Obama, Russia, and the Voters

And Mitch McConnell, Too

There is some debate about whether Obama and team responded adequately to Russian interference in 2016. This is a reply to an essay that attempts to defend Obama’s response (it’s actually a reply to a reply to a reply). After an exchange or two, the author, Nicholas Grossman, offered this:

“The key question, for my argument at least, is whether it should have been apparent to the Obama administration in fall 2016 that the defensive measures they took would not sufficiently safeguard the fairness of the election.

That’s what I mean by hindsight bias. Looking back, we know the election results. But for Obama’s strategy to be inherently incorrect, it would have to be reasonable to believe in the fall of 2016 that:

1 Trump was likely to win.

2 The reason he was going to win was Russian interference.

3 The defensive measures the administration took would be insufficient to counter that interference.

4 More drastic measures would successfully counter the interference and make the election fair.

But few believed #1. Even with hindsight we don’t know #2. #3 is uncertain with hindsight (even if you assume #2) and couldn’t have been clear at the time. And #4 is impossible to know now, and couldn’t have been known in the fall.

On top of all that, you’d have to believe there’s no downside to stoking public panic about the integrity of the electoral process. As I wrote in the article, I definitely think there’s a downside to that.”

What follows is my lengthy response. It’s lengthy because Nicholas presented a number of knotty problems and because this topic contains issues that Beltway pundits are only addressing in superficial ways. As I suggested before to Nicholas, we are now entering the realm of historiography on this matter as opposed to emotional reactive venting. In a situation like this, we need to be clear on what happened and where the responsibility lies. I think Obama made a mistake, and I present my reasons. Putting this discussion out there is an attempt to open up the catastrophe of the 2016 election and in a democratic fashion discuss what went wrong and why. My belief is that there are extant principles that might have guided Obama’s actions better.

Nicholas suggested my impugning Obama was an example of “hindsight bias” — or believing what was not inevitable before the fact (Trump’s win) was inevitable after the fact.

The concept of hindsight bias doesn’t really apply here because no one to my knowledge is arguing that a Trump win was inevitable and we should have seen it coming all along — a case of so called 20/20 hindsight. There was always some probability that Trump would win — based on the polls and their logarithmic narrowing he had approximately a 40% chance of victory — sufficient odds to warrant caution. (I could be wrong on that figure, but a poll in October gave Clinton a 4.4% lead over Trump — significant but not overwhelming.)

But very important: any counter-measures should not have been made in response to any probability of victory by either candidate.

The question of fair elections is independent of notions about prospective, favored, or likely victors. Otherwise, we would only need to ensure fairness in the case of an unfair disadvantage for an underdog or in the case of a statistical dead heat. But fair elections need to be ensured regardless of prospective speculations (to counter any prospective bias).

The hindsight bias concept is a basic and common fallacy, and because a Trump win or loss in itself would not be integral to the concept of fair elections it doesn’t apply to this case. I emphasize again that an election’s fairness should be guaranteed regardless of the projected outcome.

Otherwise, another fallacy would be informing the decision making: I will call it the prospective fallacy, or the sure-thing fallacy, which means that we make important decisions based on the inevitability of what is not in fact inevitable.

Regarding the claim: “for Obama’s strategy to be inherently incorrect, it would have to be reasonable to believe in the fall of 2016 that:

1. Trump was likely to win.”

— we can rephrase that in positive terms: for Obama’s strategy to be correct, it would have to be reasonable to believe in the fall of 2016 that:

1. Clinton was likely to win.

The problem is that Nicholas is attempting to make Obama’s decision’s correctness contingent on a Clinton victory. In other words, the condition for making Obama’s decision correct would be the presumption of a Clinton victory. Or: the administration was making the correct decision only because Clinton had a 6 out of 10 chance of victory.

And that’s another way of saying the administration was letting a significant perversion of the election process to occur and to remain unchecked (the Oct. 7 announcement did not alert the public to the full reality, and it was not timely) because its preferred candidate probably would not be affected by the unfairness: i.e., regardless, “she most likely would win.” That’s the sure-thing bias. (There may also be tangled up in this a due process issue.) I should add to this — to continue to argue against a position that does not really address the crux of the situation — that given the Russian involvement and the “unknown unknowns,” why Clinton’s victory should have been viewed as almost inevitable is a mystery.

But the Obama administration’s decision to implement a conservative (in a double sense) response was really a politicized decision — the reasoning being that the administration’s preferred candidate would most likely win, so response to malfeasance could be less than urgent. But would this same lack of urgency apply if the favored candidate was more likely to lose?

Because the other side of the argument seems to be that if Trump was expected to win, Obama should have done more. But that sounds like procedural unfairness.

My argument is that more should have been done irrespective of who was projected to win. The real object of concern here should not have been cui bono but rather: Was the election process sound and was all being done to ensure an even playing field for both players? It’s more of a structural/technocratic question than a political one. Was there sufficient integrity to the electoral process?

The Mind of the American Electorate as Catalyst

In a broad sense we have to ask what did Russia do in its attempt to change the election’s outcome. All technical operations aside, the catalyst was the collective American mind/the electorate. That was the real target of the operation. The intention was to create a prejudice against Clinton in the collective mind of the electorate.

We need to look at precisely what kind of modification to the election process Russian interference introduced. Did it actually change minds? Almost certainly. How many? We don’t know, but any is too many. But it is impossible that the concerted actions of Russia had no influence on the electorate.

If the effect that Russian interference had was to influence the mind of the electorate, the most relevant response would have been to attempt to negate that influence somehow. The best way to do that would have been through words: put it to the voters that Russia had imposed itself on the electorate’s decision making and was attempting to place one candidate over another.

Did the Administration believe their defensive measures would safeguard the fairness of the election?

That question presumes that the defensive measures were intended to safeguard the fairness of the election. It is an open question as to what the administration’s measures were intended to do.

It’s not good administrative practice to guarantee fair elections only if the preferred candidate has more than a minor chance of losing.

Nicholas’s argument can be distilled down to the proposition that because Clinton was the favorite the Obama administration did enough.

I think there is a deeper principle here: the presumption of executive duty to ensure a fair election regardless of whether one’s favorite candidate leads or lags in the polls.

In other words, Obama should have acted more forcefully whether a Trump victory was unlikely or likely as a matter of administrative duty.

It is true that despite Russian interference Trump was considered unlikely to win (but we should acknowledge he was not far behind in the polls). But Trump did win. The issue is not whether he won as a result of Russian interference. The issue is that he received an advantage from it. And at the time that should have been made clear to the American people, and whether he was an underdog or not, an unfair political advantage should be countered as a matter of administrative procedure. That is the key.

Were the Obama administration’s measures adequate after it became known that the Kremlin intended Trump to win? We don’t know if the measures were adequate because we don’t know the precise weight Russian interference had in Trump’s victory. We most likely agree that there would have to be some electoral benefit to Trump from this intervention, but at the same time we can’t be sure that Trump would not have won without Russian assistance. But the Obama administration logically could not let its uncertainty about the effect deter it from a response that automatically assumed the worst: that Russia might be able to turn the election. That was the one thing that should not happen, the one thing to be guarded against at all costs.

Nicholas’s (and other writers’) argument then is that we can’t know what enough would be in this context. However, my argument is that, in any case, considering the nature of the threat and the very special status of the election, the response should have automatically assumed the worst outcome as a matter of extreme vigilance — which, I believe, we deserve.

Nicholas argues that ignorance about the outcome and about the electoral value of the interference made the administration’s response sufficient from the perspective of late Summer 016. Because the future technically was unpredictable the measures taken were adequate.

If any notion of adequacy is to be assessed we should consider what measures were taken and what were not.

On October 8 it was announced that Russia had been interfering in the election process but no indication was given which candidate was the intended beneficiary. Obama also personally cautioned Putin in September (I believe in China) and offered that the US could also implement cyber attacks.

It is not absolutely clear why Obama did not alert the nation to what was by August a known fact that Russian interference was designed to assist Trump’s election chances. The explanation generated so far, but which Obama himself has not confirmed, is that stating so would have appeared as though the president was intervening in the election on behalf of fellow Democrat, Clinton.

There is of course something to that fear. One month later in September administration officials approached the Hill and laid out the known facts. Russia was working to elect Trump. It has been reported that the Republican leadership guided by Mitch McConnell refused to collaborate in a bi-partisan public response to Russia.

That meant any statement made by Obama as to Russia’s intentions would only be supported by other Democrats, presumably feeding the impression that a Democratic plot was afoot to falsely discredit Trump’s campaign. That seems to have been the line of reasoning.

However, succumbing to that fear was a mistake and was political. It meant that Obama was making an important administrative decision based on his fears about Clinton’s candidacy. He unwittingly politicized his not telling the full truth about the situation to the American people. Telling all, because of Republican truculence, might jeopardize Clinton’s chances. It appears he behaved the way he behaved in order to not upset Clinton’s likely victory.

But a) that was procedurally incorrect. Regardless of the threat to his favorite candidate, Clinton, he should have told the whole truth about Russia to the American people and b) his primary concern should have been with the fairness of the election. And I think b) necessitates a).

Which brings us back to what he could have done to re-establish fairness in the election process.

I think the key here was truth, openness, and trust in the American people to weigh the evidence and make the right decision — idealistic perhaps, but that’s what democracy is all about.

As I indicate above, the American mind was in effect under attack through information and disinformation forays. The collective judgment of the American people needed to be reset. Only the whole truth could possibly do this. Anything less could not re-balance the collective judgment of the electorate. It’s really a variation on the psychological precept of If you don’t know what’s influencing you, it’s hard to make good life decisions.

Effectively, it was the Republicans who decided for Obama. Because they refused to offer support of any kind, he caved. That was one important failing; another was a failure of the imagination, a certain inability to visualize the unusual but still possibly manageable path forward. The reasoning and calculations on this went only so far, then stopped. They thought three moves ahead, but they should have thought six.

In August Congress should have been addressed by the president with a call for unity in the face of the enemy. Those should have been the terms. And if the Republicans didn’t believe the CIA then, we would have no further need for a CIA because they simply couldn’t ever be believed. There is no point in having a CIA if they are not believed.

Then if the Republican caucus balked, Obama should have made his address and appeal to the people, while pointing out that certain Republicans have refused to endorse resisting Russia precisely for the reason that Russia is assisting a Republican candidate. But to do this, he had to be disinterested in the election’s outcome and only interested in resetting the election process so that it would run according to spec. Again the collective American mind was the real catalyst — not government.

The second plank would be swift and incisive punitive measures against Russia, publicly announced — because that’s what Russia deserved but also because there would need to be the appearance of a convincing and very justifiable response to exhibit conviction, resolve, and national anger. Why wouldn’t we be angry over this? Tilting an election goes deeper than crime.

Would that have decreased Clinton’s chances of winning? It doesn’t matter. What was compulsory was that the administration attempt to restore balance to the election process.

There has to be a default scenario for political candidates: each has the same rights and their respective chances of success should not affect or influence administrative behavior, should not impinge on executive responsibility. Election 016 really was another case of the tail wagging the dog. The larger picture was not Clinton and her success or lack of it; it was rather the Kremlin’s attack on the American election process. Therefore, it was necessary to take aggressive measures to neutralize the effect Putin was having on the election and on the collective judgment of the electorate. Obama chose the lesser issue (Clinton’s candidacy) as a basis for decision — or so it seems; he allowed a concern over Clinton’s chances to cause him to relax his duty and withhold from the people the complete truth about Russian interference. That was his big mistake.

Had he traveled the alternative path, Republicans would have been in a peculiar and difficult position of impugning and maligning the CIA and defending Russia just before an election. Not a good position. It’s hard to think of a worse one. I ask you to visualize it.

Instead, to our collective regret, Mitch McConnell decided for Obama what the response to Russia should be.

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NOTE: Here a Newsweek pundit repeats the claim that Obama’s response was appropriate because of the fear of the appearance of intervening on behalf of Clinton. And he mentions: “Obama had to be especially cautious lest he fuel Trump’s paranoid claim that the election was rigged.” In other words, in this case, Obama let Trump decide administrative policy. Trump’s threats should not be the basis of policy. The writer also points to a lack at that time of inter-agency consensus. The CIA was the primary source of the intelligence and assessment in August. The CIA’s assessments are sufficient grounds for many major decisions, including war. To be safe, it was necessary to credit this agency — especially since it had a primary relationship to the intelligence. In any case, it was important to at minimum to deliver the general content of the CIA report to the American people. The source would not be Obama, but the CIA. And only the president has the power to release this information. And the unstoppable and unnegotiable element here was time. Time could not wait for perfect. Good was sufficient.

And here William Saletan argues that Obama made the right decisions because, “Obama’s job wasn’t to prevent the election of a particular person, even one as awful as Trump. Obama’s job was to preserve the country. That meant protecting the integrity of our elections and public faith in them. . . .” We are in perfect agreement. However, without involving the electorate — and instead fearing it — the integrity of the election under Russia could not possibly be preserved precisely because the nature of the attack was on the electorate’s collective mind. He also writes, “Obama met that standard [of being presidential]. He focused on protecting democracy, not on electing Clinton.” But he is begging the question here; despite any possible damage or blowback, the voters had a right to know about certain actionable measures that were influencing them. Why? Because it was their vote. To deprive them of that knowledge is overly paternalistic, as if the rule was: “If we tell the voters the truth, they won’t be able to function; it will only harm or confuse them.” Another answer to the above quote:

You cannot protect democracy without involving the people.