“Let no act be done at haphazard, nor otherwise than according to the finished rules that govern its kind.” Marcus Aurelieus, Meditations. iv. 2.
I like rules. I like playing with them, figuring out the reasoning or policies behind them, determining how to get around them while still staying within them, and using them to further my cause. It’s part of why I like the law. More specifically, it’s a big part of why I like being a lawyer…it’s ultimately all about playing with the rules.
Rules are ruthless. They don’t have a rooting interest in the contest. They don’t care if you really are the best, or the nicest, or the most righteous. They just are… implacable, without mercy and unrelenting.
I suspect he would not articulate it this way, but I have to admit, I have developed a particular admiration for Obama and his team because of their knowledge, manipulation and yes, ruthless use of the rules. I’m not suggesting that this command of rules is the only factor in their successes, there was certainly a good amount of both skill and luck involved as well. Nonetheless, Obama’s skill with the rules, and his adherence to their ruthlessness, has certainly been a major factor in his success.
Obama started his political career with a particularly ruthless use of rules. Alice Palmer had served in the Illinois Senate for a long time. She decided to run for Congress, and touted Obama as her replacement. When Palmer lost in the primary (badly by the way), she wanted to stay as a state senator and she and her supporters asked Obama to forgo the race this time so she could reclaim her state Senate seat. Obama said no. Not only did he say “no”, he filed challenges to the signatures filed on her nominating petitions….and those of every one of Obama’s Democratic primary rivals. He succeeded in getting each of them removed from the ballot. When asked about this, The Chicago Tribune reported Obama replied that the unsparing legal tactics were justified by obvious flaws in his opponents’ signature sheets.
“To my mind, we were just abiding by the rules that had been set up,” Obama recalled. And he defended his use of ballot maneuvers: “If you can win, you should win and get to work doing the people’s business.”
That ruthless understanding and use of rules continued in the primaries, and is largely responsible for Obama’s claiming the Democratic Party nomination.
The Hoover Institute examined how Obama won the Democratic Party nomination. The Hoover Institute posited that
“[T]he particular rules of the process were very important in determining the party ’s nominee, that there were features of the system that favored Obama over Clinton, and that slight, uncontroversial changes in the rules could have produced a different outcome.”
In reaching that conclusion the Institute notes
“Obama’s lead in the actual vote count was vanishingly small, just 150,000 votes out of 35 million cast for the two, without Michigan having fully participated. Thus, by the end of the primaries, Obama had amassed a 3.1 percent lead in pledged delegates, compared to a 0.4 percent lead in votes. This implies that Obama’s voters were more efficient than Clinton’s voters at producing delegates. Indeed, for every Obama delegate, there were 10,788 Obama supporters. For every Clinton delegate, there were 11,727 Clinton supporters.
“This efficiency advantage probably made the difference for the junior senator from Illinois. If Clinton ’s voters had been as efficient at producing delegates as Obama’s voters, his lead in pledged delegates would have shrunk from 106 to a paltry 14, which would have placed Clinton well within striking distance of the nomination. Thus, it behooves us to ask how it was that Obama supporters produced more delegates.
“This essay will argue that Obama was favored by the delegate allocation system. In other words, Obama won not simply because he had more supporters, but also because the “rules of the game” made those supporters better at generating delegates.”
Obama’s campaign manager David Plouffe is largely responsible for crafting a strategy which showed a particularly acute understanding of the “rules of the game”. That is…in the Democratic primaries, delegates mattered more than popular votes. But Plouffe’s appreciation of rules did not make him immune to mistakes, but it did enable him to quickly shift strategies when he was mistaken. Rolling Stone reported on Obama’s Brain Trust, and David Plouffe in particular.
“Given how much has gone right with the Obama campaign, it’s easy to overlook how flawed its Plan A was. It was a classic momentum strategy: Win Iowa and the rest of the states will fall like dominoes. Just before the Iowa caucus, Plouffe — who, unlike Obama, is a man of few words — rallied the troops with a crisp address, delivered in his stern, pitchless voice. The logic seemed impeccable: “We’re gonna win the caucus, then we’re gonna win New Hampshire, and on the night of February 5th,” he said, cracking his puckish sideways grin, “Hillary’s gonna give her concession speech.”
“Plouffe was wrong about New Hampshire — but instead of digging in his heels, he made a precise and nimble pivot that proved crucial to Obama’s victory. Realizing that the momentum strategy was shot, he immediately began deploying operatives to Maine, a state that did not caucus until five days after Super Tuesday — a shift that Clinton failed to make until the morning of February 6th. Thanks to the extra month of organizing, Obama went on to win Maine by 18 points, part of a decisive victory streak in 11 states.
“Plouffe had also prepared for the long haul, by crafting a strategy that focused on winning delegates, not just states. “David has got one jones,” says Bill Carrick, who worked with Plouffe on Gephardt’s 2004 presidential bid. “He has an absolute, insatiable appetite for numbers. Whether it’s media buying or polling or voter ID, he will massage numbers, dissect numbers. He is absolutely the quintessential numbers junkie.” Driven by his obsession, Plouffe built his own delegate-counting apparatus — a network of operatives positioned inside county courthouses — that could provide him with election-night snapshots of the delegate math without relying on official party pronouncements.
“That delegate-counting apparatus turned out to be essential, given the Democratic Party’s esoteric and complex rules for divvying up pledged delegates based largely on the differing margins of victory in each and every one of a state’s congressional districts. While the Clinton strategy was focused on winning the overall popular vote in big states, Plouffe was parsing data on every district in the country to identify the pivot points that would allow Obama to maximize his delegate haul, even in states he lost.”
This appreciation of rules was made particularly evident in both Nevada and Texas.
In Nevada Hillary Clinton won the “raw” vote, but Obama claimed more delegates. This victory was largely because of Plouffe’s understanding of how delegates were selected in Nevada….down to the district level. The Brain Trust was again responsible here, as the Rolling Stone reported
“[A]fter Clinton won the Nevada caucus on January 19th, and the Associated Press went live with a story saying she would take home the most delegates. Jeff Berman, . . . , rushed over to Plouffe at the Chicago headquarters with a giant book of Nevada legal code. “We’re going to win the delegates in Nevada!” he said, citing the arcane delegate-selection process in one of the state’s congressional districts. Berman knew that Obama had won the popular vote in a key part of the district that still hadn’t publicly reported its results, giving him a 13-12 edge in delegates statewide.”
The Washington Post explained this phenommenon
“While the process of delegate apportionment is extremely complicated, it boils down to this: in the places that Clinton won, there were an even number of delegates that were split between she and Obama. In the places Obama won, there were an odd number of delegates, meaning that he often took two delegates to one for Clinton.”
Then there’s Texas. A couple of weeks before the Texas primary, Martin Frost at Politico reported on the complicated delegate selection process in Texas. The delegate selection process involved both a primary and a caucus…and there was a whole formula for how the delegates were awarded based on both.
About the Texas process, Hillary Clinton was reported as saying “I had no idea how bizarre it is,” Clinton told reporters this week. “We have grown men crying over it.” (Although, one of those weeping grown men should not have been her husband, since his campaign helped write those rules for 1992, and he twice won the Texas primary using those rules.) There was no such problem at Obama’s campaign. They understood the rules and worked them. At the end of the day, Hillary Clinton had won the popular vote and the primary….and again, lost the delegate count.
My appreciation for rules and the ruthless use of them extends beyond the specific rules themselves. No, a truly great and ruthless use of rules includes understanding when the rules are not in your favor and devising a plan to deal with that contingency. Obama’s campaign did this as well.
The Democratic Party nominee is not just decided by delegates, but also by superdelegates. These delegates are allowed not pledged to any particular candidate. They’re allowed to choose their own criteria for deciding who to vote for. The entire point of superdelegates is for them to exercise their independent judgment, not bound by either the popular vote lead or the pledged delegate vote lead. Strictly speaking, those are the rules.
The Clinton campaign argued that the superdelegates should use the popular vote as their guide and that she had one the big states critical to winning in November.
The Obama campaign by contrast argued that the superdelegates should not overthrow the pledged delegates. The argument wasn’t adhering to the rules, but trying an end run around them. He got traction with this argument, as party leaders and superdelegates themselves argued they should not overturn the votes of the pledged delegates. Even Nancy Pelosi argued that pledged delegates should trump the popular vote.
Obama won that argument and got around the rules by creating the perception that strict adherence to the rules would be stealing the nomination from him. I suspect this was a particularly frightening thought to a party who had suffered the Bush-Gore debacle and was facing the prospect that African-Americans and young voters in particular would believe the party elite had jobbed their man out of the nomination.
What if anything does the understanding and willingness to manipulate rules and the public perception of those rules say about governance? Perhaps nothing. But, to me it suggests something. There’s an old adage (of disputed attribution) that laws are like sausages, it’s better not to see them made. Getting legislation passed is a messy business. To get things done, requires a real understanding of the rules of the game, how things work and how to make them work for you. It also helps if you have an ability to frame the public message in a way that frames your answer as the obvious one.
Rules don’t level the playing field. Rules are the playing field. They create the framework within which the contest will occur. To win a contest, sure you have to have some natural skills and talent. But, knowledge of the rules, their intricacies, their weaknesses, their strengths and their quirks can make the difference between a win and a loss.
Gustave Flaubert once said that mediocrity cherishes rules. That may be so, but I think it disregards the fact that the truly gifted can utilize the rules more effectively than others in the field.
Obama’s White House team is taking shape as a group that understands sausage making…at its best and worst. Picking Rahm Emmanuel as his Chief of Staff shows his continued dedication to a ruthless use of those rules, procedural and otherwise.
I think this is going to be fun to watch….and maybe even productive.
