Confronting a Cusp Point: Renew, Relapse or Reverse?
We're going to try and wrap up our series of discussions on Renewing America with this final post on
the major cusp point we're facing. The central question facing us is whether we collectively opt to confront our challenges and work together to solve them. Or whether we let our not-so-better natures lead us into partisan politics and populist reactions that cause us to relapse into the behaviors that brought us to this point in the first place. Or worse, whether the impulses of our hindbrain so overwhelm the best thinking of our collective forebrains and lead to the reversal of over three centuries of growth and historically unprecedented prosperity. A record of achievement that has served as an exemplar for the world as being an active agent of (mostly) constructive change. Yet, at the same time, those hindbrain impulses have often been the very thing that has enabled us to cope with previous crisis.
The video clip is taken from "The Patriot" which, allowing for dramatic license, is not historically inaccurate. The hero is a Scots-Irish settler who organized his fellow backwoodsmen into an effective and fighting force that was one of the main underpinnings of America's successes in the Revolutionary War (the book to read is Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America by James Webb). But one of the things the Scots-Irish brought with them was an innate distrust of authority and government - largely because thruout 2,000 years of history governments had tried to exterminate them (the Romans twice, the English three times) and then betrayed them multiple times, after exploiting their qualities as fighters (the English again). That populist strain has become infused thruout America and is one of the main under-currents of our culture. The question would then seem to be what behaviors are appropriate in what circumstances and who's likely to pick what? There times when you need a tomahawk and times when you need to "reason together".
Expecting Miracles, Confronting Realities
The time when the hindbrain takes over the most is under stress, when competition for scarce resources (like, say, jobs) is most severe and people are scared, apprehensive and have no clue as to where they stand. And it gets worse when they got blindsided by things they took for granted. This being exactly one year since Obama was inaugurated there are a lot of report cards being offered up, and one of the most thorough is the WSJ/NBC poll. Now if you listen to the punditocracy the President's in the ditch and headed for a disaster but if you actually read the whole poll, summarized here, we think people's judgments aren't so far off. Nor are they as disastrous as the infotainment media would have us believe. In fact when you look back over the last several administrations he's actually higher than most of his predecessors. Simply come down off the euphoric highs of the first few months. Wow, what a surprise! What we find and found particularly interesting in this summary is the two questions about how the Rips are handling healthcare and whether or not "business as usual" is getting fixed in D.C. Think about and what it really tells us!
Boots on the Ground: Real Problems for Real People
Let's tunnel down another level of detail by looking at the reactions to Healthcare, Foreign Policy and the Economy. The UL corner is the overall questions that drove the first chart (and if you look closely you'll see our answers are filled in). Now we went to a lot of trouble to create a summary inventory and analysis of the huge slew of problems that've had to be dealt with in this first year (t's Your Life: Change Is Hard, Change We Must, Changing We Are!) so we won't go back thru 'em but suggest you check back on the assessment chart. You may not agree with our conclusions - feel free - but at least consider the inventory and what alternatives you might have had; or you've heard from the opposition.
One of the things you haven't heard from the pundits is any appreciation of how deep these problems are, how hard they are to address, how difficult it is to tackle them legislatively and on the implementation side and how challenging the political problems are. When you consider all that we give the Administration on A on several grounds. They've tackled all the serious problems, they've done so in a pragmatic and realistic way, and allowing for real-world timetables so far everything they've done has worked. And our template for the preferred policy options is identical to the one we published and have been using since 2003/2004 and the same one we used to discuss the entirety of last year's campaigns. If nothing else we've been consistent.
The Wars of the Lizards
Nonetheless, as the recent elections in MA. show, the President's agenda - and therefore our future - is in some jeopardy. The people ARE scared and angry and there are multiple reasons for that. For one thing - fear and anger are reasonable responses to the situations we're in. For another some of the necessary actions, e.g. the Financial bailouts, are very difficult to understand; more so when everybody just wants to burn the witches. That's all made worse by watching the manuverings of the special interest groups and the inside beltway sausage-making (which most people are learning more about than they ever wanted to learn or that allows them to sleep at night). Earlier (several months ago in fact) we put together this evolutionary story of how the candidates and then the Administration and the Rips were approaching the challenges of Vision, Communication, Leadership and Policy, which you can see here. The one we like better, though it's more complex, analytical and built on the first, is the illustrated one. Which captures, we think, all the dimensions and issues. The bottom shows the tri-modal distribution of Voters, with the two end-peaks of die-hard supporters while the vertical shows the distribution of decision-making by those voters - the tendency to let the hindbrain dominate most decisions. The problem is that while campaigning can be done at the fantasy level governing has to happen down where the adult brain lives. While Barry has put more emphasis on clear but complex explanations of the policy decisions his not-so-loyal opposition has spent all their time and energy on ignoring hard choices in favor of appeals to the worst part of a scared and angry electorate. Continuing a two year evolution that began during the campaign, accelerated at the end and has metastasized this last year. So in addition to interests groups and sausage-making uglinesses we've got a major political party making short-term tactical decisions to just say NO to everything and hope they can damage the President without making any effort at compromise. The problem, as the polls show, is that it's working only partially, the voters have caught on and, as things start working out if we're right about the substance, is that they'll get more and more embarrassed.
We're Not Making this Up
Just as a brief sidebar, and entirely serendipitously, there was a recent special Charlie Rose program on what science has learned about humans as social animals and how the brain functions. It's a pretty telling story (and perfectly complementary to the recent PBS specials on "This Emotional Life" we've previously cited).
We offer it up here because it offers both a lot of useful background information and some valuable insights into why and how things are working out the way they are.
But we think we'll give the last word and summary this time to the political cartoonists rather than the scientists. They seem to us to capture the reach and range of the issues involved. From the point that to attack a President who inherited the worst messes we've had in generations due to screwups on the part of the Rips is disingenuous at best, to the tendency of the Teabaggers hindbrains to throw the wrong things overboard, to some arrogancies and complacencies (combined with some profound mis-readings of the public) on the part of the Dims to the not-so-just rewards of being the man on the hot seat. Finally we'll leave you with one other pointer, though sans vidclip picture, to a recent PBS Newshour panel on assessing the first year. As is usual for the Newshour the panel is calm, judicious, covers the political spectrum and, by and large, lines up with our conclusions: PBS Panel on Obama's First Year.
Here's the bottomlines - the President (as implied by our graphic on what's required to both lead and govern) is going to have to do better on creating an over-arching message and vision, communicating it and reaching the hindbrain while still selling the substance compellingly. We'd also hope that the disloyal opposition would turn into constructive opponents who would bring some balance back into the process instead of pursuing their partisan agenda at the cost of substance - and at great risk to the Republic's well-being. Sadly we see little hope of that but in those things like the resolution of our original questions. With one addition - now is not a time for tommyhawks. It's a time to struggle with our fears and go for the substance. In that decision lies the answer to which side of the cusp we fall on.
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First Year Reportcard Readings
Poll Shows Democrats Lose Their Edge As Barack Obama enters his second year in office amid an enduring economic downturn, voters are less optimistic about his ability to succeed and no longer clearly favor keeping the Democrats in control of Congress, according to the new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll. The trends point to an increasingly difficult political climate for President Obama as he hopes to push his domestic agenda beyond health care this year and preserve his party's majorities in the House and Senate. The severity of that climate, in fact, was promptly underscored by Democrats' surprising loss of a Senate seat in Massachusetts Tuesday. The seat of the late Edward Kennedy went to a conservative Republican, Scott Brown, in one of the nation's bluest states. That may not be an anomaly. Nationally, the new survey finds, voters now are evenly split over which party they hope will run Capitol Hill after the November elections—the first time Democrats haven't had the edge on that question since December 2003.
How's It Going? A One-Year Report Card On the first anniversary of Barack Obama's inauguration as president, Americans seem a bit weary and a bit wary, not yet convinced the nation's economic trauma has passed, or that its leaders have found the cure for it. Mr. Obama won the presidency by rallying Americans by the millions behind the idea of "change." But Americans are proving to be—as they have almost always have been—a people ultimately more comfortable with incremental rather than dramatic change. Thus, most continue to like and respect the man they gathered around televisions to watch sworn in as president on a cold noon hour a year ago, and most still hold out hope for his presidency. Yet many also worry that, in his quest to mobilize government to solve the nation's problems, he may have moved too far too fast. That, at least, is the picture that emerges from a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll on the one-year mark of the Obama presidency. As Tuesday's stunning victory by Republican Scott Brown in a special Senate election in Massachusetts suggests, the terrain explored in the survey is a challenging one for a president and a Democratic Party that seemed last January to be in full control of the political world, and destined to stay that way for some time. Obviously, the landscape has proved to be a lot more complex than those easy predictions implied. What the Journal has set out to do here is paint a picture of that national landscape. In collaboration with its partners at NBC News and its polling team of Democrat Peter Hart and Republican Bill McInturff, the Journal surveyed more than 2,000 Americans in December and January on where the country stands at this juncture. We asked their views of their president and other political leaders, of course. But we went well beyond that, to see what they think of the economy, their personal prospects, changes in their health-care system, the security of their nation, and the state of race relations within it. The survey finds areas of doubt and skepticism, and well as areas where Americans are starting to see glimmers of light. So here is our report—a kind of portrait of America one year into the era of Barack Obama's presidency.
Lack of Credit President Barack Obama has presided over a turnaround in U.S. economic growth, but he doesn't get much credit for it. The disconnect has much to do with choices he's made, problems he inherited and deep-seated worries among voters about the economy's long-run health in the aftermath of the recession. In the new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, 49% said they disapprove of the job Mr. Obama is doing handling the economy, while just 43% approve. Last February, 56% approved of Mr. Obama's handling of the economy. The downward trend tracks his broader approval ratings. Yet the approval rating is moving in the opposite direction of economic growth. When Mr. Obama took the oath of office a year ago, the economy was contracting at a 6.4% annual rate, its worst decline in more than a quarter century. But by the fourth quarter, the economy recorded a growth rate of well over 4%, according to many estimates. More than six in 10 in the survey said the nation's difficult economic situation is one Mr. Obama inherited. So why isn't he getting more credit for steering the U.S. away from an outright depression?
Missing the Target With the Stimulus Unlike previous recessions, the current downturn was not caused by Federal Reserve tightening and therefore couldn't be reversed by lowering interest rates. President Obama was correct to conclude that boosting economic activity required a fiscal stimulus. Unfortunately, despite the talented team of economists in the administration, most of the president's economic policies have done little to help the problem. And indeed, many of these policies have created even more problems than they solved.
Falling Short on the Stimulus That leaves us with two major questions: First, why has the outcome thus far been so much worse than what pretty much everyone expected in the late fall of 2008? And second, why is the forecast going forward for growth so much slower than our previous experience with recovery from a deep recession in 1983-84? I attribute the differences to four factors:First, the financial collapse of late 2008 did much more damage than we realized—to American households' and businesses' willingness to spend, as well as to the financial system's ability to match savers with cash to businesses that needed to borrow. The shock now looks to have been about twice as great as the consensus in the fall of 2008 thought. When it comes to fighting economic depressions, governments essentially have two bags of tricks they can pick from: They can directly put the otherwise unemployed to work via deficit spending, or have the central bank boost asset prices and so make it more attractive for businesses to borrow and put the otherwise-unemployed to work. The incoming Obama administration tried to do both. And that leads us to Factor No. 2. The Obama administration envisioned a $1 trillion short-term deficit-spending stimulus for a problem that turned out to be twice as big as was then understood. In other words, had the administration known how big the problem would turn out to be, it would have sought a $2 trillion stimulus. And what did we get once Congress got through with it? A $600 billion stimulus—about one-third of what we needed.
A Good Start All told, the vision was quite a heavy load for the reform train. Once in the White House and challenged with the chore of governing, President Obama and his allies in the Congress quickly realized that health reform cannot overnight realize the entire vision held out during the election. It had to be achieved in stages—expanding insurance coverage first, bending the cost curve and greater cost-effectiveness later. Extending health-insurance coverage to the millions of Americans who now find themselves priced out of the market for health insurance is the easiest part of health reform. In the bill now working its way through Congress, an estimated 30 million or so lower-income, otherwise uninsured Americans are expected to gain adequate coverage with the aid of between $800 billion and $1 trillion in federal subsidies over the next decade. That may appear a staggering sum, until one realizes that it is only about 3% or so of the $35 trillion or so now projected by actuaries to be spent on U.S. health care in the coming decade, even in the absence of reform. The bill in its current state lays important foundations for obtaining better value for our health-care dollar—more research into cost-effective care, a move away from piece-rate (fee-for-service) payment of doctors and hospitals and toward bundled payments for entire medical treatments, and perhaps an independent Medicare Commission with power to control Medicare spending.
Centrist, and Yet Not Unified The bills before Congress are politically partisan and substantively bipartisan. What does that mean? The first part is obvious. All 60 Senate Democrats and independents voted for the bill, and all 40 Republicans voted against it. The second part is the counterintuitive one. Yet it’s true. The current versions of health reform are the product of decades of debate between Republicans and Democrats. The bills are more conservative than Bill Clinton’s 1993 proposal. For that matter, they’re more conservative than Richard Nixon’s 1971 plan, which would have had the federal government provide insurance to people who didn’t get it through their job. Today’s Congressional Republicans have made the strategically reasonable decision to describe President Obama’s health care plan, like almost every other part of his agenda, as radical and left wing. And the message seems to be at least partly working, based on polls and the Massachusetts surprise. But a smart political strategy isn’t the same thing as accurate policy analysis. The better way to describe the Obama agenda, I think, is that it’s ambitious (even radical) in its scope and sharply different in direction from the Reagan-Bush era, but mostly moderate in terms of how far it goes on any single issue. Mr. Obama wants to undo George W. Bush’s high-income tax cuts, but would keep the basic Reagan tax structure intact. The administration is trying to re-regulate financial markets, but has rejected the sweeping ideas favored by the former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, British regulators and many liberals. The pattern is especially clear on Afghanistan and Iraq.
- Second Opinion Americans are worried Congress will make a bad health-care system even worse.
Americans Grow Weary of Government Intervention Republican Senate candidate Scott Brown's surge in Massachusetts comes as a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found increasing voter unease over the federal government's expanding role in the private sector. For the first time, a majority of Americans—53%—disapprove of the government's increased role in the economy since the financial crisis, up from 44% in March. And 48% said Washington was doing too many things better left to businesses and individuals, a plurality seen in polling since September. The government's takeover of General Motors, the biggest economic intervention that happened solely on Mr. Obama's watch, drew the strongest negative reaction. Nearly two-thirds of Americans surveyed, 65%, disapproved of the government's taking a majority stake in the troubled auto maker. Independents were highly critical of the move, as were Republicans. Poll respondents lumped Democrats' proposed overhaul of the nation's health-care system into their basket of worries about expanded government. A majority, 53%, thought the proposed legislation went too far and would hurt the quality of health care. That is the highest level of opposition since the peak of the "town hall" protests against the proposal in August, when 54% of Americans polled felt that way.
Dangers Ahead A trio of big worries—economic troubles, health-care uncertainties and security threats—are weighing on Americans' hopes for their future, though they haven't entirely dashed the traditional American spirit of optimism. Just 34% of Americans surveyed this month in the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll said they think the country is headed in the right direction, compared with 54% who said it is off on the wrong track. In February of last year, not long after President Barack Obama's inauguration, 41% said the country was headed in the right direction and 44% said they thought it was on the wrong track. Moreover, there are some signs that the economy's woes may be sowing doubts not just about current prosperity, but about long-term prospects as well. In a companion Journal/NBC News survey in December, two-thirds of Americans said they didn't feel confident their children's generation would be better off than their own. The key question is whether Americans are convinced a long-term decline in prosperity is inevitable—a sentiment that would have implications for, among other things, spending and investment decisions—or whether the gloom will only persist until there are clearer signs the country's situation is improving. The latest poll found four in 10 expect the economy to improve sometime in the next year.
Do It All, but Better After just one year, President Barack Obama has expanded the role of the federal government with an agenda already greater than Johnson's Great Society and closing in on Roosevelt's New Deal. Such plans are in keeping with America's deep commitment to a better future, although the financial cost is staggering. The problem, though, is Washington has never been so poorly equipped to succeed. As the failure to detect the Christmas Day bombing plot proves once again, the federal government's stifling bureaucracy can void almost any promise, big or small. The president's agenda covers virtually every aspect of American life—health care for the uninsured, banking oversight, a new consumer-protection agency, mortgage aid, climate regulation, credit-card reform, defense-procurement reform, education, and the giant stimulus package, which contains dozens of extensions in existing programs.What this agenda lacks, however, is the kind of sweeping bureaucratic reform that might increase its odds of success. Just talk to the federal employees who say their agencies won't reward innovation and creativity, deal with poor performers or make promotions on the basis of merit. The solution, however, is not a new Reagan revolution to remove government from people's lives, any more than it is to increase the already gargantuan public sector, whose payroll currently may exceed 20 million, including federal, state and local employees, contractors, recipients of grants and people paid through the stimulus package. Ask Americans whether they think government is too big, and they agree. They understand how much the government has grown, and that there is significant waste in the new programs. But at the same time, most Americans want more of virtually everything government delivers. Ask them whether they support cuts in Social Security, Medicare, job training, environmental protection, highway construction and so forth, and they say absolutely not. The problem, then, is not the government itself, but inefficiency and bloat.
He'll Come Back Has the American Dream come to an end? Certainly, the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression has convinced most Americans that attaining the dream will not be easy in the future. In a National Journal poll last September, 62% thought the economy would experience more severe cycles of boom and bust than in the past, and 79% said average families in the future would suffer economic reversals more often than in the past. But this pessimism about the economy as a whole is tempered by considerable personal optimism about the future. Can the Obama administration connect to this individual sense that the dream remains alive, and turn around feelings of pessimism about the country as a whole? Right now, that is difficult because the state of the economy tends to obscure the administration's contributions to economic progress. Consider the $787 billion stimulus bill. The bill's expenditures, combined with extensive interventions to stabilize the banking system, pulled the U.S. economy back from the brink of a catastrophic meltdown. As a result, we are now on a growth path that, while slow, seems likely to pick up considerably. But President Obama couldn't prevent the steady rise in unemployment. That's making it hard for many Americans to see the connection between his administration's activities and a brighter future. Over the longer term, I believe Mr. Obama will be able to make that connection. The example of Ronald Reagan—who did link the public's individual optimism to a positive outlook on the country—is instructive. Mr. Reagan had to contend with a severe recession, just like Mr. Obama. At about this point in Mr. Reagan's first term, his approval rating was essentially identical with Mr. Obama's current rating, and his party lost heavily in midterm elections.
The Pragmatic Leviathan Over the years, American voters have reacted against any party that threatens that basic sense of proportion. They have reacted against a liberalism that sought an enlarged and corrosive government and a conservatism that threatened to dismantle the government’s supportive role. A year ago, the country rallied behind a new president who promised to end the pendulumlike swings, who seemed likely to restore equilibrium with his moderate temper and pragmatic mind. In many ways, Barack Obama has lived up to his promise. He has created a thoughtful, pragmatic administration marked by a culture of honest and vigorous debate. When Obama makes a decision, you can be sure that he has heard and accounted for every opposing argument. If he senses an important viewpoint is not represented at a meeting, he will stop the proceedings and demand that it gets included. If the evidence leads him in directions he finds uncomfortable, he will still follow the evidence. He is beholden to no ideological camp, and there is no group in his political base that he has not angered at some point in his first year. But his has become a voracious pragmatism. Driven by circumstances and self-confidence, the president has made himself the star performer in the national drama. He has been ubiquitous, appearing everywhere, trying to overhaul most sectors of national life: finance, health, energy, automobiles and transportation, housing, and education, among others. He is no ideologue, but over the past year he has come to seem like the sovereign on the cover of “Leviathan” — the brain of the nation to which all the cells in the body and the nervous system must report and defer. Americans, with their deep, vestigial sense of proportion, have reacted. The crucial movement came between April and June, when the president’s approval rating among independents fell by 15 percentage points and the percentage of independents who regarded him as liberal or very liberal rose by 18 points. Since then, the public has rejected any effort to centralize authority or increase the role of government. Trust in government has fallen. The share of Americans who say the country is on the wrong track has risen. The share who call themselves conservative has risen. The share who believe government is “doing too many things better left to business” has risen. The country is now split on Obama, because he is temperate, thoughtful and pragmatic, but his policies are almost all unpopular.