Shock and…stall?

GG 2020 - 1st July 2010

If crises are opportunities, then Barack Obama is a lucky man. From the financial meltdown to the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico—where 35,000-60,000 barrels of oil are spilling into the ocean every day—there are disasters aplenty.  Environmentalists are eager to use the Deepwater Horizon oil spill to move the debate on alternative energy forward, but the Whitehouse has consistently failed to turn unexpected disasters to its political advantage. Instead, the Administration’s calculated, deliberate legislative approach seems to have left it unable to capitalize on spontaneous changes in the political landscape.  This is unfortunate, because it is from exactly these kinds of shocks that some of the most important environmental achievements have come.

 Apropos the 2008-2009 financial crisis, Whitehouse chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel famously said, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.” Emmanuel, widely admired and feared as one of Washington’s savviest political operators, was describing how he hoped to pass far-reaching financial reform through Congress on the heels of the economic meltdown.

 A year and a half later, financial reform remains (as of this writing) plodding through the Senate. What early this week looked like a consensus around strong reforms seems to have unraveled, with the death of Democratic senator Robert Byrd taking away a crucial vote. The final bill—and there will be one, it seems, as Congress wants to look active in the lead up to the November elections—will likely be a watered down version of what was hoped.  If this happens, the Whitehouse will be able to claim some victory, but nothing commensurate to the magnitude of the cost of the crisis.

 The Gulf oil spill, however, is threatening to become a crisis from which the Whitehouse will extract no advantage whatsoever. The magnitude of the spill, far and away the worst in American history, is difficult to imagine.  An enormously productive ecosystem on which millions of people depend has been devastated.  Worse, no one knows when the spilling will stop, or how it might finally be contained.  People are angry. A May poll found that over a third of Americans consider the spill the “worst disaster in 100 years,” and they are taking it out on BP and the President.

 The proximate causes of the spill—sloppy standards at the company, lax oversight from the government—are clear, and have either been addressed already or soon will be.  But the real cause of the spill, the nation’s—and the world’s—overdependence on oil, is also clear. Here was a golden opportunity for the Obama administration to change the debate on clean energy with a bold initiative.

 That call didn't come till some three months after the explosion, when the President gave his widely-panned Oval Office speech. As usual, the rhetoric was audacious:

"But a larger lesson is that no matter how much we improve our regulation of the industry, drilling for oil these days entails greater risk.  … For decades, we have known the days of cheap and easily accessible oil were numbered.  For decades, we’ve talked and talked about the need to end America’s century-long addiction to fossil fuels.  And for decades, we have failed to act with the sense of urgency that this challenge requires.  Time and again, the path forward has been blocked -- not only by oil industry lobbyists, but also by a lack of political courage and candor."

But it is exactly political courage and candor that we have not seen from the Whitehouse. The House has passed an ambitious energy and climate bill. But in the Senate the compromise bill from Senators Kerry, Lieberman, and Graham—widely viewed as the best hope for energy and climate reform—remains stalled following a strange 11^th hour defection from Graham, the Republican co-sponsor.  The administration has yet to exert the kind of strong public leadership needed to get even this not particularly ambitious bill passed.

 Why hasn’t Obama seized the opportunity in the spill? The answer can perhaps be put in the terms of a recent blogosphere controversy, in which Slate’s Christopher Beam, riffing off a piece in the Columbia Journalism Review, imagined what the news would look like if it were written by political scientists. The basic idea is this: we can think about politics as political scientists do, or we can think about politics as journalists do. The former see the world like a chemistry equation; take a given distribution of interests and power, run them through the relevant political institution, count the votes, and there’s your policy. The underlying factors of power and interests largely determine outcomes. Journalists, in contrast, see political struggles as a narrative; issues emerge, people discuss them in newspapers, on cable television, and in the blogosphere, opinions form, and people act on them. Personal charisma, individual leadership, and the shaping of the discourse are key. Outcomes are less predictable.  

The Obama administration seems to prefer the political science approach. The views of every Senator and Congressman are determined, defining the range of what is legislatively possible. A cost-benefit calculation is made to understand how much can be gained in policy from a given investment of the Whitehouse’s political capital. A coalition is formed, and a bill, in theory, is passed.

 There is much to recommend this approach, not least the Administration’s phenomenal success with healthcare reform (which seemed to catch the journalists by surprise).  As a political scientist myself, I’m partial to a view of the world that focuses on detailed analysis of interests, power, and vote-counting.

 But any political scientist would tell you there is more to politics than that. In statistical models we call it the “error term,” the random, unpredictable part of the political process that can’t be reduced to underlying variables. Political scientists hate the error term, because it messes up our models of the world. But we also respect it—because these unpredictable shocks are responsible for some of the most important political changes.

 Consider the environmental field. In 1969 the Cuyahoga river became so full of toxic sludge that it actually caught on fire. Time magazine started a storm of media coverage that filled the American public’s mind with images of impending environmental disaster. While difficult to measure, the event is commonly thought to have played a strong role in creating the conditions needed for the flurry of environmental regulation that followed, including the Clean Water Act and the Environmental Protection Agency.

 Twenty years later, international negotiations were underway to limit CFCs, the chemicals responsible for the depletion of the ozone layer.  Existing agreements fell short of what experts believed was needed, and consensus looked unlikely. Then scientists discovered a massive and expanding ozone hole above Antarctica. An obtuse issue suddenly became a kind of sci-fi threat, capturing the political imagination. The Montreal Protocol, widely admired as one of the most effective international environmental agreements, soon followed.

 Political scientists wouldn’t necessarily have predicted these outcomes given the underlying factors. But unforeseen incidents led to new narratives and perspectives that shifted the parameters of the political debate. In each, skillful activists and leaders promoted the narratives that served their interests, capturing the rhetorical high ground. They made sure these crises didn’t go to waste.

 It is this kind of political finesse we need now to shift the American debate over clean energy. If we look only at the underlying interests and count the votes, there is no opportunity to be found in the crisis in the Gulf. But if a politician with courage, candor, and rhetorical skills looks a bit harder at the error term, he might just find a way to change the terms of the debate. Here’s one political scientist hoping for a little more journalistic flare in the President!

Tom Hale is a PhD candidate at Princeton University and a GG 2020 Fellow.