by Dick Morris
Republicans have yet to cross the aisle. They remain content to propose ways to meet their usual partisan goals and tend to resist any environmental programs and any federal education reforms. This is not the way to victory. The right must develop its own solutions using Republican means to achieve Democratic ends.
For example, the right can do a lot to take the education issue away from the left by advocating reform of teacher tenure, teacher testing, and merit pay for teachers. The Democrats, dependent on teacher unions for political support and campaign contributions, will find it hard to agree with these common-sense steps to inject managerial flexibility, performance requirements, and financial incentive into education. The Republicans can have these issues all to themselves.
If Republicans were to back tax cuts to reduce pollution and enhance environmental quality, they would work to preempt Democratic domination of environmental issues. Similarly, if the GOP focused on reducing the tax burdens of the elderly, they could go a long way toward repairing the damage they sustained in the Medicare fight of 1995–1996.
The mandate here is mix and match: Use Democratic means like regulation and spending to achieve goals Republican voters value. Use Republican tools like tax cuts and profit incentives to do the good works Democrats seek.
Democrats must not base their campaigns on asking voters not to worry about crime, high taxes, or welfare, and Republicans cannot ignore the elderly, the environment, or education. The concerns of each side have validity. To win, each side must figure out solutions to the problems targeted by the other side.
Chapter 8
Values Over Economics
FROM FEDERAL RESERVE BOARD Chairman Alan Greenspan on down, the entire economic superstructure of America is asking the same question: Have we tamed the business cycle? Is there a “new paradigm” of ongoing and continuous slow growth and low inflation?
We don’t know yet. But while the current economic climate lasts, Americans have fundamentally shifted their focus from economic concerns to social-values issues. A majority of our countrymen understand that an increase in their disposable personal income is not going to solve the major problems in their lives. Crime, pollution and its health impact, education of their children, time with their families, access to health care, safer foods, cleaner drinking water, and better access to parks and recreation are not going to be improved by a 10 percent rise in take-home pay.
In the days of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, American politics changed fundamentally from a preoccupation with helping business to one of protecting consumers. Under Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Lyndon Johnson, it evolved once again from assuring fair play in the marketplace to actively assuring economic security. Now, a third transformation is underway—from guaranteeing economic minimums to catalyzing lifestyle improvement.
The new challenges our politics must address are less economic than social, and their remedies relate more to changes in attitudes and mores than to increases in public spending. While improvements to the environment and law enforcement cost money, the main stuff of federal budgets—income redistribution and cash transfer—is no longer on the cutting edge of our political agenda. Our political season is increasingly less defined by the beginning and end of the federal fiscal year. National goals are less matters of dollars than of values, and government action is increasingly to encourage and offer incentive, not to subsidize.
President Clinton’s success in maintaining his high job approval rating reflects his ability to articulate these concerns and to recognize the new issues of our political process. Consider the valuesoriented proposals that have buoyed his popularity:
extending family leave
banning handgun ownership for those arrested for domestic abuse
expanding child care
tax credits for college tuition
testing for educational standards
increased school construction
extra police on the streets
more help for the disabled
increased funding for disease prevention
more rapid cleanup of toxic wastes
increases in clean air standards
better food safety inspection
cleaner drinking water
cleanup of urban brownfield sites
keeping schools open late as community centers
incentives for organ donations
standards for home healthcare workers
bans on cigarette advertising aimed at teenagers
tracking gun ownership across state lines
tracking sex criminals after release from prison
promoting educational content on children’s TV
rating systems for violence and sex on television
drug counselors in schools
doubling of Head Start programs
a federal DWI standard
more vigorous child-support collection
preservation and reform of affirmative action, eliminating quotas
incentives for employment of welfare recipients
tax credits for adult education at community colleges
child immunization
school bus safety
curfews for teenagers
school uniforms
These proposals and dozens more of the same genre are the new stuff of our politics. To political leaders steeped in the focus on incomes and distribution of wealth, the list seems trivial. But to Americans faced with the daily, daunting task of raising a family, the list spells H-E-L-P—a day-to-day aid in overcoming the obstacles they face in building a better life.
Political figures in modern America need to dig themselves out of their economic determinism, put away their Marx and their Charles and Mary Beard, and focus on the social needs of their constituents. This expanded focus of public activity is the new agenda voters want to take center stage.
Historically, two types of populism have come to dominate our politics at various points in the past hundred years. Well defined by Robert Kazan in his seminal work The Populist Persuasion, these have included three waves of economic populism: the populist farmer movement in the 1890s, the American Federation of Labor growth in the early years of this century, and the industrial unionization in the 1930s—and four waves of social populism: Prohibition in the 1920s, McCarthyism in the 1950s, the New Left in the 1960s, and George Wallace in the 1970s. Each of these movements were fueled by anger and focused on an enemy.
But the new values agenda leaves populists without a cause. The economic populism of the left—which hates Wall Street—and the social populism of the right—which hates social diversity—have very little to do with most of these new issues. In fact, the anger which impels populism, the politics of resentment, is stylistically inappropriate for our new public priorities. The fundamentally negative proposals of the economic left (anti-corporate privilege, antispeculator profiteering) and the equally negative ideas of the social right (anti-gay rights, anti-choice, anti-immigrant) have nothing to do with the largely positive proposals of the new agenda.
In the elections of 1992 and 1994, Americans were fueled first by economic and then by social populism. Angered by the recession of 1991, which lingered in our politics long after the economy resumed its sluggish growth, they voted first against Bush by backing Clinton, and then against Clinton by backing Gingrich’s Republicans. But after the 1994 elections, the politics of populism faded in our culture. Now, our politics marches to the beat of a different drummer. Basically, the new American issues are moved by compassion, not anger, more by love than hate. Our people are more inclined to vote for than to vote against, a sharp reversal from the anger of the 1970s and the self-involvement of the 1980s.
Since voters do not want to topple establishments, just help children and families live better, the era of the big issue has left us. It went the way of big government. No overarching ideological redesign of our basic economic, social, or tax systems is going to galvanize today’s voters.
By
its very nature, the new agenda consists of small bricks of progress, each a good idea, most of them stemming from consensus, and all aimed in a positive direction to improve people’s lives in specific but small ways. Yet in the aggregate, these bricks combine to build an impressive edifice of social change to improve the lives of the average American.
Chapter 9
Women and Children First
THE TRADITIONAL HIERARCHIC PYRAMID of our politics has been turned upside down. Where once men came first, women second, and children last in our political focus, the order is now reversed. Political agendas which focus on the needs of children are the most compelling. The social concerns of women for their families rank a close second.
Richard Nixon taught America that crime was a national issue. At times, it seemed as if it was the national issue. Bill Clinton has taught us that education is one of the most important national issues. No longer are schools a political backwater for state races. They are the substance of our national political agenda and the focus of our electorate. Ten years ago, education ranked first or second on the list of issues facing a state, but public-opinion pollsters found that it ranked far down as a federal problem. Current polls place education at the very top of our national-issue concerns and priorities.
As the political focus shifts from economic concerns of businessmen to the social concerns of mothers and fathers, a curious dichotomy commands our attention. The interest groups which dominate our legislative process overwhelmingly concern the older economic agenda. Few lobbyists prowl the halls of Congress fighting for child nutrition or foster care reform or higher educational standards. Those who do tend to represent unions seeking their own economic interests, not the social needs of the children they are supposed to serve.
So an American politician faces a situation where his nine-to-five day is likely to be occupied with the push and pull of economic interests in battles that do not really concern his constituents much. The average American doesn’t really care about the wars of doctors versus trial lawyers, big banks versus regional banks, AT&T versus MCI, national phone companies versus local Bell spin-offs, cable companies versus phone companies. For the most part, voters don’t have a horse in any of these races. But the issues that do rivet their focus are not the central issues over which these warring special interests contend. A politician must make time in his day to work on the things his constituents care about. Unless he deliberately turns aside from these commercial dogfights and involves himself in issues on which the lobbyists are silent and uninterested, his political focus will wander far from his voters’ concerns.
Even among human-services issues, the lobbying guns are all lined up for the elderly. The American Association of Retired Persons (AARP)—of which I became a direct-mail target when I turned fifty—is one of the most potent lobbies around. But voters care more about the very young than the old. The 1960s focus on elderly poverty has given way to a sense that we are neglecting our children while we subsidize our seniors. With a quarter of America’s children growing up in poverty (twice the proportion of the population as a whole), voters want to hear more about the under-five set than about those over eighty.
One of the blind spots of the Republican Party is the increasing concern American voters have for the working poor—those not on welfare but still in or near poverty. One of the major mistakes of their Contract With America was its opposition to the expansion of the earned-income tax credit, initially passed under Republican presidents, which assures the working poor of federal tax credits and subsidies to lift them out of poverty. Public concern has shifted from the bottom 10 percent, who are on welfare, to the next 10 percent, who are working but struggling to make it.
These new foci of our politics turn our old interest-group priorities on their heads. The very groups for whom no lobbyist speaks are those the voters most want our process to hear. From this paradox emerges the true ideological fault line of modern politics: the insider versus the outsider. No longer is the left/right division the most important. Voters see little difference between the right-wing friends of doctors and the left-wing friends of trial lawyers. They are both insiders. The electorate wants politicians who will speak up for four-year-old children, single mothers leaving welfare to find a job, or low-income men anxious to upgrade their skills and improve their jobs. These interests do not donate money. They have no trade associations to advance their goals. They don’t even vote in large numbers. But their problems galvanize those who do vote and play a central role in our elections.
Chapter 10
Generosity Over Self-Interest
IF VOTERS APPRECIATE that the major issues in their lives are social rather than economic, they also realize that their own individual self-interest can best be served by helping others.
Pollution can best be prevented by policing industry and by enlightening the public. Education can best be served by upgrading standards in schools and funding them. Welfare and taxes can best be reduced by improving educational and vocational opportunities for the poor and making them find work or go to school. Crime can best be addressed by arresting criminals and by helping young people stay out of crime.
None of these steps involves any program, subsidy, or tax cut that is in the direct economic interest of the vast bulk of the voters. Not one of these ideas will put more money into their pockets, yet they are the key initiatives voters agree are vital to improving their personal quality of life.
So, enlightened self-interest may have achieved what religion never has done in leading the American voter to value charity and generosity to others over padding his own pocket.
But our politicians, as always, are slow to get the message.
When Bob Dole’s advisors suggested he propose a 15 percent personal income tax cut across the board, they felt he had a sure winner in the idea. Working from a playbook from the early 1980s, they hoped that voters would realize that Dole’s idea meant more money in their paychecks every week.
But they misunderstood the voters. The electorate knew that a tax cut would help each of them personally. But they also knew that a fatter paycheck was not their major priority. Their self-interest led elsewhere. They understood that their lives would be made better by helping others than by helping themselves.
So Clinton’s smaller but targeted tax cut carried the day. Voters wanted to cut the taxes of parents with children living at home. They liked tax credits for kids going to college, or adults returning for retraining and additional schooling. The electorate supported tax breaks to make it easier for first-time homebuyers to save for a down payment and for people to save for college.
“Give the money to them, not to me,” the American voter said, shocking the political establishment. Voters have become generous because they realize that only by helping others can they make their communities safe and stable.
In the cold, objective world of practical politics, we must come to realize that warm hearted generosity, with standards and discipline, is the most pragmatic course for a politician to pursue. What virtue doesn’t prompt, a candidate’s self-interest should elicit.
Environmentalism most effectively captures this sense of helping oneself by helping others. As Americans worry about their diet, drinking water, and air, they’ve become aware that the pollution that hurts their neighbor also hurts them. As environmentalism turns its focus to global problems like ozone depletion and planetary warming, the self-interest evident in working with others becomes ever more apparent. The dangers of pollution and climate change mock the basic construct of self-interest politics. Is there any CEO who wants to die young as he breathes our common air?
The illogic of self-centered politics is dawning on large numbers of Americans, but not on their political candidates. But as the global problems of environmental destruction loom ever larger, it is inevitable that the twenty-first century will become more preoccupied with common interest than with self-interest.
Chapter 11
Communities, Not Gover
nments
IF THE AGENDA of our politics has changed, so has the means of achieving it. It is almost a truism to say that politics concerns itself with the direction of government. But this statement is no longer really true. Most of the important changes our new electorate seeks can best be addressed through collective community action, often using the marketplace and profit incentives to advance their goals. Government’s role in this new vehicle for change is to organize, publicize, catalyze, and—sometimes—partially to subsidize. It is not to bureaucratize.
For a long time, political theorists have spoken about the need for more industrial democracy, empowering workers in the management of the businesses that employ them. But voters are now seeking a kind of marketplace democracy in which they can use their economic power, just as they do their electoral franchise, to promote social changes.
In its elemental stages, this new form of political power has already arrived. Recycled toilet paper sells better than the perfumed, pink, soft, double-ply alternative that comes from dead trees. “Biodegradable” (meaning that it rots) was once a product’s downfall. Now, it is its most treasured attribute. The changes triggered by worldwide disinvestment in South Africa show the power of a marketplace determined to trigger social change. Swiss bankers are doing whatever they can to avoid a global boycott over their hoarding of ill-gotten gains from Nazi bank accounts.
Increasingly, politicians should look to schemes that harness the positive social intentions of American consumers to the task of upgrading their world. Recently, a consortium of timber producers sought to label their wood so that purchasers of their end product would know that they had observed all the suggestions of environmental and wildlife preservation groups in their lumbering practices.