Comeback America Read online

  I won’t stop there. Now that I have your attention, I’m going to be very free and easy about putting other major political changes on our agenda for discussion—including constitutional changes. My proposals may sound a bit, well, idealistic. We Americans have always been leery of amending our Constitution. But let me tell you this: It’s time to think in dramatic and transformational ways.

  I will concede at the top that I don’t expect an ambitious constitutional convention to meet anytime soon. But I do know from my Washington experience that even the first rumblings about the need for dramatic and fundamental change, coming from a sizable number of Americans, will attract close attention in the capital. These politicians are professionals, after all, and it’s their job to try and stay ahead of political shifts. So let’s start rumbling.

  HOW OUR POLITICS EVOLVED

  Step one is to remember who we are. It took leaders, not laggards, to forge our nation’s identity and strength. It took hard work, prudence, thrift, saving, and personal responsibility—and the old-fashioned American desire to avoid too much debt—to make us the strongest economic power on earth. And most of all it took our sense of stewardship, a commitment dating from our origins in an untamed land, to always strive to pass on a better country to the next generation of Americans.

  Our Constitution created American politics, and we were lucky that George Washington was selected to be our first president. He did not pursue the office, yet in assuming it he defined the role.

  At the time, the prevailing view was that the ideal president, like Washington, would be a reluctant soldier—a farmer, professional man, or merchant who would be called to duty from a life other than politics. He would govern all Americans and be respected by his fellow citizens. He would wield appropriate authority. If people had the right to form their government, they had the corresponding duty to obey it. Factionalism was a sin and politics was an evil.

  General Washington (he preferred that title to “President”) reviled the very idea of political parties. “They serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force,” he said in his farewell address, “to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation, the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community.”

  Sorry, General. Washington’s dream of a government linked to the people by a common culture and their recognition of a common good while shunning formal political parties didn’t last very long. His successor, John Adams, had apprenticed in Massachusetts politics, shepherded the Declaration of Independence, and served as a diplomat and as Washington’s vice president before taking the presidency himself. Yes, he was a farmer, but he was also very much a political pro.

  Not only that, Adams was a lawyer (as were half the men who signed the Declaration of Independence). Adams’s presidency, no less than Washington’s, marked the beginning of America’s governmental tradition. The culture of the lawyer took root quickly in our nation’s capital, to the consternation of nonlawyers like Adams’s rival, Thomas Jefferson. “If the present Congress errs in too much talking,” Jefferson wrote, “how can it be otherwise in a body to which the people send one hundred and fifty lawyers, whose trade it is to question everything, yield nothing, and talk by the hour?”

  Jefferson would still be complaining today. So far in our history, twenty-six of our forty-four presidents have been lawyers. And in numbers, lawyers have been by far the most plentiful members of our legislative branch. When the 111th Congress convened in early 2009, 54 percent of the senators and 36 percent of the House members present were lawyers.

  Their prevalence has helped shape Washington’s culture. There are good lawyers, of course, just as there are good politicians, and the practice of law has an honored and vital role in our society. My point is that lawyers exemplify the politicians in our leadership who typically lack experience in the real world. Professional politicians, like the professional lawyers many of them are, take office with very little experience in the practical pursuits of their constituents—manufacturing things, inventing things, transporting people and products, caring for the ill, and teaching young people.

  If politicians rank rather low on the list of esteemed professionals in America, that is partly because lawyers do, too. But mostly, it’s because many people don’t consider them to be part of the mainstream of America.

  Most Americans see themselves as problem-solvers and doers, and often they see lawyers as nitpickers and naysayers. Like lawyers, lawmakers have a language of their own. That’s the special language of our nation’s capital—I’ve been introducing it to you here and there in this book. These Washington words are another of the factors that separate people inside Washington’s Beltway from the rest of us.

  THE INCUMBENCY DISEASE

  That language can flourish because the culture that nurtures it is not only isolated but self-preserving. The politicians, aides, lobbyists, consultants, and others who occupy and influence the center of national power are pros who have worked together for years, often decades. Yes, we have elections every couple of years, but the political process has become so adept at protecting incumbents that for most sitting members of Congress, running for office amounts to little but a periodic pain in the keister. (That’s a sophisticated southern term.)

  Just look at the numbers. Since the end of World War II, according to a study by the Constitutional Rights Foundation, U.S. senators have won reelection 75 percent of the time. And they’re less secure than House members, who have won reelection 90 percent of the time.

  Even the newcomers tend to be insiders. Over the years, most of those entering Congress for the first time are experienced politicians, defined as individuals who have won elections at other levels of government. The sad truth is that a shrinking minority are amateurs in the “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” tradition. I congratulate all the newcomers for climbing the ladder from local councils to Washington. Their skills took them far. But the arrival of this nonstop stream of political pros exacerbates the problem we have in promoting real-world leaders to national politics.

  This largely holds true even in times of upheaval, when Americans vote to “throw the rascals out.” In the 1994 Republican revolution, when the GOP swept to control of Congress, only 45 percent of the new House members had never held office before, and only half of the new senators. So much for fresh faces.

  No matter what the state of the country, no matter how angry the voters, the Washington establishment marches along to its own cadence, which is increasingly out of touch with reality. This insular culture is one big reason our nation’s capital always seems to be reacting to crises rather than addressing our challenges head-on.

  Washington is a lagging indicator on just about everything. Yes, Washington is a lag indicator and the Congress is a lag indicator within Washington. The truth is that if the Congress is taking on some societal illness, you can be certain that the poor patient is close to death. If members of Congress were on a pay-for-performance plan, many would owe us money!

  THE FAILURE OF PARTY POLITICS

  Which party happens to hold power at any given time matters a lot when it comes to dividing up the spoils—but not so much when it comes to combating the huge fiscal problems I’ve been describing. Occasionally our two political parties reach accord and celebrate their “bipartisanship.” But bipartisanship is no cure-all when it comes to the really big challenges facing our country.

  For most of the time since 1945, we haven’t been able to blame solely the Democrats or the Republicans for our failed fiscal policies. The facts show that both parties have been responsible for our state of affairs. During most of the years since 1945, the Democrats dominated the House and only a bit less so the Senate, while the trend favored Republicans in the White House. For fifty of the sixty-four years between 1945 and 2009, no one party controlled all three centers of political power—namely, the Senate, the House, and the White House.

  When you look at some of the most
important stages in our fiscal downfall, the message becomes clear: The whole establishment was to blame. Throughout the 1980s, when Republican president Reagan’s tax cuts and defense spending increased our fiscal challenges, Democrats controlled at least one house of Congress every step of the way.

  The parties share the blame for the red ink in our nation’s entitlement programs. The Democrats controlled both houses of Congress when President Johnson signed the Medicare law in 1965, and the Republicans controlled both houses of Congress when President Bush 43 signed the new Medicare prescription drug benefit into law just a few years ago.

  On the other side of the coin, the Democrats controlled at least one house when President Bush 41 took steps to address the growing budget deficit, and the Republicans controlled both houses during most of the time Democrat Clinton was taking steps to balance the budget.

  In any event, it’s clear that no pattern of righteousness emerges here. In fact, in my view, while individual members of Congress are fiscally responsible, there is no party of fiscal responsibility. They tend to get more serious about this subject when they are out of power than they do when they are in charge.

  If bipartisanship hasn’t helped in recent times, outright partisanship has made things worse. Partisanship widens the large and growing ideological divide that obstructs progress in Washington. A stalemate in our nation’s capital is not all bad when things are going well. After all, sometimes Congress can muck things up. However, having a stalemate when things are not going well—and getting worse—is unacceptable and it needs to be addressed.

  Our election system seems almost to guarantee that this ideological divide will continue. In all but a handful of states such as Arizona and Iowa, state legislatures draw the boundaries of congressional districts. Thanks to modern computer technology, the parties in control have become expert at custom-designing the districts to protect their parties and incumbents on a block-by-block level in every town. As a result, only about 60 of our 435 congressional seats are considered truly competitive. The overwhelming majority of seats are safe for the party in control and for the incumbents in office.

  If incumbents face any real challenge at all, it is in their party primaries, when a party’s most ideological supporters tend to turn out. In a primary, a Democratic incumbent will feel pressure from the left, and a Republican from the right. Over time, that pushes both parties to their extremes and turns Washington’s political debates into ideological noise fests. Our political system is well designed to create television talking heads and “fact-free zones,” public shouting matches, and legislative gridlock—but not so great at representing the needs of most Americans or at making progress on their behalf.

  The way districts are custom-designed explains why so many Americans like their local Congress member. He or she is probably a pro who knows how to bring home the bacon and reflects the ideological majority of the district’s activists (even if those policy stances vary considerably from the more centrist views of the nation). But the workings of the system also explain why so many Americans hold such a low opinion of Congress as a whole.

  Congress is a model of the dysfunction I’m writing about. Like the Pentagon, it needs to reduce its bureaucracy—in this case, the plethora of committees and subcommittees—and take a more integrated approach to its duties. Right now, inefficiency is the name of the game. More than twenty Senate and House committees claim jurisdiction over the relatively new Department of Homeland Security, for example. This is not productive for the department, the Congress, or the American people.

  Congressional dysfunction is the political underpinning of our fiscal crisis. Too many Republicans won’t retreat from promoting lower taxes and smaller government. Too many Democrats refuse to restructure our unsustainable social insurance contracts, and insist on advocating a larger and more activist government. That leaves us with both low taxes and unsustainable benefit programs, even though these policies are putting us in the poorhouse. Here’s the independent view: We don’t need either a “small government” or a “big government.” We need an effective government—one that is fiscally responsible, focuses on the future, and looks out for the collective best interest of America and Americans rather than the narrow agendas of various special interests.

  There is little room for compromise in the ideological wars. It’s getting harder to find a conservative Democrat anymore, or a moderate Republican (although some of these rare birds still exist). It’s even harder to find the sensible center on key issues facing our society. For independents like me and a growing plurality of Americans, there may be no place at the table at all.

  It will be hard to change that. The formula of low taxes and generous social spending that has created this disaster will be hard to eliminate. For the past few decades, our political culture has played to what divides us rather than what unites us. Politicians pit us against each other in the great grab for goodies. They have often reduced this voraciousness to specious cries for “fairness.” They tell us that adding benefits is “fair” to those who get them. They also tell us that raising taxes on anyone but the “rich” to pay for government is “unfair,” because “hardworking” taxpayers should be able to keep more of their “hard-earned” money.

  This is a lethal political formula. Just look at what happens to our national leaders who choose a different way. Bush 41, as a recent example, became associated with tax increases and lost reelection for doing the fiscally responsible thing. His son, Bush 43, the tax cutter, entitlement expander, and father of preemptive wars, on the other hand, won two terms despite the fact that our deficit and debt levels exploded during his administration.

  Now it is President Obama’s turn. His promise to add a huge new national health care program while not raising taxes on anyone making less than $250,000 a year sounds like the same old get-something-for-nothing marketing pitch we have been hearing from politicians for decades. Don’t worry, everybody, I’m going to ladle out lots of new benefits and only the “rich” will pay. What kind of “change” is that?

  The higher base level of federal spending from Obama’s 2009 budget, his first signed budget bill, will be with us long after the recession ends. And what will we get for it? If history is any guide, not much, other than higher taxes and fewer choices.

  Will Obama eventually see the light and move toward a more limited, responsive, results-oriented, and fiscally responsible government? And will he make the transition from campaign mode (in which he’s greatly overexposed) to governing mode—in which he will act on rather than just talk about fiscal responsibility? I sure hope so.

  FACING UP TO REFORM

  As you have read this book, I’ve been showing you that solutions in the sensible center can avoid both taxes that are too high and government benefits that are too expansive. There can be a commonsense solution to every problem. If you look back over the remedies I’m suggesting for Social Security, health care, taxes, defense, and other issues, you can boil down my approach to three questions: What do we need as a nation, what can we afford, and how can we best pay for it?

  As individuals, we do the best we can for ourselves and our families. As a nation, we do what’s best for our country for both today and tomorrow. Those who receive government benefits must see that adjustments are sometimes necessary—such as raising the eligibility age for Social Security. A step like that is not “unfair;” it is simply a recognition that Americans are living longer than they did in 1935, when Social Security was created, and that our economy has switched from an industrial base to a service base. We need Americans to work until a later age not just for fiscal reasons, but also to keep our economic growth strong during a time when our workforce is shrinking.

  Those of us paying taxes and fees to support government benefits should see that we are helping ourselves with our contributions. Those who can afford to pay more should pay more, both in taxes and in premiums for voluntary government programs like some of Medicare’s. That is not a socialis
t concept; it’s a common-sense concept. But there is a limit as to how much they should be required to pay.

  All of this is easy to say, but it will be tough to accomplish. On the policy front, it will take something like the Fiscal Future Commission I proposed earlier in this book to help us jump-start the major policy reforms that are needed. The commission would recommend reforms in how the federal government handles budgeting, distributes government benefits, and levies taxes. These recommendations would not sit on a shelf as so many others have. Congress—by law—would vote these measures up or down.

  In addition to a Fiscal Future Commission, we need a separate group of transformational leaders to get government to focus more on results and to properly align the federal government with the realities of the twenty-first century. If handled correctly, the Baseline Review Commission (or Government Transformation Commission) I proposed in the previous chapter could be as effective as the Hoover Commission in Truman’s time. Truman used that independent commission to streamline the workings of the executive branch, and the Congress ultimately adopted most of the commission’s proposed reforms. The new commission I am suggesting would help to transform our government priorities, preparing us for leadership in the twenty-first century, and would help improve the federal government’s economy, efficiency, effectiveness, credibility, and accountability.

  Only extraordinary commissions like these will be in a position to state the facts, speak the truth, and take the heat from championing the long-overdue reforms we need. By their very existence, they will make clear to Americans that it is not a question of whether budget controls, entitlement changes, tax reforms, and other transformational changes will be made; it’s only a matter of which ones and when.