Arguments that annoy me: Political Capital

If the words "political capital" are present in your politics shell, you're doing it wrong.

In policy debate, the politics debate is limited by the available evidence that can be found from major news wires.  On balance, this is a good thing, as it limits the extent to which debaters can govtrack.us their politics disads, creating some level of predictability.  The one downside is that on the whole, most Beltway Journalists™  write trite and boring pieces with very little insight.  Being completely incapable of actually assessing the motives of legislators in a nuanced manner, they discuss the notion of "political capital" as though it were a thing that actually exists.  Because they frame the passage of legislation as requiring the "expenditure" of  "political capital" out of the "Scrooge McDuck Political Capital Bank LLC," policy debaters use political capital arguments in their disads.  "Hey, it's not just me, look, Joe Klein said it!"

In parliamentary debate, you are liberated from this stupidity.  Because you aren't forced to actually have "evidence" for your arguments (muahahahahaha) you can do things like analyze the motives of the specific individuals responsible for enacting a given policy, and articulate how their motives might change if the affirmative is enacted, even if you don't have a Beltway Journalist™ to glean insight from.  An example:

In late 2009-early 2010, health care reform was THE politics disad.  Sarah and I read it, primarily because I enjoyed torturing Sarah with arguments she found boring.  But our link argument actually had some nuance to it.  Remember that the bill was just barely going to pass with 60 Senators voting for it.  Well, I read about a poll that said Ben Nelson's poll numbers had dropped by 20 points after he had voted for the first version of the bill, that he would be facing re-election in the fall, and that he would be required to vote for the bill again when it came out of committee.  No more than that - just the existence of this poll and the reconciliation vote.  For our link argument, we extrapolated that Nelson would want to reverse the polling damage, but that he couldn't just flip-flop on the issue without looking like a craven hypocrite.  He needed a reason, a rationale for breaking with the liberals.  And…your well-intentioned plan, whatever it was, gave Nelson the rationale he needed to vote against health care reform.

Try and turn that.  It's not fun.  You can probably win some defense against it (in fact, a lot of defense against it) but it's so specific as to be insulated from most of the generic crap people throw at it.

And if they say "political capital high"  in response?  LOL.

Now, "political capital" can occasionally be meaningful, if, for example, one is equating "Obama's political capital" with "Obama's ability to influence the congress."  Sometimes Obama needs to call in favors, exert some level of pressure, etc.  And there may well be a limit to the amount of pressure he can exert on his own side or on the GOP.  But realize that when we talk about politics in this way, most of the metaphors that are associated with political capital are simplistic or totally irrelevant.  And when people read political capital links against XO plans?  "Today, President Barack Obama spent his whole day in closed-door meetings with President Barack Obama in order to try and persuade the President to sign the executive order on his desk.  In other news, the Secret Service is currently readying a padded room for the President at the local mental hospital."

Good politics disads resemble every other type of good straight-up argument - they talk about what human beings will do if the plan is passed, and they use our shared understanding of human behavior as the basis for warrants.