The stakes are too high, please get serious about governing before it's too late.
By Ted Van Dyk
As a lifelong Democrat, I have a mental picture these days of my president, smiling broadly, at the wheel of a speeding convertible. His passengers are Democratic elected officials and candidates. Ahead of them, concealed by a bend in the road, is a concrete barrier.
They didn't have to take that route. Other Democratic presidents have
won bipartisan support for proposals as liberal in their time as some
of Mr. Obama's are now. Why does this administration seem so determined
to head toward a potential crash and burn?
Even after the embarrassing playout of
the Obama-invented Great Sequester Game, after the fiasco of the
president's Fiscal Cliff Game, conventional wisdom among Democrats holds
that disunited Republicans will be routed in the 2014 midterm
elections, leaving an open field for the president's agenda in the final
two years of his term. Yet modern political history indicates that big
midterm Democratic gains are unlikely, and presidential second terms are
notably unproductive, most of all in their waning months. Since 2012
there has been nothing about the Obama presidency to justify the
confidence that Democrats now exhibit.
Mr. Obama was elected in 2008 on the basis of his persona and his
pledge to end political and ideological polarization. His apparent
everyone-in-it-together idealism was exactly what the country wanted and
needed. On taking office, however, the president adopted a
my-way-or-the-highway style of governance. He pursued his stimulus and
health-care proposals on a congressional-Democrats-only basis. He
rejected proposals of his own bipartisan Simpson-Bowles commission,
which would have provided long-term deficit reduction and stabilized
rapidly growing entitlement programs. He opted instead to demonize
Republicans for their supposed hostility to Social Security, Medicare
and Medicaid.
No serious attempt—for instance, by
offering tort reform or allowing the sale of health-insurance products
across state lines—was made to enlist GOP congressional support for the
health bill. It passed, but the constituents of moderate Democrats
punished them: 63 lost their seats in 2010 and Republicans took control
of the House.
Faced with a similar situation in 1995, following another GOP House
takeover, President Bill Clinton shifted to bipartisan governance. Mr.
Obama did not, then blamed Republicans for their "obstructionism" in not
yielding to him.
Defying the odds, Mr. Obama did become the first president since
Franklin Roosevelt to be re-elected with an election-year unemployment
rate above 7.8%. Yet his victory wasn't based on public affirmation of
his agenda. Instead, it was based on a four-year mobilization—executed
with unprecedented skill—of core Democratic constituencies, and on fear
campaigns in which Mitt Romney and the Republicans were painted as
waging a "war on women," being servants of the wealthy, and of being
hostile toward Latinos, African Americans, gays and the middle class. I
couldn't have imagined any one of the Democratic presidents or
presidential candidates I served from 1960-92 using such
down-on-all-fours tactics.
The unifier of 2008 became the
calculated divider of 2012. Yes, it worked, but only narrowly, as the
president's vote total fell off sharply from 2008.
Other modern Democratic presidents have had much more success with
very different governing strategies. In 1961-62, John Kennedy won
Republican congressional and public support with the proposals of his
Keynesian Council of Economic Advisers chairman, Walter Heller, to cut
personal and business taxes "to get America moving again," and for the
global free movement of goods, services, capital and people.
In 1965, Lyndon Johnson had Democratic
congressional majorities sufficient to pass any legislation he wanted.
But he sought and received GOP congressional support for Medicare,
Medicaid, civil rights, education and other Great Society legislation.
He knew that in order to last, these initiatives needed consensus
support. He did not want them re-debated later, as ObamaCare is being
re-debated now.
Johnson got bipartisan backing for deficit reduction in 1967, when he
learned that the deficit had reached an unthinkable $28 billion. Faced
with today's annual deficits of $1 trillion and federal debt between
$16.7 and $31 trillion, depending on whether you count off-budget
obligations, LBJ no doubt would appoint a bipartisan Simpson-Bowles
commission and use it to get a tax, spending and entitlements fix so
that he could move on to the rest of his agenda. Bill Clinton took the
same practical approach and got to a balanced federal budget as soon as
he could, at the beginning of his second term.
These former Democratic presidents
would also know today that no Democratic or liberal agenda can go
forward if debt service is eating available resources. Nor can
successful governance take place if presidential and Democratic Party
rhetoric consistently portrays loyal-opposition leaders as having
devious or extremist motives. We really are, as Mr. Obama pointed out in
2008, in it together.
It's not too late for the president to take a cue from his
predecessors and enter good-faith budget negotiations with congressional
Republicans. A few posturing meetings with GOP congressional leaders
will not suffice. President Obama's hype about the horrors of
fiscal-cliff and sequestration cuts, and his placing of blame on
Republicans, have been correctly viewed as low politics. His approval
ratings have plunged since the end of the sequestration exercise.
But time is running out for Democrats to get serious about
governance. That concrete barrier—in the form of the 2014 midterm—lies
just ahead on the highway, and they're joy riding straight toward it.
Mr. Van Dyk served in Democratic national
administrations and campaigns over several decades. His memoir of public
life, "Heroes, Hacks and Fools," was first published by University of
Washington Press in 2007.
http://tinyurl.com/c5wgyx5
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