when social evolution demands it. The EC has earned such a re-examination.
The Founders’ original intent in creating the EC is worth considering, in part, because most contemporary commentators fail to appreciate how distrustful the Founders were of direct democracy and its inability to solve what they considered the fundamental challenges of democracy: to stunt the formation of factions and stop the rise of men to the nation’s highest office possessing only “talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity.” The EC is just one manifestation of their wariness of direct democracy.
James Madison expressed in The Federalist Papers (Federalist Paper №10 — The Union as a Safeguard Against Domestic Faction and Insurrection) an opinion common among intellectuals at the time regarding direct (or pure) democracy:
“…a pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert result from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths. Theoretic politicians, who have patronized this species of government, have erroneously supposed that by reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their political rights, they would, at the same time, be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions.”
According to Madison, with direct democracy (“one person, one vote”) follows the inevitable rise of factions and a resultant political chaos, particularly within “societies consisting of a small number of citizens.” In other words, people in relatively small groups can’t govern themselves.
But what about big groups?
Madison’s prescription was to establish “a republic…a government in which the scheme of representation takes place, opens a different prospect, and promises the cure for (factions).” The interests of the people would be delegated to elected representatives — some elected directly (U.S. House members) and some elected by the state legislatures (U.S. Senate members until 1914).
But more interesting than Madison’s circumspection about direct democracy was his belief that representative democracy has a sweet spot at the national level where representatives should not represent too many people, nor too few.
Wrote Madison in Federalist Paper №10: “… however small the republic may be, the representatives must be raised to a certain number, in order to guard against the cabals of a few; and that, however large it may be, they must be limited to a certain number, in order to guard against the confusion of a multitude…By enlarging too much the number of electors, you render the representatives too little acquainted with all their local circumstances and lesser interests; as by reducing it too much, you render him unduly attached to these, and too little fit to comprehend and pursue great and national objects.”
However, in establishing the people’s chamber — the U.S. House of Representatives — the U.S. Constitution set no maximum as to how many people (free persons) a House member can represent, but there is a minimum as to how few they can represent.
Set forth in Article I (Section 2) of the U.S. Constitution: The number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty thousand, but each state shall have at least one Representative.
When the U.S. House passed the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929, it fixed the number of House members at 435 (as it stands today), regardless of national population growth. Thus, while the size of a state’s U.S. House delegation depends on its population and can grow with that state’s population growth, there is a theoretical maximum of 386 House members for any given state [Imagine a world where everyone lives in California, except for one person living in each of the other 49 states].
Today, the average U.S. House member represents 750,000 people (adults and children). At the founding of the American republic, that number was about 57,000 people. By their actions, the Founders and subsequent generations of American political leaders have been more concerned about elected representatives representing too few people than too many.
That would seem to be an argument for the popular vote over the EC; after all, the President represents the common interests of 327 million Americans. Not a problem, according to the Founders, if their regard for the U.S. House is any indication.
But that is not how the Founders viewed the election of the President. Not even close.
Enter Alexander Hamilton — a skeptic about the wisdom of the masses.
In Federalist Paper №68 (The Mode of Electing the President), Hamilton explicitly rejected the idea that the selection of the President could be left to the earthly passions of the people. To the contrary, Hamilton felt the decision must be left to an exemplary set of individuals, approved by the people, but not beholden to them.
Wrote Hamilton: “It was desirable that the sense of the people should operate in the choice of the person to whom so important a trust was to be confided. This end will be answered by committing the right of making it, not to any preestablished body, but to men chosen by the people for the special purpose, and at the particular conjuncture…It was equally desirable, that the immediate election should be made by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station (emphasis mine), and acting under circumstances favorable to deliberation, and to a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice. A small number of persons, selected by their fellow-citizens from the general mass, will be most likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to such complicated investigations.”
Hamilton didn’t believe the people, through a popular vote, could make such an important choice as President. In 1789, he was hardly alone in the opinion that a direct election of the President would make the office vulnerable to manipulation and potentially bound to sectarian interests.
“The process of election affords a moral certainty, that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications,” wrote Hamilton of the EC’s virtues. “Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity, may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first honors in a single State; but it will require other talents, and a different kind of merit, to establish him in the esteem and confidence of the whole Union, or of so considerable a portion of it as would be necessary to make him a successful candidate for the distinguished office of President of the United States.”
The EC was explicitly designed to prevent someone like Donald Trump from becoming president. Were Hamilton and Madison able to join us in the present, I am certain they would look at the election of President Trump, not as a justification the popular vote, but as evidence that something else is wrong in the political system.
The Founders never intended the Electoral College to give rural America disproportionate power in the selection of the President.
Based on their writings and the actual content of Article II, Section 1, Clause 2 in the Constitution, the Founders’ central intention regarding the EC was straightforward: Its outcome — the election of a President — must be viewed as legitimate by the people.
Hamilton and Madison did not view the direct election of the President as a requisite condition for such legitimacy. Why would they? Popular sentiment in 1789 easily could have supported the ascension by decree of General George Washington as a life-time monarch.
There is also no evidence that either Hamilton or Madison (or any other participant in the Constitutional Convention of 1787) anticipated the EC results and a popular vote tally could be compared within an election. The debate within the old Pennsylvania State House in Philadelphia was over what type of system to use, not running two systems simultaneously and hope both always agree as to the outcome.
Their final decision, Article II, Section 1, Clause 2 of the Constitution, opted for letting the states choose their electors — by a means of their own choosing — and allocating each state’s number of electors based on their numerical representation in the Congress:
Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector.
By using the U.S. House in the elector allocation formula, the Founders were attendant to the importance of population representativeness (despite their willingness to count almost 18 percent of the population as only three-fifths of a person). What they did not do is create a system where it would be easy for a cabal of small states, representing a minority of Americans, to wrest the presidency from the large-population states.
In the second presidential election (1792), the first presidential election with the participation by all states, 68 electoral votes were necessary to win the presidency (out of 132). If the smaller (mostly rural) states had joined in coalition, they nevertheless would have needed New York or North Carolina’s 12 electoral votes to win the presidency (see Figure 1). That can hardly be called a rural, small-state bias. In contrast, Virginia, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and New York alone — representing 46 percent of the total U.S. population at the time — could, as a bloc, determine the outcome of a presidential election.
Figure 1: The U.S. Population and Electoral College by State in 1792
Source: U.S. Census
If Hamilton or Madison could engage Ocasio-Cortez regarding the EC, they might address her concerns — particularly her third third point (“the Electoral College provides ‘fairness’ to rural Americans” at the presumed detriment to other groups) — with this response: There was never an intention by the Founders to give rural America disproportionate power in the selection of the President. Quite the opposite, the Electoral College was designed by elites for elites to elect other elites. Their objectives were focused on placing an additional layer of protection between the presidency and the common, easily manipulated tastes of the general masses.
From the Founders’ mindset, the election of Donald Trump was a failure of the nomination process, not the Electoral College.
K.R.K.
Send comments and constitutional amendment proposals to: kroeger98@yahoo.com
In the late summer of 1994, I walked into a small, two-story Fairfax, Virginia office in the middle of a nondescript commercial complex of converted town homes, itself residing on the edge of a middle-class residential neighborhood.
The sign in the front window — Republican Party of Virginia — was faded from sunlight exposure and severely bent on the corners. After a few unanswered doorbell rings, I just walked in through its half-opened front door. Not a soul in sight.
“Hello!” I sheepishly bellowed. No answer. I walked halfway up some musty-smelling stairs, softly issued a last ‘Hello!’ and walked back down the stairs, picking up a couple of brochures at the receptionist’s desk as I walked out.
“Can I help you?” I heard as I opened my car door to leave. A large man approached me with a striking resemblance to Sebastian Cabot (a reference only someone over 50 can visualize).
“Yes, sir,” I replied. “I’d like to volunteer for the upcoming election if you need help.”
So began my 20-year-plus defection from the Democrats to the Republicans.
Only six years earlier, I volunteered for Jesse Jackson’s second presidential campaign and, four years before that, worked as a paid staffer for then-Iowa congressman Tom Harkin’s first U.S. Senate campaign. In that same 1984 election, as a Black Hawk County Democratic delegate for Jesse Jackson, I saw first-hand how the proportion of county delegates a candidate has does not necessarily translate into the same proportion of state convention delegates.
And there I was, in 1994, on a steamy Virginia weekday morning, offering my time and effort to help people like Oliver North — who was running for the U.S. Senate against Democratic incumbent Chuck Robb — get elected.
For the next 20 years, I attended Republican precinct meetings, helped organize neighborhood fundraisers, and worked the phones for the party’s get-out-the-vote efforts. When I left the Republican Party in 2016 to work on my brother’s campaign to challenge incumbent Republican Rod Blum in Iowa’s 1st Congressional District, I felt some ambivalence.
Though never an insider for either party, as a part-time activist for over 35 years, I have developed a strong sense about each party’s organizational and cultural differences. In most cases, these dissimilarities have remained constant over variations in time and geography (Iowa, Virginia, New Jersey). These observations are not, however, necessarily a reflection of the parties’ rank-and-file supporters. And this is not a thesis on the policy differences between the two parties. The following is merely the palpable imprints the two parties left on me.
And as I now reflect on these impressions, I have come to believe some of these differences may explain why, since Watergate’s aftermath, the Republicans have won more national and state elections across this country than have the Democrats, despite the fact that public opinion across many issues has become more ‘liberal’ since 1978.
That the Republicans continue to win elections on a consistent basis cannot be explained by blessing or luck. It is more likely because the Republicans have created a leadership and activist culture organized for just one purpose: winning elections. Where the Democrats have created the world’s most sophisticated fundraising and vote harvesting apparatus in American history, the Republicans have created the most successful political party.
As to how this could happen, I turn to the three specific organizational and cultural differences I’ve observed across the two parties. This first relies a bit too much on psychoanalysis, perhaps, but I believe is the most consistent difference between the two parties since 1978.
(1) Republicans have an enduring sense of being the ‘minority’
Calling Mitt Romney’s 2012 defeat to Barack Obama one of the most painful political losses in his lifetime, conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh found clarity in a moment of despair as he told his radio audience the day after Obama’s re-election:“I went to bed last night thinking we are outnumbered. I went to bed last night thinking we’ve lost the country. I don’t know how else you look at this.”
Fox News’ inelegant host Bill O’Reilly was more direct: “The white establishment is now the minority.”
Republican feelings of being outnumbered did not start in 2012, however. Or in 2008 for that matter. In fact, it can be traced as far back as Richard Nixon’s first presidential term as he reacted to the growing anti-Vietnam protest movement. “And so tonight — to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans — I ask for your support,” Nixon intoned in a televised address to the nation.
But if Nixon was anything, he was a realist — laced a pinch of dark paranoia. Having won his first presidential term by a whisker’s margin, he knew any majority he might rely on politically could never be taken for granted.
Nixon’s frequent lament about his mistreatment by other political elites would contribute to his eventual downfall in the Watergate conspiracy. More broadly, many of Nixon’s personal weaknesses were imprinted onto the psyches of Republican Party’s faithful. The psychological trauma dealt to the Republican Party from the double whammy of Watergate and the inconclusive end to the Vietnam War cannot be over-estimated. Despite a relatively close presidential election in 1976, the Republican Party’s status in Congress and across the state legislatures was in descent.
Around this time, we see the rise of terms such as ‘middle America,’ ‘liberal media,’ and ‘moral majority’ — terms still heard frequently in Republican circles (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: Use of terms “middle America” (green line), “liberal media” (blue line) and “moral majority” (red line) in literature since 1950.
Source: Google Ngrams
The Republicans I knew in Virginia had an “us against the D.C. political establishment” mentality. Everything, I mean everything, was working against them. To this day, my conversations with Republicans often include references to the ‘liberal media’ and ‘coastal elites.’ The news media is against them (even Fox News, according to some particularly strong Trump loyalists). Washington ‘elites’ are against them. Hollywood is against them (try to name more than one scripted TV show today that openly espouses conservative principles). Social media is against them. The public school system is against them. Academics are against them.
These laments emerged in force in the mid-1970s. The term ‘Moral Majority’ was minted by conservative religious activist Paul Weyrich from a perspective of political vulnerability, not strength. It was a defensive mobilization strategy built on a deep insecurity, heightened to toxic levels by Watergate. “We are the moral majority!” was a Republican acknowledgement of their political minority status and the electoral necessity of a coalition with like-minded Democrats and independents. In the 1980 election, many of those like-minded voters would be called ‘Reagan Democrats.’
The Republican affection for the economic aristocracy also brings with it an attendant understanding that this socioeconomic bias puts them in a definitive minority status within the electorate. Without election activities engineered to attract weak partisans and suppress enthusiasm among Democratic voters generally, the Republicans are at a serious disadvantage to the Democrats.
And, in practice, this is has been the electoral strategy of the Republican Party since Watergate. Whereas I frequently heard within the Iowa Democratic Party leadership in the 2014 and 2016 elections that all the Democrats needed to do was “get out their voters,” I don’t recall ever hearing Virginia Republican leaders uttering an equivalent sentiment. Virginia Republicans in the 1990s had endured a century of Democratic Party domination of Virginia politics. For them to think they could just turnout ‘their voters’ (as if voters are owned) would have sounded suicidal.
More importantly, the Republican’s basic approach towards the electorate, motivated by this sense of minority status, makes them a far more effective competitor on election day. Where the Democrats believe the majority of Americans already love them, the Republicans entertain no such assumption.
Any attempt to explain why Republican candidates have kept winning elections since Watergate must therefore include, if not be dominated by, an understanding of their deep sense of their own minority status.
(2) Republicans are more tolerant than Democrats of opinion diversity within its ranks
In my experience with Virginia Republicans and Iowa Democrats, I witnessed two different management styles by the party leaders that impacted how opinion differences were handled within the organizations.
In 1994, when I joined the Republican Party of Virginia (RPV), there was open warfare between upstate (D.C.-area) conservatives, who tended to be more liberal on social issues, and the downstate conservatives, who were much more conservative. The religious right had just won the RPV chair position (Patrick McSweeney) but the battle was far from being won. What left an impression with me was how the Virginia Republicans more frequently engaged in bottom-up conversations. The Republican activists and volunteers I met, many of whom were already successful professionals outside of the party, were not overly deferential towards the party’s staff and leaders. In fact, they were often dismissive of the ‘political hacks’ running the state party. The organization less hierarchical and, frankly, more democratic.
The Iowa Democratic Party (IDP) was the opposite. The party leaders were either career activists that had risen up the ranks or were from academia; whereas, the activists and volunteers were typically students or young professionals early in their careers. This made the IDP more hierarchical and affected internal dialogues which were almost always top-down and less democratic.
Strict hierarchies tend to suppress diversity of opinion within an organization; flat organizations much less so.
Still, I encounter resistance anytime I suggest to a Democrat that the Republican Party is more tolerant of opinion diversity. ‘No f**king way,’ is a common response.
But, in fact, way.
Such resistance is rooted in a common belief that intellectual nimbleness is associated with higher levels of education. In reality, this is not necessarily true — at least not when it comes to politics. According to the analytics firm, PredictWise, the most politically intolerant Americans “tend to be whiter, more highly educated, older, more urban, and more partisan” and lean liberal, particularly on social issues.
This finding augments research by University of Pennsylvania professor Diana Mutz, who concluded in her book Hearing the Other Side that white, highly educated people — who skew Democrat and liberal — tend not to talk with people who disagree with them — which makes the probability higher that they will stereotype those with opposing views.
Self-selection bias impacts how we organize our lives, including who we talk to on a regular basis. The more educated and wealthier we become, the more we can control that dynamic and homogenize our surroundings.
But I posit another factor behind higher levels of opinion tolerance among Republicans. Most of the Virginia Republican leaders, activists and volunteers I met were already (or had been) successful business people from the private sector. They often had MBAs or business law backgrounds and were almost always private sector oriented.
Why does that matter?
Most businesses, large or small, try to avoid politics when making contact with current or potential customers. The big companies may hire powerful Beltway lobbyists to do the dirty partisan work, but at the point-of-sale, partisan politics does more harm than good. Republican party leaders and activists understand that better than their Democratic counterparts because they are more likely to have dealt with that issue in their professional lives.
In contrast, many Democratic Party leaders and activists have only worked in academia or in the non-profit, public advocacy sector. Planned Parenthood isn’t in the business of compromising its policy message in order to appeal to a broader audience. Greenpeace activists aren’t looking for common ground with Exxon-Mobil so they can work together more effectively. The Democrat DNA is fundamentally different and inherently resistant to compromise and opinion diversity.
Again, why does this matter? Because the electoral arena has more in common with consumer brand market competition than it does to an academic symposium on immigration policy or a non-profit funded public awareness campaign. Brands are forced to adjust to market realities in ways few advocacy groups ever encounter. “A wise man adapts himself to circumstances, as water shapes itself to the vessel that contains it,” says an old Chinese proverb. A more contemporary quote comes from business author Alan Deutschman who popularized the business catchphrase, “Change or die.”
The Republican Party is powered by a different culture and mindset than the Democratic Party. It makes the GOP more flexible on issues when it matters most — at election time. Republicans are betting at adapting to changing market conditions.
This cultural difference manifests itself when looking at the prior occupations of U.S. House members in the 103rd Congress and the current 116th Congress (see Figure 2). In the 103rd Congress, 41 percent of GOP members had a business background and that would rise to 47 percent in the 116th Congress. Only 18 percent of Democrat House members had a business background in the 103rd Congress, though it has risen to 30 percent in the current Congress. The other stark difference is in those House members with a public service or political activism background. As of today, 47 percent of Democrat House members have a public service/political background, compared to only 30 percent of GOP members.
Figure 2: Occupations of U.S. House members in the 103rd Congress and the 116th Congress (House members can have multiple prior occupations)
The rise of Donald Trump is a living testament to the ability of the Republican Party and its rank-and-file supporters to embrace change and diversity. How can an evangelical Christian who abhors adultery embrace Trump? Apparently, its pretty easy when you believe you need to compromise on a candidate’s qualities in order to win elections. Does that sound like a quality commonly found among Democrats? I would say not, even if Joe Biden is still leading in the 2020 Democratic nomination race.
(3) Republicans hold themselves accountable for failure
Business people love quantitative performance metrics. They measure like their career depends on it, because if often does. And they always have that one, bottom line metric looming over them: profits.
The Republican National Committee (RNC) has a similar orientation. The party doesn’t value moral victories. The RNC cares about one metric: You either win or lose. It’s the Ricky Bobby theory of electoral politics: If you ain’t first, you’re last.
That’s why Republicans have no problem turning on themselves when their party loses an election. I wouldn’t call it introspection on their part. It’s more like, “We just lost, I need to fire somebody in this office.”
When the Republicans lost to Barack Obama in 2008, Senator John Cornyn, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, turned the spotlight on his entire party. “While some will want to blame one wing of the party over the other, the reality is candidates from all corners of our GOP lost tonight. Clearly we have work to do in the weeks and months ahead.”
There was little vote-shaming (i.e., blaming voters for how they voted) by Republican leaders after 2008 (though there was some of that after the 2012 election when some in the GOP pundit class blamed voters for wanting ‘more stuff.’).
After the 2012 election, the RNC commissioned an internal study to explain the election results and how the party needed to adjust going forward. The Atlantic’s Garance Franke-Ruta described the 2012 postmortem report as “an astonishingly frank document that calls for major changes in how the party addresses minorities, women, and its own campaign processes.”
No such study has ever been released by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) following their 2016 election debacle. Instead, groups outside the DNC have picked up the slack. One group, DemocraticAutopsy.org, led by Karen Bernal, a three-term Chair of the California Democratic Party’s Progressive Caucus, Pia Gallegos, Chair of the Adelante Progressive Caucus of the Democratic Party of New Mexico, Sam McCann, a writer, and Norman Solomon, co-founder of RootsAction.org, produced their own report.
Unfortunately, such “independent” reports are more ideological treatises than true objective analyses — which is what the Democratic Party desperately needed after 2016.
Instead of critiquing their party’s policy and voter outreach strategies, as the Republicans did after 2012, the DNC and most Democratic leaders have blamed Russia for their 2016 loss to Trump.
Like a starving dog pack, the Republicans act collectively after electoral defeats; while, in contrast, the Democrats scurry about doing their own individual thing hoping that somehow it will all come together when the next election rolls around.
Republicans more collectivist? Democrats more individualistic? Isn’t that backwards?
Not at all.
There are many organizational and cultural characteristics distinguishing the Republicans from the Democrats. The three differences I’ve highlighted here may seem counter intuitive, which is why I believe the Democrats must acknowledge them if they are ever going to sustain any electoral success over multiple, contiguous elections.
As of today, it is the Democratic Party that shuns introspection and instead leans on undemocratic processes to push its agenda and pre-approved candidates through to its rank-and-file supporters. Underwriting this culture is the Party’s widely held belief that Democrats are the manifest majority in the U.S. and will become even more so as the country’s demographics change going forward. ‘All we have to do is turn out our voters,’ they tell themselves.
American’s electoral history is a graveyard for such hubris.
If the Democratic Party’s organizational culture doesn’t change, I predict more unexpected defeats in its future.
K.R.K.
Please send comments to: kroeger98@yahoo.com
At issue in the United Kingdom (UK) over Brexit — UK’s exit from the European Union (EU) — is not just whether the country should leave the EU, but the democratic status of the people vis-a-vis Parliament.
The working assumption about the UK democracy has long been that it is predicated on the concept of parliamentary sovereignty: Parliament has absolute and unlimited power.
The idea of a popular referendum supplanting the will of Parliament, even if authorized by an act of Parliament, is controversial in the UK, evidenced by the fact that only three national referendums have ever been held.
Popular referendums have never been popular among UK’s political class. When Prime Minister Winston Churchill wanted to use a referendum to extend his wartime government during World War II, Deputy Prime Minister Clement Attlee balked, “I could not consent to the introduction into our national life of a device so alien to all our traditions as the referendum which has only too often been the instrument of Nazism and Fascism.”
UK elites, including Margaret Thatcher in 1975, have since echoed Attlee’s admonishment of referendums.
So when the majority of UK voters (51.9%) voted on June 24, 2016 to leave the EU, more than a few observers rejected its directive as outside the bounds of parliamentary sovereignty.
“The simple answer to the question as to whether the EU referendum is legally binding is “no,” according to the Guardian’s Haroon Siddiqueln, a senior reporter.
To be binding, Brexit opponents (Remainers) argue the referendum needed to be declared so by the 2015 European Union Referendum Act authorizing the 2016 vote by the people.
“Parliament has deliberately chosen a model which does not involve any binding legal effect,” argued lawyer David Pannick before the Supreme Court in December 2016.
Supporting the No-Brexit-Exit argument, the original parliamentary briefing paper (no. 07212) sent to MPs on June 3rd — 21 days before the actual vote —stated that the “referendum is advisory only. It doesn’t bind either Parliament or the Government to act on its outcome.”
But what MPs understood about the Brexit referendum does not necessarily represent what the people understood when they placed their cross on the ballot — itself offering no indication the vote was non-binding and advisory only:
The vast mount of public opinion polling preceding the 2016 Brexit Referendum didn’t ask about the supposed non-binding nature of the referendum. Neither did the news coverage discuss it. And there wasn’t a surge around date of the referendum vote in Google searches on the term ‘Brexit’ plus either ‘non-binding’ or ‘advisory’ (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: Google Searches on the Term ‘Brexit’ and either ‘Non-binding’ or ‘Advisory’
If the 2016 Brexit Referendum was a non-binding vote all along, it was a well kept secret from the people and makes the Remainers, still pushing for its nullification or calling for a re-vote, seem indifferent to the democratic principles at stake should the UK ultimately stay in the EU.
What may be defensible under UK law may still be the wrong decision in light of the message it sends to the people. There is a reason UK citizens trust politicians and government ministers the least of any profession, according to a October 2017 study by Ipsos MORI (see Figure 2).
Figure 2: UK Public Trust in Various Professions (October 2017)
In good faith, the UK went to the polls and voted to leave the EU. And instead of fulfilling the will of the majority, the Parliament and the Government have proceeded to sow chaos and partisan rancor. But it wasn’t a binding referendum, cry the Remainers, who treat democracy like its a game of Simon Says.
The anti-democratic predilection of the UK democracy is understandably discounted by the majority of its citizens. They assume their vote means what it means. If the majority of citizens want something done, they assume it will be done.
Not so.
Whether Labour, Conservative, and Liberal, all UK parties have a hand in the anti-democratic debacle called the 2016 Brexit Referendum. None have risen to the moment to defend the principles of democratic governance. Direct democracy, after all, has never been supported by those in power. Alexander Hamilton and James Madison dedicated 190,000 words to piss on the idea of direct democracy in the U.S.
What has changed since then? Nothing. And the UK is even more disinterested in direct democracy.
Robert Kennedy famously said, “Democracy is messy, and it’s hard. It’s never easy.” When he made this comment, he was assuming people still believed in the general principle of majority rule. When the concept of majority rule itself is abrogated, as it has been in the UK, democracy only gets messier and its support further eroded.
K.R.K.
All comments and ad hominems can be sent to: kroeger98@yahoo.com
Source: Google Ngrams
