One other point on yesterday's bailout failure. It's possible, as Chris Bowers shows, to argue that "[Bailout supporters] didn't lose because [their] opponents are dumb. [They] lost because [they] failed to convince enough people [they] were right." (sorry for all the brackets, I couldn't figure out how to reformulate this post in the second person). On one level, that's likely true. On the other, though, most Americans have no idea what they think of the bailout. Polling is mixed, and mainly depends on phrasing. Opinions will likely cement after the fact. It will have been a very popular policy if it fails and the economy collapses. It will be popular if it passes and the economy roars forward. It will arguably be unpopular if it succeeds in forestalling collapse but we still have an anemic, weak economy come election day. So was this a victory for those who were cleverly crafting bailout messages? I sort of doubt it. Rather, my hunch is it was a victory for the system. We have a political structure biased against Big Things (this is less true when it comes to foreign policy). Blocking change is far easier than passing it. Health care fails, and so does cap and trade and Social Security privatization and immigration reform and bailout bills and most major initiatives. Doing big things slowly is almost impossible. Doing them very fast is similarly tricky. A lot of the theoretical reasons are well-explained in Sven Steinmo and Jon Watts paper, "It's The Institutions, Stupid." But it's a lesson worth remembering. In any large scale initiative, the odds are against success. That's one reason most bills come out so badly: if the Democrats could just pass health care or a bailout bill, they'd simply build the bill they wanted to pass, and it would be clean and ideologically coherent. They'd respond to the financial crisis much as the Swedish did, with a plan for nationalization. On health care, they'd shoot for single payer. Instead, they need the president, and a bill that doesn't trigger a filibuster in the Senate, and to attract all sorts of House members who have little to fear from party discipline as the system is regional and entrepreneurial and fractured rather than parliamentarian. This is why I argued yesterday that what we're seeing is bigger than the bailout. No one quite knows how to harness our political system in opposition to major problems. No one knows how to get real health reform through, or pass a global warming bill that could actually avert catastrophe, or shepherd a capital infusion that will avert possible economic collapse. Those problems are all different, to be sure, with different coalitions and different messaging strategies, but much of what blocks action is structurally similar. When it comes to the American political system, you can almost never believe in change.
