In the past, the
Japanese political and business establishment would have been saddened by Romney’s
defeat. The perception there is that Republican administrations tend to treat Japan
more gently, both in style and substance. And the Noda administration and big
business here must have welcomed comments from Glen Hubbard, a prominent economic
advisor to Romney and a probable candidate for a key assignment in the event of
his victory, in Nikkei Shimbun that a Romney administration would support Japan’s
participation in the TPP negotiations. This time around, though, China has been
the one that has been getting the short shrift from the Democrats with the
Obama administration’s abandonment of a G2 perspective and adoption of an Asian
“pivot,” broadly regarded and largely welcomed in the region as a counterbalance
to an increasingly aggressive projection of Chinese power. So, although the Romney
campaign had been pushing a very forceful line against
China, “four more years” must not have seemed to be a bad consolation
prize. At least that must be why there was little to no debate here over the relative
merits of the two presidential candidates for Japan, or any display of the by now
familiar anguish over the Japan “passing” in the foreign policy debate. On the
latter point, maybe we’ve become so used to being sidelined that we don’t
notice, but that’s too depressing an idea, and unnecessary at this point to
ponder when there’s a more plausible explanation.
2.
Value of a Vote
The electoral college
system came under criticism as the possibility that the popular and electoral
votes might go their separate ways, which actually happened in 2000 then
almost repeated in 2004, was extinguished for good for practical purposes only
when the networks called Ohio for Obama with just three more states out of the
50 remaining to be called. Another, less serious charge is that the electoral
college system forces presidential campaigns to focus on at most ten or so “swing”
states while taking the rest of the US more or less for granted. This cannot be
a healthy state of affairs, or so the story goes. What’s funny, though, is that
similar complaints are not being made about the Senate, where each Wisconsin
vote is currently worth about 66 Californian votes. That makes the most recent
2.30 (House of Representatives, 2009) and 5.00 (House of Councilors, 2010) that
the Japanese Supreme Court has condemned look…absolutely “constitutional,” yet
the people in California and New York appear to be too stoned to complain.
Could it be that John Q. Public just doesn’t care, and that the only reason that
the electoral college is part of the national debate is because it’s another
fish to fry when the US media dishes out stories on election night? I mean, who
wants that extra attention in the form of ever-more negative campaigning, robo-calls
and the like.
3.
Mandate, Shmandate
And what’s all
this talk about a “mandate”? Depending on whom you talklisten to, President Obama got
a mandate because he won the popular vote and smashed Romney in the electoral
college tally, in the process producing a near-sweep of the “swing” states; or,
he didn’t get a mandate because he ran against a weak candidate and still failed
to convince nearly half the US voters who actually voted. Well, Bush only became
president because he won a 5-to-4 vote in the Supreme Court, but he still got
his tax cut…because the Republicans owned both chambers and managed to get
enough Democratic Senators to cross the aisle, sometimes with timely advice
from their donors and lobbies, to cross the aisle to surmount considerable
procedural obstacles (particularly in the Senate). Obama will have more difficulties
in getting any legislation passed because the Republicans own the House of Representatives.
(It’s more complicated than that, but let’s leave it there for now.) The “fiscal
cliff” will be avoided though, not because Obama has received a mandate but
because both the Democrats and the Republicans will be held responsible if the
US government goes over the edge, which will not be a good thing for incumbents
come 2014. Same thing with the Japanese “twisted” Diet and the Japanese “cliff”—which
BTW MOF has been GPSing away every few months as if it were a hot-road mirage. “Mandate”
is the language of pundits and is of little utility for explication purposes
and even less for forecasting, and it’s a good thing that we don’t resort to anything
similar in our public discourse.
4.
Nate Silver
Nate silver has
been the undisputed forecasting star of the media coverage, making Roger
Federer at his career peak look like an also-ran. I’d wondered how
arithmetically possible it was to give even a small number of, say, 7 to 3 odds
and wind up making a near-perfect call on the outcome at state level unless his
model was terribly wrong. Stupid me, I hadn’t realized that Silver would be
refreshing his numbers right up to the point that they closed the ballot box,
so the calls would grow shorter and shorter (or is it longer and longer?) for a
candidate who, like Obama in this election, enjoyed a clear last-minute polling
trend in his favor. Two thoughts flow from this: First, pundit forecasts tend
to become less relevant as the day of the election approaches, but that is also
when they get the most air time. It is no surprise, then, that many of them are
directing plenty of visceral anger and scorn towards him (while selectively
citing polls where convenient), or simply ignoring him altogether. Thankfully,
there aren’t nearly enough detailed, much less daily, and publicly available polls
in Japan, which allows arithmetically challenged people like me to concoct
stories around what little is around. Second, Silver’s model can only be validated
if the calls that he—more accurately, his model—makes along the timeline are
also accurate, and it should not be difficult for a capable statistician to
figure out ways to gauge this. This is important because people will be making
business-investment decisions along this timeline, decisions that will be
affected by the outcome of the election. Again, the dearth of useful Japanese polls
means that we won’t be seeing any Nate Silver-like figures here for a long
time, if ever.
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