by Dick Morris
Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich has proposed an idea that may well be the blueprint for scores of schemes to use the profit motive to induce social change. He proposes that the apparel industry either adopt voluntarily, or have adopted for them, suggested minimum standards for working conditions and compensation of workers, and prohibit child labor. Then he suggests that any garment manufacturer who complies with the standards and is willing to open his factories to inspection be permitted to buy “No Sweat” labels to sew into his merchandise for consumers to see. The revenues from the sale of the labels would pay for the inspectors and for advertising to urge consumers to buy only No Sweat garments.
Would China permit American inspectors to examine their garment factories? Not on your life. But denied the No Sweat label, they would likely see their American market share plummet and be forced to relent. Beijing would never succumb to government pressure to violate its sovereignty to open its factories, but in the face of pressure from the American marketplace, it would indeed be helpless to prevent it.
This generic formula can work in many different situations. First, formulate standards for an industry to follow voluntarily. Then, publicly reward cooperating companies so that consumers can tell which are their products. Finally, publicize their compliance and then sit back and let the marketplace do its work:
Which banks have safe cash machines?
Which HMOs permit patients to appeal denials of treatments?
Which TV programs and movies have especially good educational or values content?
Which toys are safest and most educational for children?
Which foreign imports have been made by workers paid most fairly?
Which schools have been certified to have the best academic standards?
The key to each of these efforts is that the certification must be by a non-governmental, private, and widely trusted group of people or agencies. The enforcement must be left to the marketplace.
Consumers are clearly willing to pay more for their products if doing so causes positive social change. When Labor Secretary Reich proposed the No Sweat label idea, polling showed that 65 percent of Americans would be willing to pay twenty-five cents more for their garments if they had such a label. By harnessing this desire for idealism and change, a politician can get in sync with the times and can relate to voters in a way that neither the advocates of government intervention nor the supporters of the unfettered marketplace can replicate.
Proposals like these are the ones that will seize the imagination of the electorate. They tap into our collective desire for progress without regulation and for social change without higher taxes.
Part 2
Governing
Our political attitudes have changed how we must govern. The formal powers of the American presidency are increasingly eroded. The Federal Reserve Board, not the president, runs the economy. The American public will not tolerate significant casualties in military action, compromising the president’s formal power as commander in chief. With a national mandate to cut taxes and shrink government, new spending is difficult to pass. The national consensus against government regulation further handcuffs the chief executive.
How is a president or an executive leader at any level of government to lead or achieve his agenda? What are the new styles of governance our leaders can use in our new era?
Chapter 12
The Need for a Daily Majority
AS WE BECOME more of a Jeffersonian direct democracy, the presidency acquires more of the responsiveness and fragility characteristic of a parliamentary system. No longer does a president get elected and remain powerful for four years. His functional strength ebbs and flows with his popularity as it is measured in weekly tracking polls throughout his term.
Today, a politician does not just need public support to win elections; he needs it to govern. An elected executive—whether president, governor, or mayor—needs a popular majority every day in his term. Politicians and the media ignore titular power and focus only on an elected official’s actual ability to command a following. Like canny market traders who disregard face value but look only at the over-the-counter price, they understand that a president without popularity is without power as well. When he dips below 50 percent, he is functionally out of office.
Our constant newspaper polling, instantaneously sensitive to changes in public thinking, has changed the very nature of our democracy. While American presidents do not rise or fall with votes of confidence from Congress like their British counterparts, each week’s poll is a vote of confidence the president must win to govern. His only advantage in a nominal hold on the office is that it gives him time to get his popularity back should he lose it.
As scandal took its toll on Nixon and Reagan, Vietnam dogged Johnson, and the economy plagued Bush. All four presidents saw their last years in office robbed of any real power by their drop in popularity. In the language of Watergate, they all twisted slowly in the wind. Bill Clinton took the oath of office on January 21, 1993, but his failure to get even close to a majority of the popular vote cost him much of the power of his presidency in the early years. Buffeted by Whitewater, his executive order on gays in the military, his appointment of Lani Guinier, his failure to get his Attorney General nominees confirmed, the travel office scandal, and even the Los Angeles airport haircut, Clinton found his power eroded from the very beginning. Often, he would say that he felt Republicans “don’t recognize me as a real president because I didn’t win a majority.” When his congressional allies defied the polls and backed the president, passing his 1993 tax increase and backing his health-reform package, it cost them their majority in the 1994 election. It was only when Clinton passed the 50 percent approval mark, after the 1995 government shutdown, that he was really fully empowered as president.
Clinton biographer David Maraniss criticizes the “permanent campaign” that Clinton waged as governor of Arkansas. Many criticized President Clinton’s reliance on polling and advertising during the 1995-1996 runup to his reelection. Some will doubtless wonder at the president’s ongoing use of polling even as he moves through his second term, unable to seek reelection.
But a politician needs a permanent campaign to keep a permanent majority. One who does not calculate how to keep his support each day over each issue will almost inevitably fail.
In a 1997 panel discussion, Wall Street Journal columnist Al Hunt attacked those who bring political manipulation to the White House. “Did Abe Lincoln or Franklin Roosevelt need political handlers?” he asked scornfully at a forum in Washington.
Damn right they did. Their names were David Davis, for Lincoln, and Louie Howe, for Roosevelt. Just as we cleanse the memorials in Washington to keep the marble bright, we sanitize our memories of past political leaders and impute to them a divine streak. But all effective leaders use the tools of persuasion and manipulation to lead and to succeed.
Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Harry Truman waged their permanent campaigns from the White House, huddled with advisors Joe Timulty, Louis Howe, Harry Hopkins, and Clark Clifford. Now, a president speaks with political consultants instead. Wilson, Roosevelt, and Truman fought to retain their popularity and sell their programs through barnstorming speeches or radio addresses. Now, a president uses television advertising as well. The icons of the past relied on political instinct. Now, presidents can use scientific polls and focus groups. I fail to see the difference.
In 1978, conservative Democrat Ed King successfully toppled Mike Dukakis as governor of Massachusetts. King lagged badly in the polls throughout the whole campaign, surging only right before primary day and immediately before election day. Dragged down soon after the election by scandal, it was clear the unpopular governor had only two days where he broke 50 percent in popularity—primary day and election day.
They turned out not to be enough. As King’s popularity plummeted, the liberal Massachusetts legislature sat on their hands, defeated his programs, and waited him out. Devoid of
power, King couldn’t get anything passed, which made him an easy target for Dukakis’ comeback in the next election.
Keeping a majority does not mean abandoning principle. It means caring enough about how you explain yourself to get the nation behind you. When Franklin D. Roosevelt rallied support for lend-lease by asking if it didn’t make sense to lend your neighbor your garden hose if his house was on fire, he overcame America’s isolationists. Abraham Lincoln used the biblical metaphor of a house divided against itself to win backing for the eradication of slavery. Woodrow Wilson rallied popular support for America’s entry into World War I by calling it a struggle to “make the world safe for democracy.” When presidents explain themselves well, they are vindicating principle, not abandoning it.
But when presidents take bold steps and don’t explain them properly, they aren’t doing their job. Woodrow Wilson’s failure to rally popular support for the League of Nations, Jimmy Carter’s inability to rescue America from what he called its “malaise,” and President Clinton’s failure to make a compelling case for his massive healthcare changes are all grisly examples of this failure.
The greater informational levels of the voters, their decreasing inhibitions in expressing disagreement, and their greater preference for Jeffersonian direct involvement all make the need for a “permanent campaign” to sell a president’s policies all the more crucial.
After the healthcare debacle, Clinton learned this lesson. It was his permanent campaign—polls, ads, and all—that defined the budget fight against Gingrich as a battle to save Medicare, Medicaid, education, and the environment.
“I won’t sit back silently and let them do to me over the budget what they did to me over health reform,” President Clinton said at a meeting at the White House in 1995. “We’ll be the ones on the air advertising, not just Harry and Louise,” alluding to the imaginary couple invented by the insurance companies to attack the president’s healthcare plan.
Once upon a time, elections settled things for the term of office. Now, they are mere punctuation marks in an ongoing search for public support and a functioning majority. Each day is election day in modern America.
Chapter 13
Whether to Be Aggressive or Conciliatory
MACHIAVELLI ASKED WHETHER it is better to be loved or feared in The Prince. The most basic decision a modern politician must make is whether to be aggressive or conciliatory. Should he lash out boldly with new approaches and positions, or focus instead on incremental change? Is it time to run up the flag and charge, or to mediate differences and seek to move the consensus by stages?
Wrongly, a politician’s personal temperament or passion usually governs this crucial decision. Rather, it is the mood of the times that should be decisive. The visionary or strident political leader who comes at a time when America yearns for national unity will fall flat. But woe to the leader who seeks sweet reason in a time of national angst and anger. He is usually swept aside by one revolutionary mob or another charging to the left or the right. The conciliator in a time of upheaval will prove inadequate. It matters less if a politician’s agenda is great or small, or if his personality is explosive or calm—he must match his style to the mood of his era.
American voters alternate between periods of confrontation and debate and those of moderation and conciliation. During periods of confrontation, we want our political system to describe the alternatives to us and to fashion new answers to coming problems. Unlike Japan, where the political system stresses consensus and candidates rarely articulate sharp differences with one another, Americans want conflict during periods in which we confront new problems and seek new solutions. We egg on the left and the right to fashion agendas and offer their contrasting remedies to what ails us. We welcome one’s critiques of the other’s proposals as we grope with new questions and national problems.
But there comes a time when our voters have heard enough and are ready to come to conclusions. Impatient with continued debate, they see the consensus they want enacted and feel it is time for their politicians to get on with it. We are not like Italy and France, where debates seem never to come to conclusions, parties remain embittered enemies, and old conflicts keep resurfacing. Here, the left and the right must come together when voters call for consensus and demand that they enact the decisions the people have made. At such times, we Americans will not tolerate divisiveness when it is time for joint action.
Unlike Japan, we use our political system to debate and explore new options when we feel that the conventional wisdom fails to offer adequate solutions. But unlike Italy or France, we do not endlessly polarize our politics into rigid opposing camps. We come to conclusions. Even if our politicians continue to fight, the American people synthesize their views into a national consensus.
In our recent history, the alternating periods of confrontation and conciliation have been clear enough.
While World War II prompted conciliation, postwar uncertainty about the threat of communism, the role of labor, and civil rights triggered a highly partisan polarization in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
The Eisenhower years brought back a calm consensus. Then, concern about racial discrimination, domestic poverty, the war in Vietnam, Watergate, and the energy crisis caused conciliation to fade, ushering in a period of confrontation and change that continued through the early 1980s.
By the middle of the decade, a calm returned under Reagan’s seemingly benign stewardship. Shattered by the recession of 1991-1992, debate raged anew as America zigged to the left with Clinton and zagged back to the right with Gingrich. By 1996, the debate was spent and a national mood of bipartisan conciliation and compromise returned.
With each of these oscillations, some politicians got the message and others didn’t. For example, Truman, Nixon, and John L. Lewis grasped the combative tenor of the 1945-1953 period and ratcheted up their rhetoric to meet the challenge. But Thomas E. Dewey did not, and came across as too bland and banal.
In the period of consensus that followed, Eisenhower’s tone fit well, but the more strident voices like McCarthy’s and Nixon’s did not. Nixon waited until history came round again to his aggressive style and, with politicians like George Wallace, succeeded well in the turbulent 1960s and 1970s. Those who sought consensus failed. Lyndon Johnson’s appeal for wartime unity, Ford’s feeble attempt to “Whip Inflation Now (WIN),” and Carter’s summons to the “moral equivalent of war” for energy independence didn’t work.
If Nixon waited for the times to change to suit his style, Ronald Reagan changed his style to suit the times. In 1980, he reflected national anger and angst by pushing an aggressive agenda of less government and lower taxes. In 1984, he changed his style, morphing into a tone of contentment and prosperity more fitting to the country’s mood. Voices of dissent like Gary Hart and Walter Mondale got little attention. Not only were their views too liberal, their style was too aggressive and activist to suit the pacific mid-1980s.
When recession broke the calm, Bill Clinton profited by the new intensity of the debate, while President George Bush vainly sought to ride the feelings of national harmony after they had vanished. In the 1992 campaign, the incumbent’s assurance that the recession had passed, and his appeals for national unity, sounded hollow in a country that demanded activist answers to nagging and deepening problems.
After he took office, Clinton rode the polarization of the national debate with an aggressively liberal program of tax increases and healthcare reform. It was Newt Gingrich’s genius to counter the activism of the left with that of the right. Realizing that the times were neither liberal nor conservative, but simply activist, he achieved control of Congress in 1994 with aggressive advocacy of spending and tax cuts, opposition to gun control, and a pro-life agenda on abortion.
As the Gingrich budget cuts wore thin on America, Clinton’s liberal advisors urged him daily to lash out at Republican cuts in school lunches and Medicare. Speechwriting at the White House became a search through the thesaurus fo
r new invective. Clinton scorched Republican policies. But his ratings remained dismal and the hot words seemed only to dig him deeper into his hole.
Like Reagan before him, Clinton came to realize that the national mood had again shifted. Exhausted by the liberal extremism of healthcare reform and the right-wing agenda of harsh budget cuts, the nation wanted its politicians to get together and compromise their differences. His overtures to Gingrich in the aftermath of the GOP 1994 victory were well received in the polls, but his aggressive condemnation of the Republican cuts did little to improve his popularity.
America was not in the mood for another fight. Having steered left with Clinton and right with Gingrich, it now wanted compromise. Only when the president cast aside what he called “the liberal stuff my staff keeps putting in front of me every day,” and outlined a way to balance the budget and cut taxes without slashing vital programs, did America begin to listen.
As Clinton lowered his voice, he raised his ratings. When he crossed party lines to advocate a balanced budget and fashioned a compromise on welfare reform, he moved into the ascendancy. President Clinton’s recognition that the nation wanted compromise and “common ground” in 1995 and 1996, while the Republican right and the Democratic left spoiled for one more decisive round of conflict, impelled his turnaround in fortune and his reelection.
When Trent Lott inherited the Senate Republican leadership in mid-1996, he realized that the national mood had shifted back to a desire for consensus and unity. Understanding that the GOP had moved too far toward confrontation, he understood that he could not keep the Senate in GOP hands without setting aside partisanship and turning to compromise. When he took power, he noted that most incumbent Republican senators faced uphill battles for reelection. “Forget about it if we don’t start passing some laws around here,” Lott said. When he worked with Clinton to pass the minimum-wage increase, the Kennedy-Kassenbaum law, and welfare reform, he saw his GOP congressional incumbents rise in the polls. Consensus worked.