Saying No to Your Own
A few thousand snarky tweets upended the confirmation of the President’s nominee to head the Office of Management and Budget by the Senate.
The tweets sent over the last several years by Neera Tanden, a long-time participant in Democratic presidential politics, have been bi-partisan in that they were directed at whomever she disagreed with, regardless of party.
Mitt Romney called them “mean”. Bernie Sanders called them “vicious”. The New York Times label was “prolific venom”. Amy Klobuchar said, “A lot of people have said a lot of things on social media … that they regret.”
Republican senators lined up unanimously against Ms. Tanden’s nomination. When Joe Manchin, Democratic senator from West Virginia said he would not vote to confirm, her fate was sealed.
After the era of Trump who took tweets to a new low of vitriol and personal invective, one might ask, “What’s the big deal about nasty tweets?”
Republicans, however, who were uniformly silent about the former president, expressed outrage. Democrats who routinely deplored Trump, used him as cover for Ms. Tanden. Supporters invoked sexism. A woman was being held to a higher standard than men.
Hypocrisy is the usual charge when there is a sudden change in judgment depending on whether it is your side or their side doing the deed.
But hypocrisy is not the primary culprit here. Hypocrisy is the symptom, not the cause. Underlying the changing responses to very similar actions is one of the most difficult of all political acts, saying “no” to your own. It is also lonely.
I learned about peer pressure early in my years as a state representative in Illinois. From the first day, it was impressed on me and other first termers that we were part of a team. Where you sit, what office you have, what committee assignments you get are all determined by your place within the team and your relationship to the team’s leaders.
You vote for the bills sponsored by your fellow caucus members, they vote for yours, and the team wins. The numbers within the caucus are small, and everyone knows everyone else. Every defection is noticed. It is difficult to be the one vote that defeats a bill sponsored by a friend who has consistently supported your proposals.
More than anything else, party leaders want to be able to count your vote. Reliability is the most prized political attribute. Reliability is encouraged with rewards and punishments.
“Our brains are just designed to experience a lot of excruciating pain at the idea of being alone,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told the New York Times last year after being the lone Democrat to vote “no” on an early stimulus bill, “When you cast those lonely votes, you feel like your colleagues respect you less, and that you are choosing to marginalize yourself.” It can be difficult to appreciate the “powerful psychology of the House floor.”
There is a price to pay when you don’t vote with the Party, with your voters as well as your leaders. Your allegiance to Party principles is questioned. Can you be a real Democrat if you are the only Democrat voting “no”? In the presidential primaries last year, Sen. Klobuchar had to cope with the charge she had voted to confirm more of Trump’s nominees than had other Democrats.
When she was State Senator here in Wisconsin, Kathleen voted against the governor’s proposal to extend health insurance to low-income families. During a subsequent primary campaign, she was attacked for being “the only Democrat” to vote against the bill. It didn’t matter that the program had ended after a year because it was poorly designed—flaws that Kathleen had pointed out when voting against it. Those details weren’t discussed. The message to the party faithful was that she is out of step with the party. The attack—“She isn’t one of us”—lends itself to the thirty-second sound-bite. It is more difficult to explain that a program with a good goal isn’t going to work because it’s poorly designed and inadequately funded despite the promises.
Our default attitude to someone being the only “no” vote, is they are wrong.
Team leadership, team dynamics, and team chemistry are as important in politics as in sports. Sometimes you have to take one for the team, submerging your own welfare, because the goals and success of the team are more important.
At the same time, it is only by saying “no” to their own that members of a Party can keep the Party and its leaders from self-destructive, excessive acts. Saying “no” to the excesses of the other Party is dismissed as just politics. All of the condemnation by Democrats of Trump’s excesses had no effect. If it had been Republicans then who said “no” to their own, we would be in a different place now.
Saying no to your own is most difficult when you are part of the majority, the margin between the two parties is narrow, and your choice decides whether the Party wins or loses. If you are in the minority, there is little effect if you differ from your leaders; the outcome doesn’t change. Only when members of the majority go against their Party’s position is there a different outcome. The pressure then to go along, both within the caucus and from interest groups and Party voters, can be intense.
Wittingly—or unwittingly—the media contributes to the pressure by reporting the results of a vote as a win for one Party and a loss for the other. The tactics and the politics are the story. It’s not about truth and justice, right or wrong. It is about whose side are you on. So, in addition to weighing whether your Party’s policy is wrong, you have to decide if it is wrong enough to give the opposition a very public victory and your own team a loss. You are praised by your usual opponents for having moral integrity. You are condemned by your usual friends as a traitor.
When Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Brian Hagedorn, joined in ruling against the Trump campaign in the Wisconsin election cases, the headline of a follow-up story in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel was “After siding with liberals in election cases, conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Hagedorn finds himself in 'Twilight Zone'”. Liberals were “singing his praises”, but otherwise there were "lots" of crude, negative and angry comments.
Sen. Manchin’s decision to vote against Ms. Tanden may or may not reduce the toxicity of political rhetoric. It may or may not partake of hypocrisy. Most agree with what he said, “We must take meaningful steps to end the political division and dysfunction that pervades our politics.”
By applying the standard to his own side, he churned up waves.
Douglas Kane is the author of "Our Politics: Reflections on Political Life" published in 2019 by Southern Illinois University Press
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