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The New Law of Uncertainty
By Jonathan Alter
NewsweekDec. 22 Issue - "Game over," an Iraqi on the streets of Baghdad told CNN. Maybe. More likely, the game is just beginning, and not only on the ground in Iraq. The American presidential campaign, connected at the hip this year to foreign policy, will now move in a different direction. Toward a Bush landslide? Not so fast.
The biggest fallacy in forecasting of any kind is to take current conditions and extrapolate forward as if those conditions won't change. President Bush could still be vulnerable politically. Same for Howard Dean in the primaries, regardless of how positive the news climate may be for both of them right now. Even with good odds, the shoo-in doesn't fit.
That's because the media-political universe adheres to two strange laws simultaneously. The first is the Law of Premature Predictions. It's a dinner party or chat-room thing. "Stick a fork in him" sounds confident and smart. "Who knows?" sounds boring and lame. So people look at the latest news--Saddam captured, Al Gore endorses Dean--and ignore other inconvenient variables.
Then there's the Law of Media Oscillation. The process invites--no, demands--a series of sine curves to keep everyone interested. Up one week, down the next. The only safe prediction is that a static, unchanging political narrative is impossible. As we're seeing, stuff happens in war and politics, and when it doesn't, the media will half-consciously rearrange all the atoms of emphasis and particles of story choice to make it seem so.
Think of Werner Heisenberg's theory of physics, the Uncertainty Principle: "The more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known." In other words, the more we handicap, the more handicapped we.
From here on, beating the ever-changing expectations spread gets tricky, abroad and at home. Bush must now show rapid progress toward security and democracy in Iraq, or end up worse off than he was before Saddam was apprehended. For all the value of the Gore endorsement in making Dean more credible with African-Americans and other core constituencies, the governor may be at his moment of maximum peril. The usual Democratic buyers' remorse (which hobbles every presumptive nominee in early summer) could set in early this time, as harsh antiwar declarations lose their appeal.
Dean's hedge against the Uncertainty Principle is the Tupperware Party. He's pioneering the use in politics of what is called "multilevel marketing"--the magic behind Tupperware, Amway and other sophisticated selling schemes. The most amazing statistic I heard in New Hampshire last week was that Dean supporters there have, in three months, held nearly 1,000 "house meetings." A "Deaniac" invites over a dozen friends and passes out a compelling Dean pamphlet modeled on Tom Paine's "Common Sense." Dean himself is mentioned only on the last page of the pamphlet; it's mostly about building a movement to "take the country back" from the big-money interests that have hijacked it. New recruits to the crusade then hold their own house meetings, and the idea spreads virally.
When you buy Tupperware, you get Teflon, too. Normally, gaffes stick to a candidate and dry up money. Dean has reversed that. Every time he runs into trouble, his backers give more. It's almost a form of human insurance.
For months, the other candidates have tried to derail the Dean Machine. John Kerry calls him a flip-flopper. Joe Lieberman warns that Dean is in danger of being isolated on the left on national security, trade and spiritual values. John Edwards explains that optimism, not anger, wins presidential elections, a point borne out by the failure of populist campaigns to ever win the White House. (FDR, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton all ousted GOP incumbents with smiles, not scowls.)
These arguments may be true, but they aren't likely to be relevant in the primaries. The challengers' best bet may be a simple change of scenery. Every epidemic has a break point, a natural and often inexplicable moment when, just as in punditry, present trends no longer continue. For Dean, that may come when the campaign shifts to Southern and Midwestern states where local politicians have detected no groundswell for him.
The Dean phenomenon is empowering for the hundreds of thousands of people who suddenly feel a connection to politics; it's invigorating for a process that seemed as if it were destined forever to be run by big money; it's inspiring for a Democratic Party that has traditionally trailed far behind the GOP in attracting small donors, and it's intriguing to see how far it goes. Might the movement grow large enough to fire Bush? It sure doesn't look that way this week. But the only certainty of American politics is that its quantum physics will continue to confound us.
© 2003 Newsweek, Inc.
