ArticleIP_2103.txt

   
   
      
         
            A Snowball's Chance

            Impeachment is still a
minority taste. In mid-August, 25 percent of adults supported impeachment; by
the beginning of this week almost 40 percent did. But why is that number
growing at all? The Starr report, Clinton's response, or just the slow
sinking-in of the story may all be factors. But opinion polls themselves can
change the results of opinion polls. They can even turn a minority view into a
majority one without anyone actually changing his or her mind about the rights
and wrongs.

            Here's
how. Start with a poll indicating that 25 percent of voters think Clinton
deserves to be sacked. Three-quarters think he doesn't. But of that 75 percent
who don't think he should quit or be impeached, many are disturbed at the
thought that he has lost the confidence of so many other citizens, and some
will feel that, whatever their own views, the president should go because he
has lost the ability to govern effectively. (This argument is already a
subtheme among the commentariat.)

            How many will feel this way? Impossible to say, of course.
If everyone in the country except you felt that Clinton was disqualified on
moral grounds, you would almost certainly conclude that he should go on
effectiveness grounds alone. If half the country disagreed with you, you might
or might not buy the effectiveness argument. If 10 percent of the country
favored impeachment, you almost surely would not worry that this made the
president ineffective.

            Let's suppose that at 25
percent favoring impeachment, one out of 15 of the remaining 75 percent
believes that having a quarter of the population wishing him impeached makes
the president dangerously ineffective. The next time a pollster comes around,
this small group tells him or her they think Clinton should go. Thus the next
poll results show that an additional 5 percent of voters now want him out--and
the total for ouster is now 30 percent.

            Of the
remaining 70 percent, one in 14 thinks that 30 percent favoring impeachment is
too much for effective governance, and thus the next poll publicizes the news
that 35 percent of voters think Clinton should go. If an equal number of
pragmatic voters (now one in 13 of the remaining Clinton supporters) think that
35 percent is enough--they'll flip, and the next poll will show that 40 percent
of voters think impeachment is warranted. Two iterations later, 50 percent of
American voters want to send Clinton to the showers. And that's enough for
Congress. Clinton is impeached by a snowball. A majority of Americans now
believes he must go, even though only one in four actually believe he deserves
to go.

            
The dynamic eventually loses steam, of course.
The halt comes when there is no one left who wishes Clinton would stay but
thinks the current level of impeachment sentiment means he should go. But is
the end north or south of 50 percent? We don't know.

            This
dynamic is perhaps easier to see in the stock market, as explained in a famous
passage by John Maynard Keynes. Keynes wrote of:

            Those
newspaper competitions in which the competitors have to pick out the six
prettiest faces from a hundred photographs, the prize being awarded to the
competitor whose choice most nearly corresponds to the average preferences of
the competitors as a whole. ... It is not a case of choosing those which, to
the best of one's judgement, are really the prettiest, nor even those which
average opinion thinks the prettiest. We have reached the third degree where we
devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the
average opinion to be. And there are some, I believe, who practise the fourth,
fifth, and higher degrees.

            An example of Keynes' point: Suppose AT&T stock trades
at $50. A group of optimistic but thickheaded investors suspects that a share
of AT&T is actually worth $100. Most investors are skeptical, correctly
divining that future earnings justify a price of only $50. But if some skeptics
suspect that optimists will buy AT&T for $100, then these skeptics will buy
AT&T and drive the price to, say, $60. The fact that the market newly
contains optimists and speculating skeptics moves another group of more
conservative skeptics to start buying, driving the price to $70--even though
the new group believes the stock is only worth $50. After all, it's OK to buy a
stock you know to be overvalued as long as someone else--it doesn't matter
whether it's a skeptic or an optimist--will pay even more for it.

            The process iterates,
bringing more and more investors aboard, until someone gets spooked about
finding a speculating skeptic or an idiotic optimist who will continue the
game. The result is often a precipitous sell-off. Keynes writes, "The actual,
private object of the most skilled investment today is to 'beat the gun,' as
the Americans so well express it, to outwit the crowd, and to pass the bad, or
depreciating, half-crown to the other fellow."

            Keynes
believed that this kind of speculation was pernicious. The reason is that it
diverts attention from something called "enterprise," by which Keynes means the
development of real operating businesses. Can a similar argument apply to the
voting example? It is indeed troubling that Clinton could be driven out by
voters who don't necessarily deplore his conduct. Something smells rotten about
the idea that you must surrender your opinion to your neighbor. The real
polity, like the real economy, ought to be what counts.