Woody Gets an Election

There’s a great episode, despite the juvenile title, from the final season of Cheers called “Woody Gets an Election.” In it, Frasier Crane bets that he could train a chimp to spout meaningless shibboleth and still garner ten percent of the vote in the upcoming city council election. No chimp being handy, it’s agreed that Woody Boyd, by far by the dumbest of Cheers’ characters, would make a fine surrogate. Woody’s campaign rhetoric consists of farming stories that the press mistakes for political analogies, and this being television, Woody duly gets elected to Boston’s City Council.

Sadly, this sort of thing happens in real life all too frequently at the local level, but mainly because so few people know the people for whom they’re voting. But could it happen at the U.S. Congressional level? Not usually to that extreme, perhaps, but something only slightly less insidious happens on a fairly consistent basis.

Legislators are called upon to regulate all sorts of things. Some such things, like fiscal policy, banking law, environmental regulation and health care policy, are really quite complicated. Other things, like “Do we post the Ten Commandments in the hallway?” are easily within the grasp of your average simpleton. The same set of legislators, however, will decide both how we regulate multinational banks and whether we post the Ten Commandments in the hallway. The thing that we as voters get to decide is whether we choose our legislators based on their views on the former or on the latter.

When evaluating candidates in a political debate, I think it’s helpful to evaluate them based on the decidedly non-partisan Woody Test. The one question of the Woody Test is, “How smart would this person (Woody) need to be in order for me (Frasier) to train them to answer these questions in front of a camera?”

It takes almost no intelligence to get up and say, for instance, that you oppose abortion in all cases. To be fair, it takes just the same amount of intelligence to say that you want to make sure that all women have abortion rights. Similarly, it takes zero intelligence to say that you believe a marriage should only be between one man and one woman, or say that everyone should be allowed to marry, no matter what their orientation. This is not to say that some very, very intelligent people couldn’t hold any of these beliefs. It’s just to say that if someone does hold such beliefs, it in no way suggests that they possess some greater intelligence.

On the other hand, it is much tougher for the below-average rube to get up there and fake knowledge of banking law. Granted, someone can advocate bad policy in a way that sounds very intelligent and convincing, but if all a candidate can do is get up there and fire off simplistic and extremist slogans, that’s going to show through. So you won’t be guaranteed to get superb policy, but at a minimum, you’re at least unlikely to get a Woody-style complete idiot.

From that, it makes sense that if we judged candidates based on their stances on issues that the average Woody couldn’t fake convincingly, we would get better legislators, and thus better government, than if our legislatures were forums for the sort of social issues that are easily understood by the masses, but not terribly relevant to the business of running a country.

So take the following idea as thought experiment rather than a recommendation of policy: I firmly believe that we would get better government if wedge issues like abortion and gay marriage were taken out of the political process. Now, this is in and of itself doesn’t imply how those issues should be resolved. If there were suddenly either a constitutional amendment banning all abortions, or ensconcing the right to have one, either of those would presumably take the issue out of the legislatures. The same could be said of amendments banning gay marriage or declaring it a fundamental right. Further, I’m also not saying that because such resolutions would probably have a positive effect that we should run out and try to implement them—indeed, it would at least temporarily exacerbate the very problem they seek to correct.

But, the principle can inform our voting patterns, even if we agree that such issues need to be left within the public square. This is why I don’t understand why so many voters make it a priority to find to the most pro-life and anti-gay marriage candidate possible and then vote for that person in the primaries, given that there are plenty of (presumably) acceptably pro-life and anti-gay marriage candidates from which to choose. If a candidate is asked something about how we deal with global warming and says something like, “We should assume it isn’t real,” or is asked a complex question about banking and says, “Let’s just let the banks fail,” that’s a really bad idea. What’s more, it is probably not the only bad idea this person has. This person is probably chock full of disastrous ideas. When candidates expose their ignorance and imprudence in this way, that is nature’s way of removing them from the political gene pool. But if voters say, “Yeah, but he had such great things to say about the sanctity of marriage,” they subvert nature’s process. My point, at the moment, is not that these positions are bad in themselves. My point is that people should be able to find much smarter people with almost the same views on those issues, but they seem disinclined to look.

I’ve probably tipped my partisan hand at this point. True, Democratic primaries mechanistically filter out candidates who are not pro-choice and increasing those who oppose marriage equality, and this has some unfortunate consequences. But Democratic voters in no way seem concerned with finding the candidates who take the most extremist positions on these issues. Democratic primaries largely focus on issues like the economy, health care and the environment, and voters seem to be looking for thoughtful answers on these subjects and usually reward the candidates who can provide them. It makes it difficult, though not impossible, for a Woody to slip through. Thus, we by and large get Democrats who can speak intelligently about a wide range of complicated civic issues. That does not per se guarantee their wisdom on all those matters, but it is certainly a good omen.

Republicans, conversely, put great pressure on their candidates and tend to winnow the field based on who can deliver the best sound bites about the Woody issues and tack furthest to the right. Sometimes a thoughtful, knowledgeable candidate will get through despite the hurdles. But there’s absolutely nothing about familiarity with social issues that implies competency in complicated issues, and the same legislators will have to decide both kinds of matters. So the Republican vetting process, if you will, has produced an awful lot of Woodies. As a result, we have a large chunk of the Republican caucus that can’t offer anything constructive to the debates. All they can do is rattle off very simplistic talking points: “Tax cuts!” “Government bad!” “Global warming is a hoax!” “Tax cuts!”

In a democracy, if you’re lucky, you get just barely as good a government as you deserve. Republicans have leaders that are just as good as the party deserves. Those leaders led the country into an economic ditch and a military boondoggle, have gotten smacked hard in two straight elections because of it, fail to offer anything useful to the current policy debates, and as such are leading the party down a road to irrelevance. So that should tell us something about how well Republicans have discharged their duty to elect productive leaders.

Particularly, the inability to constructively add to debates is worrisome because the solutions proffered by Democrats, while generally productive, are never perfect, and more often much less than perfect. So it would always be helpful to have two parties offering useful ideas instead of one. Changing the Republican culture is a long-term project, but perhaps a change is called for to a greater focus on thoughtfulness and competency rather than simplicity and extremism. This in and of itself doesn’t even require changing their positions on social wedge issues, but it does require that the other business of government get more attention. If and until that happens, the ill effects of public policy will be steep, and the effects on the Republican Party could be fatal.