by Bill Clinton
Second, the people had given both the White House and Congress to Democrats to fix things, and on Election Day 2010 things didn’t feel fixed. Jobs weren’t coming back, and the deficit continued to increase dramatically, due to the combination of declining revenues because of lower incomes and higher unemployment and increased federal spending, because of the stimulus package and the large number of unemployed people and part-time workers who were receiving aid. For example, one in seven Americans was getting food stamps. So even though President Obama and Congress did several significant, positive things in 2009 and 2010, the beneficiaries of the changes didn’t yet feel them, and often didn’t even know about them, while the opponents of those changes were inflamed and energized.
Third, Americans hate all the partisan bickering in Washington and usually prefer to see one party in control of Congress when the other is in the White House. They think that will force our elected officials to work together across party lines and keep the government from going too far to the left or the right. So in 2010, whether it was necessary or not, the whirlwind of government activity—saving the financial system, the stimulus, restructuring the auto industry, the financial reforms, the health-care law—left many voters thinking we had too much government. That’s what happened in 1994, too, when independent voters also rewarded the partisan “just say no” tactics they otherwise deplore.
Fourth, the Republicans ran a more effective, more aggressive campaign, characterizing the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, and President Obama as extreme leftists who wanted to spend America into ruin, regulate the economy into extended recession, and tax individuals into poverty and businesses into bankruptcy: Someone had to stop them before it was too late. The GOP candidates repeated the message incessantly, as did their supporters in the media and interest groups.
The Republicans were also both candid and clever in presenting their own policy agenda in printed materials distributed to their more ideological base voters. They proposed (1) to cancel the still-unspent portion of the “failed” stimulus, in spite of nonpartisan studies finding that the stimulus had created more jobs than predicted and kept unemployment lower than it would have been; (2) to repeal the financial-reform bill with its provisions to require banks to maintain more capital to cover potential loan losses and to avoid future bailouts by establishing a liquidation procedure that would hold stockholders and management more accountable for them (so repeal would make both failures and the bailouts the Tea Party claims to deplore more likely in the future); (3) to repeal incentives to rebuild our manufacturing base through green technologies and instead rely on more drilling for oil and gas, mining coal, and spending on heavily subsidized nuclear power;1 (4) to repeal the student-loan reform law, ending direct government lending, giving a 90 percent government guarantee to banks to make loans, rendering them more expensive, thus increasing the costs to taxpayers and eliminating the most important part of the law—the part that allows students to repay their debt as a small percentage of their income for up to twenty years, so they won’t ever have to drop out again for fear they’ll never be able to repay their debt;2 (5) to repeal the health-care reform law, including the requirement that insurance companies spend 85 percent of the premiums people pay on health-care costs (80 percent for smaller plans), not on profits or marketing; to reverse the so-called cuts in Medicare, which were actually lower increases in reimbursement rates to providers, especially in the Medicare Advantage program, where the profit margins of the participating private providers were large; and, having given the money back to the providers, to reopen the so-called doughnut hole in the senior citizens’ drug program and reduce the solvency of Medicare by a few years;3 and (6) to both cut taxes again, largely for upper-income citizens, and still reduce the large annual deficit by making very large but unspecified cuts in nondefense, non-Medicare spending.
The fifth reason for the size of the Republican victory is that for the first time since their big losses in 1994, when the Republicans ran on the Contract with America, the Democrats did not counter the national Republican message with one of their own. There was no national advertising campaign to explain and defend what they had done and to compare their agenda for the next two years with the GOP proposals. The large amount of money Democrats raised, $1.6 billion, was almost all spent on local races, just as it was in 1994, with similar results.
In the 1998, 2002, and 2006 midterm elections, the Democrats did well with a national message buttressed by a few clear specifics, winning House seats in 1998 despite being badly outspent, the first time since 1822 the president’s party had won House seats in the sixth year of a presidency; not losing many seats in 2002, with President Bush and national security riding high in the polls in the aftermath of 9/11; and in 2006, with the economy in bad shape and the Iraq War increasingly unpopular, winning the majority in both houses of Congress for the first time since 1994.
In 2010, with the economy in trouble, people upset with government spending that didn’t seem to be making it better, and many Democrats holding seats in Republican-leaning districts facing energized, organized opposition, the Democrats ran individual races without a big message. Apparently, they couldn’t agree on one, because they themselves were divided on some issues, especially health care and how best to combat climate change. These problems could have been finessed with commitments to reform—not repeal—the health-care law and to change how we produce and consume energy in a way that grows the economy and creates jobs.
Vice President Biden—whose speeches provided much of the same information and made many of the same arguments mine did—and I tried to get the Democratic National Committee to send out a centralized set of talking points to its large e-mail list so Democratic foot soldiers would at least have some good ammunition for their phone and door-to-door campaigns. We couldn’t persuade the decision makers to do so. I’m always glad to be in Joe Biden’s company, but it was frustrating to work crowds, right up to the night before the election, and hear people shouting at us after our speeches, “Why didn’t I know that?” At least we know Democrats can keep a secret. The failure to counter the GOP national campaign with an equally good one cost the Democrats.
Beyond the economic turmoil, the popular inclination toward divided government, and the relative effectiveness of the campaigns, there is a final factor that had a large impact on the election and the partisan wrangling on the budget that followed it: the idea that the government, especially the federal government, is the cause of every problem America has. Therefore, no matter what the problem, apart from national security, the solution is always the same: less government, lower taxes, weaker regulations.
At its core, this has been the modern Republican Party’s credo since President Reagan rode it to victory in 1980. The idea that the government would mess up a two-car parade has shaped the framework in which we debate the issues and colored the way the media reports on them. It’s great politics for antigovernment Republicans because it meets the financial needs of their biggest backers and the emotional needs of alienated voters and, until things get really bad, explains even the failures of their own administrations. If you don’t believe in government, how can you be disappointed when it fails? It’s supposed to fail.
The antigovernment theme has also proved to be irresistible as a framework for members of the mainstream media, who use the term “conservative” to describe even the most extreme antigovernment policies and define as “liberals” all those who oppose them. This simple but superficial labeling reinforces an easy but inaccurate caricature of our traditional political philosophies and makes it harder to understand the likely consequences of radical actions camouflaged in conservative clothing.
There are only two forces that seem to slow down extreme antigovernment activists. One is stinging public rejection, as we saw in the 2011 special election in New York, where a Democrat, Kathy Hochul, won in an overwhelmingly Republican district less than a year after the
GOP’s landslide victory there by opposing the Ryan plan, which the House had voted for, to replace Medicare with vouchers and require seniors to pay much more out of pocket for health care. The other is progress under a Democratic administration, as was the case in 2000, when George W. Bush ran as a “compassionate conservative” in a time of shared prosperity and more confidence in government.
Then-governor Bush was genuine in his commitment to diversity in government, to improved learning in public schools, to immigration reform, and to doing more to help poor nations fight AIDS. But his brilliant “compassionate conservative” slogan also embodied a more subtle version of the antigovernment theme. Like the Republicans in 2010, Bush was both forthright in making specific antitax, antiregulation commitments targeted to his base and skilled in not pushing them too hard on swing voters who might have disagreed but were captivated by the appeal of his more moderate compassionate-conservative mantra. He was really telling swing voters he’d get them the same good economic results of the previous eight years with a smaller government and lower taxes. Who could be against that?
To be fair, antigovernment politics have been around a long time, and a healthy skepticism of government power and enforceable limits on its abuse are important to the functioning of any democracy. Criticizing the government is part of the birthright of every American. We can all come up with a program we thought was a waste of money, a regulation we thought was wrong, a tax we thought was too high, and an official we thought went overboard in the exercise of authority.
Our nation was founded by citizens determined to resist—then break away from—an empire ruled by a government unaccountable to them. Our constitution, with its separation of powers and Bill of Rights, is designed to preserve liberty and protect us from abuse of government power. However, contrary to the current antigovernment movement’s claim to represent the intent of the framers, our founding fathers clearly intended to give us a government both limited and accountable enough to protect our liberties and strong and flexible enough to adapt to the challenges of each new era. They tried to give us the ability to keep America moving toward a “more perfect Union,” the eternal mission to which they pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor.
In other words, our constitution was designed by people who were idealistic but not ideological. There’s a big difference. You can have a philosophy that tends to be liberal or conservative but still be open to evidence, experience, and argument. That enables people with honest differences to find practical, principled compromise. On the other hand, fervent insistence on an ideology makes evidence, experience, and argument irrelevant: If you possess the absolute truth, those who disagree are by definition wrong, and evidence of success or failure is irrelevant. There is nothing to learn from the experience of other countries. Respectful arguments are a waste of time. Compromise is weakness. And if your policies fail, you don’t abandon them; instead, you double down, asserting that they would have worked if only they had been carried to their logical extreme.
A congressional hearing on climate change in March 2011 offered an interesting example of the difference between conservative philosophy and antigovernment ideology. Congressman Ralph Hall, chairman of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, convened a hearing to secure testimony from Dr. Richard Muller, a professor of physics at the University of California at Berkeley, who had long been considered a “climate skeptic.” Muller started the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project with a team of UC physicists and statisticians to conduct an independent review of the research data in order to challenge the overwhelming scientific consensus that global warming is real, is caused primarily by human behavior, and is likely to have calamitous consequences. The project’s biggest private backer is the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, established by one of the Koch brothers, conservative oil billionaires who have also funded efforts to defeat proposals to reduce the burning of fossil fuels for transportation and electricity, two of the largest sources of the greenhouse gases that cause climate change.
The committee members who don’t believe climate change is happening or, if it is, don’t think it’s a problem expected Dr. Muller to support them in their drive to stop the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from regulating greenhouse gases by casting doubt on the climate science. Instead, Muller, a supposedly reliable ally, committed an unforgivable error: He was more interested in finding the truth than in confirming the ideological convictions of his supporters. In forthright language, he explained that his project had assembled 1.6 billion temperature measurements and attempted to correct for potential biases he thought might have influenced previous studies. Then he said that as a result of his own review, “We see a global warming trend that is very similar to that previously reported by other groups.”
The Los Angeles Times reported that “conservative critics who had expected Muller’s group to demonstrate a bias among climate scientists reacted with disappointment.” Disappointment is putting it mildly. Muller’s testimony was ideological heresy, a rejection of the predetermined truth that global warming is a hoax. But Ken Caldeira, a climate scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science, which also contributed funds to the Berkeley project, praised Muller’s statement for acknowledging that previous climate studies “basically got it right. . . . Willingness to revise views in the face of empirical data is the hallmark of the good scientific process.”4
It’s also the hallmark of good public policy. When our economic plan passed in 1993, it was a comprehensive program of spending cuts, targeted increases in spending on education, technology, and research, tax cuts to spur investment in areas of high unemployment and to help lower-income working families, and tax increases on the largest corporations and the top 1.2 percent of Americans who had reaped most of the income gains and tax cuts of the 1980s. All the Republicans voted against it, claiming the tax increases would crush the economy, calling them a “job killer” and “a one-way ticket to recession.”5 They were wrong, off the mark by 22.7 million jobs. But today, with federal taxes at their lowest share of national income in fifty years, they’re still saying the same thing.
That’s really why no comprehensive long-term agreement came out of the 2011 budget negotiations. The central tenet of antigovernment ideology is that all tax hikes, even when coupled with much larger spending cuts, are bad. The evidence is irrelevant.
It hasn’t always been that way. Previous Republican presidents did not hesitate to invest tax money and use the power of government when the evidence supported doing so. Abraham Lincoln, a self-made man who said society needs wealthy people to encourage industry and enterprise in others, got Congress to fund the transcontinental railroad and, in the heat of the Civil War, signed the Morrill Act, which set aside land in each state on which to establish public universities. Theodore Roosevelt used the power of the federal government to manage our transition from an agricultural to an industrial society, limiting monopolies’ power to fix prices and to abuse women and children in the workplace and protecting vast tracts of western lands from private development. Dwight Eisenhower built the Interstate Highway System with tax dollars and sent federal troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, to enforce the Supreme Court’s decision on school integration. Richard Nixon signed legislation establishing the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the EPA, signed an executive order strengthening the federal affirmative action program, and for the first time since World War II imposed wage and price controls to fend off inflation.
Even after the dawn of the antigovernment era, President Reagan signed budgets that restored a sizable portion of the revenues lost to his big tax cuts, including a bill that stabilized the Social Security system for twenty-five years by adjusting benefits and raising taxes. President George H. W. Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act; strong amendments to the Clean Air Act to limit smog, acid rain, and emissions of toxic chemicals; and the budget reforms of 1991, which restrained spending, established the PAYGO
rule, and modestly raised taxes.6 And President George W. Bush supported the No Child Left Behind law; the senior citizens’ drug benefit; President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which provided unprecedented American support for the global fight against AIDS and malaria; and large investments in nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In fact, the first three decades of the antigovernment movement have been more antitax and antiregulation than antispending. The lone exception, before 2011, is the yearlong budget battle I waged with the pre–Tea Party antigovernment Congress in 1995 over their plan to dramatically cut education, health, and environmental spending. In a failed effort to force those of us who disagreed with them to give in to their demands, they shut the government down, twice. After public opinion moved clearly toward my position, we finally got down to the people’s business, agreeing on a reasonable budget, then the Balanced Budget Act, which produced the first of four surplus budgets in a row for the first time in seventy years.
President Obama faces a different challenge. Because of the deep recession, he didn’t repeal the Bush tax cuts when the Democrats were in the majority in 2009 and 2010. Instead, to shore up a suffering economy, he enacted both more tax cuts and more spending. Now he’s trying to convince Republicans to agree to a long-term deficit-reduction plan that includes both spending cuts and new tax revenues. I didn’t have to do that. Even in 1993 with a Democratic Congress, the budget with its spending cuts and tax increases passed by just one vote in the House and one in the Senate, with Vice President Gore breaking a tie.
President Reagan’s budget director David Stockman has explained how the era of large permanent deficits began in 1981. At first, the Reagan administration thought that by cutting taxes, they could force big cuts in domestic spending. But when it turned out that the White House and both parties in Congress wanted to keep on spending, they simply borrowed the money to do it. It was the first time in our history that we had deliberately amassed large deficits in peacetime. Unlike President Obama’s two-year stimulus program, the 1980s deficit spending was, in effect, a government stimulus program that continued for more than a decade.