Reihan Salam in The Daily Beast:
Republicans are giddy, and for good reason. Despite the fact that they have in no way earned the tremendous momentum they now enjoy, they’ve been given an opportunity to undo the mistakes of the Bush years. One has to assume that they’ll mess things up somehow, but they’ll have plenty of help from a White House that seems increasingly out of touch. To build on recent victories, Republicans need to do what the Democrats seem unwilling or incapable of doing, and that is to dramatically change their approach.
[…]
With the election of Scott Brown as the 41st Republican senator, the congressional GOP is no longer powerless. The smart move, as Newt Gingrich recently suggested, is for Republicans to declare victory—Brown’s election essentially killed the Reid bill—and then get behind legislation that will deliver better tangible outcomes for Americans. One approach, backed by Yuval Levin and James Capretta in The Weekly Standard, would expand state-based high risk pools dedicated to helping individuals with preexisting conditions, promote malpractice reform, and give the states the freedom and flexibility they need to craft health reform proposals that meet local needs. Chances are that this won’t be enough for congressional Democrats, who also want to expand Medicaid. The only problem is that expanding Medicaid without reforming its complicated structure as a program shared between the states and the federal government might exacerbate cost growth. One straightforward solution is to create two separate bills, including a more modest package designed to attract a large number of Republican votes. By going in this direction, Republicans will demonstrate their good faith and contribute to improving a health system that everyone acknowledges is badly broken.
On the jobs front, Republicans would be wise to get behind the Schumer-Hatch plan for offering payroll tax relief to private sector firms that hire workers who’ve been unemployed for 60 days or longer. The fact that Orrin Hatch, the conservative senator from Utah, is a co-sponsor should serve as a seal of approval for reluctant Republicans. Conservatives have been clamoring for payroll tax relief since the start of the recession. Stanford economist Michael Boskin, a leading right-of-center wonk, has argued that cutting the payroll tax by six percentage points in lieu of passing the president’s Recovery Act would have increased employment by three to four million jobs while costing the Treasury only half as much. Last fall, he proposed shifting resources from the stimulus to partial payroll tax relief. Though that option might be off the table, Schumer-Hatch is a decent intermediate step that Republicans can and should get behind.
The other major issue where Republicans might be able to tug the Democratic majority in a better direction is financial sector reform. A number of economists from across the political spectrum have grown more sympathetic to curbing the use of deposit insurance, an approach that would help reduce systemic risk without micromanaging the size and activities of financial institutions. Many details need to be worked out, but it sounds like a smart center-right alternative to endless bailouts.
The beauty of this strategy is that it allows Republican candidates to do well by doing good. The Democrats have offered a series of bloated, heavy-handed bills to tackle real problems facing the economy, and Republicans have been right to take them to task. But they’re now in a position to offer more cost-effective, scalpel-like proposals of their own that can demonstrate their readiness to govern. And besides, Republicans will still be well within their rights to criticize the Democrats for their major missteps in 2009—President Obama spent most of his 2008 presidential campaign running against George W. Bush’s first term. If Republicans choose not to pivot, if they instead continue to rely exclusively on scorched-earth opposition, they’ll find that victories in 2010 won’t translate into victories in 2012, when the electorate will be larger and more inclined to elect problem-solvers and not bomb-throwers.
Ya think? From Day One, the GOP has had one strategy, utterly unrelated to the country’s interests, and utterly divorced from any responsibility for their own past: the destruction of any alternative to Bush-Cheney conservatism.
They believe that the policies of 2000 – 2008 are the right ones for the future, which is why their only economic policies are tax cuts, why they refuse to cut any spending, why they believe in more aggression abroad, and why they still hold to a view of the presidency that places it entirely above the law – or capable of simply pronouncing the law to say what it plainly does not – in order to wage war outside constitutional restraints.
And that appears to be what a large section of the country really, really wants: a second Bush-Cheney administration. If you doubt it, ask any of the current Republican leaders which policies of Bush and Cheney they specifically refuse to continue.
Messaging matters in politics, but so does timing. Suppose the Republican leadership had worked with the White House this past year to craft a health care bill that, though opposed by both the purer elements of both right and left, could pass the House and Senate; suppose too that this bill actually worked. Who gets the credit for that? Not the Republican party or Republican candidates across the country, that’s who. No, it would be the President’s triumph and his alone. (I’m assuming, for the sake of this argument that the bill would have covered 30m Americans, controlled or lowered costs etc.) It’s Obama who would have reaped the electoral rewards from this process. So what, rationally, does it profit the Republican party to help him achieve that aim?
You might argue that this is a form of political nihilism or that it’s putting party before the national interest and you might well have a point. But the country is, much of the time, a secondary concern. Parties exist to win elections and then – and only then – take measures they believe are in the national interest. Helping the other mob win isn’t part of their brief.
But that only works until the mid-terms. After that, as Reihan says, you gotta pivot. Scorched-earth is a temporary policy forced upon you by unfavourable circumstances and your own need to retreat and regroup. It can buy time and weaken the enemy before the counter-attack but it’s not, and cannot be, the counter-attack itself. It’s tactics, not strategy.
One assumes that (most of) the likely Presidential candidates appreciate this. If they don’t they need to see how Republicans have won gubernatorial contests since elections to executive positions, unlike legislative contests, cannot, except in the rarest of cases, be won on a platform emphasising preventative measures alone.
Sullivan responds:
If this is truly the case, and if the GOP is prepared to use a filibuster to prevent any change, then we basically have a pattern in which the only changes to the Bush-Cheney disaster would be to move the republic to even more extreme “right” positions: national bankruptcy because of endless entitlements, soaring health costs and ever-expanding and costly empire.
I do not believe that, given the fiscal and healthcare crisis we are in, that we should simply surrender to the basest impulses of partisanship. And I believe that was the core message of the Obama candidacy. And if this opportunity is simply thrown away, the bitterness will deepen, the polarization will widen, the public cynicism will explode and the country will truly pass the point of no return on its core and pressing problems.
And when good folks like Reihan and Alex simply endorse all this, it’s enough to make one despair.
So, if the Republicans follow Salam and Massie’s advice, we’re in for at least three more years of a stalemated Senate or, even worse, a Republican caucus successful at passing legislation that appeals only to their exclusive base of delusional loons.
Gee, how’s that for horrifying?
Reihan Salam responds to Sullivan and Massie:
Actually, I don’t think this is about who gets credit. Rather, I think that the approach taken by the White House and its congressional allies was wrongheaded, and that one potential benefit of the Brown victory is that it might chasten the Democrats in a constructive way. The hypothetical example — a reform model that actually works — was not a realistic option after Arlen Specter defected from the Democratic caucus in the Senate and Al Franken won his recount battle. At that moment, the incentives for cooperating with moderate Republican senators weakened tremendously. Granted, it would have been nice for the Democrats to have Olympia Snowe on-side, but as all close observers know, Maine has an unusual set of challenges with regards to the high cost of insurance premiums. Senate Democrats offered “compromises” like interstate compacts that bore little resemblance to robust interstate competition. There wasn’t a serious effort to woo Senator Bob Corker, who has explicitly said that he’d be interested in compromise legislation that placed a heavier emphasis on catastrophic coverage (an idea advanced by Michael Graetz and Jerry Mashaw in True Security, among many others), because there was no perceived need a serious effort.
So when Andrew Sullivan writes the following:
I do not believe that, given the fiscal and healthcare crisis we are in, that we should simply surrender to the basest impulses of partisanship. And I believe that was the core message of the Obama candidacy. And if this opportunity is simply thrown away, the bitterness will deepen, the polarization will widen, the public cynicism will explode and the country will truly pass the point of no return on its core and pressing problems.
And when good folks like Reihan and Alex simply endorse all this, it’s enough to make one despair.
This isn’t my position, and I’m succumbing to the basest impulses of partisanship. Rather, it is about crafting workable solutions to difficult problems. I do not believe that a weak mandate, a sharp increase in implicit marginal tax rates, and a regulation-driven strategy to addressing adverse selection — as opposed to an incentive-driven strategy using state-based high-risk pools and, better still, well-designed public reinsurance — will work. In fact, I believe that it will turn out very badly and that it will prove impossible to reverse.
Sullivan responds:
My point was in response to his seeming resignation to politics as usual in the face of a huge and growing crisis. And while I would draw up my own ideal version of healthcare reform very different from Obama’s, I’m not naive enough to believe it has a snowball’s chance in hell of ever passing. At some point, you have to make a pragmatic choice of the actual options available. I think the current bill is it. I also think it can be worked on continually to improve it in the future. Hence my support.
Some readers, Andrew, Reihan and a couple of other bloggers all argue, to one degree or another, that this post is depressingly cynical* [typo fixed]. It wasn’t meant to be! I wasn’t meaning to endorse Republican obstructionism, rather I was trying to point out that, viewed from a GOP perspective, a policy of knee-jerk opposition to anything and eveything proposed by the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress made or makes a certain amount of sense. That’s all! I don’t pretend that this is necessarily good for the country.
But in a two party system which also massively favours incumbents at elections time and in which a 53-47% victory is considered a mini-landslide, there’s little incentive to try and improve bills proposed by the majority. If passing HCR improves the Democratic position – as some evidence suggests it might – then a guerilla campaign to derail that particular train makes sense. Again, one doesn’t have to approve of this to recognise that fact.
I’d be quite happy if there weren’t political parties at all or, if we must have them, that they were weaker than is currently the case. But we have ’em and the trend in American politics is towards greater, not weaker, party discipline. Again, if you can achieve that discipline in the minority then the system – and hence the incentives – favour taking an obstructionist apparoach.
At least in the short-term. The downside is that if this becomes the minority party’s default position then you won’t be able to do much even when you regain the initiative and the majority. A two party system, however, really is close to a zero sum game. Maybe that is a cynical way to look at matters, but in such a system what’s the point of a party that has lots of great ideas – and even great people – if it doesn’t also put itself in a position to win? That’s why I say, viewed from the position of the party itself, it makes sense to put the party’s interests before the immediate interests of the country. And of course many people might think there’s no great difference between those interests anyway.
Around The Sphere 