Events have a way of forcing reevaluations of opinions so deeply ingrained they seem like laws of science.  For example, given the late night car crash, the sanctimonious evasions and half-apologies, and now the text messages and voice mails:

Why was Tiger Woods so popular in the first place?

It’s a legitimate question.  He is quite possibly the most boring individual champion of the last half-century in any major sport.  Borg at least had foils, Connors and McEnroe, whose raw emotion reminded you that tennis is a game played by humans with creativity and verve.  Nicklaus and Palmer always had a knack for drama, and Palmer made his name — and, arguably, the future of televised golf — with daring charges of go-for-broke golf when the tournament seemed lost.   Golf wouldn’t seem to be made for TV, which made it rich, but Nicklaus, Palmer, and those who followed them proved that it could be by fleshing out the inherent drama of how individuals, forced into difficult situations, can tap deep inside themselves for courage and the occasional miracle.

But not Tiger.  Tiger’s strength is his course analysis, the way he calculates the risks and rewards of every hole and carves up the course with optimum efficiency.  If he were in another line of work, he’d be a hedge fund manager, surveying the market for hidden inefficiencies and exploiting them.  His game plan is constant:  stay with the pack on Thursday, steadily open a lead on Friday and Saturday, and then force players to catch up with him on Sunday, when pin placements and course setups are at their most difficult.  Occasionally we see real flair and creativity, but only when necessary.  For the most part, Tiger wins golf tournaments not because of the spectacular chips or putts, but by regularly making 8-9 foot putts that allow him to keep par and stay on program.  That’s why his strength is the 72 hole tournament, which emphasizes consistency, and why he’s so mediocre in Ryder Cup play, which rewards risk-taking and flash.  What he can do on a golf course is impressive, but impressive isn’t always interesting.  And when Tiger has a three-shot lead on Sunday, it rarely is.

What else explains his popularity?  Cross graciousness off the list.  With few exceptions, most champion golf players radiate a sense of almost astounded glee at the fact that they play golf for a living — a very good living — and more than in any other sport, they respect the efforts of those who came before them.   But to Tiger, it seems all one great burden.  Galleries are a distraction, the press (and the golf press is notoriously polite) is a nuisance, and he seems to have practically nothing to do with his fellow players.  I’ve seen Phil Mickelson fist-bump a close competitor after a good shot in the last round; the most Woods will muster is a glare.  His caddy, Steve Williams, stares down fans who would dare disturb his boss from behind the ropes.  Bad shots are followed — loudly — with f-bombs and the kind of fury that Bobby Jones learned to correct as a teenager.  He has a charitable foundation, to be sure, but it’s not clear whether he actually puts skin and sinew into it, or simply treats it as a part of a carefully crafted public identity.

It’s not the gracefulness of his swing — unlike the long, easily-flowing arc of a Sam Snead, a Fred Couples or a Vijay Singh, Woods is all muscle.  And it’s certainly not his personality, which at least in interviews is stiff and scripted.  To the extent we see any personality peek through at all, it’s obsessive-compulsiveness:  nearly everything he says has something to do with his play that day, the mechanics of his swing,

So why, up to the recent revelations, was Tiger Woods so astoundingly popular in the first place?  Let me suggest three reasons.

First, he was not offensive.  Golfers are not, by nature, an offensive lot, and it doesn’t take much to cause dislike.  People hated Nicklaus for years because he dared to beat Arnold Palmer, The King.  When he burst onto the scene, Woods was clean-scrubbed and well-behaved and had no universally popular icon to dethrone.   He had an audience which was immediately receptive and only occasionally resistant to his talents.

Second, because he’s usually in the hunt in the most televised tournaments he gets lots of television coverage, which in turn makes him enormously attractive to advertisers and sponsors.  The sponsors themselves have in turn undertaken the huge marketing effort for the Tiger Woods brand.  The ads, particularly Nike’s, humanize him and probably articulate identity and personality for him better than anything else he’s done.

Third, he’s a winner, and we love winners.  Michael Jordan was a great, great basketball player but only became a hero when his Chicago Bulls starting racking up championships, and the halo of those championships turned lesser players on those teams into heroes as well, with endorsement deals and book contracts well beyond what they could have expected without the banners.  We are willing to forgive an awful lot for people who win consistently, and far less for those who don’t.

The question facing the Woods camp, after (allegedly) buying the silence of  the three or five or seven or nine women he’s (allegedly) had affairs with, is what to do next.  He has to figure out whether or how to rehabilitate his public image, he has to figure out how he’s going to deal with the media, and he has to figure out what he wants to do about golf.

And the fulcrum of that, I think, will be conversations his representatives are certainly having with Billy Payne, the chairman of Augusta National Golf Club, which hosts the Masters.  Augusta National’s members like things tidy and under control, dictating the terms under which CBS will cover the tournament (under annual one-year agreements) and spending millions annually to protect the reputation (and brand) of the course, the club, and the tournament.  Augusta National’s members don’t care about gate revenues or television ratings — in 2003, they responded to a planned boycott of its corporate sponsors by making its coverage commercial-free.  It’s inconceivable that Payne would allow Woods’ presence to turn the tournament into a tabloid frenzy, and I’d be surprised if Payne isn’t diplomatically sharing that warning with Woods’s representation.

Then consider the British Open, to be played this year in St. Andrews, Scotland.  Unlike Augusta National, the Old Course at St. Andrews offers no protection from prying eyes.  There are no fences, no walls, no gates, and the British tabloids — never known for restraint — will have a field day with him.  The Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews is at least as prestigious and protective of its reputation and tournament as Augusta National, and it’s almost impossible to imagine the R&A wanting its centerpiece overrun with reporters from the Sun, News of the World, and the Daily Mirror any more than their peers in Augusta.  Consider the same for the Ryder Cup, to be held in September in Wales.  Will the U.S. team captain, Corey Pavin, want to disrupt his team’s chemistry on foreign soil when Ryder Cup team dynamics are inherently difficult in the best of times?  Will other players want to answer questions about whether their wives approve of Tiger being on the team?

Which, possibly, leaves the U.S. Open (at Pebble Beach) and the PGA (at Whistling Straits in Wisconsin) as the only major tournaments for the year where pressure from television networks and the PGA itself might be enough to make Woods and the attendant tabloid swirl tolerable.  (But consider, also, that GM, a major Woods sponsor, parted with Woods when it went bankrupt).   Is that enough for someone who treats all other golf tournaments as warmups for the majors?

So here’s what I think happens, or at least makes most sense for Woods as  a professional, economic entity.

Sometime soon, he announces that he is withdrawing from playing professional golf for 2010 so he can focus exclusively on his family and his (alleged) personal problems.  He needs to do something this bold and dramatic to show the full depth of remorse that, in the public eye, his (alleged) serial philandering requires, and he needs to show he has values beyond tees, greens, and fairways.

Operationally, this will give him cover from the press, but also allow him to manage his public communications on his own terms.  And he’ll have some time to figure out what he actually wants to do without having his decisions driven by short-term pressures.  When he makes those decisions, he’ll give the occasional interview with friendly reporters who will ask questions Woods needs to answer but won’t press too much.

The next big question is whether Woods’s void can be filled by some of the exciting young golfers who grew up idolizing him and are now winning tournaments on their own.  If so, it might be hard for Woods to come back.  The players, television, corporate sponsors (especially Nike, whose image-shaping will be critical for any comeback), and those responsible for putting on the major tournaments may have moved on.  But that is the risk he took.

Medical research tells us that when humans sense danger, the resulting sense of fear shuts down nearly every other voluntary brain function.  Imagination: shut down.  Rational thought:  shut down.  Emotion: shut down.  Most auditory and visual processing that’s not related to the immediate danger:  shut down.  We’re instinctively thrown in to hedgehog mode, focusing exclusively on the immediate threat and what’s immediately necessary to avoid it, and blind, deaf, and frozen to everything else.

Which, as much as anything, explains how Congressional Democrats are reacting to terrible economic numbers, an epidemic of buyer’s remorse among the independent voters who had given them control of Congress and the White House, and not-even-close losses of gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia.  Imagination is shutting down; critical self-appraisal is shutting down; willingness to accept anything other than the tried-and-true is shutting down.  Instead, they are hunkering down with a vengeance.

Let’s start with the health care bill, an absolutely mammoth effort which — unlike any other similarly mammoth legislative effort since the New Deal — is exclusively rejecting anything more than a barely detectable sliver of bipartisanship.  It’s enormously expensive — so expensive that a critical, $200+ billion component preventing scheduled reductions to doctor Medicare reimbursement rates had to be moved separately.  Including the Medicare reimbursement fix, the cheapest version of the proposal still exceeds a trillion dollars in new costs over 10 years.  That cost doesn’t just make it politically unpopular among independents.  It doesn’t just expose huge fissures within the Democratic party.  It also scares the bond markets, increases economic uncertainty, and makes it that much harder for the economy to generate new jobs coming out of the recession.

So why are Obama and the Democratic Congressional Leadership pursuing it in such Charge-of-the-Light-Brigade (“into the valley of death rode the six hundred”) fashion?

Because Rule Number One of hunkering down is to look for protection, which first means gathering your friends.  Independents might be skittish about government-run health care, but the Democratic base isn’t.  It’s a long-held dream, a central tenet in their understanding of not just what Democrats must do if given the opportunity but what it means to be a Democrat.  If Congressional Democrats are going to have their base fighting toe-to-toe with them in 11 months, they need to achieve something they can credibly call health care reform.  Independents might have different ideas, and at the end of the day independents will decide who controls Congress in 2011, but that’s a rational question.  This is not about hope, or justice, or any other core Democratic value.  Fear among their political class is driving things here, and fear dictates keeping your friends close and in the fight.

Rule Number Two of hunkering down is finding ground where you can win — preferably uphill, and definitely with protection on your rear.  This argues even more strongly for pushing health care.  Perhaps the critical advantage Democrats will have going into the 2010 elections is leverage.  The credible power to pass legislation or regulation that can significantly affect the private sector creates leverage on any number of fronts.  It makes fundraising easier; it makes it easier to get those who oppose your agenda to compromise rather than obstruct; it makes it easier to control the information that corporations get from their Washington representatives because those corporations, wanting the ability to affect legislation, hire representation sympathetic to the leadership.  For the House, where every single aspect of procedure is dictated by the majority, to be unable to pass its top-priority legislative item would undermine the credibility of the Democrats’ leadership, which would mean surrendering their leverage.

What does all this suggest for the rest of the Congress?  Quite a bit.

First, expect to see the national Democratic strategy focused on fully exploiting their leverage advantage.  They’ll drive specific votes designed not so much to solve problems as define issues on their own terms — a vote for extending unemployment insurance, for example, or a vote for guaranteeing insurance coverage for breast cancer.   Not much will actually get done — too many compromises would be necessary — but there will be lots and lots of votes intended to mollify supporters and brand Republicans as extreme and uncaring.  And national Democrats will raise huge amounts of money, with which they’ll buy commercials tagging incumbent Republicans with these votes.  Top-tier Democratic communications shops will be saying much more about how bad Republicans are than about the substance of the Democratic agenda.  Positive messages will be up to the local incumbent, running for reelection.

Third, don’t expect to see any new ideas which might upset key Democratic party constituencies.  President Obama spoke positively about including tort reform in health care, but approximately zero effort will go into following up on it because it would upset the trial lawyers.  The same goes for education reform, private sector concessions on global warming legislation,  and extension of free trade.  Not gonna happen.

And fourth, look for the intensification of current efforts to tying current Republicans to the now-departed Bush Administration.  Interrogation techniques, inadequate regulatory enforcement, mismanagement, and accusations of racism, sexism, and religious intolerance — you’ll see it all, either in press-friendly hearings, leadership communications, and as much as the White House can get away with.  For decades, Herbert Hoover’s administration was the gift that kept giving for Democrats; Democrats will try to get at least two years from George W. Bush.

Missing in all this, of course, will be keeping the core promises that led most independents to vote for Obama and Democratic candidates in less partisan districts — promises to tackle hard challenges, to get spending under control, to focus on results instead of stale partisan ideology.  But keeping those promises would require a degree of openness to change, of candid self-assessment, and of imagination that Democrats simply aren’t capable of right now.  Fear is perhaps the most powerful human emotion, and in Washington, it’s taken over the Democratic mind.

One long-prominent trend that’s become even more powerful over the last several years is what I call the Politics of Tribes.  It’s about how political decisionmaking is driven by deep relationships with specific constituencies, and how policymakers define themselves in terms of those relationships more even than ideas or broad vision.

In this, Tribes stands at the opposite of the Politics of Solutions, which is chiefly informed by precise understandings of problems, data, substantive goals, and an openness to ideas which can credibly meet those goals.  And it’s very different from the Politics of Vision, which seeks to redefine governing coalitions under new statements of value and aspiration (Obama and Reagan are good examples).  But it’s also distinct from the Politics of Ideology, which is more about underlying philosophy, and this is an important distinction because much of the time, we view political differences in terms of ideology, when in fact the critical differences are all about tribalism.  And because Tribes is fundamentally about people and converting their relationships into action, I’d argue it’s more powerful and offers a more dependable way of seeing how an issue will develop.

The great example that I took from my congressional career of Tribes was disease research funding, particularly cancer research.    Experienced medical researchers will tell you that medical breakthroughs come largely by accident, and the best way to achieve more of them is essentially to throw more stuff up against the wall — do more experiments, more lab work, just try more ideas out — and see what sticks.  To some extent you can narrow the scope, but only in ways that the developing data suggest.  Otherwise you’re shutting off promising lanes of exploration.

Which is not what many health advocacy groups want to hear.  They want to tie specific kinds of diseases to their constituencies, and — so they argue — help their constituencies by increasing the resources for research into their areas.  You can argue that cancer is, for the most part, cancer, and that we’re better off studying all kinds of cancers than individual kinds; you can argue that specifying a big chunk of the research budget for one kind of cancer is, by definition, cutting off large swaths of possible research and is largely counterproductive; and that the best people to decide where to focus are the medical researchers who understand the data the best.  And you would be completely ignored.  Their point wasn’t ideological, they didn’t care about evidence, and they didn’t care about vision.  What they want to hear is whether you’re on their side or not: were you part of their Tribe.

We had a fascinating example this weekend of what happens when these politics collide when the House Democratic Leadership, acting (as it usually does) unilaterally through Speaker Pelosi, allowed pro-life Democrats to offer an amendment to the House health care bill preventing government-provided insurance from covering abortions, except in case of rape, incest, and risk of death.  Through last week, it became clear to her — to anyone, really — that she didn’t have the votes to pass her health care bill without the socially conservative Democrats who were insisting on this, and that delay risked further erosion.  So made the deal, knowing that the amendment had a better chance of passing than the underlying bill (and in fact it passed with 20 more votes).

This was the Politics of Solutions:  there is a problem (millions of underinsured, runaway costs); and a solution (whatever you think of how well it will work).  But in pushing for a solution, she seriously threatened absolutely fundamental tribal bonds among Democrats generally and House Democrats specifically.  Many House Democrats were drawn into politics by the huge abortion debates of the 1960s and 1970s, and pro-choice (here I’m using each side’s own self-designation) advocates have built a powerful political apparatus.  Abortion isn’t just an issue that drives individual passions; it defines relationships among decisionmakers in a very, very personal way.  You can argue endlessly about merits, philosophy, political and constitutional theory, social trends, and necessary political tradeoffs, but at the end of the day, what matters to these people is whether you’re on their side and to be trusted by their tribe.  An awful lot of the people who have supported Nancy Pelosi throughout her career, who supported Barack Obama through the Democratic primaries and the election just over a year ago, and who comprise the critical mass of the Democratic party, are wondering today just how much they can trust Obama and Pelosi to protect their common tribe.

Managing a governing coalition over a long term is essentially about managing the various kinds of politics.  You need a Politics of Vision to keep things fresh and, to the extent possible, align effort and brainpower in a common direction.  You need a Politics of Solutions to keep policy grounded and relevant.  You need a Politics of Ideology to articulate the big principles in any proposal, and you need a Politics of Tribes to get the actual work done.  If the others aren’t tended to, Tribes will dominate, just because — again — they’re the people doing the actual work.  But if Tribes get too dominant, their wants tend to override the real needs of those not in the tribe, from which point it’s just a matter of time before that governing coalition gets too isolated to be sustainable.

But that also means managing the tribes is critical for any governing entity.  Pelosi used to be able to keep Democrats together just by pointing to a picture of George Bush, but he’s gone.  Usually it’s a matter of modest tacks in modestly different directions that give divergent tribes within a party a reason to stay together.  What’s so interesting about allowing this particular amendment is how fundamental it goes to tribal interests; by any objective standard, Pelosi sold out her pro-choice Members so that she could get a health care bill passed, and the ideological goal of that bill — public health care — has itself been so compromised that many of them have to wonder whether it was worth the price.

What will be interesting to see from this point forward is how much trust Pelosi has lost from the pro-choice community (sorry – tribe) and what she’ll have to do to regain it, particularly when similar language is sure to pass the Senate (if any health care bill passes the Senate) and when her Members will need intense support from their liberal base to make up for the independents who are getting a strong case of buyer’s remorse.  Even more interesting will be the responses of other tribes affiliated with the Democratic party — how many of them will look at what else Pelosi wants to pass, and how willing she’ll be to jettison them if she needs to.

One of the big trends that will drive policymaking in Washington for the next several years is the emergence of Behavioral Economics.  Most branches of the economics tree follow (a bit too closely for comfort, perhaps) Woody Allen’s course description for Econ 101:  “The study of money and why it’s good.”  Behavioral economics more directly reaches into sociology to understand human motivations for economic activity, and though its advocates were ignored for several years, they’ve been racking up the Nobel Prizes of late (and unlike the Peace prize, you actually have to have done something to get a Nobel in Economics, but that’s for another day).  Behavioral economists study things like how panic psychologies spread, and their insights into just this helped them understand and anticipate the fiscal collapse of 2008 much better and sooner than their more traditional colleagues.

How, whether and when incentives schemes work is fertile territory for the BE’s.  In this fascinating TED talk, author Dan Pink (one of the most creative and incisive business writers going right now), lays out the behavioralist case against money as the key incentive for creativity and innovation.  Financial rewards, he says, are great at getting people to comply — to achieve very fixed goals which require activity and speed more than imagination.  But they’re lousy at getting people to create something new — they wind up pushing people more deeply inside the box than outside of it.  Sociologists have known this for years, and it was confirmed in a recent study sponsored by the Federal Reserve (interesting, interesting, interesting) in which different groups from distinct cultures throughout the world were offered big, medium, and small rewards for solving a number of difficult problems quickly.  In culture after culture and problem after problem, those offered the big rewards for success underperformed the others, and usually by big margins.

What Pink offers as a more powerful incentive to compensation is engagement, the feeling that one’s work matters deeply to the surrounding world.  Wikipedia is one example of this; so is Google and its combination of a bold, unifying vision (to organize the world) and encouragement for individually directed work.  There’s a lot of anecdotal evidence to support this, but to be honest these kinds of structures haven’t been in place long enough to yield much solid, quantifiable data.  (See the talk:  http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html.  While you’re at it, take a look at this presentation by Behavioral Economist Dan Ariely:  http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_asks_are_we_in_control_of_our_own_decisions.html)

The Fed is now interested in governing compensation for Wall Street, and though some see politics at the root of this I suspect that the Fed’s real interest is substantive.  Pay on Wall Street is skewed toward bonuses and short-term incentives more than nearly any other industry, and, generally speaking, the structure of incentives drives decisionmaking and risk tolerance far more than any regulatory scheme.  If the prevalent incentive schemes on Wall Street helped cause the fiscal meltdown, fixing them will help prevent another collapse more effectively than any regulatory reform.  If Lehman Brothers had been a private partnership in which each partner was directly exposed to investment risk, would it have so aggressively doubled down on mortgage-backed securities?  I’m not suggesting that investment banks should have to go private, but… perhaps it wouldn’t have.

Behavioral economics has already penetrated public policy through the field of Choice Architecture, as framed by University of Chicago academics Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein in Nudge. Their point is that people can be more effectively encouraged to make better choices by designing those choices more carefully.  For example, not nearly enough people save nearly enough for retirement, even with many getting generous company matches for IRA contributions.  The 2004 pension bill included a provision requiring automatic IRA enrollment in defined contribution plans, which employees could change if they chose.  Employees still had the choice whether to fund their IRAs, but the default was reversed; if they did nothing, a slice of their income would automatically go to their IRA.  It’s a new and interesting way to encourage smart behavior, an alternative to the traditional conservative approach (increase the incentive for participating, usually through a tax cut) and the liberal approach (impose a mandate, most likely on the employer).  And at least until the market crash last year, it’s been very successful in increasing IRA participation.

Sunstein isn’t just a law professor (at Harvard since 2008 after 25 years at Chicago) who’s interested in Behavioral Economics and public policy.  He’s also one of Barack Obama’s closest friends and an expert in regulatory policy, and — here’s the kicker — as of September 10, the head of the Office of Information and Regulator Affairs at OMB, which is very likely one of the five most powerful jobs in Washington.  As the gatekeeper of all new federal regulation, OIRA’s influence is direct and ubiquitous.  New regulations can’t get off the drawing board unless OIRA signs off on them, and if OIRA is trying to drive a new model for regulation and you ignore it, you might just find that OMB is nipping your budget in a particularly painful way.  Harvard Professor John Graham (now leading the Rand Institute), the nations’s leading authority on cost-effective regulation, made a huge impact on federal regulation when he led OIRA under the more recent Bush Administration.  Sunstein will now have the same opportunity.

Like Behavioral Economics, Sunstein’s thinking is unorthodox, driven as much by data as existing ideology.  He has challenged the usefulness of the Kyoto protocol, questioned government’s recognition of marriage, and praised Ronald Reagan for aggressively attacking acid rain (which, in his view, made much more sense than Kyoto’s attempt to limit global warming without dealing with developing nations like China and India).  And he’s been able to take these positions because he was offering them as an academic.

Now it’ll be interesting to see how well Sunstein will be able to implement Behavioral Ecomomics ideas, like choice architecture and effective incentives, now that he has to contend with powerful constituencies with practical needs and deeply rooted orthodoxies.  What will happen when he gets a call from Rahm Emanuel asking about a proposed rule from the Department of Labor — one that the AFL-CIO had a hand in drafting, perhaps?  Or a friendly visit from a representative from the environmental movement, congratulating him on the job and eager to discuss ways to implement expensive new pollution controls?

Washington is almost always hostile to new ideas, however powerful, which threaten established agendas.  The big question about behavioral economics isn’t whether it will be taken seriously, because it is.  It’s what happens when it collides with practical politics — which battles Sunstein takes on, which ones he doesn’t, which ones he wins, which ones he loses.  I suspect we’ll see BE making its earliest impact on financial regulation because political opposition will be weakest and need most evident.   But if you want to understand how federal regulation will effect you over the next several years, you’ll need to understand both BE and the political pressures it would threaten.

Gerald Seib’s Wall Street Journal piece this morning argues that although Democrats in Congress are, if anything, even less popular than they were in 1994, the odds of Republicans winning either the House or Senate are longer than they were then.  He has two reasons: first, that far fewer Democrats are retiring, and second, that vulnerable Democrats are almost a year ahead of their 1994 counterparts in anticipating trouble and preparing for it.   The odds against Republicans may be long, but I think Seib is wrong and I’ve got a lot more than two reasons.

Let’s start with the traditional value of incumbency.  Incumbency is valuable in three critical respects: first, it helps raise money, second, it allows a platform for building a non-policy identity (constituent services, parades, school visits) as well as a policy identity; and three, it’s much easier to make news.  Incumbency with a majority party has the additional advantage of institutional leverage:  your leadership will help you spotlight strengths (both ideas and pork projects) and hide weaknesses through its control of the legislative process.

The trouble for these incumbent Democrats, many of whose districts were won by John McCain, is that in today’s environment, those values recede.  The internet’s potential for cheap communications and social networking makes money much less important than it used to be; and in any case, the recession has hit fundraisers hard.  The Obama Administration’s incredibly ambitious policy agenda and strong liberal tilt are driving how incumbents are seen much more than they would normally be.  Pork is less advantageous than it used to be as people start to perceive that it’s coming out of their pockets whether in their district or not.

But you still have to deal with the chief weakness of incumbency when the leader of your party is the President — possibly even more so because of the base of the Democratic party is so inflexible.  Imcumbents are defined by the national agenda, and the national agenda is driven by their base.  Republicans in marginal districts might have had a tough time with social conservatives, but in reality they only cared about a few issues.  Labor unions, environmental groups, and inner city groups like ACORN put leftward pressure on Democrats on nearly every issue, and this shows up in the bills that the Leadership puts on the floor and in the amendments they allow to be considered.

The safe place for most of these Members is the position that Blue Dog Democrats found during the health care debate: a willingness to stand up to their Leadership even if it risked a top-tier domestic agenda item.  For this,of course, they wound up being vilified in their own districts by those same constituencies over the August recess.

So what does this all add up to?

First, some aggressively liberal Democrat constituency groups might actually support primary races against more independent Members, no matter how vulnerable the Member might be.  They will want to send a signal that they won’t tolerate deviations from the party norm, and they may even be willing to write off an incumbent to do it.  But even without primary opponents, incumbent Democrats will have to face a far more disappointed Democratic base than 1994 (Clinton’s only policy debacle was health care; Obama may have several more).  Advantage:  Republicans.

Second, bad news now might help Democrats hunker down, but it also helps Republicans recruit top-tier challengers, and they’re doing it.  Some complete freaks wound up winning races in 1994 because the Republican tide came late and the better candidates had opted out.   That won’t happen this time.  Advantage:  Republicans.

Third, health care passing or not, the single biggest issue facing the nation (absent a foreign policy disaster) next fall will be the national debt.  Does anyone believe this issue doesn’t favor Republicans, particularly given how much Democrats have tried to spend over the last year?  Advantage:  you figure it out.

What’s surprising here is that the real nightmare for the Obama White House wouldn’t be Republicans winning the House or Senate.  What should terrify them is the prospect of Republicans getting close without actually winning.  Such gains would be at the expense of the marginal moderate Democrats whose districts voted for McCain.  Fewer of them in the Democratic caucus will embolden their base even more, and Obama will go into the 2012 election cycle with a narrow but unyielding and unpopular Congressional majority.  It will be the worst of possible worlds for him.  Bill Clinton managed to avoid such a fate when Republicans took the House and Senate; repositioning himself as their foil, he staged a miraculous recovery.  But if Republicans don’t climb the high wall that Gerald Seib and others predict, Barack Obama may not be so lucky.

The National Football League is a great place to learn about strategy because resources are so evenly shared that it’s often the only real advantage that teams have, both long- and short-term.  There’s no one better to learn from than New England’s Bill Belichick, and in this Sunday’s game against the (then) undefeated Baltimore Ravens, he taught another lesson.

To better protect quarterbacks from season-ending injury, this year the NFL tightened up the rules on what defenders can and can’t do when they rush the passer.  For defenders, intimidating quarterbacks is just as important as tackling them, and the new rules have gotten a fair amount of pushback from football traditionalists who think that quarterbacks should be treated no differently than any other player.  But, as Belichick would say, it is what it is — the new rules are as valid as the old rules, and you gain more from understanding them than from resisting them.

Belichick is known for leaving no stone unturned in search of useful information and analysis.  A few years ago he changed his offensive playcalling based on an economic analysis of field position, and the way he manages his team’s roster and payroll owes an awful lot to portfolio theory.  So when QB Tom Brady told a weekly Boston radio audience that Belichick’s staff had researched the tendencies of this Sunday’s referee crew, found that it had led the league in penalties assessed two of the past three previous years, and that they could expect a tightly called game this week, it shouldn’t have been any surprise for Patriots fans.  As a result, his players knew what to expect and adjusted.

Their opponents, the Baltimore Ravens, didn’t.  Baltimore’s defense is one of the league’s most physical; they hit hard and often, and this is central to their personality.  Unlike New England, they didn’t adapt to the fact that new, more protective rules were being enforced by a crew which has a history of enforcing rules aggressively, and because of this they wound up committing two roughing-the-passer fouls which led to two New England touchdowns.  That was the difference in the game:  New England won 27-21.

After the game both Ravens players and coaches were unrepentant.  The rules, linebacker Ray Lewis said, were “embarrassing.”  Coach John Harbaugh told reporters after the game that tough, physical play was fundamental to his team’s character, and that regardless of Sunday’s penalties they’d keep playing this way.

Here’s the point.  At some point, circumstances force a collision between necessary change and tradition.  GM failed because it wouldn’t adapt to a changing energy environment.  Republicans lost power because they (we) wouldn’t adapt to a political environment in which cutting taxes and aggressively going after terrorists had become secondary issues.  You can wrestle thoughtfully with the issues that a changing environment presents and gain some useful insights — or you can ignore them and keep doing what you’re comfortable doing.  Change happens whether you like it or not; the only choice is how you respond to it.

On a football field in southeastern Massachusetts this Sunday, we saw which approach succeeded, and which failed.

If you really want to understand why Chicago’s failed Olympic bid is such a disaster for Barack Obama, start with sports.  By which, I mean real, honest-to-god American sports, like football and basketball — not the utterly bizarre, hopelessly overinflated hobbies that the Olympics treat as sports, like male underwater team handball or mixed ambidextrous hopping-on-one-leg ping pong.

Consider the movie Hoosiers. Gene Hackman plays a basketball coach with a blight on his record and an obsession with team fundamentals, coming to a small Indiana high school in the 1950s for quite probably his last chance.  Basketball is the town’s religion and zone defense one of its main tenets; when Hackman announces his team is going to play man-to-man defense the town reacts as if he’d spat on the American flag before flushing it down the toilet.  But the players warm to him, particularly the pure-money shooter Jimmy, and the team defies all odds to win the state championship.  The town doesn’t necessarily embrace Hackman — this isn’t the kind of town that does a lot of embracing.  But they clearly respect him and will follow him.

Or, more currently, Josh McDaniels, the new coach of the Denver Broncos.  Plucked from the staff of NFL uber-genius Bill Belichick in New England, McDaniels managed to offend more Broncos fans in one off-season than many of his predecessors had managed in a career.  He alienated his star quarterback, who eventually forced a trade to Chicago, made only a smattering of small off-season acquisitions without any big, splashy free agent signings, seemed to alienate his star receiver, and to top it all off he’s one of the youngest coaches in league history and probably the youngest looking coach, well, in any major sport.  He was tearing up an offense that had been successful; lost a quarterback who’d been successful; had himself replaced a fired coach who had won two Super Bowls.  Broncos fans were calling for his head before the season even began.  But with a new, risk-averse offense and a completely revolutionized defense, Denver is now 4-0, and no one seems to be complaining about McDaniels any more.

The point here is that Americans  — I argue — are used to the freedom to express opinions vehemently, righteously, stridently, without necessarily feeling accountable for them.  Man-to-man defense is a sham, a travesty, and any new coach trying to force it on our beloved team should be run out on the rails — unless he wins.  A quarterback as talented as the one McDaniels alienated is a once-in-a-generation find and McDaniels showed himself incompetent by getting rid of him — unless Denver wins.  Supply side economics was economic voodoo until it revitalized the U.S. economy, and in fact much of the Reagan agenda polled badly until it was implemented and wound up working.  Americans have a few very fundamental principles that are violated at risk of death, but one of them is pragmatism.  We like what works, and are perfectly willing to reject or ignore early misgivings if a leader sees it through and wins.

And that’s why it was stupid — yes, stupid, a word I don’t even like my first-grader to use — for Barack Obama to try so visibly to convince the International Olympic Committee to give the 2016 Olympics in Chicago.  Winning would have done very, very little for him because he entered the scene so late, but by changing his schedule and actually going to Copenhagen, he put himself in position to take the loss directly, and he is.  (At the top is a picture of the winning – yes, winning – Rio representatives.  That’s what winning looks like).

The loss matters for two reasons.  First, it fits perfectly into the image that Americans are developing of Obama as someone who confuses doing things with getting things done, activity with achievement.  He already has a huge legislative agenda, and has accomplished practically none of it.  Instead of hunkering down to the task at hand, he jets off to do something else that has approximately nothing, nil, nada, rien to do with that task.  After a year of overextending, he again overextends, and loses.

The second is that the Olympics loss is final.  The rest of his agenda is still in play — nothing has passed but nothing has failed, either, so there haven’t been huge dents to his viability as a leader.  This does.  People now see that he’s willing to put his own prestige into things that can turn out to fail, and this will give them second thoughts about following him.  Effective Presidents can get even difficult items through Congress because there’s a sense among those willing to follow that the President will be successful, and they want to be along for the ride.  When Presidents lend their credibility to things that fail this visibly, that confidence in their ultimate success takes a huge hit.

Americans are as well-informed, and thoughtful as any nation in the planet, but the vast majority of us doesn’t know any more about bending the curve of health care spending, green manufacturing, or financial services regulatory reform than zone defenses.  What we do understand is winning and effectiveness.  On both scores, Obama’s failed pitch in Copenhagen create huge doubts.

If you want to understand why the Obama health care agenda has come so completely unglued, think about the Aeron chair.  Seriously.

In the early 1990s, two designers at office design maven Herman Miller struck on a soup-to-nuts reinvention of the office chair.  To maintain back support, it would be ergonomic; to keep things airy, it would replace leather and vinyl with mesh, draped over a lightweight skeleton; to provide comfort, would allow unprecedented control over height, pitch, and rigidity.  And it would look singularly, unbelievably cool, unlike any office chair that had ever been made.

And — as Malcolm Gladwell tells the story in Blink — when Herman Miller did its usual market research on the Aeron, it bombed.  It was too new, too much of a shock for people who were used to thinking of office chairs as totems — big, deep, leather chairs for the senior execs, narrow cloth seats with a small back for the steno pool.  They simply weren’t used to thinking of office chairs as statements of hip design or steady comfort.

The company persisted, of course, and within a few months of the Aeron hitting the market it became not just the hottest chair in the industry but the biggest-selling piece of office furniture of all time.  Going forward required a certain amount of skepticism about HM’s own research methods, and the Aeron’s success has to stand as kind of a warning:  being captive of your existing research tools puts you at enormous risk.

In politics there are two dominant forms of voter research — the poll and the focus group.  In the first, carefully prepared statements are read to participants, whose reactions are quantified in terms of agreement and depth of interest.  Focus groups are more qualitative, with pollsters teasing out voter views on statements, issues and trends.  What’s important about both is they ask their participants to respond to something the pollsters offer.  And this depends on people to be able to clearly say what they want and what they care about.

Such reliance, marketers are finding, is often misplaced. Increasingly, market research for product development is emphasizing more anthropological perspectives, studying how people really behave and what kinds of needs and preferences this suggests.  Instead of asking 1000 people to tell them what they’d like in a new kind of ready-made dinner, for example, they might spend time inside the houses of 15 or 20 families, studying their evening schedules, how and where they actually eat, who does the cooking, and how they cook.  Out of this can emerge something tied not to what consumers say they want, because in fact consumers are really bad at saying what they want, but to the full and honest complexity of feeding a family every night.

And that is where I suspect the Democrats have missed out.  They did the customary polling and got the customary answers, which included (1) the desire for guaranteed and affordable health care, and (2) support for the government to be the last-resort health insurance provider.  And they’ve built their entire policy and communications strategies on those answers.  What they neglected are all the other complex insights that come from studying the same voters more broadly and deeply.  If you’re really concerned about losing your health care, the recession has probably also made you worry about debt, and news that the Obama plan would cost nearly a trillion dollars (which you or your kids will at some point have to pay for) might give you second thoughts.  At the same time, the governmental failures at the heart of the current recession might make you question whether you can rely on government-run health care.  Finally, you’re probably not hearing anything about the Democrats plan that’s actually relevant to your own health care experience.  All told, that’s a recipe for failure.

Polling can be useful, but it shouldn’t be the last word.  By its very nature, it’s reactive and limited, and no good at all if you’re trying to think more than a few months ahead.   (In fact, as I think the Obama team is finding, they can be dangerously misleading).  If you want to be able to anticipate political pressures early enough to be able to do anything about them, you need to go well past polling toward the trends and long-term pressures that are concretely affecting the environment in which we live.

Bill Clinton recently gave an interview to Bloomberg’s Tom Keene on Clinton’s philosophical activities, and offered some interesting though somewhat predictable comments on economic growth and budget control.  Most interesting was what he said about how to manage in an environment as uncertain and dynamic as what we’re facing right now.  Focus on what you can control, he said; don’t get distracted by what you can’t.

That answer came in response to a question about how to balance the budget.  Clinton acknowledged that the biggest reason the budget reached surplus during his administration was that the economy grew faster than anyone anticipated, generating waves of income no one expected.  We can’t count on that, he said, but we can get our spending under control, and that’s the point he was making; we can’t count on revenues to explode again but we can at least control spending, and should.  As a fiscal matter, then, focusing on what you can control and not on what you can’t makes sense.

But it’s terrible advice outside the province of government budgets and fiscal policy.  What’s different about the risks we all face now is specifically that they aren’t within our control.   If you don’t pay attention to these risks and the forces that create them, you’re fried.  You might be able to march from one day to the next looking crisp, neat, and in command.  But you’ll also be increasingly irrelevant and vulnerable to those risks.

This is what happened to national Republicans — as globalization and technology were creating a vastly different set of challenges for workers, families, and the entire economy, we kept hammering tax cuts and government spending, because that’s what we were good talking about.  It’s happening to Democrats — with amazing speed, considering how little time they’ve been in control of the entire government — as they’re finding their class warfare scripts playing very badly.  But both are guided by the mantra of focusing on what you can control and not being distracted by what you can’t.

If anybody should know this, it’s Clinton, or at least Hillary Clinton, who managed to control nearly everything she could possibly control during the 2008 Democratic primaries and still lost to a candidate who personified change and understood the importance of what was outside his control — in his case, social networking.  And in his defense, his emphasis was on not letting rosy scenarios undermine fiscal discipline.

But many involved in strategy still believe in the broader theme, and it’s wrong.  Strategy can’t just limit itself to what’s in anyone’s immediate control.  In today’s world, it needs to contemplate what’s outside control as well — identify relevant trends, understand the different directions they can take and how to either take advantage of them or ride them out.  Strategy based on what’s in your immediate control might have worked when resources alone could win the day — but those days are long gone.

At first blush, NBC’s decision to give Jay Leno five hours of prime time carries the scent of the death of network television.  The 10pm slot used to be the home of edgy, innovative new programming — shows like Hill Street Blues, LA Law, Homicide: Life on the Street, and ER(at least before it became a soap opera).  But cable has deeply eroded the major networks’ chokehold over content, and DVR and Tivo are making its control over schedule irrelevent.  At the same time, programming costs have gone up.  Turning the 10pm hour from dramas to talk seems like a last try to squeeze what’s left out of the habit of turning to a network channel.

But GE isn’t as dumb as that, and as you think about this move, some interesting insights crystalize about how GE and NBC see the entire television industry changing.

First is the obvious shift from control (buying shows and scheduling them) to content.  Before cable and the internet, the networks were able to put an awful lot of formulaic garbage on the air because viewers had few alternatives; if people wanted to watch TV, they had to watch what the nets put on, when they put it on, and scheduling decisions were driven the need to find competitive matchups at each time slot.  Now it’s all about getting viewers to tune it at all.   As a consequence NBC’s programming is now more directly engaging, whether it be reality shows where you wind up sincerely rooting for the participants or dramas and comedies that are just a bit quirky, just a bit new (even Law & Order manages to stay fresh).  And unlike the old days, NBC-Universal produces shows (and earns revenues, particularly if the show makes it into syndication) that go to rival networks (House M.D.) or cable subsidiaries like USA and SyFy.  Few are built around big stars because stars drive up production costs; most emphasize slightly quirky premises and strong characters, and most make fewer episodes per season, which drives up quality.  In other words, NBC is shortening its portfolio and focusing on shows that can sustain value — instead of having to fill a year’s worth of nightly programming at 10pm.

Second is the nature of Hollywood itself.  Hollywood’s evolving business model is putting a lot of pressure on A-List stars to keep up their profile and maintain their ability to bring big audiences to their movies’ opening weekends, and Leno will give them a forum.  The first few weeks have already featured a flurry of top stars like Tom Cruise, Jerry Seinfeld, Vince Mel Gibson, and Eric Clapton who don’t have big new movies or albums coming out.  Leno gets their drawing power and they get a chance to promote themselves, strengthening their ability to open a new movie and possibly ginning up a bit more interest in their back catalogue of DVDs and CDs.  (It might also give movie executives a chance to gauge star power:  would you pay $20 million for a star whose appearance on Leno gets the worst ratings for the week?)  Newer stars with something to promote have gone to Conan O’Brien’s Tonight Show.

Which brings up the third insight.  NBC seems to be making a bet that in an increasingly fragmented media landscape, there’s still a need for a water cooler show — some common cultural reference that people of different ages, different tastes, different political preferences.  If you try to imagine what that show might look like, you start seeing the outline of Leno’s jaw and hearing the echoes of his monologue.  And this is where Leno is, in a sense, different.  In a culture where people agree on very little, and where areas of disagreement become sharper and more hostile, everyone seems to accept Jay Leno, and no one seems to resent him.

So in a sense, blocking out an hour every night where Americans looking flicking through their channels and looking for something tame and diverting — everybody’s second or third choice — might not be just an attempt by NBC to keep costs low and GE happy.  It might actually be best choice they could make.

A coda:  one new feature of the Leno show puts a celebrity in an electric Ford car for two laps around a track NBC built specifically for the show; a camera inside the car lets us watch the celebrities wrestle with the wheel and gear stick and their times go on a wall so we can compare them over time.  If this sounds familiar to you, it might be because it’s sort of a Hollywood/ Green take on Top Gear’s Celebrities in a Reasonably Priced Car segment.  Top Gear is Leno’s favorite TV show in the world, and it’s worth considering that on a good night Leno might snare 15 million viewers while Top Gear’s audience is more than 20 times that — about 350 million.  When NBC was thinking of adapting it for an American audience, he publicly argued against it because he thought the pressures of a sponsorship-based television network would kill it.  At the top of this post is a picture of Leno with The Stig, and here’s a video of his own visit to the Top Gear track. (http://www.jaylenosgarage.com/video/video_player.shtml?vid=1134023)