We're all above average

Here are a few factoids that help explain the mid-term elections--and which the pundits haven't mentioned:

#1: Recently I heard about a study showing that the worst employees almost always rate themselves as superior ones, while the best tend to be very self-critical.

#2: If you watch American Idol, America's Got Talent, So You Think You Can Dance or similar programs, one thing they all have in common is the number of people who show up for auditions who have not just no talent--they have what you'd have to call "anti-talent"--yet who absolutely believe they're God's Gift to the Arts. Interviewed after the Simon Cowells have told them they suck massively, they stoutly maintain that the judge(s) know nothing.

#3: I visited Las Vegas recently. It's full of huge, fabulously expensive casinos, paid for by hordes of visitors, each of whom believes he will leave Las Vegas with his pockets stuffed with Benjamins.

#4: When I taught high school in a largely blue-collar semi-rural school district, I was stunned to discover that most of the students believed they already knew everything that was useful or necessary to know, and that the sole utility of school for them was as a place to socialize with their peers. As a corollary, I found that their belief in stuff like astrology was rampant and credulous, while any scientific claims were met by general scoffing and impossibly high standards of proof.

#4: Sociobiologists believe that human beings constantly overestimate their own skills and chances because it's good for the species for them to do so--even if such delusions have disastrous personal consequences. Warriors go into battle believing the bullet has the next guy's name on it. If they were realistic they'd run.

All this gets us an election in which people with no knowledge or understanding of economics all acted as if they were experts--that what they knew about balancing a checkbook was sufficient to know what the nation needed.

The Republicans' strategists understand mediocre people's intuitive overevaluation of their understanding, constantly telling them they knew more than those Democrat eggheads.

A perfect example is the balancing a checkbook analogy. In fact nearly every large business got there by going into debt. For that matter, nearly every middle class family is in debt because they bought their home on credit, not with cash.

Of course it's insane to go into debt to buy luxuries, or to gamble at the nearest Indian casino. But going into debt rationally is exactly what the word "investment" means. We buy a house on time--not too expensive a house, mind you--because it's a good investment. We shoudln't buy a luxury car on time because that's a bad investment.

So to say that government must always avoid deficit spending is a principle that doesn't work for business or for families.

And it's not what people mean, anyway. What they mean is this: "Deficits don't matter (to quote Vice President Cheney) as long as it's for things I like, spent on people I like. While no amount of money, deficit or not, should be spent on things or people I don't like. Democrats take money from white people and spend it on colored (black and Mexican) people and foreigners. Obamacare is free medical care for blacks and Mexicans taken from whites, so it's bad. The bailout was for rich people, who aren't as bad as blacks and Mexicans because they look like me, but it's still bad. Republicans are my tribe. Democrats are a different tribe trying to conquer my tribe, so they aren't just bad--they're enemies."

Good economists have conceded that all theories and predictions based on market and business leaders being rational fail. Economics only gains predictive power when it takes into account human foibles.

Ditto elections. So, as I keep saying, it's not about the economy. It's not not about the economy either, but almost nothing that was said by the Republicans and their minions and their masters was factual.

Go back to those business analogies. A big company gets in trouble. Its stock plummets. Sales tank. That happened at Chrysler, for example, largely because Chrysler cars look sexy but aren't reliable. In the crisis such a company should keep a tight lid on executive compensation and make sure to week out employee dead wood. But it also needs to spend--with borrowed money--on improving its product, and then on communicating how improved its products are. It can pay for that deficit spending when times are better. But if it doesn't spend then, times won't get better.

And then in good times it needs to reign in unnecessary spending (such as lavish manager compensation) so that it has a fat war chest for the bad times.

The Republicans have it exactly backwards--when the good times roll they spend like drunken sailors. Then in a bust they want to turn off the spigots.

That serves no one's interests but that of those who are insulated from suffering in the bad times--think CEOs with golden parachutes--and who have--and see--no need for a social safety net.

And the Republican Party and its faithful adherents always advocate policies that agree completely with the interests of the CEO/investor class. Purely by coincidence, of course.

Money can and can't buy elections

Here in California, Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman has spent many, many millions of dollars in her quest for office--vastly more than her opponent. Yet she'll probably lose, as did Arianna Huffington's wealthy then-husband some years before.

On the other hand, a giant coal company bought itself a West Virginia Supreme Court judge who then voted in that company's favor in a case that had been pending.

You can find abundant examples of cases where money did get someone elected, and many others where lots of money failed to do so.

The Freakonomics guy claims money achieves tiny advantages in elections--way disproportionate to the amount spent. However, even if that's true, in a close election a tiny advantage produces exactly the same win as a giant one. Remember the congressional election in the state of Washington that was won by a few hundred votes out of millions cast?

So--what's the answer overall?

The frustrating answer, I believe, is that money talks but it has to be spent wisely and it can't overthrow settled opinions in most cases.

Thus you could spend a billion on the next Senate seat election in Alabama and you still won't elect a Green Party candidate. Likewise a Tea Party type won't win in a statewide California election.

But that's the boundary of the envelope. Within that boundary, money speaks. And don't delude yourself into thinking that it's just those campaign ads you see on TV, along with the glossy fliers you get in the mail. Huge--by the standards of those who aren't billionaires--amounts of money have been poured into creating and maintaining a squadron of fake think tanks (fake because they start with their conclusions, which always serve the interests of the billionaires), ownership of the AM talk radio world, and one network (Fox News) wholly dedicated to promoting Republican interests--up to and including employing Republican politicians when they aren't in office and donating millions to Republican political campaigns.

There's also a dirty tricks infrastructure which sometimes obvious--as in the Swift Boat campaign that defeated Kerry's presidential run--and sometimes sub rosa--as in the whisper campaign to convince Republican voters in the 2000 North Carolina primary that McCain had adopted a Negro baby he'd fathered--which succeeded in defeating McCain's presidential run so Bush could win.

One other hidden aspect of big money in campaigns is that it's easier to lie, and the Republican noise machine routine promulgations jaw-dropping whoppers. But when you have a thousand talk show hosts and think tankers and politicians all saying the same set of lies using the same emotionally charged language each week, it's easy to believe the lies. And by the time responsible journalists have done the spadework needed to debunk the lies of the week, a new set of lies is spawned, burying the truthtellers in an avalanche of propoganda.

And while you're perfectly free to buy your own airtime to oppose this "wall of sound"...they're perfectly free to spend, literally, billions, drowning the unions' ad buys, try as they might.

Plus when union money is used in politics, they're required to reveal it--whereas the Supreme Court's Far Right Five have enabled billionaires to fund their campaigns in total secrecy, even though the Supremes' Citizens United ruling said just the opposite. But it hasn't worked out that way.

So, within certain limits, money wins elections.

Not all agree of course. I listened to Fox News programs this afternoon as they gloated over their coming victory, constantly touting the fact that public opinion favored them. And never--not once--mentioning the role of the billionaires' money in creating and shaping that opinion.

Because in the Fox News universe public opinion is formed by tens of millions of voters reading all the bills in Congress and making informed judgments about the effect of those bills on their own lives and those of their loved ones. In the Fox-0-verse there is no such thing as right wing propaganda fueled by billions of billionaires' dollars.

Lastly, the role of vast monies and vast lies in this election becomes even more ironic given that most Republican voters will not benefit from "their" victory--just the reverse, in fact. And this victory will come from well-financed lies, not from an honest debate of the actual issues. Yet I believe the average rank and file Republican voter is personally honest.

So--how can such honest people rejoice at winning through a tsunami of lies?

That's the power of primitive tribalism. Honesty is reserved for one's tribe. For everyone else--anything goes. That's the kind of morality the human race practiced a million years ago. I guess that makes it conservative to preserve such ancient ways today.