• You didn't notice the missing word above. That means you didn't proofread adequately. Get used to finding and fixing every mistake and solving every problem with your language, if possible.

• I don't understand why you want to cast this as a description of "the reason" politics works as it does. That commits you to a unifactorial explanation of complex phenomena, which means that readers are certain, and the more they know the more certain they are, to find themselves in disagreement with you, even if they agree the phenomenon you are describing exists and is important. I don't think you need to make this strong claim in order to have an essay that holds together, and you can't hold it together against the sales resistance you are raising unnecessarily.

• But doesn't that make this account a wedding without musicians? These players do far too much to determine whether legislation actually happens to be eliminated from the discussion of the political cycle, and they are not about hiding from their uncertainties. So for the unifactorialist, they're a big problem with the explanation, and for the multifactorialist, they're necessary characters in the drama.

Instead, I focus on other parts of the play because only by understanding what actually motivates individuals will we be able to dismiss ineffective solutions.

• Ineffective at what? "Effectiveness," as opposed to "effect," is another "fact" subject to dramatic manipulation. Effectiveness compared to what? Starting from what baseline? With what regard to cost, and with what regard to who pays? Declaring the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of fixes is a game everyone can play. Civil legal assistance through the Legal Services Corporation had such profound effects that the Republican Party declared it ineffective, waged war on it for a generation, and now young lawyers like yourself can't even imagine the idea of impact litigation on behalf of the poor brought using lawyers paid on federal grants. But that was once not just proposal, but funded, active policy. Is it the problem or the fix that disappeared?

In fact, the idea that reforms could change a process which is perpetuated by the human inability to cope with uncertainty might be little more than an act of the drama itself (see ethics reform, for starters). I think a better metric for evaluation when there is a popular clamor for a fix to the latest problem is whether the proposed solution will further our values on the whole.

• But that's the same conversation politics is always having. Do the President's health care reform proposals suit our values as a whole? Hence you have the whole immensely ludicrous and completely serious show going on at the moment, as the reorganization of one-seventh of the US economy is again tried, with all the extraordinary mobilization of everyone in the United States who would like to find a few tens of billions lying on the sidewalk, while Sarah Palin talks about how Obama is "evil," and "ordinary citizens" turn up at Democratic congressional town halls to shout against socialism.

So to take an example from class, when we expand SCHIP with a cigarette tax increase we should ask whether, knowing that this is our only chance to tackle children’s health care for several years, we prefer their health over the liberty of citizens who are smokers. Of course, if we are really good, we might even become the people who start the public outcry in the first place!

• I agree that this draft pulls the essay together much better than the first one did. But you're still left with some weaknesses in the argument. I would recommend looking again at the rhetoric of causation, and at the relationship of the present media-arranged dramatic psychology of politics to the parallel processes of interest-group competition and political career-building.

• This essay is very strong for three quarters, but it wanders a little towards the end. I think you could strengthen it by tightening structure: rewrite the first paragraph to state the thesis, the idea you are explicating, and tie that tightly to the conclusion you arrive at. If you mean to adopt the point of view stated in the present last paragraph, that the result of all trials is the consequence of uncertain exposure to subjective accounts impossible of producing certainty as to facts, you would need to ask how a much larger, fuzzier and more influenceable process such as legislation could ever produce laws tightly correlated to the intended social result. It's the very possibility that the truth about complex social occurrences can be descried that makes modern legislative process worth pursuing, as you say. So I think some relatively precise but unsparing editing is called for, and then I think you will have an excellent work to show for the effort.

Dealing with the "Fix"

-- By HelenMayer - 27 Feb 2009

As a casual observer of politics, I am always fascinated by the idea of the “fix.” The cycle, call it a play even, goes something like this: an issue arouses the public conscience and a popular call for action results. After Congress passes legislation addressing it, commentators spend a week reviewing each player’s performance and wrapping up the story, after which time the issue slips off the front pages while politicians take a curtain call. Everyone prefers to consider the problem “fixed” until a blue ribbon commission of experts publishes a report reminding us that, in fact, the problem still exists. Then comes the “reform effort,” more legislation to quell the popular outcry, more curtain calls, and so the play continues. We see this phenomenon all the time. We “fixed” the Nation at Risk with No Child Left Behind legislation and now are schools are accountable. We “fixed” the problems of our country’s working poor by raising the federal minimum wage to $7.25 an hour. We “fixed” children’s health care by extending SCHIP and now millions more have access.

There are standard explanations for this cycle of events. These things take time to work, we are told, and it will take years to measure their full effect – if it is possible at all. Until then there is no sense in Monday morning quarterbacking. Another popular explanation is the role of the media, with its penchant for flash over substance. The only way the networks can even approach profitability is to be the first on the scene of the next big crisis – no time to cover yesterday’s news, let alone its after effects!

I think what’s happening here has a simpler, but potentially more intractable source. We have read about it in the writings of both Frank and Leff. Political action follows this pattern for the same reason that the ultimate decision of guilt or innocence is left to twelve people locked in a blackbox, and for the same reason that people turn to religion to provide a comforting explanation for death – to solve problems they feel otherwise powerless to cope with. In the drama of politics, when a society identifies a problem ordinary people play their part as outraged citizens clamoring for its resolution because it seems too difficult for a person-by-person solution, just as it seems too difficult to deal with the problem of the subjectivity of facts in a trial or the fear of death in the human psyche. So, Congress and the President are cast in the roles of “fixers-in-chief” with the networks serving dual functions as microphone and narrator. When the “fixers” develop a solution, we may not be able to grasp what it means for a country to spend $634 billion on health care reform, or to home in on $2 trillion in budgetary savings over the next ten years. (These astronomical numbers often leave me, at least, at a loss – what is the difference between an $800 billion stimulus package and a $700 billion one?) But passing the law or developing the way forward alleviates the uncertainty we feel about these problems. And if it provided a little gossip or entertainment along the way, so much the better. Once the “fix” portion of the play reaches its conclusion, we can return to our steady state of contentedness while telling ourselves that although it was not a perfect bill, such a thing does not exist. At least we as a society “dealt” with the problem, and for pity’s sake next time we should remember not to watch how laws or sausage are made. We remain in this cognitive state until the blue ribbon commissions and “outside agitators” lead us to clamor once again for a solution (this time with lessons learned, of course) and the play begins anew.

Admittedly, this is a discouraging portrait of how our laws are written. And in focusing on the public’s role in encouraging a “fix” I have not touched on the undercurrent of competing interests that lurk just below the surface. This is not to say I do not recognize the existence of that element as well. Indeed, when all the check-writing attendees at a fundraiser with John Murtha, Chairman of the Subcommittee on Defense Appropriations, attach business cards from Boeing, Lockheed and Northrup Grumman these players are brought into stark relief. I focus on other parts of the play because I often find that this class elicits a deceptively simple question in each context we discuss: which is more effective – changing the script from the outside or acting out the script from the inside with different goals in mind?

To my mind, working from the inside has a slight edge. Fear is a powerful human emotion, and fear of uncertainly is especially so. I mention this not only to recognize the difficulty of altering this aspect of the human psyche, but also because humans use magic not just to explain areas we are uncomfortable dealing with, such as death, but also to assuage our doubts in contexts where conquering uncertainty and finding the “truth” is impossible because it is inherently subjective. A trial is such a context. If the facts we allow a jury to hear are ultimately subjective, we cannot say whether the rules of evidence as they stand are “right” or “wrong." We can only say whether we think a change into the rules will get us to an outcome we believe is just more often than the rules would without it. I believe political solutions fall into this latter category. To take an example from class, when we pass a law such as the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, we should evaluate the move by asking whether, given that it is funded with a cigarette tax increase, it will further our values on the whole. We should evaluate our laws with this metric in mind, rather than the more comforting but ultimately cyclical goal of curing uncertainty in the public mind.

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