What every actor knows: Never work with children or animals

 I hope you read a good book last night.  It is usually the best thing you can do with your time, although other fine pass-times include learning a musical instrument, engaging in any similar artistic endeavor, or generally speaking, something practical, engaging or enriching.  What I hope you did not do is watch someone make the classic actor's mistake of working with children and animals.  Kevin McCarthy continues to demonstrate that he is the weakest Speaker in modern history, and he just got the gavel.  He implored his-- what do you call a group of hyenas? or shit-flinging monkeys?-- anyway, he implored his shit-flinging monkeys, hyenas and toddlers to keep it in their diapers.  Their feces, that is.  Amongst other things.  Birds gotta fly, fish gotta swim, shit-flinging monkeys gotta fling shit.  See, this is why I stopped attending Political Science Department meetings at CWRU, but that's a topic for another day.  McCarthy is not the smartest monkey in the tree, but he is just barely smart enough to realize that the image of a bunch of monkeys, hyenas and children putting on that kind of show hurts the party, collectively.  Yet, each falsely perceives him or herself to benefit individually.  Here's the trick.  By flinging a lump of shit, Marjorie Taylor Greene knows that she can raise money among those capable of being manipulated and duped.  The irony is, as I wrote in "Goin' Off The Rails On A Crazy Train," the net effect is electorally damaging to people like Greene, because they help challengers raise money too, and challengers need the money more, and there are direct, negative electoral consequences.  Yet as long as the Marjorie Taylor Greenes of the world see the direct financial gain, they will at least perceive their own interests to be in the act of flinging shit, even if the party would benefit from appearing more responsible.

This is a classic collective action problem, and precisely the one detailed by Cox & McCubbins in Legislative Leviathan.  The party has an interest in constructing an electorally beneficial brand image, and so the party is empowered to solve the collective action problem to create a universally beneficial brand image, but the problem is that in order to do so, there must actually be an empowered party leader, and McCarthy is powerless.  He cannot create a more broadly beneficial brand image for the party because he has no power to impose discipline.  Rather, he depended on Greene, herself, to get that very gavel!

A party constructing a broadly beneficial brand image would impose discipline and prevent the displays we saw, but instead, when McCarthy is dependent on the shit-flinging-est monkey in the caucus to get the gavel, he has no power to prevent the flinging of shit.

So what have we learned?  Never work with children or animals.  Acting 101.