Now that this year's content-free election is over, maybe we can begin to discuss the realissues the candidates studiously ignored.
America was treated to a presidential election that, compared with the desultory spectacle that has blessedly just come to an end, was a model of enlightened and substantive discourse. Bill Clinton offered a convincing description of the rise of the new economy and put forward a set of policies to deal with its promise and its perils. Ross Perot elevated the budget deficit to an appropriately high place on the national agenda and argued that the government would soon be forced to rein in the runaway growth of entitlement spending. Even George Bush, with his talk of a New World Order, took the first halting steps toward a vocabulary for the post-Cold War era.
Given this precedent, it wasn't insane to think the '96 campaign might be at least as edifying. After all, the extraordinary changes - economic, social, cultural, technological, demographic - that Clinton, Perot, and Bush were reacting to four years back have only accelerated in pace and expanded in scope since then, and two of those candidates were in the thick of it again.
But this time everything was different. Confronted with a level of upheaval unmatched since the last turn of the century, Bob Dole talked about ... the tax code (and a bunch of movies he'd never seen). Clinton kept up a constant patter about the thrilling, wrenching transformation of postindustrial America and then proposed ... curbs on teen smoking, public school uniforms, alternative 911-style numbers for community policing, and so on. And Perot just disappeared around the bend.
Now what? Well, the voters have spoken, and in the wake of a campaign that was thoroughly divorced from the real challenges the country faces, the victor is left to actually deal with those challenges.
Easing America's passage into the new age of global markets, networked economies, aging populations, and declining national sovereignty - by speeding the benefits of such forces and by dealing with the dislocations they cause - is what the president's job is,or should be, all about. The election is over - and not a moment too soon. There's serious work to be done.
__ Taming the entitlement monster__
Today, around half the federal budget goes for entitlement programs, the two largest of which by far are Social Security and Medicare. According to the Bipartisan Commission on Entitlement and Tax Reform, by 2012, absent any changes in policy, entitlements (plus interest on the national debt) will eat up all the tax revenues collected by the federal government. The culprit here isn't bureaucratic profligacy but demographic inevitability: the baby boom generation's retirement, which officially commences in 2008.
The brutal truth, therefore, is that unless the nation gets a handle on Social Security and Medicare, it faces a future of crushing debt, exorbitant tax rates, or both - all in order simply to maintain the barest bones of a government. Of the two, Medicare's crisis is most immediate; its Hospital Insurance Program is on course to be insolvent by 2001. Meanwhile, though Social Security isn't set to go bust until 2029, its first cash-flow shortfall - i.e., when it starts ballooning the deficit - is forecast for 2008. And that's using relatively optimistic assumptions. Using pessimistic ones, the kind that usually have proven true in the past, Social Security could start running into trouble not long after Medicare goes belly up.
In the campaign, both Clinton and Dole were worse than ludicrous when it came to entitlements, with Clinton maintaining his demagogic posture that the GOP's hardly radical Medicare proposals were a foul attack on the elderly, and Dole saying he would repeal Clinton's perfectly sensible tax on Social Security benefits for middle- and upper-income seniors. Conventional wisdom holds that a bipartisan commission will soon be named to take on entitlement reform, but the ultimate, politically explosive responsibility to change the law will lie with the politicians. Without presidential leadership, the status quo - with all its horrid implications - will prevail.
__ Nurturing the new economy__
By now, nobody sensible doubts that the developed world is in the midst of a once-a-century paradigm shift: from the old industrial order to the globally interdependent, knowledge-based economy in ascendance. This transformation is being wrought by chips and bits and sparking minds, and the vast bulk of it is affected by government only on the margins. But those margins are sometimes wide. Indeed, there are at least two large areas in which the president can and should play a constructive role with respect to the new economy.
The first is what might be called the systemic. At home and abroad, America should take the lead in developing new structures, or in adapting old ones, to facilitate the functioning of an economic system whose currency is information and whose engine is the microprocessor - that is, structures to deal with the fact that the new economy is a digital economy. This means, for example, working at the international level to set common standards that will encourage global networking to flourish, and thinking hard, as Alan Greenspan has recently started to do, about the implications of ecash.
The second area has less to do with the new economy per se than with taking steps to help US firms thrive within it. This doesn't mean subsidies or protection from foreign trade - precisely the opposite. American companies dominate a variety of leading-edge industries; creating an even more open world trading system would benefit them, and American consumers, immeasurably. The president could also strengthen the nation's competitive position in the new economy by slashing billions in corporate welfare, which disproportionately favors yesterday's industries, like farming and transportation, at the expense of tomorrow's; by retooling the tax code to favor investment and saving; by resisting the call to restrict the inflow of immigrants, who have been so crucial to the high tech explosion; and by increasing federal spending on basic research.
__ Reviving the human-capital agenda__
In 1992, Clinton spoke lucidly about a basic truth: in the new economy, rewards go to the smart and the skilled, while everyone else is in major trouble. To ensure that all citizens have a fair chance at succeeding in the new world of work, Clinton contended that the country needed to invest tremendous sums in education and job training. In office, however, the sums he delivered were not tremendous but trifling.
Unsurprisingly, the problem Clinton identified four years ago is still very much with us. Despite a steadily growing economy and a slight uptick (for the first time in many years) in real wages, the long-term outlook for workers with poor education and few skills remains grim. And the savage trend of increasing income inequality - a trend that poses a real threat to America's social fabric - continues unabated.
For a president genuinely committed to equal opportunity and to maintaining our position in the fiercely competitive arena of the new economy, reviving the human-capital agenda is essential. Doing so would naturally be costly, but heaven knows there is plenty of unproductive or even positively counterproductive spending (see corporate welfare above) that could be decimated to pay for this valuable variety. Although much of the talk regarding putting people first tends to focus on job training and on postsecondary education, and these things are important, the reforms that would do the most to improve the stock of human capital would be at the K-12 level. It's here that American education is truly falling apart. And it's here that the seeds of achievement or failure are first planted in students.
Presiding over elementary and secondary schools is largely a state responsibility. But an "education president" worthy of the title would do all in his power to promote one or more of the serious reform schemes - from school choice to charter schools - that are floating around out there. If the teachers unions denounce him, we'll know he's on the right track.
__ Paring back the warfare state__
A few years ago, toward the end of a lengthy elaboration of the CIA's many follies and feckless attempts at estimating Soviet GNP, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan reached a critical juncture in the narrative and exclaimed, "Look, look: The Cold War ended. This wasn't trivial. This was very, very big!" Yet, even now, nobody - nobody in American politics at least, and certainly not Clinton or Dole - seems to have noticed. This coming year, a decade after Russian defense spending fell by two-thirds, ours is still at 90 percent of its Cold War average. As a proportion of national income, in fact, the Pentagon's budget is around the same as it was during the Brezhnev era.
The robustness of defense spending, despite world-historical changes that have made the planet dramatically less dangerous, owes itself mainly to two factors, one partisan and one strategic. At the partisan level, a combination of traditional hawkishness and political opportunism meant that there was never any way Republicans were going to let Clinton, the first post-Cold War president, do more than trim the defense budget. At the strategic, the Pentagon continues to operate on the basis of being able to fight and win two major wars simultaneously. Both those factors seem to have weakened, however. Republican hawks such as Senator Pete Domenici and Representative John Kasich, as well as senior military figures from the Reagan and Bush administrations, now argue that it's time to scrap the two-wars doctrine and take the knife to military-industrial-complex funding. Do we hear a presidential second?
__ Being Digital__
With the government preparing for its landmark Supreme Court appeal of the CDA, it might seem fanciful to suggest that the president start taking netizens seriously. And maybe it is. Yet given the march of cyberspace issues over the last four years from the periphery to a spot within shouting distance of mainstream politics, the president may have little choice. Electronic privacy, encryption, online free speech, intellectual property in the wired world: these are considered emerging, cutting-edge issues in Washington, DC, and no wonder. Even the most densely analog politico knows Something Important is happening in the etherworld.
In addition to putting forth policies that are supportive of the Net and Net culture, the government should also step up its efforts to actually put its artifacts on the Net itself. Less propaganda and more data on the White House homepage, expanded access to House and Senate doings on the congressional system - such moves should be only the beginning. And if the president were in the market for a bold stroke, he might consider an idea once floated by Stewart Brand: that the government and the cyberspace community collaborate to put the contents of the Library of Congress online. An "Apollo Program for the Digital Age"? Not bad.
__ Fashioning a new federalism__
When Newt Gingrich and his band of merry revolutionaries took control of Congress at the start of 1995, a new intellectual fashion suddenly gripped the capital: devolution chic. After diagnosing the ailments of any given domestic program, Republicans would invariably declare that the correct prescription was to "send it back to the states." Even after the Gingrichians had for the most part failed to devolve very much responsibility to their beloved governors (the historic exception being welfare), Dole was carrying around on the campaign trail a card inscribed with the 10th Amendment, to prove that, despite spending most of his adult life within the confines of the Senate and the Watergate, he was a devout New Federalist, too.
Gingrich and Dole are not the Republican Party's first New Federalists, however. The idea is an old one, and, in theory, a plausible one. It's long been clear that Washington tries to do far too much, and that many of its functions would be better carried out by state or local officials. Such arguments seem even more natural now, at a time when technology is decentralizing decision making and flattening hierarchies - that is, devolving everything in sight - in virtually all organizations other than government. But the trouble with the Republican approaches to the New Federalism, especially in their most recent incarnation, is that they have been driven less by rational calculations about what programs would be best run at what level of government than by budget-cutting imperatives and an unwillingness to make hard choices about controversial programs. Typically, "sending it back to the states" has meant reducing its drain on federal coffers and getting it out of the Republicans' hair.
Thoughtful academics and policy wonks (including Clinton's budget director, Alice Rivlin, who wrote a fairly radical book on the subject) have done some interesting work on what a real New Federalism might look like. Harvard academic Paul Peterson, for one, argues that the federal government could relinquish a large chunk of its current responsibilities - its spending on infrastructure, say - because states, which are locked in intense competition with one another for business investment and highly skilled workers, have every incentive to do those things well themselves. But completely opposite incentives come into play with programs for the poor, which is why Peterson thinks the Feds should actually expand their role in sustaining the social safety net. Agree or disagree, it's an informed debate Washington desperately needs to have.
__ Healing health care__
When Bill and Hillary Clinton were waging their doomed battle for health care reform, conservatives would often insist that the very premise for the plan was wrong: there was, they said, no "health care crisis" in America. And, to the extent that the term "crisis" connotes the possibility of imminent collapse, that was true. Still, it's hard to argue that our health care system doesn't have gaping flaws. Consuming a stunning 15 percent of GDP, it's more than twice as expensive (per person) as that of any other industrialized country, but it produces no better public health results - and manages to leave 40 million Americans uninsured in the bargain.
Getting a grip on health care inflation is vital to the new economy. Taking care of the uninsured is a precondition to alleviating poverty - to making the new welfare-reform law work, in particular. The Clintons' plan was plainly not the way to do it. But they weren't wrong to try. Now it's time to learn from their mistakes and start trying again.
__ Getting real about the war on (some) drugs__
If Washington ever did have an honest conversation about federalism, it would immediately reveal one of the Big Lies of American politics: that Washington has much to do with fighting crime.
Every election, this fiction consumes - i.e., squanders - a massive amount of airtime. This year, both Dole and Clinton talked about how brutal they've been to violent criminals and how many thugs they'd happily put to death in the future. But since presidents have authority only over the federal courts, and since more than 90 percent of violent crimes are prosecuted at the state level, the candidates' braggadocio was pure hooey. Meanwhile, Clinton's persistent boast of putting 100,000 cops on the street was both false (the actual figure was around a third of that) and, placed in the proper context, a bit pathetic. For as Adam Walinsky pointed out last year in an article in The Atlantic Monthly, restoring the cops-to-violent-crime ratio of the 1960s would require 5 million new boys and girls in blue.
Fortunately, there is one area of crime-related policy over which the federal government exerts control: drugs.
Unfortunately, drugs also happen to be the only topic in the campaign ranted about at greater length or to less helpful effect than crime itself. The whole thing was appalling. Every day in America's big cities, the continued demand for cocaine fuels a business that leads to routine slaughter. Yet neither Dole nor Clinton fretted about that. What really worried them was the "dramatic" rise in drug use among teenagers, which turned out to be driven largely by an increase in marijuana use and which, in raw numbers, wasn't very dramatic anyway.
No doubt, at this moment in history, it's asking a lot of a president to defy a political culture that treats speaking reasonably about the pros and cons of legalizing drugs as if it were on a par with speaking reasonably about the pros and cons of pedophilia. But it certainly isn't too much to expect - or, at least, to hope - that he might be courageous enough to talk forthrightly about the fact that the drug problem has far less to do with suburban teens smoking some grass (let alone with Pulp Fiction) than with the core group of adult drug addicts, mainly poor, whose custom spurs so much violence and mayhem. It isn't too much to expect that the president would be courageous enough, then, to propose a set of demand-side policies to deal with this problem, and to explain to voters that, though prevention and treatment may sound timid, they will do a great deal more to improve the situation than William Bennett's bromides have ever done.
__ Talking hard about race__
Last but not least, America's most stubborn and troubling social dilemma. Four years ago, Clinton's election held out some promise of progress on this front. Having grown up in the segregated South, his instincts on race were finely honed, and he rarely put a foot wrong when he addressed the subject. In office, arguably his three best speeches were all on race: his famous address to a black church in Memphis in 1993, his "mend it, don't end it" speech on affirmative action in the summer of 1995, and his speech on the day of the Million Man March in October that same year. But, apart from these three performances, Clinton was surprisingly, disappointingly quiet about the tensions and resentments between blacks and whites.
Typically, exhortations to clamber into the bully pulpit and pronounce on this or that ring pretty hollow; talk becomes a cheap and convenient substitute for action. But when it comes to race, talk is, in a way, precisely the right prescription. For most of the period following the Second World War, the federal government played a central role in ending formal discrimination against blacks and integrating our public space. Now, however, the ills afflicting race relations are far more ambiguous and far less amenable to programmatic remedy. What's required today, above all, is a sustained national dialog on race; a dialog that, despite the ever diminishing power of the office, the president is still better-placed than anyone to lead.
Such a dialog needs to be impolitic in its candor. It needs to challenge whites to confront their lingering racism - and to stop seeing blacks as a protected class that has somehow profited unfairly from efforts, such as affirmative action, to improve their lot. And it needs to challenge blacks to realize that racism is not the whole story. Such a dialog would be hard as hell. It would offer no immediate political payoff. But, in the end, it could serve as the first step toward a kind of tolerance and understanding without which the country will never live up to its highest ideals.
