Political Football

November 14, 2006
Posted by Jay Livingston

Thinking back on the Democratic sweep of a week ago, I now realize that I should have seen it coming last year during football season. It was the year of the Steelers.

I don’t mean anything silly, like the idea that the Superbowl forecasts the stock market— if the NFC team wins, buy; if the AFC wins, sell. It’s worked about three-quarters of the time, but if it’s anything more than coincidence, it’s mostly because the NFC has won more often than the AFC, and the stock market has gone up more often than down.

But the link between the Steelers and the election may be real. It wasn’t that the Steelers won the Superbowl; it was that somehow along the way, they had become “America’s Team.”
That title used to belong to the Dallas Cowboys. I imagine that some PR person for the Cowboys dreamed up the phrase, but it was true in a way. The Cowboys weren’t really America’s team so much as they were what we might now call the Red States’ Team. Through a wide swath of the South and West, people rooted for the Cowboys, mostly because football fans had no other good pro team to root for, maybe no team at all.

Today, fans in places like Arizona, North Carolina, and Tennessee have local teams. Not so in the 1960s and 70s. And the teams that did make their home in the South and West were in the AFC. On Sunday, NBC would broadcast the local AFC team (Broncos, Dolphins). But the CBS affiliate would be broadcasting the NFC, and usually it was the Cowboys.

So the people who listened to Country & Western on the radio watched the Cowboys on TV. Rooting for Dallas was easy in those days. The Cowboys were good. They went to the Superbowl four times in the 1970s, winning twice. Beyond the won-lost record, they had an image, a brand. The Cowboys represented the individualist strain in American culture. The Cowboys were Texas, the land of big thinking, big opportunity, and every man for himself. They were rugged, independent, a football version of the Marlboro man. And just as Americans bought Marlboro cigarettes, America also bought a lot of Cowboys jerseys and other paraphernalia. For a while, the Cowboys alone accounted for 30% of all NFL merchandise sales.

As the red states got more NFL teams, the Cowboys position as “America’s Team” started to fade. There were teams closer to home to root for, and the Cowboys’ performance in the past few years hasn’t exactly been the kind that makes distant fans remain loyal.

The Steeler brand is something else entirely. If the Cowboys were the team of the Sun Belt, the Steelers are the team of the Rust Belt. Pittsburgh produces very little steel these days. The economy of the region is dominated by medical complexes. That and unemployment. But the team is still called the Steelers, not the Medics, and it still represents the values of an industrial past. Steelworkers are working class wage earners bringing home a paycheck. Their families depend on the New Deal kind of government they pay taxes to or the union they are part of to help protect them from the uncertainties of life — sudden turns of fortune like layoffs at work and serious illness at home. These people stress the public and collective over the private and individual. Remember, the Steelers’ powerful running back Jerome Bettis was not called the SUV or the Pick-up Truck; he was public transportation, The Bus.

Is there a parallel in the election? We all know that people were voting against Republican policies in Iraq and against Republican sleaze. But Democrats weren’t just non-Republicans. Many of the Democrats who won ran as economic populists. They support policies that benefit ordinary people and perhaps cut into the profits of corporations. One of the first things the new Democratic congress will do is pass an increase in the minimum wage. They will also try to change the new Medicare law to allow the Government to negotiate with drug companies to get lower prices, something forbidden under the Republicans’ Medicare bill.

In 2005, the Steelers became America’s team. They won the Superbowl. But more tellingly, Americans, voting with their wallets, bought more Steeler merchandise than that of any other team. Nine months later, Americans voted for a congressional majority that could easily be wearing black and gold under their red, white, and blue.

(An ironic footnote: The election did feature one actual Steeler. Lynn Swann, the great receiver for the great Steeler teams of the seventies, ran for governor of Pennsylvania as a Republican. He lost badly.)

They Blew It

November 13, 2006Posted by Jay Livingston

“Victory has a hundred fathers, but defeat is an orphan.” It’s not clear who originally said this. JFK used it after the disastrous the Bay of Pigs invasion. I’m surprised this quote hasn’t turned up again now that even the Bush administration is all but admitting that Iraq is pretty much what The Daily Show has been labeling it all along — a mess (“Mess-o-potamia”). Or worse.

The question is no longer how to achieve “victory”— after the election, that word has disappeared quickly from official talk— but which policy will give the least bad results.

Proponents of the war—the neoconservatives who, from in and out of government, pushed hard for the invasion— are starting to sing the chorus of “Don’t Blame Me.” In the latest issue of Vanity Fair, several neo-con biggies who have since left government insist that the invasion was a great idea. The trouble is that those incompetents in the Bush administration, including the president, botched the way that idea was put into action.

Here’s Richard Perle, a member of something called the Defense Policy Board, who pushed long and hard for the invasion: “I'm getting damn tired of being described as an architect of the war. I was in favor of bringing down Saddam. Nobody said, ‘Go design the campaign to do that.’ I had no responsibility for that.”

What about the millions of Americans who have supported the war, who talked about victory, who voted for Bush in 2000 and 2004? Will they similarly be able to distance themselves from their earlier enthusiasms and blame everything on the people they elected?

When I was in graduate school I remember hearing about a study on pronouns. The researchers called students at a large university, one of those places where football was very important, and asked them about the game. When the team won, students usually used “we.” When the team lost, the students used “they.” The perfect example came from one student after a disappointing loss: “We were winning up until the fourth quarter; then they blew it.”

"I Want to Be a Part of It. . . "

November 9, 2006
Posted by Jay Livingston

“Who voted?” I asked in class today. One student. And this was in New Jersey where the race for Senate looked to be close enough that your vote might have made a difference. One. The others were too busy.

I voted. I live in New York, where none of the races was going to be close. I knew my vote didn’t mean a thing. But I voted. I wonder why. Not out of civic duty or a belief that my vote will influence policy or any of those other reasons you learn in school.

Why do I vote, I asked myself. Then I remembered that “why” is the wrong question. Start with the other “reporter’s” questions – who, what, where, when, how. Get good answers to those, and you’ll be much closer to answering why.

What do I do when I vote; where and how do I do it?

I live in New York City. In my precinct, you vote an old building in a drab room with dull lighting and a coffee-stained linoleum floor. Usually, people are waiting in line, most of them people you’ve never seen, but you chat and joke with them. The voting booths and machines are the old kind with a curtain —an old piece of canvas that if you thought about or looked at closely you wouldn’t want to spend too much time touching. Inside the both is the machine. You push the big lever to the right, then you flip down the little levers beside the candidates’ names, then you pull the lever back to the left, and that’s it.

Every time I do it, I think – and sometimes I make this comment to the person next to me in line– that these are probably the same machines people voted on to elect LaGuardia mayor in 1934.

As I was thinking about this now, I realized that I felt good about this whole scene. I liked it. I liked the dirty floors, I liked standing there with these strangers. I liked it because even though we were strangers, even though we might be voting for different people (not really all that likely in my precinct), we were all there together as New Yorkers. I liked thinking that I was connected with New Yorkers and New York elections going back to Fiorello (who, by the way, was dead long before I ever set foot in the city). It’s the sense of being part of something that I want to be part of.

I was talking about this with a friend, and he had the same reaction. He said that when he votes, it always takes him back to the first time he voted. It was the Oregon Democratic primary in 1968. He voted for Bobby Kennedy against Hubert Humphrey and Eugene McCarthy. Kennedy didn’t win in Oregon, McCarthy did. But a couple of weeks later, Kennedy went to California, and on the night that he won that primary, he was assassinated. My friend’s point is that his vote then connected him with an event of historical importance. And now when he votes, he still feels he’s connecting to history.

I think that’s why I vote and why my students don’t. Older people feel more of a connection to history. I know I feel that connection much more now than when I was in my twenties.

But the larger point is that voting is not a rational act, or at least not completely and not always. It’s not a logical means towards some specific goal (like putting the people you like in office). It’s more about how you feel. If you don’t feel connected to the dominant institutions and the history of the country, come election day there will be something else you feel emotionally closer to, and you’ll probably be “too busy” to vote.

The Old Rugged Cross Pressure

November 6, 2006

Posted by Jay Livingston

I don’t know if Paul Lazarsfeld (1901-1976) invented survey research and applied sociology, but he was certainly one of the most important figures in those fields. Everyone who does voter surveys today owes Lazarsfeld, big time. As we go into tomorrow’s election, I keep wondering about the Republican “base,” the Christian conservatives or conservative Christians, the “values voters” who have provided the Republicans not just votes but much of the campaign work force. And I keep remembering Lazarfeld’s concept of “cross pressures,” something he developed back in the 1940s.

Lazarsfeld thought you could make a pretty good prediction about how someone would vote if you knew about certain demographic markers — income, occupation, religion, urban or small town, etc. Often, these characteristics tended to cluster, especially in the 1940s with the dominance of the Roosevelt coalition. But what about the person who belonged to groups that pulled in different ways — the small-town Protestant (Republican pressure) who had a blue-collar union job (Democratic pressure)? Lazarsfeld’s answer was that these voters tend make up their minds later in the campaign, and sometimes they resolve their conflict by just not voting at all.

The conflict for the conservative base today is not so much between group affiliations or demographic categories but between image and reality. They have supported the war in Iraq, but more and more the reality in Iraq makes the war seem to have been a bad idea. They support the President and they support the military. But they may also hear that many generals and the military newspapers want Rumsfeld to resign while Bush wants Rumsfeld to stay. These conservatives are against sex outside of marriage, especially when it involves minors or homosexuals or both. But each week seems to bring some new scandal about homosexuality or infidelity, and the perpetrators and their protectors are Republicans.

Obviously, the Republican leadership is worried about these pressures and about the response that Lazarsfeld would predict — staying home on election day. From the top of the party on down, GOP professionals are trying to make sure that their traditional voters come out. It’s not about converting Democrats or persuading the Independents and undecided. It’s about making sure that the hard core keep the faith, that they do not give in to cross pressures and just avoid the voting booth.

The election is no longer about issues; it’s about turnout. And that’s what a lot of people — the politicos, the network analysts, me — are going to be looking at tomorrow.