Why Are The President’s Priorities the Opposite of the People Who Elected Him?
This January, as President Obama began his second term, the Pew Research Center asked Americans to list their policy priorities for 2013. Huge majorities cited jobs and the economy; sizable majorities cited health care costs and entitlement reform; more modest majorities cited fighting poverty and reforming the tax code. Down at the bottom of the list, with less than 40 percent support in each case, were gun control, immigration and climate change.
Yet six months later, the public’s non-priorities look like the entirety of the White House’s second-term agenda.
Source: Ross Douthat.
Well, wouldn’t they contend that those priorities have been addressed? Just trying to understand myself.
Could be but besides explaining their stance, the fact that the public still has those as priorities means those issues should be at the forefront of the second-term agenda.
Samuel, true. It’s upsetting when you can tell certain issues are pushed due to political reasons.
Well, as with most politicians and administrations, the reasons are all for political gain before anything else.
Well, that can be pretty obvious but it’s hard to think that all of it is just for pure political gain when the public has clearly other priorities. In this case I can see where they’ve tried to address these issues in the past and perhaps are still waiting for the benefits out of the bills they’ve passed. Not saying it’s correct or that there aren’t hidden reasons, as there usually are.
Guess you got to pick you battles. I don’t think either the public or the administration have any clue what the nation’s priorities are and will be for a very long time.
First of all, voters don’t elect candidates — donors do. Without donors and what is sometimes called the “base” of the Democratic Party, Obama would have had problems getting elected.
I personally subscribe to Median Voter Theory which postulates that candidates need to attract 50% of the voters +1 additional person to win. But, that’s not to say that the 50% will necessarily be everyone left of the middle for Democrats or everyone to the right of the middle for Republicans. Since voters tend to be clustered just to the left and right of the center, candidates tend to pander to the middle (at least in their rhetoric). However, they need the support of people willing to donate money. The people who tend to donate are not your average, indifferent Independent voters in the middle. The people who are willing to open their checkbook are ideologues at the fringes of their party; or single-issue voters who care passionately about one issue. Some of Obama’s donors are wealthy people who care about these special issues. Or, maybe he is trying to capitalize on issues that Republicans are weak on. Maybe Obama believes he can garner donations by supporting liberal causes, retain the extreme liberal voters in the process and then buy the independent moderates who don’t know any better.
Many of the Independent Median Voters don’t know much about the issues except they know they want hope & change as long as everything stays the same!
@Buster: You might be interested in the public choice work of Goodman and Porter, which focuses on competing candidates and their platforms. They point out median voter theory doesn’t account for the intensity of voters’ support for their preferred candidates, which may be expressed in many ways — but quantitatively thru donations or expenditures on behalf of the candidate. (I think the discussion in this article may be relevant: http://www.ncpathinktank.org/pdfs/Political-Equilibrium-and-the-Provision-of-Public-Goods.pdf). Policies on guns, immigration and climate change (and same-sex marriage, I would add) are intensely supported/opposed by a small fraction of the public, but to the extent those people are most likely to vote and support candidates/issues financially, the issue moves up in the priorities of political candidates affected by those policy preferences.
Why do the priorities differ? Easy. Mr. Obama’s priorities were veiled in generalities like “hope and change,” leaving each voter to assume his/her own meaning. The priorities required to meet Mr. Obama’s definitions were vastly different from those of the electorate.
Meanwhile, Mr. Obama has been supremely successful at focusing his supporters’ attentions on what they dislike, rather on what his ability to deliver their fondest “hopes.”
Result? Supporters still like him, at least a lot more than they like his opposition, but still can’t quite figure out why their priorities are so at odds.
Because the government decides what you think is important, don’t you know?