Only twice before in the
lives of most voters have we seen an election offering such radically
different visions about the role of government in national life.
The first was 1964, when
Lyndon Baines Johnson was holding up the Democratic standard, calling
for government to create a Great Society with a cornucopia of new
federal programs. On the other side, Barry Goldwater had seized the
Republican banner from previously-dominant moderates and crusaded on the
most conservative agenda in six decades, seeking to push back not only
the Great Society, but much of the New Deal.
"Extremism in the defense
of liberty is no vice and ... moderation in the pursuit of justice is
no virtue!" Goldwater declared to thunderous applause at the GOP
convention. It was a bare-knuckles fight, but LBJ was campaigning in
John F. Kennedy's cloak and Goldwater's proposals were seen as scary and
radical. LBJ swept to a crushing victory. Score one for bigger
government.
The second "choice"
election came in 1980, when, after a decade of failed leadership, a man
came galloping out of the West who seemed the most improbable of figures
to get the country going again. And he was carrying with him many of
Goldwater's ideas. But Ronald Regan turned out to be a strong leader
with a million-dollar smile; Jimmy Carter, a man better suited to be a
saint than a politician, went down decisively. Score one for smaller
government.
This year's election is
shaping up to be a rubber match with major implications for the
country's future. Gov. Mitt Romney's choice of Paul Ryan as his running
mate has dialed up the ideological contrast between the two tickets,
while both sides have been throwing sharp elbows at each other (even by
the low standards of American politics).
The harshening words and diverging visions speak to an election that breaks somewhat with tradition. Time was, as Chris Cillizza at the Washington Post and
others have pointed out, the playbook was simple: run to the base in
the primary and pivot back to the middle in the general election,
winning over as many of the voters in the middle as you can. (In
economics, this effect is called Hotelling's Game and is otherwise
normally used to explain why gas stations all seem to be on the same corner.)
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But this election features a small number of genuinely undecided voters --and high negatives for both party candidates, as Karl Rove notes in Thursday's Wall Street Journal
-- so the dominant strategy has become playing to the base. That
explains Romney's picking Paul Ryan, but it also explains why partisans
of both sides rejoiced when Ryan was picked: His strong conservative
beliefs fire up the Democratic base as well as the Republican one.
If anything, this year's
choice is starker than in 1980: Reagan had a pragmatic streak, so he was
willing to compromise to get a deal done and keep moving forward (Tip
O'Neill used to say that the Gipper would win more than half a loaf and
come back for the rest later). Romney and Ryan, however, reinforced by
the tea party, show no inclination to compromise. On the Democratic
side, aides to President Obama are spreading the word that, if he wins,
he has had enough of trying to accommodate the Republicans and will also
be more confrontational.
Whether the two sides
will seize upon their conventions to set forth more complete, detailed
plans for the next four years remains to be seen. So far, they have
refused to go beyond vagaries and harsh, trivial attacks on each other.
Most voters are yearning for more courage and less bile.
But there should be no
doubt that the two tickets stand behind radically different visions of
the role of government and individuals. Under President Obama, federal
spending is now 24% of GDP,
far higher than in recent decades. While Obama talks of trimming, his
most thoughtful advisers think the government is likely to grow in
coming years no matter who wins (see Larry Summers's provocative column
in the Financial Times this week).
In contrast, Romney has
vowed to get federal spending down to 20%. That difference may not sound
like much, but it roughly equates to over half a trillion dollars each
year. At a time when 10,000 Baby Boomers are becoming eligible for
Medicare and Social Security each day, going from 24% to 20% of GDP
would mean massive cuts.
Presented with a stark
choice between bigger government and smaller government, where are
voters likely to come down? That is a question that has interested
scholars for a long time. Some years ago, political scientists Lloyd
Free and Hadley Cantril observed that Americans were "philosophical
conservatives" but "operational liberals," that is, they would tell
pollsters they wanted to keep government small, taxes down and socialism
out. But when asked if they wanted the government to spend more on
programs and benefits, they were all for it.
In the coming election,
we may have finally reached a point of reckoning between these two
conflicting impulses. And so, while conventions are generally the place
for sweeping statements, the winning ticket will need to be able to
speak operationally as well as philosophically.
All this makes for a
dramatic series of addresses, not just from Mitt Romney and President
Obama, but from their parties' top messengers: people like New Jersey
Gov. Chris Christie and San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro. These
conventions will offer them a chance to make a firm case to the American
people on which kind of government, both operationally and
philosophically, they should choose.
Looming over that choice
is the question of whether, at the end of this campaign, the winner can
actually govern. Certainly, the raucous, often vicious nature of the
combat so far has not been encouraging. One of us (David) has been
attending conventions for some 40 years and has witnessed a distinct
change in tone; listening to the hot rhetoric in both conventions in
2004, it suddenly became comprehensible how the country could have wound
up in Civil War back in 1861 after another election full of
ramifications for the nation's future.
And the chasms between the two parties continue to widen before us. A deeply illuminating study,
released a few days ago by the Washington Post and the Kaiser Family
Foundation, has shown that over the past 14 years, the percentages of
Democrats and Republicans who consider themselves "strong partisans" has
shot up by about 20 points in each case.
So, in pushing voters to
make a choice between sharply different visions, it is also imperative
that the candidates look beyond November to the next four years,
figuring out how they will bring the country together again when the
brawl is over. The acceptance speeches are not just a moment to rally
the base, they are also a place to begin laying the foundations of a
successful presidency.
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