Obama Assassination Plot Thwarted

Some unsettling news in the last week of the election:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Law enforcement arrested two men in Tennessee who had plans to rob a gun dealer to shoot Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and "as many non-Caucasians" as possible, an official said on Monday.

An official from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives said police found the men in the Jackson, Tennessee area with a number of guns, including a sawed-off shotgun, in their car.

"They wanted to go to a place where they could shoot as many non-Caucasian as they could," the official said, noting that the men first planned to rob a gun dealer. "They also had a plot to assassinate Sen. Obama."

Obama, who would be the first black U.S. president, is leading Republican John McCain in opinion polls ahead of the November 4 election.

If McCain has any self-respect, the first thing he'll do if not elected is to attempt to undo the dangerous character attacks that have characterized his campaign. If Obama were to be injured or killed by an assassin, I believe that much responsibility for that would rest squarely upon McCain's shoulders. His reckless disregard for the truth has endangered Obama, his family and the police and Secret Servicemen who are guarding them.

FOLLOWUP: Looks like it was white supremacists. Link

The Why of the Vice-Presidential Pick (Part Two)

This is the second half of my essay analyzing the vice-presidential picks by Barack Obama and John McCain. I'd suggest reading the first part before delving into this one.

According to the Median Voter Theorem, Obama’s decision should have been relatively straightforward. Having clinched his party nomination, Obama should have deliberately moved towards the median, independent voter – effectively following a political Laffer curve. Clinton’s widespread support among moderate women would make her the obvious choice from that game theory model. Whatever votes Obama lost from the contention would be more than made up for by independents and cherry-picked Republican moderates.

But he didn’t pick Clinton. Obama chose Biden.

In Game Theory class, this decision was rationalized using Prospect Theory. That is, that Obama knew that picking Clinton would improve his chances of winning the election, but the utility of probably winning the Presidency with Clinton as VP was lower than potentially winning the election without the worry of an administration at odds with itself – essentially that he was too emotionally biased against Clinton to make the right call. This model is supported by the largely adversarial primary campaign, and Obama’s statement towards the end of the contest that he was not considering Clinton as a candidate for vice-president.

However, I disagree with this understanding. For all the idealism displayed in the campaign – the grandiose speeches and calls for “Hope” and “Change,” Obama is fundamentally an American pragmatist. In his books, The Audacity of Hope and Dreams from My Father, as well as many of his speeches, Obama displays a considered attitude conscious of the difficulty of the road ahead. He appears driven by a desire to effect policy, and willing to compromise in order to do so. It seems uncharacteristic of the man to jeopardize the prospects of the entire liberal movement in order to spite Clinton.

For me at least, this model appears insufficient. In game theory, we are taught that a model is only correct if it serves a purpose. While perhaps this is merely confirmation bias, I don’t think that a model predicated upon the irrationality of Obama and his campaign advisors is particularly serving the purpose of explaining Obama’s decision. These are people who created a juggernaught campaign, raised unheard of amounts of money, and shoved aside a shoe-in candidate at the 10-yard line – it does not seem likely that they would bench Clinton for a Hail Mary pass rather than kiss and make up.

Therefore, I drop the prospect theory explanation, and return to the discussion of Obama’s choice between focusing on independent voters and depressing conservative turn out.

The Median Voter Theorem is predicated upon the existence of the uninformed voter. That is the purpose of appealing to the median voter – to convince the uninformed that their opinions are moderately liberal or moderately conservative. Converting the decided voter is far more of a crapshoot. But in an election that has seen record advertising and discussion, truly uninformed voters are rare at this point. Most people have already decided if they are liberal or conservative, and are unlikely to cross all the way over the aisle.

From this perspective, Obama and McCain were engaged in an infinitely serial Prisoner’s Dilemma with imperfect information: they were effectively cooperating with each other by striving for moderate voters and increasing their base for this election and those in the future. Each party benefited from the contest, because it pulls in donations and marginalizes the third parties. But at some point each campaign needed to stop going after the increasingly marginal number of undecided voters, call that a 50 / 50 game, and work on shoring up their base in battleground states like Florida, Ohio, Michigan and Iowa.

In this model, it can be expected that the two parties will follow the Trigger Strategy (as opposed to Tit For Tat in the primaries or between like-minded parties,) meaning they will cooperate until “Nature” provides a triggering event that will cause one player to defect, followed by the other, for the remainder of the game.

That is exactly what seems to have happened.

Biden is a liberal who will help to bolster turnout in Democratic blue-collar areas. His credentials are unlikely to actually convert those leaning towards McCain, but rather to allay concerns that might keep moderate liberals home or induce disaffected Republican voters to voting against Obama. Whereas picking Clinton would have rallied a limp conservative flag.

McCain seems to have recognized this signal for what it was. Rather than picking Joe Lieberman to drive home McCain’s maverick image, or even Mitt Romney or Tim Pawlenty to gain the median voters ignored by the Democratic pick, McCain chose little known Sarah Palin. The little-known Alaskan governor has proved to be a hit with social conservatives and small government traditionalists, but has struck out with moderates and all but the most ardent PUMAs.

While the McCain / Palin ticket has seen such rocky roads out of the starting gate that they haven’t really been able to get on the offensive, I predict that Republicans will begin fielding attacks aimed at depressing Democratic turnout as the official campaign kicks into full gear. Though neither campaign will totally abandon rhetoric aimed at convincing undecided voters, particularly in battleground states, I think that the candidates are going to focus on raising the percentages of their base, rather than increasing the size of the base as a whole. I’d also anticipate aggressive tactics by the DNC and RNC to gain the full support of the Green Party and Libertarian Party respectively.

I have one final point to make supporting this model, which lies with Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney. If Prospect Theory was correct, and Obama spited Clinton while McCain retaliated against his party preventing him from choosing Lieberman, then Clinton’s and Romney’s involvement with their respective campaigns would be very limited. Instead, both Clintons have maintained their stumping around the Mid-West, while Romney is revving up for an offensive after Republicans throw off the Palin controversies, while being touted as the Republican candidate for 2012 or 2016.

Surely the prospect of allowing those two to recover by retaining them as stump speakers would be little different from having to deal with them as vice-presidents. And the Republicans are certainly no idealists. The Prospect Theory model just doesn’t explain the picks.

The Why of the Vice-Presidential Pick

I am finally getting over my primary fatigue that has plagued me for the last few months. After the Obama nomination was self-apparent, I pretty much turned my attention to other things. The war in Georgia and the state of the national economy took up much of my discussion time, and summer consumed the rest.

Still, I have been writing, photographing and attending summer classes, and I plan to start posting some of the things I've found interesting over the last couple months. I thought I'd start by sharing an essay I just wrote analyzing the vice-presidential picks. I spent a great deal of time thinking about the issue, and I think that it is something worth reading. Enjoy:

The American presidential election provides a wealth of opportunities for exploration by political scientists. The infighting between the parties and the candidates and the large variety of goals and interested parties makes for a complex and fascinating contest, which makes delving into it all the more rewarding. Game theory appears to excel at parsing the process, which is why I chose to explore the election for this course essay – specifically I wanted to analyze the surprising selection of the vice-presidential candidates by Democratic nominee Barack Obama and Republican contender John McCain.

While many, including myself, were surprised by the choices by the candidates that appear to contradict the game theory expectation that each candidate would moderate their ticket, I think that the decisions can be rationally understood and supported using game theory.

Prior to the early morning announcement on Aug. 23, that Delaware senator Joe Biden would carry the Democratic vice-presidential title, the Obama campaign was remarkably tight-lipped about their selection from the field of contenders. In lieu of concrete information, journalists camped out in front of the houses of the three leading candidates, as well as tailed Obama and his surrogates. The McCain campaign was similarly close-mouthed before their choice a week later of Alaskan governor Sarah Palin as their VP pick.

This degree of secrecy is abnormal for American elections, where a hungry and well-connected media tends to receive tip offs well in advance of formal announcements. It was a change of pace for the news outlets, which were so on edge that a pizza delivery prank to Joe Biden’s house in Wilmington received live national television coverage in the hope that it was some kind of political symbolism. Only a flurry of 11th hour Wikipedia updates and a careful monitoring of unscheduled flight plans tipped the hand of either campaign.

With all this in mind, it is clear that the campaign advisors were operating in a climate of incomplete information. Not only did they not know the intended pick for VP by the other party, but each pick represented a different strategy for their respective campaigns. The inability to predict their opponent prevented either campaign from making a response for fear of reacting to the wrong strategies and utilities.

In game theory terms, the selection of the vice-presidential candidate was the paradigm-changing “costly signal” that indicated the campaign course to both supporters and opponents. The classic example of the “costly signal” in game theory is the wedding band, which is offered to a potential fiancé to indicate the seriousness of one’s intentions. The ring accomplishes two things: it signals long-term investment in the relationship, and it also overtly promotes an intended course of action.

Game theory predicts that each of the players in this situation will sit on their hands until a third player, “Nature,” makes an action that unveils the preferences of each party. And so the campaigns did since the end of the primary season (though political fatigue was also a part of that) – but the advent of party nominating conventions was the third player that would determine the future strategies.

As the Democratic Party convention was scheduled earlier than the Republican Party convention, Obama was forced to make a decision with less information than his opponent – a disadvantage that he attempted to mitigate with the above-mentioned uncharacteristic party discipline that gave Republicans little time to react.

Obama effectively had three significant candidates going into the Democratic convention: Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, and Bill Richardson. Each choice had broad implications for the last leg of the election campaign.

Biden would bring a wealth of experience to the campaign and a Catholic working-family background that would help to defuse the Republican narrative against Obama, but his long, liberal Senate history would be unlikely to win over many Republicans, nor particularly excite independents. While popular in his state, Delaware has a negligible number of electoral votes.

Clinton’s more moderate politics would nominally bring in many fence-sitters, especially women. However, her selection would also serve to invigorate part of the conservative base more interested in voting against her than voting for McCain. It would also create ongoing turmoil within the Democratic Party still sore after the primaries, though there were already a number of discontents (such as the PUMAs, or Party Unity My Ass, that had exploded onto the blogosphere with their intention to punish the Obama campaign’s treatment of Clinton by voting for McCain) that promised complications regardless of the pick.

Finally, Richardson, as a Latino and governor of New Mexico, would bring his own assortment of pros and cons to the ticket. He would help with a battleground state, and bring in a Latino population wary of Obama during the primaries, but he would also rile a conservative population already uncomfortable with a young, Black president.

In short, Obama was faced with the prospect of choosing to increase his own support by going after independent voters, or attempting to depress McCain’s conservative base that appeared to have lackluster support for their candidate.

(Part two to follow)