Regardless of who is elected the U. S. will continue to be interventionist in its foreign policy.

Regardless of who is elected the “Bush tax cuts” will be sustained. There may be some tweaking around the edges…

Regardless of who is elected the detention center in Guantanamo will be maintained.

Regardless of who is elected the security apparatus put in place in the aftermath of the attacks in New York and Washington, DC in 2001 will only be expanded.

Doug Mataconis added his own list.

And yet: Republicans and Democrats fight hard over elections, and partisans on both sides certainly feel that there’s a lot at stake. Are they nuts?

Basically, there are two stories here.

One is that while presidents do in fact try to keep their promises, they are often thwarted by others within the system. That’s not just a story about Congress. The bureaucracy can also defeat presidents; so can interest groups, or the courts, or state governments or foreign governments, including at times very friendly foreign governments. Indeed, it’s usually difficult for outsiders to tell exactly who defeated the president on some policy issue – even when the final battle takes the form of a congressional vote, it may be, for example, that the permanent bureaucracy in some executive branch agency really played the key role and successfully manipulated Congress to get the result it wanted.

And yet: Just because presidential power is very limited does not mean that it doesn’t exist. Presidents often lose, but they do have some agenda-setting ability, and they have a fair amount of bargaining ability – overall, far more than any other single policymaker. To take just one fairly basic example: There’s a good chance that Barack Obama was free to choose whether to push hard for healthcare reform or climate legislation. Had he chosen the latter, or if John McCain was in the White House, there’s simply no chance that healthcare reform would have become law.

And I can hear the criticisms already: Yes, but why should liberals support a GOP-inspired policy such as the ACA anyway? What about single-payer? Which gets to the second story: For some, even if liberal presidents did get their way on every campaign promise it would still be meaningless, because it’s all within the context of accepting the basic Washington policy consensus – whether it’s a mixed economy instead of socialism, or (for libertarians) a welfare state instead of a unregulated market economy, or an internationalist foreign policy.

There’s no doubt that there’s a bit of truth in this kind of perspective. If you believe that it is critically important, say, that U.S. foreign policy and national security institutions return to a pre-WWII condition, then you’re certainly going to be disappointed in the outcome of the 2012 election. Even if your ideal state is (oddly enough, to me, but OK) the 1990s, then you’re still going to be upset that both parties buy into the Department of Homeland Security (a Democratic invention, don’t forget), drone attacks with little effective oversight and massive growth of an apparently permanent national security bureaucracy.

And yet: it’s still a mistake to ignore differences within the broad consensus. Those who care about civil liberties can be quite critical in their disapproval of Barack Obama (and Bill Clinton before him, and really most U.S. presidents), even finding some issues in which Obama might be worse than George W. Bush, and still recognize significant differences between Obama’s record and Bush’s – or, Obama’s record and Mitt Romney’s likely record. The healthcare reform passed by Obama and the Democrats might not work – but surely it’s far different, in important ways that already matter to lots and lots of people, than the old status quo. And there’s little question that a President McCain wouldn’t have passed any significant healthcare reform.

Going to Schuler’s list: Yes, both Obama and McCain will be interventionist. But if one would invade Iran and the other wouldn’t … well, that’s a massive difference, even if both would embark on Libya-type adventures. There’s a good chance that Guantanamo stays open regardless of who is elected, but Romney’s supporters include many who support reinstituting torture; that’s extremely unlikely to be U.S. policy if Obama is reelected. Again, I’d call that a massive difference. On taxes, too, one candidate supports modest increases in tax rates for upper-level taxpayers, while the other favors large tax cuts from current levels; if either party wins a landslide, it’s likely that those positions would be enacted. No, it would not be a return to 1990s levels (nor, most likely, would it get taxes quite to where Ron Paul might want them), but again, there’s quite a bit of money for both individuals and the U.S. Treasury on the line.

Dismissing these differences amounts to ignoring things that will make a huge difference in people’s lives in order to stay loyal to ideals. Which is all well and good in some circumstances, but not in politics, where the ideal generally has no place, as thinkers as far back as Plato realized. If you want to engage in politics meaningfully, you must act, and that means making what at times are very difficult, even very painful, choices. One of my favorite quotations about politics is from Bonnie Honig, working from an essay by Bernice Johnson Reagon about taking collective action:

Coalition politics is not easy.  When you feel like you might “keel over at any minute and die,” when “you feel threatened to the core,” then “you’re really doing coalition work.”

Supporting a candidate who you know will let you down is a lot harder than supporting one who you can pretend will be perfect if the impossible happened and she was elected, or just sitting out the election entirely because neither candidate measures up. It may take some courage to support someone despite important, serious, substantive reservations. It is, however, what needs to be done in a democracy. That certainly doesn’t mean anyone should support imperfect candidates uncritically – and in a complex democracy such as the United States, there’s nothing at all wrong with choosing to focus one’s energies where it will make the most difference, which is not always the presidential contest. But to pretend that the president makes no difference is just as bad a mistake as to believe he is all-powerful, and to pretend that substantive differences that will affect millions of lives are meaningless is even worse.

I’ll start with the difference between 2010 House races, which the team of political scientists studied, and a presidential election. The truth is that those types of elections – midterm House and presidential – have little in common. In both cases, party identification is important. But beyond that, there are quite a few important differences. House elections are typically low-information contests. Most of us barely know who our own Member of the House is, let alone much about him or her. We typically know even less about the challenger. In that kind of context any new information can, it turns out, be fairly potent. As Gary Jacobson has shown, knowing one “good” or “bad” thing about a House candidate (that is, something one believes is good or bad) can have a surprisingly large effect on how one votes. In the case of the healthcare study, it turned out that just knowing that a member voted for ACA was enough to make a significant change in voters’ estimates of how liberal that member was. And why not? It’s not as if people knew of all the other things going on in Washington.

By contrast, presidential elections are heavily funded, high-information contests. That’s particularly true about an incumbent president. Think about it: I bet everyone reading this can reel off a dozen facts about Barack Obama without even trying. You know about healthcare, you know about the stimulus, you know about bin Laden; you know his wife’s name, and his kids, and where he went to high school; you know, probably, about his birth certificate and his old church in Chicago and some of the other attacks that have been made against him. Learning something new about him – say, how he deals with the situation in Syria – probably won’t change what you think of him. In fact, it probably works the other way around; if you already like Obama you’ll assume that what he does in Syria makes sense, and if you don’t like him you’ll be inclined to be critical of what he does there.

Indeed, you probably know quite a bit about Mitt Romney. If you’re a partisan Democrat, you already don’t like him, and if you’re a partisan Republican … well, you may or may not like him now, but after the convention, and after Republican opinion leaders wind up fully supporting him, odds are you will.

Remember, the study found that healthcare hurt Democrats by making people think they were more liberal than they otherwise would have thought. So the question is: To what extent has ACA changed people’s opinions about Barack Obama? My guess is that whatever the answer to that might be, it’s a lot less than the extent to which it changed people’s views of their Member of Congress because it has to compete with so much other information.

At the same time, the Obama campaign apparently believes that healthcare reform could be a plus for him, at least among some key groups – such as women who will have contraception covered under the new law. I’m skeptical about much of an effect there, either, and for the same reason; adding one piece of information is unlikely to change anyone’s mind about Obama. That’s not to say that his campaign shouldn’t try (or that Republicans shouldn’t attempt to pound home their ObamaCare message); after all, if you have raised gazillions of dollars, you might as well use them, and on the margins campaigns certainly can matter, even at the presidential level. It’s just that the overall effect of the entire campaign is relatively small, and so any particular piece of it or a single issue is most likely even smaller. Or, think of it this way: The Republican assault on Planned Parenthood and many of the more aggressive GOP initiatives on abortion have been legislatively separate from the ACA-related birth control wars. The Obama campaign was going to target single women and young women anyway; healthcare reform is just part of the story there.

Moreover, whatever the effects healthcare will have on Barack Obama, it’s almost certainly already incorporated in his overall polling right now; there’s no reason to expect a further change as a result of the fall campaign. I suppose it’s possible that the upcoming Supreme Court ruling could shift public perceptions of ACA somewhat and in turn move Obama’s approval a bit. But I’d expect most changes in Obama’s approval rating, and his overall chances for reelection, to be driven by events from this point on, particularly changes in the economy. There’s really no good argument – and plenty of political science theory against it – to expect healthcare to exert much effect on Obama’s reelection all by itself.

They should be careful what they wish for.

In the modern era since the nomination process was reformed before 1972, we’ve never had a real contested convention, and the institution that we have today isn’t built for deliberation and decision making; it’s built to formally ratify a decision made months before, and then serve as props and extras for the nominee’s multiday TV extravaganza. If the delegates were suddenly forced to make a decision, it’s not hard to imagine some of the nightmare scenarios that might develop.

Imagine, then, that Newt Gingrich really does stay in and win delegates, especially in the South; that Ron Paul’s delegate strategy is wildly successful; and that Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum split the rest; and that the delegate count after the last primary stands at Romney 700, Santorum 650, Paul 450, Gingrich 400, with a hundred or so automatic delegates and formally unbound caucus state delegates remaining uncommitted. No one is close to the 1,144 needed for nomination as the delegates arrive in Tampa.

What happens then? Remember, the conventions are essentially the governing body of the political party. They have rules, but if they choose to change those rules there’s really no one (not the Republican National Committee, not the courts) who is going to prevent them from doing so. The majority of the convention, ultimately, is responsible only to itself. And unlike the old days, when many delegations were simply creatures of a state party chair and the individual delegates would do whatever the chair said, the delegates now would be over 2,000 free agents. They might follow the orders of the candidate they were pledged to, or not; some of them might choose to follow some other party leader. Most of them, however, would be free to choose, with little or no professional or personal risk involved.

What could go wrong?

Back when we had real conventions, one of the ways that nominations were fought out was over credentials. Rival groups would claim that they were the “real” delegation from one state or another. Ultimately, the convention itself decides. Anyone who recalls the extended dust-up over the Florida and Michigan delegations to the Democratic National Convention, a bitter fight that went on even after there was nothing at stake, can imagine how vicious something like that can be when the nomination is at stake. Given the various penalties that have been assigned as well as the dicey counting so far in the caucus states, there’s plenty of material available for some awesome, and awesomely ugly, credentials challenges.

Any platform fights that have made it to the convention floor in recent decades have been carefully staged and choreographed by the campaign that controlled the convention. No nominee, no one in control – and the choreography collapses. All those crazy amendments offered in the House of Representatives last year, or the ones you’ve seen offered by state legislators? If the convention decides to open up the platform for amendments from the convention floor, they could get a string of those — in prime time. Remember, most intense conservatives (and most intense liberals) tend to believe that their fringe, unpopular ideas are really supported by a silent majority out there.

What are the odds that it works out well for the Republican Party image? In a normal convention, if a few delegates misbehave in any way, the campaign can simply disavow them, and the story goes away quickly. In a deadlocked convention, there’s no one who can do that; the delegates are the party at that point. So if some of them turn out to have nasty stuff in their backgrounds, or decide to enjoy the convention atmosphere a little too much, or just get carried away with partisan or ideological behavior – remember how the Republican debates were marred by embarrassing behavior by the audiences – well, that’s going to get press attention. And no one is really in a position to look after the party image. To the contrary, rival campaigns might even feed the press stories about delegates for the other candidates.

The ultimate nightmare: It’s really not hard to imagine Ron Paul or Newt Gingrich becoming fed up with a credentials or platform decision and just stomping off. Perhaps taking their delegates with them. Remember, a deadlocked convention, if it ever happens, would be the end of months of hardening of positions and intensifying rivalries. Partisans who may have thought back in 2011 that it was a tough choice deciding between candidates will, by the convention, have spent months and in some cases years trying to convince everyone how great their candidate is and how dangerous the others would be, and the one set of people they’re most likely to have convinced is themselves.

How ugly could it get? What if Paul and Gingrich go off by themselves, and declare that their rump group is the real, authorized Republican National Convention and those RINOs down the street are the imposters – and the Paul/Gingrich nominee is the one who is entitled to Republican ballot slots in the fall. Hmmm … I can think of one former governor of Alaska who might be willing to head that ticket.

The truth is that Republicans are living in a fantasy if they assume that someone could just snap their fingers and 2,000-plus Republican delegates would automatically switch their loyalties to Jeb Bush or Mitch Daniels and that everything would run smoothly from that point. A sensible party would do anything possible to avoid the possibility of a true deadlocked convention.

In the old days, when key party bosses bargained with each other to determine the nominee, a lot of vetting happened via word of mouth. It was, even into the 1940s, a much smaller and often more hierarchical (at least within states and cities) political world, and the various state party leaders could form relationships with each other and trust that those who had worked with the candidates would tell other party leaders what they needed to know. Of course, that was mainly about how candidates would behave if they were elected.

For electoral appeal, party leaders used the handful of primaries that were contested once they were introduced early in the 20th century. So, for example, John F. Kennedy entered the West Virginia primary in 1960 to show that a Catholic could win in the South.

The old word-of-mouth method of gathering information, which probably was always a lot less effective than its practitioners believed, broke down when the relevant number of party actors exploded. Nowadays, there are hundreds, and maybe thousands, of unbossed party actors who make their own decisions about candidates. But where can they learn about them? By the 1970s, the job of vetting was largely turned over to the working press, which does it by attempting to expose various potential scandals that lurk in the candidates’ backgrounds. While no party wants a White House scandal on its hands, the aversion of the press to governing and public policy meant that critical questions about those things regularly went unanswered.

Thus, debates. Debates are, on the surface, at least, a relatively efficient means of gathering information about the candidates. Do they seem to be well-versed in the issues? Do they appear to be intelligent? Are their issue positions deeply held enough that they can know how to answer various questions? That last one can be tricky. For example, more than one Republican candidate with a perfect voting record and an ability to memorize the correct right-to-life talking points has been tripped up on an abortion question that forces them to actually talk about it as a part of life instead of a political issue, while other candidates clearly understand and really believe the rhetoric they use. An activist in Florida, a campaign consultant or congressional staffer in Washington, or a party official in South Carolina may not have an opportunity to meet with the candidates personally, or even to speak with someone who has. The debates are, at least to some extent, a substitute for that.

They appear to also be a test of the various contenders’ strengths as campaigners. Of course, the primaries do that, too, but it at least appears that party leaders are using debate “wins” as indicators of overall potential for drawing votes. After all, Herman Cain’s whole path to his brief popularity began with a strongly reviewed performance at the very first debate, many months ago.

The problem is that using the debates for vetting is hardly safe. Party actors might not have access to word of mouth, and may not receive useful signals from (or simply not trust) the press, but debates aren’t much of a solution. We all “learned” from the debates this year that Rick Perry is a moron – but is that really true? What appears obvious from brief episodes of reality TV, we know, doesn’t always turn out to be the case. Even things that seem fairly obvious – that Newt Gingrich is great at TV debates – turns out to be an artifact of live audiences.

The consequences? Republicans this cycle had three candidates who made it as far as the televised debates who were plausible nominees because they held mainstream conservative views on public policy and had conventional credentials: Mitt Romney, Rick Perry and Tim Pawlenty. The latter two were rapidly eliminated, at least in part because party actors turned against them after mediocre or worse debate performances. Were they correct? If Mitt Romney turns out to be a poor general election candidate or, should he be elected, an unreliably conservative president, those party actors may very much regret that they turned to the debates for vetting. If they are foolish enough to give Newt Gingrich the nomination because he proved to be a better debater than Romney, they’ll regret it even more.

The truth is that Newt Gingrich –- who is never, ever, ever going to be president of the United States, and will almost certainly never again be allowed to have any real responsibility greater than hawking his endless output of books and movies –- nevertheless fills a real need for Republicans. If Newt didn’t exist, they’d have to invent him. And the reason tells us something important about the Republican Party.

The thing is that the Republican Party just doesn’t care very much about entire realms of public policy. Oh, they care about taxes a lot, and many Republicans care about foreign policy quite a bit, although the current crop of candidates is mostly happy to duck national security issues. But does any current Republican have a transportation policy? An environmental policy? A policy on obesity? Not that I’m aware of.

Put it this way: Republicans certainly have an aversion to anything that Barack Obama supports, and therefore pledged a while ago to repeal ACA and replace it with something else. But the “replace” part of that has faded rapidly, to the point that they really don’t even bother to repeat the old “repeal and replace” slogan very often anymore. Had Obama’s healthcare plans crashed and burned back during the 111th Congress, does anyone believe that Republicans right now would be advancing plans for what to do about the problems of recisions, of preexisting conditions, of the multiple market malfunctions in health insurance? I sure don’t.

It could be that Republican lack of interest in most areas of domestic policy is simply a consequence of an ideology that opposes government involvement (although on things that Republicans do care about, such as abortion, they’re not hesitant to get the government involved). More likely, it’s a consequence of the group composition of the GOP. Organized Republican groups simply have fewer demands on the government than do organized Democratic groups; if there’s no organized group demanding the Republicans develop a policy on poverty or education or housing, then they’re not all that likely to do so.

That’s where Newt Gingrich is helpful. He has ideas — oh, so many ideas. Well, not really, but he says that he has ideas, and that’s the next best thing. In fact, he won’t shut up about it. There’s no policy area for which Newt isn’t prepared to recite a list of buzzwords and then explain how whatever others are saying, it’s not nearly radical enough; no, things need to be entirely and completely rethought, because no one else is willing (as Newt will be happy to tell whoever is stuck listening to him) to utterly and completely rethink all the old assumptions. Frankly (as Newt will be sure to say), the others just aren’t willing to do it.

To be sure, it’s all snake oil. Saying that you have ideas, even if you use lots of power words in doing so, doesn’t actually constitute having ideas, much less specific policies that could be passed and implemented. But since Republicans aren’t much interested in the substance of all of those areas, it’s good enough. It allows Republicans to think: Yes, we too are policy innovators. We too have big plans.

In some ways, it’s like the way that Gary Hart was embraced by lots of Democratic voters back in the 1980s when he was the candidate of “new ideas.”

It was never very clear why new ideas were needed, as opposed to, you know, good ideas, and in fact there was a lot more substance to Hart than there ever was to Newt Gingrich. I don’t want to blame Hart for his more gullible fans. But just as Hart allowed Democrats to believe that they had something to add to the policy debate at a point in which many party themes were perceived as outdated or rejected, Newt allows Republicans to believe that they have something to say about all those policy areas in which it’s not entirely clear, even to them, that tax cuts will magically cure everything.

So while it’s unlikely that anyone in the Republican Party will put Newt Gingrich in an important position again — not as long as those who remember how he handled the last one are still around and can remember how that went — I’m afraid we’re probably stuck with hearing him yakking away for quite some time. After all, if the other guys have something appealing to sell and you don’t have anything, snake oil can seem like a really good option.