The Gulf oil spill,
Shirley Sherrod, and Afghanistan may have chased some of the economic news off
of the front pages, but everyone nonetheless knows the economy will be at the
top of the voters' agenda for the fall election, and Democrats are slipping in public
opinion polls when on the question of which party is trusted to do a better job
on the economy. On the one hand this is not surprising; job creation
continues to languish and Democrats are in control of Washington. But on the other hand, to
reject the Democrats on this question poll respondents have to choose the
Republicans, a party without a credible economic plan. Ask a Republican
to name a single economic program they support that was not part of George W.
Bush's economic plan just before the economy collapsed, and wait for the
answer.
You will hear crickets
chirping.
This helps explain why
Democrats still lead Republicans when it comes to fixing the economy even if
our support on the issue falls far short of a majority. The Washington
Post, ABC News Poll asked the question this month and found 42% trusting the
Democrats to do a better job handling the economy, with 34% trusting the
Republicans and 17% volunteering that they do not trust either party to fix the
economy.
Democrats actually have
a lot to say about the economy, but they struggle to connect with available
swing voters, get tripped up over details, and sound tentative in their desire
help people while boxed in by the expanding federal deficit. First let's
address some of the logical aspects to this communications challenge, which is
largely a timing and verb tense problem, then we will address the other levels
of the challenge to connect with voters when it comes to their economic
realities heading into the fall election.
What have you done for
me lately?
These days Democrats
are getting tripped up over timing issues. We have done a lot to improve
the economy but a lot of it was in the first few months of 2009 when we passed the
Recovery Act with almost no Republican support. There is also a lot we want to do to
improve the economy, but with nearly unified Republican opposition, and
divisions among Democrats on Capitol Hill, there are continuing doubts about
what we can get passed through Congress, and anything that costs money raises
deficit concerns.
All of this adds
complexity to our message, and makes it difficult to explain what we are for
without inviting questions like, "Haven't you already tried that?"
and "Do you realistically think that will pass?" And "How
are you going to pay for that?"
First let's deal with
what we will call the "verb tense" problem, and the key to avoiding
this trap is to return the discussion of the strategy. The solution to
this problem is no more complicated than accurately describing the current
reality, which is that the Democrats have an economic strategy to fix the
broken economy we inherited, and to rebuild a solid foundation for long term
economic success. We developed this strategy before Barack Obama was
sworn into office and have been working hard to implement the strategy from day
one. We will continue to implement the strategy until the economy is stable and
Americans are working again.
Articulating the strategy
helps solve the verb tense complexity problem because each element of the
strategy spans the full time horizon. Once voters understand the
strategy, they can see how the Administration and Congress have been working to
put the strategy it in place since before taking office in 2009, how we are
trying to move forward now, and that what is at stake in November is whether we
continue forward or turn back to the Bush Cheney economic policies. When
our Democratic Leaders are in an interview about the economy, and feel a
question really is a version of the timing trap, they should get in the habit
of turning the discussion back to the strategy.
Plan Your Work and
Work Your Plan
What the Democrats
need is a strong Five Point Plan to Fix the Economy, and as Tom Lehrer might
say, the good news is we already have one. The President gave a
major economic address at Georgetown University in the spring of 2009 where he did just that, laying out the
path to economic recovery. It would be good if the President could give
another speech updating the plan but the Five Pillars he laid out more than a year ago are still
quite workable:
1) New rules for Wall Street that will reward
drive and innovation, not reckless risk-taking.
2) New investments in education that will make
our workforce more skilled and competitive.
3) New investments in renewable energy and technology
that will create new jobs and new industries.
4) New investments in health care that will cut
costs for families and businesses.
5) New savings in our federal budget that will
bring down the debt for future generations.
Now most voters know
that we passed a major stimulus bill, health care reform, and more recently a
package of financial reform
and regulations, so no one is going
to say this is a "do nothing Congress" and that alone sets up a good
contrast with the "party of no." Most people may not know all
of the elements of these major initiatives especially the many investments in
energy savings and green technology that were part of the Recovery Act. Environmentalists are
not likely to get any form of an energy bill before the election, so any plan
to put a price on carbon emissions will have to wait 'til next year, but in the meantime the EPA will be regulating carbon emissions.
Voters are not going
to know a lot about the Race to the Top education reforms and the tax credits for college education. But just because
the details are on our side the message cannot be about policy details.
The point is to move the conversation to the breadth and depth of the
strategy. The voters are disappointed that the economy is not fixed now,
and we will have no credibility telling them it is better than they think it
is. But we can tell them we are doing something about it, and something
is a lot better than the other side's nothing.
The challenge is in
explaining the last two elements of the plan, health care reform, and how it
fits into the economic plan, and what we are going to do about the
deficit. The two are closely related substantively, in that the deficit
that matters is the long term deficit, and the key driver of success in
reducing the long term deficit is taming rising health care costs. Anyone who thinks health care reform should be
talked about using the past tense does not know how Washington works. Health care is far from done. Regulations are being
written that will define the way that the legislation is implemented in
ways that will impact the quality coverage and cost of future care.
There is no easy
solution to the challenge of explaining to voters that short term deficits were
and still are needed to continue to steer the economy away from a far deeper
recession but that shrinking deficits and eventually reaching a balanced budget
is the needed prescription for the long term. It is a complex position to
take, but we have little choice other than to rely on American voters to
understand this level of complexity. The Democrats' economic policy is based on balancing spending
money now on effective stimulus like extending unemployment benefits and repealing only part of the Bush tax cuts which are due
to expire while finding the resolve to really take on long
term deficits that eluded the Republicans when they were in charge.
This Will Not Work
Unless Democrats Can Connect With Voters
But no amount of
policy clarity will be successful unless our leaders connect with voters on a
human level. Voters are still in a state of worry and shock over the
sense that the bad economic news is settling and long term
unemployment is a reality many
families understand. They need to know their elected leaders get
it. It's still scary out there.
Just after the Gulf
Oil spill happened, Democrats may have gained the policy upper hand, but
politicians no more talented than Bobby Jindal and David Vitter cleaned Obama's
clock in their ability to connect with the locals. People just wanted to
know that their leaders understood what they had lost and would work to help
them get it back. Despite everything going on in the Gulf region, just
like everywhere else, what people want is secure employment. That's how
people keep their family's respect and their self respect. They need to
know Democrats understand this, and then we can tell them about our strategy to
get things moving forward again.
Many voters don't like it. That segment is likely to grow in the months and years ahead, for reasons I'll describe later that go beyond Republican rhetoric. Those with expertise tend to see it as a big step in a positive direction. The basic disagreement is one I keep coming back to - experts tend to think the system is delivering more care than is needed. Patients and providers tend to disagree and viewed reforms as a promise to make added care available to all irrespective of their ability to pay directly for it.
Drew Altman of the Kaiser Foundation spelled it out more than a year ago and there's no reason to believe there's subsequently been a basic shift in attitudes.
That is a very basic disagreement that can't and won't be papered over by linguistic games where the public asks whether it will get all the care it wants and President Obama and other reformers say they'll guarantee that all needed care will be available.
Change will come gradually and the distracting and disruptive will be somewhat offset by the positive. Nonetheless, there's reason to believe public attitudes will get worse before they get better. Maggie Mahar of Health Beat Blog, an ardent and articulate advocate for reform spelled out why in a recent response to my comment betting against total repeal:
"I don't think reform is going
to be "popular" anytime soon--except among the working poor who
didn't qualify for Medicaid in the past and now will either qualify for
Medicaid or good subsidies that make insurance affordable-- and among those who
couldn't get insurance because of pre-existing conditions, and now will be
insured.
Many upper-middle-class
Americans (say couples earning more than $75,000) will find that don't qualify
for a subsidy, and that if they don't have employer-based insurance, now they
will have to buy comprehensive insurance. (Comprehensive insurance may be more expensive than
the skimpy insurance they have now. Many people don't realize how little
coverage they actually have now because they've never been seriously ill.)
Younger Americans, in
particular, will not be happy about being forced to buy comprehensive insurance
(or pay a penalty)-even though, in fact, they will be safer. And I suspect
that, in order to make the system work, those penalties will have to be raised.
This will not be popular.
Some of the highest paid
physicians will see their incomes drop as both Medicare and insurers move away
from paying for volume. They won't be happy, and they'll complain to their
patients, who won't be happy."
She seems to be saying that the only folks who are happy will be among the minority now uninsured, a group not previously thought to have great political clout (in fact I've argued in other venues that if they'd had political power, they'd also have gotten insurance years ago). Meanwhile young people, affluent older people and many providers will be unhappy. That's not a pretty picture.
What to do? One can hope for the best and hope that this group will come to see the wisdom of reform over time. Perhaps if we build it, they will come to like it over time. Maggie also raises the "compared to what?" issue:
"What people forget is that the alternative to reform is what we
have now--and that's unsustainable."
I think they've forgotten already. The question is whether they'll feel
uncomfortable with the status quo. If
so, telling them they would be even more uncomfortable with the unchanged
system won't prove to be a compelling argument.
We can also hope that the voters have short memories and that
they'll be distracted by other issues, ranging from guns to the state of the
economy and that healthcare will simply be pushed aside. That's a compelling dream, but the links
between health spending and the economy make it an improbable one.
I continue to be frustrated by what I view as a gigantic failure to communicate. Basically the elites who study this issue never succeeded in convincing the public of the need for a medical conservation ethic.
Obama and the Democrats in Congress were right to move forward, striking while the iron was hot. Who knows how long the education process I'm advocating here would have taken? Today's question is what comes next. For various reasons the government probably cannot do the sell here, both because it has credibility problems and because implementation of the program is the appropriate first priority.
We can simply hope for the best.
That's a strategy that has worked often in the past. But there's no guarantee. The last time major health legislation was
passed in such an environment was enactment of Medicare catastrophic coverage
that was repealed the following year.
That's not an encouraging precedent.
Or perhaps the various organizations that have worked so hard so
long to dramatize the plight of the uinsured could not focus instead on
convincing us we should use less rather than demanding more.
The path ahead isn't clear and may get quite rocky.
Still there is more to the Republican side of the debate than just Hooverism, and given the way the congressional pay-as-you-go ("pay-go") rules work, Democrats can, and should, put aside the ideological battle and the potential campaign issue, and identify some tax increases and budget cuts we can support to bring the budget closer to balance once the economy starts moving forward. Extending unemployment benefits is necessary both for the economic simulative effect and because it is a lifeline that is needed by millions of individuals and families who have lost jobs through no fault of their own. These families can't eat the ideological battle or the campaign issue. They would rather have the cash.
Speaker Pelosi understands that moving good policy is more important than maintaining good political arguments. "Pelosi told HuffPost... that to meet the demands of deficit hawks, Democrats might agree to offset the cost of the spending."
Sure Spending Cuts Would be Bad Now, But What About 2015?
The real challenge in the Democratic economic message in this election year is the need to explain that we are for balanced budgets, we are just not for them now. While the Republicans play to the public's growing concern about the deficit, and hammer away at Obama's red ink, our position is that the current deficits are a purposeful response to a global economic downturn. But when the crisis is over, we agree that we will need to make difficult choices in order to address the long term structural deficit. We point out that President Clinton managed to balance the budget while President Bush squandered it away, and, well you have heard the talking points, but they are complicated and may not be working all that well.
The argument is right on the merits, but it is easily characterized as a promise to do the difficult things in the future - like a drunk promising to sober up by next Sunday. To make the promise more credible, Obama created a Deficit Commission to suggest specific ways to address the long term structural federal deficit but its report is due in December, just after the November election. It would add a meaningful degree of credibility if we were able to identify and commit to enough spending cuts in future years to offset this $33 billion budget item.
But the pay-go scoring rules allow averaging spending and revenue over five budget years to calculate the overall effect on the budget deficit. This means the Republican stance amounts to a challenge to Democrats to identify a combination of spending cuts and tax increases, as far off as fiscal Year 2015, that add up to the $33 billion Democrats want to spend on the current "emergency" extension of benefits. Senate Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has already made a partisan tinged suggestion to do just that by cutting pay for federal workers. We should counter with our own partisan tinged suggestions of cuts in oil and gas subsidies, agribusiness subsidies, and perhaps scrap or delay a weapons system or two. Then we can get a deal done by working out the details.
In The Promise, his authoritative book about Obama's first year in office, Jonathan Alter reports that the president held a series of meetings with the Pentagon brass, including Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, as part of his three-month review for a new policy that included sending thousands of additional American troops to Afghanistan [pp. 386-390].
Central to that policy, Alter writes, was that "[b]y July 2011, a significant number of troops would begin to come home. At Mullen and Gates's insistence," however, "the plan included a caveat: conditions on the ground permitting." Obama wanted the short timeline. The Pentagon brass didn't, hence the caveat.
Alter writes that the last of those meetings was held in the Oval Office last November 29. If, indeed, his account of the meeting is correct - and he apparently got at least a partial transcript -- Obama addressed Gen. David Petraeus, whose responsibilities as head of U.S. Central Command included Afghanistan as well as Iraq, this way:
"David, tell me now. I want you to be honest with me. You can do this in eighteen months?
"Sir, I'm confident we can train and hand over to the ANA [Afghan National Army] in that time frame," Petraeus replied.
"Good. No problem," the president said. "If you can't do the things you say you can in eighteen months, then no one is going to suggest we stay. Right?"
"Yes, sir, in agreement," Petraeus replied.
"Yes, sir." Mullen said.
The president was crisp but informed. "Bob, you have any problems?" he asked Gates, who said he was fine with it. The president encapsulated the new policy: in quickly, out quickly, focus on Al Qaeda , and build the Afghan army. "I'm not asking you to change what you believe, but if you don't agree with me that we can execute this, say so now," he said.
No one said anything.
"Tell me now," Obama repeated.
"Fully support, sir," Mullen said.
"Ditto," Petraeus said.
If this account is correct, the only possible interpretation is that the president was determined on a prompt drawdown of American troops from Afghanistan, beginning with a large withdrawal in July 2011. And, however reluctantly, Petraeus and the others all agreed to that plan.
But seven months later the war is going even worse for us , and Petraeus has lost whatever acceptance he had for the plan, as we're reminded by a front page story in today's (6/24)Washington Post:
Called to testify before uneasy lawmakers on Capitol Hill last week, Petraeus appeared far less committed to an early, substantial drawdown of U.S. forces next year than Obama...
Counterinsurgency, he said, is a "roller-coaster experience" that does not lend itself to a strict timeline. Although he said he supported Obama's strategy, Petraeus sought to play down the deadline. He said that Obama told members of his national security team that July 2011 was the date "when a process begins...not the date when the U.S. heads for the exits...
His comments drew a direct inquiry from White House officials, who sought and received reassurances that they were all in accord.
Although the White House has firmly stuck by the withdrawal date, senior administration officials have acknowledged that reductions of coalition forces will probably be limited to those areas of the country where insurgents are already scarce.
From that, it sounds like both Petraeus and Obama have dropped the idea of a significant troop withdrawal beginning a year from July. Perhaps it was never realistic to begin with.
However, delaying that timeline would surely have political consequences, among others. One would be to outrage Obama's base and anyone else who doesn't believe the war can be won, just 15 months before the president runs for re-election. But if Obama is still determined to hold to his timeline, I doubt he can expect much help from the new general he's put in charge, a man even more popular with Republicans than with Democrats, a man who could just end up running against him in 2012.
This article originally appeared in The Huffington Post
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