Saturday, January 15, 2005
I.
In writing the previous article, I did a lot of research into both tort reform and Social Security reform, and as I did my research, I kept coming back to the same question. Why is tort reform a conservative issue? It's easy enough to understand why reforming Social Security, or even eliminating it entirely, is a conservative issue. After all, the core principles of conservative ideology are personal responsibility and limited government. But tort reform doesn't necessarily correlate with these values. The victims of torts are not irresponsible people, they are people who have been exposed to the negligence or malfeasance of others, and running a justice system is an appropriate activity for even the most limited of governments.
For conservatives, there are broader, systematic problems with the legal system. Large awards in tort claims create very significant problems, both practically and ideologically. First, awards for noneconomic damages and punitive damages can be so high as to completely ruin a business; second, these damages are unpredictable and expensive to insure against; third, the victims of torts do not deserve to benefit from damages assessed as punitive measures; fourth, large awards encourage more suits, even those of questionable merit, leading to high settlements even when the merits of a case are questionable; fifth, lawyers take anywhere from a third to over a half of the proceeds of these settlements and jury awards, which makes them the primary beneficiaries of the current tort system; and finally, large tort awards function as a practical risk for only one group of people - those who have a lot of money.
Not all of these concerns are particularly ideological, nor are they all that controversial. Liberals do not wish to see good businesses ruined and important jobs lost by tort awards that are grossly out of proportion with committed wrongs, and a liberal sense of justice is also offended when innocent people or corporations are forced to settle outrageous suits filed by shyster plaintiffs. On the other hand, two of these claims are so profoundly ideologically based that they must be examined more closely.
II.
The first ideological claim is that victims of torts do not deserve to benefit from the punitive component of a damages award. In a judgment in tort, a damage award has a number of components. The first component is compensatory damages, in which the responsible party must compensate the aggrieved party for damages both measurable and non-economic. The second component of an award is punitive damages. Generally, this type of award has the express purpose of punishing the guilty party as well as deterring others from engaging in similar behavior.
In between these two types of damages falls pain and suffering. Pain and suffering is the catch-all name for non-economic damages suffered by the plaintiff. It includes physical pain, emotional pain, and injuries which, though difficult to assign a dollar value to, are nonetheless quite real, such as amputations, blindness, or the loss of a child or parent. Though legally speaking, these non-economic damages are in the category of compensatory damages, there is certainly much in them that has a punitive flavor. They are not easily quantifiable, not consistent from case to case, and lead to much higher awards in jury trials than in cases adjucated solely by a judge. Because of these factors, such awards are more easily viewed as arbitrary and unjust, instead of being seen as a woefully inadequate substitution for the just compensation that mere humans simply cannot provide. It is these claims which the Bush administration is currently seeking to cap, though the administration has also called for caps on punitive damages.
In seeking to cap pain and suffering claims, the administration is making an audacious claim itself. It is asserting that $250,000 (the proposed cap) is always sufficient to cover any non-economic claim. No matter what your claim, from psychological damages inflicted by a pedophile priest, to the lifelong scars, both physical and emotional, of a wrongful amputation, to the tragic and senseless loss of a child's life through malpractice, to the savage poisoning of an entire community and its children by the willful dumping of toxins into their drinking water, all are resolved with a cool quarter million from the central office. There's something horrible about knowing that after thousands of years of exploring human suffering in art, literature, law, and politics, we've finally discovered that it's worth, at most, $250,000.
On an even more fundamental level, the first question to ask is not what the appropriate cap number is, but whether capping is appropriate at all. If the problem is that juries are making bad decisions, the solution would be to provide better guidelines to them, or to make their judgment reversible. In fact, this already occurs, and most massive judgments are reduced, in many cases by more than 50%, either on appeal or as part of a negotiated settlement to avoid an appeal. If the problem is that companies are forced into settlements for cases that have little merit, expand the use of administrative law judges for initial judgments on the merits of a case, or increase the penalties for lawyers who bring frivolous claims. Limiting the damages is the sort of solution that guarantees only one truth - that defendants will pay out less money to victims.
Some stop that analysis at this point, chalk the whole argument up to simple greed and politics as usual, and carry on with their day. But the actual issue is more insidious. By seeking to keep money in the pockets of defendants, conservatives are actually attempting to destroy the power of the judicial system to oversee government and business in any meaningful fashion. Our judicial system, as it currently operates, is a key participant in the shaping of our law. Perhaps this is unsurprising - one would expect that the legions of intelligent, educated and accomplished men and women who devote their lives to the practice and study of law would be welcomed to the process of shaping it. To conservatives it is abhorrent. Some of this can no doubt be attributed to the legal activism that led to racial integration, civil rights, and the uniquely American conception of the conjoined rights of self-expression and privacy. However, some of this detestation for American justice as currently practiced stems from the desire of conservatives for legislative authority.
One of the great lies of every conservative movement is that it is, in fact, conservative. Whereas progressive parties authorize their agenda on the power of good ideas, conservatives claim authority from the power of great people. By canonizing certain people, conservative movements create authority for certain political positions. We often encounter this argument in the form of the constitutional interpretive stance known as intent of the author. Conservatives argue that only the original intent of such great personages as the Founding Fathers has the necessary inherent rightness to guide us today in our understanding of the Constitution. Interpretations which expand this original intent, or which decide on limits to the application of this intent are unauthorized, regardless of whether they are logical. Logic is not the rule of decision, personal greatness is the rule.
What makes this position an internal lie is the fact that it's impossible to understand an intention without some level of interpretation. Lincoln, for instance, was a member of the Republican party, but his political beliefs were more in line with the positions of the Democratic party today. When Lincoln said that he was a Republican, what did he mean? Did he intend to say that he stood for the particular set of issue and positions held at that point in time by his party? Was he stating that the fundamental makeup and structure of the Republican party was superior to other parties? Either position is defensible, and neither is, of itself, conservative. If you wish to sanctify the current positions of the Republican party, you refer to it as the party of Lincoln in this second sense, and claim an inherent and essential rightness to a particular sort of affiliation. If you wish to attack the current positions of the party, you declare that it has betrayed the heritage of Lincoln, thus defining Lincoln's heritage as one of specific ideas and policy goals rather than type of affiliation.
Conservative groups wind up basing their authority on whichever historical figures or tradition is most suitable to the policy goals which conservatives currently stand for. Given that the current structure of the judiciary has left it as the sole watchdog over corporate America, and the underfunding of our justice system has forced it to make strategic decisions regarding commitment of resources to any particular prosecution, it is no surprise that judgments that are out of proportion with the damage caused are a regular feature of our justice system. Only the threat of catastrophic lawsuit serves to incentivize actual following laws intended to protect powerless individuals. By seeking to eliminate this last line of protection, conservatives seek to overthrow basic principles of human dignity and rights in favor of a one-size-fits-all $250,000 commoditization of human suffering and corporate responsibility.
III.
The second ideological claim of conservatives is that large judicial awards serve as a threat to only one class of people - the wealthy. As such, they are inherently unfair, because they select out a group for punishment without seeking to determine their culpability. At first glance, this claim has some moral appeal. All doctors pay high insurance premiums, regardless of whether they've done anything wrong. But this result is actually a function of the insurance industry and the desirability of pooling risks. In order to make sure that any person who wishes to practice medicine can reimburse those to whom he causes injury, we require that medical practitioners carry insurance. By doing so, we inevitably wind up having innocent doctors subsidize the guilty, but that's a preferable outcome to having guilty doctors who cannot compensate their victims.
What's puzzling is that it's not as though capping claims in some way resolves this alleged moral claim that innocents are being unfairly punished. For one, it is inevitable that people pay a price for their affiliations. Though there are many honorable lawyers in this country, they all suffer the slings and arrows brought on by the shameful actions of their less-honorable colleagues. But more to the heart of the matter, capping claims doesn't mean that doctors pay less for their insurance. All that capping claims does is slightly reduce the cost of providing health care (by about 2%, according to the most recent study by the Congressional Budget Office), and passes that savings on to insurance companies. Even if companies do pass these savings on to customers, something which has not occurred in states that have adopted caps, innocent doctors will still subsidize guilty doctors - it'll just cost two cents less on the dollar.
In other words, the moral claim is not resolved by the proposed solution, from which one can infer that the actual claim is something other than the moral claim. The actual claim is identical to the one made in tax policy, and it is a fairness claim. Basically, it is a rejection of the notion most recently popularized by the wild success of the Spiderman movies, in which Peter Parker is forever guided by the lesson of his uncle and adoptive father that "with great power comes great responsibility." For conservatives, the emphasis lies solely on the personal. No matter how much power you have, you must have only personal responsibility - a duty to yourself and your family.
For those who don't have wealth and resources, meeting these responsibilities is a lifelong challenge. For the wealthy, it's simply a box that, once checked, leaves you free to do as you wish. The fact that you have great power is no reason to impute any more responsibility to you than any other person, or so the argument goes. Why should the wealth earned by the sweat of a distant relative's brows be a reason for you to face additional obligations and burdens? Certainly, self-respect may require some charity work or volunteerism, but that's purely a personal choice. If you can sleep well at night without giving up a minute of your time or a penny of your fortune, why, everyone has the right to dislike you, but none has the right to force you to give what is yours.
This wholesale abdication of responsibility is the actual goal of the conservative, and it is bound up in the faith in a higher judgment. Let the greedy man be greedy, let the oppressive man oppress. All will one day come to judgment for their actions, if not in this world then most certainly in the next, and all the aggrieved shall have a healing of their wounds, a comforting of their spirit, and an eternal life in Christ. Forget the rest of the village, just worry about your family. If everyone just worried about themselves, everyone would be fine. Let's just ignore the inconvenient facts that not everyone can take care of themselves, or that for some, taking care of their own is achieved most easily by aggrieving others.
What the Conservative movement holds out to all is the hollow veneer of affiliation. To most of us, affiliation with something greater than yourself is an ennobling act, one in which you share the burdens of others, invest in achievements to benefit more than just yourself, and find identity and appreciation in a community of people who care about one another. Conservatism offers the lie - it offers affiliation, true, but the community of conservatives is bound up by only one shared value: selfishness and isolation.
0 comments
In writing the previous article, I did a lot of research into both tort reform and Social Security reform, and as I did my research, I kept coming back to the same question. Why is tort reform a conservative issue? It's easy enough to understand why reforming Social Security, or even eliminating it entirely, is a conservative issue. After all, the core principles of conservative ideology are personal responsibility and limited government. But tort reform doesn't necessarily correlate with these values. The victims of torts are not irresponsible people, they are people who have been exposed to the negligence or malfeasance of others, and running a justice system is an appropriate activity for even the most limited of governments.
For conservatives, there are broader, systematic problems with the legal system. Large awards in tort claims create very significant problems, both practically and ideologically. First, awards for noneconomic damages and punitive damages can be so high as to completely ruin a business; second, these damages are unpredictable and expensive to insure against; third, the victims of torts do not deserve to benefit from damages assessed as punitive measures; fourth, large awards encourage more suits, even those of questionable merit, leading to high settlements even when the merits of a case are questionable; fifth, lawyers take anywhere from a third to over a half of the proceeds of these settlements and jury awards, which makes them the primary beneficiaries of the current tort system; and finally, large tort awards function as a practical risk for only one group of people - those who have a lot of money.
Not all of these concerns are particularly ideological, nor are they all that controversial. Liberals do not wish to see good businesses ruined and important jobs lost by tort awards that are grossly out of proportion with committed wrongs, and a liberal sense of justice is also offended when innocent people or corporations are forced to settle outrageous suits filed by shyster plaintiffs. On the other hand, two of these claims are so profoundly ideologically based that they must be examined more closely.
II.
The first ideological claim is that victims of torts do not deserve to benefit from the punitive component of a damages award. In a judgment in tort, a damage award has a number of components. The first component is compensatory damages, in which the responsible party must compensate the aggrieved party for damages both measurable and non-economic. The second component of an award is punitive damages. Generally, this type of award has the express purpose of punishing the guilty party as well as deterring others from engaging in similar behavior.
In between these two types of damages falls pain and suffering. Pain and suffering is the catch-all name for non-economic damages suffered by the plaintiff. It includes physical pain, emotional pain, and injuries which, though difficult to assign a dollar value to, are nonetheless quite real, such as amputations, blindness, or the loss of a child or parent. Though legally speaking, these non-economic damages are in the category of compensatory damages, there is certainly much in them that has a punitive flavor. They are not easily quantifiable, not consistent from case to case, and lead to much higher awards in jury trials than in cases adjucated solely by a judge. Because of these factors, such awards are more easily viewed as arbitrary and unjust, instead of being seen as a woefully inadequate substitution for the just compensation that mere humans simply cannot provide. It is these claims which the Bush administration is currently seeking to cap, though the administration has also called for caps on punitive damages.
In seeking to cap pain and suffering claims, the administration is making an audacious claim itself. It is asserting that $250,000 (the proposed cap) is always sufficient to cover any non-economic claim. No matter what your claim, from psychological damages inflicted by a pedophile priest, to the lifelong scars, both physical and emotional, of a wrongful amputation, to the tragic and senseless loss of a child's life through malpractice, to the savage poisoning of an entire community and its children by the willful dumping of toxins into their drinking water, all are resolved with a cool quarter million from the central office. There's something horrible about knowing that after thousands of years of exploring human suffering in art, literature, law, and politics, we've finally discovered that it's worth, at most, $250,000.
On an even more fundamental level, the first question to ask is not what the appropriate cap number is, but whether capping is appropriate at all. If the problem is that juries are making bad decisions, the solution would be to provide better guidelines to them, or to make their judgment reversible. In fact, this already occurs, and most massive judgments are reduced, in many cases by more than 50%, either on appeal or as part of a negotiated settlement to avoid an appeal. If the problem is that companies are forced into settlements for cases that have little merit, expand the use of administrative law judges for initial judgments on the merits of a case, or increase the penalties for lawyers who bring frivolous claims. Limiting the damages is the sort of solution that guarantees only one truth - that defendants will pay out less money to victims.
Some stop that analysis at this point, chalk the whole argument up to simple greed and politics as usual, and carry on with their day. But the actual issue is more insidious. By seeking to keep money in the pockets of defendants, conservatives are actually attempting to destroy the power of the judicial system to oversee government and business in any meaningful fashion. Our judicial system, as it currently operates, is a key participant in the shaping of our law. Perhaps this is unsurprising - one would expect that the legions of intelligent, educated and accomplished men and women who devote their lives to the practice and study of law would be welcomed to the process of shaping it. To conservatives it is abhorrent. Some of this can no doubt be attributed to the legal activism that led to racial integration, civil rights, and the uniquely American conception of the conjoined rights of self-expression and privacy. However, some of this detestation for American justice as currently practiced stems from the desire of conservatives for legislative authority.
One of the great lies of every conservative movement is that it is, in fact, conservative. Whereas progressive parties authorize their agenda on the power of good ideas, conservatives claim authority from the power of great people. By canonizing certain people, conservative movements create authority for certain political positions. We often encounter this argument in the form of the constitutional interpretive stance known as intent of the author. Conservatives argue that only the original intent of such great personages as the Founding Fathers has the necessary inherent rightness to guide us today in our understanding of the Constitution. Interpretations which expand this original intent, or which decide on limits to the application of this intent are unauthorized, regardless of whether they are logical. Logic is not the rule of decision, personal greatness is the rule.
What makes this position an internal lie is the fact that it's impossible to understand an intention without some level of interpretation. Lincoln, for instance, was a member of the Republican party, but his political beliefs were more in line with the positions of the Democratic party today. When Lincoln said that he was a Republican, what did he mean? Did he intend to say that he stood for the particular set of issue and positions held at that point in time by his party? Was he stating that the fundamental makeup and structure of the Republican party was superior to other parties? Either position is defensible, and neither is, of itself, conservative. If you wish to sanctify the current positions of the Republican party, you refer to it as the party of Lincoln in this second sense, and claim an inherent and essential rightness to a particular sort of affiliation. If you wish to attack the current positions of the party, you declare that it has betrayed the heritage of Lincoln, thus defining Lincoln's heritage as one of specific ideas and policy goals rather than type of affiliation.
Conservative groups wind up basing their authority on whichever historical figures or tradition is most suitable to the policy goals which conservatives currently stand for. Given that the current structure of the judiciary has left it as the sole watchdog over corporate America, and the underfunding of our justice system has forced it to make strategic decisions regarding commitment of resources to any particular prosecution, it is no surprise that judgments that are out of proportion with the damage caused are a regular feature of our justice system. Only the threat of catastrophic lawsuit serves to incentivize actual following laws intended to protect powerless individuals. By seeking to eliminate this last line of protection, conservatives seek to overthrow basic principles of human dignity and rights in favor of a one-size-fits-all $250,000 commoditization of human suffering and corporate responsibility.
III.
The second ideological claim of conservatives is that large judicial awards serve as a threat to only one class of people - the wealthy. As such, they are inherently unfair, because they select out a group for punishment without seeking to determine their culpability. At first glance, this claim has some moral appeal. All doctors pay high insurance premiums, regardless of whether they've done anything wrong. But this result is actually a function of the insurance industry and the desirability of pooling risks. In order to make sure that any person who wishes to practice medicine can reimburse those to whom he causes injury, we require that medical practitioners carry insurance. By doing so, we inevitably wind up having innocent doctors subsidize the guilty, but that's a preferable outcome to having guilty doctors who cannot compensate their victims.
What's puzzling is that it's not as though capping claims in some way resolves this alleged moral claim that innocents are being unfairly punished. For one, it is inevitable that people pay a price for their affiliations. Though there are many honorable lawyers in this country, they all suffer the slings and arrows brought on by the shameful actions of their less-honorable colleagues. But more to the heart of the matter, capping claims doesn't mean that doctors pay less for their insurance. All that capping claims does is slightly reduce the cost of providing health care (by about 2%, according to the most recent study by the Congressional Budget Office), and passes that savings on to insurance companies. Even if companies do pass these savings on to customers, something which has not occurred in states that have adopted caps, innocent doctors will still subsidize guilty doctors - it'll just cost two cents less on the dollar.
In other words, the moral claim is not resolved by the proposed solution, from which one can infer that the actual claim is something other than the moral claim. The actual claim is identical to the one made in tax policy, and it is a fairness claim. Basically, it is a rejection of the notion most recently popularized by the wild success of the Spiderman movies, in which Peter Parker is forever guided by the lesson of his uncle and adoptive father that "with great power comes great responsibility." For conservatives, the emphasis lies solely on the personal. No matter how much power you have, you must have only personal responsibility - a duty to yourself and your family.
For those who don't have wealth and resources, meeting these responsibilities is a lifelong challenge. For the wealthy, it's simply a box that, once checked, leaves you free to do as you wish. The fact that you have great power is no reason to impute any more responsibility to you than any other person, or so the argument goes. Why should the wealth earned by the sweat of a distant relative's brows be a reason for you to face additional obligations and burdens? Certainly, self-respect may require some charity work or volunteerism, but that's purely a personal choice. If you can sleep well at night without giving up a minute of your time or a penny of your fortune, why, everyone has the right to dislike you, but none has the right to force you to give what is yours.
This wholesale abdication of responsibility is the actual goal of the conservative, and it is bound up in the faith in a higher judgment. Let the greedy man be greedy, let the oppressive man oppress. All will one day come to judgment for their actions, if not in this world then most certainly in the next, and all the aggrieved shall have a healing of their wounds, a comforting of their spirit, and an eternal life in Christ. Forget the rest of the village, just worry about your family. If everyone just worried about themselves, everyone would be fine. Let's just ignore the inconvenient facts that not everyone can take care of themselves, or that for some, taking care of their own is achieved most easily by aggrieving others.
What the Conservative movement holds out to all is the hollow veneer of affiliation. To most of us, affiliation with something greater than yourself is an ennobling act, one in which you share the burdens of others, invest in achievements to benefit more than just yourself, and find identity and appreciation in a community of people who care about one another. Conservatism offers the lie - it offers affiliation, true, but the community of conservatives is bound up by only one shared value: selfishness and isolation.
Friday, January 14, 2005
Although the recent South Asian tsunami disaster has rightfully dominated the news recently, the Bush administration has started moving towards enacting its primary policy objectives as well. Foremost among these objectives is reforming Social Security, perhaps the most sacred program to emerge out of the New Deal, and if successful, the greatest Conservative legislative achievement in decades. It is particularly notable then that the administration is supporting another major reform at the same time - an act which appears politically puzzling, given that it may distract from the plan to revamp Social Security. This other reform is the attempt to cap punitive damages for non-physical injuries in medical malpractice cases to $250,000.
At first glance, the two proposals seem wholly unrelated. One program seeks to borrow trillions of dollars in the hopes that amateur individual investors will invest this borrowed money wisely enough to repay the debt, and to generate a surplus large enough to benefit both the investors and the federal government. The other program seeks to lower the cost of insurance premiums by essentially asking the families of victims of medical malpractice to subsidize the insurance industry by limiting the payouts they can receive. Upon closer inspection though, the two programs are linked by something more than their irresponsible approach to governance.
Among the narratives which the Bush administration has promulgated about itself is the recent re-election mandate theory, in which the Republican party claims a mandate to reshape America's domestic politics, despite the fact that voters to whom domestic issues such as healthcare and the economy were paramount voted overwhelmingly for John Kerry. The attempt to sail a controversial legislative agenda through Congress will test this mandate narrative.
Republicans are feeling more uneasy today than what one might have expected after winning even larger majorities in both houses of Congress in the past election. Some of that unease comes from a redefinition of ideology that the Neocons have thrust upon the party. Right now though, things are not looking good for the Neocons. With no WMDs in Iraq, a war that has lost the support of the majority of the voters, and a mission in Iraq that is suddenly faced with the prospect of serious restructuring once a massive, unexpected, and Presidentially authorized review is completed. Indeed, saber-rattling can already be heard from the camp which the Neocons had once smirkingly dubbed the Paleocons; among these Conservative-flavored Conservatives are old warhorses like former Speaker of the House and architect of the current Republican Congressional majority Newt Gingrich, former Bob Dole running-mate Jack Kemp, and billionaire financier and one-time Presidential office-seeker Steve Forbes.
When George W. Bush first ran in 2000, he sought to distance himself from the curmudgeonly, old, and unpopular perception of Republicans, and instead sought to reposition himself as a warm, religious Conservative, who appreciated value in economics and values in private life. Calling himself a "compassionate Conservative", the Governor of Texas tried to sell America on the idea that big, across-the-board tax cuts were good for whatever ailed you, and since they would cure any ill, from a too-large government surplus, to a deficit-stricken, recessional economy, there would soon be no need for the traditional entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare. These new programs would eventually be reconstituted into something more appropriate for a government that would generate income primarily through taxing consumption.
Putting aside political rancor (but only for the moment), there's a serious timing problem with trying to change fundamental rules for any large system. My father would always joke that whenever the British consider switching over to driving on the right side of the road, they always stall when the only acceptable compromise between proponents and opponents of the plan is to implement it gradually, starting only with the trucks. That's where the Bush team is at right now. The equation for making sense of Conservative economics, as best as I understand it, is that a tax on consumption alone would be cheap and efficient to administer, would encourage untaxed savings and investment, and would exempt certain kinds of consumption, like healthcare, from taxation, so that all families could meet their basic needs. The main problem is that a tax on consumption, if applied to current economic realities, would result in a lot less tax revenue than the federal government currently collects. Even if we grant the assumption that if we reformed our tax and entitlement policies, the economy would expand at a faster rate, so tax revenue would eventually grow as well, you're still left with a gap of trillions of dollars that would need to be financed (read: borrowed) in order to make the changeover.
Neocons and Paleocons react to this assumption, and its consequences, in very different ways. To an old-school conservative, the watchword is caution, and the approach is piecemeal. These conservatives seek to cut and restructure taxes in step with cuts in spending and deficit reduction. In fact, Bill Clinton's successful co-opting of Conservative policies was palatable to both parties particularly because cuts in capital-gains taxes were accompanied by deficit-slashing and a commitment to balanced budgets (despite a very large number of military deployments abroad). The idea of borrowing trillions of dollars to enact an economic policy which only works in theory so far is abhorrent to the prudent, fiscally sensible conservative, particularly when it comes at a time of deep national debt.
The Neocon is rarely constrained by such reality checks. Flush with electoral riches, but with the day of reckoning for Iraq still off in the future, Neocons have successfully ignored reality for the time being, and are looking to make one more big bet. As their foreign policy has demonstrated, Neocons prefer the bold, dramatic, throw-the-cards-in-the-air approach to change, rather than the pragmatic, step-by-step approach long favored by their conservative forebears. But the Neocons can't do it alone. Even though the Neocons wield great power in the executive branch of government, they are dependent on Paleocons in the legislature.
It is here that the connection between the medical malpractice and Social Security reforms lies. Medical malpractice reform is either a first step in, or a stalking horse for tort reform, depending on your perspective, and tort reform itself is a key part of the Conservative vision of protecting the haves from the have-nots. To Conservatives, the haves are the haves because they are deserving of it. They have worked hard - at least at some point along the genealogical line - and profited. The have-nots are to blame for their lack. After all, we live in American, a land of opportunity, where anyone willing to work hard can make it. But I digress. The point is that Bush knows that reforming Social Security to include personal investment accounts is going to cost a lot of money today, and most old-school conservatives will not like that one bit. In order to bring them over to his side, Bush must promise them something they want very badly, and tort reform is very high on their wish list - perhaps high enough that they would be willing to borrow over a trillion dollars in order to secure it.
The challenge to Paleocons is significant. In four years of governing, the Republicans have accomplished little of lasting impact on the domestic front. Nearly all of their achievements, from the loosening of environmental standards to opening the federal purse to religious evangelists, have come through expansive uses of executive power. The election of a Democrat to the White House could result in an immediate reversal of many of these policies. In order to truly bring the country onto more Conservative ground, legislative achievements are necessary. Unfortunately for Republicans, the country as a whole does not agree with conservative economic policies, nor is it receptive to conservative social policies of an extreme sort, such as reversal of affirmative action or abortion rights. In fact, it appears that the only 'value' that conservatives share with America as a whole is greed. As long as the promise is tax cuts or lower costs, and as long as the victims are presented as overprivileged or hated (e.g. trial lawyers), Americans can't wait for the checks to arrive.
The problem is that the checks do have to arrive. If you're a conservative who honestly believes that consumption taxes, smaller government, larger savings and private investment will be better, in the long run, for everyone, you're stuck with an awful choice. You must be willing to do that which is most contrary to all of your beliefs - borrow an ungodly amount of money - in order to reformulate Social Security. By doing so, you essentially bet that the ticking time bomb of a trillion dollars of new debt will be disarmed by the benefits of your program. That's a tough pill to swallow. In order to sweeten the deal, Bush is offering a plan to cut down on tort costs and pave the way for a cap on all damages in tort. Though tort reform is only a marginally ideological position, in the sense that there is little about the concept of tort reform that corresponds with the conservative hallmarks of flatter taxes, self-reliance and limited government, tort reform is a wildly valuable political plum that is worth untold fortunes to corporations and to the legislators that can deliver it. Put simply, Bush is telling the Paleocons the same thing he has so effectively told the country: just vote for me, and your check will also be in the mail.
Will paleocons take this deal with the devil? I suspect that they will. After a half-century of Democratic dominance of the legislature, Republicans finally have a shot to do things their way. Paleocons do not share the President's rosy assessment of the war in Iraq, and they are well aware that someone will have to pay electorally for that failure. With an election looming in '06, conservative lawmakers need to have legislative achievements to hang their hats on. Moreover, in his last two years, it will be nearly impossible for President Bush to effectuate major legislative changes, and given the state of foreign policy, by '08 the Conservative window may slam closed if a Democrat is able to capitalize on the foreign policy failures of the current administration. This may be the only chance in ten years for conservatives in Congress to make a fundamental, lasting change to American social and economic policies. It's almost tragic that it will cost them over a trillion dollars, and perhaps also their souls.
0 comments
At first glance, the two proposals seem wholly unrelated. One program seeks to borrow trillions of dollars in the hopes that amateur individual investors will invest this borrowed money wisely enough to repay the debt, and to generate a surplus large enough to benefit both the investors and the federal government. The other program seeks to lower the cost of insurance premiums by essentially asking the families of victims of medical malpractice to subsidize the insurance industry by limiting the payouts they can receive. Upon closer inspection though, the two programs are linked by something more than their irresponsible approach to governance.
Among the narratives which the Bush administration has promulgated about itself is the recent re-election mandate theory, in which the Republican party claims a mandate to reshape America's domestic politics, despite the fact that voters to whom domestic issues such as healthcare and the economy were paramount voted overwhelmingly for John Kerry. The attempt to sail a controversial legislative agenda through Congress will test this mandate narrative.
Republicans are feeling more uneasy today than what one might have expected after winning even larger majorities in both houses of Congress in the past election. Some of that unease comes from a redefinition of ideology that the Neocons have thrust upon the party. Right now though, things are not looking good for the Neocons. With no WMDs in Iraq, a war that has lost the support of the majority of the voters, and a mission in Iraq that is suddenly faced with the prospect of serious restructuring once a massive, unexpected, and Presidentially authorized review is completed. Indeed, saber-rattling can already be heard from the camp which the Neocons had once smirkingly dubbed the Paleocons; among these Conservative-flavored Conservatives are old warhorses like former Speaker of the House and architect of the current Republican Congressional majority Newt Gingrich, former Bob Dole running-mate Jack Kemp, and billionaire financier and one-time Presidential office-seeker Steve Forbes.
When George W. Bush first ran in 2000, he sought to distance himself from the curmudgeonly, old, and unpopular perception of Republicans, and instead sought to reposition himself as a warm, religious Conservative, who appreciated value in economics and values in private life. Calling himself a "compassionate Conservative", the Governor of Texas tried to sell America on the idea that big, across-the-board tax cuts were good for whatever ailed you, and since they would cure any ill, from a too-large government surplus, to a deficit-stricken, recessional economy, there would soon be no need for the traditional entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare. These new programs would eventually be reconstituted into something more appropriate for a government that would generate income primarily through taxing consumption.
Putting aside political rancor (but only for the moment), there's a serious timing problem with trying to change fundamental rules for any large system. My father would always joke that whenever the British consider switching over to driving on the right side of the road, they always stall when the only acceptable compromise between proponents and opponents of the plan is to implement it gradually, starting only with the trucks. That's where the Bush team is at right now. The equation for making sense of Conservative economics, as best as I understand it, is that a tax on consumption alone would be cheap and efficient to administer, would encourage untaxed savings and investment, and would exempt certain kinds of consumption, like healthcare, from taxation, so that all families could meet their basic needs. The main problem is that a tax on consumption, if applied to current economic realities, would result in a lot less tax revenue than the federal government currently collects. Even if we grant the assumption that if we reformed our tax and entitlement policies, the economy would expand at a faster rate, so tax revenue would eventually grow as well, you're still left with a gap of trillions of dollars that would need to be financed (read: borrowed) in order to make the changeover.
Neocons and Paleocons react to this assumption, and its consequences, in very different ways. To an old-school conservative, the watchword is caution, and the approach is piecemeal. These conservatives seek to cut and restructure taxes in step with cuts in spending and deficit reduction. In fact, Bill Clinton's successful co-opting of Conservative policies was palatable to both parties particularly because cuts in capital-gains taxes were accompanied by deficit-slashing and a commitment to balanced budgets (despite a very large number of military deployments abroad). The idea of borrowing trillions of dollars to enact an economic policy which only works in theory so far is abhorrent to the prudent, fiscally sensible conservative, particularly when it comes at a time of deep national debt.
The Neocon is rarely constrained by such reality checks. Flush with electoral riches, but with the day of reckoning for Iraq still off in the future, Neocons have successfully ignored reality for the time being, and are looking to make one more big bet. As their foreign policy has demonstrated, Neocons prefer the bold, dramatic, throw-the-cards-in-the-air approach to change, rather than the pragmatic, step-by-step approach long favored by their conservative forebears. But the Neocons can't do it alone. Even though the Neocons wield great power in the executive branch of government, they are dependent on Paleocons in the legislature.
It is here that the connection between the medical malpractice and Social Security reforms lies. Medical malpractice reform is either a first step in, or a stalking horse for tort reform, depending on your perspective, and tort reform itself is a key part of the Conservative vision of protecting the haves from the have-nots. To Conservatives, the haves are the haves because they are deserving of it. They have worked hard - at least at some point along the genealogical line - and profited. The have-nots are to blame for their lack. After all, we live in American, a land of opportunity, where anyone willing to work hard can make it. But I digress. The point is that Bush knows that reforming Social Security to include personal investment accounts is going to cost a lot of money today, and most old-school conservatives will not like that one bit. In order to bring them over to his side, Bush must promise them something they want very badly, and tort reform is very high on their wish list - perhaps high enough that they would be willing to borrow over a trillion dollars in order to secure it.
The challenge to Paleocons is significant. In four years of governing, the Republicans have accomplished little of lasting impact on the domestic front. Nearly all of their achievements, from the loosening of environmental standards to opening the federal purse to religious evangelists, have come through expansive uses of executive power. The election of a Democrat to the White House could result in an immediate reversal of many of these policies. In order to truly bring the country onto more Conservative ground, legislative achievements are necessary. Unfortunately for Republicans, the country as a whole does not agree with conservative economic policies, nor is it receptive to conservative social policies of an extreme sort, such as reversal of affirmative action or abortion rights. In fact, it appears that the only 'value' that conservatives share with America as a whole is greed. As long as the promise is tax cuts or lower costs, and as long as the victims are presented as overprivileged or hated (e.g. trial lawyers), Americans can't wait for the checks to arrive.
The problem is that the checks do have to arrive. If you're a conservative who honestly believes that consumption taxes, smaller government, larger savings and private investment will be better, in the long run, for everyone, you're stuck with an awful choice. You must be willing to do that which is most contrary to all of your beliefs - borrow an ungodly amount of money - in order to reformulate Social Security. By doing so, you essentially bet that the ticking time bomb of a trillion dollars of new debt will be disarmed by the benefits of your program. That's a tough pill to swallow. In order to sweeten the deal, Bush is offering a plan to cut down on tort costs and pave the way for a cap on all damages in tort. Though tort reform is only a marginally ideological position, in the sense that there is little about the concept of tort reform that corresponds with the conservative hallmarks of flatter taxes, self-reliance and limited government, tort reform is a wildly valuable political plum that is worth untold fortunes to corporations and to the legislators that can deliver it. Put simply, Bush is telling the Paleocons the same thing he has so effectively told the country: just vote for me, and your check will also be in the mail.
Will paleocons take this deal with the devil? I suspect that they will. After a half-century of Democratic dominance of the legislature, Republicans finally have a shot to do things their way. Paleocons do not share the President's rosy assessment of the war in Iraq, and they are well aware that someone will have to pay electorally for that failure. With an election looming in '06, conservative lawmakers need to have legislative achievements to hang their hats on. Moreover, in his last two years, it will be nearly impossible for President Bush to effectuate major legislative changes, and given the state of foreign policy, by '08 the Conservative window may slam closed if a Democrat is able to capitalize on the foreign policy failures of the current administration. This may be the only chance in ten years for conservatives in Congress to make a fundamental, lasting change to American social and economic policies. It's almost tragic that it will cost them over a trillion dollars, and perhaps also their souls.
Sunday, January 02, 2005
Like many other Democrats who were appalled and disappointed by the Republican electoral victory of last year, I've spent a good deal of time and thought on the question of why John Kerry lost. Even the question is slippery. Though Kerry ultimately lost, he came awfully close, and given that, it's disturbing that Democrats were so soundly defeated in Senate and Congressional races around the country. Other puzzling and important results included the votes for various propositions to ban gay marriage, and what appears to be a Democratic victory for the governorship of Washington state, but only by the narrowest of recount-aided margins.
A variety of theories have been forwarded to explain the above results. Values was the most popular explanation in the aftermath of the election, at least partially because of flawed polling results released by exit-pollers in the wake of the election. This particular interpretation of the election results was welcomed by the Republicans, and reinforced frequently on Fox News, but after a week or two, real statisticians and professional pollsters came forward with the surprising information that the numbers of voters who identified values as their primary concern in voting had actually declined in 2004 as compared with the last two elections.
Democrats found a number of other reasons besides values to explain the results of the elections. The war in Iraq was a popular explanation for how a polarizing and seemingly vulnerable incumbent won reelection. Another idea was that John Kerry was a flawed candidate, either because of how easily he played into the Northeast liberal stereotype, or because of personal shortcomings in charisma, speech cadence, or human touch. Shortly on the heels of this theory came the wiseacre liberal punditry which exclaimed that Kerry, despite his obvious shortcomings and unenviable affiliation with Massachusetts, still garnered more votes than any other man in history aside from George W. Bush. Clearly, if Kerry fell only a few thousands votes in Ohio short of the presidency, despite facing a well-funded incumbent who was in the midst of waging war, the Democrats must be on the right path, or so the thinking goes.
Understanding the reasons for Kerry's loss is key to the Democrats as they seek a unified overall strategy for dealing with the reform-minded Republicans over the next two years. With another Congressional election looming in 2006, there is not a lot of time to overhaul the Democratic platform, strategy and message.
But it is just not clear which changes need to be made. Republican control of state governments has enabled them to gerrymander effectively throughout the country. Strong feelings about gay marriage, and particularly the use of the word marriage to define gay unions, led to the passing of several gay marriage bans, even in deep blue states. The debacle that was Grey Davis' governance of California, particularly in the state's fleecing by unregulated energy concerns like Enron, opened the door to Republican control of the governor's mansion in the largest, and arguably bluest, state in the union. The fact the Arnold Schwarzenegger is a Republican who rejects many core Republican values highlights the fact that the Republicans have learned how to expand their base around something other than core ideology. For Democrats, none of the above indicates a clear plan for reforming Democratic tactics, overall campaign strategy and structure, or basic principles and policy goals.
In addition to examining the above factors, as well as many others, such as the President Bush's ability to make many Americans feel safe, the desire of many Americans to be a part of something as important as World War II, and so forth, it's critical to understand that these factors are interrelated and often self-stoking.
One of the great failures of the Clinton administration was the loss of control over the legislative branch, beginning in 1994. In his first term, Bill Clinton intended to put a capstone on New Deal legislation with one final massive entitlement program: national health care. The failure to pass this piece of legislation, or anything else of a like scale, robbed the Democrats of any real, lasting achievements in the eight years of Clinton's presidency. Though various important laws were passed, and some parts of Clinton's legislative agenda survived, the the nineties is remembered for Newt Gingrich and the Contract With America then any clean air acts. By the time the 2000 election rolled around, Al Gore had little to run on beyond prosperity. There was no massively successful, highly visible program to run on. The foreign policy initiatives in the former Yugoslavia, Northern Ireland, and Israel had either failed, or remained in nascent, unstable phases. Moreover, they did not directly impact the daily lives of most Americans, no matter how important they were to certain interest groups.
During John Kerry's run at the presidency, I remembered hearing one of my favorite comedians, Lewis Black, describe the Democrats as the party of no ideas, and the Republicans as the party of bad ideas. This struck me as funny and true (though perhaps not funny because it is true). What makes the Republicans effective is not the power of their good ideas as much as their ability to sell bad ones. But since Democrats by nature do not appeal to things like blind faith, when Democrats don't have good ideas, they don't win elections.
John Kerry was not an unattractive candidate. He was a man of faith, a long-time hunter, and a virile, active, tall, and fairly good-looking man. He was a decorated veteran, a respected member of the senate who had vast experience in dealing with international terrorism, and a man of obvious intelligence, education and erudition. But in many ways, he was also the ultimate facade. In nearly every way, he was almost what you wanted in a candidate. Though tall and somewhat attractive, he was also gawky - perhaps not as gawky as Al Gore, but still not the smooth, lithe athlete. He was a hero and a veteran, but he came home angry at his government, and not proud of his service and awards. Though he was a religious man, and anti-abortion, he was Catholic, and either refuse or was incapable of speaking eloquently about the division in his heart over abortion. He had long experience in the Senate, but he had few legislative achievements, and never even managed to emerge out of the shadow of the senior senator from his state, Teddy Kennedy, prior to running for president. John F. Kerry hoped that he could be John F. Kennedy, but in the end, he was just a cheap imitation. Though he fought well in a difficult Democratic primary, many felt that Hillary Clinton and Howard Dean better expressed the two different visions for the party, and that John Kerry was an Establishment candidate who won a flawed nomination process through traditional methods in Iowa and New Hampshire.
That's not to say that the loss in '04 is to be laid solely at the feet of John Kerry, who was at least a better campaigner and probably a better candidate than Al Gore. Rather, it's to show that John Kerry couldn't win on force of personality alone. That's not surprising. Bill Clinton never won 50% of the electorate, or even as many votes as John Kerry. Rather, it's to say that Democrats needed, and still need, to do two things. First, Democrats must make it acceptable to be a Democrat again. Second, they must have real ideas and a true vision for the future of the country.
Democrats have for too long failed to effectively counter the Republican assault on the word 'liberal'. The results of this assault, and all of the collateral attacks on liberalism that were not solely linguistic, is a United States in which people are uncomfortable identifying themselves as Democrats and liberals. Many self-styled independents or libertarians no longer wish to be associated with the Democratic party because of this utter failure to debunk the myth of the bleeding heart liberal. Many social conservatives have abandoned the party entirely, to the point that it's almost laughable to think that a person could be against gay marriage and still be a Democrat.
The numbers from the 2004 election back this up. Bush won about 84% of all those who identify themselves as conservative, while Kerry won about 85% of those who identified themselves as liberal. Kerry soundly defeated Bush when it came to moderates, who voted 54-45 in favor of John Kerry. The telling statistic? While 34% of the country identified itself as conservative, only 21% of the country identified itself as liberal - a difference of 13%. Kerry's landslide among the moderates is deceptive - it's not that Kerry was so much more appealing to moderates than Bush, it's that a large segment of moderates identified themselves as moderates because liberalism has been poisoned.
Clearly though, the problem goes beyond just labels, presentation, and message management. Democrats need more vision. Right now, the primary values that the Democratic party appears to be defending or championing are the rights to abortion and gay marriage. The party does not have a unified vision for Iraq, for terrorism, or even for the economy. Fiscal discipline remains important to Democrats, but solutions to spiraling health care costs and social security have not been forthcoming from either executive or legislative leadership. Instead, Democratic positions appear to be shaped by opposition to Republican policies.
So which policies should Democrats be pursuing? Here's some statistics to point the way. In 2004, the voters who chose President Bush were those who saw one of the following issues as most important: moral values, taxes, and terrorism. While the moral values voters can safely be considered base right-wing voters, the other issues are not as straightforward. Only 5% of voters identified taxes as their primary concern, and they 57-43 in favor of President Bush. What this statistic tells us is that Republicans did not get a huge boost, electorally speaking, out of the $1 trillion Bush tax cut. While I don't have statistics for this, presumably, that 5% is disproportionately made up of wealthy voters, for whom tax policy has very serious economic implications. Instead, we get to the unsurprising answer. Of 19% of voters who identified terrorism as their primary concern, a whopping 86% voted for George W. Bush. Though John Kerry won all the other categories, including Iraq, education, health care, and the economy, no category was won as decisively as terrorism (not even moral values).
In other words, America told us that it thought John Kerry would be better at dealing with all of the problems that face our nation, from domestic concerns like health care and social security to foreign entanglements such as Iraq. The only problem was that America didn't trust Kerry to fight terrorism. But it's not an 'issue' problem. It's a perception problem. In order to gain America's trust on this key issue, we need to confront not just that issue, but all issues. We need to have a strategy, rather than just a collection of good ideas. We need to fight back hard when Republicans call us names or impugn our patriotism, because America won't believe that Democrats will keep them safe when they have so much trouble standing up for themselves.
And finally, we need to have just a little bit of faith. Most of this country believes in God. Democrats need to remember that believing that God wants America to be great is a good, healthy belief, not one that needs mocking. Democrats need to understand that, particularly in times of trouble, people draw strength from their faith, and from the belief that God cares about them because they, as individuals and as a nation, are unique and special. Unfortunately, Democrats shy away from messages of American particularism, and often look at people of faith as though they only recently came down from the trees. Most Americans do not have the hubris to believe that the only thing which will save us is the power of the good ideas of our elected officials. For Democrats to succeed, they need to learn not how to speak to these people, but how to understand these people. Democrats need to understand that trustworthiness comes from consistency, and leadership is demonstrated through vision and commitment.
The time has come for Democrats to declare a new vision for America, and to strike back at the slander and lies of the Republican machines. We need leadership, we need dedication, and we need ideas. But more than anything else, we need to stop dickering with ourselves and with Republicans over details and specifics. Our policies have already won over this nation, that much is clear. Now we need to show that we have the strength of character and the personal will to lead this country. To do so we need to stand up consistently for our beliefs, attack the Republicans for their disrespect for this country, its ideals, its institutions, and most importantly, its people. We need to demand responsibility from our leaders for their behavior, from the actions of our military abroad, to the rights of citizens at home. And we need be responsible for ourselves as well. If anybody stole an election from us, it's because we didn't lock the front door. If anybody took our rights, it's because we failed to stand guard over them. And if anybody thinks to victimize and shame us again, our vigilance, our integrity, and our commitment to the cause of freedom will stand to defend us.
All statistics are from CNN.
0 comments
A variety of theories have been forwarded to explain the above results. Values was the most popular explanation in the aftermath of the election, at least partially because of flawed polling results released by exit-pollers in the wake of the election. This particular interpretation of the election results was welcomed by the Republicans, and reinforced frequently on Fox News, but after a week or two, real statisticians and professional pollsters came forward with the surprising information that the numbers of voters who identified values as their primary concern in voting had actually declined in 2004 as compared with the last two elections.
Democrats found a number of other reasons besides values to explain the results of the elections. The war in Iraq was a popular explanation for how a polarizing and seemingly vulnerable incumbent won reelection. Another idea was that John Kerry was a flawed candidate, either because of how easily he played into the Northeast liberal stereotype, or because of personal shortcomings in charisma, speech cadence, or human touch. Shortly on the heels of this theory came the wiseacre liberal punditry which exclaimed that Kerry, despite his obvious shortcomings and unenviable affiliation with Massachusetts, still garnered more votes than any other man in history aside from George W. Bush. Clearly, if Kerry fell only a few thousands votes in Ohio short of the presidency, despite facing a well-funded incumbent who was in the midst of waging war, the Democrats must be on the right path, or so the thinking goes.
Understanding the reasons for Kerry's loss is key to the Democrats as they seek a unified overall strategy for dealing with the reform-minded Republicans over the next two years. With another Congressional election looming in 2006, there is not a lot of time to overhaul the Democratic platform, strategy and message.
But it is just not clear which changes need to be made. Republican control of state governments has enabled them to gerrymander effectively throughout the country. Strong feelings about gay marriage, and particularly the use of the word marriage to define gay unions, led to the passing of several gay marriage bans, even in deep blue states. The debacle that was Grey Davis' governance of California, particularly in the state's fleecing by unregulated energy concerns like Enron, opened the door to Republican control of the governor's mansion in the largest, and arguably bluest, state in the union. The fact the Arnold Schwarzenegger is a Republican who rejects many core Republican values highlights the fact that the Republicans have learned how to expand their base around something other than core ideology. For Democrats, none of the above indicates a clear plan for reforming Democratic tactics, overall campaign strategy and structure, or basic principles and policy goals.
In addition to examining the above factors, as well as many others, such as the President Bush's ability to make many Americans feel safe, the desire of many Americans to be a part of something as important as World War II, and so forth, it's critical to understand that these factors are interrelated and often self-stoking.
One of the great failures of the Clinton administration was the loss of control over the legislative branch, beginning in 1994. In his first term, Bill Clinton intended to put a capstone on New Deal legislation with one final massive entitlement program: national health care. The failure to pass this piece of legislation, or anything else of a like scale, robbed the Democrats of any real, lasting achievements in the eight years of Clinton's presidency. Though various important laws were passed, and some parts of Clinton's legislative agenda survived, the the nineties is remembered for Newt Gingrich and the Contract With America then any clean air acts. By the time the 2000 election rolled around, Al Gore had little to run on beyond prosperity. There was no massively successful, highly visible program to run on. The foreign policy initiatives in the former Yugoslavia, Northern Ireland, and Israel had either failed, or remained in nascent, unstable phases. Moreover, they did not directly impact the daily lives of most Americans, no matter how important they were to certain interest groups.
During John Kerry's run at the presidency, I remembered hearing one of my favorite comedians, Lewis Black, describe the Democrats as the party of no ideas, and the Republicans as the party of bad ideas. This struck me as funny and true (though perhaps not funny because it is true). What makes the Republicans effective is not the power of their good ideas as much as their ability to sell bad ones. But since Democrats by nature do not appeal to things like blind faith, when Democrats don't have good ideas, they don't win elections.
John Kerry was not an unattractive candidate. He was a man of faith, a long-time hunter, and a virile, active, tall, and fairly good-looking man. He was a decorated veteran, a respected member of the senate who had vast experience in dealing with international terrorism, and a man of obvious intelligence, education and erudition. But in many ways, he was also the ultimate facade. In nearly every way, he was almost what you wanted in a candidate. Though tall and somewhat attractive, he was also gawky - perhaps not as gawky as Al Gore, but still not the smooth, lithe athlete. He was a hero and a veteran, but he came home angry at his government, and not proud of his service and awards. Though he was a religious man, and anti-abortion, he was Catholic, and either refuse or was incapable of speaking eloquently about the division in his heart over abortion. He had long experience in the Senate, but he had few legislative achievements, and never even managed to emerge out of the shadow of the senior senator from his state, Teddy Kennedy, prior to running for president. John F. Kerry hoped that he could be John F. Kennedy, but in the end, he was just a cheap imitation. Though he fought well in a difficult Democratic primary, many felt that Hillary Clinton and Howard Dean better expressed the two different visions for the party, and that John Kerry was an Establishment candidate who won a flawed nomination process through traditional methods in Iowa and New Hampshire.
That's not to say that the loss in '04 is to be laid solely at the feet of John Kerry, who was at least a better campaigner and probably a better candidate than Al Gore. Rather, it's to show that John Kerry couldn't win on force of personality alone. That's not surprising. Bill Clinton never won 50% of the electorate, or even as many votes as John Kerry. Rather, it's to say that Democrats needed, and still need, to do two things. First, Democrats must make it acceptable to be a Democrat again. Second, they must have real ideas and a true vision for the future of the country.
Democrats have for too long failed to effectively counter the Republican assault on the word 'liberal'. The results of this assault, and all of the collateral attacks on liberalism that were not solely linguistic, is a United States in which people are uncomfortable identifying themselves as Democrats and liberals. Many self-styled independents or libertarians no longer wish to be associated with the Democratic party because of this utter failure to debunk the myth of the bleeding heart liberal. Many social conservatives have abandoned the party entirely, to the point that it's almost laughable to think that a person could be against gay marriage and still be a Democrat.
The numbers from the 2004 election back this up. Bush won about 84% of all those who identify themselves as conservative, while Kerry won about 85% of those who identified themselves as liberal. Kerry soundly defeated Bush when it came to moderates, who voted 54-45 in favor of John Kerry. The telling statistic? While 34% of the country identified itself as conservative, only 21% of the country identified itself as liberal - a difference of 13%. Kerry's landslide among the moderates is deceptive - it's not that Kerry was so much more appealing to moderates than Bush, it's that a large segment of moderates identified themselves as moderates because liberalism has been poisoned.
Clearly though, the problem goes beyond just labels, presentation, and message management. Democrats need more vision. Right now, the primary values that the Democratic party appears to be defending or championing are the rights to abortion and gay marriage. The party does not have a unified vision for Iraq, for terrorism, or even for the economy. Fiscal discipline remains important to Democrats, but solutions to spiraling health care costs and social security have not been forthcoming from either executive or legislative leadership. Instead, Democratic positions appear to be shaped by opposition to Republican policies.
So which policies should Democrats be pursuing? Here's some statistics to point the way. In 2004, the voters who chose President Bush were those who saw one of the following issues as most important: moral values, taxes, and terrorism. While the moral values voters can safely be considered base right-wing voters, the other issues are not as straightforward. Only 5% of voters identified taxes as their primary concern, and they 57-43 in favor of President Bush. What this statistic tells us is that Republicans did not get a huge boost, electorally speaking, out of the $1 trillion Bush tax cut. While I don't have statistics for this, presumably, that 5% is disproportionately made up of wealthy voters, for whom tax policy has very serious economic implications. Instead, we get to the unsurprising answer. Of 19% of voters who identified terrorism as their primary concern, a whopping 86% voted for George W. Bush. Though John Kerry won all the other categories, including Iraq, education, health care, and the economy, no category was won as decisively as terrorism (not even moral values).
In other words, America told us that it thought John Kerry would be better at dealing with all of the problems that face our nation, from domestic concerns like health care and social security to foreign entanglements such as Iraq. The only problem was that America didn't trust Kerry to fight terrorism. But it's not an 'issue' problem. It's a perception problem. In order to gain America's trust on this key issue, we need to confront not just that issue, but all issues. We need to have a strategy, rather than just a collection of good ideas. We need to fight back hard when Republicans call us names or impugn our patriotism, because America won't believe that Democrats will keep them safe when they have so much trouble standing up for themselves.
And finally, we need to have just a little bit of faith. Most of this country believes in God. Democrats need to remember that believing that God wants America to be great is a good, healthy belief, not one that needs mocking. Democrats need to understand that, particularly in times of trouble, people draw strength from their faith, and from the belief that God cares about them because they, as individuals and as a nation, are unique and special. Unfortunately, Democrats shy away from messages of American particularism, and often look at people of faith as though they only recently came down from the trees. Most Americans do not have the hubris to believe that the only thing which will save us is the power of the good ideas of our elected officials. For Democrats to succeed, they need to learn not how to speak to these people, but how to understand these people. Democrats need to understand that trustworthiness comes from consistency, and leadership is demonstrated through vision and commitment.
The time has come for Democrats to declare a new vision for America, and to strike back at the slander and lies of the Republican machines. We need leadership, we need dedication, and we need ideas. But more than anything else, we need to stop dickering with ourselves and with Republicans over details and specifics. Our policies have already won over this nation, that much is clear. Now we need to show that we have the strength of character and the personal will to lead this country. To do so we need to stand up consistently for our beliefs, attack the Republicans for their disrespect for this country, its ideals, its institutions, and most importantly, its people. We need to demand responsibility from our leaders for their behavior, from the actions of our military abroad, to the rights of citizens at home. And we need be responsible for ourselves as well. If anybody stole an election from us, it's because we didn't lock the front door. If anybody took our rights, it's because we failed to stand guard over them. And if anybody thinks to victimize and shame us again, our vigilance, our integrity, and our commitment to the cause of freedom will stand to defend us.
All statistics are from CNN.
