A short while ago a story related to the four year long drought in California was the lead of story on news shows across the country. This story's time at the top of the charts was short lived. In most markets it was a one day wonder. But for that one day it was literally red hot. The key to this story's dominance of the news cycle was, what else, spectacular video. There was no blood but there was something that was almost better, pictures of burning cars and trucks including at least one 18 wheeler. A wildfire had swept across the I-15 interstate highway and set a bunch of vehicles on fire. There were flames shooting out of some vehicles while others had already been reduced to burned out hulks. A movie special effects crew with a big budget couldn't have done a better job.
And this happened in the L.A. TV market. All the local stations there have helicopters equipped with high tech video cameras. This meant that there was plenty of superb video for everyone. And everyone used all the video they could shoehorn into their shows. But by the next day the novelty had worn off and it was time to move on to the next shiny object. If this was the only "water shortage" story out there it would have been one thing. But there have been enough "water shortage" stories out there for long enough that most people are at least vaguely aware that something is going on. So what's up?
As Coleridge opined in "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner": "water, water, everywhere nor any drop to drink". In one sense there is no water shortage. The oceans are full of it. As are several other large bodies of water like the Mediterranean Sea. The problem is that the Med, the oceans, and these other large bodies of water contain salt water. It is not potable (drinkable) water so for many purposes it is useless. The "water shortage" is in reality a shortage of potable water. But a shortage of potable water is not a new problem.
Civilization used to be traced back to the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in what is now Iraq. A key to development of this "first" (modern archeology now traces our roots much further back in time and to completely different places) civilization was the development of irrigation. Irrigation makes more potable water available and makes it available in more places and for longer periods of time. Controlling the spring flood of the Nile river performed a similar role in the development of the early Egyptian civilization. Various water management capabilities also played a similar role in allowing societies in ancient China and in its neighbor India to support dense populations for thousands of years. I could continue but let me instead skip to the near present.
One of the key drivers of the spectacular technological advance of the twentieth century has been giant water projects. I live in "the West". Dams, irrigation canals, and other large "water works" are literally everywhere. The Southern California we now know would be impossible without the many projects that bring water from hundreds of miles away to slake the thirst of the people, industry, and agriculture of the region. The region is still growing but it has now been decades since the last large water project was completed in the area. This has caused a lot of people to ask "are we at the end of our ability to find more water"? And by "water" they mean potable water.
If it was just Southern California it would be one thing. They have been getting their hands on water from somewhere else for more than a century now. People are often slow but they do eventually wise up. And the areas that Southern California historically has gone to for water have now also been growing quickly for decades. So they are much less interested in shipping water to Southern California. More importantly, they now have enough power and wealth to be able to resist advances by the "outsiders" from Southern California.
But it's not just Southern California. You now hear "we are running out of water" from pretty much everywhere. So is there a real crisis? Yes. If we keep going as we have then we are in big trouble. But the key phrase is "if we keep going as we have". It turns out that we have options. The problems are primarily not technological. We don't need some new gee whiz gadget or technological breakthrough. Instead the fixes we need are primarily political and psychological. If we can fix the politics and the psychology we have plenty of potable water. So what's the deal?
This is one of those "victims of our own success" things. The technology we deployed in the twentieth century enabled massive growth in our consumption of potable water. That technology primarily made more water available. It also did so very inexpensively. Most of the "new" water cost users very little. But there is no more new super-cheap water out there. We have to look elsewhere for solutions. The fact that the twentieth century produced so much cheap water caused us to get lazy. And by lazy I mean it caused us to get into the habit of using water very inefficiently.
The current poster child for inefficient water use is the Almond. We, or at least I, have recently learned that it takes a gallon of water to produce a single Almond. That seems like a lot and it is. That's why Almond producers have recently gotten a lot of flack. Yet on a per-Almond basis, Almonds in the supermarket are cheap. Amazon sells Blue Diamond Almonds, a premium name brand, for roughly a buck an ounce. I don't know how many Almonds are in an ounce but it is several. So at retail Almonds cost a few cents each.
And this price includes all kinds of non-water costs like the land, labor, Almond trees, packaging, shipping, marketing and distribution costs, etc. So there is at most a penny's worth of water in an Almond. And Almond production is up because it is a profitable product and the farmers seem to be able to find water somewhere. So they grow more Almonds. And they do so in Southern California where they are in the fourth year of a historic drought. Whatever Almond farmers are paying for water, it is not high enough to cause them to switch to a less water intensive crop. And maybe Almond farmers use water very efficiently. But a lot of farmers don't.
The Israelis have been critically short of water for many decades now. There is very little water in Israel. This makes what water there is very valuable. This has caused them to be world leaders in the field of efficient water use in agriculture. Even if it is used efficiently, water in Israel is still expensive. Any additional increase in efficiency can save farmers there a lot of money. So Israeli farmers do what they can to drive their already high level of efficiency even higher because that's what makes sense for them to do.
If water was cheap a farmer would be a fool to invest in expensive technology to increase efficiency. And for many farmers in the U.S. water is cheap so they use cheap inefficient water use practices. And they will keep doing so as long as they have access to cheap plentiful water. The same is true of industry. The "home" market for water in the U.S. constitutes a very small portion of the overall market. Most of it is used in agriculture and industry.
In California, for instance, 80% of all water usage in the state is by agriculture. What that means is that if you cut non-agricultural use by 10% you will only save one fourth as much as if you cut agricultural water use by 10%. When you factor in industrial use residential water use in a state like California is probably less than 10% of total consumption. So it is good PR to go after residential use. It convinces the average voter that the problem is real. But it does little to address the real problem.
I have now been going on about all this cheap water for some time now. What am I talking about? How much does water cost? To an extent that is astonishing the answer is "it depends". Water is a commodity isn't it? Shouldn't the price of water work like other commodities like Oil? It should but it doesn't. Let's start with a look at the pricing of Crude Oil as price information for it is easily found on the Internet. A quick search will turn up a number of different prices, a price for say "WTI" (West Texas Intermediate). or for "Brent" (basically oil from the North Sea). Each price quote will differ from the others. What's going on? Each quote is actually for a different grade of Crude Oil.
Oil varies from "light" (contains a high percentage of "volatiles", components that evaporate easily) to "heavy" (low percentage of volatiles). It can also be "sour" (contains a high amount of Sulfur contaminants) or "sweet" (contains a low amount of Sulfur). Light oil is easier to refine. Sour oil is more expensive to refine because the Sulfur must be removed. This is hard and, therefore, expensive. So the market likes and will pay more for light sweet crude (WTI and Saudi oil). It pays less for oil that is heavier and/or more sour like Brent oil.
In a similar manner there are grades of cotton, wheat, and many other commodities. If you stick to the same grade, however, everybody pays pretty much the same price. This is how commodity pricing works. If I can get the same thing somewhere else cheaper, I will. So prices for the same thing in different markets quickly even out. Now let's take a look at water, specifically potable water. There are gradations of potable water but the differences are small. So price variation is small, right? Let's see.
If I buy house brand bottled water online from Amazon it costs about $8/gallon. There are about 8 gallons in a cubic foot so that figures out to about sixty-odd dollars per cubic foot. But this is a retail price for water. How about wholesale? Usually there is a big markup between retail and wholesale. So the price difference might be something like two to one or four to one. The retail price is twice or four times the wholesale price. That would translate to a $30 (two to one) or $15 (four to one) wholesale price of water.
Because it is convenient I am going use the price of the water I get for my house from the municipal utility run by the city of Seattle as a proxy for the wholesale price of water. Now there is no packaging, advertising, etc. costs. There is the pipe to my house and the meter but all of that has a useful life of decades. So maybe this price is more similar to a farm price. Farm prices are lower than wholesale prices so let's apply another four to one factor to be on the safe side. This admittedly crude analysis would predict a "farm" price for water for my house of around $4 per cubit foot. What do we actually see? Depending on whether it is the summer or not and depending on my usage (they price to discourage high usage) I pay between 5 cents and 12 cents per cubit foot. So the actual retail to "farm" price ratio is roughly 600 to 1 instead of my calculated ratio of 16 to 1. That's quite a difference.
And so far I have only crudely estimated what a farmer pays for water. What do farmers actually pay? It should be about the same as I pay, right? Nope! They actually pay a lot less. But how much less varies wildly from farmer to farmer. Again, why? It's complicated but let me hit the high spots. Most farmers get their water one of three ways. They can draw "surface water" from a river, stream, lake, etc., that is on or adjacent to their land. I am going to call this drawn water. Farmers in the U.S. have been doing this since before the country was founded. In a lot of cases this right to draw water is considered an inherent right that goes with the land. Other than the cost of the pump, etc. this water is often free.
A more modern variation of this idea, dating back at least to the nineteenth century, involves pumping water from under the land they own, what I am going to call "pumped" water. Think of the squeaky windmill that features in lots of western movies. The windmill is connected to a water pump. Again in many cases pumped water is considered a right that comes with the land and is free except for the cost of the pump, etc.
In both of these cases the law is slowly evolving. You may now need a permit draw or pump water. It is still rare but it is becoming more common to "meter" (measure) how much water is drawn and to charge farmers some volume based fee. Before moving on let me add one more wrinkle. In the "western movie" scenario only shallow water, water ten or twenty feet down was accessible. Modern technology allows farmers to go much deeper and access large lakes of underground water called aquifers.
The most famous one is the Ogallala Aquifer. It stretches from Texas to Nebraska in the central U.S. Water in this Aquifer is from two to six million years old. (The water in other aquifers may be of much more recent origin.) The Ogallala was filled from rain and other sources literally millions of years ago. When farmers figured out it was there they started tapping it. Initially they were able to inexpensively tap it because the top of the aquifer was not very far down. But it should come as no surprise that the top of the Ogallala has been dropping as farmers pump it out while nothing is refilling it. There is a lot of water there but the amount is finite and farmers use a lot of water when it is essentially free.
The top has been dropping for decades now. Farmers have had to drill deeper (and more expensive) wells and to install increasingly sophisticated (and expensive) pumping systems. In many areas the top of the Ogallala and other aquifers is now more than 200 feet down. It is easy to lift water 33 feet because that is how high normal atmospheric pressure can lift water. But every additional 33 feet means you need to push with an additional 15 pounds per square inch of pressure to get the water out of the ground. Systems for lifting water hundreds of feet are not only very expensive to install. They are very expensive to operate when compared with their short lift brethren. So pumping the Ogallala and other aquifers is getting more expensive as they are drained down. But it is still very cheap compared to the alternatives.
The third and most recent method was is to get water through some kind of agricultural water district. In this case the water district sells farmers metered water and the farmer is charged a volume based fee. But each district does things their own way for their own purposes. And while the purposes, in general are similar, the specifics are unique to each district. These districts were created to build and operate a dam or other large water project.
Dams have been built all over the western U.S. Many people think the federal government just coughed up all the money and built them. Actually many of them were built and operated by some state or local entity or even by completely private entities. But all of the big projects, regardless of who built and operated them, were financed with bonds. In the federal case the bonds were backed by the federal government (an indirect subsidy) but in all cases revenue to support the bonds came from fees charged farmers and based on the volume of water used. These dams and other big water projects were built starting in the late nineteenth century and continuing through the latter part of the twentieth century.
To make the bond scheme work Wall Street had to be convinced that there was sufficient revenue to cover the interest and principal. Say you wanted to build a ten million dollar dam. Then there needed to be a revenue source that would pay off those bonds (with interest) in say thirty years. The water rates were set to just cover the water district expenses. And the expenses consisted of money to pay off the bonds and to operate and maintain everything. There was literally no reason to set rates any higher and every reason to keep them as low as possible. Farmers would sign up to use water from the reservoir behind the dam to irrigate their crops. As soon as enough farmers signed up and promised to pay enough money for the water, everybody was happy.
Agricultural water is typically measured in acre-feet. An acre-foot is enough water to fill up an acre of land to a depth of one foot. It is a little less than 50,000 cubic feet. It turned out that the cost per acre-foot necessary to generate enough revenue to cover water district costs was not very much. And district costs dropped precipitously the day the bonds were paid off. At that point the per acre-foot rate for water could be and was cut drastically. Where I can find rate information it looks like farmers in water districts pay roughly the same amount of money for an acre-foot of water as I pay for a hundred cubic feet of water. (Rates for drawn or pumped water are even lower.) So the cost ration between a farmer and me is often in the neighborhood of 500 to 1. But it may be much higher as actual rates may be lower, in some cases much lower, than the rate I used in this calculation.
Sticking with 500 to 1 for the moment, this ratio is roughly the same as that between bottled water and tap water. The ratio between the cost of bottled water and farm water is roughly 300,000 to 1. My estimate of maybe a cent for the cost of the water to make an Almond turns out to be way high. The cost of water is not a factor in a farmer's decision as to whether or not to increase Almond production. And that's a problem. But wait. There's more! It turns out that a lot of bottled water is produced in that very same drought stricken Southern California. Why? Because, like Almond farmers, the price of water does not figure into the business calculations of bottled water manufacturers. Finally, remember that a lot of farmers pay even less for water. It just does not make any sense for them to put any time or money into using water more efficiently so they don't.
And that's the fundamental factor driving water use and driving very inefficient water use. The same kind of logic drives industrial water usage. There is no incentive to use it efficiently and every incentive to use it inefficiently. And more than 80% of all potable water goes into agriculture or industry. The obvious fix to this problem is to change the incentive structure by making water more expensive. This would make market forces part of the solution instead of part of the problem. And in many cases large increases in efficiency are available very inexpensively.
So why hasn't this happened? There are literally thousands of water districts. They operate as they do because of contracts. Long ago contracts were created to make sure the bonds got retired on time. That was the objective. But the contracts were written so that the basic system would remain in place in perpetuity. Farmers would still need the water after the dam was paid off. There seemed no reason at the time not to lock a farmer's water rights into place forever. It didn't cost the dam builders or Wall Street anything to put "forever" language in the contract so they did. And now all of us are forced to deal with the forever language written into these old contracts, some created more than a hundred years ago. Times have changed but the contract language hasn't.
Powerful people with lots of money have been litigating contracts against equally powerful people with lots of money for a very long time. The result is that lawyers have long known how to write "iron clad" and "bullet proof" contracts of this type. This knowledge dates back to well before the time the first water district was set up. There will be no successful legal challenge to these contracts based on some flaw or loop hole in the contract. Congress could pass laws to negate these contracts. But it would run up against a lot of lobbying clout. Anyone associated with any of these water districts would weigh in. But legislative action of this type would also be fiercely opposed by anyone interested I the idea that "a contract is a contract". And unfortunately this latter group includes pretty much all of the rich and powerful. So a legislative fix is extremely unlikely.
Another path would be to buy the farmers in question out. But this would be extremely expensive. Farmers would be giving up not only whatever the water is currently worth but also whatever the water might be worth in the future. Any farmer who could not figure this out on their own would be quickly clued in by a friend, neighbor, passing stranger, somebody. And in a water short future world just how much might water come to be worth? That's a guess but speculation would start at "a lot" and go up from there. Asking taxpayers to pony up the cost of a mass water rights purchase program is a hard sell. And the more money farmers see in the kitty the more they are likely to hold out for.
So we are locked in one of those all too common political gridlocks. Market pressure could change behavior if market forces could be applied. And the cost of making the changes necessary to substantially improve efficiency are known and known to be inexpensive in many cases. But there is currently no incentive for the players to change their behavior so they don't. Moving ahead by changing the pricing structure or by buying farmers out over farmer objections is theoretically easy to do. But real world political considerations make it nearly impossible. Do we have any other things we can do?
We do but they will not be nearly as effective as efficiency improvements. And the benefit potential of the alternatives are much more modest. The key idea to keep in mind is that "all water is recycled". Geological and cosmological processes gave us the water we have. Most, perhaps all of the water on earth dates back billions of years. Since then it has cycled and recycled through various hydraulic systems. Heat from the sun evaporates water from the oceans. It eventually comes back to earth as rain. The rain may land high on a mountain. From there it moves through the soil to rivers. Rivers eventually deliver it back to the ocean. This description gives you the general idea but leaves out some key steps that have been involved for at least the last half billion years. And this is where the problem comes in.
The problem can be succinctly described by quoting a common aphorism: don't drink the water - fish fuck in it. But it's not just the fish. Another aphorism asks: do bears shit in the woods? Indeed bears do. These, and many other processes, some "all natural" and others not so much, affect the water situation in the following way. A lot of people believe that yucky things happen to water and they don't want to drink water that has been yucked up. This is good as far as it goes. The problem is that many people believe that there is magical source of non-yucked up water. They believe that rain water or natural spring water or water from some other source is not yucked up. But the truth is that all water has been yucked up over and over and is yucked up now. There is no such thing as the water equivalent of immaculate conception.
All water is yucked up to a greater or lesser extent. It is never completely yuck-free. Rain water can pick up air pollution and lots of other nasty things that happen to be airborne while the rain is falling. Alpine spring water can contain bacteria that will put you in the hospital if you don't take the proper precautions. The wrong question is "where did it come from"? The right question is: "is it safe to use for the purpose I intend to put it to"?
People have a misplaced faith in the ability of certain "natural" processes to produce de-yucked water. This matched by a misplaced distrust in the ability of "artificial " processes to produce de-yucked water. So they want nothing to do with water that comes out of even the best sewerage treatment plant, for instance. But if this yucky water is put into the Mississippi River (there's a reason it's nickname is "the big muddy") and allowed to travel a few miles downstream, all of a sudden it's fine. And it's fine even if pesticide runoff and who knows what else has been added to the river as the water makes its magical journey from upstream sewerage outfall to downstream water system intake.
The yuck factor is a potent political force. If people come to the opinion that certain water is yucky they tend to throw roadblocks in the way of worthy projects. If they come to the opinion that water is not yucky they tend to believe that water should just be left alone. This can get in the way of necessary steps being taken. From here on I am going to focus on the worthy projects.
Potable water gets used for many purposes. If it is being used for drinking water it needs to meet high standards of safety, clarity, etc. But there are many uses for which a lower standard is just fine. Historically it has been hard to put multiple systems in place to handle multiple grades of water. Why spend the extra money if, as used to be the case, high quality water is available cheaply. But times have changed. Now there are real opportunities that make sense both technically and financially to go to multi-grade water systems. Continue to maintain the highest standard and grade for drinking water. But go to grades and standards that are appropriate for what the water will actually be used for.
This multi-grade system offers real opportunities to expand from an "all drinking quality all the time" system to a more flexible one delivering more usable water at a lower cost. The more flexible system (irrigation quality water for the golf course, cleaning quality water for the plant that needs to keep equipment clean, etc.) increases the amount of usable water. There are many situations where cost is not a problem because this is the cheapest alternative. But that still leaves the problem of the many people who look at such a system and go "yuck". That is a difficult but manageable problem. Assuming the "yuck" problem can be fixed going to a multi-grade system is a good idea. It won't be as effective at increasing the effective water supply as fixing our dysfunctional pricing system but it will help.
Finally there are some technological fixes. One of them is desalinization. Salt water from oceans and seas can be turned into potable water. Here too the Israelis have been pioneers. And the technology has improved substantially over the past half century. But it is still very expensive. The underlying scientific principles tell us that the process will always require a lot of energy. That means it will always be expensive. Gulf states have little water and lots of energy. They can also afford to subsidize the process. There are some other situations where it makes sense. But the process will never be cheap so it will always be a niche solution.
So there it is. We don't really have a shortage of water. We have a shortage of potable water. And we can free up a lot of potable water by increasing efficiencies, particularly in agriculture and industry. The way we price water is the primary impediment to progress on this front. Contracts are the principal impediment to using market forces (price increases) to drive improvements. But to stand a chance of making progress here the political environment must change to the point where these contracts can be modified or eliminated. Unfortunately, there seems little chance of this happening any time soon.
The next best approach is to move toward a multi-grade approach to water use. Here the big problem is the "yuck" factor. Some progress is being made in some areas and more progress is possible. There is probably a multiplier factor here. If the "yuck" factor can be overcome in some places then those successes can probably be leveraged to achieve progress in other places. As more and more people get comfortable with the idea opposition will fade. But this approach does not have anywhere near the potential of the efficiency approach.
Finally there are technological assists like desalinization. But these kinds of things have only limited applicability so their contribution will be modest and will be restricted to a few special situations.
We really don't have any long term choice but to increase efficiency. It has tremendous potential but frankly I do not know how to solve the political problems that make it presently infeasible.
Thursday, July 30, 2015
Wednesday, July 15, 2015
The Donald
This blog has been organized around the idea that I have a contribution to make to public discourse. I try to find topics where what I have to say is different and hopefully more informative than what you can find elsewhere. But this post is an indulgence. I am doing it because I want to. At best it will contain a few gems but I would characterize them as semi-precious at best. This is substantially below the standard I try to hold myself to when I am writing a post But I just can't stop myself. I have to remark on the fact that Donald J. Trump has entered the race on the Republican side for the nomination to become the next President of the United States.
Various pieces of legislation have been facetiously characterized at "the Accountant full employment act" or "the Lawyer full employment act". The Donald's entry into the race can be and has been characterized as "the Comedian full employment act". As just one example, David Letterman, who only recently retired from his CBS "The Late Show" gig, popped up on stage a few days ago. He said that The Donald's announcement had convinced him that his decision to retire was a mistake. He then read off a The Donald oriented "Top Ten List". One of the things I am really bad at is comedy so that's all I am going to have to say in a comedic vein.
I welcome The Donald's announcement. It represents the culmination of a trend that is more than 50 years in the making. It dates back to at least the 1960 election. That year John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon squared off in the first presidential debate to be carried live on television. On paper Nixon was the much better qualified of the two. He had served in the House of Representative before moving on to the Senate. From there he moved on to become Vice President for two terms. Along the way he acquired considerable expertise on both foreign and domestic issues. Kennedy, on the other hand, had spent only a short time in the Senate and had no obvious in depth expertise on either foreign or domestic issues. So if the contest was a "battle of the resumes" Nixon should have won in a walk.
But it was not a battle of the resumes. And conventional wisdom is that in a very close race the deciding factor was Kennedy's performance in the debates and, more specifically, on TV. The debates were covered simultaneously on both TV and radio. The consensus among the radio audience was that Nixon won in a relatively close contest. However, the TV audience rated Kennedy a clear winner.
We saw pretty much of a rerun in 1992 with George H. W. Bush, a man with a long and distinguished resume that was capped by a term as President. He was challenged by a small state Governor named William Jefferson Clinton with no obvious national credentials. Again, a battle of the resumes would have put Bush well ahead. But Clinton impressed the TV audience (by this time no one paid attention to radio any more) and went on to unseat him.
We saw the same sort of thing in 2000 when a Governor with a weak resume (George W. Bush) squared off against a man with a resume almost as impressive as that of Nixon or George H. W. Bush (Al Gore). To a lesser extent we saw the same thing in 2008. Obama had an extremely thin resume. And while McCain's resume was not as impressive as others I have mentioned it was definitely more impressive than Obama's. We definitely do NOT pick our Presidents based on who has the best resume. So how do we pick the winner?
Back in the day the story was "by some kind of deal between the power brokers in a smoke filled room". The Primary system was put in place to do away with that system. We would have a separate mini-election for each party in each state using the Primary system. A small vestige of the "smoke filled room" system is present in the Caucus system. The party faithful meet but no longer in secret in a smoke filled room. Instead a long series of meetings are held in public where everyone can watch and many can participate. After a winnowing process a public state convention selects delegates pledged to specific candidates that go on to the national convention. At the national convention the first candidate to 50% plus 1 gets the party nomination. This complicated process requires a large expert staff, it is said, that knows all the ins and outs of each step so that at each stage the candidate's interests can be protected.
So ok, this is a complex system but at heart it is just a bunch of elections. How does a candidate win these elections? It turns out this has been complex too. You need money to hire all that expert staff. But you also need more money and more staff to identify supporters and people who can be convinced to become your supporters. Then you need more money and more staff to engage in an elaborate advertising campaign. You design, print, and mail targeted messages. You design produce and air TV commercials. In the old days you also needed newspaper and radio ads but they have become far less important. Finally, there is GOTV (Get Out The Vote). You need more money and more staff to get your supporters to the caucus or primary and make sure they support your candidate. But what about volunteers? If you are lucky, you have a large and energetic volunteer organization. Aren't they free? Volunteers are free but you need more money and more staff to organize and direct them. That's how it is supposed to work.
What is interesting is that so far The Donald has done none of this. He personally has a lot of money. But I expect that it will turn out that he is spending very little of it. And he is not raising money. "I'm rich. I don't need to fund raise.", he says. And there is no evidence so far of any kind of serious fund raising effort by his campaign. So what about the rest of it? Does he have an organization, consultants, a "ground game" operation, ads up on TV, and so on? Nope! None of it. So he is doomed to failure, right? Again, nope! He is doing fine, actually better than fine. He went from being down at one or two percent in the polls and well back in the field to about 15% in the polls and in second or first place. So what's happening?
I talked above about this candidate or that candidate having a great resume. It turns out that The Donald has a terrible resume as measured by the standards of yesteryear (experience, expertise, etc.). Instead what he has is a great resume as measured by modern standards. He is a whiz at marketing and particularly at marketing himself and most particularly at marketing himself on TV. He is not doing all the things candidates did (and most candidates still do) to get themselves the nomination (and presumably eventually win the general election). He is instead "the very model of a modern major candidate", to paraphrase Gilbert and Sullivan.
We have been going down this path for a long time. I quoted example after example above where the most qualified candidate lost out. In every case the winner beat out his more qualified (at least on paper) opponent by coming over better on TV. People just liked (or at least trusted) the winner more than they liked the other guy. Over time this had a profound influence on how the political media acted. In the olden days you had a cadre of political reporters who prided themselves on their expertise. It might have been policy expertise ("so and so has a good/bad foreign policy because of . . .") or electioneering expertise ("so and so is winning/losing the farm/blue collar/etc. vote because of . . ."). This has been totally replaced by "horse race" coverage ("so and so is up/down in the polls"). And the "because of" part has been dropped as being boring.
The fact that "because of" is no longer part of the coverage has had a perverse effect. Politicians can say whatever they want. The question is not whether it is true or not but whether it moves the polls in the right direction or not. The modern definition of "truth" in a political context is "if it moves the polls in the right direction it is true; if it moves them in the wrong direction it is false".
Now let me state the obvious. Politicians have always lied. The '50s featured a lot of talk about a non-existent "bomber gap". This was replaced in the '60s by talk of an equally non-existent "missile gap". I pick these examples because one (bomber gap) was successfully used by Republicans against Democrats while the other (missile gap) was successfully used by Democrats against Republicans. Politicians on both sides of the aisle could only occasionally get away with an outright lie. They could get away with lying about these particular issues because in both cases the evidence that would have exposed the lie was highly classified. In other words, the truth would not, and in this case did not, come out until well after the election. But situations like this used to be fairly rare.
And that's how the game used to be played. Mostly politicians would exaggerate or cherry pick the evidence. Only occasionally would they flat out lie. They only lied if they were confident they could get away with it. And these safe situations were a fairly rare occurrence. Mostly they felt that if they strayed too far or too consistently from the truth they would eventually be caught out and pay the price by losing the next election. That started to change when it became more and more obvious that the press had completely abandoned any interest in content. In that environment you could tell almost any lie you wanted to and be pretty sure you would be able to get away with it.
The mission of the political press had changed from knowing what was going on and reporting it to the much narrower mission of knowing who was up and who was down and what the trend was. Now their responsibility to the truth started and ended with verifying that the quotation was accurate and that the poll numbers were correct. So who was now responsible for pointing out any lies or exaggerations? The other side. But the other side was just another bunch of politicians. They were susceptible to the "don't believe them because they are just trying to score political points" tactic. All disagreements quickly devolved into "he said - she said" because there was no longer a credible referee around.
We have seen an increasing number of instances of politicians taking advantage of their newfound freedom from accountability. Wildly untrue charges are now a dime a dozen. Still most politicians have felt the need for at least some restraint. But the Donald is not a politician. He is a "reality" star on TV who is famous mostly for being famous. In short he is a celebrity. He has had a couple of decades to hone his craft. He has exited (at least temporarily) his old reality TV gig in order to move on to his new gig, being a Presidential Candidate. He made the switch when he was at the top of his game. And he is applying the very same rules that worked so well for him for so long to his new gig. So far that has turned out to be a very smart move. The cardinal rule of being a celebrity is "always be entertaining". Truth doesn't enter into the equation.
And a recent change to the traditional rules of the political game has played straight into The Donald's hand. You used to have to run a long complicated gauntlet to get your party's nomination. You still do. The first gauntlet you needed to surmount used to be as to make a big splash in the "early" states. It still is. Iowa and New Hampshire have adroitly maneuvered to position themselves as "critical early states". First comes the Iowa Caucus. Next comes the New Hampshire Primary. If you don't have enough success in at least one of those two events you are dead. (After these two events it is a free for all with South Carolina maneuvering vigorously to maintain its "first of the rest" position.)
Iowa and New Hampshire have convinced everyone that any candidate that does not spend a lot of time in state doing small one-on-one "retail" events is doomed to failure. They have turned the associated circus into a nice tidy little industry in each state. And, of course, voters in each state love the extra attention. It doesn't matter if it is true that you must do well in one or both states to have a chance. It only matters that candidates and their staff believe it. And historically everyone has believed it. It is an article of faith that a successful candidate absolutely must shake hands and kiss babies for months in Iowa, New Hampshire, or both. So serious candidates "do what you gotta do". Any candidate that doesn't is branded as "not serious".
It is only possible to do this kind of retail politics in a few small states. For the rest of us it's seeing the candidates on TV. And one of the most popular TV shows for this has been the candidate "debates". (The events rarely feature any actual serious debate.) Heretofore this didn't change the overall trajectory because you still had to win in Iowa and/or New Hampshire. A bad debate performance could hurt and a good debate performance could help but sufficient "shoe leather" effort in the early states was critical. In fact, a good or bad showing in one or both states could balance out a bad or good debate performance. The Donald has now called this received wisdom into question and he has gotten a big assist in doing this from Fox TV and the GOP.
The Iowa Caucus is the traditional kick-off event for the official election process. It typically takes place in February of the election year. That means February, 2016 this time around. But there will be several debates before then. The first one is set for August 6, 2015. It will be televised on Fox TV and Fox has decided to restrict the number of candidates that will make it on stage to 10. But there are at least 15 "serious" candidates on the GOP side. If you are not on stage you may be out before Iowa.
How is Fox deciding who to put on stage? By averaging "national polls". All of a sudden spending a lot of time in Iowa or New Hampshire is a bad idea. Instead you want to raise your profile with the general public so that they will select you an a poll. You need to spend your time in New York City or Los Angeles because that's where the national media is. You need to be all over the interview shows. And not just the Sunday politics shows. Now you need to be on The Today Show or The View or even the even the late night shows like Kimmel or Fallon. And the more appearances on the more shows the better.
These shows reach millions of viewers at a time giving them real impact. In a typical retail stop in an early state you may get in front of a dozen or so people. That's not going to move a national poll . Any viewer in any part of the country might be polled. And what's the secret of getting on these shows? Be good for ratings. Now who has spent literally decades mastering the skills necessary to have a high national profile? The Donald. And it shows. He has been all over the TV machine. Why? Because he knows how to get shows a ratings bump that is tied directly to his appearance. At this point he has more invitations than he has time to accept.
We have already seen The Donald's strategy work to perfection. Before he made his tightly choreographed announcement in the major media market of New York City he was sitting at one or two percent in the polls. He wouldn't have made the cut. I think part of this was that frankly no one thought he would actually run. The announcement made his candidacy real. And what did he do next? It was not spending time in Iowa or New Hampshire. They are small media markets.
Instead he made and continues to make the rounds of all the national media. And he made sure to make outrageous statements at every opportunity. That's what a reality star does. Would anyone watch "real housewives of wherever" if those ladies didn't regularly do outrageous things? No! Does anyone care whether what they say is true? Of course not! Any fool knows that's not how reality TV works and The Donald is not a fool. He just plays one on TV.
There used to be something called "free media". This was news coverage by the major TV networks. It is now called "earned media". How do you earn coverage on earned media? By being outrageous. The Donald has gotten more earned media that all his competitors combined. He deserves the coverage. He has worked hard for it and performed at the top of his game.
Any producer of a reality TV show knows that you must understand your audience. You have to provide outrage they want to watch. They have to be entertained without actually being outraged. (Fake outrage is just part of the fun.) The Donald has done his homework here too. His outrageous statements have been carefully crafted to be exactly what his target audience wants to hear. The proof that The Donald has done his homework is in his jump in ratings, ah, er, polls. And his polls are through the roof. So far The Donald has not put a single foot wrong.
I am not a fan of dishonesty in politics. I would be a hypocrite it I did not acknowledge that Democrats frequently engage in dishonesty. But I think that Republicans have raised the bar on dishonesty to a new level, one far higher than Democrats have even aspired to. What The Donald has done is to blast past the previous exalted mark set by Republicans and put the bar into orbit.
As a result of his superior work I want to finish up this post by enthusiastically endorsing The Donald. I am one million percent behind Donald J. Trump in his quest for the Republican nomination for the job of President of the United States. He is a shining beacon illuminating the core values of the modern Republican party. What more can we ask from a candidate?
Various pieces of legislation have been facetiously characterized at "the Accountant full employment act" or "the Lawyer full employment act". The Donald's entry into the race can be and has been characterized as "the Comedian full employment act". As just one example, David Letterman, who only recently retired from his CBS "The Late Show" gig, popped up on stage a few days ago. He said that The Donald's announcement had convinced him that his decision to retire was a mistake. He then read off a The Donald oriented "Top Ten List". One of the things I am really bad at is comedy so that's all I am going to have to say in a comedic vein.
I welcome The Donald's announcement. It represents the culmination of a trend that is more than 50 years in the making. It dates back to at least the 1960 election. That year John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon squared off in the first presidential debate to be carried live on television. On paper Nixon was the much better qualified of the two. He had served in the House of Representative before moving on to the Senate. From there he moved on to become Vice President for two terms. Along the way he acquired considerable expertise on both foreign and domestic issues. Kennedy, on the other hand, had spent only a short time in the Senate and had no obvious in depth expertise on either foreign or domestic issues. So if the contest was a "battle of the resumes" Nixon should have won in a walk.
But it was not a battle of the resumes. And conventional wisdom is that in a very close race the deciding factor was Kennedy's performance in the debates and, more specifically, on TV. The debates were covered simultaneously on both TV and radio. The consensus among the radio audience was that Nixon won in a relatively close contest. However, the TV audience rated Kennedy a clear winner.
We saw pretty much of a rerun in 1992 with George H. W. Bush, a man with a long and distinguished resume that was capped by a term as President. He was challenged by a small state Governor named William Jefferson Clinton with no obvious national credentials. Again, a battle of the resumes would have put Bush well ahead. But Clinton impressed the TV audience (by this time no one paid attention to radio any more) and went on to unseat him.
We saw the same sort of thing in 2000 when a Governor with a weak resume (George W. Bush) squared off against a man with a resume almost as impressive as that of Nixon or George H. W. Bush (Al Gore). To a lesser extent we saw the same thing in 2008. Obama had an extremely thin resume. And while McCain's resume was not as impressive as others I have mentioned it was definitely more impressive than Obama's. We definitely do NOT pick our Presidents based on who has the best resume. So how do we pick the winner?
Back in the day the story was "by some kind of deal between the power brokers in a smoke filled room". The Primary system was put in place to do away with that system. We would have a separate mini-election for each party in each state using the Primary system. A small vestige of the "smoke filled room" system is present in the Caucus system. The party faithful meet but no longer in secret in a smoke filled room. Instead a long series of meetings are held in public where everyone can watch and many can participate. After a winnowing process a public state convention selects delegates pledged to specific candidates that go on to the national convention. At the national convention the first candidate to 50% plus 1 gets the party nomination. This complicated process requires a large expert staff, it is said, that knows all the ins and outs of each step so that at each stage the candidate's interests can be protected.
So ok, this is a complex system but at heart it is just a bunch of elections. How does a candidate win these elections? It turns out this has been complex too. You need money to hire all that expert staff. But you also need more money and more staff to identify supporters and people who can be convinced to become your supporters. Then you need more money and more staff to engage in an elaborate advertising campaign. You design, print, and mail targeted messages. You design produce and air TV commercials. In the old days you also needed newspaper and radio ads but they have become far less important. Finally, there is GOTV (Get Out The Vote). You need more money and more staff to get your supporters to the caucus or primary and make sure they support your candidate. But what about volunteers? If you are lucky, you have a large and energetic volunteer organization. Aren't they free? Volunteers are free but you need more money and more staff to organize and direct them. That's how it is supposed to work.
What is interesting is that so far The Donald has done none of this. He personally has a lot of money. But I expect that it will turn out that he is spending very little of it. And he is not raising money. "I'm rich. I don't need to fund raise.", he says. And there is no evidence so far of any kind of serious fund raising effort by his campaign. So what about the rest of it? Does he have an organization, consultants, a "ground game" operation, ads up on TV, and so on? Nope! None of it. So he is doomed to failure, right? Again, nope! He is doing fine, actually better than fine. He went from being down at one or two percent in the polls and well back in the field to about 15% in the polls and in second or first place. So what's happening?
I talked above about this candidate or that candidate having a great resume. It turns out that The Donald has a terrible resume as measured by the standards of yesteryear (experience, expertise, etc.). Instead what he has is a great resume as measured by modern standards. He is a whiz at marketing and particularly at marketing himself and most particularly at marketing himself on TV. He is not doing all the things candidates did (and most candidates still do) to get themselves the nomination (and presumably eventually win the general election). He is instead "the very model of a modern major candidate", to paraphrase Gilbert and Sullivan.
We have been going down this path for a long time. I quoted example after example above where the most qualified candidate lost out. In every case the winner beat out his more qualified (at least on paper) opponent by coming over better on TV. People just liked (or at least trusted) the winner more than they liked the other guy. Over time this had a profound influence on how the political media acted. In the olden days you had a cadre of political reporters who prided themselves on their expertise. It might have been policy expertise ("so and so has a good/bad foreign policy because of . . .") or electioneering expertise ("so and so is winning/losing the farm/blue collar/etc. vote because of . . ."). This has been totally replaced by "horse race" coverage ("so and so is up/down in the polls"). And the "because of" part has been dropped as being boring.
The fact that "because of" is no longer part of the coverage has had a perverse effect. Politicians can say whatever they want. The question is not whether it is true or not but whether it moves the polls in the right direction or not. The modern definition of "truth" in a political context is "if it moves the polls in the right direction it is true; if it moves them in the wrong direction it is false".
Now let me state the obvious. Politicians have always lied. The '50s featured a lot of talk about a non-existent "bomber gap". This was replaced in the '60s by talk of an equally non-existent "missile gap". I pick these examples because one (bomber gap) was successfully used by Republicans against Democrats while the other (missile gap) was successfully used by Democrats against Republicans. Politicians on both sides of the aisle could only occasionally get away with an outright lie. They could get away with lying about these particular issues because in both cases the evidence that would have exposed the lie was highly classified. In other words, the truth would not, and in this case did not, come out until well after the election. But situations like this used to be fairly rare.
And that's how the game used to be played. Mostly politicians would exaggerate or cherry pick the evidence. Only occasionally would they flat out lie. They only lied if they were confident they could get away with it. And these safe situations were a fairly rare occurrence. Mostly they felt that if they strayed too far or too consistently from the truth they would eventually be caught out and pay the price by losing the next election. That started to change when it became more and more obvious that the press had completely abandoned any interest in content. In that environment you could tell almost any lie you wanted to and be pretty sure you would be able to get away with it.
The mission of the political press had changed from knowing what was going on and reporting it to the much narrower mission of knowing who was up and who was down and what the trend was. Now their responsibility to the truth started and ended with verifying that the quotation was accurate and that the poll numbers were correct. So who was now responsible for pointing out any lies or exaggerations? The other side. But the other side was just another bunch of politicians. They were susceptible to the "don't believe them because they are just trying to score political points" tactic. All disagreements quickly devolved into "he said - she said" because there was no longer a credible referee around.
We have seen an increasing number of instances of politicians taking advantage of their newfound freedom from accountability. Wildly untrue charges are now a dime a dozen. Still most politicians have felt the need for at least some restraint. But the Donald is not a politician. He is a "reality" star on TV who is famous mostly for being famous. In short he is a celebrity. He has had a couple of decades to hone his craft. He has exited (at least temporarily) his old reality TV gig in order to move on to his new gig, being a Presidential Candidate. He made the switch when he was at the top of his game. And he is applying the very same rules that worked so well for him for so long to his new gig. So far that has turned out to be a very smart move. The cardinal rule of being a celebrity is "always be entertaining". Truth doesn't enter into the equation.
And a recent change to the traditional rules of the political game has played straight into The Donald's hand. You used to have to run a long complicated gauntlet to get your party's nomination. You still do. The first gauntlet you needed to surmount used to be as to make a big splash in the "early" states. It still is. Iowa and New Hampshire have adroitly maneuvered to position themselves as "critical early states". First comes the Iowa Caucus. Next comes the New Hampshire Primary. If you don't have enough success in at least one of those two events you are dead. (After these two events it is a free for all with South Carolina maneuvering vigorously to maintain its "first of the rest" position.)
Iowa and New Hampshire have convinced everyone that any candidate that does not spend a lot of time in state doing small one-on-one "retail" events is doomed to failure. They have turned the associated circus into a nice tidy little industry in each state. And, of course, voters in each state love the extra attention. It doesn't matter if it is true that you must do well in one or both states to have a chance. It only matters that candidates and their staff believe it. And historically everyone has believed it. It is an article of faith that a successful candidate absolutely must shake hands and kiss babies for months in Iowa, New Hampshire, or both. So serious candidates "do what you gotta do". Any candidate that doesn't is branded as "not serious".
It is only possible to do this kind of retail politics in a few small states. For the rest of us it's seeing the candidates on TV. And one of the most popular TV shows for this has been the candidate "debates". (The events rarely feature any actual serious debate.) Heretofore this didn't change the overall trajectory because you still had to win in Iowa and/or New Hampshire. A bad debate performance could hurt and a good debate performance could help but sufficient "shoe leather" effort in the early states was critical. In fact, a good or bad showing in one or both states could balance out a bad or good debate performance. The Donald has now called this received wisdom into question and he has gotten a big assist in doing this from Fox TV and the GOP.
The Iowa Caucus is the traditional kick-off event for the official election process. It typically takes place in February of the election year. That means February, 2016 this time around. But there will be several debates before then. The first one is set for August 6, 2015. It will be televised on Fox TV and Fox has decided to restrict the number of candidates that will make it on stage to 10. But there are at least 15 "serious" candidates on the GOP side. If you are not on stage you may be out before Iowa.
How is Fox deciding who to put on stage? By averaging "national polls". All of a sudden spending a lot of time in Iowa or New Hampshire is a bad idea. Instead you want to raise your profile with the general public so that they will select you an a poll. You need to spend your time in New York City or Los Angeles because that's where the national media is. You need to be all over the interview shows. And not just the Sunday politics shows. Now you need to be on The Today Show or The View or even the even the late night shows like Kimmel or Fallon. And the more appearances on the more shows the better.
These shows reach millions of viewers at a time giving them real impact. In a typical retail stop in an early state you may get in front of a dozen or so people. That's not going to move a national poll . Any viewer in any part of the country might be polled. And what's the secret of getting on these shows? Be good for ratings. Now who has spent literally decades mastering the skills necessary to have a high national profile? The Donald. And it shows. He has been all over the TV machine. Why? Because he knows how to get shows a ratings bump that is tied directly to his appearance. At this point he has more invitations than he has time to accept.
We have already seen The Donald's strategy work to perfection. Before he made his tightly choreographed announcement in the major media market of New York City he was sitting at one or two percent in the polls. He wouldn't have made the cut. I think part of this was that frankly no one thought he would actually run. The announcement made his candidacy real. And what did he do next? It was not spending time in Iowa or New Hampshire. They are small media markets.
Instead he made and continues to make the rounds of all the national media. And he made sure to make outrageous statements at every opportunity. That's what a reality star does. Would anyone watch "real housewives of wherever" if those ladies didn't regularly do outrageous things? No! Does anyone care whether what they say is true? Of course not! Any fool knows that's not how reality TV works and The Donald is not a fool. He just plays one on TV.
There used to be something called "free media". This was news coverage by the major TV networks. It is now called "earned media". How do you earn coverage on earned media? By being outrageous. The Donald has gotten more earned media that all his competitors combined. He deserves the coverage. He has worked hard for it and performed at the top of his game.
Any producer of a reality TV show knows that you must understand your audience. You have to provide outrage they want to watch. They have to be entertained without actually being outraged. (Fake outrage is just part of the fun.) The Donald has done his homework here too. His outrageous statements have been carefully crafted to be exactly what his target audience wants to hear. The proof that The Donald has done his homework is in his jump in ratings, ah, er, polls. And his polls are through the roof. So far The Donald has not put a single foot wrong.
I am not a fan of dishonesty in politics. I would be a hypocrite it I did not acknowledge that Democrats frequently engage in dishonesty. But I think that Republicans have raised the bar on dishonesty to a new level, one far higher than Democrats have even aspired to. What The Donald has done is to blast past the previous exalted mark set by Republicans and put the bar into orbit.
As a result of his superior work I want to finish up this post by enthusiastically endorsing The Donald. I am one million percent behind Donald J. Trump in his quest for the Republican nomination for the job of President of the United States. He is a shining beacon illuminating the core values of the modern Republican party. What more can we ask from a candidate?
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