Obama Nails His Blue Colors to the Mast
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD
The past few years have seen a number of blue-state Democratic governors—from California to New York to Vermont—driven by dire fiscal situations to attack the blue model. Yet this tide of reform washing over the Democratic Party at the state level still hasn’t gone national.
Up until recently, President Obama had been somewhat vague on this issue, but with campaign season beginning in earnest this is quickly changing. In a statement on Tuesday, Obama did more than blast the budget proposed by the House GOP; he stepped out as the defender in chief of big blue. The New York Times reports that Obama attacked the GOP budget as “an attempt to impose a radical vision on our country” and as “thinly veiled social Darwinism” due to its plan for lower taxes on high-earners and significant restructuring of government programs like Medicaid. Though Obama did not respond with a coherent budget proposal of his own, he did sketch out the broad outlines of his proposed response: higher taxes on the wealthy and increased spending on education, police, and other local services.
The Republican budget may or may not be the way forward, and there is doubtless much to criticize within it. Yet Obama’s response hardly advances the debate, reading as it does like a laundry-list of blue dream ideas that have dominated Democratic thinking for decades. Rather than proposing an alternative model for the future to compete with the GOP’s, the President appears content to run on what is essentially a stand pat program: the only thing wrong with the blue social model is that it is underfunded.
The difference between national and local Democrats on this issue has a lot to do with printing presses. States don’t manage their own currencies and so can’t run up debts like the Feds. Governors and mayors have been disciplined by reality: when there isn’t any money, you have to learn to do more with less (and in some cases, you just have to do less). Public sector unions have to be confronted; government has to think carefully about how to organize itself and prioritize spending.
Moreover, there is a much closer and more obvious link between tax policy and economic growth at the state level. States like Illinois that keep raising taxes start to feel competition from tax cutters like Indiana and Wisconsin. Companies shift operations, jobs and headquarters from state to state more often than from country to country. States have become better at competing for investment than the federal government, where all these bread and butter questions have seemed somehow less urgent.
As fiscal realism undercuts blue fundamentalism at the state level, blue Democrats around the country look more and more to Washington as their savior. With its deficit spending ability and the very wide tax net it can cast, the federal government is virtually the only place in America where big blue ideas still look possible. Obamacare is one such; blues also look to Washington for the funds to pump into inefficient educational and government systems around the country. What the states can’t or won’t pay for, Washington will subsidize or mandate and increasingly state and local governments (to say nothing of colleges and universities) depend on federal largesse — in part because so much of their money goes to fulfill federal mandates.
In making himself the standard bearer of blue, President Obama is faithfully representing the instincts and the interests that animate his supporters. And he remains a distinctly darker shade of blue than the “New Democrats” of the 1990s for whom reform was more important than shoring up the old ways of life. Yet it remains interesting to see that even President Obama has (particularly on educational issues) been forced by reality in the direction of reform. Beyond the public sector union movement, where all anybody can think about is how to get more funds to shovel into the machine, even the staunchest defenders of the blue social model must these days pay some attention to the need for results. Even Obamacare has more of a cost-cutting agenda and is somewhat less statist than past Democratic grand designs for the medical system.
Elections are about choices, and President Obama is to be commended for nailing his blue colors to the mast. The dust is still settling from the primary campaign on the GOP side and it is a bit too soon to know how the presumptive nominee Mitt Romney will define his agenda for the general election. What the country has had since 2000 is a series of elections in which Democrats by and large are trying to defend a status quo that isn’t working, and Republicans talk about changing it but have a muddled (at best) idea about what to do in its place.
Voters are divided. There is a hard core blue group that depends either on the services and income transfers that the blue model offers (though less effectively and with fewer guarantees for the future as time goes on) or on the salaries that blue government pays. And there is a significant business lobby that benefits from special connections with government spending.
There is a beyond blue group as well: libertarians, populists, fiscal hawks, and businesses small and large who think that lower taxes and less regulation would help them better than special government subsidies or more government contracts.
And there are those in the middle, who acknowledge a need for reform but think that reform should be careful and incremental. They would like to see the blue system pruned back rather than clear cut, and don’t want to destroy the old systems until we have a clearer idea about what we would do instead. They are worried about huge federal deficits and the growing role of government in the economy, but they are also concerned about the pressing social problems — like access to health care and education — that government programs attempt to address.
In 2012 this third, decisive group of voters is going to be asking, first, how well have the President’s economic programs been working. If the economy seems to be in good shape on Election Day and moving in the right direction, these voters are likely to conclude that the case for change may not be as urgent as many feared in, say, 2010. They will also be looking at sustainability: are programs like Obamacare and Medicare sustainable, or are they short term fiscal giveaways that are fun now, but will have to be cut back to survive. The size of the budget deficit is likely to influence their thinking on this question.
President Obama will have to convince these voters that America can stay blue without economic stagnation or drowning in red ink. If he can do that, he will likely win. Inertia is a powerful force in politics, and if people don’t think they need to do uncomfortable or risky things, they will generally opt for repose.
His opponents will have to make the contrary cases: that the need for reform is urgent, and that the reforms they have in mind are well thought out, no harsher or rasher than they need to be, and likely to achieve key goals of blue programs (like helping the poor, educating the young, caring for the old and the sick) but in a more sustainable way. So far, Republicans have almost entirely depended on the first of these three arguments: that reform is urgently needed. They have done considerably less well convincing voters that they have a balanced, sensible, small ‘c’ conservative plan that will do what blue programs want to do, but at less cost.
Except in the field of education, where charter schools and vouchers are the kind of post-blue proposals that voters instinctively get, post-blue social and economic policy remains underdeveloped. There are no policy proposals for health, higher education, or many other policy areas which have the natural appeal that parental choice has in K-12 education. Dems say that is because no such options exist or can exist; blue is the only way to go if you want to deal with important social issues. Build the bureaucracy or starve the orphans: there is no other choice.
Right now, the GOP depends on blue failure to motivate swing voters to shift its way. That isn’t a weak position exactly: since 1968 Republicans have won seven presidential elections and lost four. But the absence of a compelling reform agenda means that Republicans have not been able to emerge as the kind of natural party of government they were between the Civil War and the Depression, and that the Democrats were between 1932 and 1968.
Even with a stronger economy, President Obama’s heel of Achilles in 2012 is the nagging doubt voters have that his vision can work. His opponent’s will be that too many voters, worried about the future of blue, don’t think the GOP has reasonable or workable alternatives to policies whose sustainability they doubt. Between now and the start of the real election campaign around Labor Day, President Obama needs to hope and pray that the economy continues to heal. And Mitt Romney and those around him need to try to craft some concrete reform ideas that will both attract and reassure voters.
The 2012 election will feature its share of negative campaigning, political flim flam and demagogic attacks. But there is an important question at its core: is America better off moving farther away from the blue model or should we stick where we are for a while. Via Meadia looks forward to seeing how the two candidates make their case.
